Intermarriage between Europeans and Natives was not an uncommon sight across the colonial Americas, as Sean F. McEnroe shows in his lively exploration of Indigenous elites within post-Conquest societies. Beyond these literal marriages, however, the broader metaphor of the troubled or unequal marriage works in this book in two central ways. On a surface level, it refers to the “marriage of cultures and continents” that the lives and families of Indigenous elite individuals came to embody and on which their position as brokers of all sorts came to depend, from Canada down to Chile (164). On a deeper level, it refers to their role in the production of the colonial order, alongside European settlers and empires eager to expand and consolidate their New World possessions. Some of the best pages in this intercontinental tale of opportunities lost and fulfilled recount the roles of Indigenous “co-conquerors” and “co-colonists” who spearheaded the advance of the colonial frontier, especially in North America (186). Successfully placing these historical subjects in a global context, McEnroe further illustrates how Native groups carved out political and economic autonomy not only by promoting imperial designs—which were in some cases partially their own—but also by pitting empires and European colonists against one another.McEnroe is a capable storyteller. A series of biographies carry this book forward with ease, covering an arc of some three hundred years. Some are devoted to well-known individuals who “marr[ied] across cultures,” such as the Powhatan Matoaka, also known as Pocahontas or Lady Rebecca (16–19). Others introduce lesser-known characters (unfamiliar even to specialists) whose lives, like that of the Native Andean Jesuit Fray Roderigo de la Cruz, are woven into the narrative using multiple archival threads (53–55, 70). The book successfully presents these privileged individuals both as unique in their circumstances and as representatives of “emerging social types,” which scholars have identified across colonial regimes in the Americas (xx). While societies of the time conceived of nobility—and by extension elite status—as inherent to certain individuals, McEnroe shows that these characters’ roles and positions depended as much on their performing as such, sometimes through carefully planned and executed intergenerational actions.Given the author’s main interest, a tilting of the narrative toward elite sectors seems inevitable, leaving less room for assessing Indigenous commoners, the dramatic impact of colonial regimes on them, and the roles Indigenous elites themselves played in that process. Admittedly, this is not what the book is about. Nonetheless, some of the strategies and motivations of the less privileged in their dealings with imperial powers—and in fact of the larger groups that incorporated them, such as the Iroquois and the Guaraní, among many others—do emerge from the study of their leaders and notable members, about whom McEnroe’s retelling has plenty to offer. While the fluid nature of the elite/commoner dichotomy during this period could have been explored further, widespread patterns for achieving, performing, and preserving elite status among the Indigenous across the continent clearly emerge from the start. Chapter 1, for instance, is devoted to elite individuals who, like the Tlaxcalan envoys sojourning at the Spanish court in the 1520s, went across the ocean to negotiate their place within the empire, setting important precedents. Subsequent chapters shed light, always with a keen eye for comparisons and relevant case studies, on other practices and spaces besides marriage and diplomacy, where colonial regimes opened multiple opportunities for Indigenous elites old and new, including art, literacy, religion, education, state formation, commerce, and military service.Perhaps the main virtue of the book is its comprehensive approach, which brings together decades of scholarship on North, Central, and South American Indigenous elites during the colonial and early national periods. By bridging these historiographies, McEnroe introduces a series of topics that, though familiar to colonial Latin Americanists, are perhaps less so for its North American, nonspecialist audience. Conversely, he shows that this now-common frame for the study of people considered “in between”—elite and nonelite—in colonial Latin America draws heavily from earlier contributions by scholars of Indigenous peoples in British, Dutch, and French North America. In that sense, A Troubled Marriage is, first and foremost, an invitation for scholars of the colonial Americas to read each other across national and hemispheric boundaries.
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May 2, 2023
David Lantigua 
Open Access