Colonial Latin America Final Essays: An Unequal Mixture; and the Incomplete Conquest (Copy)
In an address to the Congress of Angostura in 1819, Simon Bolívar passionately emphasized the need for mestizaje, or ethnic mixing: “Unity, unity, unity must be our motto in all things. The blood of our citizens is varied: let it be mixed for the sake of unity.” At the apex of elite creole consciousness and anti-peninsulare sentiment, Bolívar demanded the need for ethnic mixing in order to transcend racial boundaries in the fight for independence. However, contemporary scholars viewing colonial Latin America purely through Bolívar’s lens of mestizaje can be misleading. Though mixing of various peoples certainly did take place across colonial Latin America, a mestizaje framework masks the unequal power relations across race and gender in imperial mixing.
The expansion of the Spanish Empire into the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries hinged on its Christianizing mission, creating a major site for mestizaje in the contestation of power. Epitomized by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, many “Christianizing” natives undertook the language of Christianity to articulate their disdain with violent Spanish colonial practices. By claiming Catholic religious authority, Ayala and other “Christianizing” natives fought constant suspicion and scrutiny in their calls for more just treatment of native imperial subjects. In their case, mixing between indigenous cultures and Catholic Christianity for legitimacy reiterates power structures within the Spanish Empire. Blanket mestizaje fails to take into account the inequality of mixing within the early colonial Spanish Americas: debased natives appealing to the power of Catholic hegemony.
Additionally, mestizaje fails to account for the mass-scale devastation of native cultures upon the arrival of the conquistadors to the Americas in the late 15th century and early 16th century. The conquistadors successfully invaded Aztec and Inka empires through a combination of spreading diseases, maneuvering divides between natives, and unexpected treacherous cruelty. However, not only did they engage in physically murdering native peoples in their conquest, but also devastating native cultures through erasure. While most natives preferred visual forms of expression through tunics, huacas, and dance for example, the Spanish privileged written documents as the essentially legitimate form of cultural discourse. By being the authors of primary sources, Christian missionaries and conquistadors often purposely or inadvertently silenced native peoples. Some Spanish authors, such as Diego Durán, grafted Christian myths over indigenous oral narratives. Others, such as Hernan Cortes, deliberately overshadowed native perspectives in their accounts of contact with Aztec and Inka empires. Because the construction of primary source archives favors the powerful, the documents may account for mixing with imperial power, but they do not account for the unwritten, silenced, and destroyed.
However, not only are power dynamics between natives and Europeans crucial in reading unequal mestizaje; mixing must also account for the unique position African slaves hold in relation to both European and native peoples within the colonial Americas. The slave trade was launched in the 16th century to supply labor for greedy conquistadors after the demographic collapse of indigenous peoples. Though the Spanish exploited both natives and Africans, they did not occupy the same position within imperial structures. During the colonial middle period, natives typically worked the mines, while African slaves mostly worked on cattle fields, as craftsmen, domestic slaves, mule trains, dockhands, carriers, cloth-production and textiles. In theory, the middle and late colonial social hierarchy “placed Spaniards on top, followed by mestizos and Indians, with coloreds and then Africans at the bottom,” yet political and economic realities in the colonial Americas scarcely operated according to plan. As such, the African diaspora in Latin America established its own vibrant culture, distinct from both native and European cultures. Therefore, a homogenous mestizaje understanding of colonial Latin America could potentially smudge the structural and cultural differences between native, African slave, and European master.
Furthermore, a mestizaje framework fails to interrogate the unequal gender dynamics throughout the colonial Americas, where women bore the brunt of mixing within patriarchal confines. Within native and African communities, women subjected to rape and concubinage bore many “mixed” children. They were largely defined within patriarchal enclosures, monopolizing on their reproductive powers. Santa Rosa, canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church, emblematized the feminine ideal within the colonial patriarchal system: chaste, silent, and submissive, written about by men rather than writing herself. However, occupying a much more fraught position within the church, Sor Juana often disavowed marriage and sought intellectual Catholic pursuits. Though both Santa Rosa and Sor Juana operated within the framework of Christianity, many native and African women did not enjoy the same visibility within primary source documents: they often stood accused of witchcraft whenever they challenged strict patriarchy. Horizontal, homogenizing mestizaje frameworks could easily overlook the brutal role reserved for women across “mixing” colonial Latin American societies.
Elite creole insistence on mestizaje coincides with the war of Independence, and the need to create a “homogenous” nation-state entity of space out of unequal power-relations. Bolívar’s cry for unity within a homogenous mestizaje cannot be taken for granted—rather, scholars of colonial Latin America ought to engage closely with the structural hierarchies that constitute mestizaje and give it its meaning. Native, African, and European men and women did not arbitrarily “mix” into a monolithic mestizaje; along with reinvention, silences pervade the primary sources telling the story of ethnic mixing.
Bibliography
Durán, Diego. Book of the Gods and Rites and The Ancient Calendar. [1st ed.]. University of Oklahoma Press, 1971.
Matthew Restall and Kris Lane. Latin America in Colonial Times. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Skirski, Julie. “The Ambiguities of Authenticity in Latin America: Doña Barbera and the Construction of National Identity.” In Becoming National: A Reader, ed. Geoff Eley & Ron Suny, 371-402. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
“Santa Rosa of Lima According to a Pious Account” in Colonial Latin America: A Documentary History, eds. Mills, Taylor, and Lauderdale-Graham. Oxford: Scholarly Resources, Inc. 2004.
De la Cruz, Sor Juana. “Letter to Sor Filotea” in Colonial Latin America: A Documentary History, eds. Mills, Taylor, and Lauderdale-Graham. Oxford: Scholarly Resources, Inc. 2004.
Mills, Kenneth. “African Slavery.” Lecture given at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, October 2019.
Mills, Kenneth. “Spanish Conquest of Mexico.” Lecture given at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, October 2019.
Bolívar, Simon. “Selected Writings of Bolivar” in “The Ambiguities of Authenticity in Latin America: Doña Barbera and the Construction of National Identity.” In Becoming National: A Reader, ed. Geoff Eley & Ron Suny, 371-402. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
“The Inka’s Tunics” in Colonial Latin America: A Documentary History, eds. Mills, Taylor, and Lauderdale-Graham. Oxford: Scholarly Resources, Inc. 2004.
De Ayala, Felipe Guaman Poma. “Appeal Concerning the Priests, Peru” in Colonial Latin America: A Documentary History, eds. Mills, Taylor, and Lauderdale-Graham. Oxford: Scholarly Resources, Inc. 2004.
Essay B, Prompt #1:
The Incomplete Conquest
As Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella overtook the last Moorish stronghold in Granada in 1492, Christopher Columbus set sail to “discover” the so-called New World. Articulating the dream of a universal Catholic world, Columbus wrote his Libro de Profecias, one of many texts emerging from the early Colonial period emphasizing the dream of a Catholic universe. As the Spanish empire took hold throughout the 16th century, the Catholic “spiritual conquest” Columbus romantically refers to gradually unfolded. Many missionaries initially arriving to the “New World” regarded “innocent Indians” with great opportunism, designing strategies to convert the native masses to Catholicism. As their premature optimism gradually faded to frustration, an inquisitorial crackdown on paganism and witchcraft engulfed the Americas starting in the mid-late 16th century. Responding to Inquisitional crackdown, natives and Africans creatively melded together Catholic practice with pre-imperial religiosity, complicating the Catholic ideal of a unilateral “spiritual conquest.”
Emerging out of Catholic victory in Iberia, conquistadors invading the Americas justified their greed and thirst for adventure by claiming to continue what had started in Iberia—Catholic spiritual conquest. In a series of letters to King Charles of Castile, Hernan Cortes sought to convince the monarchy of his service to the dream of a Catholic world. By invading “the New World,” conquistadors such as Cortes could claim to bring land and peoples under the fold of Catholicism in order to gain support from the monarchs, who recently received the Americas in the “papal donation” Treaty of Tordesillas. Their claims particularly resonated with Iberian monarchs in the aftermath of the Reconquista, with the expulsion, conversion, and torture of Iberian Muslims and Jews triumphantly heralding an era of Catholic glory. Evidently, the roots of the Spanish Empire cannot be separated from the notion of a “spiritual conquest,” an ambitious undertaking eventually proved to be more arduous than the monarchs might have expected.
As Catholic missionaries embarked on the “spiritual conquest,” discovering the “Indians” for the first time, many became enamored with the possibilities of conversion. As Felipe Fernández-Armesto notes, pagan natives and Canarians confounded the expectations of Iberian Catholics—they were no longer engaging with the wilful Jewish and Muslim apostates of Iberia. Instead, the natives of the Americas and Canary Islands were shockingly naked, a sign of innocence for many observers. Responding to other Iberians who took pagan natives to be less pure and more malicious, Dominican friars such as Francisco de Vitoria and Diego Duran advocated for softer conversion tactics, emphasizing the need to learn about native history and culture. The discovery of a new kind of “human,” the native, provided missionaries with infinite possibilities on the road of fulfilling the spiritual conquest.
However, as pagan “Indian” rituals persisted, much of the early missionary optimism faded away into a more robust system of crackdown with the establishment of the Inquisition tribunals. The 1568-1571 Alpujarras rebellion in Iberia reiterated the need to maintain limpieza de sangre, or purity of blood, both in Iberia and its colonies. Targeting non-Christians and “New Christian” converts alike, Inquisition tribunals found their way into Lima and New Spain in 1570 and 1571 respectively. In order to root out hidden disbelievers and promote public morality, Inquisition officers regularly tortured suspected non-Christians. Responding to the threat of torture, many natives testified against their neighbors for following Pagan, Jewish, and Muslim religious practices. Though many European Christian missionaries such as Vitoria continued to pushback against and critique unjust treatment of natives, the establishment of Inquisition tribunals opened a much more forcible chapter in the spiritual conquest.
Nevertheless, natives did not blindly accept Catholicism through the brutal crackdown of spiritual conquest—non-European imperial subjects often adopted and melded Christianity and pre-imperial beliefs to escape the grip of the Inquisition. In his book How to Provide for the Salvation of the Indians, Jesuit priest José de Acosta laments “the Christianity in which the majority of the Indians live,” where “they revere the Lord and they do not revere Him.” Acosta highlights not only Catholic insecurity with the authenticity of native Christianity, but also hints at how natives secretly practiced their own traditions under the noses of Catholic authorities. Don Carlos Ometochtzin, a native ruler of Texcoco, pretended to adopt Christianity until he was charged with bigamy, idolatry and apostasy. Native responses to the forcible “spiritual conquest” ultimately varied in the level of accommodation, with many natives resisting Catholic hegemony through secret pagan practice.
However, other natives also powerfully adopted Christianity as a means of negotiating Spanish treatment of native populations, contradicting notions of a unilateral “spiritual conquest.” Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, an Andean native priest, utilized Christian theology in a critique of Catholic missionary practices. Later, during the Bourbon period, native rebellion leader Juan Santos Atahualpa powerfully yielded his Jesuit Christian education alongside his claims to Inka ancestry to acquire legitimacy. Juan Santos even went as far as to evict the Franciscan order, claiming that they offered a perverted and misleading version of Christianity. These natives could not be said to have “Christianized,” either—rather, “Christianizing” natives eager to negotiate the realms of Christianity and native tradition to survive imperial structures. By speaking of them as “Christianizing,” the natives themselves become the subject, rather than the objects of a unilateral “spiritual conquest” mission.
The initial imperial venture of a “spiritual conquest” cannot be taken for granted as a retrospective success. Viewing the colonial period through the lens of a unilateral Catholic triumph over paganism only reaffirms the powerful, yet problematic myths of the Reconquista. Scholars uncritically employing “the spiritual conquest” also run the risk of silencing and minimizing the roles that natives undertook in surviving the Iberian empires. Instead, a more analytically useful approach to understanding how Catholic Christianity took hold in the colonial Americas recognizes imperial power structures, and how imperial subjects actively negotiate those structures.
Bibliography
Cook, Karoline P. Forbidden Passages: Muslims and Moriscos in Colonial Spanish America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
De Acosta, José. “On the Salvation of the Indians” in Colonial Latin America: A Documentary History, eds. Mills, Taylor, and Lauderdale-Graham. Oxford: Scholarly Resources, Inc. 2004.
De Ayala, Felipe Guaman Poma. “Appeal Concerning the Priests, Peru” in Colonial Latin America: A Documentary History, eds. Mills, Taylor, and Lauderdale-Graham. Oxford: Scholarly Resources, Inc. 2004.
De Caminha, Pedro Vaz. “There Can Easily Be Stamped Upon Them Whatever Belief We Wish to Give Them: The First Letter from Brazil” in Colonial Latin America: A Documentary History, eds. Mills, Taylor, and Lauderdale-Graham. Oxford: Scholarly Resources, Inc. 2004.
De Vitoria, Francisco. “On the Evangelization of Unbelievers, Salamanca, Spain” in Colonial Latin America: A Documentary History, eds. Mills, Taylor, and Lauderdale-Graham. Oxford: Scholarly Resources, Inc. 2004
Durán, Diego. Book of the Gods and Rites and The Ancient Calendar. [1st ed.]. University of Oklahoma Press, 1971.
Fernández-Armesto, Felipe. Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonization from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229-1492. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987.
Matthew Restall, and Kris Lane. Latin America in Colonial Times. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Mills, Kenneth. “Andean Region.” Lecture given at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, September 2019.
Mills, Kenneth. “Conquest of New Spain.” Lecture given at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, October 2019.
Mills, Kenneth. “Iberian Expansion.” Lecture given at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, September 2019.
Mills, Kenneth. “Insurrections and Crisis.” Lecture given at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, December 2019.
