Memories Of Conquest Research Articles

Memories of Conquest: Becoming Mexicano in colonial Guatemala by Laura E. Matthew, and: Vertical Empire: The General Resettlement of Indians in the colonial Andes by Jeremy Ravi Mumford (review)

Reviewed by: Memories of Conquest: Becoming Mexicano in colonial Guatemala by Laura E. Matthew, and: Vertical Empire: The General Resettlement of Indians in the colonial Andes by Jeremy Ravi Mumford Martha Few Memories of Conquest: Becoming Mexicano in colonial Guatemala By Laura E. Matthew, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina University Press, 2012. Vertical Empire: The General Resettlement of Indians in the colonial Andes By Jeremy Ravi Mumford. Durham: Duke University P ress, 2012. Laura Matthew’s Memories of Conquest: Becoming Mexicano in colonial Guatemala and Jeremy Ravi Mumford’s Vertical Empire: The General Resettlement of Indians in the colonial Andes both offer fine examples of new research that has reassessed and deepened historical understandings of the Spanish conquest and its aftermath in the Americas. Matthew’s Memories of Conquest examines the history of the Nahua and Oaxacan allies who accompanied Jorge Alvarado in the 1520s during the early stages of conquest in Central America, and their subsequent experiences as colonists and colonial subjects in Ciudad Vieja, Guatemala, over the next 300 years. She offers a Native American-centered history of these invasions by grounding her study in the ancient history of persistent Mesoamerican patterns of warfare and alliance, especially the political, administrative, religious and military aspects of Tenochca/Aztec/Mexica empire building. By rejecting the rigid division between ancient Mesoamerican history and the colonial period, she shows that the 1524-28 invasions by Spanish forces in alliance with Indigenous Mexica and Oaxacans into highland Maya territory marked “a continuation as much as a break” with ancient history (17). Matthew is motivated by a central question: What did being Mexicano mean in colonial Ciudad Vieja over time? This longue durée perspective centers Matthew’s analysis of Lienzo de Quahquechollan and a series of sixteenth-century probanzas to show the ways that the first generations of Ciudad Vieja Mexicanos remembered their participation as a military partnership with the Spanish within Mesoamerican traditions of invasion and conquest. Mexicanos continued speaking Nahuatl to the second and third generation, and yet also quickly learned Spanish, cementing their status as indios ladinos and facilitating their participation in the Spanish colonial world. She creatively and convincingly charts the ways that Nahua and Oaxacan petitioners, for example, defined and interpreted the term “Indian conquistador” in sixteenth-century legal efforts to regain exemption from tribute and made their way through the colonial bureaucracy, based on their military alliances with the Spanish. Throughout, they called themselves, and were called by others, “Indian conquistadors,” on equal footing with the Spanish and at the same time distinguished from Indian slaves and conquered Maya ethnic groups. In addition to descent from conquistadors, Nahua and Oaxacan residents maintained and transformed their identity as Mexicanos through what Matthew calls “the primacy of place.” Ciudad Vieja, she argues, must be seen as both a colonial town and as an atlepetl in the Mesoamerican tradition. As residents of a colonial town, Mexicanos participated in self-rule through the cabildo (city council) and the establishment of town militias, with Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception as the town’s patron saint. Matthew skillfully shows the ways that the colonial system provided opportunities for the recreation over time of a Mexicano identity as distinct from other Indigenous ethnic groups and as privileged, reinforced through community celebrations that reenacted rituals of conquest and through participation in other community and religious festivals in corporate groups such as cofradías (religious brotherhoods). Thus Ciudad Vieja remained the ancestral home and central settlement of Guatemalan Mexicanos over the centuries. Mumford takes a fresh look at the General Resettlement of Indians undertaken in the Viceroyalty of Peru during the administration of Viceroy don Francisco de Toledo in the 1570s, and resulted in the forcible relocation of more than one million Andeans into new colonial towns. Mumford considers the question of why Toledo’s reducciones were successful when two earlier efforts to resettle Andeans into tributary towns had failed. To answer that question, he explores in three sections the ideological origins of the General Resettlement, especially early modern practices of ethnography; the General Resettlement itself, where he deemphasizes the role of the imperial center as represented by the Junta Magna and instead argues...

Memories of Conquest: Becoming Mexicano in Colonial Guatemala

To understand the indigenous view of the conquest, Laura Matthew tells us, “requires a reimagining of the conquest itself” (p. 2). We have traditionally asked, as she points out in her introduction, how Cortez, with his handful of companions, could have conquered Mexico and Central America. The answer, of course, is that they did not, at least not on their own. The conquest took almost 200 years to complete, and much of it was carried out by the indigenous allies of Cortez, Alvarado, and the other conquistadores. These allies sometimes even took the initiative and operated independently of the Spanish. The main contingent came from Nahuatl- speaking areas of central Mexico, but there were soldiers from the Mixtec and Zapotec zones of Oaxaca as well. These men considered themselves to be conquistadores as well, and they made this a prominent part of their colonial identities. The Spanish were the first to acknowledge the invaluable contribution their indigenous allies made to the colonial project and awarded their central Mexican and Oaxacan soldiers a special status, the most important part of this being an exemption from personal tribute. When this exemption was first challenged in the sixteenth century, Spanish veterans of the conquest came to their old comrades’ defense.Matthew focuses her study on the Mexican allies of the Spanish who, after the conquest of Guatemala, settled in Ciudad Vieja, a town located in the Guatemalan high lands. She shows how they continued to speak Nahuatl right through the colonial period and how, through lengthy lawsuits, they defended their status and maintained a distinctive identity as Spanish- allied conquerors of the Maya well into the nineteenth century. She uses a great variety of sources, including the Lienzo de Quauhquechollan — of which she offers a skillful interpretation — and a pictorial manuscript in the indigenous style, as well as the traditional archival sources. She also spent time in Ciudad Vieja, whose people, she reports, are keenly aware of their history as Spanish allies and conquerors of the Maya even though they no longer speak an indigenous language.On a more general level, Matthew uses the Ciudad Vieja case to explore the dilemma of a people who play key supporting roles in a colonial project but at the end of the day are still among the colonized. For the people of Ciudad Vieja there was a constant question about boundaries. Over time, more and more people were able to claim descent from the original indigenous allies of the Spanish. Yet the value of this status depended in part on its being the exclusive identity of a relatively small group of people. If too many people were able to except themselves from tribute payments, the whole purpose of the colony would be undermined. Thus the descendants of the Mexican allies time and again faced the prospect of their privileges being watered down or completely eliminated, in part because so many others were claiming a similar exception and in part because colonial officials did not recognize their status, either out of ignorance or because they were actively seeking to end these special rights. This in turn caused the descendants of the conquistadores’ indigenous allies to draw sharp lines between themselves and other indigenous people, highlighting their cooperation with the Spanish, their sincere acceptance of Christianity, and later their familiarity with Spanish. So the descendants of the Mexican allies, who spoke an indigenous language and suffered some of the same discrimination that indigenous people typically experienced in the colonial regime, had to distance themselves from others who shared their Mesoamerican heritage, repeatedly memorializing their role as conquerors and their status as being more “civilized” than the surrounding Maya.This is a very well- written and informative book that explores an important but, until relatively recently, neglected topic in Latin American colonial history. One thing that Matthew should continue to explore is the militias formed by the indigenous inhabitants of Ciudad Vieja. It is becoming increasingly clear that military service for indigenous people — through things like the militias Matthew describes, the raising of detachments in indigenous areas to fight in the wars of independence, the practice of impressment by national armies during the late nineteenth century, or the early twentieth- century formation of revolutionary bands in indigenous areas — has been a very important catalyst for change, helping to define indigenous nationalism and to escalate ethnic conflict in certain periods. In Ciudad Vieja Matthew has perhaps the earliest example of this phenomenon, and it is hoped that she will have more to say on the topic in the future.

Memories of Conquest: Becoming Mexicano in Colonial Guatemala. By Laura E. Matthew. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Pp. xii, 336. Acknowledgments. Illustrations. Maps. Table. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $45.00 cloth.

Memories of Conquest: Becoming Mexicano in Colonial Guatemala. By Laura E. Matthew. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Pp. xii, 336. Acknowledgments. Illustrations. Maps. Table. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $45.00 cloth. - Volume 69 Issue 4

LAURA E. MATTHEW. Memories of Conquest: Becoming Mexicano in Colonial Guatemala.

LAURA E. MATTHEW. Memories of Conquest: Becoming Mexicano in Colonial Guatemala.

Memories of Conquest: Becoming Mexicano in Colonial Guatemala. By Laura E. Matthew. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Pp. xii, 336. Acknowledgments. Illustrations. Maps. Table. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $45.00 cloth.

Memories of Conquest: Becoming Mexicano in Colonial Guatemala. By Laura E. Matthew. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Pp. xii, 336. Acknowledgments. Illustrations. Maps. Table. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $45.00 cloth.

Memories of conquest: becoming Mexicano in colonial Guatemala

Indigenous allies helped the Spanish gain a foothold in the Americas. What did these Indian conquistadors expect from the partnership, and what were the implications of their involvement in Spain's New World empire? Laura Matthew's study of Ciudad Vieja, Guatemala, the study first to focus on a single allied colony over the entire colonial period, places the Nahua, Zapotec, and Mixtec conquistadors of Guatemala and their descendants within a deeply Mesoamerican historical context. Drawing on archives, ethnography, and colonial Mesoamerican maps, Matthew argues that the conquest cannot be fully understood without considering how these Indian conquistadors first invaded and then, of their own accord and largely by their own rules, settled in Central America. Shaped by pre-Columbian patterns of empire, alliance, warfare, and migration, the members of this diverse indigenous community became unified as the Mexicanos, descendants of Indian conquistadors in their adopted homeland. Their identity and higher status in Guatemalan society derived from their continued pride in their heritage, says Matthew, but also depended on Spanish colonialism's willingness to honor them. Throughout Memories of Conquest, Matthew charts the power of colonialism to reshape and restrict Mesoamerican society--even for those most favoured by colonial policy and despite powerful continuities in Mesoamerican culture.

RECONSTRUCTING THE HOUSEHOLD: THE NORTHERN CAPE COLONY BEFORE AND AFTER THE SOUTH AFRICAN WAR

ABSTRACTA major component of the South African War, the imperialist conflict that gave birth to modern South Africa, was the violence that occurred between white settlers and indigenous black populations. This article seeks to understand the particular nature of this violence in the northern districts of the Cape Colony. The war intruded into a region in which memories of conquest were alive, and where recently established settler authority was extremely fragile. Here, the war has to be seen as the final chapter in the closing of a nineteenth-century colonial frontier. The conflict was one between masters and servants in a region where capitalist relations of production had yet to take hold. Conflict continued in the years immediately after the war, and an essential task of the post-war state was to calm disgruntled black subjects.

Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the claims of memory

List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsNote on TransliterationsIntroduction: The Claims of Memory, by Lila Abu-Lughod and Ahmad H. Sa'diPart I. Places of Memory1. The Rape of Qula, a Destroyed Palestinian Village, by Susan Slyomovics2. Mapping the Past, Re-creating the Homeland: Memories of Village Places in pre-1948 Palestine, by Rochelle Davis3. Return to Half-Ruins: Memory, Postmemory, and Living History in Palestine, by Lila Abu-LughodPart II. Modes of Memory4. Iterability, Cumulativity, and Presence: The Relations Figures of Palestinian Memory, by Lena Jayyusi5. Women's Nakba Stories: Between Being and Knowing, by Rosemary Sayigh6. The Continuity of Trauma and Struggle: Recent Cinematic Representations of the Nakba, by Haim BresheethPart III. Faultlines of Memory7. The Secret Visitations of Memory, by Omar Al-Qattan8. Gender of Nakba Memory, by Isabelle Humphries and Laleh Khalili9. Memories of Conquest: Witnessing Death in Tantura, by Samera Esmeri10. The Politics of Witness: Remembering and Forgetting 1948 in Shatila Camp, by Diana K. AllanAfterword. Reflections on Representations, History, and Moral Accountability, by Ahmad H. Sa'diBibliographyContributorsIndex