HORSWELL-Sexual Identity in The Andes-P. 419

THE ROUTLEDGE HISPANIC STUDIES
COMPANION TO COLONIAL LATIN

AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN
(1492–1898)
The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean (1492–1898)
brings together an international team of scholars to explore new interdisciplinary and compara-
tive approaches for the study of colonialism.
Using four overarching themes, the volume examines a wide array of critical issues, key texts,
and figures that demonstrate the significance of colonial Latin America and the Caribbean across
national and regional traditions and historical periods.
This invaluable resource will be of interest to students and scholars of Spanish and Latin
American studies examining colonial Latin America and the Caribbean at the intersection of
cultural and historical studies; transatlantic, postcolonial and decolonial studies; and critical
approaches to archives and materiality. This timely volume assesses the impact and legacy of
colonialism and coloniality.
Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel is Professor and Marta S. Weeks Chair in Latin American
Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Miami.
Santa Arias is Professor of Latin American Literatures and Cultures in the Department of
Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Kansas.
ROUTLEDGE COMPANIONS TO HISPANIC AND LATIN
AMERICAN STUDIES
Routledge Companions to Hispanic and Latin American Studies are state-of-the-art surveys of the
key areas within Hispanic and Latin American Studies, providing accessible yet thorough
assessments of key problems, themes, and recent developments in research.
Series Editor: Brad Epps, University of Cambridge
THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO THE HISPANIC ENLIGHTENMENT

Edited by Elizabeth Franklin Lewis, Mónica Bolufer Peruga, and Catherine M. Jaffe
THE ROUTLEDGE HISPANIC STUDIES COMPANION TO NINETEENTH-

CENTURY SPAIN
Edited by Elisa Martí-López
THE ROUTLEDGE HISPANIC STUDIES COMPANION TO COLONIAL LATIN

AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN (1492–1898)
Edited by Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias
For more information about this series please visit:

https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Companions-to-Hispanic-and-Latin-American-
Studies/book-series/RCHLAS
THE ROUTLEDGE HISPANIC
STUDIES COMPANION TO
COLONIAL LATIN AMERICA
AND THE CARIBBEAN
(1492–1898)
Edited by
Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel
and Santa Arias
SERIES EDITOR: BRAD EPPS

SPANISH LIST ADVISOR: JAVIER MUÑOZ-BASOLS
First published 2021
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© 2021 selection and editorial matter,Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and
Santa Arias; individual chapters, the contributors
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Names: Martínez-San Miguel,Yolanda, editor. | Arias, Santa, editor.
Title: The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Colonial Latin America
and the Caribbean (1492-1898) / edited by Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel
and Santa Arias.
Description: London; New York, NY: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group,
2021. | Series: Routledge companions to Hispanic and Latin American
studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020022714 (print) | LCCN 2020022715 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781138092952 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315107189 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Colonies--America. | Latin America--History--To 1830. |
Latin America--History--1830-1898. | Caribbean Area--History--To 1810. |
Caribbean Area--History--1810-1945.
Classification: LCC F1410 .R68 2021 (print) | LCC F1410 (ebook) |
DDC 980/.01--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022714
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022715
ISBN: 978-1-138-09295-2 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-10718-9 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by SPi Global, India
Malena Rodríguez Castro, Emilie L. Bergmann, Georgina Sabat-Rivers, Rosa
M. Cabrera, and Margarita Zamora—mentors, “makers” and friends—the collabora-
tive spirit animating this volume is a tribute to their “enseñanzas.”
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments x
Contributors xiii
Between colonialism and coloniality: Colonial Latin American

and Caribbean studies today 1
Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias
PART I
Colonialism and coloniality 41
1 Race and domination in colonial Latin American studies 43

Daniel Nemser
2 Self-representation and self-governance in early Latin America 57

Karen Graubart
3 Mestizaje as a dispositif for a paradigm shift in colonial studies 71

Laura Catelli
4 Race, ethnicity and nationhood in the formation of criollismo

in Spanish America 85
José Antonio Mazzotti
5 An integrational approach to colonial semiosis 99

Galen Brokaw
6 Latin American and Caribbean colonial studies and/in the decolonial turn 117
Nelson Maldonado-Torres
vii
Contents
7 The ecocritical turn and the study of early colonial societies

in the Caribbean: of dogs, rivers, and the environmental humanities 132
Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert
8 Coloniality and cinema 147

Juan Poblete
PART II
Knowledge production and networks 163
9 Old Testament, New World: diluvialism and the Amerindian

origins debate in the Enlightenment 165
Ruth Hill
10 The “cannibal cogito” and Brazilian antropofagia: radical

heterogeneity or “family resemblance”? 183
Luís Madureira
11 Presumptions of empire: relapses, reboots, and reversions in the transpacific

networks of Iberian globalization 199
John D. Blanco
12 Imperial tensions, colonial contours: Jesuits, slavery, and race within

and beyond the Portuguese Atlantic 215
Hugh Cagle
13 The Caribbean conundrum: José Antonio Saco’s Hispanic archive

and the Black Atlantic 231
Eyda Merediz
PART III
Materialities and archives 247
14 Material encounters: Columbus’s Diario del primer viaje and the objects
of colonial Latin American and Caribbean studies 249
Raquel Albarrán
15 It comes with the territory: indigenous materialities

and Western knowledge 267
Gustavo Verdesio
viii
Contents
16 Creole knowledge in colonial Mexico: religion, gender and power 281

Stephanie Kirk
17 The colonial Latin American archive: dispossession, ruins, reinvention 295

Anna More
18 Materialities and archives 309

Charlene Villaseñor Black and Mari-Tere Álvarez
19 Port cities as sites of spatial knowledge in eighteenth-century

Spanish America 328
Mariselle Meléndez
20 Spatiality and discourse in the region of La Plata 344

Loreley El Jaber
PART IV
Language, translation and beyond 361
21 The white legend: El Dorado, pachacuti, and Walter Raleigh’s

discovery of (Latin) America 363
Ralph Bauer
22 The agency of translation in colonial Latin America: rethinking

the roles of non-European linguistic intermediaries 379
Larissa Brewer-García
23 Intercultural (mis)translations: colonial static and “authorship”

in the Florentine Codex and the relaciones geográficas of New Spain 393
Kelly McDonough
24 Defending the indefensible: Las Casas and the exceptions to sovereignty 406
Nicole Legnani
25 The (dis)continuities of decolonized gender and sexual identity

in the Andes 419
Michael Horswell
Index 433
ix
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to start by thanking Javier Muñoz-Basols and Brad Epps for inviting us to curate
this volume as part of the series of Routledge Companions to Hispanic and Latin American
Studies.The contributors have shown extraordinary enthusiasm and patience during the process
and we would like to thank them all. Sam Vale Noya and Rosie McEwan worked with us as our
editors at different moments in this project. This volume was supposed to be finished in 2018,
but life had other (wonderful and painful) plans for both of us, and the compilation of this com-
panion was delayed several times. We want to thank everyone for sticking with us until the
completion of this project. Brad Epps offered particularly encouraging words that allowed both
of us to come back to this project with new enthusiasm and energy. We also owe special thanks
to Lilianne Lugo-Herrera (University of Miami) who assisted us with research that informed the
introduction to this volume. Anna K. Donko (University of Chicago), Luis Sánchez Arrocha
(University of Kansas), and Rafael Burgos-Mirabal (University of Massachusetts-Amherst)
offered us crucial editorial assistance. Finally, Lisa Rivero provided invaluable assistance with the
indexing. We would like to acknowledge their important contributions without which this
volume would not have been possible.
Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel is grateful to Santa Arias, her coeditor, for accepting her invi-
tation to join this project and for the many years of collaboration and discussion about colonial
Latin American studies that have informed the introduction, the thematic sections, and the list
of contributors that have been brought together in this volume. I also want to thank my students
and colleagues at Rutgers–New Brunswick and the University of Miami for contributing to this
long process of thinking about colonialism, postcoloniality and coloniality. Nelson Maldonado
Torres, Carlos Decena, Camilla Stevens, Anjali Nerlekar, Michelle Stephens, Patricia Saunders,
Lillian Manzor,Viviana Díaz Balsera and George Yúdice heard different versions of my musings
on transatlantic, early modern and colonial Latin American and Caribbean studies and have
shared with me many moments of intellectual and personal joy. The research fellows participat-
ing at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, as well
as Lorgia García Peña, Adrián Emmanuel Hernández-Acosta, Adri Rodríguez-Ríos, Edwin
Ortiz and Katerina González Seligmann (Emerson College) were all important interlocutors
that allowed me to rethink colonialism and coloniality more expansively during my research
semester at Harvard University. Rígel Lugo and colleagues in 80 grados read and published
x
Acknowledgments
several of my essays on Caribbean and Latin American colonialism and the feedback provided
for those columns encouraged me to refine my thinking about the status of the field.
I would also like to thank my family and friends for supporting my work and keeping me
(in)sane(ly) alive: María Mercedes (Mereche) Martínez-San Miguel,Alexandra (Leisa) Rodríguez
Martínez, Luis Andrés Prieto Martínez, Eugenio Frías-Pardo, Jossianna Arroyo, Frances Negrón-
Muntaner, Maggie de la Cuesta, Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui, Mark Trautman, Celinés Villalba-
Rosado, José Quiroga, Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, Marisa Belausteguigoitia, Luis Álvarez Icaza, Juan
Carlos Quintero Herencia, Ivette Rodríguez and Lourdes Martínez-Echazábal. My mother,
Carmen Yolanda (Yolinda) San Miguel, passed away on October 18, 2019, and was unable to
read and comment on this project with me. I will miss your notes at the margins of my chapters,
but I hope this volume recognizes in some way how much I learned from you. Finally, nothing
in my professional and academic career would have been possible without the initial support I
received from the Ford Foundation when I was a graduate student and a junior scholar.
Santa Arias is indebted to many colleagues and friends. First, I thank Yolanda Martínez-San
Miguel for inviting me to be a part of this project.Yolanda is an example of courage and dedica-
tion that, coupled with her immense intelligence, make for one of the best scholars and mentors
I have encountered. Among other colleagues, I am particularly indebted to Mariselle Meléndez,
Rocío Cortés, Eyda Merediz, José Rabasa, Luis Fernando Restrepo, Rocío Quispe-Agnoli,
Kathleen Myers, Stephanie Kirk, Amber Bryant, Karen Stolley, Gustavo Verdesio, Mónica Díaz,
Vanina M. Teglia, and Ruth Hill. I profoundly admire their contributions to the field and I am
grateful for their friendship and support.
At the University of Kansas, I have the fortune of co-directing the Hall Center for the
Humanities’ Colonialism seminar with Robert Schwaller and Cécile Accilien. The seminar has
provided a valuable space in which to maintain an interdisciplinary dialogue on global colonial-
ism and coloniality. I would like to acknowledge Betsaida Reyes, the University of Kansas librar-
ian for my field. Her work and interest in colonial Latin America and the Caribbean have been
invaluable in my teaching and research. I am grateful to colleagues with whom I had the plea-
sure of sharing many conversations and frustrations about past and present forms of colonialism
and imperiality. Thank you Magalí Rabasa, Omaris Zamora, Araceli Masterson-Algar, Iris
Hauser, and Ignacio Carvajal-Regidor for your engagement with critical issues in research and
teaching and continuous effort for a better world. Finally, I am grateful to mi querida familia and,
as always, to Gregory T. Cushman for his patience, laughter, kindness, and our life together.
This volume is dedicated to our mentors:
From Yolanda
Malena Rodríguez-Castro taught me to think about colonialism and coloniality in the context
of Puerto Rico and world literature when I was an undergraduate student at the University of
Puerto Rico. She also gave me permission to ask questions and write, and to find my own place
to do the work I love in the classroom, in writing, and in conferences. Emilie L. Bergmann
taught me how to read seventeenth-century poetry, shared my love for Sor Juana and rocked her
Góngora pants while teaching me to read “Las Soledades.” Georgina Sabat-Rivers taught me to
read colonial poetry with passion and care. These three women taught me, took care of me and
shared with me how fascinating and complex it has been for them to be women in academia.
From Santa
I am deeply indebted to Rosa M. Cabrera. During and after my years as an undergraduate at
SUNY New Paltz, she served as a model of teaching, mentoring, and generosity. She introduced
xi
Acknowledgments
me to colonial and nineteenth-century Latin American and Caribbean literatures and taught me
to read and think critically about these texts. During my final year, Rosa Cabrera had a strong
opinion about my future and encouraged me to continue with graduate studies.At the University
of Wisconsin-Madison, Margarita Zamora offered unwavering support, guidance, and encour-
agement. She underscored the importance of learning across disciplines, of historicizing, and
theorizing. Rethinking textuality beyond the confines of the book was a vital lesson from her.
Gracias
This anthology would have not been possible without the generous support of several institu-
tions. Rutgers University, the University of Miami, and the University of Kansas provided time
and funds that were crucial for the completion of this volume. The Wilbur Marvin Visiting
Scholarship from the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University
and the University of Miami’s Marta S. Weeks Chair in Latin American Studies supported
research time for Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel between 2017 and 2020.The College of Liberal
Arts and Sciences at the University of Kansas provided Santa Arias research time during 2020.
xii
CONTRIBUTORS
Raquel Albarrán earned her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and is assistant profes-
sor of Luso-Hispanic studies at Middlebury College. She teaches and writes about colonial Latin
American and Hispanic Caribbean literatures and cultures. Her first academic monograph is
entitled Colonial Assemblages: Race, Materiality, and the Invention of the New World, which focuses
attention on the colonial life of objects and the ways in which histories of race are closely inter-
twined with the circulation of material culture.
Mari-Tere Álvarez Ph.D. is a project specialist at the J. Paul Getty Museum and associate direc-
tor of USC’s International Museum Institute. She has recently coedited Remix:Changing
Conversations in Museums of the Americas (University of California Press) as well as Beyond the
Turnstile: Making the Case for Museums and Sustainable Values and Arts, Crafts, and Materials in the
Age of Global Encounter, 1492–1800, a special edition of the Journal of Interdisciplinary History.
Santa Arias is professor of Latin American literatures and cultures at the University of Kansas.
Her research focuses on Spanish colonialism and the critical importance of space and place in
articulations of cultural difference, colonialism, and imperiality. She has published Bartolomé de
las Casas y la tradición intelectual renacentista (2002) and four coedited volumes: Mapping Colonial
Spanish America (2002), Approaches to Teaching the Writings of Bartolomé de las Casas (2008), The
Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2008), and Coloniality, Religion, and the Law in the Early
Iberian World (2013). She is working on a new book project with the title Entanglements from San
Juan:The Imperial-Colonial Paradox of Enlightened Discourses on Improvement at the Caribbean Frontier.
Ralph Bauer is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Maryland,
College Park. His publications include The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures:
Empire,Travel, Modernity (Cambridge UP 2003, 2008); The Alchemy of Conquest: Science, Religion, and
the Secrets of the NewWorld (University of Virginia Press, 2019); and the coedited collection Translating
Nature: Cross-cultural Histories of Early Modern Science (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).
John D. (Jody) Blanco teaches the literatures and cultures of early modern globalization under
the Spanish Empire (Philippine, Latin American, and Asian), comparative empire studies (Spanish,
British, and US) and modern Philippine, Latin American, and Asian-American literatures at the
xiii
Contributors
University of California, San Diego. His current research and book manuscript analyze the
phantasmagoria and rhetoric of the Spiritual Conquest against the background of social anomie
and frontierization in the Philippines between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. He is the
author of Frontier Constitutions: Christianity and Colonial Empire in the Nineteenth-Century
Philippines (UC Press, 2009).
Larissa Brewer-García is assistant professor of Latin American literature at the University of

Chicago where she specializes in colonial Latin American studies, with a focus on cultural pro-
ductions of the Caribbean and Andes and the African diaspora. Her publications include Beyond
Babel: Translations of Blackness in Colonial Peru and New Granada (Cambridge University Press,
2020) and articles in journals such as the William and Mary Quarterly and Colonial Latin American
Review.
Galen Brokaw is professor of Latin American and Latino studies, and Hispanic studies at
Montana State University. He is the author of A History of the Khipu (Cambridge University
Press, 2010), and coeditor with Jongsoo Lee of Texcoco: Prehispanic and Colonial Perspectives
(University Press of Colorado, 2014) and Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl and His Legacy (University
of Arizona Press, 2016).
Hugh Cagle is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Utah,
where he is also Director of International Studies. He specializes in the history of science,
technology, and colonialism in the early modern world, with a particular emphasis on Portugal
and its colonies. His first book, Assembling the Tropics: Science and Medicine in Portugal’s Empire,
1450–1700 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), won the 2019 Leo Gershoy Award
from the American Historical Association.
Laura Catelli earned her PhD in Hispanic colonial studies at the University of Pennsylvania
and is tenured researcher and director of the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios en Teoría
Poscolonial at the Instituto de Estudios Críticos en Humanidades (Universidad Nacional de
Rosario, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas). She is full professor of
Problematics of Twentieth-Century Latin American Art. Her research and teaching focus on the
formation of Latin American racial imaginaries, from a transdisciplinary postcolonial and deco-
lonial perspective. She has published articles and book chapters in Latin America and the United
States, and her book Arqueología del mestizaje: colonialismo y racialización is forthcoming (Ediciones
UFRO, Chile).
Loreley El Jaber is professor of Argentine literature at the University of Buenos Aires. She is a
researcher at the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET). She
obtained her PhD in 2008 at the University of Buenos Aires. Professor El Jaber specializes in
colonial Río de la Plata discourse and colonial Latin American studies as well as nineteenth-
century Argentine literature. Her publications include Un país malsano. La conquista del espacio en
las crónicas del Río de la Plata (2011), the coedited volume Fronteras escritas. Cruces, desvíos y pasajes
en la literatura argentina (2008), the first volume “Una patria literaria” of the Historia crítica de la
literatura argentina (2014, coordinated with Cristina Iglesia), and the critical edition of the chron-
icle of Ulrich Schmidl, Derrotero y viaje a España y las Indias (2016).
Karen Graubart is associate professor of history and concurrent associate professor of Romance
languages and literatures at the University of Notre Dame. Her first book, With Our Labor and
xiv
Contributors
Sweat: Indigenous Women and the Formation of Colonial Society in Peru (2007) won the Ligia Parra
Jahn prize of the Rocky Mountain Council of Latin American Studies. She has published
numerous articles on colonial history, gender, and race, and is presently completing a new book,
Republics of Difference: Religious and Racial Self-Governance in Castile and Peru, 1248–1650 (under
contract at Oxford University Press). Her work has been supported by Fulbright, the National
Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Kellogg
Institute for International Studies, and other generous agencies.
Ruth Hill is professor of Spanish and Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt
University. She is the author of two books and several articles. Currently, she is working on two
book projects: a history of Aryanism in the Americas from the nineteenth century to the present
entitled Incas, Aztecs, and Other White Men: A Hemispheric History of Hate, and a comparative analy-
sis of colonial racial histories entitled Reckoning with Race in the Americas (under contract,
University of Virginia Press).
Michael Horswell is professor of Spanish and Latin American literature and Dean of the
Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author
of Decolonizing the Sodomite: Queer Tropes of Sexuality in Colonial Andean Culture (2005), the coed-
ited volumes Submerged: Alternative Cuban Cinema with Luis Duno-Gottberg (2013); Baroque
Projections: Images and Texts in Dialogue with the Early Modern Hispanic World with Frédéric Conrod
(2016); and Sexualidades Periféricas. Consolidaciones literarias y fílmicas en la España de fin de siglo XIX
y fin de milenio with Nuria Godón (2016).
Stephanie Kirk is professor of Spanish and affiliate professor of religious studies and women,
gender, and sexuality studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of two
books: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Gender Politics of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico (Routledge,
2016) and Convent Life in Colonial Mexico: A Tale of Two Communities (Florida University Press,
2018 and 2007). Other publications include her coedited volume Religious Transformations in the
Early Modern Americas (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). She is currently working on a
book project entitled Global Martyrs: Jesuit Missionaries in Early Modern England, Ireland, and the
Hispanic World as well as a translation into English of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora’s convent
chronicle Paraíso occidental.
Nicole Legnani earned her PhD from Harvard University and is an assistant professor of
Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University. Her work focuses on the intersection between
venture capital, the laws of peoples and theology in the conquest of America. Her monograph
The Business of Conquest: Empire, Love and Law in the Atlantic World is forthcoming with the
University of Notre Dame Press. Her second book project, tentatively titled The Dispossessed:
Insurgent Voices in 1560s Peru engages deeply with a decade of developments in colonial Peru,
while conversing more widely with heresy, postcolonial, and subaltern studies as well as ethno-
history and Indigenous studies. She is also the translator and editor of Titu Cusi: A 16th-century
Account of the Conquest (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). Her articles have appeared
in Hispanic American Historical Review, Romance Notes, and in Bulletin of Hispanic Studies.
Luís Madureira is professor of African cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

He earned his PhD in comparative literature from the University of California-San Diego. His
research interests include Luso-Brazilian colonial and postcolonial studies, modernism and
modernity in Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean, early modern and colonial studies, and
xv
Contributors
theater and performance in Africa. He has published two books and several articles on these and
related topics. His current projects center on Mozambican drama and Luso-African historical
fiction.
Nelson Maldonado-Torres is professor of Latino and Caribbean studies, and of comparative

literature, as well as director of the Rutgers Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies at
Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He is also a former president of the Caribbean Philosophical
Association (2008–2013), and member of the executive board of the Frantz Fanon Foundation.
His publications include Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity (Duke University
Press, 2008), and the collection of essays entitled La descolonización y el giro descolonial
[Decolonization and the decolonial turn], compiled by the Universidad de la Tierra (Chiapas,
Mexico) in 2011. He has written dozens of journal articles and book chapters on decolonial
thought, political theory, and the theory of religion, among other areas.
Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel is the Marta S. Weeks Chair in Latin American Studies at the
University of Miami. She specializes in colonial and postcolonial Latin American and Caribbean
literatures. She is the author of four books: Saberes americanos: Subalternidad y epistemología en los
escritos de Sor Juana (1999); Caribe Two-Ways? Cultura de la migración en el Caribe insular hispánico
(2003); From Lack to Excess: “Minor” Readings of Latin American Colonial Discourse (2008); and
Coloniality of Diasporas: Rethinking Intra-colonial Migrations in a Pan-Caribbean Context (2014). She
has recently coedited three anthologies: Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought
(2016, with Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui and Marisa Belausteguigoitia), Trans Studies:The Challenge to
Hetero/Homo Normativities (2016, with Sarah Tobias), and Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking:
Towards New Comparative Methodologies and Disciplinary Formations (2020, with Michelle Stephens).
José Antonio Mazzotti is King Felipe VI of Spain professor of Spanish culture and civilization
and professor of Latin American literature at Tufts University. He has published numerous essays
on El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, creole cultures, viceregal epic poetry, contemporary poetry and
the documentation of Amazonian languages. His collection El Zorro y la Luna (poemas reunidos
1981–2016) received the José Lezama Lima International Poetry Prize from Casa de las
Américas, Cuba, in 2018.
Kelly McDonough (Anishinaabe [White Earth] and Irish descent) is an associate professor of
Latin American literary & cultural studies and Indigenous studies in the Department of Spanish
and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin. S he is the author of The Learned Ones:
Nahua Intellectuals in Postconquest Mexico (2014), and various articles related to Nahua studies.
Her current book in progress is entitled Indigenous Science and Technologies of Mexico Past and
Present: Nahuas and the World Around Them. McDonough is coeditor of the Native American and
Indigenous Studies journal.
Mariselle Meléndez is professor and head of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Deviant and Useful Citizens: The
Cultural Production of the Female Body in Eighteenth-Century Peru (2011), Raza, género e hibridez en
El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes (1999), and coeditor of Mapping Colonial Spanish America: Places and
Commonplaces of Identity, Culture, and Experience (2002). Her articles have appeared in journals
such as Latin American Research Review, Colonial Latin American Review, and Revista Iberoamericana,
among others. Her current book in progress focuses on the cultural and racial geography of
Spanish American ports in the eighteenth century and is under contract with Vanderbilt UP.
xvi
Contributors
Eyda Merediz is associate professor and head of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at
the University of Maryland, College Park. A graduate of Princeton University, her academic
interests concentrate on the fields of colonial Latin American studies and early modern transat-
lantic literatures and cultures. She is the author of Refracted Images: The Canary Islands through a
New World Lens (MRTS 2004). She has also edited, with Santa Arias, the volume Approaches to
Teaching the Writings of Bartolomé de las Casas (MLA 2008), and with Nina Gerassi-Navarro, Otros
estudios transatlánticos: lecturas desde lo latinoamericano (IILI, 2009). More recently, she has under-
taken a project centered on critical appropriations of Bartolomé de las Casas in the Caribbean.
Anna More is professor in the Department of Literary Theory and Literatures at the Universidade
de Brasília. She is the author of Baroque Sovereignty: Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and the Creole
Archive of Colonial Mexico (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); editor of Sor Juana Inés de la
Cruz: Selected Works, a Norton Critical Edition (2016); and coeditor of Iberian Empires and the Roots
of Globalization (2019). Her current work focuses on the relationship between death and value in
the Iberian slave trade, from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries.
Daniel Nemser is an associate professor of Spanish at the University of Michigan. He is the author
of Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico (University of Texas Press, 2017),
which won the Latin American Studies Association’s Mexico Humanities Book Award in 2018.
Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert is a professor of Caribbean culture and literature in the

Department of Hispanic Studies and The Environmental Studies Program at Vassar College,
where she holds the Sarah Tod Fitz Randolph Distinguished Professor Chair. Professor Paravisini-
Gebert is the author of a number of books, among them Phyllis Shand Allfrey: A Caribbean Life
(1996), Jamaica Kincaid: A Critical Companion (1999), Creole Religions of the Caribbean (with
Margarite Fernández Olmos, 2003; 2nd ed., 2011), Literatures of the Caribbean (2008) and the
forthcoming Extinctions:The Ecological Cost of Colonization in the Caribbean (Liverpool University
Press). She coedits Repeating Islands, a blog on Caribbean culture, with Ivette Romero-Cesareo.
Juan Poblete, professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Author of La
escritura de Pedro Lemebel como proyecto cultural y político (2019); Hacia una historia de la lectura y la peda-
gogía literaria en América Latina (2019); and Literatura chilena del siglo XIX: entre públicos lectores y figuras
autoriales (2003), all in Cuarto Propio; editor of Critical Latin American and Latino Studies (University
of Minnesota Press, 2003) and New Approaches to Latin American Studies: Culture and Power
(Routledge, 2017); and coeditor of Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Non-citizenship
(Rutgers University Press, 2021), Piracy and Intellectual Property in Latin America: Rethinking Creativity
and the Common Good (Routledge, 2020), Sports and Nationalism in Latin America (Palgrave, 2015),
Humor in Latin American Cinema (Palgrave, 2015), Desdén al infortunio: Sujeto, comunicación y público
en la narrativa de Pedro Lemebel (Cuarto Propio, 2010), Andrés Bello (IILI, 2009), and Redrawing The
Nation: National Identities in Latin/o American Comics (Palgrave, 2009).
Gustavo Verdesio is associate professor of Spanish and Native American studies at the University
of Michigan. A revised English version of his book La invención del Uruguay. La entrada del territorio
y sus habitantes a la cultura occidental (1996) has been published as Forgotten Conquests. Rereading New
World History from the Margins (Temple University Press, 2001). He coedited (with Álvaro F.
Bolaños) the collection Colonialism Past and Present. Reading and Writing about Colonial Latin America
Today (State Universtiy of New York Press, 2002). He has also edited an issue of the journal
Dispositio/n (#52, 2005) dedicated to the legacy of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group.
xvii
Contributors
Charlene Villaseñor Black is professor of art history and Chicana/o studies at the University
of California, Los Angeles; the author of Creating the Cult of St. Joseph: Art and Gender in the
Spanish Empire; editor of Tradition and Transformation: Chicana/o Art from the 1970s to the 1990s,
and editor of Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies. In 2016–2017 she was awarded UCLA’s Gold
Shield Faculty Prize for Academic Excellence. She is founding editor-in-chief of Latin American
and Latinx Visual Culture (University of California Press).
xviii
BETWEEN COLONIALISM
AND COLONIALITY
Colonial Latin American and Caribbean
studies today
Introduction
Since we both share a passion for maps, we tried to find a cartographic representation for the cover
that was both Americas-centric and Global South-centric. Although many images came to mind,
we were not expecting the process of finding a map that would address the complexity of the
representation of colonial spaces to be so difficult.The image that we chose is not perfect, because
it is still a map conceived from a European point of view. Cartography, as J. B. Harley (2001) has
theorized so well, is not a mode of representation but of invention that has been dominated by
imperial, First World-centric perspectives. As a result, Americas-centric maps, that show its strate-
gic position between the Atlantic and the Pacific, Europe, Africa and Asia, and that at the same
time showcase a Global South perspective are not that easy to find.We are therefore reframing the
interpretation of this map in a way that invites our readers to focus on the alternative worldviews
that become possible when colonial studies is intentional about making this happen.
We chose the “Map of America” by German cartographer and humanist, Sebastian Münster.
This map was originally published in 1538, and was reprinted several times until it was included
in his Cosmographia Universalis (1544), Münster’s best-known geographical and historical text
that was published in five languages and forty-six editions (Harley 1990). Mixing medieval and
modern geographical ideas and findings, this map includes several firsts: it is the first printed map
focused only on the Western Hemisphere, and it is the first map to name the Pacific Ocean and
the Strait of Magellan. It includes one of the earliest representations of Japan (identified as
Zipangri), and it is also one of the first cartographic representations of John Cabot’s and Giovanni
da Verrazano’s travels in North America in the 1490s and 1520s respectively. In addition, there is
a reference to the Treaty of Tordesillas and its division of Spanish and Portuguese possessions in
the Americas and the map clearly represents the Americas as a separate insular landmass barely
forty-six years after the so-called “discovery” of the Americas.1
The Caribbean is represented in detail, with the Castilian flag waving over Saona (confused
with what is today known as Puerto Rico).2 North, Central and South America appear at the
center, while Asia, Europe and Africa are represented on both sides of the map, close to the
borders of the image. The vessel in the Pacific commemorates the Magellan-Elcano circum-
navigation of 1519–1522. There are references to European myths and stereotypes, like the
1
representation of Brazil as a land of cannibals, or the Southern Cone as a region inhabited by

giants. Cuba, Hispaniola, Florida,Yucatan, and Tenochtitlan are clearly identified.Yet beyond all
of the accurate and inaccurate portrayals that one can find on this map, it is the centrality of the
Americas, and its contacts with Asia, Europe and Africa through the navigational networks of
the Manila Galleons and the expeditions by Magellan and Marco Polo, that prompted us to use
this cartographic visual text. We believe that our decolonial misreading of Münster’s map can
be representative of the complex networks of imperialism and coloniality that are simultane-
ously transatlantic and transpacific. In this map the Americas are a center of the European
colonial enterprise that becomes a location more closely connected to the Global South via its
coloniality, than to the Global North via the imperial potentiality of its rich resources.
The study of colonialism and coloniality has a long lineage across disciplines in the humani-
ties and social sciences. Yet, it has changed dramatically within the last thirty years under the
influence of theoretical positionings, disciplinary and interdisciplinary turns. In Latin American
literary and cultural studies, while scholarship on “the colonial” has traditionally focused on
cultural manifestations under Iberian rule, critical engagements with postcolonialism and deco-
loniality have expanded the temporal, geographical, and epistemological domains of the field.
Instead, these two frameworks refocus on the critical examination of historically and ideologi-
cally determined formations of knowledge, practices of domination, and forms of resistance
from a colonial standpoint. These shifts in scholarship are viewed as necessary lessons on the
pervasive legacy of early modern imperial designs.
The essays in this volume propose innovative examinations of cultural conceptualizations of
colonialism and coloniality to interrogate power relations and imperial practices of economic
development, population and territorial expansion, and the production of knowledge. The four
overarching themes used to organize this collection of essays—colonialism and coloniality,
knowledge and networks, materialities and archives, and language, translation and beyond—offer
entry points to examine questions about the circulation of ideas, objects and people, race and
mestizaje, gender and sexuality, geography and geographical thinking, the transformation of
nature, geopolitics, sovereignty, and imperial power.We hope that the topics proposed to organize
the essays in this volume offer new insights about central epistemological premises for under-
standing the colonial world. Approaches to colonialism and its inscriptions call for a profound
reflection about the nature of colonialism, as a process of territorialization of new spatial forma-
tions that transformed natural landscapes and environments. The centrality of the study of Latin
American colonialism today is indebted to its interdisciplinary and transhistorical nature, attentive
to its pervasive local and global reaching consequences for the human and non-human worlds.
Scholarship on Latin American and Caribbean colonial studies brings to the fore critical
concerns that expose the tensions between the past and the present—it therefore needs to be
viewed as another form of political practice with crucial methodological implications. As is the
case with other theories and approaches to the study of literature and culture, the examination
of texts, institutions, and situated practices that shaped the Latin American and Caribbean colo-
nial experience before 1898 is neatly tied to enduring questions that go beyond the issue of
scholarly or academic representation.
There is no doubt that colonialism and coloniality are alive and well in Latin America, the
Caribbean, and US Latinx enclaves. It is almost impossible not to notice the entanglements of
contemporary manifestations with the colonial past. The colonial roots of national movements,
as well as neocolonial and neoimperial designs of major significance in the broader field of Latin
American studies, have led to interdisciplinary research on ethics, citizenship, migration and
human rights violations.These themes and their call for political activism, can be found in some
of the most recent reconceptualizations of the field. For instance, for a new generation of
2
Between colonialism and coloniality
scholars, decolonization is not merely an abstract notion in the analysis of the transition from
colonies to republics. While the study of the colonial period unveils imperial and colonial
engagements, it also questions the Eurocentric rationality, as well as consequences that have
hindered aspirations for sovereignty, equality, or even “el buen vivir” (Gudynas 2011).
Scholars have offered important (and often critical) overviews of the main modes of configu-
ration of the colonial period in histories, anthologies or compilations of Latin American and
Caribbean cultural studies (such as the study of generations, periodizations and particular genres)
(Balbuena Briones 1952; Anderson and Florit 1960; Hamilton 1960; Anderson Imbert 1965,
1969; Lazo 1965; Madrigal 1982; Goic 1988; Vidal 1993; Zavala and Rico 1994; Valdés and
Kadir 2004; Adorno and Echevarría 2017; Chang Rodríguez and Filer 2017). Some of the
canonical histories and edited volumes of colonial Latin American literature (i.e., Goic 1988;
Gónzalez-Stephan and Costigan 1992; Greenblatt 1993; Ceballos, Cole and Scott 1994; Castro-
Klaren 2008; González-Echevarría and Pupo-Walker 2008), prompted by the quincentennial
anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage, offer new criticism on colonial texts, take on innovative
theoretical or disciplinary turns to examine the colonial experience (i.e., Mignolo 1995; Arias
and Meléndez 2002; Moraña 2005; Castro 2008; Rodríguez and Martínez 2011), or make hemi-
spherical connections between the Anglo and Spanish conquests of the Americas (Greenblatt
1993; Castillo and Schweitzer 2001; Bauer 2003b). More recently, some edited volumes have
focused on important keywords and/or theoretical turns that can be used to define Latin
American cultural studies as a whole and include references to the colonial period in their
examinations (i.e., Irwin and Szurmuk 2009; Martínez-San Miguel et al. 2016; Poblete 2018).
Historians have also contributed to the cultural field paying attention to key concepts that
define the production, exchange and circulation of knowledge (Levy and Mills 2013). It is
impossible to propose a critical history that can do justice to the complexity of the field (Castro
2008, 6; González Echevarría and Pupo Walker 2008, 32). Therefore, this volume aims to focus
on the entrenched workings of colonialism and coloniality and reflect on novel themes and
debates through new approaches and interpretations.
In thinking about the field beyond the framework of a single genealogy of colonial Latin
American and Caribbean studies, in this introduction we are engaging four tendencies or
schools of thought to discuss the formation and transformation of colonial studies since its
creation in the nineteenth century until the present: (1) the invention of colonial Latin
American and Caribbean studies and its establishment as the origin of latinoamericanism; (2)
the process of Latinization of the colonial period; (3) the challenges and contributions of
postcolonial and decolonial frameworks in the field; and (4) the inter- and transdisciplinary
engagements that have nourished the scholarship in colonial Latin American studies. We do
not conceive these four areas of thought or dimensions of the field as chronological develop-
ments, but rather as tendencies that have informed Caribbean and Latin American colonial
studies transversally.
The invention of the Latin American and Caribbean colonial period

We would like to start this section with an apparently uncontroversial affirmation: the colonial
period was a colonizing invention and a modern project advanced by cultural agents (biblio-
philes, historians, writers and cultural critics) to provide Latin American literary history with a
parallel structure to European literary histories. If one thinks of the ideological underpinnings
that the gathering and recovery of documents entailed, the colonial period was much conceived
as the equivalent to the recovery of the medieval period in European cultural projects with a
clear presentist goal of establishing the pre-national origins to national literatures and cultures.
3
The nationalist and romantic teleologies that shaped the study of colonialism in literature, his-
tory, and even anthropology proved to be compromised by contemporary debates and political
agendas. Moreover, the colonial archive (or archives) shared with the medieval corpus the prob-
lem of anachronism, since literary and cultural historians would classify a wide variety of written
texts under genres and categories that were alien to their contexts of production. As a conse-
quence, these early archival projects denied a place to cultural objects, the role of institutions,
and the subaltern perspectives hidden behind other voices (Arias 2015).
Within the field of Latin American literary history and criticism, the emergence of colonial
studies as an academic field needs to consider early archival activities and establishments of librar-
ies by indigenous, mestizo, and Creole intellectuals who took the first steps to recover, order, and
safeguard primary sources that were later listed in encyclopedic projects that showcased and
enlightened with pride (yet following Eurocentric models) the cultural wealth of different
regions across the Americas. Initial Eurocentric colonial archives, and the circulation of primary
sources via printed collections, such as those edited by Andrés González de Barcia (1749), Martín
Fernández de Navarrete (1825–1844) and Lord Kingsborough (1831), also serve as ideal sites for
research on the problematic origins of Latin American colonial literature and, more importantly,
as examples of the limited repertoire of imperial projects that present more questions than
answers (Taylor 2003). Criollos, reasserting an American-centric identity in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, or seeking autonomous power and local government in the nineteenth
century, replaced the European colonizers who with their economic privilege and social posi-
tioning gave continuity to Enlightenment liberalism (Ross 1993; Bauer and Mazzotti 2009;
More 2013). For nineteenth-century criollo intellectuals, the constitution of early archives and
publications that followed sought to give heightened importance to patriotic agendas for the
democratization of knowledge, abolition of slavery, and independence. Perhaps some of the best
examples of these early criollo archives are from the Atlantic circuit reaching to the earliest US
Latinx enclaves (Lazo 2016). José Antonio Saco, Domingo del Monte, Alejandro Tapia y Rivera
José Julián Acosta, and Arturo Schomburg published and taught by unveiling a colonial literary-
historical corpus that exposed Spanish hegemony and its instruments for empire building.
The critical and historical apparatus used to conceptualize the colonial Caribbean and Latin
American literary and cultural canon was significantly transformed during the eighteenth cen-
tury. After the Wars of Succession, the Bourbon monarchy set new priorities for recovering
Spain’s historical past in the context of the extraimperial competition for global reach. Despite
its decline in military power and loss of vast swaths of territories to Portugal, Britain and France
during the second half of the century, court ministers and their letrados sought to find and repro-
duce their nation with the establishment and reordering of archives, libraries and new royal
institutions designed for the grand display of imperiality. As Christopher Schmidt-Nowara
(2006) notes, historians of the era agreed that Spain had become an imperial power with the
expansion of the routes of commerce made possible under Columbus’s lead. Neither Portuguese
nor Italian historians could bring forward the evidence needed to recover this historical figure
from oblivion.When Juan Bautista Muñoz was asked to write the definitive history of the Indies
to refute northern European philosophes, he began a long and arduous process to lay the founda-
tion for a comprehensive account that reinserted Columbus back at the center of Spain’s mod-
ern history with newly found documents.3 While the impetus to recover the Columbian
experience in order to redefine Spain’s modern history originates within Madrid’s cultural
institutions, paradoxically, the actual remaking of Columbus as a global hero of civilization and
religion was achieved from abroad.
Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, other chroniclers and colonial actors were
also inscribed in the canon across Europe and the Americas: Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernal Díaz
4
del Castillo, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, José de Acosta, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Fray
Bernardino de Sahagún, Alonso de Ercilla, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,
and Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, to name a few. Thereafter the canon was further enriched
by more recent generations of scholars who unveiled new actors, documents, and/or redirected
critical attention to questions of race, gender and sexuality, indigenous sources, space, science,
and the environment (Mazzotti 2000; Arias and Meléndez 2002; Myers 2003; Bennett 2006,
2009, 2018; Hill 2007; Martínez 2008; Arenal and Schlau 2010; Paravisini-Gebert 2011; Kirk and
Rivett 2014; Brian 2016; Bentancor 2017; Quispe Agnoli and Díaz 2017; Bauer 2019; Bigelow
2020). Anyone who has followed the development of colonial studies should be able to recog-
nize the impact of scholarly editions and interdisciplinary scholarship on Guaman Poma de
Ayala, Chimalpahin, Hernando de Alvarado Tezozomoc, the Popol Vuh, the Huarochirí Manuscript,
and Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, among many others. A more recent tendency is to propose
the study of latinidad, Blackness and indigeneity from comparative perspectives that include
north-south dialogues in the Americas and south-south comparisons and juxtapositions
(Castro-Klaren 2008; Coronado 2013; Saldaña-Portillo 2016; Hooker 2017; Nemser 2017;
Martínez-San Miguel 2018b) or to question the whole narrative of the indigenous disappear-
ance in the Caribbean (Jackson 2012; Newton 2013; Feliciano‐Santos 2017a, 2017b, 2021).
Once “invented,” the colonial period presented several challenges for Latin American cul-
tural studies scholars. First, many of the texts that were read as the “origins” of the literary tradi-
tion were not actually produced or intended as aesthetic interventions. “Literature” as it was
defined and configured in nineteenth-century Europe, did not exist as such in the sixteenth,
seventeenth and eighteen centuries. Furthermore, the notion of literature cannot be assumed to
be a universal category that can be imposed on the rich diversity of communities inhabiting the
Americas from the sixteenth century to the present (Mignolo 2013). For example, the written
accounts that are usually identified as the beginnings of Latin American literatures were chron-
icles, relaciones, administrative documents, and correspondence between colonial authorities and
the metropolis. Others were legal, liturgical and evangelical texts in which the performative and
aesthetic dimensions were explicitly secondary. More recently, Fernando Degiovanni (2018), in
his discussion on the foundations of Latinoamericanism, has examined Latin American literature
as a product that, from its beginnings, has been mediated by the specter of war and proposals on
the region’s potential for economic development. The heightened significance of imperiality
and development could explain how indigenous and subaltern subjects’ aesthetic, historical and
symbolic expressions were systematically excluded from many of the early literary histories
about the colonial Americas.
Although colonial poetics also had a place in the literary canon as an imperial instrument,
poets often embraced military or courtly motifs to promote heroic deeds of military expansion
and social order (Beverley 1998; López-Chávez 2016; Téllez 2012). The imperial purview was
contested by satire writers that in prose and verse offer an unforgiving critique of metropolitan
life in cities such as Mexico, Lima, and Bogota (Johnson 2014). Finally, the notion of history that
was prevalent during the colonization, conquest, and second imperial expansion under Bourbon
rule in the Americas and Pacific regions included aspects of what we currently associate with
the literary function (Beckjord 2007). Therefore, colonial discourses that have been conceptual-
ized as the origins of Latin American literature belong simultaneously in more than one archival
corpus, and in several of the currently known literary and discursive genres.
Crucial interrogations remain open for discussion and analysis. On the one hand, many of the
authors did not intend to produce texts that will eventually be located outside the European
historical, literary or cultural archives/canon. In this context, the Latin American dimension of
these texts is the result of a completely different exercise of interpretation disengaged from their
5
context of production. As a consequence, many of the Latin American resonances we currently

identify in the early colonial corpus are readings against the grain of this archive. On the other
hand, even when the Americas are central in the production of these colonial texts, it became
evident very early on that the writers’ locus of enunciation and intentions were not the depic-
tion, preservation, or celebration of Latin American and Caribbean cultural traditions. Instead,
many of these descriptive and narrative accounts register the painful and difficult colonization
of the imaginary (Gruzinski 1988), as well as the agency and creative modes of resistance and
accommodation that emerged in the Americas and other colonial regions as an alternative locus
of enunciation from which local and native voices were able to transmit their experiences, ways
of knowing, and ancient traditions (Charles 2010; Yannakakis, 2014; Matthew and Oudijk 2014;
McDonough 2014).This realization of the polysemic and contingent nature of language (verbal
and non-verbal) and its inability to capture the explicit intention of an authorial voice or a
response to socio-political goals, has been crucial in the continuous rearticulation of the field.
It would not be until the late 1960s that cultural historians began to question the periodiza-
tion that established the beginnings of Latin American “civilization” as a global extension of the
Reconquista that was centered in the account of Columbus’s enterprise. Critics and literary his-
torians Raimundo Lazo (1965), Jean Franco (1969, 1975a), Guiseppe Bellini (1985), and
Cedomil Goic (1988) problematized the imperiality of Spanish literary histories that included
the colonial literary corpus. Goic (1988, 26) identifies the emergence of colonial Spanish
American studies as a distinct field in the critical and historiographical work previously con-
ducted by Moses (1922), Pirotto (1937) and Picón Salas (1944).This Latin Americanist approach
to the colonial period was later expanded in works by key scholars, such as López Baralt (1988,
1993), Mignolo and Boone (2004), Castro-Klaren (2008), Adorno (2000), Chang-Rodríguez
(1988, 1991) and Chang-Rodríguez and Filer (2017), among others. Recent work has contin-
ued to recover indigenous and African cultural discourses as an alternative to the Euro- and
verbal-centric archive established in the late eighteenth century (Bennett 2006, 2009, 2018;
Brewer-García 2012, 2019; Díaz Balsera 2018; Fuentes 2018). The important yet oftentimes
ambivalent role of criollismo during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries has been critically
examined by scholars of colonial Latin American discourses (Ross 1993; Bauer and Mazzotti
2009; Mazzotti 2016; More 2013; Stolley 2013; and others). Mounting research on the presence
of mestizos and criollos in the religious orders and convents has benefited from new perspectives
across disciplines that bring attention to their agency in art, science, geography, and their politi-
cal role shaping the colonial church (Villaseñor Black 2006; Lavrin 2008; Asúa 2014; Díaz 2017).
This evolving scholarship on the role of criollos and other subaltern subjects who contributed
to colonial literary history and the institutionalization of knowledge had a strong beginning in
Pedro Henríquez Ureña’s Harvard lectures later published in his Literary Currents in Hispanic
America (1945).4
The field has had a series of crucial moments in the redefinition and reinvention of its object
of study during the last forty years.The first one was the interrogation of the notion of colonial
discourse (Adorno 1988; Seed 1991; Vidal 1993; Klor de Alva 1995). We will review that
moment in our discussion about theorizations of the colonial, postcolonial and decolonial in
Latin America. The second one is the problematization of “literature” to interrogate the
written-centric configuration of the field, to propose the study of “colonial discourse” and
“colonial semiosis” as a rather capacious method of analysis that would allow for a decentraliza-
tion of the modern notions of book and literature from our field of study (Adorno 1988;
Mignolo 1989). One of the main results of this critical moment was the inclusion of a broad
6
array of modes of cultural production and the redefinition of “writing” beyond the confines of
the alphabet and books as a universal mode of expression (Taylor 2003; Salomon 2004; Boone
and Mignolo 2004; Brokaw 2010).
Some scholars have also analyzed the many ways in which indigenous, African and non-Euro-
pean communities did engage with writing and used existing religious and legal discursive forms
to preserve their cultural traditions (Brokaw 2010; Bennett 2009; León Llerena 2011; McDonough
2014). A third important moment was the call for a decolonization of colonial studies, to inter-
rogate Euro- and verbal-centric notions of history and culture, and to showcase the history of
indigenous, Black, mestizo and Asian populations that did not adhere to the white, criollista and
nationalist teleologies (Kubayanda 1990; Mignolo 2000, 2009; Rabasa 2000; Blanco 2009; López-
Calvo 2009; Brewer-García 2012; López 2013). Gender, gender expression and sexuality have also
generated an important body of scholarship that is linked to the reconfiguration of the field after
the emergence of subaltern studies as well as a whole series of interdisciplinary modes of inquiry
that we will discuss in more detail in the fifth section of this introduction (Curiel 2013; Gruzinski
2002; Horswell 2006; Lugones 2007, 2008, 2010; Goldmark 2015; Tortorici 2018).
From the invention of the colonial to the deconstruction of its imperial/colonial and nation-
alist premises, the field of colonial Latin American studies has grown to become an important
area of inquiry that is producing exciting scholarship. Furthermore, today’s scholars do not con-
ceive colonialism either as the sole origin of Latin American and Caribbean cultures and histo-
ries, or as the proto-nationalist preface to contemporary identities in the region. Critics and
scholars recognize the existence of symbolic and historical archives produced by populations
that existed before colonialism (even though these are often hard to study due to the difficulty
involved in accessing and preserving non-written materials), as well as the emergence of identi-
ties and cultural expressions that complicate or transcend the confines of the colonial context in
which they originated. This expansion of the colonial archive, and/or of the inquiries that are
examined through the written, verbal, symbolic, archaeological and otherwise material corpus
that is available to historians, cultural critics and interdisciplinary scholars, has also generated
important debates about the approaches and methods that can and shall be used to study a more
encompassing and complex notion of the early moments for Latin American cultures and soci-
eties (Verdesio 2010a, 2010b). Nowadays, the colonial period is hardly an invention of a group
of First World and Euro-American scholars wishing to produce parity between European and
American cultural histories. The colonial Latin American archive is a vibrant and complex
repository of materials that are crucial to understand contemporary cultural and symbolic pro-
ductions, as well as political and social experiences in the region. This is precisely the second
tendency or school of thought that we would like to discuss in the next section.
The Latinx Americanization of colonial studies

In this section we include two parallel genealogies that are crucial in the formation of the con-
temporary inflections of the field: the Latin Americanization and the Latinization of colonial
studies. We are linking these two processes because both focus on the centrality of Latinx
Americanity and colonialism. We therefore adopt a gender-neutral version of José Quiroga’s
capacious conflation of both tendencies in his term “Latino American” (2000). This gesture of
including these two important historiographical projections of the field aims to signal the exist-
ing collaborations between area and ethnic studies that are constitutive of recent scholarship in
colonial Caribbean and Latin American studies.
7
Colonial Latin America

Any discussion of the Latin Americanization of colonial studies needs to be approached with
much caution.This complicated story of the origins of Latin American colonial studies cannot be
separated from the beginnings of Latin American history and literary studies as fields that resulted
from the modern ordering of knowledge that shaped institutional learning during the nineteenth
century. As Foucault reminds us, knowledge is bound up with a search for the epistemic truth that
justifies political power. As we will discuss in what follows, in this process, imperial and national
politics shaped cultural values that hinged on subjects’ transnational circuits. Mobility allowed
them access to archives and communities that would support their political agendas.
While most of the following examples pertain to the Spanish American experience, it is criti-
cal to acknowledge that early underpinnings of coloniality and colonial cultural history in the
Spanish-speaking regions share significant threads of history with Brazil. Herbert Bolton (1933),
Lewis Hanke (1964), Eduardo Galeano (1992), and a vast number of scholars in history and
literature grappled with the idea of their common history. Historian Marshall Eakin (2014)
returns to the relevant question on the use of “Latin America” to refer to the territorial space
mostly colonized by European empires, primarily by Spain and Portugal. The name “Latin
America” was first imposed in the mid-nineteenth century by the Spanish American Creoles
who sought a collective identity based on their history as former Spanish and Portuguese colo-
nies. As Eakin writes, paradoxically, imperial expansion had much to do with the prevalent use
of the name. It took hold when Napoleon III described the broad region he wished to conquer.
While the Creole’s collective agency that invented the idea of Latin America had significant
implications in the Latin Americanization of colonial studies, it is important to acknowledge the
role of the imperiality of naming on these two opposing fronts. Napoleon III’s use of Latin
America was brief; it was replaced with Spanish America after a few years. Its debut in publica-
tions, histories and literary anthologies inscribed and celebrated the “expansive idea of
Hispanism” (Resina 2005) by highlighting the Spanish colonial period, thus excluding any
memory of indigenous territories and a shared geography and ethnohistory with Brazil.
Sharing or not the spirit of Hispanism, transnational interventions—as well as exchanges
between Spain, the United States, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Latin America—
marked access and scholarship on the colonial corpus in a long process between the late eigh-
teenth century and the 1980s. At the root of this genealogy are the colonial texts of the Iberian
early modern canon. As Richard Kagan reminds us, universities in France and Germany had
already established Spanish studies in the late eighteenth century.The emphasis on “Golden Age
literature” brought prominence to chronicles, epic poetry, and comedias de Indias (plays on the
Indies), which recreated the theater of war of the conquest (Quintana 2010). Hispanists at
Göttingen, Paris, and even across the Atlantic, at Harvard, mastered Spain’s literary history and
established a Spanish-centered curriculum that included the imperial expansion, which remained
in place until the 1960s (Kagan 2002, 2019; Ríos-Font 2005).
During the Age of Revolutions (1774–1849), key intellectuals from Latin America and
Europe traveled back and forth, creating a circuit of exchanges that made possible the appropria-
tion of ideas that would influence education and enlightened scholarship, economic investments,
and political alliances and interventions (Brown and Paquette 2013). For instance, London
became a center of revolutionary activity after Francisco de Miranda’s exile. Between 1811 and
1816, Servando Teresa de Mier, Luis López Méndez, Carlos María de Alvear, Simón Bolívar, and
Andrés Bello lodged in Miranda’s residence while seeking international support. From London,
Bello published in the monthly El Censor Americano (Jaksić 2006, 66), and later began his publi-
cations Biblioteca Americana (1823) and Repertorio Americano (1826–27). These periodical
8
publications included his poems, literary criticism, and essays on language, politics, and more.
Articles by other intellectuals on natural history, geography, and science—Enlightenment
knowledge that could support designs for progress and improvement in the Americas—were
published as well.
Bello’s Biblioteca and Repertorio provide an opportunity to consider how Creoles’ publications
uncovered and brought visibility to unknown primary sources to educate and deploy research
agendas. He was formed as a colonial subject, fought against colonialism, translated and made
available colonial primary sources, and, more importantly, wrote a grammar for the americanos.
His activities and calls to develop an autochthonous American cultural tradition that transcends
national boundaries recognized the significance of historical writing and poetics produced
under colonialism. Those arguments were further developed by José Martí (1891), José Enrique
Rodó (1900), Manuel Ugarte (1920), and Octavio Paz (1959) among many others who advanced
ideas of a continental Latin American other.
In Bello’s 1842 inaugural lecture as president of the University of Chile, he called for reading
and revaluing colonial texts to forge a new future (Jaksić 1999). At that moment, Spain had not
yet published its first literary history. The Spanish Romantic dramatist and scholar Antonio Gil
y Zárate published his Manual de literatura in 1844, and the seven volumes of the first compre-
hensive history, José Amador de los Ríos’s Historia crítica de la literatura española, were published
between 1861 and 1865. From Gil y Zárate and Amador de los Ríos to still well-known literary
histories and anthologies such as Ángel del Río’s Historia de la literatura española (1948), the inclu-
sion of Sor Juana, el Inca Garcilaso, Alonso Ercilla y Zúñiga, and early chroniclers eroded Latin
American cultural capital, by enlisting these authors in a canon that served the national and
cultural reconstitution of Spain.
Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo includes colonial Latin American literature as part of
Spanish literature in his Historia de la poesía hispano-americana (1911) and even Jean Franco’s
1969 English edition of a Literary History of Spain: Spanish American Literature since Independence
partially conflates Spanish and Spanish American literatures. Spanish literary histories also
display enormous ambivalence on the value of colonial literature, and present the period and
corpus as an intermediary cultural space between Spain and the Americas (Goic 1988, 24).
This position also appears in literary histories such as the influential three-volume History of
Spanish Literature (1849) by American literary scholar George Ticknor. Ticknor’s history
became the standard for decades, even informing readers in Europe with translations in
French, Spanish, and German.
The position celebrating Spain’s discovery and a professedly new national cohesion in the
name of progress epitomized nineteenth and twentieth-century intellectual currents and ideolo-
gies that took hold in Spain, and the US. Besides American Hispanophile George Ticknor, other
prominent figures that contributed to this revisionist version of colonialism are Washington
Irving (1828), William H. Prescott (1837, 1843), Justin Winsor (1884), Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow (1846, 1966–82), Bernard Moses (1922), and the founder of the Hispanic Society of
America, Archer M. Huntington, through his works and patronage. Among these actors,
Washington Irving occupies a singular position in the history of Hispanism and colonial studies.
As Rolena Adorno notes, Washington Irving’s multivolume literary biography of Christopher
Columbus, A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828) (with 116 editions and
a Spanish translation (1834) reprinted 14 times) was produced to portray the explorer as “the
consummate heroic figure” for the United States to be “neither challenged or debated” (2002,
89). Biographies of Columbus and interpretations of the conquest multiplied in acts of historical
appropriation seeking to produce enduring myths. The 1892 World’s Columbian Exposition
(delayed until 1893), revived the history of colonialism and the imperial vision for the American
9
public. For David Armitage, the celebration of the fourth centennial represents the desire for
“national unity and historical identity that rested on an interpretation of Columbus as progres-
sive and heroic” (1992, 54).
Across the Americas, Hispanism and its obligatory celebration of the Spanish conquest con-
fused and delayed the emergence of colonial Latin American studies.This movement was ampli-
fied even more by the number of Spanish writers and scholars who came to US universities after
the First World War and, years later, in a second wave escaping the Spanish Civil War in the
1930s. Some that taught in US universities include keystone figures such as Ramón Menéndez
Pidal, Américo Castro, and Federico de Onís. This influx of scholars from Spain who also pub-
lished work on colonial Latin America coincided with the growing interest in research devoted
to indigenous cultures of the Americas, race and mestizaje, and other themes that began to shift
the intellectual basis for the study of the colonial experience. Oftentimes, US-based American
scholars’ writings on colonial Latin America were at odds with earlier efforts by Spanish
American Creoles during the nation-building process.
A full understanding of the transhistorical and transnational dimensions of the colonial expe-
rience escapes the bounds of literary and historical production and analysis. One needs to pay
attention as well to developments in architecture, the arts, and music, which often brought, in
contradictory ways, cultural value to the “exotic” cultures and nature that had been colonized
by Iberian powers. Governments or societies sponsoring museums and archives were at work as
well, often in collaboration with universities for the continued plundering and appropriation of
books and artifacts from Latin America. These kinds of extractive engagements had an old his-
tory; European missionaries who regarded indigenous sacred texts as evidence of their idolatry
first tried to make sense of their writing system in ethnographical accounts before the massive
burnings that left only a handful of manuscripts that reappeared intact centuries later in several
European locations (Mignolo 1995; Boone, 2007).
The plundering by colonial travelers, natural scientists, and missionaries had much to do with
enlightened ideas and policies. European empires sought knowledge aggressively on what they
perceived as “exotic” lands for their scientific developments and for commercial-colonial expan-
sion. Over the last two decades, research on the history of science, archives, and material history
has underscored the role of enlightened knowledge brokers such as Lorenzo Boturini Benaducci,
Felipe Bauzá, Franco Dávila, Pierre Ledru, and Alexander von Humboldt (Pratt 1992; Delbourgo
and Dew 2008; Kontler et al. 2014). Interdisciplinary research on their writings, mappings, and
collecting practices unveils the wide array of dynamics of the production of knowledge as well
as the complex negotiations entailed in exchanges to create new botanical gardens and archival
collections. Botanical gardens established in major metropolitan centers during the second half
of the eighteenth century introduced specimens from the Americas. After the Wars of
Independence, several Latin American national museums received artifacts of pre-colonial and
colonial origin for displays that brought national prestige to these institutions.
The nation-building process often facilitated forms of imperial violence. For instance, during
the post-independence literacy campaign, the Mexican priest and bibliophile José María Luis
Mora Lamadrid exchanged the Chimalpahin Codex for protestant bibles from the British and
Foreign Bible Society (Jacquot 2019). The exchange allowed the use of bibles for the literacy
campaign.The Codex, a three-volume history of the Aztecs, was passed to Cambridge University
in 1982. After a decision to sell the books in 2014, the public announcement of the auction by
the international art company Christie’s alerted the Mexican government, which was able to
negotiate the return of this important codex.
Without losing sight of imperial ideologies always embedded in the collection and appro-
priation of local knowledges, Ricardo Salvatore argues that foreign scholars who participated in
10
what he calls the “disciplinary conquest” of South America, “claimed possession” of knowledge
for their academic disciplines (2016, 11). For him, their intervention developed the field of
regional knowledge of Latin America. The Yale Peruvian Expedition of 1911 that led Hiram
Bingham to his fortuitous discovery of Machu Picchu remains as one of the most polemical
academic-commercial ventures of the twentieth century. Kodak and National Geographic spon-
sored the second and third expeditions, and artifacts recovered were deposited at the Peabody
Museum at Yale. Peru requested the return of objects in a highly controversial lawsuit that
received international attention. In 2008, the government of Alan García successfully negotiated
the return of artifacts in several installments (Orson 2010). For the development of colonial
Latin American studies, this case demonstrates the role of imperiality in the forging of archives
that serve as the foundation for the discipline.
During the same period, Bernard Moses published his Spanish Colonial Literature in South
America (1922). Moses, a social scientist who established the political science department at
University of California, Berkeley late in his career, began to research the economic and politi-
cal history of colonial Latin America. Of five books on the topic, the Hispanic Society of
America published the last two. His literary history is one of the first attempts to cover South
American writing in all genres up to 1810. As expected, he excluded indigenous authors,
except for the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, who appears in most Hispanophile collections because
of the more readable qualities of his writing for a European public. It would be fair to ask: why
would a social scientist undertake such a project? He writes: “to know a nation’s life as known
at any given epoch or to visualize the worldly show that passed before the thoughtful contem-
porary mind, one should refer, not to the artificial creation of the modern historian, with its
twentieth-century atmosphere, but to what men wrote of their times or times near their own”
(1922, 6).
An exception to the nationalism and Hispanophile impetus that forged the field in the
Americas and Europe can be found in the work and ideas of José Carlos Mariátegui and the
1920s Amauta magazine. Amauta (1926–1930) created an avant-garde network of intellectuals,
writers, and visual artists with international recognition that came to define the project. Their
contributions to modern politics, traditions, art, and particularly indigenismo represented well
Mariátegui’s perspective for an avant-garde movement in Latin America. Mariátegui’s pluralistic
vision, anchored in the celebration of difference, interrogates the nature of national literatures
that excluded indigenous literatures created before the conquest. Literary writing under colo-
nialism, indigenous survival, and the Quechua-Spanish dualism are central preoccupations in
Mariátegui’s thought that contributed to the Latin Americanization of colonial studies and the
inclusion of subaltern perspectives developed during the second half of the twentieth century.
Another crucial moment in the study of Latin American colonial literature is organized
around the study of the Baroque in the Americas, with significant critical interventions pub-
lished from the 1940s until the present.5 The central argument of these artists and scholars is that
although the Baroque began in Europe, the corresponding movement in the Americas was
transformed to open the artistic and aesthetic arenas to the creolized and syncretic expressions
of the complex array of populations, that included indigenous, Black and Asian cultural forma-
tions. The diversified contributions of the Baroque were later claimed as a central element in
contemporary Latin American literature, through what Severo Sarduy (1974) and Haroldo de
Campos (1989), among others, denominated as the neobaroque. Some of the names by which
colonial Baroque in the Americas was reclaimed by Latin American critics were: Barroco de Indias
(Picón Salas 1944; Acosta 1984); Barroco indígena; Barroco indo-hispánico; Barroco indiano (Roggiano
1978, 1994); Barroco americano, Barroco del Nuevo Mundo (Parkinson Zamora 2006); Barroco criollo,
mundonovismo, lo real maravilloso (Carpentier 1964, 1975), neobarroso (Perlongher 1991), and
11
Barroco latinoamericano. These new histories and debates broke the tie and, by doing so destabi-
lized the romantic and encompassing Spanish Golden Age canon.
Roberto González Echevarría and Enrique Pupo Walker’s Cambridge History of Latin American
Literature (1996) still represents today a significant landmark in Latin American literary history.
With the incorporation of changing theoretical perspectives, cultural studies, and coverage of
Afro-Hispanic, Latinx, and colonial literature, these three volumes announced new directions for
the twenty-first century. The broadening of colonial studies is demonstrated with eleven essays
devoted to the period that brought light to further questions and authors who had been excluded
from the canon.This important task of recovery and expansion of the colonial archive takes into
account various themes including indigenous and mestizo perspectives, the influence of the law
in historical writing, questions of authorship and intention, women in the lettered culture, the
Barroco de Indias (colonial Baroque), the Spanish American Enlightenment, and interdisciplinary
perspectives exemplified in the examination of the history of women in the convent.The expan-
sion of the canon, announcing interconnected histories that serve as a point of departure for the
hemispheric turn today (Negrón Muntaner 2020; Voigt 2016) is rendered in essays that link Afro-
Hispanic and Afro-American authors as well as Brazilian and Spanish American literatures.
Another critical connection examined in several essays in the Cambridge History is that of the
literary production of 1960s Boom novelists and their mining of the colonial period. Alejo
Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and others that followed such as Abel Pose,
Antonio Benítez Rojo, and José Juan Saer reimagined episodes that brought back the violence
and contradictions of the colonization and conquest. In 1981 Carpentier published La novela
latinoamericana en vísperas de un nuevo siglo where he defined “la nueva crónica de Indias” (the new
chronicle of the Indies) as the gold standard for shaping the new Latin American novel. In his
view, the redeployment of colonial tropes and images of the unexpected and marvelous could
inspire and define everyday life in Latin America. His significant intervention on the real maravil-
loso was tied to an understanding of the early years of the colonial experience, as well as Baroque
aesthetics. In Tientos y Diferencias, Carpentier concludes that “the legitimate style for the Spanish
American novelist is the baroque” (qt. in Oviedo 2001, 409).
Far from the circuit included in the Cambridge History of Latin American Literature, critical
paradigms from Latin America gained currency in US academia, making waves among colonial
scholars. The arsenal of cultural theorizations by Fernando Ortiz, Oswald de Andrade, Roberto
Fernández Retamar, Ángel Rama, and Antonio Cornejo Polar have been central in the critique
of Eurocentrism and the decolonization of the nineteenth-century literary canon invented by
enlightened Creoles. These key intellectuals entered the long-running debate about Latin
American identity by addressing the nature of colonialism from perspectives that recognized the
significance of anthropophagia and cannibalism (Andrade ([1928] 1991 and Fernández Retamar
[1971] 1989), transculturation (Ortiz [1940] 1970 and Rama 1982), heterogeneity, vernacular
Latin Americanisms, and colonial poetics (Cornejo Polar 1993, 1994, 2002). Oswald de Andrade
and Roberto Fernández Retamar questioned in their work the representation of Americans as
savages and cannibals by resignifying the notion of cannibalism as cultural difference and appro-
priation. Fernández Retamar theorized Americanness by appropriating the Shakespearean fig-
ures of Próspero and Calibán in the Caribbean region and exposing the symbolic dynamics
between master and slave. Frederic Jameson wrote the foreword to the 1989 translation into
English, which boosted Fernández Retamar’s positioning as a Caribbean postcolonial scholar of
the same stature as other English-speaking Caribbean intellectuals (Hulme 2016).The Uruguayan
scholar Rama advocated for socio-historical approaches, which moved criticism closer to the
social sciences shifting the emphasis from literature to culture. His two main contributions to
colonial studies are the adaptation of Fernando Ortiz’s anthropological notion of
12
transculturation into literary and cultural Latin American studies (1982) and the study of the
lettered city (1984). As Hernán Vidal (1993) explains, his approach signaled an epistemological
shift from literature to texts, discourses, and practices. Cornejo Polar’s notion of “latinoameri-
canismo vernáculo” referred to a combination of critical interventions produced from within
the Latin American contexts, as well as the disciplinary terminologies and debates that emerged
elsewhere but that developed a very particular meaning and set of inflections in the context of
Latin American-based thought. According to Cornejo Polar, Latin American heterogeneity
referred to an irreducible difference from which distinct cultural formations emerged. He
devoted an important part of his thinking to analyzing the origins of critical and theoretical
thought in Latin America, that he denominated as “poéticas coloniales” or “poéticas latino-
americanas” (Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, 1996). These key Latin American think-
ers provided a model for new interpretations of the disavowal of indigenous knowledge, orality
and writing, the violence of the conquest, and the persistence of the colonial in the present.
Caribbean scholars and thinkers have also been crucial in rethinking Latin American colo-
nialism. In addition to the contributions by Fernando Ortiz and Roberto Fernández Retamar
already mentioned, well-known theorizations on négritude and colonialism by Aimé Césaire (in
collaboration with Léon Damas and Léopold Sédar Senghor) (1939, 1955), on the reappropria-
tion of the figure of Calibán by Aimé Césaire (1969), as well as Edouard Glissant’s thinking on
antillanité, creolization, relationality and opacity (1990, 1997a, 1997b, 1999) have reshaped con-
temporary debates on colonial and postcolonial Caribbean and Latin American studies. Frantz
Fanon ([1952] 2008) and Sylvia Wynter (1970, 2003) have also made important interventions in
thinking about the complexities of early modern and late colonialism in the Anglo, French and
Spanish Caribbeans. All of these thinkers have engaged with the many complexities of colonial-
ism in the Caribbean, an important area of development in the conceptualization of the field
that has been crucial for comparative and hemispheric studies of the Americas.
Colonial Latinx studies

An important aspect of colonial Latin American studies has been developed through the col-
laborations and interactions between Latinx and Latin American and Caribbean studies. These
disciplinary exchanges require that we take into account the different intellectual genealogies
informing Latin American and Caribbean studies in the US and in the Global South. In the US,
for example, Latin American studies has developed institutionally under area studies and its
financing has been linked to national security issues during the Cold War (Poblete 2003). In
Latin America the field has been shaped within identity discourses in the context of the forma-
tion of nation-states (Mignolo 2000). Originally focused on Mexican American/Chicanx and
Puerto Rican communities, Latinx studies is currently an expansive disciplinary formation that
engages interdisciplinary methods and transnational critical canons in order to include modes of
knowledge that emerge from ethnic communities that have experienced internal colonialism in
the US. Due to the disparate contexts operating in the formation of the fields, the collaboration
between colonial Latin American and Caribbean studies and Latinx studies is simultaneously
organic and problematic.
Coloniality and latinidad6 are not mutually exclusive. European imperial expansion reached
across the Americas transforming territories, urbanizing, and reshaping native communities that
later confronted or negotiated their place in colonial and neocolonial situations. Identities that
configure latinidad have been determined by geography, historical trajectories, and cultural
expressions nourished by myths of ancestral origins, accounts of survival, and coerced and vol-
untary migrations, displacements, and diasporas. The colonial period is also very important in
13
the foundation of latinidad, and it has been a source of study in Latinx studies.7 Although some
scholars have questioned the relationship between colonial texts written in Spanish, Portuguese
and English and the US Latinx corpus, other critics have recognized certain iconic Latin
American and Spanish American writers and artists as part of the Hispanic literary traditions in
the United States. This critical move allows us to make visible the long history and cultural
traditions from the Caribbean and Latin America in the US.
Research on the emergence of Latinx identities and cultural production has been tradition-
ally set in the 1960s, prompted by the civil rights and liberation movements. Increasingly, how-
ever, criticism, histories, and anthologies propose alternative origins such as 1848 and 1898
(referring to the central dates marking the current neocolonial relationship between the US,
Mexico and the Hispanic Caribbean). Some critics include the conquest and colonization of the
northern part of Mexico to create the Southwest of the US after the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty
in 1848 and claim important figures like Eulalia Perez and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton as
foundational figures for the Latinx/Chicanx colonial archive (Stavans and Alcaraz 2000; Lima
2007).The Spanish exploration and settlement of what is currently the Southwest of the US has
been claimed as the beginnings of Anglo-Hispanic relationships; this alternative conceptualiza-
tion of history questions the white supremacist discourses that represent Latinxs as aliens to the
history of modernity in the US (González 2000; Kanellos 2002; Coronado 2013). Others still
trace its earliest expression to Spanish colonial testimonies and historical accounts by the first
Europeans who arrived on the shores of Florida, and years later embarked on the imperial
expansion of New Spain’s northern frontier. Juan Bruce-Novoa and Luis Leal set the founda-
tions for the definition of a colonial Latinx genealogy. Luis Leal claimed that Chicanx literature
is “that literature written by Mexicans and their descendants living or having lived in what is
now the United States” (1979, 21), while Bruce Novoa proposed Cabeza de Vaca as the founder
of Chicanx literature (Bruce-Novoa 1990). By writing literary history, Leal (1971) introduced
colonial texts to the Latinx canon, making him one of the first Chicano critics to examine
imperial texts as foundational discourses of the Latinx experience. He identified a pre-Renais-
sance stage that includes the chronicles by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (1542), Fray Marcos de
Niza (1539), Pedro de Castañeda (1542) and Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá (1610). Several forms of
literary expression have been attached to the Latinx literary corpus, such as romances (ballads),
décimas (ten-line verses), coplas (couplets), pastorelas (shepherd plays) and autos sacramentales
(passion plays). As part of the memory of the older generations in the Southwest, these songs
underscore a different Americana that highlights Latinx agency in a complicated early American
history.While the Southwest colonial expression is well represented in the Chicanx canon, there
is a need to reconsider its geographical boundaries to include key chronicles, letters, and travel
accounts from other frontier regions where Spanish colonists, First Nations, and runaway slaves
from British plantations converged.
Aztlán, the mythical home located in the Southwest of the US that has inspired generations
of writers, could also be the point to consider in any attempt to find beginnings to Latinx cul-
tural expression and history. The Aztec codices that imagined the migration from Aztlán to the
South (Boturini, Aubin, or Azcatitlan) became part of the imperial archive next to histories of
European conquests and settlements that often captured the angst of the unknown and feelings
of displacement. Indeed, the conflation of north-south and transatlantic trajectories are indica-
tive of the lasting legacies of colonialism that as Kristen Silva Gruesz argues, “underscore the
deep connections between the racial formations, Creole nationalisms, and disavowals of indige-
neity that developed in the post-contact ‘New’ World—and that have persisted to the present
day in utter disregard of national borders” (2018, 289). There is no doubt that imperial designs
amplified the multiple waves of migrations, and that changes in social and economic status were
14
forced by new destinations. Creoles sought their way out of imperial rule yet reaffirmed the
Spanish roots that excluded Afro-descendants, African, Asian and Native American peoples.
Joshua Simon argues that Creole revolutions need to be defined as “anti-imperial imperialism”
(2017, 33). For him,“Creole patriots justified their rebellions by reference to arguments carefully
tailored to impugn some, but not all of the inequalities that characterized their societies, claim-
ing that their right to rule themselves originated in their forefathers’ conquest of the New
World” (2).
Transhistorical entanglements were complicated by the context and movement of colonial
actors in different waves. Here we want to focus on two additional moments in the nineteenth
century: first, the initial wave of Latin American insurgents from Mexico and South America
during the wars of independence; and second, the circuit of Caribbean expatriates from Cuba
and Puerto Rico who after 1850 traveled to Madrid and Paris and to cities such as New York,
New Orleans, Boston, and Philadelphia. Still working for the struggles at their place of origin,
these revolutionary subjects also found a new home in these metropolitan cities.
With significant enclaves in Texas and California, the Spanish/Spanish American presence
was felt first through the press. Nicolas Kanellos and Helvetia Martell identify the existence of
Spanish and bilingual periodical publications dating back to 1808 (2000, 3–5). Creoles fleeing
political persecution arrived in North American cities throughout the early years of the nine-
teenth century. Writing and publishing poetry, propaganda pamphlets, and chronicles helped
define national identities, while also legitimizing political struggles on two fronts. As anti-colo-
nial texts, these writings justified the Spanish American quest for freedom and, after the 1850s,
accentuated the need for the abolition of slavery. Some iconic examples are: Servando Teresa de
Mier’s edition of the Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias by Bartolomé de las Casas
released by Philadelphia-based publisher J. Hurtel; and New York City Librería Americana y
Estranjera’s publication of José Antonio Saco’s first edition of his Obras in 1853.
As immigrants, political exiles, or natives from California and Texas to New Orleans,
Philadelphia, and New York, Latinx writers have documented their lives and challenged their
colonial or neocolonial situations. The history of periodical publications begun by Kanellos and
Martell (2000) serves as evidence of Creoles’ revolutionary engagements against Spanish colo-
nialism in the United States.Tied to these efforts are the political, social, and educational societ-
ies and clubs established by Cubans and Puerto Ricans during the second half of the nineteenth
century. Among many other clubs, Los Independientes (1883), La Liga (1890), and Las Dos
Antillas (1892) exemplify the need to educate and organize the community to bring social and
political cohesion to New York City’s Latinx enclaves. As Hoffnung-Garskof writes, La Liga,
founded by the Cuban Rafael Serra, had as its mission to educate the “class of color” to “advance
the intellect and elevate the character” (2019, 51). Migration, labor, colonial politics, and racism
were debated at societies and club meetings as well as in their publications.
Sotero Figueroa, an important journalist, writer, printer, and political activist who moved
from Puerto Rico to New York to escape political persecution, founded the Club Borinquen
(1882) in collaboration with Francisco Gonzalo “Pachín” Marín, and with Arturo Schomburg
he co-founded the club Las Dos Antillas (1892). Figueroa’s editorial talent gained him impor-
tant positions as editor of Patria and La Revista Ilustrada de Nueva York. Working to create
momentum for the independence of Puerto Rico and Cuba, he collaborated with José Martí
and Rafael Serra; he also became a member of the Partido Revolucionario Cubano founded by
Martí in 1892. Some of Figueroa’s most original contributions were published in its official
weekly newspaper Patria. For example, the history of the Puerto Rican independence move-
ment up to the Grito de Lares (1868) can be found in his essay “La verdad de la historia” (1892
in Patria). In this essay, he introduces the notion of “la raza de la libertad,” (the race of freedom)
15
in which raza denotes a brave multiracial society unwilling to accept coloniality (Arias 2017,
25). The subject of abolitionism and the socio-racial realities of Afro-Caribbean immigrants
played an important role in shaping revolutionary politics as an everlasting framework for the
study of Blackness as part of the Latinx experience. Another key figure is Arturo Schomburg;
his interest in the history of abolition and the Black diaspora—which included Spanish America
and the Caribbean—inspired his writings and bibliographical undertakings. He created a mul-
tilingual archive of the Black experience in the Americas that would support him and others in
connecting the legacy of transatlantic slavery with the claims for inclusion and in shifting social
and political norms for Afro descendants (Sánchez-González 2001; V aldés 2017; García Peña
2019; Negrón-Muntaner 2020).
Latinx studies emerged as a field of study during the second half of the twentieth century,
and today the inclusion of colonial studies within the field continues to be a work in progress.
Archival and digital humanities projects such as the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary
Heritage project (founded by Nicolás Kanellos in 1992) are creating awareness of the deep-
seated and complicated history of the Latinx communities in the US. In this project, one can get
a glimpse into the rigors, limits, and contradictions entailed in community building through the
literary expression and, as Kanellos has demonstrated, in debates running in broadsheets and
books made available by the printing press.
Recent scholarship and anthologies are challenging older periodizations, and recognizing the
transnational nature, complicated affiliations and contingent geographies of latinidad. Borders
imposed by imperial expansion are getting undone by the overt critique of colonialism placing
indigenous perspectives at the center (Gruesz 2018). As scholars, we need to be critical of the
pervasive ideologies of “imperial anticolonialism” (Simon 2017, 33) that moved legions of
Spanish American Creoles to fight for independence and the abolition of slavery. Colonial
Latinx studies is a fertile field for scholarship, that offers new ways of thinking about key catego-
ries such as nation and borderlands, language, historical periodizations in Latin America and the
US and ethnic identities. Yet scholars need to be conscious of the many contradictions in this
corpus, as well as the “hybrid and transnational context that requires critics and scholars to be
vigilant about the ways in which archives often reproduce the logic of national, imperial and/or
colonial imaginaries” (Martínez-San Miguel 2018b, 94). For example, claiming the first Spanish
settlements in what today is the United States, and even in the rest of Latin America, as the single
source of Latinx literary history is problematic because it replicates the imperial frameworks that
identified European conquest and colonization as the beginning of Latin American literatures.
More work needs to be done to recover forms of cultural memory, knowledge and identity that
transcend the written accounts of the usual well-known figures in colonial Latin America. The
inclusion of texts written by Spanish conquistadors, religious figures, and colonial functionaries
as part of the Latinx canon also requires the development of new frameworks that would allow
the reader to focus on early historical periods that are relevant for the understanding of the
Latinx literary and cultural imaginary. Some scholars are already conducting comparative Ibero/
American early modern studies (Bauer 2003a) and colonial Latinx studies (Goldmark 2017,
2019) to foster an exchange of knowledges and discursive analysis strategies that should eventu-
ally transform both fields of inquiry.
An interesting contribution of this body of work is that for Latinx studies scholars the links
between colonialism in the Caribbean and Latin American regions from the sixteenth to the late
nineteenth century are explicit and become the source of very intentional critical interventions.
In that context, the study of the colonial past is often linked to contemporary practices of exclu-
sion, marginalization and alienation from US history that are based on racist conceptualizations
that took form in the colonial period. This is an important topic for decolonial critics, who
16
focus on the common colonial background that links Latin Americans and Latinxs in their rela-
tionship with the US (Maldonado-Torres 2006; Figueroa 2020). We will now discuss some of
the productive intersections between colonial, postcolonial and decolonial studies.
Postcolonial and decolonial Caribbean studies

and Latin American studies8
In the last four decades, a whole new series of approaches have revitalized our understanding of
colonization, conquest and imperialism across time and space, namely, the generative collabora-
tions with and the debates brought by postcolonial and decolonial thinkers. It is interesting to
note that postcolonial and decolonial studies emerged and became prevalent in the 1980s, right
after colonial Latin American studies underwent a crucial redefinition of its main methodologi-
cal approaches by expanding its object of study beyond the disciplinary confines of literature
(Adorno 1988; Mignolo 1989). Colonial studies re-emerged as a field within Latin American
studies with the publication of several influential monographs engaging key concepts and
themes relevant across disciplines. In 1990, historian Patricia Seed published “Colonial and
Postcolonial Discourse,” a compelling review in the pages of the Latin American Research Review
that prompted additional responses by Hernán Vidal (1993),Walter Mignolo (1993), and Rolena
Adorno (1993). These responses provided a historical trajectory, defined new engagements, and
questioned the Eurocentric character of the canon. Literary close readings to examine alpha-
betic textual representations and aesthetic concerns became part of what Seed defines as an
“emergent interdisciplinary critique of colonialism known as colonial discourse” (1991, 182).
Some of the main questions of postcolonial theory became possible after Edward Said’s
Orientalism (1978). This foundational book interrogated the Eurocentric assumptions informing
area studies programs in the United States and Asian studies more specifically. Reflecting on the
decolonization in the twentieth century of former English and French colonies, a few years later
Gayatri Spivak (1987), Homi Bhabha (1994), Paul Gilroy (1995) and Stuart Hall (1996) concep-
tualized ways in which colonial subjects constitute their identities under colonialism and after.
Although postcolonial theory resonated profoundly in the Caribbean region—where many of
the countries of the Anglo Caribbean became independent just as the decolonization of several
countries in Africa was taking place (1960s to 1980s)—many Latin American and Caribbean
critics aimed to correct the Anglo-European postcolonial paradigm and set the stage for new
dialogues. Postcolonialism has been particularly productive for the study of nationalism, multi-
lingual literary and cultural productions and migratory and exilic experiences from the Global
South to the First World (Figueroa 2016; Nerlekar 2016). Caribbean studies scholars like Shalini
Puri (2004) and Stuart Hall (1996) have successfully used notions such as mimicry and hybridity
to think about the creolized, transcultural, and translocal cultural productions of the Caribbean,
a point of encounter of European, Asian and African subjects.
In the case of Latin America, however, postcolonial theory became a problematic framework
since it did not distinguish colonialism between 1492 and 1800 and the colonization and decol-
onization process taking place in the Global South primarily in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries (Coronil 1996, 2008). Jorge Klor de Alva (1995) and Maldonado-Torres (2017) have
interrogated the use of postcolonialism in the Latin American context, since the criollos leading
the independence movements did not advocate for the creation of national formations that were
fundamentally different from the Eurocentric oppressive structures of the colonial period.
Coloniality at Large, edited by Mabel Moraña, Enrique D. Dussel and Carlos A. Jáuregui (2008),
offers one of the most comprehensive discussions about the tensions between Latin American
and postcolonial studies.
17
Given the problematic condition of some countries that have not attained national indepen-
dence or political sovereignty (as is the case of almost half of the Caribbean countries), Ashcroft,
Griffith and Tiffin’s alternative definition of postcolonialism has become quite productive:
‘Post-colonial’ as we define it does not mean ‘post-independence,’ or ‘after colonialism,’

for this would be to falsely ascribe an end to the colonial process. Post-colonialism,
rather, begins from the very first moment of colonial contact. It is the discourse of
oppositionality which colonialism brings into being.
(1995, 117)
However, this reframing of the postcolonial does not solve all the tensions between postcolonial-
ists and colonial Caribbean studies. As Silvio Torres-Saillant has noted, postcolonial theory
gained an international reputation often at the expense of prominent Caribbean thinkers like
Sylvia Wynter, George Lamming, Aimé Césaire, Alejo Carpentier, and Frantz Fanon (2003, 43).
Torres-Saillant shares Hall’s (1996) reservations about the limits of the universalizing impulse of
postcolonialism. He also shares with Patrick Williams (1999) the concerns about the erasure of
the Caribbean origins of foundational figures such as Frantz Fanon. Furthermore, Vicente L.
Rafael has questioned the effectiveness of a term like postcolonialism to understand regions that
experienced more than one form of imperial domination, or in non-sovereign regions that have
lived extended periods of colonial subordination (1993, ix–xvi).
Parallel to the emergence and boom of postcolonial studies, a new theoretical paradigm
focusing on coloniality, or the legacies of colonialism, emerged in Latin America and soon
became very popular. In the early 1990s, sociologist Aníbal Quijano (2000) consolidated a series
of theorizations around the notion of the “coloniality of power.” Quijano’s work focuses on the
epistemic, racial and political legacies of colonialism after the wars of independence in continen-
tal Latin America and uses the case of Peru as his point of departure. He studies the structural
and symbolic legacies of colonialism by deconstructing the racial paradigm that defines white
Europeans as the center of Western cultures, and that locates African and indigenous subjects at
the margins of the colonial and national orders. Quijano’s work is nourished by previous studies
on dependency, internal colonialism and the currency of colonialism in Latin America.9 For the
specific case of the Caribbean, Martínez-San Miguel (2014) has proposed “coloniality of dias-
poras” as an adaptation of Quijano’s term to name the coloniality operating in the coercive
migration experienced by a series of creolized societies (constituted by translocal populations
from Europe, Africa, and Asia), and where the native populations were displaced or annihilated
early on.
The decolonial turn takes as the point of departure 1492 and colonialism in Latin America.
Decolonial thinkers conjoin the global dissemination of modernity with the centrality that
colonialism had in the articulation of a capitalist world-order (Maldonado-Torres 2017; Mignolo
2009). In dialogue with thinkers from the Third World, as well as with Chicana theorizing (Pérez
1999; Sandoval 2000) closely linked to women-of-color feminism of the 1980s and 1990s
(Moraga and Anzaldúa 1983; Anzaldúa 1987; Mohanty et al. 1991), decolonial theory focuses on
the legacies of colonialism in knowledge production and in the definition of the human
(Maldonado-Torres 2016, 2017).
For Caribbean and Latin American cultural studies, one of the most important contributions
of decolonial theory has been its call to consider the legacies of colonialism in contemporary
epistemic, legal, political, and social discourses, practices and spaces. Another crucial contribution
has been the deconstruction of the Eurocentric and white supremacist frameworks behind most
of the nation-building projects in Latin America, led by Creole elites who did not decolonize
18
their social structures in the process of seeking political emancipation from Europe or the US
(Maldonado-Torres 2017, 119–120). Decoloniality aspires, then, to culminate the incomplete
process of decolonization and national state formation. Some of the main thinkers of the
decolonial turn in Latin American and Caribbean studies, have substantial training in colonial
studies (like Sylvia Wynter, Nelson Maldonado-Torres and Walter Mignolo, for example). Others
have begun to engage with important figures of the time period, like Guaman Poma de Ayala,
although with varying degrees of in-depth analysis and contextualization.
Perhaps as a result of the field’s call to decolonize its epistemic frameworks, the Caribbean
region has become a crucial space from which to reconceptualize Latin American colonial stud-
ies (Morales 1974; Puri 2004; Torres-Saillant 2006). Although the Caribbean was one of the first
points of contact between European conquerors and American natives, the region has often
been displaced to focus on the tierra firme (or the continental Americas) as the privileged locus
for the study of colonialism. This is why the foci of most of the literary and cultural histories
have been the former viceroyalties of Mexico, Peru, New Granada and Río de La Plata, while
colonial Caribbean studies is an area that still needs further expansion and development. One of
the critical interventions of this companion is the solid inclusion of the Caribbean as a central
region in thinking about the colonial period in the Americas. The Circum-Caribbean regions
allow us to engage contributions on hemispheric and comparative colonial studies. British,
French, and Dutch colonialism influenced Iberian imperial policies and colonial practices, and
each imperial regime had distinctive features that have been addressed in comparative studies
(Torres-Saillant 1997; Martínez-San Miguel 2016). The Caribbean, a History of the Region and Its
People (2011), edited by Stephan Palmié and Francisco Scarano, offers a very compelling over-
view of the different colonial regimes established in the region. Furthermore, the study of the
Caribbean shifts the temporal frame of the colonial Americas. In the Spanish Antilles, colonial-
ism did not end with the wars of independence in the early nineteenth century; some of these
communities did not become independent until the 1960s, or the 1980s, and others are still
colonial and neocolonial dependencies today.With this in mind, this volume examines Caribbean
colonialism until 1898, in order to focus on the period in which almost the entire Caribbean,
with the exception of Haiti, was a European dependency.
Another important decolonial intervention in the field of colonial Latin American studies
has been the critical study and engagement with the different populations that played crucial
roles in early modern Latin American and Caribbean societies.The inclusion of indigenous oral
and written cultures and performances in Miguel León Portilla (1962) and Nathan Wachtel’s
(1977) projects on “the vision of the vanquished” served as a precursor to recent studies on
khipus, textiles, codices, pictorial documents and oral traditions, indigenous materialities and
performances (Adorno 1988, 1993; Salomon 2004; Brokaw 2010; Dean 2010). More recently,
several colonial historians and cultural critics are analyzing the verbal, visual, symbolic and cul-
tural textualities, social practices and materialities produced by diasporic populations from Africa
and Asia that became creolized in the Americas to complicate notions like mestizaje and mulataje
in the region (Bennett 2006, 2009; Catelli 2020; López-Calvo 2009; López 2013; and others).
Although “transculturation” and “créolité” originally made reference to the African and Asian
components of the colonial populations in the Americas (Ortiz [1940] 1970; Bernabé,
Chamoiseau and Confiant 1989), until very recently nationalist and criollista discourses privi-
leged white supremacist accounts of Latin American and Caribbean cultural discourses. Other
scholars have problematized ethnic and identitarian notions imposed on American born and
raised populations, such as “indio,” “taíno,” “Andean,” ethnoracial formations like the ones rep-
resented in the “pintura de castas,” the presumed whiteness of Creole populations, etc. (Hulme
1992; Silverblatt 1995; Martínez-San Miguel 2011; Catelli 2012).
19
Latin American and Caribbean colonial studies have become a richer field of study as a result
of its dialogue, tensions and contentions with postcolonial and decolonial studies. Postcolonial
theory encouraged Latin Americanists and Caribbeanists to argue in favor of the importance of
the insular and Global South Americas to be included in the theorization of the colonial and
postcolonial. The decolonial turn takes the colonial experience in the Americas as an important
point of departure, but it also insists on engaging in comparative studies of colonialism and
coloniality from Third World and Global South frameworks (Maldonado-Torres 2016, 2017;
Martínez-San Miguel 2016) to identify common and distinctive strategies of dehumanization in
contexts of imperial expansion.
Inter- and transdisciplinary turns in colonial studies

Colonial Caribbean and Latin American studies have developed at the crossroads of several
fields: history, archaeology, anthropology, and cultural studies. Theories and critical approaches
developed in the study of colonial Latin America have contributed significantly to the under-
standing of the historiography and cultural production of local regions, political and economic
processes, and social life in regions marked by the pervasive legacy of colonialism. While teach-
ing and research on colonialism and coloniality has been tied to nineteenth-century disciplinary
distinctions, current scholarship has benefited from and contributed to theories, approaches, and
knowledge produced in dialogue with other disciplines. These interdisciplinary dynamics, long
in the making, were prompted by overlapping interests and debates that have encouraged inqui-
ries and collaborations expanding the field, posing greater challenges and calling for interdisci-
plinary thinking.
Interdisciplinarity has broadened the research and teaching base by crossing disciplinary bor-
ders while either maintaining a strong footing in a discipline, or negating traditional disciplinary
practices all together. Although some scholars in the field still function within their disciplinary
bounds, increasingly forms of interdisciplinarity have been making waves enabling dialogue
among researchers from different fields, integrating new methods and theories, reorganizing
forms of knowledge, and challenging previous findings with new questions of greater complex-
ity that could potentially expand the audience and transnational dimension of the field. There
are various forms of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary practices current in the humanities:
asking questions relevant to two or more disciplines (synthetic interdisciplinarity), proposing
methods of research that transcend existing disciplinary methods to satisfy new research ques-
tions (transdisciplinarity), and/or proposing approaches to questions with filters and ideas from
several disciplines often “without a compelling disciplinary basis” (Lattuca 2001, 83).
In colonial Latin American studies, self-conscious interdisciplinarians navigate the tension
between disciplinary approaches and the varied practices described above. With such tactics, the
study of Latin American antiquities and the colonial past have gained urgency and purchase in
the production of scholarship and the academic curriculum. Programs in American studies,
Latinx/Latin American studies, women’s, gender and sexuality studies, and various kinds of
seminars and team-taught courses are now paying more attention to the study of colonialism. A
vital tool to engage in interdisciplinarity has been the use of keywords or critical terms to
approach the colonial experience. In Traveling concepts (2002), Mieke Bal explains that the abstract
notion of a concept serves the act of interpretation; concepts that are performative in nature
travel “between disciplines, between historical periods, and between geographically dispersed
academic communities” (24) revealing hidden questions, perceptions, and considerations await-
ing cultural analysis.The currency of these epistemological tools, like the canon, is continuously
changing. The meanings of concepts change as well, particularly when crossing disciplinary and
20
cultural boundaries. In their crossing between disciplines, they “transform the boundaries”
(Neumann and Nünning 2014, 3)
Concepts are embedded in theories and disciplines that are also geographically and culturally
situated. In Critical Terms for Caribbean and Latin American Thought/Términos críticos en el pensa
miento caribeño y latinoamericano:Trayectoria histórica e institucional, the editors tackle the problem of
translation by paying attention to the different historical and institutional genealogies of Latin
American and Caribbean studies in the US and the Global South.Taking as a point of departure
twelve keywords that are represented as false cognates for US-based and Latin American and
Caribbean-based researchers and cultural critics, this volume re-examines the colonial period by
tracing the coordinated and independent developments in studies of at least seven keywords that
are central for colonial studies: indigenismo, americanismo, colonialism, coloniality, criollismo, mes-
tizaje and transculturation. Following the lead of the bilingual dictionary of Robert McKee
Irwin and Mónica Szurmuk’s Diccionario de estudios culturales latinoamericanos (2009)/Dictionary of
Latin American Cultural Studies (2012), Critical Terms explores a dialogical model of knowledge
production—through lead and response essays—to showcase the epistemic continuities and gaps
in contemporary Latin American and Caribbean studies. More recently, Juan Poblete has invited
a group of scholars to consider the development of Latin American studies through a series of
theoretical turns in New Approaches to Latin American Studies: Culture and Power (2018), reinflect-
ing the notion of keywords through the idea of the schools of thought and the disciplinary
debates that have promoted paradigm shifts in the field.
Paradigm shifts that we associate with postcolonial and subaltern studies have invoked inter-
disciplinary scholarship to define Latin American colonial studies since the mid-1980s. The
commitment to close reading inherited from New Criticism and more rigorous historical con-
textualization from New Historicism have paved the way for interdisciplinary collaborations and
borrowings. These initial operations caused some trepidation because of the fear of applying
anachronistic models or of lack of attention to linguistic and contextual differences (Cornejo
Polar 2002; Castro-Klaren 2008).With careful consideration of these claims, the field has moved
away from traditional practices of textual close readings to implement expansive modes of
discursive, semiotic and material analyses. Interdisciplinary engagements have underwritten a
deepening of our understanding of “the colonial” and its roots, tensions, impact, and redefini-
tions forced by border crossing.
The multifaceted character of the objects of study in the field was enriched by interdisciplinary
engagement with colonial written sources. Since most of the contemporary disciplines still carry
the legacies of nineteenth-century knowledge systems, and most imperial writers were educated
in European universities under the trivium and quadrivium classical curricula that dominated
until the eighteenth century, it is not surprising to read major claims about multi-discursivity in
the first chroniclers’ accounts (Pupo Walker 1982). Except for theater and poetry, most colonial
narratives are impossible to categorize within known modern genres. Furthermore, to fully
grant meaning to these texts, readers are usually only trained to make connections with European
classical thought and rhetoric, at times making it difficult to identify cross-cultural patterns of
borrowings and manipulations originating from other discursive and linguistic traditions.This is
why it was so crucial for colonial studies to undergo the paradigm shift that took place in the
1980s that allowed the scholarship in the field to critically re-examine and redefine discursive
analysis from inter/transdisplinary and transcultural perspectives.
Recent epistemological turns have promoted a broader push for interdisciplinary and trans-
disciplinary scholarship in convergence with cultural studies.These turns or shifts are embedded
in previous disciplinary knowledge, yet open the field for sustained cross-fertilizations. Archival,
translation, subaltern, spatial, transatlantic and hemispheric studies are just a few of the most
21
relevant epistemological shifts for colonial scholars today. The epistemic turn that situated dis-
cursive analysis beyond verbal and written languages, and that can be linked to Mignolo’s for-
mulation of “colonial semiosis” (1989), signaled a whole array of analytical moves that allowed
for the conceptualization of human communication in very expansive terms (Valdeón 2014).
After the publication of Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972) and Jacques
Derrida’s Archival Fever (1995), the archive re-emerged as an analytical category in cultural studies
thus underscoring another form of materiality that could deepen our understanding of the
sources and afterlife of books and manuscripts that constitute the canon. Critical archival studies
demonstrates that historical repositories, museums and document collections are not compre-
hensive, exhaustive or a closed system; they constitute a subjective selection of documentary
sources that cannot account for the unequal access and limited roles of marginal subjects in the
production of knowledge. Archives also represent a shifting corpus that operates on value judg-
ments, and political and personal agendas that replicate social hierarchies of the past. As pieces of
evidence they form the raw material of colonial discourses often supplemented by alternative
forms of knowledge production such as oral histories, and visual artifacts.
Some of the most pointed interventions on the archive can be found in the work by Michel-
Rolph Trouillot (1995), Diana Taylor (2003), and Laura Ann Stoler (2009). Trouillot suggested
that historical narratives, a by-product of the archive, are constituted by a particular bundle of
silences (27), while Taylor questioned the archive as an unmediated repository of information
and proposed it instead as a repertoire that includes embodied acts, and forms of ephemeral
knowledge (Taylor 2003). Finally, Stoler examines the archive as a space and practice bound to
ideological practices embedded in the production of meaning. As each one of the cultural turns
discussed here, the archive leads us to other turns. One important aspect of the examination of
the archive is the mobility and spatio-temporal dimensions of the production of knowledge that
one encounters in the critical study of the archive. Anthony Higgins (2000), Jeanette A. Bastian
(2003), Herman Bennett (2009), Melanie Newton (2013), Anna More (2013), Marisa Fuentes
(2018), and Larissa Brewer García (2020), among many others, have posed crucial questions that
have contributed to a radical transformation in the methods used to curate and study colonial
archives in Latin America and the Caribbean.
As Johannes Fabian demonstrates in Language and Colonial Power (1986), translation was also
central to the establishment of colonial rule as another form of violence, control, and the imposi-
tion of hegemonic culture through communication. Beyond Fabian, other postcolonial scholars
have expanded the debates on the symbolism of translation as a technology for empire building
(Niranjana 1992; Robinson 2014; Rafael 2016; Cheyfitz and Harmon 2018). Translations
enabled the appropriation and circulation of knowledge across the globe, thus alleviating anxiet-
ies about imperial propaganda, which justified intraimperial rivalry, and religious conflict.
The strong tradition of Hispanism in northern European countries expanded the visibility of
the imperial/colonial archive with translations that still serve scholars today in comparative stud-
ies. Introductions and annotations to the translations sketch the significance of the colonial
corpus for the study of intra-imperial tensions. Since the sixteenth century, eyewitness accounts
and histories of the Spanish conquest have been filtered and manipulated by rival empires. One
of the most emblematic texts of the period, Bartolomé de las Casas’s Brevísima relación de las
Indias (1552), became the first Spanish “bestseller” in multiple translations in French, Dutch, and
English during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Hart 2008). The commercialization of
books in translation became the central source for the transcultural circulation of knowledge
during the second half of the eighteenth century. Foreign translations, particularly in English,
were used as propaganda that amplified the Black Legend against Spain. Juan Bautista Muñoz’s
Historia del Nuevo Mundo (1793) and Creole Jesuits’ regional histories were translated almost
22
immediately into English, French, German, or Italian. Introductions to the translations served as
political acts, often denying Spain of the purported exceptionalism proclaimed in its imperial
histories. An interesting case is Francisco Javier Clavijero’s Historia antigua de Megico, released in
Spanish in 1826, thirty-seven years after its first publication in an Italian translation (1780–81).
In Madrid, the 1784–85 heated debate over Clavijero’s assertion of the value of indigenous
knowledge derailed the Spanish publication but could not stop the politicized 1787 English and
1789 German translations that followed.Therefore, translations played a key role in the recogni-
tion of Creole Jesuits’ “patriotic epistemologies” (Cañizares Esguerra 2001), which shaped the
Spanish American imperative to co-opt indigenous cultural history for the construction of a
multicultural society.
Translation, as a critical concept, is bound to two key colonial processes: translocality and
globalization, which are tied as well to the spatial turn and mobility studies. Postcolonial studies,
a turn by itself discussed in the previous section, has brought more awareness to space and place
and the violence and legacy of colonialism over human, physical, and natural geographies. One
could argue that these epistemological turns as analytical categories are neatly entangled. This
imbrication of modes of thought and methods of inquiry seems fitting for colonial studies as it
demonstrates the complexity of the remains of the colonial experience.
Colonialism and postcolonialism were also closely related to the emergence of subaltern stud-
ies in the 1980s and 1990s (Guha, Chatterjee and Jeganathan 1983; Spivak 1988b). The Latin
American Subaltern Studies Group was founded in 1992 (Founding Statement, 1993) and sev-
eral scholars working on Latin American colonial studies like Walter Mignolo (1995, 2000), José
Rabasa, Javier Sanjinés and Robert Carr (1994), Gustavo Verdesio (2002, 2005), John Beverley
(1999) and Patricia Seed (1994) engaged in this framework to broaden the objects and subjects
of study of the field. The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader, edited by Ileana Rodríguez
(2001) presents a compelling overview of the debates, contributions and challenges of this
approach. Michael Horswell (2006) includes a thought-provoking intervention in his book
Decolonizing the Sodomite, when he explores Inca Garcilaso’s blind spots on issues of gender and
sexuality in the Andean region, and poses the question about the extent to which one subaltern
group can speak for another. The paradigm shift promoted by subaltern studies also opened the
field to a whole series of theoretical approaches on the multiple dimensions of otherness that
complicate the colonial condition, such as gender and sexuality studies, critical race studies as
well as studies on colonialism and embodiment, which are the focus of contributions included
in this volume.
The spatial turn represents a pervasive theoretical shift that has repositioned the field of geog-
raphy and helped rework the relationship between the humanities and social sciences. Just as
geography has embraced the cultural turn, over the last two decades, other disciplines asserted that
space must be a key element in any attempt to understand social relations, ideologies, and prac-
tices. Imperial and colonial discourses have always imagined, rationalized, and reconfigured geo-
graphical space and its historical genesis. Early accounts of indigenous contact held a privileged
position in the empire’s geo-historical archive because they pointed to the potential for political,
economic, and cultural advancement inherent to Europe’s civilizing mission. Such reconstitu-
tions of early colonial knowledge are central to the emerging critique of the Enlightenment and
to the examination of geographical imaginaries that justified political dominance over less pow-
erful societies and new ecological relations.
If there is anything that radically distinguishes the colonial imagination, it is the geographical
element. As Edward Said (1978) remind us, imperialism, after all, is an act of geographic violence
through which virtually every space in the world is explored, charted, and finally brought under
control. The spatial turn has influenced other analytical shifts with great potential for the study
23
of colonial Latin America. We often refer to studies of space and place, which convey a funda-
mental conceptual difference in examinations of the situated nature of experience. Place is a
fundamental concept in postcolonial thought, particularly in the dimensions it brings to histori-
cal analysis and subjectivity. Edward Casey has outlined the critical distinction between space
and place that bears on the understanding of modernity, processes of identity construction, and
the knowledge of time and history. He goes on to claim,“every place that figures into geography
is affected by history and is a fortiori cultural in status” (2002, 266).
Colonial scholars have conducted significant work on different notions of space and place in
relationship to colonialism and empire (Dym and Offen 2011). Attention to the relaciones geográ-
ficas began with the work of art historian Barbara Mundy (1996), who as well as other art his-
torians has paid attention to identity and the visual imagination of colonial subjects (Carrera
2011; Bleichmar 2012, 2017). Other chief themes of the field include the imperial vision, indig-
enous agency and the production of scientific knowledge (Scott 2009; Valverde and Lafuente
2009; Safier 2012; Candiani 2014), textuality (Padrón 2004), frontiers (Reinhartz and Saxon
2005) and the complex politics of evangelization in the space of the mission (Díaz Balsera 2005;
del Valle 2009a, b; El Jaber 2011). The study of colonialism and coloniality as a situated experi-
ence and practice offers vast possibilities to rethink power/knowledge relations, questions of
scale, population, race relations, and sexuality and gender. Some important areas to consider
include the study of the tensions of urban development and envisioning of the Spanish traza,
indigenous notions of communal, political and economic spaces like the ayllu, the altepetl, and
milpas, as well as the organization of alternative African Afro-descendants’ socialization spaces in
the palenques, cofradías and cabildos.
Attention to space and place has played an important role in ecocriticism, urban studies, and
order variants of spatial turns such as the hemispheric turn, discussed below, and transatlantic,
Pacific, and global studies. Ecocritical perspectives in post/colonial studies evolved at the inter-
section of the study of literary representations of the environment, ecological relations, and
colonialism. As several scholars across disciplines have argued (Melville 1997; Funes Monzote
2009, Cushman 2015), it is evident that early modern forms of coloniality destroyed natural
habitats and forests, and depleted mineral resources with devastating consequences for future
generations. Observations on nature, climates, rainforests, river systems, and ecological relations
are prominent in colonial and imperial discourses that sought to apprehend geography and
nature for science and investments in the new territories. Approaches to natural sciences and the
environment across disciplines are still considered “hanging fruit” because of the pervasiveness
of coloniality for environmental concerns today and the need to understand the roots of the
Anthropocene and its connection to capitalism (Paravisini-Gebert 2014; DeLoughrey 2019).
In the late 1990s and early 2000s colonial Latin American studies interacted with two spa-
tially informed turns that questioned the artificial isolation of the field due to its postnational
focus in the Caribbean and Latin America. On the one hand, the transatlantic turn reclaimed
important historical links between Europe and the Americas for the proper understanding of the
early modern colonial/imperial contexts. Ruth Hill (2000), Viviana Díaz Balsera (2005, 2018),
Barbara Fuchs (2003, 2013), Ricardo Padrón (2004), Herman Bennett (2006, 2018), Lisa Voigt
(2009) and Benita Sampedro (2019), have explored the notion of the early modern period, and
have promoted the historical and cultural rearticulation of pre-1800 literary and cultural move-
ments. Indigenous epistemologies and transatlantic studies inform Viviana Díaz Balsera’s
Guardians of Idolatry: Gods, Demons and Priests in Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón’s Treatise of Heathen
Superstitions (2018), a monograph that delves into the intriguing dimension of the “conjuros”—
powerful conjurations of word, human desire and imagination—to offer us a complex view of
the many ways in which indigenous communities in the Americas shared the “preternatural,”
24
a border space between the marvelous and the superhuman, with many other communities in
Europe of the same time period. Nina Gerassi-Navarro and Eyda Merediz (2009) curated a
special issue of Revista Iberoamericana entitled “Otros estudios transatlánticos. Lecturas desde lo
latinoamericano” that included several contributions focusing on transatlantic colonial studies.
Ileana Rodríguez and Josebe Martínez (2011) also edited a three-volume compilation of essays,
Estudios transatlánticos postcoloniales, that explore the productive intersections between transatlan-
tic and postcolonial studies. The richness and vibrancy of this field has recently been showcased
in the compilation Transatlantic Studies: Latin America, Iberia and Africa co-edited by Cecilia
Enjuto Rangel et al. (2019). The transatlantic paradigm has led scholars to consider the Pacific
as part of a new oceanic turn of growing influence in the comparative study of colonialism and
coloniality (Thompson 2010; Padrón 2020). These perspectives connect land and sea in a con-
versation about the creation of transnational networks, the circulation of knowledge and objects,
and mappings reflecting these movements (Armitage, Bashford and Sivasundaram 2017).
The hemispheric turn on the other hand focuses on interconnections within the Americas, and
according to Ralph Bauer “has generally emphasized the relations among and similarities
between the literatures and cultures of the New World, focusing on what distinguishes the cul-
tures and literatures of the New World at large from that of the Old - the colonial past and
neocolonial present, for example, racial and cultural diversity, processes of transculturation and
creolization, and so on” (2010, 250).The hemispheric turn emerged in the 1990s with the need to
open the field of American literary studies geographically and culturally and as a reaction to the
appropriation of anachronistic paradigms that tend to ignore the multiethnic cultural produc-
tion of the colonial Americas. Important collaborations emerged around the Early Ibero/Anglo
Americanist Summits organized by Ralph Bauer, David A. Boruchoff and other colleagues in
2002 and 2004, where scholar/teachers of Ibero-American and Anglo-American colonial litera-
ture explored interdisciplinary collaborative pedagogical and research projects to conduct stud-
ies of hemispheric colonial literature of the Americas. More recently, scholars like Kirsten Silva
Gruesz (2002), Lázaro Lima (2007), Raúl Coronado (2013), María Josefina Saldaña (2016),
Lorgia García Peña (2016), and Juliet Hooker (2017) have conducted work focusing on com-
parative north-south studies, as well as research projects that revitalize the hemispheric connec-
tions between American, African American, Latin American and Latinx studies.
As we can see from this very brief review of some of the most significant epistemic turns in
literary and cultural criticism, colonial studies is a subfield of Caribbean and Latin American
studies with deep roots in various disciplines (i.e., history, literature, economics, art history, reli-
gion, anthropology, geography) that has been susceptible to the amplification of academic posi-
tionings or critical turns that have challenged and revitalized critical inquiries about colonialism.
This shifting terrain is indebted to interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary practices across the
humanities and social sciences that have renewed and transformed the field. Some scholars have
remained faithful to their disciplinary training, while others have taken new directions by col-
laborating or embracing theories and methodologies from other disciplines that have resulted in
notable paradigm shifts. These activities have expanded traditional time frames, documented
networks in the production and circulation of knowledge, and have provided enduring ques-
tions and themes that can only be approached beyond disciplinary bounds.
Contributions in this volume

It is within this critical juncture that this volume seeks to define, introduce, and offer a sample
of the new thinking animating the study of colonial Latin America. While the essays included
here survey the state of the field, they also seek to present new avenues of research that
25
demonstrate the growing significance of the interdisciplinary study of colonialism and (de)colo-
niality at the Latin American geographical axis. Casting a wider net, our collaborators examine
cultural products across regions and boundaries, bringing into play perspectives from philosophy,
gender and sexuality studies, critical race theory, geo and ecocriticism, religion, linguistics, and
literary and cultural studies.
This volume presents new readings of pre-contact and colonial discourses, institutional his-
tories, material practices, and forms of cultural expression to interrogate how first peoples, and
later colonial societies were ordered and controlled, and how colonial subjects were raised from
the colonial condition to claim legitimacy.This inclusive approach captures the voices of lettered
elites, and also brings to the fore the cultural expression of indigenous and Black subjects,
women, and religious intellectuals seeking to shed light on the violent nature of colonialism, and
its paradoxical intellectual engagements representing distinctive individual and collective expe-
riences, as well as interpretations of history. While the focus of this volume is colonial Latin
America, we approach this project understanding that early modern colonialism sparked a global
transformation involving the development of inter-imperial and intra-colonial relations that
cannot be obscured. These contributions account for the complex web and interconnected
nature of imperial expansion.
Using four overarching themes, this volume examines a wide array of issues that demonstrate
the critical significance of colonial Latin America and the Caribbean across disciplines, national
traditions, and historical periods.We seek to present a view of Latin America and the Caribbean
as an axis connecting Europe, Africa, and Asia, as well as the Atlantic and the Pacific through
Iberian global engagements. Many of the essays in this volume reiterate the persistent influence
and movement of people, commodities, and ideas that circulated north and south, and through
the Atlantic and Pacific worlds.
The first section on “Colonialism and coloniality” includes a collection of chapters that
explore keywords that define and think about colonialism and its legacies in Caribbean and
Latin American studies. These essays revisit some of the most prominent recent debates in liter-
ary, cultural, historical and philosophical studies about colonialism in Latin America and the
Caribbean, such as race (Nemser), subalternity (Graubart), mestizaje (Catelli), criollismo (Mazzotti),
orality-literacy (Brokaw), the decolonial turn (Maldonado Torres), the ecocritical turn (Paravisini-
Gebert), and visual and cinematic studies (Poblete).This first cluster of essays discusses the intel-
lectual roots and material practices that enabled empire building and forms of contestation that
shaped global coloniality, identities, and territories. The contributions to this section focus on
central notions in colonial studies informing crucial events that brought meaning to Spanish
colonialism and to its long-lasting legacies.
“Knowledge production and networks” is the second section of this companion and it
addresses the epistemological basis of colonial Latin American and Caribbean studies and the
manner in which knowledge was produced, circulated, and appropriated during the colonial
period. The debate on the human condition of indigenous populations and the nature of can-
nibalism, closely linked to public discussion about the humanity of the colonial subjects encoun-
tered in the Americas are revisited here to think about the foundations of colonialism as
epistemic dispossession (Hill, Madureira). These essays also engage comparative colonial studies,
by exploring Portuguese colonialism in Brazil (Madureira, Cagle), Spanish imperialism in the
Pacific (Blanco) and late colonial discourses on race in the Caribbean (Merediz). The contribu-
tions collected here also analyze how global exchanges created networks of knowledge that
hierarchized the contributions by Creoles, indigenous, or diasporic colonial subjects (Merediz,
Hill). This section also incorporates comparative studies that critically re-engage transatlantic
and transpacific studies.
26
The essays included in “Materialities and archives” address the significant transformations of
the field when the focus shifted from verbal and written documents to the analysis of a broader
array of objects from the colonial world. After the crisis of colonial discourse and literature as
central frameworks used to conceive and define the colonial period in Latin America and the
Caribbean as a category of analysis, studies on the materialities of the archive, as well as the rel-
evance of cultural objects, urban and social structures such as monuments and architecture have
become an emerging field. Some contributors revisit canonical texts to showcase a reading of
colonialism as a material encounter (Albarrán), and others engage recent debates in archival
studies to discuss and analyze the expansion of the colonial archives to include critical engage-
ments with gendered, indigenous, Creole and Black subjects (Kirk, More, Villaseñor Black and
Álvarez). Race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality—and their material expressions as culture-
specific yet malleable structures—challenge the usual binary oppositions between colonizers
and colonized subjects, or between European vs. American populations, and help to conceive
colonial subjects through a matrix of inter-related categories that go beyond Spanish, criollo,
indio, African, Asian, mestizo or mulatto. Another cluster of essays explores new interdisciplinary
collaborations with the archaeological excavation of indigenous sites (Verdesio) or examinations
of space in ports and missions (Meléndez, El Jaber). By capturing mobility as an embodied expe-
rience of colonial spaces and places, these essays also expose power paradigms and political and
social reconfigurations. Continental, insular and archipelagic frameworks, as well as theories on
race, diaspora, coerced and voluntary movements, borders, and utopia are also considered here
in dialogue with geography.
The fourth and last section of this volume is entitled “Language, translation and beyond” and
examines language as one of the most important areas of contact and negotiation during the
colonial period. Many of the colonial texts and archives that constitute the object of study of this
field are either translations, transliterations or uneven combinations of distinct languages and
communication systems. Access to and study of indigenous languages, as well as the presence,
evolution, and transformation of African, Asian and European languages during the conquest
and colonization process, will be the focus of this cluster of essays. This section includes contri-
butions from scholars who conceptualize colonial translation broadly to trace the adaptation of
dissemination of indigenous cosmovisions in Anglo-colonial narratives of the conquest of the
Americas (Bauer), the complex entrance of Black and indigenous subjects into colonial textuali-
ties (Brewer-García and McDonough), and the legacies of colonial notions of gender, sexuality
and sovereignty for contemporary Latin American imaginaries (Horswell, Legnani).
This Routledge Companion to Colonial Caribbean and Latin American Studies offers a survey of
some of the most exciting projects currently developing in this field. Several areas of engage-
ment were not included in this volume, like essays on colonial studies from approaches closer to
the natural sciences, political science, and philosophical thought. New tendencies have emerged
after the compilation of essays took shape, like studies on the colonial sensorium—which
includes theorizations of the colonial experience that engage the senses beyond the predomi-
nance of visual (Voigt 2018; van Deusen 2018; Kole de Peralta 2019; Brewer-García and Fromont
2020)—as well as comparative work on non-European forms of spirituality and comparative
intra-Asian relationships in Latin America and the Caribbean during the early and late colonial
periods (Tsang 2020) . We would like to see these exclusions not as limitations of this volume,
but as a testament to the evolving nature of this field, that is in a constant process of transforma-
tion, growth and innovation. We hope that Colonial studies keeps developing and growing,
while we aim to continue promoting investigations and projects that could allow us to better
understand the complexities of coloniality while wishing for a future world without
colonialism.
27
Notes
1 The line of demarcation, according to the language of the Treaty, left room for interpretation since
longitude had proven impossible to measure at sea (Elden 2013, 242).
2 He confuses San Juan de Puerto Rico and the name of Saona, the largest islet on the southeastern coast
of Hispaniola visited by Columbus. Saona, named after Michel de Cuneo de Saona, appears in the
anonymous Cantino Planisphere (1502), and well-known maps by Juan de la Cosa (1500), Nicolay de
Caverio (c. 1504), and Martin Waldseemüller (1507).
3 Muñoz only published the first volume of his Historia del Nuevo Mundo (1793); however, the bulk of his
documents were later published by Martín Fernández de Navarrete (1825–1844), and used by h istorians
Washington Irving (1828), William H. Prescott (1837), and Alexander von Humboldt (1892).
4 As Brian Gollnick (2014) writes, Henríquez Ureña conceptualizes literature as a “systematic cultural
history which can be described as a form of humanist nationalism: nationalism in the sense of defining
the particularity of Latin American culture vis-à-vis Europe and the USA” (211).
5 For more detailed study on the colonial and Latin American Baroque, see Lezama Lima 1957; Leonard
1959; Chiampi 2000; Beverley 1998, 2008; Theodoro 1992; Echeverría 1994; Moraña 1994, and
Martínez-San Miguel 2010.
6 We use the term latinidad to refer to the wide array of people of Latin American and Caribbean origins
that have become part of the Latinx community in the US.The term was originally coined by sociolo-
gist Félix Padilla (1985), but it has been embraced by several contemporary Latinx cultural critics, like
Juana María Rodríguez (2003) and Ramón Rivera-Servera (2012), among others.
7 Martínez-San Miguel (2018b) has reviewed some of the most significant contributions for the study of
a colonial period in Latinx studies. We summarize some of the insights she explores in more detail in
this chapter.
8 In this section we summarize, revise and expand the description of and distinction between colonial,
postcolonial and decolonial studies as developed by Martínez-San Miguel 2018a.
9 On dependency theory and internal colonialism, see Cardoso and Falettob 1979; Stavenhagen 1965;
González-Casanova 1965, and Bolaños and Verdesio 2002.
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39
PART I
Colonialism and coloniality

1
RACE AND DOMINATION IN
COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN
STUDIES
Daniel Nemser
In the last two decades, race has emerged as a major topic in the field of colonial Latin American
studies. By my count, nearly twenty monographs and ten edited volumes addressing the ques-
tion of race during the early modern/colonial period in part or in full have appeared since the
publication of R. Douglas Cope’s The Limits of Racial Domination in 1994.1 While the discipline
of history accounts for most of these titles, anthropology, history of art, and literary/cultural
studies are represented as well, and it is clear that these scholars see themselves as participating
in a broad, interdisciplinary dialogue. Pushing back against earlier scholarship that took for
granted the transparency, stability, and transhistorical character of racial classification in the
Iberian empires, these studies have aimed to historicize the meaning of difference and the con-
tours of identity prior to the emergence of the “scientific” approach to race in the nineteenth
century. Using rich empirical analysis, they have demonstrated convincingly that colonial for-
mations of difference drew not only on phenotype but also on other kinds of attributes, includ-
ing ancestry, culture, language, occupation, religion, and social status. Furthermore, this new
historiography has emphasized the capacity of subaltern subjects to contest, negotiate, evade, and
resist the imposition of racial categories by colonial authorities.
The Iberian empires also show up in a very different set of scholarship on race. Contemporary
race theorists often mention this case as a starting point for exploring the emergence of “mod-
ern” ideas of race, but this treatment commonly occurs in passing—a reference to limpieza de
sangre here, a name check of Bartolomé de las Casas there. In their influential work on racial
formation in the United States, for example, the sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant
trace the emergence of modern notions of race back to the conquest of the Americas. “It was
only when European explorers reached the Western Hemisphere ... that the distinctions and
categorizations fundamental to a racialized social structure, and to a discourse of race, began to
appear” (1994, 61). In a short section on the history of racial formation, they reference Las Casas
in an endnote and label the conquest “the first ... racial formation project” (1994, 182–183,
n19; 62). But here as in most of these studies, there is little sustained engagement and these
Iberian and Latin American foundations quickly drop away.
In general, then, these lines of scholarly inquiry—the historiographical and the theoretical—
have failed to intersect.2 This is not to say that historical studies do not consider race at a con-
ceptual level, or that they never cite critical scholarship on race, but that this engagement is
limited.We might say that the role of race theory in the historiographical paradigm is analogous
43
Daniel Nemser
to that of Las Casas in the theoretical paradigm. This missed encounter may be related to disci-
plinary differences, or perhaps, as I discuss below, the temporal demarcation of colonial studies
has made specialists reluctant to draw on contemporary theoretical work that they deem anach-
ronistic. Whatever the explanation, it is worth taking a step back and thinking through the
implications of the assumptions we make when we talk about race in colonial Latin America.
Although today it is a commonplace to call race a social construction, the historian Thomas
Holt observes that academics are quick to “fall back into the older habits of thought” without
“prob[ing] beyond the mantra of social constructedness, to ask what it really might mean in
shaping lived experience” (2000, 10). In this light, I suggest that the field of colonial studies
would benefit from engaging more substantively with race theory. Specifically, such engagement
might help to highlight, reframe, and address certain conceptual problems that arise from how
the field has tended to understand race.
In this chapter, I sketch out three of these conceptual problems and identify their implica-
tions. The first has to do with the periodization of race and the problem of anachronism; the
second with the privileging of agency over domination; and the third with the concept of mes-
tizaje (racial/cultural mixture) and the demographic causality it often implies. Next, I attempt to
model the sort of theoretically engaged analysis I am proposing by considering the racialization
of the “Indian” in the Jesuit José de Acosta’s De procuranda indorum salute (1588), an influential
missionary treatise that marks a significant turning point in the colonial project. Finally, I suggest
that contemporary race theory would also benefit from grappling with the conceptual implica-
tions of recent scholarship on colonial Latin America.
Before moving on, I want to outline some of the key concepts that inform my analysis here.
As a social construction, race is not a “natural” category rooted in bodies or populations, nor is it
reducible to some prior or preexisting (and therefore more “authentic” or “objective”) identity.
Race has a history, or many histories—it has come into existence at particular moments and in
particular places, and has endured but also changed over time. Precisely because the “parasitic and
chameleonlike qualities” of race make it difficult to define, Holt suggests that “we might do bet-
ter not to try to define or catalogue [its] content” but to focus instead on “what work race does”
(2000, 27). This “work” is inseparable from techniques of domination, the production and distri-
bution of violence and vulnerability, and the extraction and accumulation of capital. In other
words, race exceeds ideas and discourse—it has a social reality that over time becomes sedi-
mented in bodies and populations, institutions and practices, architectures and infrastructures.
Race is material, then, not because of the biological character or attributes of particular bod-
ies but because of “the bundle of ascriptive and punitive procedures” through which it is made
to materialize (Chen 2013, 206). Race is constituted through and made visible in political con-
tention over the distribution of social surplus (Omi and Winant 1994), differential legal status
and colonial zones of exception (Mbembe 2003), economic subordination, forced labor, and
uneven access to the wage (Wallerstein 1983; Quijano 2000), infrastructures and the organiza-
tion of space (Nemser 2017), and state-sponsored and extralegal violence and vulnerability to
premature death (Gilmore 2007; Chen 2013; Singh 2017). This means that race is an effect
rather than a cause, an end product rather than a starting point. As the critic Chris Chen explains,
“race” has no “independent causal properties” but is instead the “consequence ... of racial ascrip-
tion or racialization processes which justify asymmetrical power relationships through reference
to phenotypical characteristics and ancestry” (2013, 207). Although from the perspective of
colonial Latin America I would broaden the set of relevant “stigmata of otherness” (Balibar
1991, 18), this insight has important methodological implications. It suggests that as critics we
begin not with racial doctrines, or the ideas and discourses that cohere around the identification
of difference, but with racializing practices, or the sociohistorical processes that produce and
44
Race and domination in colonial Latin American studies
reproduce race as such—which means starting from domination rather than difference (Chen
2013; Wolfe 2016).3
Finally, this methodological shift means provisionally foregrounding the concept of race over
identity, by which I mean focusing on the product of external processes of ascription over inter-
nal acts of self and group identification. It is impossible, of course, to disentangle these categories
entirely, since structure and agency are mutually constitutive. Every racialization process will be
incomplete, and every identity will be constrained by structural limitations (Fisher and O’Hara
2009). But the same is true of critical approaches to race—as the medievalist David Nirenberg
insists, “any history of race will be at best limited, strategic, and polemical” and as such these
histories ought to be read as “provocations to comparison” (2007, 86–87). This distinction
between race and identity is strategic, leaning more heavily on structure than agency in order to
place the category of domination at the center of my analysis of racialization.4
Periodization
In many ways, colonial Latin America offers an ideal point of entry for the study of race and
racialization. Many critics agree that race is a “modern” concept tied to European colonialism,
which for the first time made possible the hierarchical classification of peoples on a global scale.
This process began with Iberian expansion into Africa and the Americas in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries.Yet the Iberian case is often relegated to a marginal position in the histori-
ography of the transition to modernity.5 Whether seen in terms of the emergence of the state,
the consolidation of capitalism, or the process of secularization and the rise of scientific knowl-
edge, for example, modernity tends to be associated with northern Europe, while the Iberian
monarchies are often relegated to the far side of this temporal break. These assumptions about
Iberian “backwardness” are in many ways a product of the Black Legend, by which, beginning
in the late sixteenth century, Spain’s European rivals mobilized narratives of its cruelty and
superstition to justify their own imperial claims (Greer et al. 2007).
Understandably, the marginality of the Iberian empires also shapes much of the new histori-
ography of race in colonial Latin American studies.This is partly a question of temporality. Most
definitions of race are associated with biology and focus on visible, bodily, and heritable markers
like skin color. This scientific discourse of race emerged during the nineteenth century, hand in
hand with Europe’s rapid imperial expansion into Asia, Africa, and the Pacific (Wade 2010,
8–10). In Latin America, however, this same period is characterized by the wars of independence
against Spain and the formation of national states. In other words, it is precisely the moment at
which the colonial period is ending in Latin America that the scientific discourse of race first
begins to appear on the global scene. From this vantage point, it would be anachronistic to
“apply” the concept of race in colonial Latin American studies.6
Scholars making this argument do not deny the existence of discrimination prior to the
nineteenth century, but they frame this discrimination in nonracial terms. Although there is no
consensus regarding appropriate language, some prefer to draw on colonial terminology like
casta and calidad in an attempt to more accurately capture pre-Enlightenment understandings of
difference. Others borrow alternative concepts from contemporary scholarship and discuss these
classifications as “ethnic” or “socioracial.” Whichever concept is used, the reasoning is broadly
consistent.What underlies these varied approaches is the notion of a form of difference based on
characteristics that are cultural or religious and thus fluid rather than biological and fixed. In this
way, early modern difference is detached from “true” race.
What is at stake in the politics of anachronism? It makes sense that scholars in the field of
colonial Latin American studies would carve out a spatial and temporal domain of expertise,
45
Daniel Nemser
insulated from the reach of non-specialists. And this expertise is important—as noted above,
colonial studies has made a valuable contribution to the project of historicizing difference. But
such fragmentation can also close down avenues of critical and comparative analysis. If casta, say,
is not racial, if it is considered to be radically different, it can tell us little about the concept or
history of race—all it can tell us is what race is not. Rather than opening up a rich dialogue on
comparative racialization (Shih 2008)—tracking how racialization processes work and how the
“races” they produce change over time and space—such an approach affirms a unitary, static, and
limited understanding of race.
Not only does this approach limit comparative analysis, it also poses problems for under-
standing race, racism, and racialization in contemporary contexts. If our concept of race is lim-
ited to its biological variant, it becomes difficult to conceptualize more recent formulations of
racism. Scholars identify a radical “break” in the mid twentieth century, when transnational
anti-racist and anti-colonial movements dismantled the dominant racial order of white suprem-
acy (Winant 2001). Rather than disappear, however, racism was reconfigured and became what
some have called “neo-racism,” “cultural racism,” and “racism without race” (Balibar 1991). If
race continues to structure the world we inhabit today—and there can be little doubt that it
does—then its operative forms are in fact more resonant with those of the early modern period
than they are with that of the nineteenth century, which for its part comes to appear as an
exception (Loomba 2002, 37–39; Nemser 2017, 10).
Domination
As I noted at the outset, Cope’s study of colonial rule in seventeenth-century Mexico City, The
Limits of Racial Domination (1994), marks a turning point in the historiography on race in colo-
nial Latin America. One of the book’s most important interventions was to challenge the con-
ventional understanding of Spanish colonial hegemony. Many historians believed that the small
Spanish elite was able to hold power over the long term by using “racial ideology” to divide the
Indian and Black populations and convince them of their own inferiority. But Cope found that
social relations among Mexico City’s poor were far more complex, nuanced, and fluid than the
rigidly hierarchical grid of the so-called sistema de castas could account for. “We should not
assume that subordinate groups are passive recipients of elite ideology,” wrote Cope. “Elite
attempts at racial or ethnic categorizations met with resistance as non-Spaniards pursued their
own, often contradictory, ends: social mobility, group solidarity, self-definition” (1994, 4–5).
Cope’s study has been widely influential in the field, particularly with regard to scholarship
on race during the colonial period. Drawing on his work, scholars have foregrounded the ways
in which non-Spaniards negotiated, contested, and resisted the imposition of Spanish racial ide-
ology, and explored the fluidity and flexibility of colonial identity. In other words, Cope’s work
reinvigorated the study of difference in colonial Latin America by turning away from elite
machinations and instead taking up the plebeian response. The turn to “popular notions of dif-
ference, and subaltern manipulations of elite ideology ... suggested promising new directions for
a cultural analysis of what was beginning to look like an exhausted line of inquiry” (Fisher and
O’Hara 2009, 12–13).
Yet by investing so deeply in the recuperation of subaltern agency and resistance, this scholar-
ship has at times lost track of the flip side of Cope’s argument. For Cope, the fact that “racial
domination” had limits was not intended as a denial of domination as such. At stake in his
meticulous analysis was not the question of whether domination was effective—that went with-
out saying—but of how domination was secured. What Cope’s work shows is simply that it was
not the imposition of an elite ideology of racial hierarchy—the idea that “Mestizos” are both
46
different from and superior to “Mulattoes,” say, and thus that no feelings of solidarity ought to
unite them—that served to stabilize the colonial order. Rather, it was primarily the social rela-
tions of production that performed this function. “Labor relations and patronage provided a far
more effective divide-and-conquer strategy than did racial ideology” (1994, 7). For Cope, even
the riot of 1692 in Mexico City, which came close to toppling the colonial order, underscored
the limits not of colonial domination but of plebeian solidarity. “The structure of Hispanic
domination,” he concludes, “could not be dismantled in a day” (1994, 160).
A quarter-century after its publication, Cope’s work can help us recuperate the category of
domination in colonial Latin American studies. With this distance, however, it is also worth
highlighting the limits of his conceptualization of racial domination. For Cope, domination has
to do primarily with the colonial state’s capacity to rule. Seen in this light, racial domination
would describe a scenario in which members of Mexico City’s plebeian population understand
themselves to be divided into a series of racial categories with divergent interests. These differ-
ences, consequently, serve as an obstacle to the formation of a unified front against their Spanish
oppressors. Domination is “racial,” then, because difference serves instrumentally to divide the
city’s poor against themselves and by doing so insulate the ruling classes from popular resistance.
But there are other ways to understand domination in general, and racial domination in
particular.
Consider, for example, the argument about the function of race laid out by the sociologist
W. E. B. Du Bois in his classic study Black Reconstruction in America ([1935] 1998). Discussing the
failure of Reconstruction following the abolition of slavery in the United States and the return
to racial segregation under Jim Crow, Du Bois showed how racial ideologies served to “dr[ive]
... a wedge between white and black workers” by fabricating a cross-class alliance between
wealthy landowners and poor laborers on the basis of their purported whiteness. Yet Du Bois
also pushed the argument an important step further, underscoring that their actions should be
seen not as a sort of “false consciousness” but as rational, given that the alliance in fact conferred
“a sort of public and psychological wage” and thus supported their material interests:
They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white.They
were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks,
and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, depen-
dent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness.
Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic
situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown
them. White schoolhouses were the best in the community, and conspicuously placed,
and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored
schools. The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and almost
utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule. On the other hand, in the
same way, the Negro was subject to public insult; was afraid of mobs; was liable to the
jibes of children and the unreasoning fears of white women; and was compelled almost
continuously to submit to various badges of inferiority.
(1998, 700–701)
Du Bois’s formulation of the “divide and conquer” argument offers a more sophisticated analysis
of racial domination precisely because he captures its heterogeneity. Here racial domination goes
beyond effective political rule and extends to social and economic relations, institutional struc-
tures, and the symbolic and spatial orders more generally. Insofar as certain workers came to view
themselves in terms of “whiteness,” racial domination is tangled up with the production of affects,
47
Daniel Nemser
habits, and subjectivities that, once materially constituted, are capable of naturalizing and repro-
ducing themselves over time. Racial domination also manifests in state and extralegal violence—
Du Bois’s comments on policing and lynch mobs resonate with the centrality of racialized
violence in recent academic scholarship and social movements. In the context of colonial Latin
America, we could read the construction of the “Indian” as a category defined by vulnerability
and tributary status and the construction of the “Black” as a category defined by enslavability and
subject to gratuitous violence as forms of racial domination. Returning to Cope serves as a valu-
able reminder of the importance of domination in colonial Latin American studies, while provid-
ing an opportunity to reflect on its multiple, interlocking and mutually constitutive modalities.
Mestizaje
The history of race in Latin America has been difficult if not impossible to imagine without the
concept of mestizaje. It is a notoriously slippery concept, and not only because it can refer
ambiguously to racial and cultural mixture, or because it bleeds into other concepts like syncre-
tism, transculturation, and hybridity. Mestizaje is also difficult to conceptualize because the very
idea of “mixture” seems to presume that the subjects of mixing begin this process as “pure.”
While apparently celebrating a sort of mixed-race or multicultural hybridity, then, the concept
simultaneously hardens notions of racial purity, since every identification of “mixture” will pro-
duce retroactive “purities” as a result.
Another difficulty with the concept of mestizaje has to do with a split regarding its proper
object. Scholarship on mestizaje in Latin America tends to treat it either demographically, as an
objective phenomenon manifesting in an “increasingly mixed” population, or politically, as an
ideological discourse of power deployed as part of a state project to construct a national identity.
While not mutually exclusive, there is a tension between these two frameworks, since the former
presumes the demographic reality of racial mixture in the population while the latter presumes
that the discourse of mestizaje is primarily ideological and at best only partially reflects a demo-
graphic reality. Given that the political approach centers on post-independence processes of state
formation, moreover, it is not surprising that the demographic approach would predominate in
scholarship on the colonial period.
There is a similar tension between a theory of mestizaje that stresses its demographic objectiv-
ity on the one hand, and a theory of race that foregrounds its socially constructed character on
the other.Yet these two frameworks often coexist uneasily in the scholarship on race in colonial
Latin America. Even when critics are clear about race as a social construction, the concept of
mestizaje often smuggles in a naturalized understanding of race, assuming that “the system of
classifying ‘blood mixture’ arose because ‘race mixture’ occurred, an argument that reproduces
the idea of races as biological givens” (Martínez 2008, 4). Similarly, many studies presume a his-
torical arc in which the binary character of Spanish colonial society, spatially and institutionally
segregated into a república de españoles and a república de indios, is undermined by the growth of a
“Mestizo” or “mixed-race” population.The premise is that racial domination was limited not by
subaltern agency or struggle but by its demographic composition.
An early and influential example of this tendency is found in an essay on the spatial organiza-
tion of colonial Mexico City published by the Mexican historian Edmundo O’Gorman in 1938.
The essay analyzed the segregated, orthogonal grid on which the city was built, with the Spanish
population living in the center or traza and the indigenous relegated to the outer districts or
barrios. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, what O’Gorman called this “Principio
de Separación” (Principle of Separation) no longer corresponded to reality, since “the mixture
of races is a fact that is inevitably consummated, and in this way the urban system ... was
48
undermined and destroyed at its very foundation” (la mezcla de razas es un hecho consumado
inevitablemente, con lo que el sistema urbano ... se vió minado y destruido en su fundamento
mismo) (1938, 802). O’Gorman’s argument is driven by a vitalist, demographic logic that grinds
slowly forward, from the colonial period to the Mestizo state of the post-Revolutionary Mexico
in which he wrote. Segregation was bound to collapse under the pressure of “customs and vital
necessities. ... Legal precepts and theoretical positions and doctrines, when they have no organic
sympathy with the reality of their time, cannot impose themselves on forms of life that always
rebel against every mechanistic treatment” (las costumbres y necesidades vitales. ... Los preceptos
legales y las posiciones teóricas y doctrinas, cuando no tienen simpatía orgánica con la realidad
de su tiempo, no pueden forzar las formas de la vida, en rebeldía siempre contra todo trata-
miento mecanicista) (1938, 812–813). Here the dialectic is coupled to the state project of mes-
tizaje, and history is propelled forward not by class struggle but biological necessity.
The basic logic of the “separation” thesis has been affirmed by many historians over the years,
especially before the critical turn in the 1990s (Mörner 1967). But even in more recent scholar-
ship that foregrounds the socially constructed character of race and disavows mestizaje’s prob-
lematic racial baggage, the causal scaffolding of the demographic framework is often retained.
The breakdown of the colonial order continues to turn on the assumption that “[m]iscegenation
proceeded apace, bureaucratic impediments notwithstanding. No rigid apartheid could be sus-
tained” (Knight 1990, 72); and that “rampant racial mixture,” persistent and unrelenting, “repre-
sented one of the realities of colonial life most threatening to the construction of an orderly
society” (Vinson 2018, 5, 2). Whether implicit or explicit, the demographic base, represented as
“increasingly mixed,” continues to drive the progress of history.
Above I noted the tension between an approach to mestizaje that takes its demographic con-
tent as an objective reality and causal force, and a critical approach to race whose point of depar-
ture is its socially, rather than biologically, determined character. Likewise, there is nothing
inherently destabilizing about “mixture,” precisely because mixture itself is both constructed and
flexible. Even an apparently binary racial order can accommodate bodies that might otherwise
be considered “mixed.”The dual republic system in colonial Latin America was far more flexible
than is often assumed, since the “republic of Spaniards” was defined negatively, as a social space
for non-Indians, rather than positively, as a social space for Spaniards. But the same is true even
for the United States, where the law of hypodescent simply defined as Black anyone with any
Black ancestry at all.
The conceptual difficulties of mestizaje are not easily resolved. Still, if we are to take social
construction seriously, it is important to challenge the easy attribution of demographic causality,
which reinscribes an uncomfortably biological base as the subject of history. This means asking
questions not about the effects of mestizaje but about the social processes that serve to define and
constitute “mixture” and “purity” as such, in always provisional yet nevertheless stubborn and
enduring formations. We might consider, for example, the racialization processes of “primitive
mestizaje” (Nemser 2017, 27) by which a homogeneous “Indian” was created out of a heteroge-
neous collection of indigenous forms of humanity. A violent process of “mixture” rendered an
entirely new “purity” without which the ideology of mestizaje itself, based on a mythical
encounter between Spaniard and Indian, would be unthinkable.
From race to racialization

So far I have made a case for an approach to race in colonial Latin America that centers not on
the meaning of race but on processes of racialization and techniques of domination. In order to
model this approach, I turn to the Jesuit José de Acosta’s influential work De procuranda indorum
49
Daniel Nemser
salute ([1588] 1984). Written in Peru in the 1570s, this extensive missionary treatise is divided
into six books that address a wide range of issues related to the evangelization of the indigenous
people of the Americas. As Anthony Pagden explains, “De procuranda became the standard work
on its subject and Acosta’s methodological prescriptions for conversion something of an ortho-
doxy” (1986, 198). In practice, the book traveled far beyond the Americas, and missionaries from
various religious orders deployed its teachings from North Africa to the Philippines.
One of the most interesting aspects of Acosta’s approach is that it extended far beyond the
minutiae of missionary work, integrating administrative questions of colonial governance and
economic extraction into the evangelization project. In her illuminating reading of De procuranda,
Ivonne del Valle (2011) frames Acosta’s work in response to the earlier critique of missionaries
like Las Casas, who had argued forcefully that the conquest of the Americas was unjust and con-
sequently that the Spanish must abandon the colonial enterprise. While acknowledging the ille-
gitimacy of the conquest, Acosta argued that it was irrational to expect Spain to give up its
colonies, and that in any case there was no one left to whom restitution could be paid. According
to del Valle, Acosta’s intervention constitutes a sort of “political realism” that recognized the
unjust violence on which Spanish colonialism depended, but responded with an effort not to
eliminate but to rationalize this violence as part of a new and more effective colonial order.
De procuranda opens by acknowledging the challenges posed by the diversity of the indige-
nous population, which made it impossible to formulate a single method of evangelization. In
response, Acosta divides the “barbarians” into three general categories according to their level of
cultural development, as represented by the degree of difference from the “norm” of Christian
Europe. The first resembles European societies in nearly every way, having cities, governments,
writing, and commerce, and lacking only Christianity; the second, which includes the Mexicas
and Incas, lacks Christianity and writing; and the third lacks everything else as well, from fixed
settlements to governing authorities. What is important about this classification is that it goes
beyond a straightforward taxonomic impulse, and forms part of an effort to rationalize evange-
lization and harness the colonial state for that project.Thus, each class of “barbarian” is associated
not only with a series of cultural characteristics but also with a particular evangelizing technique:
the first requires reasoned persuasion; the second, the potential force of an imposed colonial
state; and the third, the prior force necessary to compel its members to enter human society
before any missionary work can begin (Acosta 1984, 55–71).
Acosta’s classification figures centrally in scholarly debates about race in the Jesuit’s work.
Some argue that the cultural markers on which Acosta focuses are the product of custom and
education rather than innate, biological difference, and as such that they must be read as “pri-
marily cultural rather than racial” (Pagden 1986, 19). Others read race in broader terms, fore-
grounding the mechanisms through which culture may appear as ossified and inherited, such
that “evil custom [was] seemingly passed on biologically from parents to children” (Silverblatt
2004, 111). In spite of their differences, these analyses share a focus on Acosta’s cultural descrip-
tion of the indigenous people and thus turn primarily on the question of how race is defined.
The former defines race strictly in terms of biology, and concludes that cultural representation
cannot be racial; the latter uses a broader definition of race that could encompass certain modes
of cultural representation. Although I have argued for a concept of race that is closer to the
second approach, it seems to me that this debate can only take us so far. Starting from the process
of racialization allows us to pose a different set of questions: not what race is, but how race is
made and what kind of “work” it does.
In Book III of De procuranda Acosta addresses the matter of colonial administration, and
Chapters 6 through 10 focus specifically on indigenous tribute. Since the spiritual and temporal
care of the indigenous population has fallen to the Spanish crown, he explains, it is important to
50
determine whether it is legitimate to force the Indians to pay tribute to their rulers. Acosta cites
Romans 13 on rendering tribute to whom tribute is due, and reminds the reader that in these
lines Paul is speaking to Roman Christians who have been subjected to the arbitrary rule of
“certain Caesars who had usurped power by force in a free society” (unos césares que habían
usurpado el poder por la fuerza en una sociedad libre) (1984, 425–427). Whether or not these
circumstances were just, he continues, they had to pay tribute not only out of a fear of punish-
ment but also as a matter of conscience.The parallel is clear: regardless of how Spain has acquired
its colonies, the Indians are obligated to pay.
Following this history lesson, Acosta turns to the concrete mechanisms of tribute collection.
The usual method, he explains, is, first, to determine which goods are abundant in every prov-
ince (such as clothing, cattle, minerals, or silver); next, to count how many Indians are present in
each town or tribe; and finally, to calculate on this basis the amount of tribute each Indian can
comfortably pay. Acosta goes on to argue, however, that determining what the Indians can pay is
not enough—it is equally important to determine what they ought to pay (1984, 439–441). The
usual way of collecting tribute is thus harmful and unacceptable.
At this point in the argument, Acosta makes what at first glance appears to be a surprising
claim. “The question I ask myself is this” (La pregunta que yo me hago es ésta), he writes:
If this mode of contribution is proposed in Spain or France or other nations of Europe,

such that everyone is required to pay what they comfortably can, why will it seem
utterly unjust and iniquitous, while if it is applied to the Indians, just and holy?
(Si se propone este modo de contribución en España o Francia u otras naciones de

Europa de forma que a cada uno se les exija lo que cómodamente pueda dar, ¿por qué
parecerá a todos injustísimo y lleno de iniquidad, y si se aplica a los indios, justo y santo?)
(1984, 441)
By situating Spaniards and French within the same tributary logic as Indians, Acosta appears to
part ways with an imperial reason that draws hard and fast distinctions between metropole and
colony. What is right in Europe is right in the Americas. On its face at least, Acosta’s Christian
universalism thus endorses the principles of equality and reciprocity.7
The turn comes in the next chapter. There Acosta documents the opinion of those most
knowledgeable about the Indians:
Being as they are an indolent and lazy nation, if they are not forced to work and move
and concern themselves with acquiring what they need to pay tribute, they live their
lives stupidly as if they were sheep and shamefully dedicate themselves to the activities
of irrational beings.
(Siendo como son una nación indolente y perezosa, si no se les fuerza a trabajar y a
moverse y preocuparse para tener con que pagar los impuestos, pasan la vida estúpida-
mente como si fueran ovejas y se dedican vergonzosamente a ocupaciones de seres
irracionales.)
(1984, 443)
Although he often rejects such conventional wisdom, in this case Acosta agrees. He adds that the
Incas also held this view, and thus forced their subjects to work excessively. Referencing accounts
of indigenous elders, Acosta explains that after their basic needs had been met commoners were
51
Daniel Nemser
even assigned pointless tasks, like moving rocks from one place to another. Framing the claims
of both Spanish and Inca authorities in a more philosophical register, he returns to Aristotle’s
theory of natural slavery: “The barbarians are all of a servile disposition. And for this reason it
became a saying, as Aristotle recounts, that slaves should never be left idle. Idleness makes them
insolent” (Los bárbaros son todos de talante servil. Y por eso se convirtió incluso en un refrán,
como refiere Aristóteles, que a los esclavos no se les debe tener nunca ociosos. La ociosidad los
hace insolentes) (1984, 445). Because of their indolent character, the only way to get the Indians
to work is to require them to pay tribute. The only question, then, is not whether they should
be forced to pay, but how much and for whose benefit. Tribute obligations must be moderate
not excessive, in other words, and the ultimate end must be the Indians’ own good rather than
that of their rulers. For Acosta, the Indians do not recognize their own interests, so colonial
authorities must guide them toward that transcendent end (Bentancor 2017, 165–168).
In these chapters, Acosta both justifies and proposes a plan to rationalize Indian tribute,
articulating a transition from the unchecked plunder of the initial phase of the conquest to a
new mode of orderly and efficient extraction under a newly consolidated colonial state.
Acknowledging the illegitimate origins of Spanish rule, he nevertheless rejects the Lascasian
demand to abandon the colonial enterprise. Likewise, though recognizing the harmful effects of
tribute, he calls not for its abolition but merely for its moderation. Acosta’s “political realism”
(del Valle 2011) cannot resolve the dilemma posed by the demand for true justice, and this
demand continues to constitute a horizon for radical politics today.
Del Valle’s analysis helpfully centers the operations of racialization and the work of race in
Acosta’s treatise, precisely because she directs our attention away from the representation of the
indigenous population and onto the practices of colonial rule. If race is understood as a product
of racialization processes, it makes methodological sense to start from these processes rather than
their effects. Instead of asking whether Acosta’s representations are “racial” or not, in other
words, my reading asks how colonial mechanisms of extraction and techniques of domination
function as racializing procedures, producing the category of the “Indian” by articulating a natu-
ralizing discourse of indolence with a concrete set of forced labor and tribute obligations. The
generalized ascription of indolence mirrors the generalized character of these obligations, which
are materially applied to the entire indigenous population. From this perspective, tribute func-
tions as a modality of racial domination.
Conclusion
For del Valle, Acosta’s work brings into relief a constitutive contradiction of the modern world,
inaugurated by the foundational violence of the conquest. Efforts to undo this violence—the
only path toward justice—appear as “a collection of absurdities and impossibilities” (una colec-
ción de disparates e imposibles), while “the continuity of violence made coherent and functional
is presented as the only realistic option” (la continuidad de la violencia hecha coherente y fun-
cional, se presenta como la única opción realista) (2011, 321). This, she argues, is why colonial
studies matters. It captures both the historical conditions that gave rise to the present order and
the material and ideological operations that rationalize and naturalize its ongoing injustice.
A similar claim can be made about the concept of race.The argument that race is a “modern”
phenomenon is useful because it exposes race as socially constructed rather than transhistorical,
but it also raises difficult questions about what it means to talk about “premodern”—or, more
usefully, nonracial—modes of differentiation. These questions are commonly answered with
reference to the category of culture in general and religion in particular. For example, above
I pointed to the centrality of the conquest of the Americas in Omi and Winant’s account of the
52
historical emergence of race, and they argue that, before that point, even the sharpest antago-
nisms “were always and everywhere religiously interpreted” (1994, 61). The possibility of con-
version presumably meant that one could change religions at will, which seems to distinguish
religious identity from the fixity of race.8 And yet religion is also profoundly entangled with
what Omi and Winant take to be the earliest examples of racial discourse:
the “discovery” raised disturbing questions as to whether all could be considered part
of the same “family of man,” and more practically, the extent to which native peoples
could be exploited and enslaved. Thus religious debates flared over the attempt to
reconcile the various Christian metaphysics with the existence of peoples who were
more “different” than any whom Europe had previously known. ... [T]he “discovery”
signaled a break from the previous proto-racial awareness by which Europe contem-
plated its “Others” in a relatively disorganized fashion.
(1994, 61–62)
On the one hand, then, social antagonisms that are “religiously interpreted” are set aside as a
premodern holdover; on the other hand, “religious debates” over human variation are cast as an
epochal break. This confusion is symptomatic of a tendency to conceptualize religion and race
as radically dichotomous rather than mutually constitutive—a point that the field of colonial
Latin American studies has helped to clarify (Delgado and Moss 2018). Engaging with recent
scholarship on the ideology of limpieza de sangre, for example, would underscore the institutional
mechanisms through which blood was transformed into a carrier of Jewish and Muslim heresy
on the Iberian peninsula, and with the colonization of the Americas was reconfigured into the
hierarchical system of classification known as the sistema de castas (Nirenberg 2007; Martínez
2008; Hering Torres 2012).
Given the rise of Islamophobia in recent decades, the relation between religion and race is an
especially urgent question. Critics like Junaid Rana (2011) and Leerom Medovoi (2012) have
framed the racialization of the Muslim within a logic of war not as a recent phenomenon that
emerged after 9/11 with the rise of the War on Terror, but as part of a long genealogy of racial
formation reaching back (at least) to the emergence of limpieza de sangre on the Iberian penin-
sula. One important insight of this scholarship is that race has never been reducible to skin color,
and as such the analysis of Islamophobia “requires a historical conceptualization of old and new
racisms in which a theory of race is socially constructed between the concepts of the cultural
and the biological” (Rana 2011, 28). Racialization processes thus generate and exploit varied
modalities of group differentiation along multiple axes and across multiple temporalities. As I
have suggested, contemporary racism may share more with the early modern/colonial period
than the so-called modern, biological racism of the nineteenth century.
The confusion in Omi and Winant’s analysis of religion and race highlights a final reason
why colonial studies offers a valuable vantage point for race theory.We might read their ambigu-
ous distinction generously, as a function of an analysis focused on a historical rupture between
nonracial and racial configurations of difference. Transitions are conceptually messy, and do not
occur from one day or year to the next—1492 is, in this sense, a metonym—but necessarily
involve some conjugation of continuity and discontinuity. Still, there is value in the denatural-
izing implications of historical breaks, the insistence that race and racism are not permanent
features of human existence. Doing colonial studies, as del Valle suggests, means grappling with
transition. And from an abolitionist perspective, thinking the beginning of race also means open-
ing up the possibility of thinking the end of race as a category of domination. “Beginning from
radically different histories of racialisation,” writes Chen, “abolitionist anti-racist struggles would
53
Daniel Nemser
aim to dismantle the machinery of ‘race’ at the heart of a fantasy of formal freedom. ... ‘Race’
can thus be imagined as an emancipatory category not from the point of view of its affirmation,
but through its abolition” (2013, 223, 208).
Notes
1 These works include, but are not limited to, Carrera 2003; Lewis 2003; Katzew 2004; Silverblatt 2004;
Hill 2005; Martínez 2008; Fisher and O’Hara 2009; Hering Torres et al. 2012; O’Toole 2012; Bryant
2014; Rappaport 2014; Twinam 2015; Schwaller 2016; Nemser 2017; and Vinson 2018.
2 This “limited cross-pollination between studies of race in Latin America and the larger field of Race
Studies in general” is among the many valuable insights offered by Delgado and Moss (2018, 41) in a
suggestive review of recent historiographical literature on religion and race in the Iberian Atlantic
world. Although my focus is somewhat different, this chapter overlaps in significant ways with their
broader argument. Meanwhile, Bonilla-Silva (2015, 81) observes that race theory has so far failed to
take seriously the “oldest racial regimes” that emerged with the conquest of the Americas, and proposes
returning to these initial moments of racialization as a valuable direction for future research.
3 Here Chen (2013, 207–208) builds on the work of the historian Barbara Fields, who offers a slightly dif-
ferent formulation: “Substituted for racism, race transforms the act of a subject into an attribute of the
object” (Fields 2001, 48). While both racialization and racism refer to active processes external to the
racialized object, I foreground the former for two reasons. First, racialization stresses the historical aspect
of racial formation and thus offers a better framework for tracking the production and reproduction of
race over time. Second, the idea of racism is tightly associated with individual, moralistic notions of “preju-
dice” and “discrimination.” The late historian Patrick Wolfe distinguishes between “race as doctrine,” the
relatively coherent and formalized elaboration of racial discourse, and “racialisation, race in action” as a
series of “racialising practices [that] seek to maintain population-specific modes of colonial domination
through time” (2016, 10). Wolfe thus stresses the priority of racialization over race by arguing that
European colonialism did not require the elaboration of racial doctrines before the eighteenth century
but proceeded on the basis of Christianity (2016, 10–11). Of course, things look somewhat different from
the perspective of colonial Latin America, but in a sense the difference is merely a question of timing, since
the structural relation between conquest and racialization remains the same, while as I suggest below the
Iberian case makes clear that religion and race are more difficult to disentangle than Wolfe assumes.
4 Recent historiography of race in colonial Latin America has tended to foreground agency over struc-
ture. In the introduction to their edited volume, Fisher and O’Hara acknowledge this tendency and
define identity as the “nexus” of structure and agency, or “categorization and self-understanding,” in
order to provide “a natural check on the proliferation of agency” (2009, 20–21). But because the forma-
tion of the archive and the constraints of the discipline privilege exceptional cases, the essays in their
collection nevertheless highlight colonial actors demonstrating “creativity and agency,” taking advan-
tage of “opportunities to reinvent oneself,” “subvert[ing] colonial assumptions of ... racial deficiencies,”
deploying “creative and adaptive forms of resistance,” and “even transcend[ing] the racial categories
imposed on them” (2009, 22–26).
5 An important exception is Quijano (2000), whose work on the “coloniality of power” pushes the tran-
sition to modernity, and the emergence of race, back to the conquest of the Americas.
6 See Loomba (2007, 597) on the “horror of anachronism” and the periodization of race.
7 Here Acosta follows the influential Dominican theologian Francisco de Vitoria, who had insisted a half
century earlier that the Indians’ deficiencies were due not to their innate inferiority but to their barba-
rous education: “Even among our own people ... we can see many peasants who are little different from
brute animals” (Pagden 1986, 97, 160).
8 Similarly, despite the Enlightenment emphasis on taxonomy, eighteenth-century theories of the body
are often read as nonracial, since the privileging of external factors like climate meant that bodies were
treated as fluid rather than fixed (Nemser 2017, 163–164).
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Bentancor, Orlando. 2017. The Matter of Empire: Metaphysics and Mining in Colonial Peru. Pittsburgh:
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2
SELF-REPRESENTATION AND
SELF-GOVERNANCE IN EARLY
LATIN AMERICA
Karen Graubart
When, in the mid-twentieth century, historians turned to examine subaltern voices in colonial
Latin American history, they faced the dual challenge of finding and evaluating sources from
marginalized peoples and of reformulating narratives that privileged the perspectives of Spanish
conquistadors and administrators. In this chapter I examine some theoretical and methodologi-
cal innovations that have emerged from these concerns, focusing especially on greater Mexico
and the Andes, regions with deep historical archives for the early colonial period as well as
profound historiographical traditions. Scholars broke new ground by insisting that indigenous,
Black, and female perspectives could be represented, forcing the field to recognize the coeval
invention of a colonial world. Indeed, the literature has moved away from representing these
groups as resisting or accommodating colonial power to argue that they also reimagined colonial
and anti-colonial projects. Yet academic analysis still falters when it takes up the question of
female, indigenous, and Black self-theorization. We need to write intellectual histories of con-
quest and colonization from these perspectives, by retheorizing certain kinds of archival docu-
mentation as acts of self-representation.
Ethnohistory
The rise of ethnohistory in the mid-twentieth century was central to how Western academics
wrote histories of Latin American conquest and colonization.That field’s attention to native and
native-language sources, its alignment of colonial history and literary studies with archaeology
and anthropology, and its decentering of traditional victor-centered narratives produced new
analyses of conquest and colonial adaptation. Ethnohistorians argued that native culture was not
destroyed with the Spanish conquest, despite cultural and political traumas. The literature was
characterized by the revaluation of already-known and the identification of previously-
unknown, indigenous-language (or mixed language) texts: Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s
Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1992), Nahuatl texts translated and published by Ángel María
Garibay (e.g., 1958) and Miguel León-Portilla (e.g., 1959, 1964) as well as their coeditorship of
the journal Estudios de Cultura Nahuatl at UNAM, and the corpus of unpublished notarial docu-
ments (in Spanish and indigenous languages) characterized by James Lockhart (1992) as “mun-
dane.” Two major directions emerged. One, studying Mesoamerica, and sometimes calling itself
57
Karen Graubart
the “New Philology,” prioritized learning indigenous languages and scouring (and publishing)
early colonial resources in those languages (Restall 2003). The philologists, led in the US by
Lockhart (1992), argued that indigenous-language colonial texts offered a lens into indigenous
worldviews, especially to the experience of social change. A second direction in the Andes,
where early colonial Quechua texts are rare, focused on indigenous labor, political disruption,
and the great rebellions of the late colonial period (Glave 1989; Stern 1982; Spalding 1984).
It is hard to overstate the importance of this literature. Scholars produced nuanced works that
began from the premise that indigenous inhabitants of the Americas were not only not erased
by conquest, but that they continued to produce meaningful culture, even as those meanings
shifted in contact. Early collections such as León-Portilla’s Visión de los vencidos (1959) suggested
rich possibilities for countering Spanish conquest narratives with heterogeneous native perspec-
tives, even while those perspectives emerged in a context of already-existing colonial rule. María
Rostworowski’s tireless combing of Peruvian archives distilled Inca points of view, and her
insistence on the centrality of gender analysis revealed the ways that Inca women participated in
imperial society before the conquest and how the women of the Inca line fared after (1989b).
Rostworowski also paid attention to non-Inca cultures of the South American coastline, offer-
ing a more complex vision of imperial history prior to conquest (1989a).
Locating caches of archival materials that reveal heterogeneous perspectives was a crucial first
step. The new ethnohistories argued that it was possible to tell an indigenous history of Spanish
colonization. Lockhart’s Nahuas After the Conquest (1992) examined the transformation of the
Mesoamerican altepetl or ethnic state through Nahuatl-language notarial documents from the
first decades of Spanish rule. He tracked the entrance of Spanish political and religious terminol-
ogy into indigenous-language legal documents as an indicator of cultural transformation: from
loan words to rearticulations of native life.While his argument was limited by the use of notarial
documents—a Spanish legal form, carried out by trained notaries to accomplish Spanish colo-
nial legal tasks—his findings created space for a vast enterprise of taking stock of native-language
sources and constructing local indigenous histories.
In the Andes, in the absence of Quechua documentation, historians turned to archaeology
and anthropology to supplement and provoke new Spanish-language sources. Works like Karen
Spalding’s Huarochirí (1984), John Murra’s The Economic Organization of the Inca State (1980), and
Rostworowski’s Estructuras andinas del poder (1983) mined chronicles and notarial documents, as
well as burials, monumental and domestic architecture, quipus (knotted cords used for account-
ing and other functions), and land tenure to tell history from an indigenous perspective.
This wave of often activist-inflected scholarship, coinciding with a period of leftist move-
ments and rightwing retrenchments in Latin America, and anti-imperialist critique within the
US left, unleashed new ways to talk about cultural and political change in the century after the
conquest. It produced theoretical debates over descriptive terms such as acculturation—criticized
by some scholars as erasing indigenous agency—and transculturation or hybridity, which in dif-
ferent ways emphasized the two-way nature of cultural change (Ortíz 2002; Rama 1984; Bhabha
1985). It also allowed for subtler periodizations, drawing upon changes evident in internal docu-
mentation and especially within language and religious practices. Some studies introduced ethno-
genesis or the recognition that ethnic groups were never static but constantly reinvented themselves
(Powers 1995). Many of the monographs that emerged from this paradigm shift, however, main-
tained the large contours of the old field: Spanish conquistadors arrived with their germs, steel,
and laws, and if they initially resisted, in the end indigenous communities experienced an inevi-
table loss of political and social control.
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Self-representation and self-governance in early Latin America
Indigenous self-governance
An important corollary of this work developed first in Mesoamerica, where native-language
mundane records also included documents produced for indigenous cabildos.Those documents,
identified by Lockhart (1992) as key to understanding indigenous mentalities over time, could
show shifts in property relations, by marking linguistic novelties and legal transformations
(Kellogg 1995;Terraciano 2004). It is arguable whether these actually reveal anything substantive
that Spanish-language documents do not: they largely translated Spanish legal ideas into local
languages, in a form that could be enforced by Spanish courts (Burns 2010).
But the existence of paperwork from indigenous notaries and indigenous cabildos in Mexico
reveals the depth of self-governance far into (and often beyond) the colonial period. Spain gov-
erned its New World holdings mostly by incorporating indigenous polities within a polycentric
legal regime (Benton 2002). By recognizing certain elites as native lords (generalized as caciques,
a Taíno word picked up in the early Caribbean) and recognizing their jurisdiction over certain
civil aspects of daily life, Spanish authorities intentionally created spaces for native self-gover-
nance. Royal officials and the Catholic Church sought to intervene in these spaces, by requiring
direct royal and Catholic oversight in the forms of corregidores [provincial magistrates] and priests,
and by promoting new non-hereditary indigenous officials who would compete with caciques
for political and economic control. High mortality rates and migration also contributed to the
reorganization of indigenous polities into congregaciones or reducciones, which combined dispersed
populations and moved them to accommodate Spanish needs for tribute, coerced labor rota-
tions, and conversion efforts. Nonetheless, indigenous polities continued to function, utilizing
processes and law that met the community’s ongoing needs for justice. Their strategies encom-
passed internal acts, utilizing their political space to organize society according to group norms
and beliefs, and also external acts, using writing to push for local demands in the courts
(Yannakakis 2008; Ruíz Medrano 2011). Self-governance and self-representation ensured that
colonial law and rule had coeval origins.
Relatively little documentation of these internal processes remains. Mesoamericanists, with
access to indigenous-language documentation, produced new attempts to reconstruct local
indigenous polities. Andeanists have attended to town politics using Spanish-language records
kept by indigenous notaries or by analyzing Spanish bureaucratic and juridical records for the
gaps that would be filled in by local indigenous officials (Graubart 2015; Puente Luna 2016).
These histories offer insight into the ways that local governance intersected with Spanish expec-
tations, actions that are not easily reduced to notions of capitulation or resistance.
For example, an extraordinary cache of records from Tlaxcala, a key ally to Cortés in the
conquest of Mexico, reveals its struggles to remain somewhat independent of Spanish authority
(Martínez Baracs 2008). Tlaxcalan elites appeared before the king of Spain in 1529 on behalf of
their communities, a confederation of noble houses and unaffiliated towns, requesting remu-
neration for their services in the conquest.The king ordered them exempt from encomienda (they
would pay tribute directly to the crown rather than to any grantee) and recognized them as an
independent province subject to royal authority and local customary law under a native cabildo
or municipal government.
The cabildo was a Spanish-style political form, but in Tlaxcala it was made to accommodate
local forms of governance. Rather than annually elected alcaldes (judges) and regidores (council
members), the dynastic rulers (tlatoque) of the four noble houses (tecalli) that made up the confed-
eration occupied these offices for life. The governorship would rotate among them for two-year
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Karen Graubart
terms, and the native nobility made up the electing body. This gave the cabildo the formal struc-
ture of a Spanish town, but in content it acceded to local ways of understanding politics.
Indigenous notaries kept records, called Actas, of cabildo meetings in Nahuatl written in
Roman script. These were nearly always noblemen, representing their own tecalli, trained in
Spanish legal conventions and generally bilingual. Partial session minutes from the cabildo meet-
ings exist for the period 1547–1567 (published as Lockhart et al. 1986). Like many such docu-
ments, they have been read for evidence of cultural survival and adaptation during this early
period, as well as how the towns met and challenged growing colonial demands.
The Actas help redefine indigenous self-governance. More than finding continuity or substi-
tuting new names for old titles, self-governance reflects the preservation of local forms of justice
while the external context shifts. A rich example emerges from the assessment of colonial tribute.
Tribute was assessed as a head tax in crops or commodities on adult indigenous male commoners.
Spanish administrators created tribute schedules by censusing communities to learn how many
adult males lived in each governed unit; they charged caciques with delivering the total amount
to Spanish authorities at periodic intervals. Spaniards understood the tax as equally assessed upon
commoner families, with nobles exempted. Historians have focused upon the way that such a
head tax impacted families and communities as populations diminished (Spalding 1984).
Tlaxcala offers a counter-narrative. In 1548, its cabildo established a progressive tribute col-
lection scale (Lockhart et al. 1986, 67–69). Residents were ranked from poorest commoners to
richest nobles and rulers. Each was assessed an amount of corn that correlated to their relative
wealth. The four rulers and the alcalde would decide what category each tribute payer fell into.
With the caveat that commoners likely labored for the nobles, and thus bore a larger share of the
work, the schedule demonstrates that those with more resources were expected to contribute
more, rather than exempt themselves. This is, then, a rare case of the archive exposing the local
justice encoded in tribute assessment.
The cabildo rulings also reveal the difficulties of enforcing local justice. Certain nobles were
selling off lands illegally, and the cabildo called upon their family members to confiscate the
remaining property and evict the seller from their noble house. That is, enforcement would be
carried out through noble kin groups rather than by an external police force. In another case,
the cabildo recognized its inability to control the trade in cochineal, which it argued was under-
mining indigenous hierarchies by making some commoners rich (Lockhart et al. 1986, 79–84).
In this case, they sent a delegation of nobles to visit the Viceroy in Mexico City to request that
he place a limit on the number of cactus plants anyone could have in Tlaxcala, which they could
then enforce locally.
If Spanish law largely viewed the republic as a mechanism for organizing tax payments, setting
market days, and punishing drunkards—all things attested within Tlaxcala’s Actas—local leaders
also saw it as a space in which they could protect their interests in a changing world, theorizing
what it meant to be Tlaxcalan and elite under insurgent Spanish rule. The analysis of Indian
republics as organic polities rather than spaces of colonial domination or mimicry creates the
space to recognize local politics, justice, and colonial law more broadly, as having mutual origins.
Intermediaries
Ethnohistories of conquest brought a critical focus on the roles of translators and mediators in
the implantation of Spanish and Portuguese institutions. This attention was not new: Bernal
Díaz del Castillo, one of Cortés’ foot soldiers in the conquest of Tenochtitlan, emphasized the
roles played by two shipwrecked Spanish soldiers who found refuge of a kind among the Maya,
and especially that of Doña Marina or Malintzin, an enslaved adolescent girl the Maya gifted to
60
Cortés, who served as his guide, translator, and sexual partner (Díaz del Castillo 1970). Díaz used
Malintzin as part of a framework to undermine Cortés’ claim that he, alone, was the vehicle of
Spanish conquest. But modern historians and literary scholars have seen intermediaries as ways
to explore cultural adaptation, and especially the ways that they negotiated multiple political
identities as they made their way in colonial societies.
Recent studies of Malintzin (Townsend 2007) rightly emphasize her genius: a girl from an
elite family in central Mexico, placed into slavery and passed through the hands of diverse Maya
speakers before landing in Cortés’ party. Her mastery of Nahuatl,Yucatec Maya, and Spanish, as
well as a variety of political cultures made her a key actor on behalf of her Spanish captors as
well as herself: she ended her short life the wife of a Spanish conquistador and mother of Cortés’
illegitimate but beloved son Don Martín. It is this astuteness which has become the central trope
in new conquest histories, which argue that indigenous and African go-betweens were able to
exploit their particular and doubled knowledges to broker colonial relations.
Earlier studies of this brokerage focused on elites, mostly caciques who balanced on the knife’s
edge of early colonial rule. Required to fulfill colonial demands while maintaining the coopera-
tion of their subjects, these men (and some women) sought to temper outrageous encomendero
demands, they litigated on behalf of their communities, and they drove their subjects to engage
in new enterprises that brought income but also undermined the social fabric. Blistering cri-
tiques revealed that Andean elites, through self-interest or desperation, entered into legal rela-
tionships with Spaniards that dispossessed their subjects of shared resources (Spalding 1973;
Varón Gabai 1980; Stern 1982).
In the 1990s, the trope of the go-between shaped many histories, coinciding, as Yanna
Yannakakis has noted, with a new relationship between some Latin American states and their
indigenous communities (Yannakakis 2008). Some of these histories were extensions of the
brokerage analytic, such as narratives of the armies of indigenous conquistadores that brought
colonial rule from central Mexico to the Yucatan and Guatemala (Yannakakis 2008; Matthew
2012). Such studies effectively changed both the periodization of conquest—pushing the narra-
tive both back into precolonial conflicts and forward into a longer process of settlement and
domination—and the history of how colonization took place.
Historians have used the notion of the colonial go-between to describe people, often com-
moners, of mixed ancestry who were able to act as intermediaries between different cultural
groups. Some of this literature drew upon Richard White’s transformative The Middle Ground,
which looked for spaces in Euro-indigenous contact in North America where neither group
could compel the other to its will (White 1999). Middle grounds were particular spaces of mis-
understanding and desire for communication where mediation was possible and shared practices
could emerge.
Some of the most powerful studies of this phenomenon in Latin America have come from
Brazil and the Caribbean, sites where Atlantic slavery introduced African peoples into societies
also rent by conflict between Europeans and indigenous peoples. John Monteiro's Negros da terra
(1994) upended the early history of Brazil, demonstrating that São Paulo was founded through
Portuguese settlers' intentional exploitation of indigenous conflicts. Settlers supported and
engaged in raids that transferred Guaraní and Tupi slaves to coastal plantations, and brokered
friendlier relations with favored groups that ended up destroyed by disease, war, and crisis. Alida
Metcalf ’s Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500–1600 (2008) asked how Portuguese
conquerors and missionaries, indigenous polities, and free and enslaved Africans—and their mixed
descendants—interacted and affected one another through simple coexistence, transactional bro-
kerage, and mutual representation. In this analysis, the Portuguese ultimately succeeded in coloni-
zation because mamelucos (mixed European-indigenous peoples) negotiated terms on their behalf.
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Karen Graubart
Other studies have contemplated the ways that brokerage produced new cultures that were
not reducible to discourses of resistance and continuity. James Sweet (2009) has argued that by
the time African slaves arrived in Spanish and Portuguese colonies they had themselves often
passed through numerous re-creations of their own identities on the African continent. His
study of Domingos Alvares depicts a man from West Africa who experienced a conquest by
Dahomey, was sold into Atlantic slavery and arrived in Pernambuco, Brazil, where he began on
a career as an acclaimed healer in the 1730s. He purchased his freedom in Rio, where he opened
numerous healing centers, only to be arrested by the Inquisition and sent to Lisbon, where he
was convicted. He lived in exile, moving around Portugal, followed by the Inquisition, disap-
pearing from view in Bragança in 1749. Alvares’ identity was not reducible to African, Brazilian,
and Portuguese influences, rather he cultivated communities of followers who spoke languages
he knew, recognized his healing practices, and constructed relationships based upon shared
spiritual beliefs in the place where they met.
The move to analyzing the ways that native, African, and mixed-race people facilitated cul-
tural and physical contact reflects critical attention to the local production of power and the
politics of ethnic and racial identity in the emerging colonial world. Social historians have
assimilated Foucauldian theory to the point of naturalization: rare is the academic who sees
unilateral domination or searches for authentic agents of culture. Instead, these approaches draw
upon a foundational literature on local forms of agency to demonstrate that, while colonial
powers eventually followed up their optimistic claims of possession with increasingly hege-
monic social, political, and economic institutions, the culture that emerged was dependent upon
indigenous and African acts and beliefs.
Indigenous intellectuals
The study of indigenous intellectuals in the early colonial Spanish Americas is quite dynamic
although it began as a fairly narrow scholarship, generally the study of letrados, lettered (and often
specifically Latinate) elite men. The Nahua intellectuals Domingo Francisco de San Antón
Chimalpahin, Bartolomé de Alva, and Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, and the Andean Garcilaso
de la Vega “El Inca” have long been considered part of the canon of indigenous-descent cronistas
whose descriptions of conquest and colonial society stood in counterpoint to the masses of
Spanish soldier-authors. In the middle of the twentieth century scholars such as Franklin Pease in
Peru and Miguel León-Portilla and Ángel María Garibay in Mexico brought, respectively, Guaman
Poma de Ayala and Fernando Alvarado Tezozomoc and others into the conversation. Rolena
Adorno’s (1986) study of Guaman Poma was a landmark in diagnosing the way that an indigenous
man, born around the time of the conquest, contemplated his changing world and his place in it.
Similarly, Chimalpahin’s Nahuatl Annales has been mined for its extremely particular experience
of events in Mexico City, as a counter to Spanish official reports (Martínez 2004, 2011). These
unique, elite texts are an important and long-standing challenge to the official narrative.
Scholars have also recognized the indigenous informants for many ethnographic texts pro-
duced by Spanish priests and bureaucrats, including the Florentine Codex in Mexico, the Huarochirí
Manuscript in Peru, and the many ethnographic reports produced for viceroys of New Spain and
Peru (Ávila 1999; Sahagún 2012). But these texts are also shrouded in mystery, lacking basic
biographical information about their indigenous informants, their education and access to lit-
eracy, and their roles in indigenous societies.
Writing was perhaps the central technology of the Spanish empire. Ángel Rama, a Uruguayan
critic, wrote La ciudad letrada shortly before his death in 1983. He argued that lettered men—lawyers,
notaries, bureaucrats—brokered the relationship between cultural practice, state power, and
62
urbanism in colonial Latin America.Their documents articulated the ordered city that Spanish and
Portuguese imperial policies demanded, the “ordering principle revealed itself as a hierarchical space
transposed by analogy into a hierarchical design of urban space” (Rama 1984, 3).
But that lettered world was not solely inhabited by men of Spanish descent. The refusal to
offer access to higher learning and most bureaucratic positions to indigenous and Black men
meant that they could not be recognized as lawyers, jurists, doctors, or viceroys in the early
colonial world. Scholars interested in that intellectual realm have shifted their attention to the
men who wrote down the words of the powerful. Kathryn Burns (2014, 237) noted the pres-
ence, in Guaman Poma’s extraordinary letter, of Indian notaries whom he called quillcaycamayoc
[paper keeper] on the model of the quipucamayoc or keeper of the quipus, one of the main
accounting and representational devices of the Andes.These notaries wrote in Spanish, and their
archival production is fragmentary but not unknown (for an example, Puente Luna 2016).Their
particular biographies are largely lost, though they might be pursued through the thick weeds
of the notarial archives.
The search for lettered indigenous men and women is deepest in greater Mexico, where a
pre‑Hispanic literate culture rapidly adapted to its new circumstances (McDonough 2014). It is
likely that many of the newly literate in the Spanish alphabet were formerly the literati of pic-
tographic or performative representations. Fray Bernardino de Sahagún and his informants
described the Nahua tlamatini or sage in their Florentine Codex as the one who “possesses writ-
ings, owns books, is the tradition, the road; a leader of men, a rower, a companion, a bearer of
responsibility, a guide” (Ramos and Yannakakis 2014, ix). Sahagún's assistants likely came from
this tradition, and were trained after conquest in Spanish writing practices by clergy and other
educators. But this made Mexico a home to readers, writers, and interpreters: an indigenous
intellectual class which largely functioned as an arm of the church and colonial administration.
Their intellectual production often drew upon Western classical traditions as well as their own,
formulating new genres of writing and cultural expression.
Similarly, native assistants to the church carried out intellectual work, from fiscales who medi-
ated between the parish priest and an indigenous flock, to the translators, scribes, and compan-
ions of the extirpators of idolatry (such as Guaman Poma himself). These men translated
indigenous worldviews to Christians and vice versa, although their acts were often verbal and are
difficult to identify or theorize, but would be valuable subjects of an intellectual history. Regina
Harrison’s (2014) history of the development of the rite and semantics of confession in the
Andes, for example, opens up the possibility of studying the testimony of witnesses at idolatry
trials not so much for revelations about an indigenous worldview outside of or in contradiction
to Christianity, as for evidence of the reception of Christian precepts in those communities.
But there are encouraging new ways to approach indigenous actors as intellectuals rather
than representatives of a shared worldview. Among the most important cases was the redefinition
of the mechanism of heritable noble office, the cacicazgo, by indigenous elites through litigation.
Karen Vieira Powers (1998) offers a classic account in her study of the Duchisela family in
Ecuador, who rewrote their own histories and the story of the cacicazgo they held as they maneu-
vered to hold regional power over more than two centuries. Powers presents this as a narrative
about a particular elite family that fought for legitimacy using Spanish law whilst also justifying
their position internally to their subjects. As María Elena Martínez (2011) argued, the reinven-
tion of familial lineages and genealogies was one of the most striking aspects of the indigenous
nobility’s reaction to the challenges of colonialism.
In the Andes, indigenous women likewise took up the practice of reformulating lineages,
bringing together the fact that, in some regions of the northern coast of Peru and Ecuador
before the conquest, women could inherit political office, with the desire of the Spanish crown
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to regularize cacicazgo inheritance in order to limit challenges, especially in the absence of pre-
ferred direct males heirs.Those cases were resolved with the creation of female cacicas, an institu-
tion that quickly spread across the empire, even to regions where female inheritance was largely
unknown before the Spanish conquest (Graubart 2007).
Another fruitful path follows indigenous litigation, petitions, and testimony. Spanish admin-
istrators complained of the litigiousness of indigenous elites, who simply utilized the legal tools
given them to improve their own and their communities’ positions. Indigenous petitioners, as
members of the legal category of miserables, were entitled to free legal representation. They also
shared legal knowledge in major urban centers. While colonial caciques have been excoriated for
their role in accommodating the vicious demands of colonial rulers, they also functioned as
advocates for indigenous justice.They petitioned local and royal officials for amparo or protection
for their subjects; they also filed requests for rewards for their own meritorious service. For
example, the cacique of Pacajes (modern Bolivia) petitioned officials in the seventeenth century
to protect his community from the forced labor draft to the mines of Potosí (Choque Canqui
and Glave 2012). Notably, the memoriales he sent did not simply argue against the labor but
indicted the colonial economy for its deleterious effects on a community he was required to
preserve. Indigenous litigation was also an act of theorization of a social world.
Litigation and petitioning also reveal conflicts between community and individual interests:
caciques across the Americas presented themselves as sole owners of resources that might previ-
ously have been communal or attached to an office. Such actions might be purely self-interested,
or might reflect shifting ways of thinking about both the resources and the community, as shown
in Don Gonzalo Taulichusco’s 1562 will: the son of the cacique who ceded Lima to Pizarro
detailed how he had misused resources belonging to his community and family, and attempted
to provide restitution by demanding their return and placement into new formats that might
protect the community in future (Graubart 2017).
Elite indigenous men also traveled to the Habsburg Court to request favors from the Crown
(Puente Luna 2018; Pennock 2020). Their voyages of advocacy to and from Madrid reveal the
way that Spanish colonial rule utilized a transatlantic system of literate Spanish, indigenous, and
mestizo intellectuals to produce discourses about nobility, ethnicity, and law in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. These were rarely attempts to produce and defend a unified Indian cor-
porate self, but rather reflected individual strategies to access power that had important local
ramifications.
The very category of “Indian” was also the subject of litigation. Columbus’ voyages tempo-
rarily expanded slavery in the Mediterranean world to include indigenous inhabitants of the
Americas. Through the middle of the sixteenth century, Castilian monarchs expressed ambiva-
lence about Indian slavery, until in 1542 Charles V clarified the situation by declaring Indians his
vassals and exempt from enslavement and personal service. This inaugurated a spike in litigation
in Castile by men, women, and children who claimed that they were indios and falsely enslaved;
nearly two hundred were successful in the courts (Van Deusen 2015). Success was predicated
upon telling a compelling life narrative that defined the enslaved person as born in the Spanish
Indies, and involuntarily embarked upon a transimperial or transatlantic voyage that ended in
Castile. Despite brandings, suspect linguistic and cultural knowledge, physiognomy, and disem-
powered witnesses, many indigenous litigants crafted life stories that hewed enough to defini-
tional expectations to convince the court.
Finally, Elizabeth Hill Boone notes, “the colonial intellectuals all seem to have been men”
(Ramos and Yannakakis 2014, xi). Certainly, there are studies of noble indigenous women,
beginning with Maria Rostworowski’s (1989a, 1989b) landmark history of Doña Francisca
Pizarro, daughter of the Spanish conquistador and Inés Huaylas, daughter of the Inca Huayna
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Capac. Sara Guengerich (2017) has explored the petitions for resources belonging to Doña
Francisca and other Inca women, which reveal not only how gender relations were transformed
under Spanish rule, but how elite women made places for themselves at the colonial table (see
also Díaz 2010; Díaz and Quispe-Agnoli 2017). But Boone’s statement reflects a failure of defi-
nition as well. Women figured as healers and religious leaders, including those prosecuted under
the extirpation of idolatry; many were clearly educators and ritual specialists.Women of all races
and classes were also at the forefront of Catholic confraternities, arguably among the most salient
social networks of the early colonial period. As the lens used to designate “intellectuals” trans-
forms, scholars need to examine their expectations about gender and class.
Black intellectuals
In contrast to the burgeoning literature on indigenous intellectuals, Black thought remains dif-
ficult to locate in early Spanish colonial worlds. Black intellectuals become more common his-
torical subjects in the Bourbon period and into the nineteenth century, when free people of
African descent found distinction in scientific and artistic circles as well as through military and
commercial opportunities.
But the necessary project of finding the intellectual visions of people of African descent in
the early colonial world has advanced slowly. This project requires searching for texts in unex-
pected locations as well as making the definition of texts more elastic. Larissa Brewer-García
(2019, 2020) argues that Black subjects co-produced or influenced the production of texts as
early as the seventeenth century. She studies African translators for catechists in seventeenth-
century Cartagena, not only producing biographies of the men who performed the role for
newly arrived African slaves, but also suggesting ways to contemplate their own analysis of
Christianity. Her careful reading of the beatification hearings for the Jesuit Pedro Claver con-
templates how African Christians read visual aids and then translated them to men, women, and
children who had arrived as cargo from their own places of origin.This approach recreates both
kinds of participants—translators and audience—as active agents, and elevates the act of transla-
tion to one of political leadership.
Most stunning, perhaps, is the diary left by the Black donada or religious servant Ursula de
Jesús (1604–1666) in Lima (Van Deusen 2004). A former slave who acquired a following as a
mystic in the convent of Santa Clara, Ursula recorded her thoughts (with some anonymous
assistance) at the request of her spiritual advisors, who characterized her remarkable transforma-
tion from frivolous to pious as a model for the humble and elite alike. Her entries record a
convent world bearing the same race and class schisms as the secular one, and her own genius
for managing her circumstances with cautionary tales that emerged from her visions of souls
caught in purgatory.
Scholars have described the lives of other exceptional Black religious figures in this period,
from San Martín de Porras, a lay brother of the Dominican order in Peru who was beatified in
1837, some two hundred years after his death (Cussen 2014; Brewer-García 2019) to Juana
Esperanza de San Alberto, born in Western Africa, enslaved in Puebla (Mexico), who was allowed
to profess as a Carmelite nun on her deathbed in 1678 (Bristol 2007). Many of these figures are
largely known to us through hagiographic or instrumental representations, such as the sketches
of Madre Estephanía de San José, a saintly Black tertiary in Lima, proffered in the sermons of the
extirpator Francisco de Ávila (Cussen 2005). Ávila used the example of Madre Estephanía, who
pretended to be illiterate so that the elite women who invited her into their homes might read
pointedly chosen texts aloud to her, as a model of conversational lay preaching and evangeliza-
tion. A subsequent version of her life story erased her possession of a slave as well as her
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friendship with a mystical woman arrested by the Inquisition, as a way to use her as a model of
“nonwhite holiness.” These lives usually conform to a standard narrative although scholars
sometimes read them against the grain for evidence of an outsider perspective.They also tend to
reflect urban centers, where nonwhite religious figures were more common.
Catholic practice can provide a way to examine what Bennett (2003) calls an “Afro-Creole
consciousness.” Confraternities (cofradías) provide a fruitful opening, as one of the few colonial
spaces open to groups of Black people (von Germeten 2006).These were voluntary associations
of pious Catholics, who met regularly to share spiritual life, and fundraised collectively to pay for
members’ funerals, care in illness, and other needs. They marched in processions during holy
feast days, their spatial position within the ritual representing their place in the colonial hierar-
chy. Cofradías were required to have a spiritual advisor, usually a Spanish priest who guided them
and oversaw their elections. Some, like the Dominican “Rosary” cofradías in Spain and Portugal,
encouraged owners to bring slaves to meetings. In the Americas and Africa those heterogeneous
cofradías spawned Rosary groups aimed specifically at organizing enslaved, Black, indigenous,
and mixed-race parishioners (Saunders 2010).
Black and indigenous Christians also formed their own cofradías, under the auspices of willing
clergy. These often emerged organically—begun by a group of like-minded worshippers—and
later took on racial identifications as part of their self-articulation in a competitive religious
environment.The church expressed anxiety about the growing number of cofradías arising in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, setting unenforced limits on the number allowed in cities,
likely reflecting concerns about Black festivities and drinking (Bowser 1974; Valerio 2020).
Because cofradías elected their own leadership—men and women who directed their actions and
managed their funds—they designed their own self-governance under the constraints of the
clergy’s eye. In many cases, Black cofradías elected kings and queens who led their processions and
other cultural practices, in addition to the official Catholic roles of mayordomo and treasurer.
Many Black and mulato cofradías had short lives and heterodox practices: attention to the ways
they imagined their political organization might reveal the intellectual work that underlay them
(Jouve-Martín 2007).
The study of secular men and women within slavery is harder to document. As Marisa
Fuentes (2016) argues, archival power constructs their lives in violent, incomplete, and fragmen-
tary ways that challenge our ability to narrate.Their names and descriptions appear in legal texts,
sometimes because they used the courts to try to win freedom or improved conditions. Urban
slaves, especially, benefited from access to networks of Spaniards and Indians, who presumably
shared knowledge about the legal system as well as economic and social practices. Spanish
courts, both civil and ecclesiastic, received people of African descent as plaintiffs and witnesses.
They could also draw upon their status as miserables to call upon free lawyers and other services.
Enslaved men and women effectively created law regarding slaves’ right to self-purchase (coart-
ación) and to be sold to a new master (papel). They did so by pressing for these rights in courts
(De la Fuente 2007).
Enslaved peoples’ encounters with the law were, however, rarely favorable. Michelle McKinley
(2016) describes how masters might verbally (or testamentarily) free men and women but de
facto re-enslave them, even multiple times, given where the power of enforcement lay.The appar-
ently common experience of promises unkept—for example, children of enslaved mothers freed
at the baptismal font who continued to reside in the master’s household, effectively postponing
manumission; or slaves freed under financial conditions that kept them in eternal service—meant
that enslaved men and women lived in a world of rumor, insecurity, and quietly shared knowl-
edge about their legal possibilities. It is worth asking of them the question Jennifer Morgan
66
(2018) poses of enslaved women who gave birth against reason: were their bodily actions not the
instantiation of intellectual work?
Because people of African descent had no local nobility, nor did they generally enjoy corpo-
rate access to land or customary law, they could not claim a de facto intellectual class parallel to
that of indigenous nobles. Nor did they often litigate as a class through any kind of leadership
(for a rare example, see Graubart 2020). It is worth contemplating that long-standing groups of
runaway slaves, often called palenques, sometimes ascribed royal lineage to their leaders. Whether
this was in response to Spanish expectations—Castilian monarchs appointed the leader of the
enslaved and free Blacks of Seville ostensibly because he was of royal birth in Africa—or because
of their own narratives about their past and future is unclear. Indeed, a study of the interior
workings of palenques could reveal a good deal about the imaginations of African and African-
descent intellectuals in the early colonial world (Landers 2005).
Literacy, to be sure, is an even larger factor in the difficulty of identifying Black intellectuals
as compared to indigenous ones. Because so few Blacks could read and write, nearly anything
that emanated from their minds had to be translated into writing by a mediator of a different
race and social class. Studies of wills left by a relative elite of free Black men and women in early
Lima reveal that most could not even sign their names. Men who came up through military
service were sometimes literate, as was Captain Francisco Duarte, leader of the Black and mulato
militia, whose 1689 will noted a collection of spiritual books (Martín 2005, 64–65). But such
men, like literate religious servants, were rare exceptions in the early colonial world.
Scholars of colonial Afro-Latin American intellectual thought find themselves at the opening
of an emerging field. New answers could come from religious archives, from creative re-reading
of litigation, but also from simply asking the right question: how do we look for evidence of
intellectual practice from individuals who were not simply dominated but had little access to
unmediated literacy? How do we read archives constructed to marginalize their life stories in
order not only to understand their experiences but contemplate their creative acts of
reasoning?
Conclusion: toward a new politics

of the Afro-indigenous colonial world
The study of indigenous and African-descent peoples, individually and corporately, has been
central to the way recent scholarship has approached the early colonial world. The “coloniality
of power” has meant that Eurocentric domination, Atlantic slavery, and patriarchal authority
have produced a scholarly past (and a political present) that pays little attention to those stories
(Quijano 2000). Critical historians of the past few generations have worked both to tell those
stories and to reveal how power functions within our archives.
The result is that some fields of study have flourished. Many indigenous communities, in
great part because of a clear link between contemporary politics over land practices, language,
and rights, now have a vigorous and critical historical trail. Historical studies take seriously the
idea that, after the conquest, indigenous elites and communities more broadly engaged in politi-
cal debates and actions that produced modes of living that were not reducible to some abstract
pre-Hispanic tradition, nor to raw colonial domination.They also recognize that Spanish vassal-
age was cemented with indigenous corporate groups rather than individuals, leaving space for
the existence of vibrant indigenous politics and even indigenous legal frameworks and notions
of justice. Our literature now takes indigenous self-governance and self-representation as funda-
mental to the way we talk about the colonial past.
67
Karen Graubart
On the other hand, people of African descent and, to a lesser degree, women of non-Spanish
descent have not been centered as self-representing subjects in the same way. Histories of their
lives have tended to describe their experiences, their oppression, and their extraordinary acts, but
have rarely explored their epistemologies or worldviews.This is clearly a result of colonial archi-
val practice: records reflect not what was but what mattered to those who archived them.
Enslaved women exist as commodities that fetched a price, or unruly bodies that were punished
rather than as thinking actors. As Fuentes (2016) has shown, exposing and naming that short-
coming is an important practice; reimagining the worlds they inhabited is another.
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3
MESTIZAJE AS A DISPOSITIF
FOR A PARADIGM SHIFT IN
COLONIAL STUDIES
Laura Catelli
This chapter deals with the question of how the notion of mestizaje (miscegenation) has influ-
enced and been influenced by the field of Latin American colonial studies, and of how it ulti-
mately shapes our understanding of colonialism and its forms of persistence. Approaching these
questions requires a working definition of mestizaje, a map of certain developments in Latin
American colonial studies in relation to this notion, and an understanding of colonialism as a
multifaceted problem that cuts across but also exceeds this field.
With these aims in mind, mestizaje will be considered in this chapter as a dispositif, a dynamic,
somewhat elastic concept that Michel Foucault introduced in The History of Sexuality Vol I.
(1978) and elaborated in the later stages of his work, and for which there is no stable, closed defi-
nition.1 Though the concept has been the subject of extensive debate, there are certain aspects
that Foucault himself emphasized in a 1977 interview, such as the multiplicity and heterogeneity
of elements that comprise the dispositif (which include the discursive and the non-discursive),
the connections and relations among them, the strategic and situated function of the resulting
formation, and the various and shifting positions produced within it (Foucault 1980, 194–228).
What interests me about the notion of dispositif is the possibility of examining mestizaje from
transdisciplinary perspectives that could point to practices, discourses, institutions, and intersub-
jective relations placed in motion by Iberian colonialism, as well as the subjective, discursive,
material, and practical aftermaths of this process.2 Furthermore, this approach entails developing
an overview of the critical and disciplinary configuration of Latin American colonial studies and
understanding that the field itself is crisscrossed by effects of what Aníbal Quijano has called the
coloniality of power,3 a model of geopolitical relations sustained by a racial axis of colonial ori-
gin that has superseded the nominal end of colonial domination (2008, 181).
Also, I argue that mestizaje is crucial for situating specific attributes of Iberian settler colonial-
ism in Latin America, as well as the social, economic, and cultural relations that this system of
domination set in motion. According to Lorenzo Veracini:
The successful settler colonies ‘tame’ a variety of wildernesses, end up establishing

independent nations, effectively repress, co-opt, and extinguish indigenous alterities,
and productively manage ethnic diversity. By the end of this trajectory, they claim to
be no longer settler colonial (they are putatively ‘settled’ and ‘postcolonial’ – except
71
Laura Catelli
that unsettling anxieties remain, and references to a postcolonial condition appear hol-
low as soon as indigenous disadvantage is taken into account).
(2011, 3)
In this regard, the topic of mestizaje constitutes a pivotal and somewhat overdue discussion in the
context of the larger debate about the Latin American and Caribbean colonial and postcolonial
experiences, which pose a specific set of historical and theoretical problems, as Mabel Moraña,
Enrique Dussel and Carlos Jáuregui have noted (2008, 20). Also, the ongoing discussions on the
coloniality of power and their emphasis on race and classification seem to run parallel to Latin
American colonial studies, and would benefit from considering the extensive research on mes-
tizaje in order to reassess it as a specific mode of racialization that exceeds racial classification, a
process in itself far from transparent and systematic, as Joanne Rappaport (2014) has argued.
Thus, this chapter aims to show that it is possible to shorten the distance among various lines of
research and debate.The larger and main purpose of this chapter is to draw attention to the criti-
cal possibilities that a complex approach to mestizaje as a dispositif represents for a field that
focuses on the colonial but, arguably ( Verdesio 2001, 633–658; Catelli 2012, 44–55), has not been
entirely engaged in the larger debate on colonialism, settler colonialism, and decolonization.4
The first section of the chapter is dedicated to clarifying certain points about the idea of mes-
tizaje that will aid in mapping the development of the field in relation to this concept. It stresses
that the term mestizaje only appears toward the end of the nineteenth century, while a strategy of
establishing carnal relations as well as various types of relations of kin with indigenous men and
women in order to facilitate colonization can be traced back to the very first years of settlement
(Rosenblat 1954, 1–2; Deagan 1996, 2004; Catelli 2010, 69–115). I am referring to Ann Laura
Stoler’s expression here and of course to her study, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and
the Intimate in Colonial Rule, which “treats sexual matters not as a metaphor for colonial inequities
but as foundational to the material terms in which colonial projects were carried out” (2002, 14).
Furthermore, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui uses the expression mestizaje de sangre,“the practice of rape
and the hoarding of women by encomenderos, priests, and Spanish soldiers. In this way the invaders
accessed a double benefit: women’s labor (…) and the sexual services so eloquently denounced
by Waman Puma” (2010, 72, my translation).The section focuses on the effects of this strategy and
on making some relevant terminological and semantic nuances around mestizo and mestizaje to
indicate a long-term process that involves practices as well as discourses.
Many researchers in our field have studied these aspects of mestizaje, in a diversity of contexts.
Even though it is impossible to account for such a vast bibliographical corpus, and also not my
aim, the second section offers a comparative review of relevant works about mestizaje as well as
major critical directions formulated from some of the disciplines in the field.
In the third section, I draw attention to political aspects at stake in the construction of mes-
tizaje as an object of study. I discuss Rivera Cusicanqui’s claim that mestizaje is intrinsic to inter-
nal colonialism5 in the present and relate it to my own model of mestizaje as a dispositif. I also
explore the idea that mestizaje as a dispositif can be deployed in Latin American colonial studies
toward the decolonization of the field by promoting analytics and a critique of postcolonial
epistemic and power dynamics that is still lacking in our field of studies.
The mestizaje strategy and its effects

In this chapter I use Foucault’s idea of strategy broadly as mechanisms used in relations of power
(Castro 2011, 143), to give visibility to the carnal mechanisms of domination of the early stages
of conquest as it thrust forward in different locations. In doing so, I wish to highlight the carnal
72
Mestizaje as a dispositif for a paradigm shift in colonial studies
aspect of mestizaje as a strategic function of Iberian settler colonialism. Carnal mestizaje is a dif-
ferent (though related) phenomenon from what became a frequent topic in colonial written and
visual sources, or from what Serge Gruzinski has called “mestizo phenomena” (2002, 62–63).The
strategy of establishing carnal relations with indigenous women to facilitate colonization can be
traced to written sources from the first decade of European presence in the New World, relating
to the Spanish and Portuguese enterprises (Catelli 2010, 69–133). As I argued elsewhere (Catelli
2010, 133–136), the deployment of a strategy of concubinage, marriage, and subject/bodies in
contact set off an insurmountable chain of discursive, practical, and subjective effects. From el
Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s Comentarios reales de los incas (1609) to eighteenth century casta paint-
ing, lo mestizo6 irrupts and disrupts modern imaginaries and challenges the fixedness of European
epistemologies. Mestizos become ambivalent actors and subjects of enunciation in colonial situ-
ations.They are also one of the most frequent topics of a wide range of European and American
discourses that extends well beyond the colonial period.
The earlier occurrences of the terms mestizo and mestiza in the New World are telling signs of
the emergence of discursive effects of the carnal conquest. Dated as appearing in the wills of
conquistadors in the 1530s, they substitute the expression “hijo de español habido en india”
(“son of a Spaniard conceived in an Indian woman,” my translation) (Olaechea Labayen 1992,
269).Yet, the original, Peninsular meaning of mestizo continued to be associated with cattle and
other animals of unknown origin, a type of semantic displacement in racial classification that
Javier Irigoyen García has defined as “zootechnic” (2008, 34–43). Its persistence is reflected in
Covarrubias’s definition of mestizo in Tesoro de la lengua (1611). Even though in the colonies the
term began to be used to refer to the offspring of Spanish men and indigenous women, a deroga-
tory and dehumanizing connotation was carried in the transatlantic passage, along with the idea
of uncertainty of origin and illegitimate birth. From a European and creole perspective, mestizo
was almost synonymous with bastard, and connoted an unknown and potentially bad caste.
There were also negative indigenous views about mestizaje and mestizos. The Yarovilca writer
Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, written in Perú in 1615, manifests a
deeply negative view of the effects of Spanish colonial administration and of sexual relations
between Spanish men and Inca women (Catelli 2010, 181–196; Quispe-Agnoli 2017). On his
arrival in Lima, he describes seeing “muy muchas yndias putas cargadas de mesticillos y de mula-
tos” (“very many Indian whores carrying little mestizos and mulatos”). He notes that even those
who are married,“andan con españoles y negros” (“go about with Spaniards and blacks”), or prefer
prostitution to marriage. Moreover, Guaman Poma laments that the Indians are not multiplying, as
a result of this profound alteration to the Inca social order (Ayala 1615, 1138, translations mine).
Indeed, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, mestizo was construed as a social
condition that endangered the system of differences and hierarchies that attempted to separate
the colonial population into a República de españoles and a República de indios while subjecting
blacks to slavery. María Elena Martínez defines this process as taking place by the middle of the
sixteenth century, resulting in a “framework which consisted of two separate but interrelated
polities or ‘republics’, the Indian and the Spanish” (2008, 91).While Martínez notes that in New
Spain “efforts to maintain a strict segregation between the two republics failed, the dual model
of social organization had long-term social consequences” (2008, 91–92). Rossana Barragán
(1992) has written about the mestizo or cholo sector in the Andean colonial space as a “Third
Republic.” Contact across boundaries continued to occur, and colonial authorities attempted to
contain mixture and its effects through legal dispositions that also aimed to organize colonial
space (Carrera 2003; Meléndez 2009; Nemser 2017).
While ineffective, these efforts produced a series of classifications in the attempt to control
a population that was perceived as increasingly unruly and menacing to the colonial social
73
Laura Catelli
order. In his Política indiana (1648) the Spanish jurist Juan Solórzano y Pereira referred to mesti-
zos as a growing and problematic sector of the colonial population (248). According to him,
mestizos should be kept away from indigenous areas because of their continued abuses toward
the indigenous population, and recommended that they be confined to separate areas. Solórzano
used mestizo as a broad category that included the initial Spanish and indigenous mixture as well
as mulatos and zambaigos, but the crucial distinction within his grouping was between those of
legitimate and illegitimate birth. For the jurist, the “viciousness” of mestizos was directly linked
to the immoral conditions of their conception and birth, so he argued that mestizos of legitimate
birth should enjoy privileges that illegitimates should not. By the end of the seventeenth cen-
tury, the mestizo group of the colonial population, which included different mixtures, was
equated with a mob of plebs, as Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora expressed with alarm in his
account of the 1692 Mexico City riots (Sigüenza 1984, 113). According to Melo Ruiz,
Sigüenza’s account construed Indian presence in the viceregal capital as a social and economic
problem, while the emergence of black and mixed groups were perceived as contestatory of
colonial rule (2013, 129). The phenomenon was not exclusive to New Spain and Perú. Patricio
Lepe-Carrión’s study shows that in eighteenth century Chile mestizos were construed as “the
most deprecated and discriminated human conglomerate of Chilean society” (2017, 256, my
translation), during the Bourbon Reforms. For Lepe-Carrión the treatment extended to mesti-
zos or castas was not plainly an administrative effect but a “sociohistorical construction based on
‘race’ that had developed since the fifteenth century and sedimented the relation vagabundaje/
mestizaje in the eighteenth century thanks to enlightened scientific and philosophical debates”
(2017, 254, my translation).
While these new classifications proliferated as discursive aftereffects of the mestizaje strategy
and continued to branch out as colonial populations grew, the term mestizaje was not used until
the end of the nineteenth century, in the context of the eugenics movement.The earliest instance
I have located is in a text by Brazilian anthropologist Nina Rodrigues, written in French (Borges
1993), in dialogue with the French branch of eugenics. In Spanish, though the idea of racial
mixture is present in the Mexican anthropologist Manuel Gamio’s Forjando patria (1916), he uses
the concepts of fusion and amalgamation, not mestizaje. Its first use beyond physical anthropol-
ogy occurs in José Vasconcelos’s La raza cósmica: misión de la raza iberoamericana (1925) (Catelli
2010; Zermeño-Padilla 2008), where cultural, ethnic, and aesthetic levels of meaning are added
to the term (Catelli 2010, 55–71).
I am interested in these terminological and semantic nuances7 as inflection points to the
configuration of a tentative map for an archaeo-genealogical approach to the larger process
known as mestizaje.8 Archeo-genealogical perspectives illuminate aspects of colonial and postco-
lonial racial formations that our post-positivist perspective may otherwise miss.These approaches
also reveal that a colonial racial imaginary that involved discourses and practices and revolved
around the process we know as mestizaje developed gradually after carnal relations took place
among subjects of different races in situations of contact (Pratt 1992; Deagan 1996, 2004). Yet,
the colonial racial imaginary known as mestizaje continues to have influence in the racial imagi-
naries of the present. Its use in a myriad of situations (Gruzinski 2002, 19), has led to certain
confusion regarding what the term means, how it arose and developed discursively in different
contexts, from biology and physical anthropology to cultural anthropology, social history, eth-
nohistory, literature and art studies, and so on. Furthermore, for Antonio Cornejo Polar using
the term entailed the risk of missing a “dense layer of signification” (Cornejo Polar 1998, 7–8,
translation mine) regarding conceptions of Latin American literature and culture. From this
perspective, many questions remain.Why has mestizaje suffered so many appropriations? What is
at stake in its use as shorthand for our colonial pasts? How do those appropriations affect the
74
comprehension and lived experience of our postcolonial present? And the question that hovers
over this chapter: what role has the field of colonial Latin American studies played in these con-
structions of mestizaje?
Mapping mestizaje as an object of study

As we know, the first works about mestizaje were not critically inspired. For example,Vasconcelos’s
La raza cósmica (1925) is a celebration of the domineering role of white civilization in what is
portrayed as a teleological process of fusion. Three decades later Angel Rosenblat wrote about
mestizaje as a sociohistorical process, highlighting its centrality through a meticulous rendition
of historical sources. Rosenblat’s La población indígena y el mestizaje en América (1954) organized
the colonial archive to place mestizaje as pivotal to the sociological, political, and cultural devel-
opment and future of Latin American populations. It could be considered a transitional work
between Vasconcelos’s celebration of mestizaje as the highest stage of physical, spiritual, and aes-
thetic human evolution in La raza cósmica (1925, 1948), and a decisive historiographical turn.
Rosenblat’s positivist treatment of a rich corpus of primary sources results in a well-structured
account of mestizaje that, like Vasconcelos’s, persists in popular cultural and critical imaginaries
to this day.
In the Social Sciences, as Zermeño-Padilla observes, the topic of mestizaje was introduced
following the projects of international organisms and European academic institutions.9 The
Swedish historian Magnus Mörner was perhaps one of its most “fervent proponents” (Zermeño-
Padilla 2008, 80). Mörner (1961) approached racial mixture in the Iberian colonies as a histo-
riographical and methodological problem and mapped contributions to the study of mestizaje
up to that point (Richard Konetzke (1953), Angel Rosenblat (1954), George Kubler (1952),
John P. Gillin (1949), and Zermeño-Padilla (2008, 80)). The historian Richard Konetzke (1962)
cautioned that the legislation written in the Peninsula did not necessarily reflect the reality of
contact in the process of conquest and colonization in the New World, questioning approaches
that took instructions and other official documents as factual sources for grasping certain aspects
related to the process of mestizaje. Mörner was also emphatic about the difficulties of writing a
history of mestizaje (1962) and also noted a gap between the vocabulary associated with mes-
tizaje, which Rosenblat studied,10 and its actual use in the colonies (Mörner 1967, 59). Mörner
and Konetzke’s contributions resulted in a Latin Americanist approach to a problem that until
recently had been addressed mostly within the confines of national or regional (Rosenblat 1954,
191) discursivities and imaginaries. Their work placed a question mark on the possibility of a
narrow definition of mestizaje and inscribed the need for a comparative approach to the phe-
nomenon as well as to methodological challenges tied to the study of related sources.
Ethnohistorical perspectives in the seventies added a new level to studies on mestizaje by ques-
tioning historiographies dominated by European subjects, sources, and methods. Inspired by the
anthropologist Miguel León Portilla’s compilation of indigenous relations of the conquest in
Mexico, Visión de los vencidos. Relaciones indígenas de la conquista (1959), Nathan Wachtel’s Vision des
Vaincus (1971) aimed to produce a shift of perspective on the process of conquest in Peru, through
the confluence of historiography and ethnology, a “double methodological approach” (25). In
what Guillaume Boccara has recently called “a postcolonial or subaltern critique avant la lettre”
(2012b, 41, my translation), ethnohistorical perspectives reconfigured the narrative of mestizaje as
one of conflict among multiple agents.Yet, as Boccara has pointed out recently, the field of eth-
nohistory has not had a level of influence comparable to other critical historiographies (2012a,
142). For this reason, the work of Rossana Barragán (1990), Marisol de la Cadena (2000, 2007),
and Rivera Cusicanqui (2010) merits special mention, as over the last decades these authors have
75
Laura Catelli
constructed a methodological perspective based on a plurality of subjective points of view and

intersectional agencies, in colonial and postcolonial processes of mestizaje in the Andes.
In the seventies and eighties critical gender and sexuality perspectives began engaging with
mestizaje, but because of the field’s primary focus on lettered mestiza and creole women
(Martínez-San Miguel 1999; Burns 2007) the experiences of indigenous and black women that
had no access to writing were, for the most part (Silverblatt 1987), ignored. In some ways, mes-
tizaje was construed without naming indigenous and black women, their bodies, and experi-
ences, except to tell tales of foundational national romances, as Doris Sommer (1991) called
them. Histories of conquest and colonization were “cleansed” (Bolaños 2002, 25) of sexuality
and gender as factors in the social, material, and political articulation of Iberian settler colonial-
ism. In this context, though situated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and not really
focused on early mestizaje,Verena Stolcke’s Racismo y sexualidad en la Cuba colonial (1974) repre-
sents a groundbreaking work that showed that interracial marriage and concubinage practices in
Cuba were often in tension with colonial legislation that attempted to control mixture. In
Stolcke’s work mestizaje refers to interracial gender and sexual relations and practices, as well as
a range of patriarchal institutional discourses and mechanisms that were deployed to control
women’s bodies in Cuba. Stolcke’s most remarkable achievement was to understand the dynam-
ics by which social inequality and sexual values operated as terms of the same relation (Stolcke
1974, 33). Her study’s focus on Cuba also decentered a tendency to approach mestizaje as a
European-indigenous relation, by acknowledging the region’s black population and the impact
of slavery and abolition as parts of the mestizaje equation. Stolcke’s book also addressed questions
about the colonial caste system, as part of a line of research that elucidates the dynamics and
effects of the mestizaje strategy upon colonial governmentality and social mobility. Furthermore,
these studies about the Spanish American caste system reveal how different sectors of seven-
teenth- and eighteenth-century colonial society produced and sustained hierarchical differences
through a discourse predicated on a system of classification and an ideology of blood purity
(Kuznesof 1995; Martínez 2008; Twinam 2015; Lepe-Carrión 2017).
New approaches, not precisely to mestizaje but to mestizo discourse and subjectivity, arise in
the field of Literary colonial studies during the eighties, when reflections on Garcilaso de la
Vega’s Comentarios reales de los Incas (1609) direct their focus to the relation between Garcilaso’s
mestizo condition, his role as language and cultural translator, and the rhetorical characteristics of
his work. Zamora’s studies (1987, 1988) could be seen as part of a transition from traditional
literary approaches to colonial discourse analysis.11 Almost ten years later, José Antonio Mazzotti’s
Coros mestizos del Inca Garcilaso (1996) develops the notion of a mestizo writing subject that is
historically situated and “involves the reciprocal relation with the discourse that he elaborates
and at the same time, elaborates and configures him” (18, my translation). Mazzotti analyzes the
Comentarios to focus on the textual configuration of a mestizo discourse, where the writing sub-
ject appears as interpreter of the different cultural traditions that circulated during the conquest
(Mazzotti 1996, 18). Mazzotti’s precision regarding what the analysis of mestizo discourse involves
(and what it does not) appears as a gesture aimed at refocusing literary colonial studies. His
emphasis on producing a discursive analysis of a mestizo “text” that incorporates contributions
from the fields of history, anthropology, ethnohistory, and Andean iconography (Mazzotti 1996,
28–29), allow him to recognize the presence of sources of the Quechua oral tradition that make
the Comentarios an example of “choral writing” (Mazzotti 1996, 34) and a historically situated
example of mestizo discourse.12 Most importantly, Mazzotti’s work theorized mestizo discourse as
defined not by an ontological mestizo but by the specific social, cultural, and historical contin-
gency of a first generation mestizo writing subject, thus producing a conceptual mobilization of
otherwise fixed or even reified (Catelli 2017, 91–92) notions of colonial ethnoracial identities.
76
The initiation of a larger debate about colonial ethnoracial identities and relations coincides
with studies in the discipline of art history and the larger field of visual studies on eighteenth
century casta painting in New Spain. In the late eighties, art historians began to examine one of
the “most potent expressions” (Katzew 2004, 204) of the casta system. The series of studies on
casta painting begins with Maria Concepción García Saíz’s first complete cataloging (1989).
These studies revised the respective literary and visual cannons to inscribe mestizo and criollo
works as foundational, both because they were produced by New World subjects and because of
their formal characteristics.They situated literary and visual works from the colonial period that
were produced by mestizos or criollos in a cannon that otherwise excluded them.13 Subsequent
studies shifted their focus to the problem of colonial identities and how they were construed
visually in articulation with colonial bodies and spaces, and what those constructions suggested
about the casta society that resulted from Iberian colonialism. In dialogue with previous studies
that reflected upon the function of casta painting (García Sáiz 1989; Estrada de Gerlero 1994),
but leaning toward interdisciplinary semiotic analysis, Magali Carrera (2003) explored the
genre’s representation of ambiguous, mestizo colonial bodies in terms of a regime of visibility
that expressed colonial anxieties about a population that became difficult to order and classify.
Her study teased out the dynamic relations between the paintings (which she considered to be
in line with the realist visual regime of the eighteenth century), and legal, literary, and religious
documents. Carrera did not entirely focus on mestizaje, but working with visuality, bodies, and
space as crucial categories in her analysis allowed her to claim that “casta paintings do not illus-
trate race but instead locate it in the intersection of certain physical, economic, and social spaces
of late colonial Mexico” (2003, 38). In her work, Ilona Katzew (2004) revised eighteenth-cen-
tury colonial ideas about race under the influence of illustrated thought and the ethnographic
gaze (2004, 63), and their imbrication with casta ideology. Her work foregrounds the prevalence
of racial mixture as a topic of casta painting and argues that the genre was constructed “as a pro-
gression of images recording the process of mestizaje, or race mixing” (2004, 5). Studies about
casta painting have been essential to comprehend the role that written and visual discourses on
mestizaje, degeneration, blood purity, and whiteness have had in the configuration of politically
and culturally dominant ethnoracial identities during the eighteenth century.
When one looks at how the field of colonial studies has construed mestizaje as an object of
interdisciplinary study, it becomes evident that there are multiple facets to be considered. The
map I presented here suggests that mestizaje has mostly been studied by privileging partial ele-
ments, depending on disciplinary locus of enunciation, sometimes combining methodological
approaches with discourse analysis and subaltern critical perspectives, among others. But analyz-
ing mestizaje as a racial formation (Omi and Winant 1994) in the long duration entails combin-
ing multiple levels of analysis, that involve subjective, relational, and transdisciplinary approaches,
“where disciplines work through each other” (Gordon 2014, 87). Furthermore, what is interest-
ing about approaching mestizaje as a dispositive, beyond the multiplicity of elements this entails,
is the possibility to explore Foucault’s own question (1980, 194–228) about the nature of the
relations among the discursive and non-discursive elements involved. This question could
prompt a shift in disciplinary terms by asking about those relations that become blind spots of
disciplinary rigor, where the multiple effects of mestizaje reproduce and sustain coloniality.What
is the point of understanding mestizaje as a complex phenomenon that created hierarchical and
racist social dynamics if we don’t examine the forces and patterns by which those hierarchies
continue to be sustained?14
Let me illustrate these last points by mentioning a case study of my own (Catelli 2012).When
researching casta painting in relation to emerging discourses about mestizaje, I was surprised by
the fact that the vast majority of casta painters were criollos, though in various studies they are not
77
Laura Catelli
always identified as such.This detail is indirectly noted by Katzew (2004) in relation to Francisco
Clapera, “the only known Spaniard to have painted a series of castas” (26), in an important chap-
ter of her book that describes the configuration of the guild system in New Spain. Though
Katzew links the depiction of the castas with expressions of criollo pride (63–110), her study, as
previous ones, upholds an art history-focused perspective that explores the visual genre’s con-
solidation in formal and thematic terms, in connection with the sociocultural contexts in which
the paintings were produced and circulated. In general, casta painting has been approached as
discourse, and analyzed to tease out what it may be telling us about colonial conceptions of
racial mixture, through visual representation and a series of formal and thematic characteristics.
But what about the specific institutional context of the painters, disciples, and professors who
conformed a mostly criollo group of males who, through certain practices (which included but
were not limited to casta painting), pursued influence and recognition in colonial society? Three
attempts were made by guild groupings of criollo painters who developed the casta genre to
obtain such recognition, spread out throughout three generations, under Juan Rodríguez Juárez,
José de Ibarra, and Miguel Cabrera (Katzew 2004, 9–26). Furthermore, documents related to
these academies show that criollo painters promoted their own internal system of discrimination,
especially toward afromestizos, who were barred from studying art (Couto 1995, 112–113; Catelli
2012, 157–158). It is not a minor detail that the development of the genre of casta painting and
the foundations of successive art academies (which were never officially recognized by the
Crown), occurred simultaneously. The particular socio-identitary condition of the painters in
the colonial casta system (since the eighteenth century criollos have become increasingly obsessed
with blood purity and whiteness) seems related to the construction of the ethnoracial others’
difference in the hierarchical imaginary that can be seen in casta painting.What does it mean that
hierarchical, segregative racial imaginaries articulated both the first criollo visual genre and the
institutional dynamics behind the process surrounding the foundation of the first academia de
artes, later the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria?
Approaching mestizaje as a dispositive entails analyzing casta painting, not exclusively in discur-
sive but also in extradiscursive terms. This is not a minor distinction, as what is at stake is the
possibility to analyze the constitution of mestizaje as a discursive formation in its junctures with
processes of the extradiscursive order,15 such as socioracial dynamics in a given institutional
space. This change of perspective foregrounds how racial imaginaries were instituted and repro-
duced through institutional practices, which have not been the subject of systematic critical
study in colonial studies. The closing section of this chapter articulates these observations with
the political and decolonizing potential of approaching mestizaje as a dispositive in the field of
Latin American colonial studies.
Concluding remarks and critical considerations on mestizaje

as an object of study
To conclude, I want to insist on critical and political aspects of mestizaje that could be explored
in articulation with the field of colonial studies. In her essay “Mestizaje colonial andino: una
hipótesis de trabajo” (2010), the Bolivian and Aymara sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui begins
by defining mestizaje as an axial phenomenon of colonial origin that continues to structure rela-
tions in contemporary Bolivian society. Rivera Cusicanqui’s reflections go against the grain of
the legacy of mestizaje, which she considers to be a political concept that has produced a homo-
geneous cultural identity while concealing and reinforcing the exclusions, self-exclusions, and
segregation of casta society (2010, 35–36). She identifies three cycles, the colonial, liberal, popu-
list, and a neoliberal “epilogue,” that coexist in the present and may be perceived as diachronic
78
contradictions.These cycles also manifest as “habitus16 and collective behaviors that are grounded
in non-discursive spheres” (2010, 71, translation mine).Through her critique of mestizaje, Rivera
Cusicanqui revises González Casanova’s definition of internal colonialism, and claims that the
discourse of mestizaje is not superstructural but strategic, as it is deployed in the forging of identi-
ties and imaginaries (2010, 116). Rivera’s claim that mestizaje is an ongoing process that is still
connected with the carnal or blood mestizaje of the conquest and involves present discourses,
practices, and behaviors is compatible with the idea of mestizaje as a dispositif I propose here.
Moreover, both her definition and the dispositif model highlight the (subjective) perceptions and
discourses that have constructed and reformulated mestizaje over and over, instituting it in diverse
and unexpected spaces.
Even though Rivera Cusicanqui’s critique of the discourse of mestizaje pertains mostly to its
circulation and influence in sociopolitical and cultural life in Bolivia, I would like to extend her
observations to the disciplinary construction of mestizaje in the larger field of Latin American
colonial studies that I outlined in the previous section. I am following a line of argumentation
Alejandro de Oto and I developed (2018) that claims that internal colonialism functions as a
type of spatiality that reveals what Angel Rama called “the cultural functions of power struc-
tures” (1998, 32, my translation) of the lettered city. In that capacity, critical reflections on
internal colonialism can enable discussions on the ways in which a given theoretical domain
(colonial studies in this case) can be affected by those who wander through, produce, and repro-
duce said domain (Catelli and de Oto 2018). This type of dynamic is made even clearer by
considering Cornelius Castoriadis’s notion of the instituted imaginary.17 Elsewhere I have pro-
posed the notion of the racial imaginary (Catelli 2017, 96–97) in order to tease out the articula-
tions of discursive and symbolic racialization with other aspects such as subjectivity, institutions,
corporeality, and spatiality (Amuchástegui 2008; Catelli 2013; Nemser 2017), in the long dura-
tion of coloniality. The point here is that the disciplinary discourses that have constructed
mestizaje as an object of study in Latin American colonial studies are themselves part of the
postcolonial, racial imaginary dynamic and play a highly relevant role in instituting mestizaje
and its effects.
I am convinced that the field of colonial studies could give deeper consideration to the politi-
cal intricacies posed by the study of mestizaje. I want to insist on the decolonizing potential of
research conducted in this field. Seen as a dispositif, mestizaje entails discourses, practices, institu-
tions, and the relations among them, therefore demanding a multi-level, transdisciplinary approach
capable of showing a variety of elements as well as the forces that drive their articulation and
capacity to persist. My contention here has been that mestizaje as a dispositif can be deployed in
the field of colonial studies toward its decolonization by promoting analytics not just of mestizaje
as strategy, discourse, or subjective process, as segmented and even reified categories of study.
Foucault’s emphasis on the nature of the relations among a diversity of elements of the dispositif
shifts our questions from mestizaje as an object of study to the epistemic, subjective, and power
relations that Iberian settler colonialism and its lettered city set into motion. Not that analytics of
power in itself implies a process of decolonization, but it does further transdisciplinarity by
involving the relations among discourse (in a larger sense), practices of subjectification, and inter-
related imaginary, institutional formations. By going against the grain of what Lewis Gordon has
called “disciplinary decadence,” analyses that engage transdisciplinarity and question the effects of
how a given discipline constructs its objects of study, ultimately producing a “teleological suspen-
sion of discipline,” are to be considered in their decolonizing potential (Gordon 2014, 86–87).
This observation is meant as an interpellation to those who, from the field of Latin American
colonial studies, have contributed to constructing the process of mestizaje as an object of study
that, for better or worse, continues to configure our perceptions of the colonial experience and
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Laura Catelli
our postcolonial lives. In that capacity, the work on mestizaje that has been done in colonial stud-
ies also holds many keys to question a dispositif that continues to reproduce coloniality through
the dynamics of internal colonialism. By recognizing their own role in the workings of the mes-
tizaje dispositif, scholars of colonial studies could still produce a shift of paradigm toward decolo-
nization.We just have to be willing to acknowledge the larger, political implications of our work.
Notes
1 Dispositif is habitually translated into English as “apparatus,” though some have claimed there to be
relevant distinctions between these two terms. For Lambert (2016), Foucault uses dispositif to avoid the
sense of (state) structure apparatus, from Althusser’s definition. In this chapter I am also making a dis-
tinction between dispositif and apparatus and using the former throughout.
2 I have elaborated on mestizaje as a dispositif of coloniality in my own work (Catelli 2010, 57–68, 133–
136; 2017, 98–102). Stoler (1995) offers a careful analysis of the implications of considering Foucault’s
work in the context of colonial studies. Katzer (2010) makes the argument for mestizaje as a dispositif in
nineteenth and twentieth-century Argentina, though in her analysis the term dispositif runs closer to
defining a specific biopolitical apparatus of the nation state.
3 The concept has been developed in Quijano (2008, 181–224); Castro-Gómez (2008, 259–285); Lander
(2000), Maldonado Torres (2008); and Mignolo (2000), among others.
4 See Klor de Alva (1995) and Veracini (2011) for distinctions and implications for decolonization.
5 The category of internal colonialism has been used in different contexts and should be considered
locally specific. In Latin America, it was introduced by C. Wright Mills in Brazil in 1960 (Quintero
2012), where it continued to be developed by Cardoso de Oliveira (1978); in Mexico it is introduced
by González Casanova (1963), who recently redefined the concept through the idea that “States of
colonial and imperial origin and their dominant classes reproduce and conserve colonial relations with
minorities and colonized ethnicities to the interior of their political borders” (2006, 416, my transla-
tion); see also Stavenhagen (1963) in Mexico; Rivera Cusicanqui (2010) and Tapia (2014) in Bolivia;
Eremites de Oliveira (2015) in Brazil. For a detailed overview of internal colonialism in Latin America,
see Torres Guillén (2014); on González Casanova see de Oto and Catelli (2018), who offer a critical
overview and also consider the perspectives of Fanon, Mignolo, and Rivera Cusicanqui.
6 I am using this expression in Spanish, which translates roughly as “that which is mestizo,” to indicate a
spectrum of effects of the mestizaje strategy so wide that it cannot be named specifically as subjects,
discourses, identities, imaginaries, etc., without being reductive.
7 For careful distinctions among terms like casta, raza, mestizo, and castizo and their pertinence to the
formation of sociopolitical imaginaries in New Spain and Chile, see Araya-Espinoza (2014, 53–77) and
Burns (2007).
8 I am thinking of works by Castro-Gómez (2005), Lepe-Carrión (2017), Martínez (2008), Stoler (2002),
Young (1995),Vainfas (1989), and my own (Catelli 2010).
9 Such as the Pan American Institute of Geography and History (PAIGH) of the Organization of
American States, or the Institute of Latin American Studies at Stockholm University.
10 Alvar (1987) continued these studies decades later, commissioned by the Real Academia Española.
11 Rolena Adorno’s article “Reconsidering Colonial Discourse for Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century
Spanish America” (1993) is an illuminating piece that teases out a series of terminological and disciplin-
ary nuances in anthropological, historical, and literary colonial studies that are relevant for understand-
ing the configuration of what I’ve called the extended field of colonial studies here.
12 Mazzotti’s is an interesting, perhaps indirect response to Adorno’s concern, expressed a few years earlier,
that “One of our problems today is that there are hopelessly many disciplinary and subdisciplinary
conversations going on (...) We are always on the lookout for what can serve as a lingua franca.‘Colonial
discourse’ strikes me as such a tool (...)” (1993, 140).
13 See Adorno (1988) for a discussion of this problem.
14 Because mestizaje places a necessary focus on the contact of bodies and their control, as well as racializa-
tion and heteronormativity as a central factor in colonial and postcolonial power dynamics, it advances
the problem of colonized, gendered, sexualized, and racialized bodies as part of those relations. Here we
must ask, should we not revise the ways in which the heteronormative matrix of the mestizaje dispositif
inflects upon methodological (Martínez 2016) and critical perspectives?
15 For a detailed distinction see Lijterman (2017).
80
16 “For a structuring structure, which organizes practices and their perception of practices” (Bourdieu
1984, 170).
17 Basically, “The elementary and irreducible capacity of evoking images” (Castoriadis 1975, 127) medi-
ates the fluid relation between institutional and social life.
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4
RACE, ETHNICITY AND
NATIONHOOD IN THE
FORMATION OF CRIOLLISMO
IN SPANISH AMERICA
This chapter will define some of the most important concepts in the process of identity forma-
tion among the criollo groups in colonial Spanish America, and particularly in Peru, in order to
understand their peculiarity. The criollos were the descendants of Spanish settlers, born in the
New World, allegedly from both a Spanish father and a Spanish mother. Over time, however, the
criollos would descend from criollo ancestors and become one of the most important social groups
in the conglomerate of races and ethnicities within Spain’s New World possessions. By histori-
cizing the concepts of race, ethnicity and nationhood, this chapter demonstrates how identity
formation in this peripheral, early modern context was closely linked to the perception of one’s
individual lineage and blood. At the same time, being criollo was not solely a function of race; the
creole identity in the Spanish-American context also assumed a series of cultural values, both
European and American in origin, that would eventually become embodied in the modern
forms of internal colonialism within the Spanish-American republics. Therefore, I will also
address the concept of colonialism and nationhood in the construction of a modern criollo
definition.
Defining the Criollo

Most historians agree that the Spanish term criollo has its origin in the Portuguese “crioulo” (from
“criar,” to raise), used to refer to Black slaves born out of Africa, i.e. in the Iberian Peninsula.The
Portuguese term may date from the fifteenth century, and it initially had a classificatory purpose.
In time, however, “crioulo” slaves were regarded as more savvy, skilled in local customs and fluent
in Portuguese, as opposed to their parents, who came directly from Africa.
After 1492 and the Spanish occupation of the Americas, the term criollo was used to name the
offspring of Spaniards born in the New World. It obviously had a derogatory meaning because it
still referred to part of the Black population. However, it became normalized and—at least in the
Spanish-speaking areas of what is now Latin America—was gradually used to refer exclusively to
the descendants of the Spaniards. Today, the word is mostly used with this meaning in Spanish
America. One of the first times the word appears in writing is in the 1560s (Martínez-San
85
Miguel 2009, 404; see also Lavallé 1993, 15–25). The name became a denomination that criollos
would assume with pride a few decades later. However, some derivations of the word in English
(creole) or French (créole) preserved their original meaning, which included the presence of an
African component.
In Spanish America some criollos were direct descendants of the conquistadors and formed
part of a social elite. Nonetheless, they felt dispossessed of the properties and benefits of their
parents and ancestors due to what they perceived to be the greed of the Spanish Crown. In fact,
with the New Laws of 1542, the Crown severely limited the economic power of the conquis-
tadors. This important event is tied to how criollos reacted by advocating for their rights of
inheritance and by creating a discourse of self-acclamation as a distinguished part of the Spanish
identity. After a few generations, however, this discourse presented traces of local patriotism and
collective identity that criollos themselves would define as a “nation” (in the archaic and pre-
Enlightened sense of the word).They did not seek independence from Spain, just more political
and economic privileges and a recognition of the services rendered by their ancestors the con-
quistadors. This was the case at least in Mexico City and Lima, capitals of the viceroyalties of
Mexico in Peru.
The problem of the “nation”1

Because of the risks involved in positing the existence of a type of national identity prior to the
late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century era of political independence, it is important to
delineate the relationship between criollos and ethnic nationhood. An appreciation for the term
“nation” in its arcane sense allows access to the peculiarities of this social formation. As I have
previously noted in an article entitled “Nacionalismo criollo y poesía: el caso de Andrés Bello:”
Beginning with the first creolist writings of the late-sixteenth century, there is evi-
dence of a collective identity that fluctuates between dynastic fidelity to the Crown
and an incomparable pride of belonging to the New World by birth and upbringing.
This is the oft-cited “love of homeland” that, in an urban and micro-regional sense, can
be discerned in such canonized texts as Pedro de Oña’s Arauco domado, Pedro de
Peralta’s Lima fundada and the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s Comentarios reales (recognizing,
of course, that the latter presents a mestizophile proposal). Such writings, moreover,
while mirroring the exaltations peninsular authors made to their own homelands, have
a certain excessiveness that in many ways anticipates the emergence of the Baroque in
the Spanish peninsula itself, as evidenced in the case of Bernardo de Balbuena’s
Grandeza mexicana. There are also texts that recreate versions of the homeland exalta-
tion using a highly exorbitant tone, as in the poems Santuario de Nuestra Señora de
Copacabana (1641) by Fernando de Valverde and Fundación y grandezas de Lima (1687)
by Rodrigo de Valdés. Finally, and beginning in the seventeenth century, [these writ-
ings] construct the argumentative armor of American splendor by underscoring the
spiritual and intellectual nature of the creoles.The innate qualities of those who, by the
next century, would begin to call themselves “American Spaniards” were recognized in
these texts by symbols both pagan (the muses, the god Apollo) and Christian (sanctity,
especially in the case of the Peruvian Viceroyalty) in order to bolster the idea that the
best elements of European culture (the classics and Christianity) had acquired superior
form and unprecedented development in the lands to the west of the Atlantic, mirror-
ing the trajectory of the sun.
(2010, 158–59, all translations unless otherwise indicated are my own)
86
Race, ethnicity and nationhood in the formation of criollismo in Spanish America
Thus, the analysis of this social formation suggests the importance of recognizing three premises:
1) the need to conceptually limit the notion of “creole nation” to its own historical coordinates,
not confusing it with the subsequent nineteenth-century republican project of nationhood or
relying upon a simple formula of complete equation with Spanish peninsular subjectivities and
discursive practices; 2) the need to examine the ethnic dimensions of this elite creole nation in
light of possible continuities with a discursive production that envisioned a communitarian
ideal, but one based on the practices of “internal colonialism” (in the modern sense); and 3) the
need to re-examine the reaches of postcolonial and decolonial theories in relation to the Latin
American field, attending to the contributions of said theories to the interdisciplinary study of
the literatures produced during, and based upon, different colonial experiences.
The first two of these premises lead to a new understanding of Spanish-American historical
development based on its being a region originally composed of multiple nations within most
of its modern political “nation-state” entities. This new perspective suggests that Spanish-
American post-independence nationalist discourses, homogenizing in their insistence on equal
citizenship, were always more projective of desire than synchronic reality. To further bolster this
interpretation of the region’s development, one need only look ahead to the latter half of the
eighteenth century, a period that well illustrates the arguments that I make in regard to the first
half of the same century and before. I will concentrate on the case of Peru in order to be more
specific.
The case of Lima

Before glimpsing that second half of the eighteenth century, it is important to remember that
pre-Hispanic Lima was far from an uninhabited space. When the explorers Francisco Pizarro
sent from Jauja first arrived in the valley of Rímac on January 6, 1535, they found an extensive
network of temples, buildings, and sown fields, even if not exactly in the form of a city. The
evidence of this network still exists in the 366 archeological sites in and around Lima that today
are in urgent need of restoration (see Fernández Calvo 2013). According to Javier Protzel, the
valleys of Chillón, Rímac, and Lurín together housed an indigenous population of some 150,000
souls in 1535 (26). Although Mario Cárdenas Ayaipoma posits a smaller number (some calcula-
tions suggest a population of only 30,000 tributary indigenes), he nonetheless admits that the
population may have been much larger (2014, 30). In any case, the area was relatively populated,
due at least in part to the presence of the Temple of Pachacamac, a centuries-old pilgrimage site
in the valley of Lurín, some twenty-six kilometers south of the center of present-day Lima.This
area, in addition to its sacred character, was therefore also the site of numerous migratory cross-
roads. Furthermore, the fertility of its valleys made this entire area an arable zone.
In the decades after the arrival of the Europeans, the indigenous population fell precipitously.
By 1571, between 64% and 97% of the tributary indigenous population had already disappeared
(Cárdenas Ayaipoma 2014, 38). In a clear example of the Spanish practice of reducción, conquer-
ing officials eventually relocated the remaining native peoples to a neighboring area that became
known as El Cercado (“The Enclosure”). Other indigenous inhabitants were grouped into settle-
ments such as Magdalena and Surco and were rendered indios de servicio for the Spanish families
of Lima.2
Guaman Poma, writing his Primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno in the early seventeenth cen-
tury, could hardly be indifferent to the plight of Lima’s indigenous population. He expressed
dismay upon seeing so many Indians dressing as Spaniards, cutting their hair, and carrying weap-
ons. He called this reality “a world upside down,” one in which the indigenous people had lost
their traditional values and became transformed into hybrid, unrecognizable beings. He took
87
particular notice of the “Indian whores, shouldering little mestizos and mulattos,” who offered
themselves to the Spaniards and Blacks, thus engendering a racial mixture that he felt was
destroying the foundations of indigenous society. And for this problem, he concluded, “there is
no remedy” (Ayala 1980, vol. II, 47). Paul J. Charney’s analysis of this same historical conjuncture
(2001, 8–11) underscores the high level of assimilation that Lima’s indigenous population was
experiencing, an assimilation that, while engendering a culture of mixtures and contrasts, was
nonetheless deeply driven by the aspiration to Spanish forms and manners.3
In material terms, criollos of the seventeenth century began to exercise greater control over
Peru’s extensive commercial networks—the most active and lucrative in all of the Americas at
the time. In particular, the merchants of Lima enjoyed tremendous commercial autonomy vis-
à-vis the Spanish Crown, largely because of their ability to control local financial operations
through the Tribunal del Consulado. By the 1600s, this regulating mercantile body was mainly
composed of wealthy creoles and their financial allies, including most importantly the owners of
the seven banks in existence in seventeenth-century Lima. Within this locally based system, the
Catholic church and the various creole-dominated religious orders also played important roles
as bankers and creditors. As a result, the Consulado was able to regularly offer large amounts of
money to the Crown in exchange for the privilege of administrating viceregal commercial
operations. According to Margarita Suárez, “a monetary loan was all that was needed for the
king to allow his laws to be ignored” (2001, 397).
Despite the Spanish Crown’s obvious and desperate need for spices and precious metals to
meet its many imperial obligations, it seemed incapable of creating or sustaining any effective
economic administration. In this context, New World chroniclers and poets repeatedly drew
attention to the wealth and luxury of Lima and to its many ornate churches. Lohmann Villena
(1985) explained the source of this wealth in his scholarly introduction to the Noticia general del
Perú, a seventeenth-century text written by the viceregal Treasurer Francisco López de
Caravantes. According to Lohmann Villena, the accelerated extraction of silver from Potosí after
1570 began to greatly enrich the city of Lima, creating a vigorous commercial economy and a
steady flow of precious metals.4 Luis Miguel Glave (1998) also pointed to the abundant wealth
within the seventeenth-century City of Kings (i.e., Lima), and argued that the distributive pat-
terns of this wealth began to restructure relationships between the city’s various social sectors.5
Although creole merchants were the principal driving force behind the emergence of a
wealthy creole elite in seventeenth-century Lima, for young creole men without access to com-
mercial capital or lucrative posts within the viceregal bureaucracy, the priesthood became the
preferred career choice. Not surprisingly, then, an intellectual elite also emerged among Peru’s
creoles within various religious orders. Within these prestigious ranks, creole writers began to
elaborate an ethnocentric discourse about the inexhaustible richness (both material and spiri-
tual) of South America, which at that point in history was mostly the Peruvian viceroyalty.
My argument is that creole textual production in the seventeenth century played an impor-
tant role in the formation of an early type of ethnic creole nationhood in Lima, as creole intel-
lectuals in this South American capital city strategically carved out their own identity space.6
While forever insisting upon their loyalty to the Spanish Crown and its dominion in the New
World, they nonetheless proclaimed the superiority both of their native Peru and of their par-
ticular ancestors (i.e., the original conquerors). This argument about the emergence of a creole
“ethnic nation” during the seventeenth century must, of course, be understood within the
parameters of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century terminology (see Pagden 91) and not in rela-
tion to modern understandings. During the seventeenth century, the word “nation” still referred
to a human group whose common ancestry, language, religion, territorial origins, and, most
88
importantly, cultural ties defined them as having been born (literally, natio) of a central matrix.
The term “nation” was generally used to refer to those human groups within a larger kingdom
who had their own distinct characteristics. Examples of recognized “nations” within the Peruvian
viceroyalty included the idea of an “Indian nation” (with its many “peoples,” including the
Cañaris, Huancas, Collas, etc.), an “African nation” (with its Lucumí, Angolese, Carabalíes, etc.),
and the “Spanish nation” (with its Castilians, Andalusians, Catalans, etc.). Creoles in the New
World who wished to differentiate themselves from the peninsular-born members of the
“Spanish nation” began to emphasize their particular origins by using the term “creole nation.”
By the second half of the seventeenth century, this term had become commonplace and expressed
a clear sense of an early form of nationhood. Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, the Mexican savant,
used the term in his Theatro de virtudes políticas (1680, f. 17), as did Antonio de Montalvo in El sol
del Nuevo Mundo (1683, f. 16r), and Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela, the creole historian of
Potosí, in his early eighteenth-century Historia de la Villa Imperial de Potosí (1965, Book 9, Ch. 18).
Surely, then, what was meant by “nation” in the seventeenth century was a series of subjective
commonalities within and among human groupings, and it was during the seventeenth century
that the term “creole nation” began to circulate with great form and eloquence.7
Turning now to the eighteenth century, it is interesting to examine the observations made in
the 1740s by two members of the La Condamine expedition on the calamitous state of Lima’s
indigenous population.8 In their Relación histórica del viaje a la América Meridional (1748) Jorge
Juan and Antonio Ulloa were particularly struck by the decadence of the city’s two remaining
caciques:
The great number of Indians that the Valley [of Lima] had, both before and at the time
of the Conquest, has now shrunk to the small numbers living in these Communities
[Surco, Los Chorillos, Miraflores, La Magdalena, Lurigancho, Late or Ate, Pachacama,
Lurín and the two slums of El Callao]. And among these [Communities] there remain
only two known Caciques, those of Miraflores and Surco, both so miserable and unfor-
tunate that they have been reduced to making a living from teaching people in Lima
how to play certain musical instruments.
El quantio∫o nùmero de Indios, que tuvo aquel Valle [de Lima], antes, y con el tiempo
de la Conqui∫ta, e∫tà ya reducido al abreviado de e∫tos Pueblos [de Surco, Los
Chorrillos, Miraflores, La Magdalena, Lurigancho, Late o Ate, Pachacama, Lurín y los
dos arrabales de El Callao], y entre ellos no ∫e conocen aora mas que dos Caciques, que
∫on el de Miraflores y Surco, tan mí∫eros, y desdichados, que e∫tàn reducidos a vivir del
exercicio de en∫eñar en Lima a tocar algunos in∫trumentos.]
(vol. III, 55)
While they noted the shrinking indigenous population and the numerical majority of Lima’s
Black population, what most impressed Juan and Ulloa was the European character of the city,
apparent in the development and splendor of its creole elite. According to Juan and Ulloa, this
was an elite characterized by its economic power, its distinguished lineage, and the imperative of
retaining its whiteness:
The Families of white creoles are those who possess the wealth of Lands and Haciendas;
and among these there are some that are very Distinguished, because their Ancestors
came to these parts with honorable Positions. And bringing their Families with them,
89
they established themselves here and remained; and they have worked to maintain the
prestige of their Ancestors by marrying either their equals from this Country or
Europeans who arrive in the Armadas. But other [creole families] cannot avoid expe-
riencing a decline from their original level of Distinction.
Las Familias de Criollos blancos ∫on las que po∫∫een los bienes de Tierras, ò Haciendas;
y entre e∫tas hay algunas de mucha Di∫tincion; porque ∫us A∫cendientes pa∫∫aron à
aquellos parajes con Empleos honorificos, y llevando ∫us Familias, quedaron e∫tablecidos
allì, y han procurado mantener∫e en el lu∫tre de ∫us Antepa∫∫ados ca∫ando, ò ya con ∫us
iguales del Paìs, ò de los Europeos, que van en las Armadas; bien que en otras no dexa
de experimentar∫e decadencia de su primera Di∫tincion.
(vol. I, 40)
Clearly the creole “splendor” that Juan and Ulloa observed was not constituted by economic
class alone, but also by a form of ethnic aggrupation defined by racial and cultural characteristics.
For this reason, the “splendor” of the creoles could also be claimed by an important group of
poor whites who eventually came to constitute the “popular” base of the creole nation:
There are also other Families of People who are white, though poor; and these either
intermingle with the Castes or originate from [the Castes], and thus they contribute to the
mixing of Bloods. However, when that [mixture] cannot be detected in their own color,
their being white is enough to make them happy and lets them enjoy this privilege.
Otras Familias hay tambièn de Gente blanca, aunque pobre, que ò e∫tàn enlazadas con
las de Ca∫tas, ò tienen ∫u origen en ellas; y a∫si participan de mezcla en la Sangre; pero
cuando no ∫e di∫tingue e∫ta por el color, les ba∫ta el ∫er blancos, para tener∫e por felices,
y gozar de e∫ta preferencia.
(vol. I, 41)
Most interesting about this population of poorer creoles is not their racial “purity” per se, or lack
thereof; rather, it is their desire to be recognized as racially “pure” and thereby distinguish them-
selves socially, despite any evidence of mixture with castes or other groups that could threaten
their identity as creoles. This is precisely the phenomenon of the delimitation of creole collec-
tive identity through contrast with other groups (Blacks, Indians, mulattos, mestizos) with which
the creoles interacted but did not share ancestry, values, or the recognition of common customs.
Moreover, even in cases where a “mixing of blood” occurred, the appearance of whiteness was
enough to merit creole status, or as Juan and Ulloa observed, “their being white is enough to
make them happy.”9
As to Lima’s ethnic character, Juan and Ulloa observed that “the many Neighborhoods of
Lima are made up of Whites or Spaniards, Blacks, the Castes of these, then the Indians, Mestizos
and the rest of the species that come from the mixture of all three” (“el numero∫o Vezindario de
Lima, ∫e compone de Blancos, ò E∫pañoles, Negros y Ca∫tas de e∫tos, Indios, Me∫tizos, y las
demas especies, que provienen en la mezcla de todas tres,” (vol. III, 67)). Penning their observa-
tions in the 1740s, Juan and Ulloa claimed that “according to the most prudent calculation,”
there were some sixteen to eighteen thousand white people in Lima (ibid.). Of these, one fourth
to one third belonged to the local nobility: “many of whom are distinguished by the prestige of
ancient or modern Titles from Castile, including 45 Counts and Marquises” (“mucha parte e∫tà
90
elevada con la dignidad de Tìtulos de Ca∫tilla antiguos, ò modernos; entre los cuales se cuentan
entre Condes y Marque∫es 45,” (vol. III, 68)).There were also numerous “Knights of the Military
and Religious Orders … and 24 Inherited Estates, without Title, the greater part of which are
of ancient origin” (“Cavalleros Cruzados en las Religiones Militares [...y] 24 Mayorazgos, ∫in
Titulo, y la mayor parte de ellos tienen fundaciones antiguas,” (ibid.)). In other words, the num-
ber of persons of noble rank in Lima at the middle of the eighteenth century would have
amounted to some four to six thousand. Taking the average number of five thousand noble
“whites” (the majority of whom were creoles), and adding these to the numbers of non-noble
“whites” (which, according to Juan and Ulloa’s calculations, would have been about twelve
thousand, some of whom had presumably “mixed” with the Castes), one ends up with a critical
mass of some seventeen thousand inhabitants who identified as creoles, undoubtedly clinging to
their distinguished origins, and continued to celebrate the proud traditions of the city of Lima.10
In their comments on the wealth and ostentation of Lima’s elite families, Juan and Ulloa
added:
Because they all maintain themselves in great decency, their opulence is most apparent:
for just as they have a large number of slaves and Domestic servants on hand, so too for
their external appearance and convenience, they make use of the most elegant and
comfortable coaches as well as Carriages that do not need to be as expensive.
Mantienen∫e todas con gran decencia, y con e∫ta brilla la opulencia: pues a∫si como
tiene para ∫u ∫ervicio crecido numero de Dome∫ticos libres, y e∫clavos; para el exterior
aparato, y comodidad u∫an de coches los de mayor di∫tincion, ò conveniencias, y de
Cale∫as los que no tienen preci∫ion de hacer tanto co∫to.
(ibid.)
The use of so many coaches and carriages in the city (no fewer than seven thousand, according
to Juan and Ulloa) was not only an exercise in ostentation; it also provided a way to avoid the
abundance of mule dung that accumulated in Lima’s streets as a result of the city’s vigorous com-
merce. Over time this dung would turn into a foul-smelling dust “so annoying it becomes
intolerable to walk through because it interferes with breathing” (“tan fa∫tidio∫o, que es intoler-
able para andar ∫obre èl, como mole∫to a la re∫piracion,” (vol. III, 69)).
Not unexpectedly, Juan and Ulloa also engaged in the common practice of praising the intel-
ligence of the creoles: “creoles begin to demonstrate their knowledge of Science shortly after
studying it.This is more the result of the nobility of their Intellect than of their practices or arts”
(“[los Criollos] empiezan a luzir la Ciencia adquirida à poco de e∫tudiarla. Efecto unicamente
de la nobleza de ∫us Entendimientos mas que de ∫u cultivo, ò arte,” (vol. III, 56)). They then
concluded that Lima “has the advantage over all other cities in the culture of the Mind” (“∫e
aventaja à las demàs [ciudades] en la cultura de los Entendimientos,” (vol. III, 57)). At the same
time, Juan and Ulloa were also struck by the creoles’ adulatory tendencies and their identifica-
tion with European symbols, especially when it came to the pompous receptions staged in Lima
for newly arriving Spanish viceroys, receptions that city officials continued to organize in the
eighteenth century even after the Crown had prohibited such displays. These receptions gener-
ally included a Te Deum high mass, the filing of city officials before the viceroy (the traditional
kissing of the hand), and a reception “with magnificent refreshments throughout the palace halls
in which all the Nobility partook” (“con un magnífico refre∫co, que tambièn es general à toda
la Nobleza, que se halla en los salones,” (vol. III, 62)).
91
Nonetheless, there were fissures within the city’s governing elite, and these would become
fully evident in the wake of the earthquake of October 28, 1746, with its devastating effects on
Lima and the port of El Callao. As Walker (2008) and Pérez-Mallaína (2001) made clear, it was
then that Lima’s honorable creoles rose in resistance to Viceroy José Antonio Manso de Velasco,
the Count of Superunda, whose plans for reconstruction threatened the structures of urban
hierarchy that had been carefully erected in the city over a period of more than two hundred
years. The figure in charge of these reconstruction plans was Louis Godin, a French architect
who, along with Juan and Ulloa, had arrived in Lima with the La Condamine expedition.
Although Godin and his viceroy patron “did not pretend to banish social distinctions or ques-
tion the elite’s right to predominate,” they did seek, “in political terms, to reduce the clout of
Lima’s upper echelon” (Walker 2008, 97).
The long-term consequences of the 1746 earthquake certainly went beyond the rebuilding
of the city; this was a turning point in the history of Lima, both in terms of urbs, or material
design, and civitas, or social and political structure.11 Pedro Lozano, an eyewitness chronicler of
the devastation and its aftermath, described the tremendous zeal with which the city’s creole
nobility, inspired by “the love of Homeland” (1747, unnumbered folio), went about their efforts
to reconstruct the city and provide its population with food and supplies. In spite of this active
leadership and the predominance of creoles on the Royal High Court in Lima (see Lohmann
Villena, 1974), the exigencies of the distant Crown continued to limit the administrative auton-
omy of the city and frustrate the creoles’ increased aspirations to the powers of governance. The
unfortunate circumstances of the earthquake only fueled such aspirations; faced with the costs
of rebuilding the city, the Royal Court allowed many more creoles to become Crown officials,
or corregidores, in the hopes that they would collect the revenues needed for reconstruction. This
allowance for creoles was made in the months following the earthquake, but little by little the
Viceroy was able to regain control of the revenues from the corregimientos, diverting the funds
from reconstruction efforts and sending them instead to help cover the Crown’s financial obliga-
tions in Europe (Pérez-Mallaína 2001, 119–124). In fact, the viceroy Count of Superunda was
“one of the most efficient of viceroys when it came time to send silver to the metropolis.”
(Pérez-Mallaína 2001, 122)
The actions of the Crown and the viceroy, their apparent indifference to the plight of the city,
and their sluggish response to its urgent needs constituted a fundamental point of rupture with
the city’s creole elite, exacerbating the resentment of many who felt unrepresented by a faraway
and inefficient administration. “It seems clear that the Crown’s social consciousness reflected the
typical notion of State existing at that time” (Pérez-Mallaína 2001, 124); in other words, the
viceregal administration of Peru did not represent the best interests of the local population (in
this case, the interests of the creoles), and the events surrounding the earthquake of 1746 made
this disjuncture once again very evident.
In the ensuing decades, the aggressive interjection of Crown policy through the implementa-
tion of the so-called Bourbon Reforms (see Kinsbruner 1994, 3–24; Burckholder 2013, 110–
128) only strengthened and consolidated the feelings of differentiation that creole bards and
chroniclers had been expressing since the seventeenth century. Nonetheless, the creoles’ fear of
a Cuzco-centered movement for hegemony led by indigenous and mestizo elements ended up
being stronger than their feelings of alienation from the Spanish Crown.This was manifest in the
creole reaction to the Great Rebellion of Túpac Amaru II, begun on November 4, 1780.
Although there were some creoles among the rebel ranks, the vast majority of the creole popula-
tion, particularly in Lima, remained faithful to the Crown, condemning the audacity of the self-
proclaimed Inca descendants.
92
Independence and the prevalence of criollo identity

An exhaustive account of the many instances of the ambiguous stance of Lima’s creole elite both
before and after independence is obviously beyond the purview of these pages. It is enough to
mention that the “Society of Friends of the Country,” publishers of the Mercurio Peruano from
1791–1795, actually began by calling themselves the “Society of Friends of Lima” (so pro-
claimed in the first pages of their publication). Once independence was proclaimed, on July 28,
1821, the “national” symbols created by the new republican government were likewise Lima-
centric, as in the case of the crest on the first national flag designed by General José de San
Martín (Figure 4.1.). In this flag, the coat of arms represents a sun rising from behind the moun-
tains, which makes little sense from the perspective of the eastern slopes of the Andes or from
the Amazon.
Similarly, Peru’s national anthem contains a stanza that is markedly Lima-centric: “May the
peaks of the Andes hold high / the bi-colored flag or banner / that proclaims for all time / the
strength that freedom forever has given us. / Let us live peacefully under its shade / and since the
sun is born from those peaks / let us renew the great pledge / that we make to the God of Jacob”
(emphasis added). The poetic image of the sun rising from the peaks is obviously not evoking a
perspective from the eastern Andes or the Amazon. In both these examples, a homogenizing
view of the “patria” prevails, extending a Lima-centric vision that purports to assimilate an
unrepresented or underrepresented multiplicity of ethnic, social, and racial formations within
the new, “national” state. In this sense, the “God of Jacob” continues to be the god of the
conquerors.12
Figure 4.1 F
irst flag of Peru, designed by General José de San Martín. Note how the coat of arms reflects
a coastal, creole perspective of the country.
Source: Museo Naval del Callao, Marina de Guerra del Perú. Photo: J. A. Mazzotti. Page 3, Calendar section.
93
Although there was some popular participation in the struggle for independence (see
Morán and Aguirre 2013), the creole leadership of the new nation-state managed to maintain
its traditional colonial practices over the course of the first decades of republican rule. In fact,
in some ways, those practices became further entrenched; Simón Bolívar’s 1825 abolition of
the indigenous cacicazgos and the law establishing Castilian as the only official language of Peru
are two examples of measures that fulfilled Bourbon aspirations from the eighteenth century
(Rowe 1954, 52–53). Indeed, the linguistic conquest and colonization of Peru was consoli-
dated only during the Republic, even as most of the population continued to speak Quechua,
Aymara, or one of the nearly one hundred other surviving indigenous languages. (Today that
number has been reduced to about fifty, many of which are rapidly vanishing to the rhythms
of globalization.)
Although the mid-nineteenth century witnessed some movement toward a more inclusive
liberalism, specifically with the abolition of slavery and indigenous tribute, the ethnic and class-
based exclusivity that defined the new republic’s creole leadership was able to retain a system of
power based upon ownership of the land and the marginalization of peasants and workers
descended from the same ethnic groups exploited during the colony. This exclusivity remained
largely in place until it was challenged in 1969 by the Agrarian Reform instituted by General
Juan Velasco Alvarado during his leftist and nationalist government. In this sense, Peru’s republi-
can history supports Margarita Serje’s argument that the Latin American nation-states should
not be understood as failures (2005); instead, they have been highly effective vehicles for neutral-
izing any and all agents who would threaten the prevailing neo-colonial model.
With the sudden introduction into Peru of the neoliberal economic model (massive privati-
zation, weakening of the national states, reduction in workers’ rights, lifting of tariffs on foreign
imports and the subsequent collapse of national industries, etc.), powerful sectors of the creole
population have been recycled and reinvigorated. This model entered Peru during the so-called
“Second Phase” of the military government led by General Francisco Morales Bermúdez from
1975 to 1980 and brought to fruition during the civil dictatorship of the engineer Alberto
Fujimori in the 1990s. The creole population, following the selective reanimation produced by
the advent of neoliberalism, has admitted a greater degree of mestizo presence, but has contin-
ued to champion a Lima-centric national spirit and the privileges of the traditionally dominant
groups.
Part of this domination is based on blatant racism not necessarily in the form of open dis-
courses, but in the form of social practices. However, it is important to remember that modern
racism is a relatively recent phenomenon. The discriminatory categories that were applied
before the Enlightenment were mainly due to a religious conception of identity, based on the
concepts of “blood” and “nation” (the latter—I insist—in its archaic and ethnic sense). In their
modern meaning, categories such as “race” prevailed especially in the eighteenth century, when
human classification schemes were consolidated by strictly biological and physiognomic fea-
tures, with the consequent reaffirmation of indigenous and Afro-descendant groups at the base
of the social pyramid.13 Indeed, as Margarita Zamora (2010) has clarified, the concept of “race”
did not strictly apply to the physical features of an individual during the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries. The word existed, of course, but it referred to a spiritual defectivity, referring
above all to Jews and Muslims in the Spain of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centu-
ries.14 To speak of “race” for the indigenous population of the pre-enlightened centuries is thus
anachronistic. However, modern racism substituted other forms of discrimination as time passed.
Today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the racism that exists in Peru and the
concomitant failure to extend respect, opportunities, and rights to indigenous communities and
94
to a broad range of impoverished mestizos and Afro-Peruvians recall the oppressive practices
inherited from the colonial era. Lima-centrism is alive and well in Peru, even though Lima is no
longer the Spanish city it originally claimed to be. Even in the case of so-called decolonial initia-
tives, whereby epistemological elements of indigenous origin become part of political move-
ments of resistance against the ravages of neoliberalism, the creole republic still prefers that its
gnoseological and axiological foundations be of European design. So claims someone quite
familiar with ideas of resource redistribution and the strategies of knowledge basic to the sus-
tainable development of Peru:
Creole culture, which is hegemonic in Peru, operates upon two underlying premises
that position Eurocentrism as the critical factor par excellence in the tree of questions
involved in the production and administration of knowledge. First of all, there is the
notion that Western rationality can only be produced outside of Peru. This [premise]
leads the elite creoles to live a paradox: they define themselves as modern, yet they do
not participate in the production of global modernity; they are mere consumers of the
products of modernity. Secondly, there is the premise that millions of Andean,
Amazonian and mestizo men and women must necessarily, albeit parasitically, adopt
the systems of modern knowledge; and yet, paradoxically, the promoters of this
modernity—the creoles—have no idea how to produce or administer it.
(Víctor Carranza, ex-President of Concytec, Peru’s National Council
of State on Science and Technology, 2015)
It seems that today, more than ever, criollo identities and their Europeanized aspirations are alive
and kicking in the political and social spectrum of Spanish America. Although I have mainly
referred to the case of Peru and Lima, similar arguments can be made about other countries in
the region. Race, ethnicity and nation are categories that need to be studied together in order
to grasp the complexity of the criollo phenomenon in today’s Spanish America.
Notes
1 The following paragraphs summarize and paraphrase the Epilogue of my book Lima fundida: épica y
nación criolla en el Perú (2016), translated into English by Barbara Corbett as The Creole Invention of Peru:
Ethnic Nation and Epic Poetry in Colonial Lima (2019).
2 See also the tables presented by Cárdenas Ayaipoma (2014, 93–100), comparing the figures proposed by
David Noble Cook (1998), and John Rowe (1976).
3 Most insightful in this regard is Karen Graubart’s description of the “creole Indians” of Trujillo and
Lima who proudly assumed the adjective “creole” in an attempt to differentiate themselves in dress,
manner, and even dwelling choice from the common Indians who lived outside of the city and retained
many pre-Hispanic customs (2009).
4 Although Spaniards discovered the Potosí silver mines in 1545, it was not until the administration of
Viceroy Toledo (1569–1581) that a massive labor force was mobilized to work these mines through the
manipulation of the ancient Inca system of the mit'a. See also Lohmann Villena’s “Estudio preliminar”
in León Pinelo (1953, vii–clxxxvi).
5 By the early seventeenth century, Lima had a population of approximately 25,000; of these, 10,000 or so
were of European descent, 10,000 of African descent, and 5,000 or so were Indian. See Glave (1998, 163).
6 A similar case can be made for viceregal Mexico. See Mazzotti (2000) and Pedro Cebollero (2009).
7 For a detailed discussion of the term’s ambiguity, multiple meanings, and different uses during the
colonial period, see Luis Monguió (1978). The concept of a “form of nationhood” is drawn from
Richard Helgerson’s illuminating study Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (1992).
See also Anthony Pagden (1987) for a discussion of the term “creole nation.”
95
8 Charles Marie de La Condamine’s scientific expedition to Ecuador and Peru lasted from 1735 to 1745.
He and the scientists from the expedition (Louis Godin, Joseph de Jussieu, Pierre Bouguer) were able to
take exact measurements of the earth and make different geographical calculations from the equatorial
line. Among his staff were two Spanish officers, Jorge Juan and Antonio Ulloa, who spent several months
in Lima. La Condamine is also credited with the European discovery of rubber and quinine trees.
9 The insistence on whiteness and whitening has long been documented. Lohmann Villena (2003) dem-
onstrated that many creoles, in an effort to obtain titles of nobility, composed genealogies tracing their
lineages back to the most prestigious families of “old Christians” in Spain.This obsession had to do with
the Spaniards suspicions regarding the origins of creoles. As Stuart Schwartz (1995) and Elizabeth
Kuznesof (1995) have shown, as many as 20%–40% of “creole” children born during the first generations
after the conquest were actually mestizos but were considered “creoles” because of their Spanish fathers.
10 According to Protzel’s estimates, Lima’s total population was around 54,000 at the middle of the eigh-
teenth century and remained relatively unchanged for a century thereafter. Only with the nineteenth-
century guano boom did Lima’s population grow substantially, reaching 100,000 by the census of 1876
(2009, 37).
11 For a detailed description of the destruction suffered by the city and its port, and of the efforts by public
officials to control the ensuing chaos, see the interesting Carta o Diario, published in 1747 by the promi-
nent creole José Eusebio Llano y Zapata.
12 It was no coincidence that President Alan García Pérez imposed this stanza for all official ceremonies
beginning in 2009 during his second presidential administration (2006–2011). The imposition of the
stanza displaced the more traditional stanza that had been sung for various generations and that had a
more secular character (“The oppressed Peruvian had for a long time / been dragging his ominous
chains…”). The stanza’s implicit omission of eastern Peru in its vision of the national whole makes
perfect sense in light of García’s description of the indigenous peoples of eastern Peru as “perros del
hortelano” [“farm dogs”] and “ciudadanos que no son de primera clase” [“not first-class citizens”] (see
García Pérez 2015).
13 Glenn Loury defines race as “a cluster of inheritable bodily markings carried by a largely endogamous
group of individuals, markings that can be observed by others with ease, that can be changed or mis-
represented only with great difficulty, and that have come to be invested in a particular society at a given
historical moment with social meaning.” (2002, 20–21).
14 Zamora points out that:“The early modern Spanish term raza was employed in a pejorative sense to refer to
the cultural difference of Jews, Muslims and their descendants.The common expression ‘tener raza’ implied
a moral defect (in the larger sense of the term predominant in early modern Spanish, from the Latin moralis,
‘custom, mores’) or fault deriving from a person’s descent from Jews, Muslims or conversos. Covarrubias’s
Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, identified the origins of the term in the Tuscan word for thread, noting
that in old Spanish raça referred to an uneven or defective thread that stands out from the rest in a piece of
cloth. Applied to lineage, it became derogatory” (Zamora, 364; see Covarrubias ([1611] 1674, 155).
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5
AN INTEGRATIONAL
APPROACH TO COLONIAL
SEMIOSIS
Galen Brokaw
Introduction
The reconceptualization of literary studies as cultural studies that occurred in the 1970s and 1980s
expanded the field to include “non-literary” texts under the umbrella concepts of text and dis-
course and more general cultural products and practices. For Latin American colonial studies, Peter
Hulme articulated this shift away from the strictly “literary” most explicitly in Colonial Encounters
(1986) with his definition of colonial discourse as “an ensemble of linguistically-based practices
unified by their common deployment in the management of colonial relationships” and that com-
bines “the most formulaic and bureaucratic of official documents … with the most non-functional
and unprepossessing of romantic novels … .” Subsequently Walter Mignolo proposed a further
expansion from “colonial discourse” to “colonial semiosis” in order to reflect an even broader field
to include signifying practices that take place through any given medium or sign carrier (1989;
1995). This includes Mesoamerican scripts, the Inca quipu, and other indigenous media.
With the exception of Maya logo-syllabic script, indigenous American sign systems are usu-
ally classified as “not writing” along with all other sign systems that do not fit the traditional
definition of writing as a representation of oral language. Societies that do not employ systems
that qualify as writing are relegated to the speciously homogenous category of the oral (see
Ong 2012; Goody 2000). Sign systems developed by so-called “oral” societies demand a theo-
retical reconceptualization that is attentive to the material specificity of the media upon which
they do rely and their socio-economic, political, and cognitive effects. Approaching other sign
systems from the perspective of materiality is particularly important for two reasons. First, all
sign systems are inherently material. Even the sound waves that make up oral communication
are material phenomena. Second, the material conditions under which we live and operate
inevitably shape the dialogue between the way we think and the cultural, socio-economic, and
political institutions that we construct.The dialogical model of media (Brokaw 2010b) provides
an alternative to the orality-literacy binary. This model acknowledges the significance of the
cognitive patterns and tendencies that derive from our relationship to alphabetic writing and
that structure our thought; but it also provides the basis for a more nuanced understanding of
the nature and effects of other types of media. But other types of sign systems also require a
reconsideration of systematicity itself. Drawing on integrational linguistics, here I argue that the
grammar of a sign system is the effect of communicative practices rather than the other way
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Galen Brokaw
around. Approaching sign systems from this perspective sheds new light on the true nature not
only of other media but also of our own.
Mesoamerican iconography
One of the defining characteristics of the Mesoamerican region is the use of iconographic
scripts. Mesoamerican scripts vary in many respects, but they share certain aesthetic qualities and
semiotic conventions derived in many cases from common origins and/or the common cultural
practices with which sign systems were integrated (Prem and Riese 1983; Urcid 2012). The
mimetic nature of iconographic writing is much more accessible than the more esoteric signs of
phonographic systems, but this accessibility is misleading: the mimetic imagery contains many
nuances that remain either undeciphered or possibly even unrecognized as semiotic conven-
tions. We do know that Mesoamerican societies developed a number of different iconographic
genres that recorded detailed narratives, rituals, calendars, and geographic space.
All signifying systems, whether alphabetic or iconographic, deploy their signifiers in particu-
lar ways that in and of themselves have significance. In the case of alphabetic script, for example,
letters, newspaper articles, poems, novels, etc. all employ different formats associated with their
genres independent of their content. For example, take the following pseudo-text that substi-
tutes all letters with a generic “x”:
Xx xxxxx xxx xx xxxx x xxxxxxx

xx xxxxxxx xx xxxxx xx xxxxxxx xxxxx,
x xxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxxxxxx, xxxxxxx,
xxxxxxxx xx xxxxxxx x xx xxxxxxx;
x xx xxxxx xxx xx xxxxxxx, xxx xx xx xxxx
xxx xxx xx xxxxxxx, xxx xxxxx xxxxxx,
xxx xx xxxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx, xxxxxxxx,
xx xxxxxx xxxxx, xxxxxxx x xxxxxxxxx:
xxxxx xx xxxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxxxxx
xx xxxxx xxxxx, xxxxx xxx xx xxxxxx xxxxxx
xxxxx xx xxxxx xx xxxxxxx xxxxxx.
Xxxxxxxxxx xx xxxx xx xxxxxx xxxxxx,
xxxx xx xxxxxx xx xxxx xxxxxx
xxx xx xxxxx xxxxxxx xx xx xxxxxxxxx.
This pseudo-text is modeled on a sonnet by the sixteenth-century Spanish poet Garcilaso de la

Vega (Rivers 1966, 37–38), and is easily identified as a sonnet based merely on its format with-
out the need for the actual words. For alphabetic texts, the format conveys the genre or type of
text rather than any specific content.
The conventional differences in format between different Mesoamerican iconographic
genres is analogous to those between different alphabetic genres. Mixteca-Puebla-style ritual
books such as the Codex Borgia are divided into sections that deal with different topics and
exhibit unique formats. The calendar section (Figure 5.1), for example, is immediately distin-
guishable from that of the section on “marriage” prognostication based merely on the layout of
the pages (Figure 5.2; see Anders, Jansen and Reyes García 1993, 309–322). Similar to the
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An integrational approach to colonial semiosis
Figure 5.1 Page from the calendar section of the Códice Borgia. Códice Borgia. Vatican Library (1993), p. 3.
pseudo-poem above, these formats announce the nature of the content even without the con-
tent itself; and they condition the way the reader understands the text.
Both alphabetic and iconographic scripts also employ structures to convey more specific
information, but they do so in very different ways dictated by the nature of their sign systems.
Aside from the layout created by line length, paragraphing, etc., the phonographic nature of
alphabetic script necessarily requires the remediation or transpositioning of the temporality of
oral speech into the spatiality of the material text. Alphabetic script essentially attempts to reme-
diate individual sounds from the medium of oral speech to that of graphic signs.The relationship
between the graphic signs and sounds is completely arbitrary, because sounds have no visible
shape or form that can be reproduced graphically. These individual sounds convey no meaning
in and of themselves, and this means that the material conventions convey no meaning either.
Alphabetic texts do organize their contents according to higher level sequences (words, sen-
tences, sequences of sentences, sequences of events, etc.), but the material form of the text does
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Galen Brokaw
Figure 5.2 P
age from the marriage prognostication section of the Códice Borgia. Códice Borgia. Vatican
Library (1993), p. 58.
not encode these sequences. In other words, the discursive conventions at that level are not
transpositioned into the material conventions of the medium.
The iconographic mode of Mesoamerican scripts, on the other hand, inherently remediates
the natural and social world by virtue of its mimetic nature, and it also employs multiple conven-
tions and codes, what I have called polygraphy or semiotic heterogeneity (Brokaw 2010a, 120–
123; 2010b, 118–120; see also Marcus 1992: 17–27). The heterogeneity of iconographic writing
results in a different type of semiosis with different effects. Mesoamerican narrative histories
such as the Mixteca-Puebla-style Codex Nuttall, for example, rely upon units of signification that
correspond to places, people, and events.The first page of what is known as the 8-Deer narrative
(Figure 5.3), illustrates the nature of this genre of iconography.The narrative begins in the lower
right-hand corner, and follows a vertical boustrophedon pattern indicated by the red lines. The
first scene establishes the place where the narrative begins: the black and white checkered base
of the temple is the signifier for Tilantongo. The next scene represents the marriage of Lady
102
Figure 5.3 F
irst page of the 8-Deer narrative. Códice Zouche-Nuttall. British Museum, Ms. 39671 (1992),
p. 42.
9-Eagle/Wreath of Cacao Flowers and Lord 5-Lizard/Rain-Sun. In this scene, the position of
the figures seated and facing each other, and perhaps the hand gestures, indicate that they get
married. The following three figures represent the birth of this couple’s children. In the final
figure on the page, another woman named Lady 11-Water sits on a stool similar to that of Lady
9-Eagle. This is Lord 5-Lizard’s second wife followed by their children on the next page (Códice
Zouche-Nuttall. British Museum, Ms. 39671 (1992); The Codex Nuttall 1975, 42–43). Each of the
marriage and birth scenes are dated using a day glyph and a series of small circles corresponding
to a calendrical number between one and thirteen. In some cases the year is also specified with
a glyph and number superimposed over what looks like the letter “A” intertwined with a rect-
angle. The day sign and number function both as the date of birth and as one of the names of
the individual. Other styles of Mesoamerican iconography, such as that evident in the Codex Xolotl
(Figure 5.4), employ different conventions and demonstrate the highly versatile nature of this
sign system.
These iconographic texts convey meaning through both conventions specific to the sign sys-
tem and conventions transpositioned from the social and/or natural world represented.The bous-
trophedon format of the Codex Nuttall, for example, is a medium-specific innovation developed
in a dialogue between the message conveyed, the nature of the sign system, and the material
constraints of the codex form. The people and objects represented are highly conventionalized,
but to some extent they are transpositioned from the socio-political world which has its own
conventions. The mimetic iconography remediates these social conventions in combination with
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Galen Brokaw
Figure 5.4 Lámina 1 of the Códice Xolotl. Biblioteque Nacionale de France (1996).
media-specific conventions. The spatial configuration of the two figures conveys the marriage,
and the simple presence of individuals following this marriage all make evident the meaning of
the text even without the specific identity of the individuals involved. In other words, the con-
figuration and order of the images constitute an iconographic morphology and syntax that
encodes semantic information within the structure itself. If we were to create a pseudo-text based
on the page from the Codex Nuttall as I have done above using a sonnet by Garcilaso de la Vega,
the reader could actually glean some of the content as opposed to merely the genre of the text.
Andean Quipu
Andean societies also developed a number of different sign systems that conveyed different types
of information, but the knotted string device called quipu (also spelled khipu) has garnered the
most attention as a medium that functioned in a way analogous to writing (Figure 5.5). This
device consists of a relatively thick main cord to which thinner cords are attached and organized
into groupings that correspond to information categories and organizational structures (Murra
1975). These cords were made primarily from dyed or undyed cotton or camelid fiber. In most
cases, knots tied into the cords of Inca-era quipus consistently employ a decimal place system to
record numbers. But some quipus or sections of quipus also exhibit knots that do not conform
to the regular conventions of the decimal place system (Urton 2002, 184–191).
104
Figure 5.5 Inca Quipu. Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Antropología e Historia del Perú.
The quipu clearly exhibits a high degree of semiotic heterogeneity: we know that Inca quipus
relied upon the decimal system, colors, and cord configuration; they also may have employed
cord attachment direction (Conklin 1982, 266; Urton 2003, 69–74) and knot direction (Urton
1994, 2003, 74–88), which Sabine Hyland has documented in a quipu board from late colonial
times (Hyland et al. 2014). We could create a representation of a pseudo-quipu analogous to the
pseudo-poem given above, but as in the case of Mesoamerican iconography, the format of the
cords on a quipu is not merely ancillary. It would certainly indicate the genre of the quipu, but
for at least some types of quipu, it may also inherently reveal the content which appears in an
order dictated by a hierarchy of ethnocategories (Murra 1975). Similar to iconographic mor-
phology and syntax, the format itself encodes information rather than merely packaging it.
A media-studies approach to the orality-literacy binary

These indigenous American sign systems challenge what we think we know about the nature of
representation and the semiotics of secondary media, and they demand a reconceptualization
that deconstructs the writing/non-writing and orality/literacy binaries. The role that colonial
Latin American literary/cultural studies plays in this project was announced by Mignolo’s call to
expand and reconceptualize our field as colonial semiosis; but long before this shift from litera-
ture to discourse to semiosis, orality-literacy studies, and more specifically media studies which
arose from it, drew attention to the importance of the materiality of the medium of communi-
cation. The distinction here is not between the material and the non-material, because strictly
speaking oral language is also a material phenomenon. The essential idea that informs the field
of media studies is that the material nature of the medium affects the nature of human
cognition.
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Galen Brokaw
However, the nature of the medium does not necessarily take into account the nature of the
practice or practices associated with it. The thought, language, and discourses of “oral” societies
exhibit certain characteristics by virtue of their primary orality. And the thought, language, and
discourses of “literate” societies tend to exhibit different characteristics that are attributed to the
cognitive effects of literacy. However, Brian Street has argued that at this general level, this dis-
tinction homogenizes both oral and written traditions in ways that obscure differences between
diverse oral and literate practices which are determined in both cases more by ideology than the
nature of the medium (Street 1984). I would argue that this does not mean that such dichoto-
mies and categorizations are always unjustified but rather that they must be understood as con-
tingent and heuristic rather than essential and definitive (Brokaw 2010b).
Keeping this contingency in mind, the heuristic validity of the orality-literacy dichotomy is
not based merely on the difference between oral discourse and alphabetic writing per se. First and
foremost, it is based on the fundamental difference between ephemeral, dynamic media on the
one hand and more or less static and permanent media on the other (Harris 1995, 43-4).The field
of media studies recognizes that the nature of any given medium has cognitive implications,
whether ephemeral or permanent. In other words, even different types of ephemeral media such
as radio and television have implications for both individuals and societies. Ephemerality and per-
manence are qualities with effects or tendencies that can be generalized in many, if not all, cases.
This perspective does not deny the significance of alphabetic literacy as opposed to so-called
primary orality, but it places this difference within a much broader context rather than a narrow
dichotomy. The development of phonography, particularly alphabetic systems, has important
implications that often justify a conceptual distinction for certain purposes. But defining writing
strictly as phonography creates a binary opposition between phonographic writing and non-
phonographic sign systems that obfuscates the significance of the latter.This is particularly prob-
lematic, because it corresponds to, and is the basis for, the value-laden distinction between
so-called oral cultures and literate civilizations. It is for this reason that Elizabeth Hill Boone
argues for a much broader definition of writing that includes scripts like Mesoamerican iconog-
raphy (Boone 2000, 29–30).
Even with this broader definition of writing, we still need a theoretical model that would
account for the observable differences in function and effect of different sign systems. Elsewhere,
I have argued for the extension of the media-studies model to other societies that have been
considered to be oral in spite of the fact that they employ communicative media (Brokaw
2010a). Descriptions of indigenous American societies (and many other non-European cultures)
tend to emphasize difference over similarity, and descriptions of other cultures commonly rely
upon the perceived presence or absence of writing as one of the primary bases for this differ-
ence. But the dichotomization of societies into the oral and the literate fails to acknowledge the
important functions and effects of other sign systems and their media. The identification of a
society as “oral” defines it in terms of what it is not rather than in terms of what it is (Brokaw
2010b, 121). The media-studies approach avoids this problem as well as the implied value judg-
ments identified by Boone, because in principle it gives equal weight to all sign systems.
Sign systems other than those traditionally defined as writing have an interest in and of
themselves for epigraphers, anthropologists, sociologists, and media-studies scholars, and even
for “literary” scholars insofar as they constitute a form of discourse broadly conceived. For “liter-
ary” scholars who conceive of their field based on the fact that “literature” derives etymologi-
cally from the Latin “littera” (letters), this means that technically anything recorded using letters
falls within the realm of “literature.” The essential idea behind the notion of “literature” as
opposed to other forms of written language was at least in part that form is somehow more
important or central to literary works (i.e., novels, poems, stories). Some literary works certainly
106
foreground form in ways that other genres of discourse do not, but this is not always the case.
Conversely, form often functions in literary genres in the same way as any other “non-literary”
genre. To put it another way, all uses of written language are in this sense literary, because they
must rely upon form. And other sign systems are just as inherently dependent upon formal
conventions.
Any given medium has numerous features or characteristics that are available for use as for-
mal signifying conventions. Even differences between oral languages illustrate not only the vari-
ability of formal conventions but also the variability of the resources available that can be
formally conventionalized in the medium of oral speech. Tonal languages like Chinese and
Zapotec, for example, avail themselves of tone in ways that non-tonal languages do not. In addi-
tion to the more formalized conventions of verbal language, communicative practices integrate
a variety of paralinguistic conventions that qualify, supplement, and in some cases replace, verbal
language. The use of these paralinguistic conventions creates a dynamic that impacts the way
language functions.
The remediation of oral language into alphabetic script eliminates some of its linguistic and
all of its paralinguistic conventions and practices, because they are either impractical to transpo-
sition into graphic inscription or incompatible with this medium. The elimination of these
paralinguistic conventions isolates verbal language from all of the other elements of the com-
municative operation that worked in conjunction with it.The verbal discourse that remains after
this isolation is not able to convey meaning with the same level of efficacy. Thus, alphabetic
writing attempts to compensate for what was lost through the development and use of medium-
specific conventions in order to meet the needs of the communicative functions that it is
designed to perform. For example, the consistent spacing between every word in alphabetic
writing does not have an analogous oral convention in regular speech. To run most words
together with intermittent spaces to indicate pauses would better reflect the conventions of
normal oral discourse; and early manuscripts often do not separate words using spaces in a regu-
lar way. The convention of word spacing resolves possible confusions that may arise in written
script precisely because it is visual instead of auditory. Furthermore, the emic nature of word
spacing facilitates more rapid comprehension, because it better reflects how readers conceive of
the semantic units of language in their heads. Additionally, the disembodied nature of alphabetic
writing requires written language to be more thorough and explicit than the verbal language of
oral communication because meaning cannot be created and negotiated as part of the commu-
nicative interaction itself. Rather, the writer must create meaning independently from, and prior
to, the act of reading and in such a way that the reader can recreate more or less the same mean-
ing based solely on the written text.
In the European medieval and early modern periods, most of these conventions had not been
standardized in written script. Word spacing, capitalization, and punctuation all occurred often
in free variation, particularly in notarial documents. Print conventions inherently involved a
move toward a more standardized set of conventions both in terms of page format and the other
non-semantic conventions of spacing, capitalization, and punctuation. Print facilitated the cre-
ation of a much larger reading public, but the nature of the printing process also concentrated
the production of texts in fewer hands.The size of the reading public had an inverse relationship
to the number of text producers. The material nature of printing already standardizes alphabetic
script across a large number of texts eliminating the idiosyncrasies of individual scribes. The
concentration of text production in the hands of printers resulted in even further standardiza-
tion of textual conventions.
Today these conventions have become explicit rules that are learned as an inherent part of
reading and writing, and once learned they feel natural. They do not convey information in the
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Galen Brokaw
same way as words, sentences, or entire texts, but they serve to shape or condition the meaning
of these semantic conventions. The layout of a text such as the pseudo-sonnet given above cre-
ates a certain disposition in the reader to identify and interpret it in a particular way. Punctuation
can change the meaning of an entire sentence in any kind of text. The popular meme “Let’s eat,
Grandpa” v. “Let’s eat Grandpa” is a humorous example. But missing or misplaced commas have
been at the heart of more serious communicative interactions as well. In one recent lawsuit,
drivers for a dairy in Maine won a judgment based on the absence of a comma in Maine’s law
governing overtime pay (O’Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy 2017).
The role of these conventions demonstrates the way in which alphabetic writing attempts to
compensate for the impoverishment that takes place when language is remediated into alpha-
betic script. Interpersonal communication is a multi-dimensional activity that integrates not
only different media (e.g., verbal language, facial expressions, gestures), but also different features
of these media (e,g., tone, rate of speech). Alphabetic writing compensates for what is lost in oral
communication to the extent that it can through the use of conventions such as the standardiza-
tion of discrete sentence structures and punctuation.
The potential need for such compensation arises whenever a sign system is remediated, that
is to say transpositioned from one medium (e.g., orality) to another (e.g., writing). We witness
this same phenomenon in the digital age. Anyone who communicates by email or text message
knows that it is often notoriously difficult to interpret the intended meaning of alphabetic texts
because tone and other contextual indicators are lost.This is in part what drove the development
of emojis. A sentence with a smiling face at the end often conveys a very different message than
one without this emoji. This development occurred not just because alphabetic writing was
insufficient. The advent of electronic media moved, or extended, a lot of interpersonal commu-
nication that used to take place in face-to-face or phone conversations into emails and text
messages. This new medium was not only conducive to new conventions but also actually
required innovations and adaptations in order to effectively transposition previously analog
communicative tasks into the new digital media.
This reference to “transpositioning” or “remediation” should not be understood to mean that
alphabetic language merely recreates more enduring versions of ephemeral oral discourses.
Alphabetic writing may certainly transcribe the strictly verbal component of oral discourses, but
that is not what it was originally designed to do. The impetus and development of writing arose
from the need to communicate or remember information across time and space. But the initial
objects and activities that would eventually give rise to alphabetic writing were not representa-
tions of language at all (Schmandt-Besserat 1992; Daniels 1996, 3). And when they began to
represent language, the communicative functions that writing fulfilled would have been new
and unique to the medium. The record of numerical data inscribed in early writing systems, for
example, had no corresponding oral counterpart.To take a more modern example, letter writing
had no oral equivalent. It is a genre of written discourse that was made possible by, and is unique
to, the alphabetic sign system and the medium of ink and paper. Text messaging has a much
more direct oral counterpart, but even so this communicative practice inevitably develops its
own unique conventions specific to the medium.
In this discussion I have attempted to maintain a distinction between sign system and medium
or what Mignolo calls sign carrier (Mignolo 1995). In many cases, these are two separate things:
alphabetic writing, for example, is a sign system that is not necessarily bound by a particular
medium. The qualities mentioned above of ephemerality and permanence are features of media
rather than sign systems. Alphabetic writing can be performed on a computer, in the sand, or in
the air using gestures or smoke. Thus it is not the sign system that makes writing more or less
permanent. It is the medium or sign carrier. The term orality refers metonymically to oral
108
language, but the more literal meaning of orality as medium is actually more appropriate from
the theoretical perspective of media studies.
The nature of the sign system is also significant, but it must be understood in the context of
the medium that supports it. In the same way that different conventions of oral discourse have
different effects, not only different media but also variations of the same medium have different
potential effects independent of the sign system. This is the essential idea of Marshall McLuhan’s
famous dictum “The medium is the message” (McLuhan 1994, 7–21). So in the move from hand-
written manuscripts to printed books, the sign system remains the same, but the medium under-
goes changes that have important effects (Eisenstein 1980) inflected by ideology (Street 1984).
In the recent past, the advent of computers transformed the way alphabetic texts were writ-
ten and read; and more recently, cell phones and tablets have led to an even more radical trans-
formation in the nature of alphabetic communication. Unlike traditional alphabetic genres, one
can argue that text messaging has a counterpart in interpersonal oral dialogue. Nevertheless,
they are not the same. Texting is a kind of digital version of an oral conversation, but it is a
unique genre specific to the digital medium with its own conventions. Writing or printing on
paper disembodies language and separates the addresser from the addressee in both time and
space. Texting also disembodies language, but it separates the addresser from the addressee in
space, not necessarily in time. The temporal immediacy of texting induces the development of
a genre analogous to the oral genre of interpersonal dialogue. As in the case of written and
printed language, it must compensate for what is lost when the language is disembodied, but the
immediacy of the communication and the materiality of the digital medium lead to compensa-
tions very different from those that characterize graphic inscription and print. Abbreviations
such as “lol,”“rofl,”“lmao,” for example, are not digital expressions of actual laughter in an analo-
gous interpersonal dialogue. They are unique texting conventions that serve a phatic function
and convey the positive disposition of the addressee toward the content of a message.
Even for the period prior to the digital age, the distinction between the sign system of alpha-
betic writing and the medium of graphic inscription is important. The acknowledgment that
the medium must be considered independent from the sign system allows for an analytical
model that can correlate variations in the medium (e.g., handwriting v. print) with different
effects; and this is one of the bases for the field of book history. The shift from hand-written
manuscripts to printed books has effects that go beyond efficiency and practical utility; and the
more recent development of computers and smart phones further transforms communicative
practices with corresponding effects.
The transformation that has been occurring in the modern digital age brings with it certain
ironies. Pictography played an important role at an early stage in the development of the first
writing systems (Schmandt-Besserat 1992, 120–121), and modern text messaging returns to a
partial reliance upon pictography in the form of emojis as one of the techniques that compen-
sates for the disembodiment of language. In a sense, some emojis reembody language pictorially
in order to convey meaning, intent, or attitudes that are not normally communicated through,
or are more efficient than, verbal language. So digital media begins incorporating pictorial imag-
ery as a way of increasing the communicative effectiveness of the sign system.
Rational and aesthetic modes of communication

We might characterize the original move from pictorial representation to phonography as a
move from a more “aesthetic” to a more “rational” mode of representation. And the incorpora-
tion of pictorial imagery in modern text messaging constitutes a partial move back to a more
aesthetic mode of communication. The distinction drawn here between aesthetic and rational
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Galen Brokaw
should not be understood as hierarchical or value laden; and these are not absolute descriptors.
“Rational” in this context refers to the predetermined, codified semiotic conventions that con-
vey meaning or intent. Roy Harris argues that “conceptions of human rationality vary according
to the view of language adopted” (Harris 2013b, xiv); and the dominant modern view of lan-
guage as a codified system of rules is the product of a rationality that derives from alphabetic
literacy (Linell 2005). On the other hand, “aesthetic,” which derives from “aesthesis” meaning
“sense perception,” refers here not to the question of beauty but rather to communicative prac-
tices that constitute their rules and conventions (for lack of better terms) in the act of commu-
nication. The theoretical but non-existent absolutely rational system would be an absolutely
codified system that exhibited no free variation and no extraneous elements. An absolutely
aesthetic practice, on the other hand, would have no predetermined rules or conventions, and
would be limited at best to invoking feelings or intuitions.
All sign systems lie somewhere on the continuum between these two extremes and have both
rational and aesthetic dimensions. Even predominantly “rational” signing practices never exhaust
the resources that their media make available. More importantly, they never operate in a com-
pletely logical and consistent way. They exhibit features that users can play or innovate with
either for purely aesthetic effect or in order to modify, add to, or expand the meaning or intent
that they wish to convey. This means that communication is never reducible to the rational
dimension of the sign system. What I am calling the aesthetic mode of communication involves
inherent and inevitable innovations that modify or add to the meaning that is constructed, even
with the predetermined rules of “rational” systems. All communicative practices rely to one
degree or another upon what can be described after the fact as rules and conventions.The essen-
tial question is the extent to which they operate in an aesthetic mode and constitute those rules
in the act of communication versus a rational mode that relies on predetermined ones.
A sign system such as alphabetic script that is based on the representation of the individual
sounds of oral language must rely heavily on predetermined rules. At the most basic level, readers
must learn through prior instruction the arbitrary relationship between letters and sounds.
Furthermore, as explained above, the remediation of European oral languages into alphabetic
script, particularly with the advent of printing in the early modern period, induced the formal-
ization of grammatical rules and stylistic conventions that serve as the basis for the modern
concept of language as linguistic system.
The claim here is not that oral language employed no grammatical structures prior to writing
and print but rather that such structures did not have the same force or linguistic ontology that
they acquired through the formalization of official grammatical rules and conventions. Systems
of grammatical rules can be abstracted from any language, but these abstractions do not feed
back into linguistic practice in the same way prior to their explicit formalization as rules and
conventions. Language did not exist in the same way prior to this formalization. Integrationist
linguists such as Roy Harris claim that no such thing as a language exists in the first place (Harris
2013a, 25–28), but the institutionalization of grammar and style induces a change in linguistic
practice. The transpositioning of oral language into alphabetic writing took the semiotic func-
tions of communication, which had been dispersed, and concentrated them in verbal language.
The isolation of the verbal component of communication induced a formalization and stan-
dardization of linguistic practice that came to be understood as a priori rules and conventions.
The formalization and standardization of these rules and conventions was then projected back
onto, and attributed to, oral language. This projection then serves as the basis for the metaphysi-
cal conceptualization of language as a system of rules (Linell 2005, 142–146). This perspective
on language is thoroughly conditioned by alphabetic writing, and it induces the expectation that
other sign systems will be similarly rational rather than aesthetic (Linell 2005, 122–123).
110
From this perspective unfamiliar sign systems present several difficulties for decipherment.
Approaches to decipherment are based primarily on the assumption that communicative prac-
tices are reducible to fixed codes. In other words, they focus on the rational, analytic dimension
of a sign system, and they ignore the aesthetic dimension. The first step in this process is to
determine which features are “rational” or conventional and thus need deciphering and which
are merely aesthetic and thus can be ignored in terms of decipherment.The assumption that the
communicative practices of a sign system must conform to predetermined rules and conven-
tions is a perspective characteristic of societies with more or less strictly codified rules and
conventions. In contrast, the social, economic, and political institutions of many societies do not
depend upon such strict codification. The codification of grammatical and stylistic rules that
occurred with alphabetic writing might inevitably occur with any sign system that relied upon
an asynchronous secondary medium that disembodied the communicative act under the same
socio-economic and political conditions. But the nature of the codification would vary with the
nature of the sign system, the particular nature of the disembodiment, and the social nature of
the production and reception of signs.
Any communicative interaction must rely to some extent upon a kind of agreement between
the addresser and the addressee with regard to what signs mean and how they relate to each
other. In direct, primary, or synchronous communicative interactions (e.g., face-to-face conver-
sations), this agreement is constantly negotiated and renegotiated. The rules and conventions
that can be abstracted from communicative practices are often more tendencies and inclinations
than rules. It is only when institutions of power such as schools, newspapers, and publishers
begin imposing and enforcing official rules that grammatical and stylistic systems take on their
rigidly predetermined quality. And typically, some form of secondary medium facilitates the
development of these institutions. Then the strength of such systems leads us to project back
onto language a rigid systematicity that was only constituted as such by the process of abstrac-
tion and institutionalization. The more enduring nature of secondary signing practices may be
more conducive to the development of more codified sign systems and their accompanying
institutions, but the nature of the medium and the ideological practices associated with it con-
tribute to the degree to which this happens. Phonographic writing is particularly prone to such
codification, because it isolates the sound system at a level of specificity that requires its own
differential logic independent from any meaning.
In modern alphabetic societies, socio-political institutions impose rigidly codified rules of
grammar and style that regulate the negotiation of meaning. This results from the interaction
between the socio-political institutions, their particular ideologies, and the media through
which they perpetuate themselves. In so-called more traditional societies, what signs mean and
how they communicate meaning are often less determined because the institutions that regulate
semiotic functions tend to be less monolithic. The signifying practices of such societies are
inherently more aesthetic in the sense that they allow for more originality: they simultaneously
negotiate meaning and the practices that produce it. Their communicative practices are not
always as strictly governed by a priori rules; they are often more free to constitute the rules upon
which communication is based in the communicative act itself.
Aesthesis and rationality in indigenous American sign systems

Insofar as iconographic sign systems transposition the reality and the communicative acts of
everyday life, they will inherently involve aesthetic practices to a greater extent than sign systems
such as alphabetic script.The mimetic nature of iconography makes it inherently more aesthetic
because the relationship between signifier and referent is determined by the mimetic mode.This
111
Galen Brokaw
is not to say that iconographic scripts may not have rules and conventions, whether explicitly
formalized or not. The process of transpositioning the natural and social world into mimetic
images will necessarily induce a certain level of reflexivity conducive to more formalized con-
ventionalization. Elsewhere I have argued that iconography relies upon and further develops the
cultural codes inherent in the images that it transpositions in ways analogous to how alphabetic
script relies upon and further develops linguistic codes and conventions (Brokaw 2010b). But
the mimetic nature of the medium allows for the introduction of signs and relationships between
signs without necessarily the same kind of propaedeutic instruction required by sign systems in
which the relationship between signifiers and referents are arbitrary. An iconographic sign sys-
tem will still engage in practices that potentially can be abstracted into rules and conventions,
even highly complex ones; but the nature of mimesis and the intuitive relationship between
iconographic signs and their referents allow for a much more aesthetic mode of communication
that maintains a role for innovation rather than relying strictly upon predetermined rules.
This is one of the reasons why Mesoamerican scribes were so easily able to adapt icono-
graphic scripts for new purposes in the colonial period. Figure 5.6, for example, presents a bill
of sale in iconographic script from 1562 for a plot of land near Tomatlan, Mexico (Brokaw
1998). This particular genre did not exist in pre-Hispanic times; but even without previous
familiarity with the conventions employed (which are based on pre-Hispanic practices) a basic
understanding of the cultural context makes the document relatively easy to read. The plot of
land is marked by four stakes at each corner. The hand icons extending from the posts on the
lower and left edges signal the size of the plot. The heads of a man and a woman inside the
boundaries of the plot represent the buyers.The circles represent the purchase price of ten pesos.
The eight smaller circles within each peso represent tomines, the unit of currency equal to an
eighth of a peso. These tomines help insure the identification of the larger circles as pesos. To the
left of the plot, the first head presents the owner of the land, and the fact that his eyes are closed
indicates that he is deceased. The head below him connected by a dotted line to the pesos rep-
resents the community official who administered the sale and received payment.The eight heads
on the other side of the road on the right side of the page indicate members of the community
who served as witnesses to the sale. This document combines pre-Hispanic conventions such as
the closed eyes to represent death with colonial-era innovations that create new signs and con-
ventions to represent new objects and phenomena such as the pesos and the principle of private
land ownership.
Iconographic scripts inherently lend themselves to this type of aesthetic mode, but abstract
systems can do so as well. Frank Salomon has identified precisely this type of phenomenon in
the staff code of the Andean village of Tupicocha (Salomon 2001). The minor political office
holders in the community of Tupicocha are selected by the community for one-year terms of
service. Each of the offices is associated with a staff created each year specifically for the office
holder and inscribed with an identifying inscription made up of three possible symbols that can
appear individually or in groupings. At community events where these office holders play a role,
they lay out and organize their staffs prior to the event in order to determine the hierarchy
appropriate for that particular context. Both the combination and sequence of symbols or sym-
bol groupings corresponding to each office and the hierarchy in any given situation is highly
variable. Salomon argues that contrary to the nature of most sign systems which consist of a
fixed code that can produce varying messages, the Tupicocha staff system employs a variable
code to produce a fixed message: the general social structure of the message will always be the
same, but the configuration of signs that produce that message may vary depending on the
socio-economic and political context at the time (Salomon 2001, 12–13). Salomon emphasizes
the fact that the official acceptance of individual staff inscriptions at the beginning of the year
112
Figure 5.6 Tomatlan bill of sale. Lilly Library, Indiana University.
and the arrangement of the staffs for specific events occur with little to no verbal language
(2001, 9–11). The staff-code practice plays out in a socio-political context in which the partici-
pants are all present. As such, the nature of the practice is an interesting example of a material
medium integrated into the social interactions that it is designed to support and facilitate.
The Tupicocha staff code differs significantly from other sign systems, but it also demon-
strates on a smaller scale the primordial nature of any given practice of signification. Essentially,
signifiers are resources for the communication of intention. These signifiers originate in a
113
Galen Brokaw
process that negotiates meaning. The initial innovation that produces successful communication
may set precedents that develop into conventions. Institutions of power may then convert these
conventions into rules; but all rules and conventions of communication (the meaning of indi-
vidual words, grammar structures, stylistic conventions, and so forth) necessarily originated in a
primordial conversion of pure aesthesis into semiosis.The conventionalization and institutional-
ization of the original practice disguises that origin, but it remains nonetheless.
An understanding of the primordial nature of communication as an integrated practice as
opposed to the deployment of an autonomous fixed code and the various ways in which such
practices can develop (including into fixed codes) has important implications not only for
approaching the work of decipherment but also for understanding what decipherment even
means. Traditional epigraphy approaches decipherment under the assumption that sign systems
function as fixed codes. Semiotically homogenous and asynchronous systems such as modern
alphabetic script inherently tend toward the development of fixed codes, and therefore they
would be highly susceptible to epigraphic analysis. And to some extent all signifying practices
have “rational” elements that can be understood at any given moment as a fixed code that lends
itself to an epigraphic methodology. But communicative practices that rely upon more aesthetic
modes of communication are not susceptible to epigraphic analysis in the same way precisely
because they are not fixed.Thus if a particular medium or sign carrier with its associated signify-
ing system operates on the aesthetic end of the continuum, then epigraphic analysis must
acknowledge the inevitably limited, incomplete, and contingent nature of its findings.
This argument does not set up a strict opposition between the “rationality” of European
alphabetic writing and the “aesthetics” of indigenous American signifying practices. All com-
municative practices and signifying systems exhibit both rational and aesthetic characteristics.
The quipus employed by the Inca state appears to have functioned in a highly “rational” system.
And Maya logo-syllabic script inherently involves at least in part a fixed code by virtue of its
phonographic nature. Even the iconographic scripts of other Mesoamerican societies employed
standardized conventions to one degree or another.
Furthermore, literacy in Mesoamerica and the Andes was almost certainly as complex, if not
more so, than it was in Europe in the sixteenth century. In modern societies with universal edu-
cation, literacy tends to be seen as an either/or phenomenon. This is less true than we tend to
think, but a basic knowledge of reading does give one a certain level of access to any text. This
was not always the case with Mesoamerican iconography or the Inca quipu. The various genres
of these media would have employed conventions in distinct ways or even different sets of con-
ventions. Mesoamerican scribes may have been well-versed in all aspects and levels of their
respective sign systems, but the masses would have exhibited different levels of literacy depend-
ing on their particular role in society. All levels of society may have understood to some extent
the iconography built into public architecture, but a thorough and detailed reading of ritual
books would have required more specialized knowledge. In the case of the Andes, we cannot
talk about the quipu as a monolithic system either: the evidence suggests that different levels of
quipu literacy operated in a wide array of social, economic, and political spheres, from shepherds
who maintained records of their flocks to imperial historians who recorded histories of the Inca
rulers (Brokaw 2010a, 121–23).
Conclusion
An understanding of both the nature of indigenous American media (their rational and aesthetic
dimensions) and the nature of their particular literacies has important implications for our
understanding of pre-Hispanic and colonial contexts and the methodologies that we use to
114
study them. Any project that involves “reading” an indigenous sign system must necessarily
attempt to understand the interplay between rational and aesthetic practices. At the very least, it
must keep in mind the difference between these two modes and the limitations of traditional
epigraphic approaches. The aesthetic nature of many indigenous American signifying practices
may mean that we will never be able to completely decipher them; and acknowledging this may
at least help avoid both mistakenly reductive and speciously authoritative readings.
Moreover, this theoretical perspective must inform our understanding of the way in which
indigenous American discourses interacted with alphabetic script in the colonial period. Both
European and indigenous discourses were transpositioned into the sign systems and media of the
other. Mesoamerican iconographic and Andean quipu-based histories were transcribed into
alphabetic script (Brokaw 1998, 2003, 2010a, 127–163). European genres such as the bill of sale
(carta de venta) and the title (título) were produced in iconographic script alongside alphabetic
versions (Brotherston et al. 1997; Brokaw 1998). And confessions and religious prayers were
encoded on quipu (Harrison 2002; Charles 2007; Brokaw 2010a, 226–234). This transposition-
ing from one medium into another always results in a transformation.Thus, we must be attentive
to the shifts that occur when this happens and to the socio-cultural and political contexts that
inform the processes of both production and reception of such texts.
Equally important, however, is the way that such an understanding sheds light on the true
nature of our own signifying practices. The codification of conventions into rules induced by
the nature of alphabetic writing and the institutionalization of literacy was not merely a benign
transpositioning of the material phenomenon of oral language into the materiality of ink and
paper. The voluminous scholarship on literacy, print, and other kinds of media elucidates the
powerful interplay between material forms on the one hand and human cognition and socio-
economic and political institutions on the other. The integrationist perspective that informs the
theoretical model presented here does not deny the significance of this interplay. Rather, it
highlights the way in which the institutionalization of writing and print obscures the primordial
nature of all forms of communication and the media that support them.The challenge posed by
non-phonographic sign systems like Mesoamerican iconography and the Andean quipu is not
always first and foremost the logical decipherment of a code or sign system but rather the over-
coming of the biases derived from alphabetic writing in our conceptualization of the nature of
communication and what makes it possible.
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6
LATIN AMERICAN AND
CARIBBEAN COLONIAL
STUDIES AND/IN THE
DECOLONIAL TURN
A wide array of publications in the last 15–20 years indicate the emergence, solidification, and
continued expansion of a decolonial turn in theory, scholarly research, and critique. The deco-
lonial turn considers that modern Western colonialism and its legacies are central to the under-
standing of Western modernity, and that decolonization can be regarded not merely as an event,
but more fundamentally, as an attitude and an unfinished project (Maldonado-Torres 2017a,
112–13). Not a small part of these ideas have been framed with explicit reference to the concepts
of coloniality and decoloniality.
This chapter is an introduction to the exploration of the connections between Latin American
and Caribbean colonial studies and scholarship on coloniality and the decolonial turn. Attention
to the work of Aníbal Quijano and Sylvia Wynter offers an appreciation of the relevance of dif-
ferent major historical moments of the decolonial turn for the understanding of colonization
and modernity. It also highlights the importance of avoiding a conflation between Latin America
and the Caribbean, and between Latin American and Caribbean colonial studies.
For both Quijano and Wynter, coloniality is less an object of study with discreet temporal
and/or spatial boundaries than an organizing logic that is entangled with Western modernity.
Attention to coloniality cannot dispense with a careful consideration of the historical periods of
colonization in different parts of the world, including indigenous points of view that consider
that colonization is ongoing. Coloniality, however, is present within and without colonial ter-
ritories and settler colonial spaces that are considered republics or nation-states. Since the
Caribbean and Latin America are the first areas of modern colonization in the so-called New
World, colonial Caribbean and Latin American studies have much to offer in terms of under-
standing the constitution of modernity/coloniality.
Aníbal Quijano
La colonialidad, en consecuencia, es aún el modo más general de dominación en el
mundo actual, una vez que el colonialismo como orden político explícito fue destruido.
Ella no agota, obviamente, las condiciones, ni las formas de explotación y de dominación
117
existentes entre las gentes. Las relaciones coloniales de periodos anteriores, probable-
mente no produjeron las mismas secuelas y sobre todo no fueron la piedra angular de
ningún poder global.
(Quijano 1991a, 14; trans. in Quijano 2010, 24)
Aníbal Quijano (1928–2018) was one of the most renowned Latin American sociologists in the
second half of the twentieth and the early part of the twenty-first century. Among other achieve-
ments, he was a major contributor to the theory of dependency (see, among others, Quijano1970a,
1970b). In the late 1980s and early 1990s he also coined the terms coloniality and coloniality of
power, and started to develop theoretical accounts of these concepts that played a vital role in
the generation of a decolonial turn in various fields of scholarship (Quijano 2010 [1991], 1993,
1994; Quijano and Wallerstein 1992). Quijano started his career as an expert on the work of the
also Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui (Quijano 1956), who is best known for his Seven Interpretive
Essays on Peruvian Reality (Mariátegui 2007 [1928]). Mariátegui’s Seven Interpretive Essays offer a
creative Marxist approach to the conditions of Peru that considers the specific situation of Latin
America, including its colonial history, and the role of race and ethnicity, in addition to class, in
the formation of Peruvian society (Quijano 1995a). In doing this, Mariátegui arguably formu-
lated a creolized version of Marxism that, with all its limitations, brought to light and challenged
accounts of capitalism that used metropolitan European history as the norm.
Not far from Mariátegui, Quijano’s early work also focused on seeking to understand the
particularities of the Peruvian reality. His doctoral dissertation, “The emergence of the ‘cholo’
group and its implications for Peruvian society” (1965, my translation), explored what Quijano
called the “cholificación” of the Peruvian population, the containment of “cholos” as a political
force, and their potential. By “cholificación,” Quijano refers to a process of de-indianization of
indigenous communities, many of which migrated to urban centers, particularly after 1945
(Quijano 2006, 19). Rita Segato refers to “cholificación” as a process of mestizaje from below,
different from a mestizaje from the position of the sectors of the colonial society that claimed
Spanish ancestry (2010, 2014).
It is illuminating that one of the earliest literary references to the term “cholo” appears in the
Comentarios reales de los incas (Royal commentaries of the Incas; Garcilaso 1991 [1609]) by the also
Peruvian Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539–1616), back when what is known today as Peru was
an administrative district of the Spanish Empire. Garcilaso went to Spain in his early twenties
and lived there for most of his life (Varner 1968). In a chapter on “Nombres nuevos para nom-
brar diversas generaciones” [“New names to name diverse generations,” interestingly also trans-
lated elsewhere as “New names for various racial groups”] in the Comentarios, Garcilaso states
that “cholo” is a term used to refer to the offspring of mulattas and mulattoes (see Vega 1991
[1609], book 9, chapter 31). At that time and in that context, Garcilaso explains that mulatta and
mulatto were terms used to refer to the offspring of a Black man and an indigenous woman, or
a Black woman and an indigenous man.
Garcilaso’s Comentarios reales can be read as an anthropological treatise, “entre la épica y la
historia” [between epic and history], as Mariátegui would put it, that seeks to shed light on
Peruvian reality before, throughout, and right after the initial moments of conquest (Mariátegui
2007 [1928], 199). The information that Garcilaso offers about the emerging terms used to
identify different people (criolla/os, mulattas/oes, cholas/os) combine reference to geography,
labor positions, and gender instead of simply, or principally, religiosity. In doing so, it testifies to
the emergence of new categories of identity and social position in a “New World” that includes
Europe, Africa, the Americas, and the rest of the until then known world (Quijano 1991b, 1993).
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Colonial studies and the decolonial turn
In this, one not only finds a displacement of theology as the preferred discourse to produce
knowledge about the world, but also, an awareness of the necessarily inter-relational mode of
analysis that is needed in order to make sense of the emerging globalized Western modernity
(Maldonado-Torres 2014). As Sergio Villena Fiengo has suggested, one could argue that this
form of analysis present in Garcilaso’s work not only anticipated, but also served as a source for
Mariátegui’s and Quijano’s explorations of “Peruvian reality” (2016).
The connection between the colonial figure of the Inca Garcilaso and both, Mariátegui and
Quijano, also transpires in Mariátegui’s and Quijano’s work. Mariátegui characterizes Garcilaso
as “the first Peruvian, if we understand ‘peruanity’ as a social formation, determined by the
Spanish conquest and colonization” (Mariátegui 2007, 198, my translation). Quijano, in turn,
considers Garcilaso as one of the principal “mestizos” who learned the “cultural codes of the
victors” to transmit the idea of the “complex intersubjective universes” of the inhabitants of
Peru before the conquest (1993, 171, my translation). For Quijano, knowledge of the richness
and complexity of the indigenous world prior to the conquest represented a threat to the colo-
nial order as it could serve as a major source of “cultural resistance over time” (1993, 171, my
translation).
Quijano identifies two main directions in “the defense of indigenous legacy” (Quijano 2007,
143, my translation) and traces one of them to Garcilaso’s Royal Commentaries. This modality of
defense of indigenous heritage insists on “the peaceful, civilizing, and solidaric character of the
Inca” (143, my translation). He differentiates this direction from another one that he traces to
the also classic colonial text New Chronicle of Good Government by Guaman Poma de Ayala
(c. 1535-c. 1615), which, according to him, is more critical than Garcilaso’s because it “insists on
power and its implications” (143, my translation). For Quijano, both directions converge in con-
temporary calls for the restoration of “una sociedad tawantinsuyana” [a tawantinsuyan society]
against “the increasingly predatory character of capital today” (143, my translation). Perhaps it is
not an exaggeration to indicate that both directions (“vertientes”) that are present in Garcilaso’s
Royal Commentaries and in Guaman Poma’s work can also be found in Quijano’s conceptualiza-
tion of coloniality.
Quijano approaches Garcilaso’s and Guaman Poma de Ayala’s work as different, yet related
forms, of a decolonial turn against “cultural coloniality” (Quijano 2010 [1991], 23). By cultural
coloniality Quijano means the relationship of domination between “Western” culture and all
other cultures, but not only as an external relation between them. Cultural coloniality is a rela-
tionship that consists, “in the first place, of a colonization of the imagination of the dominated;
that is, it acts in the interior of that imagination, in a sense, it is a part of it” (23; see also
Gruzinski 1990).This interiorization of domination is the product of “[t]he repression, above all,
over the modes of knowing, of producing knowledge, of producing perspectives, images and
systems of images, symbols, modes of signification, over the resources, patterns, and instruments
of formalized and objectivized expression, intellectual or visual” (23).There was also the imposi-
tion of the “rulers’ own patterns of expression” and of their “beliefs and images,” all of which
served to facilitate “a very efficient means of social and cultural control, when the immediate
repression ceased to be constant and systematic” (23).
For Quijano, modern Western cultural coloniality started, not only with a systematic repres-
sion and subordination of non-European cultures, but also with “a massive and gigantic exter-
mination of the natives” in the Americas (2010 [1991], 24). One of the key features of the global
New World and of its mapping of subjects and geography is that it creates spaces for genocide.
Cultural coloniality is anchored in this conceptualization, which is also a material relation,
between the West and non-Western spaces.
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Quijano’s attention to the demographic, cultural, and epistemic catastrophes that served as a
foundation to the New World explains why he considered cultural resistance so important,
including the work of the Inca Garcilaso and Guaman Poma de Ayala, as well as the culture of
“cholas” and “cholos” in twentieth-century Peru.1 That is, cultural resistance in the colonies
could not but take unique forms in the face of such catastrophes. The degree of devastation in
the Americas, along with the “widespread importation of a labour force,” led Quijano to advance
the thesis, in a joint publication with Immanuel Wallerstein, that “the mode of cultural resistance
to oppressive conditions was less in the claims of historicity than in the flight forward to ‘moder-
nity’” (Quijano and Wallerstein 1992, 549). That is, the catastrophic disconnection from the past
by the decimation of the population, the importation and imposition of new systems of domina-
tion and exploitation, and the destruction and colonization of vast cultural spaces and knowl-
edge formations in the New World, made it difficult to engage in cultural resistance by trying to
assert a connection with the past. This would seem to indicate that assimilation to modernity
was the only route of resistance for colonized subjects, yet much of Quijano’s work indicates that
the most apt term and direction would be decoloniality.2
Quijano’s concepts of “coloniality” and “coloniality of power” are the outcome of his own
decolonial turn within the social sciences, expressed as a form of epistemological decolonization
that is in conversation with the multiple forms of cultural and social resistance to colonialism and
its legacies in the modern world. In his 1991 essay, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” he
referred to decolonization as “epistemic reconstitution,” which involves divesting—desprenderse,
which appears as “to divest” in the translation, and that Mignolo interprets as “delinking,” which
he connects to “epistemic disobedience”—from “the pitfalls of European rationality/moder-
nity” (Quijano 2010 [1991], 30).3 The epistemic reconstitution introduced by the concepts of
coloniality and coloniality of power involves a questioning of the standard approach to the spa-
tial and temporal boundaries of colonialism and decolonization. For Quijano, coloniality sur-
vives explicit forms of colonialism, and is part of a global matrix of power that emerged or that
at least started to acquire centrality with the “discovery” of the New World. While similar per-
spectives have been advanced before, Quijano greatly benefited from one of the most pressing
social and intellectual debates that were taking place when he formulated the concept of colo-
niality: the debate around the meaning and significance of the 500th anniversary of the “discov-
ery” of the Americas. This historical context has been characterized as a major moment in the
genealogy of the decolonial turn (Maldonado-Torres 2017b).
In addition to the debate about the 500 years after the “discovery,” the late 1980s and early
1990s presented a challenge to leftist intellectuals everywhere, including in Latin America.
Whether justified or not at that time, Marxism was in crisis because of the fall of the Berlin Wall
and the Soviet Union in 1989. It was the end of a crucial part of the Cold War—which contin-
ued in other places such as the Korean Peninsula (We 2019). Marxists like Quijano, who had
been critical of key ideas in the standard Marxism of the time, particularly the concept of totality,
of economic reductionism, and of the absolute centrality of class in the analysis of capitalism and
the opposition to it, found themselves in an arena that invited them to carefully and seriously
consider the question of the significance of “discovery” and colonialism.4 This explains the tone
and the substance of Quijano’s essay “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” which starts with
specific reference to “the conquest of the societies and the cultures which inhabit what today is
called Latin America” (Quijano 2010 [1991], 22). Quijano also makes a connection between
conquest and “the constitution of a new world order” that culminates “five hundred years later,
in a global power covering the whole planet” (22).
“Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality” originally appeared as the opening article in a
special issue largely dedicated to reflections about the “discovery” of the Americas and which
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included a section entitled “Voz indígena” [Indigenous voice] with several statements and
reports from indigenous organizations about the “discovery” (see Quijano 1991a). The article
was then reproduced in a 1992 publication entitled Los conquistados: 1492 y la población indígena
de las Américas [The conquered: 1492 and the indigenous population in the Americas; Bonilla
1992a].5 It was in this edited collection that Walter Mignolo, who is widely known for his writ-
ings on Latin American colonial studies and for his explorations of decolonial thinking, encoun-
tered Quijano’s essay for the first time. He has characterized reading Quijano’s article as “a sort
of epiphany” (2009, 39).6
While Quijano does not use the concept of “coloniality of power” explicitly in his 1991
essay, he does refer to coloniality in that essay as “the most general form of domination in the
world today” (2010 [1991], 24).7 Then, in a 1993 publication that is based on a presentation that
he offered at an international conference that took place in October of 1992 and that was dedi-
cated to Mariátegui, Europe, and “el otro aspecto del descubrimiento” [the other aspect of the
discovery], he explicitly refers to the “colonialidad del actual poder global” [the coloniality of
the current global power] (1993, 167). He also starts the essay with reference to the linkages
between capitalism, the division of labor, and the production of “new identities,” like “Indian,”
“Black,” “white,” and “mestizo,” all of which became part of his more formal definition of the
coloniality of power.
The epistemic reconstitution at work in the idea of the coloniality of power involves the
connection between political economical structures, culture, and knowledge production, as well
as between exploitation and domination, as it is explained in the 1997 essay “Coloniality of
Power, Culture, and Knowledge in Latin America” (Quijano 2000 [1997]). In this essay, Quijano
writes that “America was constituted as the first space/time of a new model of power of global
vocation, and both in this way and by it became the first identity of modernity” (533). He
explains that the new model of global power has “two fundamental axes”: (a) the idea of ‘race,’
which served as the basis to classify populations within the new model of power, and (b) capital-
ism, as a structure for the control of labor, its resources, and products that articulated “all histori-
cally known previous structures of control of labor…together around and upon the basis of
capital and the world market” (533–34). For Quijano, state hierarchies, social classification, and
domination based on the idea of race are entangled with capitalist exploitation. All of them came
together and became a central part of an emerging world system in the time of discovery, con-
quest, and colonialism. The coloniality of power refers mainly to this entanglement, which
affects the central areas of modern existence: the forms of authority (e.g., the state), labor, sex
(through the bourgeois family and exclusions from it), and intersubjectivity/knowledge (e.g.,
Eurocentrism).
By becoming a central part of Western modernity, which it helps to generate, the coloniality
of power does not depend on formal or explicit juridico-political relations of colonial domina-
tion. The coloniality of power is, therefore, not only a theory of modern Western colonialism,
but also a theory of modernity. It is a theory or analytical framework that reflected critiques of
existing paradigms and formulas, such as Marxism, neoliberal globalization, and postmodernism,
and that sought to take seriously the calls for attention to the 500 years of modern Western colo-
nization in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It also built on multiple theoretical formations that
insisted on the constant presence of colonial relations after the formation of republics and/or on
the entanglement between capitalism and race.8
While race and capitalism appear at the center of Quijano’s formulation of the coloniality of
power in the above-mentioned essay of 1997, with other forms of domination organized around
them, he offers a perhaps more radical conceptualization of the term in a footnote of a 1994
publication entitled “Colonialidad del poder y democracia” [Coloniality of power and
121
democracy]. In this text, Quijano rejects the conflation of coloniality of power and ethnicity/
race, claiming that:
Coloniality of power is, to be sure, a category that is more complex than that of rac-
ism/ethnicity. It includes, normally, the “señorialismo” between the dominant and the
dominated; sexism and patriarchalism; “familismo,” clientelism, “compadrazgo” and
patrimonialism in the relationships between the public and the private, and above all
between civil society and the political institutions. And articulating and bringing all of
that together, authoritarianism in society and the state. The complex racism/ethnicity
form part of the foundation of this power.
(1994, 94)9
Quijano anticipates here the proliferation of approaches to coloniality, which today include a
myriad of explorations, including the coloniality of knowledge (Lander 2000; Mignolo 2000;
Grosfoguel and Cervantes-Rodríguez 2002; Walsh, Schiwy, and Castro-Gómez, 2002; Castro-
Gómez and Grosfoguel 2007), the coloniality of gender (Lugones 2007, 2010a, 2010b; Espinosa
Miñoso, Gómez Correal, and Ochoa Muñoz 2014), and the coloniality of being (Mignolo 2003;
Wynter 2003; Maldonado-Torres 2007), among others. What is common to these various theo-
retical approaches and forms of analysis is a connection between colonial history, a colonial logic
embedded in knowledges, cultures, and institutions, and the recognition of multiple forms of
resistance.
Quijano insisted on the importance of epistemic decolonization because he thought that the
dominant theoretical frameworks in the social sciences were inhibiting a proper identification
and understanding of the major problems and possibilities that deserved to be considered in
Latin America. In this context, he points to figures such as the Inca Garcilaso and Guaman Poma
de Ayala as representatives of major forms of cultural resistance that continue having relevance
after the formal end of colonialism and the attainment of independence from Spain. He also
paid attention to at least some twentieth-century intellectuals and movements that contributed
to this perspective. Most of these were present in Latin America. I will now turn to Sylvia
Wynter to identify a parallel trajectory of engagement with colonial studies and with the deco-
lonial turn that is focused on the Caribbean and the question of Blackness.
Sylvia Wynter
The Call
1492. The Great Discoverers hurl themselves upon the Atlantic, in search of the Indies.
With them begins the poem. Also all those, before and after this New Day, who have
known their dream, lived off it or died from it. The imagination suscitates ever new
Indies, for which man quarrels with the world…
Edouard Glissant, Les indes (1956)10
Like Quijano, Sylvia Wynter was born in 1928. Her parents gave birth to her in Cuba and raised
her in Jamaica (Scott 2000), which means that right from the start of her life she was exposed to
two different histories of colonization and struggles for decolonization. On the one hand, there
was the Spanish Empire and the history of the struggle for independence in what came to be
known as Latin America, and, on the other, there was the British Empire and its presence in the
Caribbean all through the second part of the twentieth century. Jamaica became independent in
1962, which means that Wynter was a colonial subject raised in a colonial context. As a Black
122
Caribbean subject in a majority Black colony, Wynter also had to contend directly with a long
legacy of anti-Black racism which could be considered foundational for the Caribbean and the
Americas. The relationship between colonialism, modernity, the birth of the Americas and the
impact of multiple empires in the region, and anti-Blackness is central in her work.
Wynter’s work on colonialism and her contribution to the understanding of coloniality and
decoloniality are surely not limited to her lived experience as a Black Caribbean colonial subject
with roots in Cuba and Jamaica. In 1947, Wynter left Jamaica to study modern languages at
King’s College, London. Her specialization was Spanish with a minor in English (Scott 2000,
126). The teacher who advised her to pursue this path was a specialist in sixteenth and seven-
teenth century Spanish literature (127), and Wynter herself completed a Master’s degree on
Golden Age Spanish Drama in 1953. Wynter thus became very well versed on the period of the
formation and expansion of the Spanish empire in the Americas.
Wynter was not a traditional scholar of the Spanish Golden Age, though. Her approach to the
Golden Age as well as to drama was informed by the emerging anticolonial movements in Jamaica
and the diaspora from at least the 1940s. In Jamaica, she was part of a generation of students who
were greatly impacted by the anticolonial Jamaica Youth Movement (Scott 2000, 126). While in
London, Wynter met other young people from the West Indies, Africa, and India, all of whom
shared an anticolonial sensibility, leading to what Wynter describes as a sense of “Third Worldness.”
What we have then is that, in the 1940s and early 1950s, both Quijano and Wynter find clear
indications of the unfinished business of colonization as well as new efforts or new possibilities
to engage colonization critically and creatively. For Quijano, it was the “cholificación” of indig-
enous communities in urban spaces of Peru. While Peru was an independent nation-state, the
sociological dimensions of indigenous peoples who lived in urban spaces (but not only there)
was indicative of a constant presence of colonial features in Peruvian society. Quijano was not
an expert in colonial studies or a colonial subject. He was in touch with colonial reality in
another way. It was as a sociologist who observed the social dynamics around “cholas” and “cho-
los” that he became obsessed, if you will, with the question of the legacies of colonization and
cultural resistance. Already in Latin America, there was an investment in the idea of develop-
ment, particularly after the end of the Second World War. Developmentalism made the colonial
period appear further in the past than it actually was. In the eyes of many, development repre-
sented the last stroke against indigenous reality in Latin America. At least in Quijano’s approach,
“cholificación” represented a challenge to the developmentalist ideal and to the search for solu-
tions to the problems created by colonization only within Western modernity.
It was different for Wynter, yet there are common threads. Wynter was closer than Quijano
to specializing in colonial studies and she was a colonial subject herself. The colonial condition
of Jamaica at the time should not be underestimated. As Wynter points out:
up to then we had been a totally governed and administered people.You cannot imag-
ine how total a system colonialism was! I still remember the image of the British gov-
ernor’s plumed helmet, his white suit, his military entourage, the flag of the British
Empire and so on. The whole ceremonial panoply of it! How could it even have
occurred to you then, before the struggles erupted, that you as a ‘native’ subject could
take action on your own?
(Scott 2000, 125)
Wynter did not have to read Mariátegui or any particular figures to be persuaded about the
continued relevance of colonialism because Jamaica was still a colony.While Spanish colonialism
in the Americas concluded in around 1898, the British Empire persisted well into the
123
twentieth century. Also, while the Spaniards settled in the Americas and mixed in various ways
with the local populations, thereby creating a large creole and mestizo population, the British
tended to govern from a distance and their colonies in the Caribbean had a majority Black
population most of whom were originally introduced as slaves. As a result, the critical engage-
ments with British dominion in Jamaica could not avoid addressing colonialism, racial slavery,
and anti-Blackness, which mestizo Latin Americans could seek to evade more easily.
The 1940s and the early 1950s have been conceptualized as a key part of a massively influ-
ential moment of the decolonial turn (Maldonado-Torres 2017a), and in that sense it is not
surprising to find that Quijano’s and Wynter’s own intellectual decolonial turns seem to have
taken place in that context.Those were the moments when a second wave of anticolonial move-
ments were emerging and when both these movements and the tragedies of the Second World
War led to an intensification of skepticism about the promises of European civilization.
The increasing anticolonial sensibility and the skepticism had already started. For example,
C.L.R. James published his Black Jacobins in 1938, and Aimé Césaire his Cahier d’un retour au pays
natal in 1939. Both of them wrote these texts as colonial subjects in a colonial context, which
makes them primary sources in Caribbean colonial studies. The critique of colonialism quickly
intensified, which become obvious in Césaire’s Discourse sur le colonialisme (1952) and Frantz
Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and Wretched of the Earth (1962), which concludes with
a call to abandon Europe and avoid the reproduction of colonial structures, knowledges, hierar-
chies, and values after independence.
Born in the 1960s, the Latin American sociology of dependency of which Quijano was part
also warned about the problems with the reproduction of European ideas of development and,
in some cases, of internal forms of colonialism in Latin American states (e.g., González Casanova
1970 [1963], Stavenhagen 1970 [1965]). Intellectuals in the West Indies were also contributing
to the critical reflection on the social, political, economic, and cultural models that the colonies
had inherited from the European empires, as they were also trying to find a path forward. For
the West Indians, this was a particularly urgent manner as most of the territories could become
independent, for the first time, within a matter of a few years. Also, many of the territories would
be constituted by a majority of Black citizens, which means that they had to tackle anti-Black
racism frontally from the start.
In the 1960s, perhaps the most important West Indian intellectual movement that engaged in
a critique of colonialism and in an exploration of alternative ways of organizing society, conceiv-
ing of knowledge, culture, etc., was the New World Group. The work of the New World Group,
and its journal, the New World Quarterly, was rooted in the anticolonial sentiment that Wynter
found in Jamaica and London back in the 1940s and 1950s (Walmsley 1992, 195).
While Wynter was not part of the New World Group like Quijano was part of the depen-
dency theorists or Elsa Goveia was part of the New World Group itself, she had at least two
publications in the New World Quarterly and considered herself part of the general movement
around it (Scott 2000, 146).Very important to understand Wynter’s engagement with colonial-
ism is one idea that was central to the New World Group and that Wynter found greatly valu-
able: the conceptualization of the plantation as the “starting point of the modern world and
developing a new scholarship based on that…” (Scott 2000, 146). As a student of language more
than a historian herself, Wynter conceives the search for the cognitive perspective that facilitates
this new scholarship as “a new science of the Word” (Wynter 2001).Wynter takes this term from
Césaire’s work, but she interprets it in light of her view of Fanon’s conception of sociogeny, or
the mutual imbrication of social formations, culture, and the lived experience of human beings.
A science of the Word is a study of the master codes and rules, also understood by Wynter as the
sociogenic principle, that accounts for the production and reproduction of modes of being
124
human. How all of this is relevant to colonial studies is that both Césaire’s and Fanon’s work
were meditations on and from the colonial experience. Like Wynter, they were not taking the
colonized or the colonial period simply as objects of study, but as a zone for the generation of
questions that could lead to the decolonization of established knowledge and the production of
new ideas with universal import. Thus, Wynter’s exploration of colonial history and literature is
driven by the effort to contribute to or generate a new philosophy of history (Wilson Harris
and Goveia; see Chamberlain 2004), a new science of the Word (Césaire and Wynter), and a new
conception of humanity (Fanon). Wynter thus produces a creative synthesis between literary
theory, semiotics, Fanonian sociogenesis, and the philosophy of history, among other areas, in the
interest of responding to the question, “What is the human?,” and how to escape the power of
what W. E. B. Du Bois (1969) referred to as the color line.
Like members of the New World Group and other Caribbean intellectuals at the time, but
probably even more so, Wynter’s work has focused on theorizing the connections between the
formation of the Caribbean, the New World, and Western modernity.What is at stake here is the
emergence of a new unit of analysis, the post-1492 Caribbean as a foundational component of
the modern West.This unit of analysis challenges the usual divides between Europe and its colo-
nies, as it also challenges temporal divides between the juridico-political colonial period and the
modern/colonial age at large.This means that formal independence does not, by itself, represent
a break with the modern/colonial order and, therefore, cannot be taken as the definitive marker
for new forms of politics, a new society, or a new form of knowledge.This perspective also chal-
lenges the academic division between colonial and non-colonial studies, and between area study
approaches, which focus on different regions of the world. It is not that these temporal and
spatial markers cannot be helpful at times, but that they should not be allowed to take the place
of a new philosophy of history that challenges the separation between Europe and non-Europe,
and between the colony, the metropolis, and the “post”-colonies. This explains why a great part
of Wynter’s work explores the sixteenth century “colonial” period (in her essays on Bernardo de
Balbuena, Bartolomé de las Casas, and Christopher Columbus, for example) and another part
explores twentieth-century Caribbean literary and historical work (in her engagement with
Lamming, Césaire, Fanon, Glissant, and others). These are for her different key moments in the
making and challenging of the post-1492 Caribbean order.
Wynter observes a significant challenge to the post-1492 episteme in Caribbean writing in a
range of contributions that go from the formation of negritude in the 1930s up to Fanon’s
Wretched of the Earth published in 1962 and beyond. She also considered the US Civil Rights
movement and the power movements, especially figures such as Malcolm X, part of the same
decolonial insurgency. The formation of Black studies and other ethnic studies areas in the US
represented for her a major moment in the struggle for the decolonization of knowledge within
the Western university.Wynter knew about Black studies and related areas from the inside, as she
became the director of the Program in African and African American Studies at Stanford
University, founded in 1969, shortly after she arrived in the US in the mid-1970s. Her work on
Black studies is consistent with her “philosophy of history,” and it engages in a critique of a
strong divide between colonial studies and ethnic studies. Rather than “studies,” the “colonial”
and the “ethnic” appear in her work as grounds for thinking critically about the making of
modern “studies,” anchored in the modern Western liberal arts and sciences and the modern
world.
Perhaps the first synthesis of Wynter’s view on the European Renaissance and the signifi-
cance of the “discovery” of the Americas and colonialism for the formation of Western moder-
nity, along with her interpretation of the formation of the new “ethnic,” “gender,” and/or
“minority studies” of the 1960s and 1970s appears in the much celebrated essay “The Ceremony
125
Must be Found: After Humanism” of 1984 (Wynter 1984). This essay responds to a crisis of the
humanities in the early 1980s. To adequately respond to this crisis, Wynter goes back to the for-
mation of humanistic studies during the European Renaissance.Wynter argues that the imbrica-
tion of the European Renaissance and the “discovery” and colonization of the Americas led to
the creation of a new dichotomy between Reason and Lack of Reason. Within this scheme,
Europeans and European civilization came to occupy the position of Reason, and “natives” from
colonial territories and “negroes” came to represent the most absolute Lack of Reason. This
framework allows Wynter to offer an interpretation of the “new studies” of the 1960s and 1970s
(ethnic, women, and/or minority studies) as major contributions to address the deeper crisis in
place: the crisis, or rather catastrophe, one could argue, of the continued reproduction of the
post-1492 order of knowledge and its global implications.
Wynter’s creative synthesis of her ideas about the Renaissance, colonialism, and anti-colonial
knowledges anticipated a larger trend of similar reflections that emerged in the 1990s and that
have been known as the Latin American modernity/coloniality research group (Escobar 2010).
Wynter’s own early conceptualization of decolonial thinking combined expert knowledges of
the Spanish Golden Age and Spanish colonialism, British colonialism, and anti-colonial responses
to both. Her being part of a generation of Afro-Caribbean anticolonial intellectuals faced with
the imminent possibility of independence in majority Black nations shaped her work and made
it relevant to decolonization. All of this considered, it can be argued that Wynter was better
equipped than Quijano to explore the theoretical significance of the post-1492 context, and
that she engaged in this activity before Quijano as well.
Without using the categories of coloniality or coloniality of power, Wynter put together a
framework that provided an account of the inherently colonial dimension of power, knowledge,
and being within modernity. She also offered a conceptualization of the decolonization of
knowledge and of the relevance of “ethnic,” “women,” and/or “minority” studies for this task.
In this, she paved the way for others who have made explicit the relevance of Black studies and
“ethnic” studies areas for decolonial thought.This is why in 2003, it was not difficult for Wynter
(2003) to rehearse and further refine her analytical framework with explicit reference to “colo-
niality” in dialogue with Quijano’s and Mignolo’s work.
By the time that Wynter engaged the emerging literature on coloniality and used the concept
of the “coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom” in 2003 (Wynter 2003), she had already greatly
developed the argument about the relevance of 1492 for the founding of the Western idea of Man.
The occasion for Wynter’s systematic exploration of this idea represented another major moment
of the decolonial turn as well as for Latin American colonial studies, one that was also crucial for
Quijano: the 500th year anniversary of the “discovery” of the Americas. Like many other intel-
lectuals at the time, Wynter started to consider, or in her case, deepen, the question about the
meaning and significance of the “discovery” of the Americas at least a few years before 1992. She
was doing so already in 1989, in an essay that concluded with an engagement with Edouard
Glissant’s contribution to the understanding of the relevance of Columbus’ “discovery” in his epic
poem of 1955, Les indes (Wynter 1989).11 By that time, Wynter had already developed a sophisti-
cated framework of her own to engage the question of the meaning and significance of the “dis-
covery,” and, as 1992 approached, she counted with a growing amount of literature by historians,
anthropologists, literary scholars and others who started to focus on the theme. As we have seen,
one such intellectual who was also contributing to these themes at the time was Aníbal Quijano.
Published in 1991, both Wynter’s “Columbus and the Poetics of the Propter Nos” (1991) and
Quijano’s “Colonialidad y modernidad/racionalidad” (1991a) appeared in journals alongside
other materials that addressed the 500th anniversary of the “discovery” of the Americas. That
Quijano, like Wynter, had already been thinking and writing about the relevance of the
126
“discovery” for the constitution of Western modernity is clear in writings such as “Modernity,
Identity, and Utopia in America Latina” (Quijano 1995 [1988]), originally published in Spanish
in 1988, and the interview entitled “La modernidad, el capital, y América Latina nacen el mismo
día” [“Modernity, Capital, and Latin America were Born on the Same Day”] (Quijano 1991b).
The shared premise in Wynter’s and Quijano’s work was that the Caribbean and Latin America
were not late and passive recipients of “modernization,” but that the “discovery” and colonialism
of the Americas were constitutive elements of W estern modernity, and, as such, that they were
part of modernity from the outset. In the Americas, one could find both the formation of dis-
courses, practices, and institutions that would gradually become global, and multiple modalities
of “cultural resistance,” to use Quijano’s term, that remain relevant in the contemporary world.
As such, the Caribbean and Latin America are both modern, but also more than just modern.
Wynter’s and Quijano’s approach to modernity would turn modernization theory and at
least some forms of colonial studies on their head. Their work proposes that modernization is
not something to struggle for after colonization. Rather, modernization has always already been
colonial. As a result, the main task for Caribbean and Latin American territories is not to mod-
ernize, but to decolonize, which is different from obtaining independence. A decolonial turn in
Caribbean and Latin American Studies, such as the one that is found in Quijano’s and Wynter’s
work, also leads us to consider the colonial periods in the Caribbean and Latin America as
intense laboratories where various forms of coloniality are produced. They are exported to
other colonial territories and become part of modern forms of governmentability. A decolonial
turn in Latin American and Caribbean studies thus calls for the development of theoretical
approaches that consider colonialism in relation to modernity/coloniality. Also important is
relational work between the different forms of colonialism in the Caribbean and in Latin
America, as well as between multiple sites of colonialism, including Africa, the Pacific, and
South Asia, among others. The forms of insurgency during the colonial period also acquire a
deep significance for the present, as they can provide valuable resources for the engagement
against coloniality. Modernity/coloniality is global, yet it has not been able to capture or subdue
every aspect of human organization or experience. A decolonial turn in colonial studies can also
help identify the extent and limits of colonial power, and open up more spaces to consider
counter-catastrophic knowledges, histories, symbols and actions in the effort to create a differ-
ent and better world.
Notes
1 For an elaboration of the concept of catastrophe in relation to coloniality and the decolonial turn, see
Maldonado-Torres (2016, 2017b).
2 In “Modernity and Coloniality/Rationality,” Quijano states that “The alternative, then, is clear: the
destruction of the coloniality of world power. First of all, epistemological decolonization, as decolonial-
ity, is needed to clear the way for new intercultural communication, for an interchange of experiences
and meanings, as the basis of another rationality which may legitimately pretend to some universality”
(Quijano 2010 [1991], 31). Note that while the concept of “epistemological decolonization” appears in
the original 1991 publication, the term “decoloniality” is added in the English translation that was
originally published in 2007 and republished in 2010. This is an indication that Quijano became
increasingly engaged with and identified with the discourse on decoloniality, which he formulated in
Spanish as “des/colonialidad” and that he used in multiple occasions, up to his last publications (see, for
example, 2014a, 2014b).
3 Mignolo often translates Quijano’s concept of desprendimiento as “delinking,” a concept that has become
central in his work (López-Calvo 2016, 176; Mignolo 2010, 2018, 20; Mignolo and Walsh 2018, 246).
Building on Quijano’s lead, Mignolo approaches authors of the colonial period such as Guaman Poma
de Ayala as examples of decolonial cultural resistance and epistemic disobedience, which he interprets
as delinking (2006, 26; 2010, 315).
127
4 In the late 1980s, Quijano criticizes Sovietism and neoliberal globalization in the context of his search
for a fresh interpretation of the relationship between modernity and Latin America. See for example
his “Paradoxes of Modernity in Latin America,” which concludes with the statement that “Statism and
capitalist privatism are actually nothing other than the Scylla and Charybdis of the navigators of our
present history. We neither have to choose between them or fear them. The ship of the new libera-
tionist rationality sails today with a new hope” (Quijano 1989, 176). That there was a certain entan-
glement at the time between the fall of the Soviet Union, which happened in 1989, and the anniversary
of the 500th year of “discovery” of the New World is directly evinced in the publication Después de la
caída: el significado de la crisis del socialismo para América Latina y Europa del Este [After the fall: the signifi-
cance of the crisis of socialism for America Latin and Eastern Europe; see Bonilla 1992b], which is a
collection of a series of presentations that took place within the space of another event entitled “1492
y la población indígena de las Américas” of January 27–30, 1992. Aníbal Quijano was one of the
speakers at these events. The publication entitled Después de la caída, includes Quijanos’s reflections
about the crisis of socialism. His reflections about 1492, discovery, and colonialism at the time appear
in a different collection of essays entitled Los conquistados: 1492 y la población indígena de las Américas
[The conquered: 1492 and the indigenous population of the Americas; see Bonilla 1992a].That is, the
same event culminated in two edited collections: one dedicated to the crisis of socialism and the
implications of the fall of the Soviet Block for Eastern Europe and Latin America, and the other to
the 500th year anniversary. Both topics were being engaged at the same time. Quijano’s contribution
to the edited book Los conquistados (Bonilla 1992a) was none other than his influential essay
“Modernity and Coloniality/Rationality.” This article is also featured (with some additions) as the
opening chapter in the 2010 edited book Globalization and the Decolonial Option (Mignolo and
Escobar 2010), which has become a common reference in the scholarship that addressed coloniality
and decoloniality in the last decade. Quijano also participated in the “Rencontre Internationale José
Carlos Mariátegui et l’Europe: L’autre aspect de la decouverte” [International meeting Jose Carlos
Mariátegui and Europe: the other aspect of discovery] which took place at the Université de Pau et
des Pays de L’Adour in France in October 1992.
5 See previous note for more information about the relevance of the time and publications where
“Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality” appeared.
6 Mignolo gives an idea of the reasons why Quijano’s concept of coloniality appeared as an epiphany to
him in his discussion of Quijano’s work in relation to other theorists such as Angel Rama, Antonio
Cornejo Polar, and Nestor García Canclini in Mignolo (2008).
7 Note that the version of “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality” that appears in a 2007 special issue
of the journal Cultural Studies, later reproduced in the edited book Globalization and the Decolonial
Option (Mignolo and Escobar 2010), includes a short section entitled “‘Race’ and the coloniality of
power” that does not appear in the original essay of 1991(Quijano 1991a) or in its reproduction in the
anthology of 1992 (Quijano 1992).
8 Unfortunately, key essays such as Quijano’s “Colonialidad y modernidad/racionalidad” [Coloniality
and modernity/rationality] and Quijano’s and Wallerstein’s “Americanity as a Concept, or the Americas
in the Modern World System,” do not include notes or references, which makes it difficult to trace the
intellectual sources and specific social movements that may have played a role in Quijano’s conceptu-
alization of coloniality.This is not altogether unusual at the time in Latin America. However, Grosfoguel
(2018) argues that Quijano reproduced a form of epistemic racism by not citing Black Marxists in the
Caribbean and the US, among others.This does not mean that Grosfoguel claims that there is no origi-
nality or substance in Quijano’s work. One can also argue that there are traces of Quijano’s position
early on in his writings on dependency (see, for example, 1970b), and that his more developed account
of the coloniality of power transcends the point about the imbrication of capitalism and race. This mat-
ter remains in the agenda for further research and discussion on Quijano and the coloniality of power.
9 This is my translation to English of a passage that is available in French and that can be read here:
http://www.multitudes.net/Colonialite-du-pouvoir-et/
10 This is Jefferson Humphries’s translation, as it appears in Glissant (1997, 166).
11 See Wynter (1989), “Beyond the Word of Man: Glissant and the New Discourse of the Antilles,” where
she makes explicit reference to the “five hundred years since Columbus sailed across an ocean sea that
was logically nonnavigable within the a priori conceptual schema and mainstream mode of ‘conven-
tional reason’ of the feudal-Christian episteme” (644).
128
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131
7
THE ECOCRITICAL TURN
AND THE STUDY OF
EARLY COLONIAL SOCIETIES
IN THE CARIBBEAN
Of dogs, rivers, and the environmental
humanities
Introduction
Eduardo Galeano’s 1971 book, The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a
Continent, introduced Latin American and Caribbean readers to the new—albeit still unnamed—
multidisciplinary field of political ecology, an approach that analyzes “environmental change as
a result of power relations, which cause highly variable access to resources” (Brannstrom 2017).
Galeano’s impassioned indictment of the resource-extraction economic model imposed on the
newly discovered lands of the Caribbean and Latin America by colonial rule, particularly in the
first centuries of Spanish control, rested on the denunciation of a history of ecological resources
being transmuted into European capital, with devastating effects for local ecologies: “Everything:
the soil, its fruits and its mineral-rich depths, the people and their capacity to work and to con-
sume, natural resources and human resources” (Galeano 1971, 2). Together with Alfred Crosby’s
The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, published a year later,
which explored the biotic impact of Christopher Columbus’ encounter with the Americas, it
framed a new ecology-focused approach to the study of the continent’s colonial history (1972).
Crosby’s book introduced concepts, theories and multidisciplinary methodologies for the study
of what it labeled “ecological imperialism” through a focus on epidemiology and the deeply
transformative transoceanic exchange of plants and animals.
Galeano and Crosby’s combined work had a galvanizing impact on the ways in which schol-
ars approach the history of the region, spearheading an “ecological turn” that inspired highly
influential environment-focused reassessments of regional environmental history like Elinor
Melville’s pioneering A Plague of Sheep (1994), Richard Grove’s Green Imperialism: Colonial
Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (1995), Shawn
132
The ecocritical turn
William Miller’s An Environmental History of Latin America (2007), and Reinaldo Funes Monzote’s
From Rainforest to Cane Field in Cuba: An Environmental History since 1492 (2008).
In the discussion that follows, I trace the contributions of this “postcolonial ecologies turn”
to our understanding of early colonial cultural production in the Caribbean region in the
decades that have elapsed since Galeano and Crosby’s seminal studies. I am particularly interested
in how theories and methodologies associated with “ecological imperialism” (which incorpo-
rate postcolonial ecocriticism, biology, ecology, the study of fauna and flora extinctions, geogra-
phy, oceanic and archipelagic studies, and forestry, among others) have contributed to a new
understanding of the interactions between humans and nature in the colonial Caribbean, par-
ticularly in the first two centuries following the arrival of Spanish conquistadors to the region,
a period during which extractive economic practices and colonial institutions took shape. My
analysis is rooted in the environmental humanities—a subfield that redefines the relationship
between the humanities and the social and natural sciences through the exploration of the ways
in which literary theory and criticism, history, philosophy, geography, anthropology and political
ecology come together to help illuminate the conjunctions across the physical, political, and
imaginative dimensions of our world. From this perspective, I look at how a re-reading of colo-
nial texts and analysis of early maps from an ecocritical perspective allows us to understand
colonialism and coloniality in the Caribbean region as a cascading series of “ecological revolu-
tions” (a concept developed by Melville in A Plague of Sheep), each of them representing “an
abrupt and qualitative break with the process of environmental and social change that had
developed in situ” (Melville 1994, 12). I explore three examples of the impact of ecological
revolutions in the Caribbean basin during the first century of the conquest—Walter Raleigh
intimations of faunal evolution amidst pristine river landscapes, the vexing question of the mute
dogs of the conquered, and the deterioration of the river ecologies that so transfixed early dis-
coverers—as embodying the potential of ecology-based analysis for our understanding of the
texts of the early conquest.
Melville’s focus in A Plague of Sheep—a study directly inspired by Crosby’s work—is on the
sixteenth-century history of the Valle del Mezquital, Mexico (1530–1600) and the profound
ecological changes brought about by the introduction of European “portmanteau biota,” par-
ticularly hoofed grazing animals (ungulates).Their presence, in the space of seven decades, trans-
formed a verdant, densely populated agricultural area bordered by broad grasslands and forests
into an arid and desolate plain, changing, in the process, the existing system of land tenure based
on communal land holdings and ushering in a new economy based on large privately held
estates. The study convincingly links “abrupt and qualitative” environmental changes—
“ecological revolutions” like those that so deeply marked the Valle del Mezquital—to the pro-
cesses that allowed Spanish newcomers to take control over these new territories. These
ecological revolutions include the early fauna extinctions and food insecurity described by
Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo in his Historia general y natural de las Indias (1535); the persistent
deforestation of the islands that can be traced from Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) and Carlos de
Sigüenza y Góngora’s Los infortunios de Alonso Ramírez (1690) to Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de
Saint-Méry’s Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de
l’isle Saint-Domingue (1789); the exploitation of natural resources that we can trace through the
pictorial narrative offered by The Drake Manuscript (1586); and most particularly the legacy of
the environmental violence of the sugar plantation as evidenced in countless texts, maps, and
visual works. Embedded in these representations of ecological revolutions are a number of colo-
nial relationships to the environment that engage central themes in artistic and literary produc-
tion in the region: extractive economies, land tenure, diaspora, slavery and indentured servitude,
family networks, and community, among others.
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Theoretically, I draw on the work of postcolonial ecologists who address the intersections
among history, literature, cultural practices and the environment in the Caribbean. From Elizabeth
DeLoughrey (Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures, 2007) to Rob
Nixon (Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, 2011), postcolonial ecological theory takes
as a point of departure the idea that from its earliest manifestations Caribbean cultural production
has continuously addressed “rather than belatedly discovered, its commitment to the environment,
reiterating its insistence on the inseparability of current crises of ecological mismanagement from
historical legacies of imperialistic exploitation and authoritarian abuse” (Huggan 2007, 702).
DeLoughrey, Renée Gosson, and George Handley underscore this point in their introduction to
Caribbean Literature and the Environment (2005), where they write that “[u]nlike the white settler
culture of nature writing, Caribbean writers refuse to depict the natural world in terms that erase
the relationship between landscape and power”(4). In the work of scholars examining early colonial
texts and visual culture—Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Richard Grove, Peter Hulme, Ursula Heise, among
others—a focus on the environmental burden colonialism placed on the Caribbean region unearths
the root of current challenges to the region’s nations, confronting the compromised ecologies that
are colonialism’s chief legacies.This preoccupation with colonial history is linked both to the envi-
ronmental humanities and to current formulations of the Anthropocene—geology’s chronological
term for the period defined by the human impact on the Earth’s ecosystems, primarily through our
growing numbers and the burning of fossil fuels—a period that gives rise to what Dipesh
Chakrabarty calls “the historicist paradox that inhabits contemporary moods of anxiety and con-
cern about the finitude of humanity” (Chakrabarty 2009, 197).
The environmental anxieties surrounding the early centuries of the conquest of the Caribbean
region, as I will argue below, often revolve around preoccupation with loss, particularly—in the
case of the immediate impact of the fateful 1492 on the Caribbean region—with biodiversity
and cultural losses linked to extinctions and invasive species (see Paravisini-Gebert 2014; Heise
2016), sustainability and indigenous management of natural resources (Hulme 1987; Heckbert,
Constanza, and Parrot 2014), deforestation (Funes Monzote 2008; Paravisini-Gebert 2011) and
the emergence of the plantation (Beinart and Hughes 2007, among others). The ecocritical
scholarship surrounding these losses recognizes both the impact of the ecological revolutions
brought about by colonialism, and the necessity of accounting for their history at a time when
human behavior has precipitated a worldwide environmental crisis. As John Miller argues in his
discussion of Stephen M. Meyer’s The End of the Wild (2006), “a failure to account adequately for
the consequences of our actions or to acknowledge fully a responsibility to other beings and the
systems of life in which they are imbricated leads … to a greatly simplified biosphere in which
the human has become the ultimate evolutionary force” (Miller 2013, 208).
Ecoreading the colonial classics: of Raleigh, biodiversity

and river landscapes
Ecocritical approaches—inherently multidisciplinary—offer tools for deeper explorations of
neglected aspects of early colonial texts. Consider, for example, the new possible ecocritical/
multidisciplinary readings of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Historie of the World (1614). Written during his
imprisonment in the Tower of London, the Historie of the World is Raleigh’s most ambitious work
in prose. Intended as a multivolume project but never completed, it covers the creation of the
world to 146 B.C. while incorporating multiple reflections drawn from his experiences as a
colonial explorer.These reflections lead him toward important formulations about the evolution
of fauna that question the fundamental tenet of creationism, the stability of species created in
immutable forms, which together with his experiences in the burgeoning American colonies,
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where he saw local varieties of familiar species and observed their adaptability to their specific
surroundings, afforded him unique opportunities for understanding of evolutionary processes. In
his discussion of the Flood, Raleigh argues that “it is manifest, and undoubtedly true, that many
of the Species, which now seeme differing, and of severall kindes, were not then in rerum natura.
For those Beasts which are of mixt natures, eyther they were not in that age, or else it was not
needfull to preserve them, seeing they might be generated againe by others: as the Mules, the
Hyœna’s, and the like; the one begotten by Asses and Mares, the other by Foxes and Wolves”
(Raleigh 1621, 94). Raleigh links his insights into the changing nature of species and the impact
of hybridity and cross-breeding in this “new” world directly to his own experiences in the
Americas and knowledge of colonial incursions into the East, citing the discovery of “strange
Lands, wherein there are found divers Beasts and Birds differing in colour or stature from those
of these Northerne parts,” and pointing out how, “for my owne opinion, I find no difference,
but onely in magnitude, betweene the Cat of Europe, and the Ownce of India; and even those
Dogges which are become wilde in Hispagniola, with which the Spaniards used to devoure the
naked Indians, are now changed to Wolves, and begin to destroy the breed of their Cattell, and
doe also oftentimes teare asunder their owne Children” (Raleigh 1621, 94).
Anticipating the field of biogeography through his interest in the distribution of species and
ecosystems across geographies and climates, Raleigh also acknowledges what will be the foun-
dation of Crosby’s transformative “Columbian exchange,” reminding his readers of how the
bounty of new flora and fauna newly discovered in the New World has transformed known
European species: “We also see it dayly, that the natures of Fruits are changed by transplantation,
some to better, some to worse, especially with the change of Clymate. Crabs may be made good
Fruit by often grafting, and the best Melons will change in a yeere or two to common
Cowcummers, by being set in a barren Soyle” (Raleigh 1621, 94). There is in this a belief in the
proliferation of difference through human and nonhuman agents coming together in new and
incipiently modern transnational environments marked by ecological and racial hybridities.
These are spaces where knowledge is transformed through biotic discovery and experimenta-
tion and transmitted globally through the circulation of books (natural histories, most particu-
larly), maps, and, increasingly, through visual culture—spaces that have provided the impetus for
new environmentally-focused explorations of the texts and cultural production of the early
colonial period. In the case of Raleigh’s History of the World and The Discoverie of the Large and
Bewtiful Empire of Guiana (1596) ecocritical approaches have yielded innovative re-readings that
have highlighted both the complex biopolitics of the History (see Swarbrick 2017) and theorized
the relationship between the human and the waterscape. Lowell Nelson Duckert’s study (2012)
of how the rivers of Guiana can challenge “the bifurcation of nature and culture, human and
nonhuman” in The Discoverie offers an ecocritical invitation to a re-engagement with the texts
of the early colonial period: “By reconceiving landscape as a mediary rather than intermediary
image, Raleigh’s Discoverie inhabits the interchange, not the ‘breach,’ between nature and culture.
The Guianan riverscape (or waterscape, or any—scape) challenges the separation between the
human body (flows of blood), the narrative text (flows of meaning) and the natural world (flows
of in/organic matter-energy). Like him, we have much to discover” (Duckert 2012, 42).
The Caribbean, Elizabeth DeLoughrey has argued, “provides a fitting frame for an ecocritical
analysis because it is one of the most radically altered landscapes in the world and, as Richard
Grove (1995) has shown, the space from which our current understandings of environmental
conservation emerged” (DeLoughrey 2007, 62). Hence the urge to revisit early colonial texts
whose narratives presuppose what DeLoughrey calls “a continuum between nature and its cul-
tural mediation” (DeLoughrey 2009, 62) in order to explore the new possibilities opened by
environment-driven theories and methodologies. I want to return in this exploration to
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Raleigh’s reference above to “those Dogges which are become wilde in Hispagniola, with which
the Spaniards used to devoure the naked Indians” (Raleigh 1621, 42) as an example of how the
concern with the nonhuman world that is part and parcel of environmental theory and meth-
odological approaches places early colonial texts in new and unexpected conversations.
The mute dogs of the conquered

In Book Two, Chapter XIII, of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo’s La historia general y natural de las
Indias (1535), the first official chronicler of the New World notes the first known fauna extinc-
tions directly caused by the diverging demands placed by indigenous and European populations
on the environment.
En este tiempo de tanta necesidad se comieron los chriptianos quantos perros gozquez
avía en esta isla, los quales eran mudos que no ladraban, é comieron también los que
de España avian traydo, é comiéronse todas las hutias que pudieron aver, é todos los
quemis é otros animals que llaman mohuy y todos los otros que llaman coris, que son
como gazapos ó conejos pequeños. Estas quatro maneras de animals se caçaban con los
perros que se avian traydo de España; é desque ovieron acabado los de la tierra,
comiéronse a ellos también, en pago de su serviçio.
During these times of so much want, the Christians ate all the dogs that were to be
found on the island, which were mute, they did not bark; and they also ate those they
had brought from Spain, and they ate all the hutías that were to be found, and all the
quemis, and other animals they called mohuy, and all the ones they call coris, that are like
young or small rabbits. These four types of animals were hunted with the help of the
dogs that had been brought from Spain; and which were eaten in their turn—in pay-
ment for their services—after they finished off the ones found in this land.
(González Fernández de Oviedo 1851–1855, 50, my translation)
The debate over Fernández de Oviedo’s “mute dogs” and their purported colonization-driven
extinction has proven to be one of the most fruitful narratives of early colonial history in the
Caribbean region, both in terms of the many narratives produced by Fernández de Oviedo’s
sixteenth-century contemporaries—eager to put their two-maravedís’ worth into the debate—
but also in terms of the number of studies it has generated from contemporary scholars, espe-
cially those working on ecocritical engagements with early colonial texts. The vexed and
still-vexing questions about the nature, species, muteness, even the very existence of these dogs,
has emerged as one of the most entrancing stories in discussions about Caribbean fauna, animal
domestication, species conservation, and ultimately, extinction. In Imagining Extinction: The
Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (2016), Ursula Heise underscores the need to “focus on
the larger narratives that enable individuals’ efforts to resonate with larger social networks” (20).
In the chronicles and natural histories that emerged from the early conquest, the nature and fate
of the Caribbean’s “mute dogs” become one such narrative. They resonate against our contem-
porary environmentalist and conservationist perspectives on fauna driven to extinction because,
as Heise argues, “public engagement with endangered species depends on these broader struc-
tures of imagination, and individuals’ paths to conservation engagement become meaningful for
others only within these cultural frameworks. Ultimately … biodiversity, endangered species,
and extinction are primarily cultural issues, questions of what we value and what stories we tell,
and only secondarily issues of science” (2016, 20).
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The complex story of the Caribbean’s mute dog has long fascinated scholars. Dr. Barton, in
his collection of “all the necessary materials for an exact history of the native dogs of North
America” (Barton 1803), carefully traces the multiple references to the tale of the elusive dogs
in early colonial texts, from their first appearance in Columbus’ diaries from October 1492
through their multiple description in Bartolomé de las Casas’ account of Columbus’ discoveries
as “dogs which never barked” and were chiefly bred for food (qtd. in Thacher 1903, 553); their
appearance in Pietro Martire d’Anghiera’s Decades of the New World (1511) as “deformed in
shape” and eaten by the indigenous population as “the Europeans did of goats” (Martire
d’Anghiera 1885, 76); and the detailed description narrative offered by Andrés Bernáldez that
speaks of Columbus’ sighting 40 non-barking dogs on a beach covered with turtle shells between
Cuba and Jamaica (Bernáldez 1856, 315). Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo also offers a compel-
ling description of a small dog, known as gosque, a well-fed domesticated companion, “always
eager to please those who fed them and whom they recognized as their masters” (Fernández de
Oviedo 2002, 119–120); “All these dogs, here and on the other islands, are mute, and even if
beaten or killed, would not bark, although they growl or moan when hurt” (30).
These domesticated pre-European dogs, often found as companions in indigenous homes
throughout the Caribbean and the mainland (and occasionally as part of the indigenous diet or
as a sacrificial animal), came in many sizes, colors and shapes, thereby complicating their identi-
fication, history, and role in local ecologies. In the Caribbean region, they were most commonly
described as having pointed ears (compared by chroniclers of the conquest to those of wolves),
long snouts and long and powerful limbs (Fernández de Oviedo 1851–1855, 30). Imported from
the South American mainland “after the appearance of ceramic-bearing Saladoid agricultural
colonists … during the first millennium before Christ” (Stahl 2013, 516), the dogs were one of
the most salient of a very small number of domesticated species kept by Amerindians, as well as
one of the first indigenous sources of meat for the newly arrived colonists. Early European
chroniclers found them to be quite similar to the European dogs of their experience, except for
their striking muteness. Luís Joseph Peguero, in his 1762 Historia de la conquista de la isla Española
de Santo Domingo, offers a drawing based on descriptions from various chronicles, a representa-
tion that mirrors images drawn on cave paintings and Amerindian sculptures (Figure 7.1).These
local dogs are thought to have disappeared as a result of an increase in consumption due to a
growing European population and the introduction of European dogs bred for war (see Varner
and Varner 1983; Piqueras 2006). Oviedo describes stuffed dog as a local delicacy, while Fray
Diego de Landa found them to be quite “tasty” (1966, 135). Occasionally they can be found on
burial grounds, as offerings accompanying the dead to the next world, functioning as protectors
of the liminal space between the living and the dead.
The dogs are featured in the first narratives of extinction that emerge from the chronicles of
the European conquest. Oviedo marks their disappearance in the Sumario of his natural history
in 1526, but their fate had not gone unnoticed in indigenous lore, as it featured in the narrative
of Friar Ramón Pané, a priest who had arrived with Columbus on his second voyage, having
been commissioned to write a report for the admiral on the beliefs of the indigenous population
of the Antilles. The report, completed by 1498, includes the following tale, which appears to
incorporate an indigenous consciousness of the dog’s local extinction in Hispaniola as a direct
result of Spanish colonization. It is of particular interest that, unlike Oviedo, Pané does not note
the tale of extinction as one of his own observation, but as something told to him:
El cual cerní Opiyelguobirán dicen que tiene cuatro pies, como de perro, y es de
madera, y que muchas veces por la noche salía de casa y se iba a las selvas. Allí iban a
buscarlo, y vuelto a casa lo ataban con cuerdas; pero él se volvía a las selvas.Y cuando
137
Figure 7.1 I llustration from Luís Joseph Peguero’s Historia de la conquista de la isla Española de Santo Domingo
[Manuscript] (1762–63), showing his rendition of a New-World mute dog. Reproduced by
permission of the Biblioteca Nacional de España.
los cristianos llegaron a la dicha isla Española, cuentan que éste se escapó y se fue a una
laguna; y que aquéllos lo siguieron hasta allí por sus huellas, pero que nunca más lo
vieron, ni saben nada de él. Como lo compré, así también lo vendo.
(Pané 1974, 49)
The semi Opiyelguobirán has four feet, like a dog, they say, and is made of wood, and
often at night he leaves the house and goes into the jungle. They went to look for him
there, and when they brought him home, they would tie him up with rope, but he
would return to the jungle. And they tell me that when the Christians arrived on the
Island of Hispaniola, the zemi escaped and went into a lagoon; and they followed his
tracks as far as the lagoon, but they never saw him again, nor did they hear anything
about him. As I buy, so also do I sell.
(Pané 1974, 45)
These extinct New-World dogs have emerged in contemporary scholarship as the focus of a
body of environmentally-centered multidisciplinary work through which we can measure some
of the salient contributions of ecological approaches to the study of early colonial Caribbean
texts, which have become central elements in studies that range from literature to the sciences.
One of the best examples of the early success of ecocritical approaches is Antonello Gerbi’s
landmark study Nature in the New World: From Christopher Columbus to Gonzalo Fernández de
Oviedo (1971), particularly in his perceptive discussion of Oviedo’s Natural History. Gerbi focuses
particularly on Oviedo’s proto-scientific methodology, particularly his commitment to accurate
descriptions of fauna and flora based on direct observation and experience, which represents an
innovative New-World paradigm for the depiction of the natural phenomena. His approach—
close observation and detailed description across differing conditions and seasons, discussions
with the indigenous populations about their knowledge and experiences with fauna and flora,
and his reliance on experimentation, constitutes an “enthusiastic eulogy of the environment”
138
(Gibson 1980, 321), an openness to new approaches to ecologies and environments at the
moment Europeans find themselves on the threshold of a new era. Gerbi will himself discuss the
mute dogs of the New World in connection to Oviedo’s curiosity about the strangeness of their
barkless condition and his experiments in relocating pet dogs from Nicaragua to Panama and
from coastline to mainland to ascertain if the condition was related to location. His determina-
tion to take a dog he had trained himself to Spain to continue his experiment was thwarted by
the theft of the pet, whose loss Oviedo deeply regretted, as “I had brought him up and he was
very tame” (Gerbi 1985, 295–296).
Alfredo Bueno Jiménez’s attention to the role of dogs in bolstering the food security of the
conquering Spaniards as they moved from the archipelago into the mainland without a reliable
source of protein is another example of the perspectives opened by ecological approaches (2011).
His study draws on early texts (particularly natural histories of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries) and visual representations (chiefly Theodore de Bry’s illustrations) to create a biogeo-
graphic backdrop for the study of both the extinction of endemic New-World dogs and the use
of European dogs as weapons of war. The concerns with food cultures and food security—with
food studies in general—spearheaded in the Caribbean and Latin American regions by the writ-
ings of Sidney Mintz (2010), has been drawn into the field of environmental studies and the
early colonial period through a scholarly focus on food insecurity, food cultures and rituals, and
food and identity, all of them elements tied to the quickly changing ecosystems of the New
World as they faced numerous ecological revolutions (See Paravisini-Gebert 2011). These are
aspects explored by Óscar Rueda Pimiento in his study of Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada’s expe-
dition into the interior of Colombia (1536–1537), which is intended as “a contribution to the
limited research that exists around the food crisis and feeding during the conquest of the terri-
tory” (Rueda Pimiento 2015, 99) and focuses on the struggles with hunger faced by a small
expeditionary force unaccustomed to available foods and the cultural principles that form the
basis for acceptance or rejection of local foods. Dogs emerge in this study as occasionally avail-
able nourishment in short but welcome supply.
Peter W. Stahl similarly draws on early texts of the conquest as a springboard for his compre-
hensive zoogeographical study of the dogs’ range across the archipelago and mainland and of the
possible explanation for the muteness and limited types of vocalization described in the early
chronicles. His work is significant for merging textual analysis of early colonial chronicles and
natural histories with current scientific knowledge of species hybridity and patterns of canid
domestication across South America. His work brings detailed attention to the multiplicity of
canid species through the Caribbean and the Spanish Main, with particular attention to testing
the various species that could have contributed to the evolution of canid species in the New
World. When reading these early texts, the focus of these scholars is firmly placed on engaging
the moments of highly significant epistemological shifts they capture through the prism of new
perspectives: an understanding of species in their habitats and ecologies, food security, species
hybridity and the history of scientific experimentation, and visual representation as a tool for
both broader dissemination of natural history information and an aesthetic tool for the apprecia-
tion of New-World fauna and flora. They all share a premise that the early colonial period was
crucial for the conception of modern science and for our understanding of the unleashing of
environmental changes we associate with the Anthropocene.
Representations of the dogs and other endemic fauna of the Caribbean region have gener-
ated significant interest among those concerned with environmental approaches to early colo-
nial phenomena. From archaeologists to art historians, this renewed attention has led to greater
understanding of both the nature and hybridization of species of both flora and fauna and of
local traditions and methods of visual representation previously neglected, bringing new
139
scholarly attention to pre-Columbian and indigenous visual cultures and to Creole artistic
expression. This has been the case, for example, of the seminal work done by Racso Fernández
Ortega and his colleagues at the Cuban Cave Art Research Group (2011) in cataloging, describ-
ing, and analyzing pre-Columbian cave paintings and sculptures throughout the Caribbean
region to examine the evolution of dog representations before and after the European encoun-
ter and their role in culture, religious practices, and the cosmovision of pre-encounter commu-
nities. Fernández Ortega and his team, as has become the established practice in these studies,
review the numerous early colonial chronicles and natural histories as the foundational docu-
ments for their multi-disciplinary approaches to the complexity of canid representation in the
early centuries of colonization.
The extinct endemic dogs of the Caribbean basin continue to resonate among the region’s
writers and artists. Known as xoloitzcuintle among the indigenous Mexicans, they feature promi-
nently in Diego Rivera’s History of Mexico murals at the National Palace in Mexico City, where
they appear in numerous guises, among them as a small fierce dog confronting a Spanish war
dog. Gabriel García Márquez opens a 1997 essay on the continued impact of colonization on
the youth of his native Colombia with a recollection of how the earliest Spanish conquerors had
“in just a few years … caused the extinction of an exquisite species of mute dog raised by the
Indians for food” (28). His meditation on the health and educational neglect of the children of
Colombia brings him to the extinct dogs and the legacy of environmental indifference and far-
reaching ecological destruction they epitomize: “We adore dogs, carpet the world with roses, are
overwhelmed by love of country, but we ignore the disappearance of six animal species each
hour of the day and night because of criminal depredations in the rain forest, and have ourselves
destroyed beyond recall one of the planet’s great rivers” (38).
On ecotones and the death of rivers

The river of García Márquez’s regrets is the Río Grande de la Magdalena, Colombia’s principal
river and one which in recent decades has been plagued by ever worsening environmental prob-
lems linked to bacterial and heavy metal contamination due to the country’s poor sanitary
infrastructure. A vital route toward the interior of Colombia, it played a crucial role during the
early centuries of the conquest and the war for independence. Indeed, in El general en su laberinto
(1989), García Márquez offers the fictionalized account of Simón Bolívar’s final journey along
the Magdalena River toward the Caribbean coast and exile in 1830.With detailed early colonial
histories and descriptions of their features, characteristic flora and fauna, and local populations
thanks to colonial chronicles, rivers have become spaces where the environmental revolutions
caused by colonization can be traced in significant detail. In the case of the Magdalena River,
we have a number of recent texts drawing upon colonial and contemporary texts to trace and
denounce environmental degradation. Marta Milena Barrios and Toby Miller (2016), for exam-
ple, analyze the level of emotion displayed in readers’ letters-to-the-editor of local newspapers
that address “ecology, the conflict, and cultural identity,” particularly the threatened health of
local rivers, urging lawmakers to protect natural resources, provide clean drinking water and
sewage services, and calling for a stop to the contamination caused by mining and the continued
discharge of industrial waste along the river.Their study echoes Ana María Mutis’ (2013) account
of the death of the Magdalena River in García Márquez’s El amor en los tiempos del cólera and
Laura Restrepo’s La novia oscura.
But it is a different river, Santo Domingo’s Ozama, that I want to offer as my final example
of the possibilities for fresh analysis of early colonial texts and images opened by ecocritical
theories. Anyone wishing to understand the looming impact of climate change on the islands
140
and populations of the Caribbean can find no better starting point than the city of Santo
Domingo, sprawled over the Caribbean Coastal Plain and straddling the Ozama River, whose
mouth is the city’s bustling port. Founded in 1496 on the east bank of the Ozama River by
Bartolomé Colón, Columbus’ brother, it was moved to the west bank in 1502 by then governor
Nicolás de Ovando after a devastating hurricane. The first seat of European colonial rule in the
New World and its first official port, it is also the oldest continuously inhabited European settle-
ment in the Americas. Its port received the first shipment of African slaves to the New World,
and sent forth Francisco Pizzaro and Hernán Cortés to the discoveries of Peru and México,
Diego Velázquez to Cuba, Rodrigo de Bastidas to discover Panama and Colombia, and Alonso
de Ojeda toward Venezuela.
As the earliest settlement in the region, the young city was the first ecotone—a transition
zone between two biomes or a place where two communities meet and integrate—to undergo
what Melville called an ecological revolution, that “abrupt and qualitative change” in its envi-
ronment. The banks of the Ozama River constituted an ecotonal area, a fluid, shifting boundary
between the river and the Caribbean Sea, a boundary quickly transformed by rapid environ-
mental and social changes, some of them devastating to the biological and human communities
that had thrived in place before the arrival of European settlers. Today, those river banks are
home to deeply endangered communities of the poor threatened by the increasing impacts of
climate change.
Being the New World’s earliest permanent European settlement, we have a treasure throve of
very early descriptions of the banks of this particular ecotone from which we can measure the
trajectory of ecological losses the port has undergone, from bacterial contamination and metal
pollution to the deterioration of its water quality. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo’s early sixteenth-
century descriptions of the zone illustrate its ecotonal foundations. When the Spaniards decided
to move their earlier settlement on the north of the island (near today’s border between the
Dominican Republic and Haiti) to found Santo Domingo, the mouth of the Ozama was occu-
pied by several villages of indigenous peoples whose presence was recorded but of whose dis-
placement we have no account. It is quite possible that they were simply absorbed into the
incipient city. Oviedo describes the river as abundant with fish of all sorts and home to communi-
ties of manatees that the indigenous population hunted sustainably, according to archaeological
studies of the middens of the area. The waters were praised for their purity and fresh taste, espe-
cially that of waterfalls feeding into the river, which as it neared the sea became too contaminated
with sea water for drinking. The banks were lined with a broad variety of fruit trees and the set-
tlers could hear the frequent songs of birds and the harsher tone of parrots. Oviedo notes the
transition of grasses that are characteristic of ecotones, as well as the gradual transformation of
fresh into sea water and the techniques of the indigenous population for hunting manatees, a
familiarity that suggests a transitional period of co-inhabiting the river’s tidal geography. The
Spanish settlers had explored both the Isabela and Ozama rivers and their tributaries and had
noted the intricate water network and its use by communities inland to bring produce to the
communities settled near the port area in exchange for fish, manatees, and other coastal sources of
protein. They also noted frequent crossings between the east and west bank of the river that sug-
gested an early form of water taxi.
The earliest transformation of this ecotonal zone came shortly after the foundation of the
Santo Domingo colony, first through the expansion of gold mining along the Cibao Valley (with
the extracted gold transported along the Isabela and Ozama rivers to the Santo Domingo port),
and the quick establishment of sugar plantations and cattle ranches in the valleys surrounding the
newly founded city. Rapid increases in population and the incipient contamination of the river
from mining and agricultural practices, runoff from significant deforestation, and soil erosion as
141
a result of the cutting of trees meant that extractivist practices quickly left their imprint on the
local environment and its main rivers. Of these practices, it was the cultivation of sugar cane by
slave labor which had the most damaging and irreversible impact on the environment. Sugar
production, which required massive deforestation to clear land for planting and for wood to feed
the boilers, quickly evolved into an overwhelming ecological revolution (see Paravisini-Gebert
2011).These developments are traced in a fascinating study by Rosa Elena Carrasquillo focusing
on the denaturalization of the native landscape surrounding the city of Santo Domingo between
1492 and 1548. For Carrasquillo, such transformation created a “Spanish” landscape through
“processes of destruction and construction, population displacement and the racialization of
space or racial infrastructures at the basis of Spanish imperial imagery” that highlight “the still-
present destruction, violence and racism of the colonial landscape” (2019, 61).
For the city of Santo Domingo, the historical continuity of the “destruction, violence and
racism of the colonial landscape” is seen through the fate of the two rivers that join above the
city to flow as the Ozama into the Caribbean at the city’s port. The city faces the same climate-
related quandaries as other urban centers in the region like San Juan and Kingston—coastal
location of essential infrastructure (airports, thermoelectric plants, major highways); rapidly dete-
riorating reef systems increasingly vulnerable to bleaching events caused by rising sea tempera-
tures; coastal erosion threatening vital tourism infrastructure; significant concentrations of people
of lower socioeconomic status living in floodplains; threats to the availability and quality of fresh
water; and high risk of food insecurity. But for the roughly 400,000 people living precariously
along the banks of the Ozama River, their proximity to the river and its port increases their
vulnerability. These are Santo Domingo’s poorest, most marginalized populations, pushed by
rapid urbanization to the most vulnerable riverside land where they live in substandard housing
in overcrowded neighborhoods. Persistent flooding threatens lives and property and brings resi-
dents into dangerous contact with the river’s highly polluted waters, bearing harmful bacteria
from raw sewage and toxic concentrations of metals like thallium from untreated industrial
runoff, which drastically impacts local wildlife as well as quality of life and health for local human
communities.The bed of the Ozama, moreover, is below sea level, so as tidal flooding and coastal
erosion from storm surges grow ever stronger due to climate change, the sea penetrates deep into
the Ozama’s watershed, its salt-water infiltration adding to the population’s vulnerability to
flooding and further contaminating the already deeply compromised freshwater supply. The
Dominican poor living along the Ozama are considered by the World Bank to be among the
world’s “most endangered people.” The deterioration of the Ozama represents the most radical
transformation the city of Santo Domingo has undergone since its late fifteenth-century foun-
dation, but most specifically in the twentieth century, which saw Santo Domingo change from a
“small, clean, tree-covered, silent city … divided by an Ozama River not yet turned into mud
and death” into a deeply endangered Caribbean mega-city (Alcántara Almánzar 2017, 52).
Ecocritical approaches to the early colonial period have brought increased attention to visual
studies through the incorporation of maps, drawings, prints, and cave art into the wealth of
materials available for study. I offer here one example of the possibilities open to the environ-
ment-focused scholar of the early colonial period—that of Baptista Boazio’s 1588 “Civitas S.
Dominici sita in Hispaniola [City of S. Domingo located in Hispaniola],” which captured the
occupation of the city of Santo Domingo in 1586 when the English, led by Sir Francis Drake,
held it for ransom for a month, destroying in the process all civic, military, and religious buildings.
Figure 7.2 highlights the architectural beauty and wealth of the city, showing the cathedral, the
first in the New World, as its most striking building. The map is full of movement and action—
soldiers marching in formation, riders putting their horses through their military paces, burning
ships, and even the detail of the boats the Spanish defenders had sunk at the mouth of the harbor
142
Figure 7.2 B
aptista Boazio. From Expeditio Francisci Draki Eqvitis Angli in Indias Occidentales a. M.d. Lxxxv.
Quâ Vrbes, Fanum D. Iacobi, D. Dominici, D. Augustini & Carthagena, Captae Fuêre. Additis Passim
Regionum Locorúmque Omnium Tabulis Geographicis Quàm Accuratissimis, by Walter Bigges (1588).
The Newberry Library.
to prevent the English ships from entering. The chart, perhaps the most famous of the port of
Santo Domingo, is a beautiful example of how the history of sixteenth-century European politi-
cal rivalries found its expression in visual culture. It establishes a lovely contrapuntal conversation
with the work of another artist said to have accompanied Drake’s expedition, the anonymous
Drake Manuscript (Histoire Naturelle des Indes, c.1585) whose 199 captioned watercolors of the
fauna, flora and indigenous population of the Indies follow the trajectory of Drake’s ports of
calls. Boazio’s picture of a serene and ordered occupation moves the focus away from Drake’s
methodical burning and ransacking of the city and expulsion of the Spanish garrison while The
Drake Manuscript offers a rich and endearing glimpse into Caribbean flora and fauna as well as
of indigenous practices that underscore the sustainability of their relationship with nature.
Boazio’s map offers us a snapshot of how the environment of the coastal valley of Santo
Domingo had been transformed in the eight decades of Spanish occupation, roughly the period
covered in Rosa Carrasquillo’s study of the transformation of the landscape. It shows the impor-
tance of the Ozama River to the city’s ecology, depicting its centrality to the fertility of the
valley and the ready access to fresh water. Boazio captures eloquently the impact of livestock
ranching through the movement of cattle across deforested fields, illustrating the impact of the
143
ungulate irruption that had let to rapid and persistent deforestation in the valley surrounding the
city.The denuded hills display the deforestation required to feed the boilers of the growing sugar
plantations and the concomitant soil erosion that has left them stripped and bare. The land is
now populated by domesticated European species—cattle, horses, sheep—the hooved species
Elinor Melville examines as having destroyed Mexico’s central valley. The map shows quite
comprehensively the extent to which European notions of land use had completely dominated
the city’s surrounding landscape by the time of Drake’s invasion. Only the sea retains the wild-
ness and tropicality of the original environment, offering us a glimpse into the breadth, liveliness,
and mystery of its oceanic setting. As a prime example of the military mapping of the Antilles
(Keeler 1978), Boazio’s map is also an invitation to an environmental reading of the type that is
transforming early colonial scholarship in the Caribbean.
Conclusion
My discussion seeks to push the boundaries of our definitions of the environmental humanities
to encompass early colonial writers and mapmakers engaging the rapidly changing ecologies of
the region and addressing the ruination that European colonization brought in its wake, creating
in the process damaged ecologies whose deterioration is still felt across the archipelago and its
basin.The focus on early colonial ecologies allows us to tease out the specificities of processes—
of deforestation, extinctions, invasive species, botanical experiments—through which the
Caribbean region was significantly transformed in the relatively short space of four to five
decades. The examples I address briefly here are but a small sample of possible new readings of
richly nuanced materials through which we can both come to understand the ways in which
the unnatural violence done to natural processes during the conquest were lived and narrated
but also the ways in which these processes force a constant reassessment of how the rapidly
changing populations of the region lived with and related to nature.
Reading the texts of the early colonial period about the Caribbean from an ecocritical per-
spective requires a new series of questions. In a battle for the hegemony over nature, what was
lost in the shift from sustainable to exploitative management of the land? What, if anything, was
gained? How did the extensive botanical experiments—which brought us the mango and the
breadfruit—create a new set of imperatives that transformed cultural practices and local identi-
ties? In what ways did the incipient capitalism and the imposition of extractive economies of the
early colony impact the literature and the arts of the region? The possible questions are too
many to list. The answers can add valuable insights to the existing scholarship on the early colo-
nial period that can illuminate texts and images through new perspectives. Yet this scholarship
can also transform our understanding of our present, by incorporating new dimensions to the
narrative of the region’s past. As the examples I offer here show, there is a rich body of environ-
ment-focused scholarship already available, one with a history dating back to the 1970s. The
richness of the early colonial materials available to scholars, on the other hand, represents an
invitation to a re-reading of colonial texts and visual culture through the prism of the environ-
mental changes whose history they contain, waiting to be unveiled.
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8
COLONIALITY AND CINEMA
Juan Poblete
Structurally, the two concepts at the center of this essay, cinema and coloniality, share a reliance
on visuality, looking, and perception to construct their socially relevant and powerful meanings.
If cinema is centrally visual, so is coloniality, understood here as the capacity of power to impose
a Eurocentric classification of world populations and the corresponding worldview, according
to a racial pattern that placed Europeans at the top of the hierarchy and so-called people of color
at the bottom, in order to justify and perpetuate exploitation (Quijano 2000; Alcoff 2006). Both
concepts have at their core the combination of a certain form of power and an ocular relation
of perception of the self and others, in relation to themselves and reciprocally.
The connections established between visuality, power, knowledge, capitalism and exploita-
tion have been many over the years. In the words of Martin Jay, himself one the great scholars
of the ups and downs of philosophical visuality: “One need only mention Michel Foucault’s
work on surveillance and the panopticon, Guy Debord’s critique of ‘the society of the spectacle,’
and John Berger’s exploration of the ‘ways of seeing’ to signal the widespread fascination with
this theme” (Jay 1988, 4). Referring to the philosophical work of Jurgen Habermas on com-
municative rationality and the perils of detached observation as an epistemological position,
David Michael Levin explains how “in the objectivist paradigm generated by traditional ocular-
centrism, the subject is invariably positioned either in the role of a dominating observer or in
the role of an observable object, submissive before the gaze of power” (Levin 1993, 4).The issue
of the gaze in psychoanalysis, feminist, and postcolonial film theory, as will be shown below, has
also been crucial to these scholarly traditions. More recently, the power of the image for social
governance and the displacement of the written by the visual, and of cognitive understanding
by sensation-based feeling and affect in a culture full of screens, have also emerged as important
topics in the overall field of Visual Culture (Väliaho 2014). Even more recently, that field has
welcomed its first systematic attempt to consider colonialism and slavery as central to Visual
Culture Studies: Nicholas Mirzoeff ’s book, The Right to Look, has the significant subtitle:
A Counterhistory of Visuality. In Latin American studies there has been a growing interest in the
topics of visuality, coloniality, and race as shown by historians of pintura de castas such as Magali
Carrera (2012) and Ilona Katzew (2005), and scholars such as Deborah Poole, Silvia Rivera
Cusicanqui, Robert Stam and Serge Gruzinski to whose work I return below.
In what follows I will develop some of these issues, first, in relation to cinema, then to colo-
niality. I will continue with indigenous and national critiques of the coloniality of cinema. The
definition of coloniality—as a Eurocentric structure of power organizing the world economy,
science and concepts of the self and others—will then ground a tripartite structure (labor,
knowledge and subjectivity) for the rest of this chapter.
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The cinematic gaze

In a very insightful overview discussing the importance of the male gaze as a key theoretical
concept in feminist film studies through an analysis of power, visuality and corporeality, Corinn
Columpar distinguishes it from the ethnographic and the colonial gaze to which it is closely
connected. Reviewing Laura Mulvey’s seminal 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema,” responsible for the place the male gaze as a conceptual tool has in film studies,
Columpar usefully reminds us that Mulvey’s two basic dynamics: “fetishistic scopophilia … and
sadistic voyeurism” (Columpar 2002, 28)—while critical of the male gaze and illuminating
about the strategic masculinization the female spectator needed to undergo in order to enjoy
dominant cinema—tended to privilege a monolithic identification between “the look, mastery,
and masculinity” (32). This is problematic not only because it does not consider the possibility
of a male gaze that may be masochistic and not only sadistic and controlling, but also because it
fails to historicize psychoanalysis and the gaze itself. Once history is considered, the issue of
“how some groups historically had the license to ‘look’ openly while other groups ‘looked’
illicitly” (Jane Gaines, quoted by Columpar, 32) becomes crucial if one is to recognize “the plu-
rality of historical experience and the recognition of multiple axes of oppression” (33). Given its
visual base, race turns into one of visual history’s closest connections with the intertwined tra-
jectories of both anthropology and imperialism and their respective dominant ethnographic and
colonial gazes.
Citing Fatimah Tobing Rony’s The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle (1996),
Columpar concludes that “ethnographic cinema denies the anthropological subject historical
agency, individual voice, and psychological complexity, it reduces him/her to a racial ‘type’ and
constructs him/her as ‘ethnographiable,’ as one existing outside of or, more accurately, prior to
history” (36) in what Johannes Fabian has called “denial of coevalness” (1983) and Anne
McClintock, “anachronistic time” (1995). In this way, not only were the various natives defined
as primitive and belonging to a pre-historic time and affording a glimpse of it, but also whiteness
was affirmed as norm in relation to which the ‘primitive’ was a different other.
Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (1994) emphasize the way in which film spectators across the
globe are interpellated to establish a link and identity with white Euro-Americans in the con-
text of former imperial territories. Because of their disciplinary content which “rendered native
bodies docile by issuing a mandate for [natives’] imitation of the dominant culture” (Columpar,
39), i.e., because those films functioned not only to produce white identification but also the
internalization of whiteness by non-whites as their desired identity, as theorized by Frantz
Fanon, such films can be thought of as colonial. While the ethnographic gaze tried hard to
imagine uncontaminated natives living in the past, the colonial gaze made “indigenous people’s
access to [their own] subjectivity contingent on a self-regulation of their otherness” (39), forcing
them to internalize racism by libidinally identifying with the white master. Columpar concludes:
“the three gazes [the male, ethnographic and colonial gazes] can be seen as a single ideological
project … [of] Western, white, male [normativity]” (40). These connected gazes, however, need
to be historicized in connection with their specific geopolitical contexts, fundamental institu-
tions (“patriarchy, colonialism, anthropology, psychoanalysis” (41)), and affected populations.
The calls to pluralize and historicize the otherwise monolithically conceived gaze have also
extended to what could be called the broader social locations of visuality. Concepts such as
“perceptual regimes” (Crary 1998),“scopic regimes” (Jay 1988) and “intercultural optical spaces”
(Taussig 1993) have been proposed to contextualize the social inscription of the visual. In the
Latin American context, Deborah Poole, for example, has proposed the term “image-world” in
order to explore the social circulation and importance of images in the naturalization of race or,
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Coloniality and cinema
in her words, “how is it that ‘race’ came to be seen at all … since both the seemingly individual
act of seeing and the more obvious act of representing occur in historically specific networks of
social relations?” (Poole 1997, 7).
Following Poole it is possible to ask, for example, what may have been the role of cinema,
both as a social activity and as a field of representation, in the social construction of political and
cultural hegemonies connected to the life of coloniality in the continent? But in order to begin
answering the question I need, first, to explain what the concept of coloniality itself means.
Coloniality
In 1992, writing with Immanuel Wallerstein, Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano defined colo-
niality as the productive structure of power resulting from the establishment of a hierarchically
organized interstate system (Quijano and Wallerstein 1992, 550). Along with ethnicity, racism,
and the newness of the modern, coloniality defined “americanity” which is the ideological
underpinnings of the modern world capitalist system. Coloniality established both the identity
of the colonizer subjects (Europeans) and that of the colonized (the non-European other); the
latter were deemed objects of political, economic and cultural exploitation. In another 1992
essay, translated into English in 2007, Quijano stated: “Coloniality… is still the most general
form of domination in the world today” (Quijano 2007, 170). Coloniality, or what Quijano
sometimes calls the coloniality of power to refer to its capacity to regulate and produce inter-
subjective identifications in both the Americas and Europe of long-lasting historical conse-
quences, created the modern world system.
In 2000, Quijano systematized and clarified his ideas on coloniality: the colonization of
America and the emergence of modern European capitalism are deeply intertwined phenom-
ena, so that the new structure of world power is inextricably colonial and modern at the same
time. While capitalism as a social relation predates the colonization of America, it is only then
and there structured as a world totalizing system for the articulation of labor and difference. It
depends on the social classification of world populations according to a colonial understanding
of race. The objective of such classification is the control of production processes in the areas of
labor, knowledge and subjectivity. The ideology, or what Quijano calls “the specific rationality”
of such a system, is “Eurocentrism.” In the area of labor, Eurocentrism uses race as the basic
technology of modern/colonial capitalism for the determination of labor identities: whites are
entitled to a salary for their work; others can be exploited in non-monetized relations (forced
labor, slavery). Both forms of labor are essential for the development of modern capitalism. Such
racial division of labor is accompanied by the production or invention of the others of Europe,
through knowledge and cultural processes. At the epistemological level, Eurocentrism manifests
as a form of Cartesian rationalism that separates soul (mind) and body (nature) as the subject and
object of knowledge and then extrapolates the latter distinction to the social field. In this way,
Europeans are deemed subjects of reason while non-Europeans are understood as subjects of
nature or bodies to be exploited. The final touch is provided by a Eurocentric historical tempo-
rality of humanity based on evolutionary and dualistic ideas. According to these, Europe becomes
the site and the time of the civilized and thus contemporary, while others are relegated to the
past and the primitive (even if coexisting with contemporary Europeans). Finally, at the cultural
and intersubjective level, Eurocentrism manifests, first, as the construction of the alleged superi-
ority of the European and the erasure of the history, thought, and cultures of others under the
colonizing and civilizing processes lead by Europeans; and second, as the imposition, policing,
and inculcation of a subjugated and conflicted interiority for the colonized. Nation-states in the
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Americas inherited this three-pronged Eurocentric structure that combined labor, knowledge
and subjectivity. Their efforts to produce nationally homogeneous populations were always lim-
ited by the basic paradox of being simultaneously independent states and colonial societies,
which were based on the social exclusion and labor exploitation of people of color in non-sal-
aried relations to the benefit of the new national white criollos.This, in turn, limited the possibili-
ties of economic industrial development and democratic organization. Given that in Latin
America social classes are still today (differentially) colored, from white to indigenous, with the
corresponding forms of social organization of labor, knowledge and subjectivities, Walter
Mignolo and the group of scholars behind what is known as the Latin American Modernity/
Coloniality Research Program speak of the need for decoloniality, a process of social, cultural,
epistemological, and ethical emancipation based on a delinking from the rhetoric of modernity
and the logic of coloniality (Mignolo and Escobar 2013).1 Ella Shohat and Robert Stam in their
pioneering 1994 book had called for Unthinking Eurocentrism since it “sanitizes Western history
while patronizing and even demonizing the non-West” (Shohat and Stam 1994, 3). There are at
least two important ways in which this critique of colonialism and the corresponding decolonial
program have manifested in the history of Latin American cinema: the indigenous effort to
Indianize film and the efforts of revolutionary filmmakers to rethink Eurocentric national cul-
tures and dependency, and with them, national cinema .
Indianizing film
What, then, may have been the role of cinema in the production and reproduction of coloniality
in the continent? Moreover, to return to the work of Deborah Poole, what if any “subaltern
regimes” of visuality may cinema have generated in Latin America?
Once the coloniality of cinema as a system of representations and an apparatus is understood,
what else can be done with it if operated by different hands and inserted into different circuits
and economies? These are issues that have a long critical tradition. They involve the need to
pluralize not only who gets to make cinema but also who gets to see it, and according to what
criteria and for what ends; they also include the question of contrasting cinema as a representa-
tional discourse, as an industrial institution, and as a social practice at different levels of society,
especially at the grass-roots level.
While the scope of cinema as an industrial, social and aesthetic lens on the world can be
adjusted, zoomed in and out, it is undoubtedly the case that the vast majority of appropriately
named dominant cinema has reproduced and involved metropolitan practices, whether these be
international or national. According to Faye Ginsburg (2016), during the 1960s and 1970s, the
issue for anthropologists of the visual was how the new electronic media (radio, TV, film) were
going to affect “primitive people,” while in the eighties and nineties it came to be about how
indigenous minorities could actively engage with the production and consumption of this visual
diet. Minorities, and especially indigenous peoples have historically faced a number of important
issues in this regard: how to react to their representations at the hands of others; whether to
engage at all with hegemonic visual practices and techniques that have a built-in naturalized
colonial logic of objectification and commodification and often take indigenous subjects as
objects of mis/representation; how to produce their own self-representations with those, until
recently, expensive technologies and, in what languages; how to judge (consume and value),
circulate and preserve that indigenous visual production; and how to determine the appropriate
audiences and interpretation protocols for such efforts. Since the invention of mass produced,
more portable, hand-held analog and digital technologies of visualization (from the hand-held
celluloid camera to the latest smart-phone), however, indigenous people across the world have
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progressively gained access to the production, management and, critique of their own self-rep-
resentations and those made by others. At the beginning of the 1990s, an early moment in this
discussion in visual anthropology, Ginsburg spoke of a “Faustian contract” being faced by
minorities. This contract involved, on the one hand, “finding new modes for expressing indig-
enous identity through media” (Ginsburg 1991, 96) and, on the other, using technologies and
media practices that may threaten their knowledges and societies.
As a possible response to this dilemma, Ginsburg proposed an “embedded aesthetics” in order
to de-Westernize the concept: “With embedded aesthetics, the quality of a work is assessed
according to its capacity to represent, embody, sustain and even revive or create certain social
relations both on and off screen, respecting longstanding protocols appropriate to the group
making the work” (Ginsburg 1994, 590).
In her book Indianizing Film. Decolonization, the Andes, and the Question of Technology, Freya
Schiwy focuses on organizations in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia to study what she calls “The
boom in Latin American indigenous media” (Schiwy 2009, 6). More specifically, she pursues the
following questions: “How do [indigenous] video makers adapt a technology apparently ‘foreign’
to their cultures for the goal of strengthening them? How significant is the representation and
role of women? How do these videos compare to earlier efforts at creating an anticolonial gaze?
How do they negotiate the openings and pitfalls of the global market for multicultural film?
How might indigenous media contribute to a greater understanding of decolonization…?” (6).
For Schiwy these organizations are engaged in an effort to strengthen their indigenous com-
munities by using among others, alternative “modes of knowing and forms of transmitting social
memory” (8), i.e., “vindicating indigenous cultures and epistemologies” in order to “turn them
into sustainable knowledge” (9). In so doing they: (a) challenge dominant representations of
indigenous peoples as allochronous to modernity (primitive, dying, irrelevant, barbaric); (b)
open themselves up to a transformation of their own “cultural and epistemic traditions”; and (c)
reveal gender and the feminization of certain aspects of culture as both a colonial and an indig-
enous key and problematic node of power (8–9).2
By Indianizing film, Schiwy refers to “the capacity of indigenous cultures to integrate
European elements into their own symbolic and social orders” (13) creating what Raheja calls
“visual sovereignty” (quoted in Schiwy, 14).
This creative appropriation of film as technology and social practice, reveals a preference for
visual rather than written technologies (the latter burdened with a long colonial and hegemonic
history) and implies a complex incorporation of European elements and a recreation and pro-
longation of indigenous cultures. Such appropriation is made possible by both the incorporation
of humor and other elements—such as “suspenseful narratives and the stock code of Hollywood
film” with “abundant close-ups, elements of the horror movie and the melodrama” (12) and
personal, not merely collective, stories—and by indigenous control over the social process of
production, distribution and exhibition of film.Thus, film as both a technology of representation
and social practice is redefined: “It becomes a technology of knowledge that entertains and
educates but also allows for social practices to be strengthened or be brought back into exis-
tence” (13–14). Rather than asking the twin questions of whether film as a dominant Western
technology could be used by indigenous people to “rescue” their own cultures or ever represent
indigenous subjects in a non-colonial way, Schiwy insists that indigenous appropriation of film
(including codes for representation and social forms of making and using) uses it to “construct
a pan-Indian ethos by assimilating Western thinking and technology” (20).
One of the central interventions of indigenous communities’“indianizing film” through their
videos is accomplished via their dismantling of what Schiwy calls “the lettered city’s visual
economy” (87) and the corresponding colonial gaze, based on a double spatial (virgin territories)
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and temporal (non-contemporaneity) displacement of indigenous others: “Camera eye and nar-
rative construct a colonial gaze that boosts the foundational ambiguity of colonialism: an ever-
present pastoral [or nostalgia for and interest in contact with pristine nature] that coexists with
a nightmarish fear of otherness” (91).
There is in fact a long tradition of mainstream films combining these two elements, the “mon-
strous” and the “pastoral” or the allochronous and the virginal (28): Emerald Forest (1985), The
Mosquito Coast (1986), The Mission (1986), At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1991) to name a few
that take place in Latin America, and it is important to consider, following Jean Franco (1993), if
a Hollywood film could ever do away with the contradiction between seemingly critical antico-
lonial positions and a mode of production and representation that betrays those goals? Or to
ponder with Ella Shohat and Alison Griffiths (2002) how cinema, having its late nineteenth
century origins in both a scientific culture of study, dissection and display and in popular itinerant
fairs, is both seemingly objective and entertaining in its use of others as objects of curiosity and
exploitation, visual and economic. In “Imaging Terra Incognita.The Disciplinary Gaze of Empire”
(1991) Shohat outlines a series of ways, including maps and sexualized images, in which Western
culture has imagined the territories of others. For her, cinema has often represented those terri-
tories through an ideological arsenal of forms as lost, unknown or hidden and ready for white
colonization, while it has also literarily colonized the world as Hollywood.This has been accom-
plished through many of those films that explore and expand what Shohat and Stam call “the
imperial imaginary” and “the tropes of empire” (Shohat and Stam 1994, 100–177).3
This colonial gaze can be reversed by what Robert Stam and Louise Spence (1983) call anti-
colonial film. Indianizing film is part of this anti-colonial reversal of the gaze. As communities
connect through audiovisual means and are increasingly aware of each other, decolonization
becomes the construction of inter-indigenous commonality and connection, beyond the colo-
nial homogenization as Indians.
There is, to conclude this section, a certain paradox or friction in the idea that film is both a
form of colonialism and a tool to overcome it. On the one hand, film is seen as an apparatus and
an industrial form of representation and mediation of the real, imposing, structurally, a colonial
form on both the represented world and the relations between the spectator and the film text.
On the other, film’s collective nature, its ways of using montage and the coexistence of narratives
and viewpoints, as well as its now relative low cost of technological entry point and circulation,
are seen as both a crucial and more democratically accessible counterpart to the primacy of the
letter, the letrados, and the colonial ideological structures associated with them, and a powerful
tool to overcome the limits of epistemological and aesthetic colonialism.4
The national critique of cinematic colonialism

US film production is such a dominant global player that its cinema is rarely seen as a national
cinema, and is instead conceptualized simply as Hollywood, i.e., the big colonizing other of all
other national cinemas worldwide. National cinema in Latin America, as elsewhere, has been to
a significant degree conceptualized as non-Hollywood or different-from-Hollywood. There is
here an important colonial/decolonial history, three of whose moments I would like to mention
in the context of this chapter. As part of the interwar effort to neutralize Nazism in the 1930s,
the US administration presided by Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the Office of the
Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs within the motion picture section of the State
Department. The office attempted to use the power of Hollywood cinema to improve relations
with Latin Americans and secure their political loyalty through films such as a Disney trilogy,
which includes South of the Border with Disney (1941), Saludos Amigos (1943), and The Three
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Caballeros (1945). This trilogy ended up representing, through a particular kind of return of the
repressed, the status of what Julianne Burton has called a full-blown “allegory of first world
colonialism” (Burton 1994, 146). Burton concludes: “Disney’s gift of intercultural understanding
turns out to be the act of packaging Latin America for enhanced North American consump-
tion” (146–147). It was as if Hollywood was bent on showing that, even when it tried hard to
avoid being colonial, it could not stop or control itself.
In fact, that was the conclusion which many Latin American intellectuals reached in the 1950s
and 1960s. Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s famous 1969 decolonial manifesto, “Hacia un
tercer cine” (Toward a Third Cinema), for example, proposed a new articulation between the
artistic medium, its producers and publics, and their political aspirations based on revolutionary
premises of radical social transformation rather than on the populist ones of social representation that
had linked the golden age classic Brazilian, Mexican and Argentine melodramas and comedies to
their respective political regimes in the 1930s–1950s. For Solanas and Getino what needed to be
reconceptualized was both the nation—in order to liberate it from its colonial and neocolonial
social and economic legacies—and cinema—in order to replace the seductive and colonizing
spectacle of Hollywood productions with new ways of presenting the fusion of the sensorial and
the intellectual (Poblete 2017).This was the task of Solanas and Getino’s famous trilogy of La hora
de los hornos (1968) which they described as “not a spectacle nor a film, but an action.”
As in the case of contemporary indigenous visual cultures analyzed by both Ginsburg and
Schewy, Solanas and Getino understood that decolonizing film involved a dual effort. Cinema
was both a potent mis/representational machine that needed to be countered, and a set of social
relations—presided over by the singular creative authority of the director, the economic might
of the producer, and the passivity of the spectators—that could be altered to serve the needs and
interest of whole communities, from union workers to a truly independent nation.
One of the most explicit points in the thesis that Hollywood, and thus cinema itself, has had
a historically ethnographic relation with Latin America (López 1993), is reached in the 1978
film Agarrando Pueblo by Colombians Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo. The film follows a direc-
tor and his crew, hired by a European company to produce images of the reality of life in
Colombia, as they stage images of child abandonment, poverty, mental illness, and street peddling
for their film. Paying pennies to their real-life actors, the director and his producer make explicit
in their actions the full extraction of surplus value that the filming of poverty for alleged denun-
ciation or political purposes has often meant in the history of Latin America’s relation with film.
In their accompanying manifesto “¿Qué es la Pornomiseria?” (What is misery porn?) Ospina
and Layolo (1978) clearly state the foreign and often exploitative nature of the film gaze in rela-
tion to the continent. In Mayolo’s words:
“Agarrando pueblo” invites us to reflect on the relationship between those being

filmed and those doing the filming, using humor to uncover the exploitation of misery
and the potential distortions certain images can generate when they are superficially
and paternalistically obtained, turning the people into the OBJECT rather than the
SUBJECT of their own destiny.
“Agarrando pueblo” invita a la reflexión sobre la relación existente entre filmado y

filmador, desentrañando a través del humor la explotación de la miseria y las posibles
deformaciones que pueden tomar ciertas imágenes cuando son obtenidas superficial y
paternalistamente, convirtiendo al pueblo en OBJETO y no en SUJETO de su propio
destino.
(Mayolo, n.d., n.p.)
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This implies a clear return of the gaze, whereby the native demands coevalness and agency
and learns to open their eyes to take control of the production of images. Such a turn has
prompted Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui to call for, and develop, a “sociology of the image” capable
of understanding the liberatory potential of images, including film, in Bolivia.
For Rivera Cusicanqui such a sociology is part of an effort to overcome the limits of the
monological and Eurocentric modernizing or developmentalist perspectives of the social sci-
ences and the colonial overtones of written discourse in the construction of the discourse of the
nation in Bolivia (Rivera Cusicanqui 2015).
Coloniality in films
As already stated, there are at least three ways to classify actual films in relation to the topic of
coloniality and cinema: there is, first, the Hollywood representation of and engagement with
Latin America; then the coloniality (and decoloniality) of Latin American film-making and
representations of and engagement with the continent’s history; and, third, there are Latin
American and Iberian films that directly engage with the long colonial period. In the first group
one could list films like the already mentioned Saludos Amigos and Three Caballeros but also 1492:
Conquest of Paradise (1992) and a long list of American movies and documentaries connected to
the Mexican, Cuban, Nicaraguan, and Chilean revolutions, many more taking place in the
Amazon or some unspecified Latin American jungle, and numerous situated on the border
between the US and Mexico or representing Latina/o struggles in the United States.The second
group would include films such as La Hora de los Hornos (1968), La Batalla de Chile (1975–1979),
Bolívar soy yo (2002), Camila (1984), La Fiesta del Chivo (2005), La Nación clandestina (1989), El
Norte (1983), etc. Finally, the third group includes films about: the colonization of the Hispanic
and Luso Americas such as O Descobrimento do Brasil (1936), and major historical figures such as
Columbus, Cortés, Cabeza de Vaca, Bartolomé de las Casas, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Lope de
Aguirre, Hans Staden; or major historical processes, such as slavery in El Otro Francisco (1974), La
última cena (1976), Quilombo (1984), and Xica da Silva (1976).5
I would like to conclude this chapter with an analysis of a few of the films in this third cat-
egory, along the triple lines suggested by the definition of coloniality: labor, knowledge, and
subjectivity.
De/colonizing the labor of film

Two important films directly engage with what I called above the paradox of, or the friction
between, the idea that film is a colonial weapon perpetuating a colonial gaze and exploitative
labor relations, and the idea that film could be a powerful means to overcome the limits of epis-
temological and aesthetic colonialism. These films are Para recibir el canto de los pájaros (1995) by
the famous Bolivian director Jorge Sanjinés, an exponent of the New Latin American Cinema
movement, and También la lluvia (Even the Rain) (2010) by Spanish actress, writer and director
Icíar Bollaín. Both films share a surprising number of elements in their effort to show—through
a metacritical commentary on representation, exploitation, and racism in film and in the film
industry—how film is connected to coloniality: from the basic structure (the films we see are
about a crew filming a critical movie about the conquest that has difficulties recruiting the
natives they need) to the combination and connection of intra and extradiegetic passages, the
ideological discussion and contradictions between actors, director, producer, and crew and then
between them and the indigenous communities, the deafness of the crew to the ways of living
in those communities, the best anti-colonial intentions of a leftist director subverted or affected
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by the weight of colonial prejudice, etc.6 In the Sanjinés film, Rodrigo, the director—having
drunk too much after the indios comuneros, in order to show their disapproval of the crew’s
behavior in the village, besieged the school where the film crew is residing—reproaches
Catherine, a French woman who lives in the area, that she is racist and Eurocentric. Catherine’s
sin is to think too highly of the ethical standards of the natives and point out to the mestizo
Bolivian professional filmmakers their ignorance and racism against their indigenous co-nation-
als. Pedro, the producer, whose brother, Fernando, has fallen in love with Rosita, one the natives
in the ayllu Janco Amayu where the films (both the one we see and the one they are filming)
take place, reinforces Catherine’s point by saying that he will “never allow an india in the
family.”
Sanjinés and the Grupo Ukamau had conceptualized in the book Teoría y práctica de un cine
junto al pueblo (1979) “the war” between Hollywood and the decolonial efforts of Latin American
filmmakers as a struggle to reach Latin American publics, especially workers and campesinos
who—by virtue of their economic situation, political consciousness (workers) or their cultural
traditions (campesinos)—were, in the 1970s, both less contaminated by Hollywood and in a
stronger position to receive a revolutionary message. Like Solanas and Getino, Sanjinés and his
Ukamau colleagues concluded that the key was to make the people participate in their films
both as workers and as fully engaged and critical spectators (Sanjinés 1979).
También la lluvia/Even the Rain (2010) by Icíar Bollaín, written by Bollaín’s husband and fre-
quent Ken Loach collaborator, Paul Laverty, tells three stories of colonialism and decolonial
struggle. In the first, we follow a Spanish production company with a Latin American director
trying to do a critical historical film on the conflict between the greed of Columbus and the
Spanish greed at the “discovery” point and the defense of the Indians and denunciation of
Spanish brutality by the Dominican Antonio de Montesinos 20 years into the conquest. While
the conquistadors in the film within the film exploit and torture the Indians, the crew, which is
filming this story of tortured Taínos in Bolivia because of the lower costs of labor and produc-
tion in that country, exploits, with American funding, its native actors and extras (the second
colonial story). The third colonial story and temporality is that of the real-life water wars
between the people of Cochabamba and a transnational company bent on privatizing all water
(even the rain) in the area, a war in which the main indigenous actor (Daniel, in the present/
Hatuey, a Taíno hero in the film within a film) is deeply involved. The colonial and decolonial
parallels and crossovers between the three historical temporalities in this film are many and have
been explored in a growing critical bibliography.7 For my purposes here it will suffice to say that
those points of connection bring us back to the following questions: Who is the real barbarian
and what is savagery? Who has the right to tell the story of colonialism in film and is it even
possible? What could be a fair representation of the conflicts it engenders? What is a just price
for the labor of those in the Third World who make possible the profits of those in the First?
The crucial critical point in this film, to my mind, is typically ambiguous. In one reading, the
moment in which También la lluvia substitutes the psychological and political transformation of
Costa, the film producer, for the conflict indigenous people had and continue to have, more than
five hundred years later, with colonizing powers, is the reflection of a decolonial realization that
the only honest thing for a European film concentrating on coloniality to do is to focus on the
Europeans and their struggles with the legacies of colonialism. In an alternative reading, that
same moment could be seen, instead, as the point of highest coloniality of power as the conflicts
affecting the indigenous people of Cochabamba today and the Taínos in the conquest are dis-
placed to the background, themselves privatized or individualized in the ethico-psychological
conflict of Costa, who, suddenly turned into the main protagonist, will occupy most of what is
left of the film. Regardless, it is important for my argument here that, in addition to the
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structural and thematic similarities already mentioned, both films share a redemptive story of
conversion and bridge-building between colonizers and colonized: in the case of the Sanjinés
film it is Fernando who falls in love with Rosita, while in Bollaín’s film it is Costa who experi-
ences a change of heart after getting to know Daniel and the natives.
A particularly interesting twist on the film about the filming of a film on coloniality and its
history is Pirinop: Meu primeiro contato by Ikpeng indigenous directors Mary Correa, Kumaré
Txicão, and Karané Txicão (2007). The film, which is part of the broader project Video nas
Aldeias, tells the real-life story of the 1964 arrival to the Ilkeng community in the Amazon of
two anthropologists, the Villas-Boas brothers, working for the Brazilian government, the later
displacement of the Ilkeng to a reservation in the Xingú park, and their current efforts to return
to their native land. As Claudia Ferman (2011) aptly summarizes, “[t]he Film tells the story of
this ‘first encounter’ of the community with the whites of the Brazilian nation, in multiple
voices: the film documentation that exists of this encounter, the testimony of those who lived
through that intervention, who are interviewed and share their memories, the dramatic recre-
ation within the community that some of the testimoniantes make of their memories, and the
voice of the filmmakers” (141–142).
Re-creating that 1964 encounter, the indigenous testimoniantes reproduced what they thought
at the time of first contact: “They yelled: He is sucking our souls. That meant we were all going
to die. It seemed like a war. Everybody was shouting up and down.” (“Ellos gritaban: él está
chupando nuestra alma. Eso significaba que todos ibamos a morir. Parecía una guerra. Todo el
mundo gritaba y lloraba para arriba y para abajo.”) When after decades the Ikpeng decide to
reclaim their lands, they are divided as to what is the best strategy: let the Brazilian justice system
of white men take care of the problem or actively occupy their lands fighting the fazendeiros and
other commercial interests?
While the airplanes replace here the carabelas, and white Brazilians the Spaniards, some of
their civilizing scripts are similar in their coloniality, as are the results: the indigenous peoples are
concentrated in reservations and they must fight to reclaim their ancestral territories against the
interests of gold diggers, miners, and fazendeiros, while dealing with the mediation and interven-
tion of the Brazilian state and its indigenous-oriented institutions.What makes this film particu-
larly outstanding in our context is that—in addition to its native directors, its palimpsestic
tempo-spatial structure, the multiplication of viewpoints (indigenous/white; intergenerational
indigenous, inter-indigenous) and times (before 1964, after it, contemporary)—it preserves the
complexity of the history and contemporaneity of a colonial situation faced and experienced, in
different ways by different peoples.8
Knowledge and subjectivity: the colonization of the imaginary

Two films that directly engage with what Serge Gruzinski has called “the colonization of the
imaginary” are Gabriel Retes’ Nuevo Mundo (1978) (New World) and Salvador Carrasco’s La otra
conquista (1998) (The Other Conquest). For Gruzinski, this colonizing process centrally involved
images in a dual development: the Christianization of the imaginary and the indianization of the
Christian supernatural, both affecting, to different degrees, indigenous peoples and European
colonizers.While, at least originally, this is not so much an invention as “the manipulation, at the
same time deliberate and unconscious” (Gruzinski 1993, 194) of forms of Spanish and Indian
piety, this dual process would eventually be instrumentalized by the Church, (which at first was
not of one mind about the issue) in a full baroque evangelizing pedagogy. As Gruzinski puts it,
the problem for the evangelizing effort was not only the inculcation of the images and the code
to interpret them but also the transformation of a subjective experience of the sacred. The later
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instrumentalizing process involved, centrally, the creation and promotion of syncretic images of
the Virgin Mary around a series of alleged apparitions and miracles.The result was the prolifera-
tion of the protonationalist cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
But before such a process could unfold, the conquistadors and their religious intellectual
companions felt the need to impose their own patterns of interpretation over the (religious)
images and things of the indigenous peoples of what became America, turning them from
strange and exotic objects to pagan idolatries, a form of organized idoloclastia which became
part of a broader war of images accompanying and legitimizing the conquering strategies of
Hernán Cortés (Gruzinski 2001).
Gabriel Retes’ Nuevo Mundo precisely tells the story of the subjugation—at first openly violent
and then ideological—of the indigenous people of New Spain in the sixteenth century, first by a
campaign to eliminate all forms of so-called idolatry and then, to impose the Catholic worldview.
More specifically, in the film the Church hierarchy—faced with an imminent indigenous upris-
ing, itself the result of labor exploitation and the so-called campaign against idolatries—decides,
through one of the main characters, fray Pedro Francisco de Cañas, to intervene in a more cultur-
ally astute way. The idea is to create an image of a native looking virgin painted by a native artist
to whom the Virgin should appear, and present that image (and the accompanying vision) to the
indigenous masses as the proof of a miracle, calling for racial and cultural mixing and peaceful
coexistence.
The film begins with a conversation between fray Pedro Francisco de Cañas and a Las Casas-
like figure, an encomendero who has come to understand colonialism. In their dialogue, an alter-
native form of coexistence of beliefs and practices is suggested. The encomendero states: “They
don’t like us and they are right. We have deprived them of all their possessions and all their
beliefs.” Fray Pedro replies: “I am here to turn them into loyal believers in our sacred mother
church.” “And to help turn them into slaves,” adds the encomendero before concluding: “Tell me
Don Pedro, why not ally ourselves with them? Instead of dominating them, why don’t we accept
their idols? In the end, the faith is the same.” Needless to say, this is not how the story unfolds.
Salvador Carrasco’s La otra conquista (1998) is in many ways—its concentration on the sup-
pression of indigenous beliefs and rites; the active inculcation of a new form of subjectivity that
gives some, power over the souls of others, and the effort at domesticating the mind through the
suppression and cultivation of images—a companion piece to Nuevo Mundo. Unlike the latter
though, Carrasco’s film will include detailed renderings of that which was under attack and
eventually replaced—the image-based records of historical memory in the Nahuatl codices and
the forms of exalted states and visions that, as a sphere, constituted a relative point of commonal-
ity between pre-Hispanic and colonial religious practices. The film begins with a long take in
which Topiltzin, a tlacuilo, paints in loving detail the scene of destruction that the Spanish war on
the rites and images of others has left around Tenochtitlan. Since contemporary Latin American
spectators rarely if ever get to see filmic images of an indigenous intellectual keeping a record of
the suffering and experience of their people, we understand both its novelty and, at almost
exactly the same time, how successful the expansive war of colonialism, supported by the war on
and of images, has been since the sixteenth century.
The tlacuilo, who is said to be a son of Moctezuma and escapes twice from the Spanish colo-
nizers, is brutally tortured and seemingly converted to Christianity, aspiring to a religious life.
But his “converted” life hides a much more complicated picture in which, as Gruzinski would
say, the hybridization of native and Christian states of the soul and the body takes command of
the screen and the film. From that moment on the dialectical relation between the veneration
of Tonintzin and the Virgin Mary stages the unresolved conflicts in Topiltzin’s mind until his
ecstatic death.9 His own spirituality, animated by ecstatic pre-Columbian rituality and by
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Christian evangelizing pedagogy, becomes a surface that registers the tensions between these
two unequally situated world views and their way of giving meaning to visions and deliria.
Coloniality is here shown to be a corrosive and even lethal space for the mind and the spirit.
Knowledge and subjectivity: the indianization of the conquistadors

The Christianization of indigenous people had its counterpart in the relative indianization of
Spaniards.The gradual transformation of Costa in También la lluvia is one film example of this as
are, in more complex ways, the disoriented Don Diego de Zama in Lucrecia Martel’s Zama
(2017) and Santiago, the Dominican priest at the center of Luis Alberto Lamata’s Jericó (1990).
Additionally, the process is well represented in a series of films, including Cautiverio feliz (Cristián
Sánchez, 1998) and Cabeza de Vaca (Nicolás Echevarría, 1990) narrating not the indigenous
perspective but that of the colonizer in deep contact with Amerindian cultures and his change,
from colonizing conquistador to different degrees of respectful engagement and reciprocity. As
captivity narratives these films, and the historical written sources behind them, oscillate between
the full and final allegiance to the colonial imaginary to which they both succumb, and the
moments of intercultural opening or ambivalence generated by the deep and intimate witness-
ing of the culture of the other.10
Cabeza de Vaca (1990) by Nicolás Echevarría, based on the book Naufragios by Álvar Núñez
Cabeza de Vaca (1542), tells the story of this Spanish conquistador who, upon embarking along
with 600 more men in Pánfilo de Narvaez’ expedition, ended up shipwrecking twice in Florida
and the Mississippi delta. He lived for eight years among the Native Americans of what is now
Texas until his return to a Spanish outpost in Culiacan in 1536, and eventually to Mexico City
and Madrid. As the book on which the script by Echevarría, Guilllermo Sheridan and others is
based, the film is one of the more vivid and realized illustrations of what, with Beatriz Pastor
(2008), we could call the crisis of Spanish imperial reason.The explorer of noble origins, Cabeza
de Vaca, undergoes a radical process of dispossession that begins when his Captain yells from one
of the makeshift barges they have built to try to sail back to Mexico: “Spain ends here. It’s every
man for himself.” Then, one by one, Cabeza de Vaca loses his companions, his clothes, his weap-
ons, until he is captured by a series of native owners who place him in a cage and mistreat him.
Instead of the riches and gold the conquistadors were seeking, Álvar experiences first hand the
poverty and the hunger some of these natives go through periodically. At one point, having
become the property of what in the film is presented as a powerful native shaman, Álvar slowly
begins a process of adaptation and acculturation. This process of re-empowerment will culmi-
nate with Álvar himself being recognized as a powerful shaman, capable of praying to higher
powers to cure a sick man and resuscitate another, taken for dead. The revenant Álvar, now free,
has recovered three of his Spanish companions and become close friends with a young Indian
whom he helped free from his enemies. At his point of maximum indigenous acculturation,
Álvar stumbles upon the Spaniards and returns to so-called “civilization,” only to see, with utter
shame and disgust, how the supposedly Christian soldiers are determined to keep on capturing
Indians to enslave them.
Cautiverio feliz (1998) by Chilean director Cristián Sánchez is based on the book by the same
name written by Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán in 1673 and tells the true captivity
story of young Álvaro, a criollo captain who was kept captive by a Mapuche lonco or cacique for
seven months in 1629 in the south of what is now Chile. At the beginning of the film, the lonco
Maulicán tells young Álvaro: “Maulicán is going to teach you to speak Mapudungun […] Since
they say that Mapuches are bad people, you will tell them that is not true.You will realize that is
158
not the case.” What follows is both an epic film—a sort of bilingual Mapuche/Spanish western
full of extremely long establishing shots with very few close-ups—and an ethnographic film full
of Mapuche rituals, performed by non-professional Mapuche actors, including rituals of death,
agricultural work, welcoming, and even a wedding. Unlike traditional ethnographic films, the
Mapuche are here endowed with plenty of voice, but as in ethnographic films, that voice is
limited to a certain anthropological concept of culture and what is “ethnographiable.” These
rituals allow Álvaro to get to know the people he has only seen as savages before, and, also in this
way, the contemporary Chilean spectator, who almost never sees Mapuche culture on screen.
The process is also reciprocal as the cacique says: “Álvaro is here with us, we love him like a son
[…] I also used to hate foreigners, but now, knowing little Alvarito, I learned to love him.” Even
though in the film Álvaro is happy among the Mapuches—the lonco has even given him his
daughter in marriage as a sign of trust and friendship—he looks forward to being rescued
through a prisoner swap, in what was at the time a very porous and active frontier economy of
human and commercial exchanges. Through anti- or non-Hollywood decisions—such as non-
professional actors belonging to the community represented, abundant long shots, no close-
ups—Sánchez’ film is an alternative effort to present on the screen intercultural dialogue and
mutual discovery in a colonial context. In fact, both films in this section could be said to partici-
pate in the admiring and thankful spirit shared by Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán
(1863) at the start of his Cautiverio feliz: “Of this quality and nature are the Indians, that some
people call ungrateful and treacherous.” Those who have gotten to know them know, he goes
on, “that their actions and courageous efforts have been justified, since they were produced by
our tyrannies, our inhumanities, our greed and our sins” (28). A realization that, however, did not
prevent the survivors, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán,
from continuing to work for the expansion of the Spanish Empire in America for the rest of
their lives.
Notes
1 For critiques of the decolonial research program’s nature and gender limits; see Escobar (2007) and
Lugones (2007, 2010).
2 While space constraints will prevent me from exploring here gender inequality as a component of
coloniality, there is a growing corpus of films dealing with the issue in the colonial period.They include
María Luisa Bemberg’s Yo, la peor de todas (1990), Eduardo Rossoff ’s Ave María (1999), Alain Fresnot’s
Desmundo (2002), Guel Arraes’ Caramuru: A Invençao do Brasil (2001), and Juan Carlos Mora Cattlet’s
Eréndira Ikukinari (2007).
3 On the Latin American tradition of representing indigenous peoples in film; see Black (1995), Stam
(1997) and Campos (2017).
4 On decolonial aesthetics; see Gómez and Mignolo (2012).
5 On slavery in Latin American film, see Stam (1997).
6 The shared elements are so many that the press in Bolivia spoke of plagiarism at the time of the opening
of Bollain’s film; see Laguna (2019).
7 See, for example, Cilento (2012) and Hulme-Lippert (2016). Cilento makes the interesting point that
the real crew of Bollaín’s movie showed their “commitment and sensibility” by providing “support for
a local film school, a new water deposit and a bridge, and paid the extras $20 a day” (256, note 7).
8 The perspective of Pirinop can be contrasted with the national Brazilian perspective developed, for the
same story but now taking the Villas-Boas brothers as protagonists, in Cao Hamburger’s film Xingú
(2011).
9 For an interesting poststructuralist reading of the colonial problematic of the colonizing power of the
religious face image in film, see Cabezas (2014).
10 Another interesting example in this regard is the contrast between Nelson Pereira dos Santos’ Como era
gostoso o meu frances (1971) and Luiz Alberto Pereira’s Hans Staden (1999).
159
Juan Poblete
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Manuel Alvarado, 81–94. London: BFI.
Ginsburg, Faye. 1991. “Indigenous Faustian Bargain,” Cultural Anthropology, 6 (1): 92–112.
———. 1994. “Embedded Aesthetics: Creating a Discursive Space for Indigenous Media.” Cultural
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———. 2016. “Indigenous Media from You-Matic.” Sociologia & Antropologia, 6 (3): 581–599.
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———. 2010. “Toward a Decolonial Feminism.” Hypatia 25 (4): 742–759.
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161
PART II
Knowledge production and networks

9
OLD TESTAMENT, NEW
WORLD
Diluvialism and the Amerindian origins
debate in the Enlightenment
Ruth Hill
Introduction
José Eusebio Llano Zapata’s mathematical and geological works, which were published in his
lifetime (Lima, 1721–Cádiz, 1780) and his recently published Memorias histórico, físicas, crítico, apolo-
géticas de la América Meridional, together convey accommodations between religion and the sciences.
Although his scientific knowledge (Álvarez Brun 1963; Millones Figueroa n.d. in Llano Zapata
2005b) was ridiculed by the renowned Americanist Antonello Gerbi (1946: 239, n. 1; Katayama
Omura 2000), the Peruvian criollo in fact intervened in two interrelated Enlightenment controver-
sies that were pivotal to the place of the New World within Old World histories of nature.The first
was the interpretation and/or modeling of the earth’s formation after the Universal Flood, under
the rubric of theories of the earth. The second controversy involved the origins of the Indians. On
both of these questions, the Peruvian polymath veered from the philological and classical path that
had been adopted by many of his predecessors, in order to embrace scientific modernity.
Theory of the earth

The Peruvian naturalist never wavered in his adherence to diluvialism, the theoretical model
fashioned by a school of theologians and natural historians who examined the role of the biblical
Flood in geological, astronomical, and paleontological phenomena of the present—fossilized
trees, marine life, mineral deposits, the formation of precious metals, mountains and valleys, even
meteorites. These authors fashioned numerous theories of the earth in order to explain the impact
of the Flood on the earth of their present.1 A salt lake, located many leagues from the sea, was
one of Llano Zapata’s natural proofs of the historicity of Noah’s Flood:
I consider it a leftover of the Flood that has remained in our lands like an eternal map
of the universal punishment and that makes visible to those who deny what the sacred
scripture teaches, the extent of its effects across the entire globe.
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Ruth Hill
[Lo considero un resto del diluvio que ha quedado en nuestras tierras como padrón
eterno del castigo universal y que hace visible a los que niegan contra lo que la Escritura
Santa nos enseña, la extension de su efecto a toda la extension del globo terráqueo.]
(2005b: vol. 1, art. 14, sec. 1, 308)
Llano Zapata argued that precious metals grew in the same way that trees and plants did: “Pues
se sabe y se ve que del mismo modo vegetan que los árboles y plantas” (2005b: vol. 1, preliminary
article, point 10, p. 151). Silver and gold in Peru had not been exhausted; he credited Antonio
de León Pinelo with understanding early on that silver in Peru grew, its veins branching out like
a tree.2 By caja, miners meant the wall rock of a vein or deposit—basically, the vein between two
cliffs or sections of rock. In an extensive discussion of the mineral kingdom, Llano Zapata cited
a manuscript copy of León Pinelo’s Paraíso en el Nuevo Mundo to confirm that Veta Rica, the
richest of the famed Potosí mountain silver veins, had been uncovered either by Noah’s Flood
or by flowing waters over the ages (2005b: vol. 1, art. 1, sec. 15, p. 164). Later in the same article
(secs. 27–28), Llano Zapata recalled Antonio de Ulloa’s examination of how precious metals
form in the bowels of the earth, and then travel, or branch out (Ulloa 1748, vol. 2, bk. 6, ch. 10,
p. 599). The criollo then declined to pursue the matter of placer deposits:
Someone who is more interested in the physics of metals that grow outside of cajas
(if this can happen), as these portions are, may enter into a subject so fascinating and
not useless to examination by the most knowledgeable naturalists.
That is, if they are not just pieces broken loose from the mines and cajas of argentite
that were cast about those spots since the Universal Flood or other floodwaters from
time immemorial.
[Otro que se interese más en la física de los metales que se crían fuera de cajas (si esto
puede suceder) como son estas porciones, podrá entrar en discusión tan curiosa y no
inútil a la indagación de los más sabios naturalistas.
Ello, si no son ya pedazos arrancados de las minas y cajas del plomo ronco y arrojados
a aquellos parajes desde el Diluvio Universal u otras inundaciones inmemoriales.]
(2005b: vol. 1, art. 1, secs. 28–29, p. 170)
More mines had been discovered in present-day Peru than ever before, he insisted, and their
production was astonishing. Indeed, he expected it to rain gold and silver:
Over time one can expect that it will rain gold and silver in those lands. The same
exhalations that form metals in the bowels of the earth also form them in the ethereal
region. During a storm that I experienced while on the peak of Chile’s cordillera
many rocks fell. I examined some of them and realized that they embellished their
cinder color with some lines of gold.
[Con el tiempo se puede esperar que lluevan en aquellos países el oro y la plata. Las
mismas exhalaciones que forman los metales en las entrañas de la tierra los forman
también en la región etérea. En una tormenta que yo experimenté en el alto de la
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Old Testament, New World
cordillera de Chile cayeron muchas piedras. Examiné algunas y reconocí que her-
moseaban su color ceniciento con unas líneas de oro.]
(2005b: vol. 1, “Adiciones,” art. 20, p. 411)
The very same thing had occurred in France, in June 1738: “All of which corroborates my
observation and inspires the hope that someday metals will rain down in our Indies, since the
spirit that engenders them is one and the same whether in the earth or in the air.” [“Lo que
confirma mi observación y da esperanza de que algún día lluevan metales en nuestras Indias,
pues es uno mismo en el aire y en la tierra el espíritu que los engendra”] (2005b: vol. 1,
“Adiciones,” art. 20, p. 411). This was not wishful thinking on Llano Zapata’s part: it was a tenet
of eighteenth-century vitalism in physics, mineralogy, and botany.
Vitalists reasoned and wrote by recurring to an “analogical hermeneutics” that, as formulated
today (Beuchot and Jérez 2016; Beuchot 2016), overlaps with the intellectual foundations of
“new realism” (Ferraris 2012) and “new ontological realism” (Gabriel 2012), while it implicitly
endorses “ontological fluidity” (Aloi 2018). Contemporary understandings of vitalism vindicate
the agency of nonhuman things as part of a broader object-based ontology, or material turn, in
the humanities. Philosophers and cultural historians see in this “vital materiality” the opportu-
nity to both break down the ontological distinction between the animate and the inanimate and
propel political, environmental, and economic change (see Bennett 2010). For Llano Zapata and
his like-minded contemporaries, the growth of precious metals was more than a metaphor. He
invoked modern chemists and other authors who had posited the continuous replenishment of
minerals, including precious metals.3 For twenty-first-century philosophers, the ordering or
disordering of organic bodies into three (artificial) natural kingdoms are not only effects or
endpoints, but agency or doing.Within such ensembles/ensemblings, one object’s movement or
erasure impacts others within the group (DeLanda 2016). Llano Zapata shared the analogical
hermeneutics of many Enlightenment vitalists who reasoned that minerals grew like vegetables
and who challenged the lines drawn around the assemblages presented as natural kingdoms
(Gibson 2015).
Spain commands our attention here because it was one of the nodes in a network of vitalism
that covered Western Europe and parts of the Americas. The famed Spanish cultural critic and
defender of criollo authors, Benito Jerónimo Feijoo y Montenegro, was a correspondent of
Llano Zapata’s who critiqued a plethora of scientific theories on the growth of minerals and
metals in “Solución del gran problema histórico sobre la población de la América y revolucio-
nes del Orbe terráqueo” (1733). The essay’s title put front and center the science conjoining
theories of the earth—theories of geological origins and time—and theories of Amerindian
origins. True, v egetation was perhaps not the appropriate term for the growth processes of rocks
and mountains. But, Feijoo insisted, numerous experiments suggested that minerals did, in fact,
grow like plants or trees.That might explain the origins of the first peoples in the Americas and
how the New World had been populated: in remote ages, before the Universal Flood, the con-
tinents were connected by rocks or mountains (1733: sec. XVI, art. 47). Feijoo cited eigh-
teenth-century French, Italian, and German chemists, botanists, and medical doctors who
would find their way into Llano Zapata’s Memorias. Furthermore, the Spanish royal physician
and logician Andrés Piquer (1711–1772) cited Feijoo y Montenegro’s 1733 essay in his own
natural sciences textbook, which was used in universities (1745: treat. 4, prop. 87, sec. 322,
p. 326). Piquer also affirmed the growth of minerals and metals (1745: treat. 5, prop. 111, secs.
404–405, pp. 408–409).
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Ruth Hill
Vitalism, then, was not passé in Llano Zapata’s eighteenth century; indeed, it seems startingly
fresh today when interpreted through the critical lens of vital materiality, or “vibrant matter”
(Bennett 2010). Vitalists shared an understanding of material agency which assumed that
objects had lives of their own that were not dependent on the human subject. Objects were not
brought into existence by language. They existed—in the case of silver and gold, they grew
across or beneath the earth’s surface—as real objects, whether a human subject had knowledge
of them or not.
Another mention of the Universal Flood in Memorias takes us deep into the earth’s surface to
grasp the conjoined nature of theories of the earth and theories of Amerindian origins. Llano
Zapata discusses unexplored caverns mentioned in León Pinelo’s manuscript, then remarks:
It is presumed that these underground caves were fashioned in times preceding the
Indians. Mr. Pinelo was of this opinion, with which I agree, saying thus:“there are these
and countless others in that continent, of which many, if not all, give the indication
that they were built before Indians went there to settle and consequently before the
Flood.”
[Se presume que en tiempos antecedentes a los indios se labraron estas bóvedas subter-
ráneas. De esta opinión a que me conformo es el señor Pinelo que dice así: “éstas y
otras infinitas hay en aquel continente, que si no todas, muchas de ellas hacen indicio
de haberse labrado antes que los indios entrasen a poblar y por consiguiente antes del
diluvio.]
(2005b: vol. 1, art. 18, sec. 8, p. 363; see León Pinelo 1943: vol. 1, 229)
A rich pageant of diluvial theses issued from top-tier thinkers during the Enlightenment; some
were controversial.4 An unidentified source for Llano Zapata’s diluvialism was the English natu-
ralist John Woodward (1665–1728), who published An Essay toward a Natural History of the Earth
and Terrestrial Bodies, Especially Minerals, as Also of the Seas, Rivers, and Springs, with an Account of the
Universal Flood and of the Effects that It Had upon the Earth (1695; rev. 1702, 1723, 1726). Llano
Zapata could have found Woodward in Andrés González de Barcia’s 1729 edition of Gregorio
de García’s Orígenes de los indios, which is cited in Memorias. González de Barcia (1673–1743) was
a co-founder of the Real Academia de la Lengua under the Spanish Bourbon Philip V, and his
editions of colonial chronicles circulated widely. Still, it is clear that Llano Zapata knew
Woodward’s theory of the earth firsthand, for he omitted Woodward’s name and cited his Essay
toward a Natural History by abbreviating its title in French, Géographie Physique ou Essay sur
l’Histoire Naturelle (1735). Woodward’s theory of the earth respected the Genesis account of
Noah’s Flood and at the same time offered modern scientific explanations for geological phe-
nomena such as the nature of the earth’s surface. Notably, Piquer had lauded Woodward in his
manual of the natural sciences (1745: ch. 12, prop. 85, secs. 316–317, pp. 319–321).
Another key diluvialist in Memorias was “el ilustrísimo Huet” (“the most illustrious Huet”),
that is, Bishop Pierre Daniel Huet (1630–1721), author of an influential treatise on the location
of paradise (Hill 2000) in which he discussed the Flood and Noah’s Ark at length. The French
bishop argued in Histoire du commerce et de la navigation des anciens (1716) that the Flood was
universal, not local: humans over the entire surface of the earth, except those in Noah’s Ark, were
exterminated (Huet 1716: 7–8). This second treatise, as shown later in this essay, also came to
anchor Llano Zapata’s theory of Amerindian origins.
Several diluvialists cited in Memorias were Copernicans, which likely contributed to royal
censor and mathematician Jorge Juan’s refusal to approve Memorias for publication. Among the
168
Copernicans often cited by Llano Zapata (and by Piquer) was the French Jesuit Noël Regnault
(1683–1762), author of the much-praised Entretiens physiques, ou Physique nouvelle en dialogues
(1729; 7th rev. ed., 1745–1750). Like the Peruvian, Regnault avoided naming Woodward, and,
instead, referred to the French translation as “Géograph. Phys” (1745–1750: 267, note a). Regnault
availed himself of Woodward’s authority to defend the historicity of the Noachian Flood. The
Flood took animal life from one dry land and transported it to another; likewise, marine life was
carried from the bottom of the seas to other countries, and shells came to be deposited inside
the earth and on mountaintops (1745–1750: 267–268).
Paul Alexandre Dulard (1696–1760) was another French Copernican cited in Memorias. He
versified his theory of the earth and world system: Le grandeur de Dieu dans les merveilles de la
Nature (1748) was republished a dozen times into the nineteenth century.5 In his second canto,
Dulard defended the historicity of the Universal Flood, recounting how torrential waters from
the great abyss came crashing out, surrounding sea levels rose, and tidal waves formed. Water
covered fields, mountains, the entire surface of the earth. Le grandeur de Dieu integrated the most
prominent theorists of the earth mentioned by Llano Zapata: Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm
von Leibniz, Noël Antoine Pluche, Louis Bourguet, the Comte de Buffon, Edmond Halley, and
René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur.
Finally, the Peruvian naturalist admired Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo (1663–1743). In his writ-
ings on the 1746 earthquake in Lima (Llano Zapata 1747) as well as in Memorias (Llano Zapata
2005b), there appeared strands of his fellow criollo’s theory of the earth as set down in the epic
poem, Lima fundada, o la Conquista del Perú ([1732] 2017). Moreover, in his outline of the
Viceroyalty of Peru’s history, he would resort to Copernican astronomers whose names and
tenets he had read in Peralta Barnuevo’s epic and almanacs (Llano Zapata 2005a: 218–221; Hill
forthcoming).
True, León Pinelo’s manuscript of El Paraíso en el Nuevo Mundo informed countless observa-
tions about animals, minerals, and vegetables found in Memorias.6 Llano Zapata integrated León
Pinelo’s firsthand knowledge of nature, after verifying it through empirical observation (Ewalt
2018). Through new-materialist and new-realist lenses, we see that Llano Zapata deterritorial-
ized or removed non-human objects that had belonged to León Pinelo’s assemblages of New
World nature and reterritorialized them within his own. Morevoer, in sharp contrast to León
Pinelo’s Late Scholastic thought, Llano Zapata’s scientific readings and methodology were over-
whelmingly of the Enlightenment persuasion. My assertion requires a brief but productive
excursion into the metahistories of science and knowledge-production that inform my engage-
ment with Memorias and, more broadly, relate to how we tell the history of scientific knowledge-
economies in the Spanish Atlantic and beyond it.
Over the last three decades, several historians of culture and of science have cast light on the ways
in which institutionalized scientific modernity, rooted in high theory and Cartesian rationality, ter-
ritorializes itself and deterritorializes alternate—usually practical, non-discursive—epistemologies
(Latour 1993; DeLanda 2016). These scholars have revived the critical distinction between
knowing-that and knowing-how, which had arisen decades earlier within the field of philosophy
(see Ryle 2009) to contest early twentieth-century critical histories of scientific modernity and
Western rationality. A similar distinction is vindicated by contemporary historians for whom mental
models—in which, I stress, the imagination is not walled off from human cognition—are crucial to
knowledge-production. On their reading, mental models mediate the experiential, or knowledge-
how, and the conceptual, or knowledge-that. Paradigm shifts, or “revolutions,” that structure previ-
ous critical histories of science (most notably, Kuhn 1962) in fact truncate the agents and networks
of knowledge-production and knowledge-transfer (Renn 2018). Needless to say, such “revolu-
tionary” perspectives also pass over material, non-human agency.
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Gerbi’s ridicule of Llano Zapata’s role in transatlantic knowledge-production originated

within a philosophy of science that did not and cannot make a space for reciprocal relationships
between local, everday knowledge—rooted in an analogical hermeneutics (Atran and Medin
2008; Beuchot 2016; Beuchot and Jérez 2016)—and ostensibly universal, discursive knowledge.
In Llano Zapata’s always unfinished notes and observations, I see the inductive reasoning associ-
ated with Francis Bacon’s concept of histories of nature (Ewalt 2018) working in tandem with
the deductive reasoning heralded by Cartesian rationality. This critical insight prepares us to
appreciate in Memorias the analogical hermeneutics that I have already mentioned. Llano Zapata’s
mental models allowed him to incorporate or reconfigure material objects, to reimagine the
relationships between them, and between them and him/us. In brief, he reassembled his own
assemblages of nature as he culled new data from nature to verify or debunk prevailing theories.
Critique of theories of Amerindian origins

On theories of Amerindian origins, Llano Zapata also distanced himself from León Pinelo. He
rejected the guiding premise of El Paraíso en el Nuevo Mundo: the American continent—Eden, or
the earthly paradise—was inhabited by Adam and Eve and their descendants up to Noah who
would build his Ark there and be carried across the seas to Siberia during the course of the
Universal Flood. Llano Zapata rejected this scenario as he refuted León Pinelo’s contention that
the New World plantain was the tree of knowledge, or of good and evil (León Pinelo 1943:
“Árbol de la culpa en las Indias,” pp. 204–207):
Assuming, then, that the malus and the ficus of sacred scripture are the same tree as the
plantain, or ficus indica, one finds that without altering the version in our Vulgate, this has
every indication of having been the tree of good and evil [...]. And since our plantain
bears no relation to the latter other than in the width of its leaves, and they are dissimilar
in fruits and trunks, it should absolutely not be considered the tree of knowledge that
Moses tells us about and that mister Pinelo aspires to situate in our regions [...].
[Supuesto, pues, que el malus y [el] ficus de la Sagrada Historia son el mismo árbol, que
el plátano o ficus índica, se halla que sin alterar la version de nuestra Vulgata, tiene esta
todas las apariencias de haber sido el árbol del bien y del mal […]. Y no teniendo
nuestro plátano otra relación con éste, que lo ancho de las hojas y de ser muy deseme-
jante en frutos y troncos, de ningún modo se debe mirar como el árbol de la ciencia,
que nos refiere Moisés y pretende colocar el señor Pinelo en nuestras regiones […].]
(Llano Zapata 2005b: vol. 2, art. 62, p. 458)
Again, in a 1758 letter to the Spanish humanist Gregorio de Mayans y Siscar, Llano Zapata was
characteristically curt in his dismissal of the Late Scholastic historian:
All told, I cannot but confess that this wise man became hasty many times in hopes of
justifying his Paradise in the New World system, which, not exceeding the limits of
some vain conjectures, has stayed within the limits of a simple paradox, albeit a sound
one if his reasons are examined. What happened to him was what happens to poets,
who tend to go off a cliff chasing the power of a consonant, or what happens to Greek
grammarians, who get themselves all in a tangle or maze of expressions.
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[Con todo, no puedo menos que confesar que este sabio hombre se precipitó muchas
veces por querer probar su sistema del Paraíso en el Nuevo Mundo que no pasando los
términos de unas vanas conjeturas, se ha quedado en los límites de una mera paradoja,
bien que fundada, si se contemplan sus razones. Le sucedió lo que a los poetas, que suelen
despeñarse por hallar la fuerza de una consonante, o lo que a los gramáticos griegos que
por encontrar la raíz de una voz se meten en un enredo o laberinto de expresiones.]
(Llano Zapata 2005b: “Carta,” p. 562)
Llano Zapata turned to a dear friend of León Pinelo’s, the Augustinian friar and criollo Antonio
de la Calancha (1584–1654), to strike down another theory of Amerindian origins: the Canaanite
thesis. While recalling Pedro Simón’s report that Spanish miners had dug out of the mountains
surrounding Port Callao a ship whose structure differed from that of modern vessels, Llano
Zapata turned to Calancha’s Crónica moralizada (1639):
His whole scheme with this false report was to prove that there were men in our lands
before the Flood. Maestro Calancha cleverly answers him with the following words:
“Three things he left unattended: first, whether or not there was a ship other than the
Ark during the Flood, and [second,] whether there are mines at Port Callao, and
[third,] if there were mines when the Spaniards arrived there. But even if all of this
(which had not a bit of truth to it) were proven, it would not prove the antiquity of
men, but, instead, the antiquity of the ship.” This report is like the many chimeras that
are swallowed by writers who are lovers of novelties.They dress up everything however
it suits them to make their whim or willfulness seem consistent.
[Toda su idea con esta falsa noticia era probar que en nuestras tierras hubo hombres
antes del diluvio. El maestro Calancha le repone con gracia las siguientes palabras:“Tres
cosas le faltaron por averiguar, primero si hubo en el diluvio más navío que la arca y si
en el Callao hay minas o las hubo cuando entraron los españoles. Pero ni probado esto
(que ni asomo tuvo de verdad) no probaba antigüedad de hombres, sino antigüedad de
navío.” Esta noticia es como las muchas quimeras que tragan los escritores amantes de
novedades. A todo envisten como les sirva de apoyo para hacer consistir su capricho o
voluntariedad.]
(Llano Zapata 2005b: vol. 1, art. 20, sec. 28, p. 410)
The foregoing quote from Calancha was the opening salvo of the Augustinian’s assault on pur-
veyors of the Canaanite thesis. Calancha ticks off “los absurdos de su congetura” (“the absurdities
of their conjecture”) here:
Let the first be that God commanded that Ham’s descendants from Canaan’s line serve
Sem’s descendants, the Jews, and not other peoples. And if they pretend that the curse
be fulfilled with these Indians, let them get the nobility [comprised] of so many lords,
gentry, and purebloods to agree that they are Jews since Indians serve them, or agree
among themselves that it is easier for Indians not to be Canaanites.
[Sea el primero que Dios mãdò, que los decendientes de Cam por la linea de Canaan
sirviessen a los Judios decendientes de Sem, i no a otras naciones; i si en estos Indios
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quieren q se cũpla la maldiciõ, o negocien cõ la nobleza de tantos cavalleros, idalgos i

linpios que seã Judios pues les sirvẽ los indios, o negocien los escritores consigo, que es
mas facil que estos Indios no sean Cananeos.]
(Calancha 1639: ch.VI, para. 1, p. 35)
Calancha crafts an ironic concessio: he appears to concede the point that Indians descended from
Canaanites only to pounce on his adversaries by arguing that, like the cursed Canaan and his
progeny, who were slaves of the Israelites in the Promised Land, Indians were slaves of the con-
verso nobility in Lima.The dilemma that he extends to writers who defend the Canaanite theory
of Amerindian origins is a forked irony.
Recent history weighed heavily on Calancha, a stalwart defender of the moral and intellec-
tual capacity of Indians and a staunch opponent of the elites who mistreated them. He certainly
had in mind events leading up to the 1639 auto-da-fe in Lima, during which the Holy Inquisition
would punish several noblemen and church officials of Portuguese Jewish extraction
(Schaposchnik 2015). Fernando de Montesinos, a Presbyterian historian and miner mentioned
in Llano Zapata’s Memorias, published an account of that auto-da-fe (1639) that opens with the
theory that the earthly paradise was in Peru, elaborating on it with colonial chroniclers
(Columbus, Antonio de Herrera, José Acosta, and others) who would later figure in León
Pinelo’s manuscript of Paraíso en el Nuevo Mundo.7 Although scholars have speculated that
Montesinos was, like León Pinelo, of Portuguese converso ancestry, the account itself (Montesinos
1639) is vehemently anti-Jewish, and its contents shed much-needed light on Calancha’s
allegation.
Montesinos recounts how Crypto-Jews in Lima vanished from the markets, beginning in
1634, as the Inquisition began its secret investigations and arrests. After reviewing lesser punish-
ments meted out by the Holy Office, he describes those merchants and middlemen whipped,
sent to the galleys in Madrid, and/or fined, and then exiled from the Indies for practicing
Judaism. The case of Don Simón Ossorio (a.k.a. Simón Rodríguez), a Portuguese raised in
Flanders and residing in Quito, illuminates Calancha’s attack on the Canaanite thesis, which
Llano Zapata was to carry forward.
Ossorio had gone with power-of-attorney to oversee the Duchess de Lerma’s obrajes in
Quito. After he was jailed, they found two portraits of him—one dressed as a woman, and the
other dressed as a man. During his trial, they uncovered three supposed fathers corresponding
to three different nationalities. Ossorio was dodging legal and social infamy: in Coimbra, the
Holy Inquisition had publicly condemned and reconciled his biological father with the Church.
He had undergone his nobility trial in Madrid, and was so convinced of victory that he bragged
about it, stating that:
With four reales he would make himself out to be whoever he wanted at the blood
purity trial in Madrid, portraying himself as the noblest and most entitled of men, and
to exhibit this he wore flowing locks and went about all dressed-up and perfumed,
[and] he was jailed and his assets confiscated for being observant of Moses’ Law and
teaching it to others [… ].
[Con quatro reales haría él en Madrid en informaciones, y quien quisiesse, pintándose

el más noble y más calificado, y para ostentar esto, traía grandes mechones y andaba
muy gala y oloroso, fue preso con secreto [sic] de bienes, por Iudio observante de la ley
de moysen, y que la enseñava a otros […].]
(Montesinos 1639: n.p.)
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Such notorious events during the gestation of Calancha’s chronicle incited his assault on Lima’s
converso nobility, deftly ensconced within his critique of the Canaanite thesis. Within a broader
historical frame, moreover, Calancha’s dilemma—as facetious as it was caustic—red-flagged the
Jewish heritage of elites at a historical inflection point for the transfer and application of blood
purity statutes to the New World (see Hill 2005: ch. 5; Martínez 2008).
Whether or not Llano Zapata was aware of the historical backdrop to Calancha’s resentment,
he knew that the Canaanite thesis was well-traveled in the seventeenth century and in his own,
thanks to Juan de Torquemada, author of Monarquía Indiana, a sprawling chronicle of New Spain
first published in 1615 and republished in 1723. In a letter to Mayans y Sicar, Llano Zapata
dispensed with Torquemada’s suggestion that José Acosta (whom Llano Zapata cited frequently
and with admiration) had stolen most of his Historia natural y moral de las Indias from another
author. Torquemada often wrote with passion, not reason, and made unverifiable claims (Llano
Zapata 2005b: “Carta,” pp. 564–565). Moreover, Torquemada himself was considered a
plagiarist.8
When viewed within a larger historical and material sensibility, Llano Zapata’s rebuke takes
on richer hues. In his Proemio to the 1725 edition of Monarquía Indiana, González de Barcia
claimed to have declined to restore a passage from the original manuscript that he characterized
as “el fundamento, o Clave de la Idea de esta Obra” [“the foundation, or Key to the Work’s
Meaning”] (Torquemada 1725: Proemio, n.p.). The so-called “key” to Torquemada’s work, which
the editor stated had been suppressed due to recato—perhaps a euphemism for censure—was that
the Mexica had traveled to the Promised Land (Canaan), as the Israelites had, according to
Exodus, because the Devil wished to imitate God (1725: Proemio, n.p.). González de Barcia sup-
ported his interpretation of Torquemada’s true intent by invoking García’s Origen de los Indios
(which González de Barcia would revise, expand, and publish in 1729) and Agustín de Vetancurt’s
Teatro mexicano (1971).9 All that we have to go on, however, is the editor’s supposition, for
Torquemada’s own words situated him within the coterie of the Canaanite thesis.
Granted, Torquemada did, in fact, divine common ground between Judaism and Mexica
religion. The Mexica people, who succeeded the Toltecs and were the ancestors of modern
Indians, observed religious holidays at the start of each month, which custom “appears to have
been taken from that of the Hebrews […]” [“parece hurtada de la de los Hebreos […]” (1725:
vol. 2, bk. 10, ch. 9, p. 248)]. Morning and evening sacrifices throughout the year mirrored those
performed by Hebrews in the Temple (1725: 248). The two peoples shared engagement and
marriage customs (1725: vol. 2, bk. 13, ch. 13, pp. 411–412, 416–417, 419), as well as traditions
of birthing and childrearing (1725: vol. 2, bk. 13, ch. 26, p. 466). In addition, a screed—allegedly
penned by Bartolomé de las Casas—traced the allegedly Hebrew roots of indigenous languages
and peoples, which irritated Llano Zapata. He seized on the linguistic argument that the word
canoa was derived from the Hebrew canon: “Whoever’s opinion it was, it lacks any foundation
whatsoever” [“Sea la opinion de quién se fuese, ella carece de todo fundamento” (Llano Zapata
2005b: “Carta a Mayans y Siscar,” p. 582)].
González de Barcia’s claim notwithstanding, however, Torquemada went to great pains to
discredit the Hebrew theory of Amerindian origins in a chapter that clearly caught Llano Zapata’s
attention when he was reading the 1725 edition of Monarquía Indiana (Torquemada 1725: 1,
bk. 1, ch. 9, pp. 22–27). A closer look at Monarquía Indiana confirms Torquemada’s open-armed
commitment to the Canaanite theory.
He began his exposition by denouncing figurative interpretations of the giants who migrated
into the Land of Canaan, or the Promised Land, and were defeated by the Israelites (1725: 1,
bk. 1, ch. 13, p. 34). He then recounted that the original inhabitants of New Spain, the Toltecs,
encountered Quinametin (giants, or the biblical Nephilim) when they arrived.10 Those Quinametin
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populated the land, according to native accounts, but nobody knew from whence they had
come (1725: 1, bk. 1, ch. 13, pp. 34–35).Torquemada had once owned a giant’s molar— twice as
big as a man’s fist—that weighed more than two pounds. At the time, he consulted a Parisian
sculptor nearby who told him that he had seen an enormous thigh bone unearthed at the St.
Augustine Convent in Mexico City, “which was from a Giant, one of those from the Age of the
Flood […]” [“que era de Gigante, de los del Tiempo del Diluvio […]” (1725: 1, bk. 1, ch. 13,
p. 35]. Such arguments framed the Toltecs as Canaanites living among the Nephilim.Torquemada
did not doubt that the disinterred bones of the Quinametin were those of the biblical Nephilim.
He did not know, however, whether those fossils in Mexico City were prediluvian or, rather,
postdiluvian (1725: 1, bk. 1, ch. 13, p. 35). On which side of the “Age of the Flood” were these
fossils of Mexican Nephilim (Quinametin)?
Llano Zapata did not pose this question because he did not believe that bones of enormous
proportions discovered in Europe and the Americas were fossils of those colossal human
hybrids—the so-called sons of man and God—from the Old Testament. In a 1726 essay, Feijoo
had acknowledged the unearthing of scattered bones that made their way to cabinets of curiosi-
ties. Almost all savants, he insisted, knew that these bones belonged to elephants or whales or
were petrifications of organic matter (Feijoo 1726; Sequeiros San Román 2002, pp. 112–138).
Similarly, Llano Zapata considered such discoveries in the New World to be either hoaxes or the
remains of large animals from the remote past (2005b, pp. 558–559). Fossils belonged to different
material and narrative assemblages: human agents such as Torquemada, Feijoo, and Llano Zapata
mentally and manually indexed fossils—which encompassed more organic and non-organic
objects than what we associate with the fossil concept today (Rudwick 1976)—in patterns that
responded to a vast array of scientific, religious, economic, and imperial demands and desires.
Fossils generated human meaning in relationship to each other, and disrupted anthropocentric
networks of signification. Not only did Torquemada and other colonial chroniclers collect and
index non-human remains, they assembled them within a broader assemblage of supposed mate-
rial evidence of the first peoples in the Americas. For Torquemada, bones that he had seen or
held in his hand were the fossils of race. As vibrant matter, the remains of those supposed giants
made explicit for Torquemada the racial origins of the Indians who were living on top of those
fossils in seventeenth-century Mexico City.
In the second volume of Monarquía Indiana, the author outlined his theory of the Canaanite
origins of Indians more deliberately, and from a very different angle. First, he surveyed potential
natural causes of skin color in Indians and Africans (Torquemada 1725: 2, bk. 14, ch. 18,
pp. 567–568), then he maintained that the actual cause was supernatural: the curse that Noah
had placed on his grandson Canaan, more commonly known by the misnomer “Ham’s Curse,”
for Noah had punished his son Ham by punishing Canaan. Torquemada did acknowledge an
exegesis of Ham’s Curse opposed to his own: the skin color of Black Africans was derived from
their ancestor Ham, whose red skin God had blackened to punish Ham for having exposed his
father Noah’s private parts to the irrision of his sons, i.e., Noah’s grandsons. Ham’s curse was
black skin, according to that exegesis, and all of Ham’s progeny were included in that “justo
juyzio de Dios” [“God’s just judgment”] (1725: 2, bk. 14, ch. 19, p. 569). Torquemada partly
disagreed, however, and emphasized the biblical mark of Cain. Canaan was the actual culprit, but
Ham failed to punish his son’s sacrilege. Consequently, Ham’s four sons were darkened by their
father’s complicity in Canaan’s infamy, and Canaan’s offspring were condemned to serve their
“brothers,” nearly all of them enslaved and killed by the Israelites (1725: 2, bk. 14, ch. 19, 569).
As elaborated in Monarquía Indiana, the combination of the mark of Cain (slavery) and Ham’s
curse (dark skin) served to justify the Indians’ servitude and death, or at least that was how it
might be interpreted—and was interpreted, at least by the criollo Calancha. In Crónica moralizada,
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the Augustinian friar razed Torquemada’s second line of argument by noting that there were no
grounds to claim that Canaanites were brown. Even if they were, he noted, the color of Indians
in Peru varied enormously. Besides, Tartars and Indians in Asia were brown and they were the
descendants of Sem and Japheth, not of Ham. Furthermore, Indians were not slaves before the
arrival of the Spaniards, nor could they be held in bondage, according to Spanish laws (Calancha
1639: ch. 6, p. 37; MacCormack 1982).
Llano Zapata disrupted another venerable school of thought about Amerindian origins, one
which had coalesced around the Hebrew theory and was rooted in the biblical Ophir founded
by Noah’s son of the same name. Different flavors of the Jewish theory circulated in Llano
Zapata’s era. Perhaps the most respected exegete of the Enlightenment was the Frenchman
Augustin Calmet (1672–1757).The 1730 edition of his Dictionnaire historique, critique, cronologique,
geographique et litteral [English trans. Calmet’s Great Dictionary of the Holy Bible, Historical, Critical,
Geographical, 1813] was often cited by Llano Zapata. Calmet provided a formidable review of
Ophir theories, at one point noting: “Others have fought for the Country of Ophir, and have
placed it in the Island called Hispaniola. Christopher Columbus, who first discovered this Island
in 1492, used to say he had found the Ophir of Solomon. […] Postel and some others have placed
it in Peru, a country famous for its vast quantity of gold” (Calmet 1813: vol. 2, p. 325).
Immediately after quoting from Calancha’s rebuttal of the tale about the ship found in the
mountains of Port Callao and of the Canaanite thesis tied to its mast, Llano Zapata discredited
the aforementioned Montesinos’s knowledge of minerals as displayed in his Ophir de España:
Memorias historiales y políticas del Pirú [Spain’s Ophir: Historical and Political Memoires of Peru] (Llano
Zapata 2005b: vol. 1, p. 410, n. 233), of which only the second volume has been published, as
Ofir de España: Anales peruanos [Spain’s Ophir: Peruvian Annals] (1650). Chances are quite high
that Llano Zapata would also have rejected Montesinos’s thesis that Peru was the biblical Ophir
just as he rejected León Pinelo’s manuscript on the New World as the earthly paradise, for both
of these authors presented the first peoples in Peru as descendants of Noah, or Hebrews.
Llano Zapata’s critique of the Ophir school included Benito Arias Montano, a Spanish theo-
logian at the Council of Trent (later, a diplomat in Spanish Flanders), who still garnered respect
from Enlightenment exegetes such as Calmet due to the polyglot Biblia sacra (Holy Bible) that he
had co-edited (Antwerp, 1569–1573). Calmet issued unbridled praise for this edition of the
Bible: “Nay, some there are who call it one of the Wonders of the World, Orbis miraculum” (1813:
vol. 3, p. 291). Calmet and other authors heaped praise on the extensive scholarly apparatus that
accompanied Biblia sacra, especially the volume entitled Hebrew Antiquities, the focal point for
Calmet (Calmet 1813: vol. 3, p. 291).11 The volume included a treatise on Canaan (Calmet 1813:
vol. 3, pp. 326, 367; Gómez Canseco and Fernández López in Arias Montano 2016: p. 50), and
it featured stunning maps, doubtless the product of Arias Montano’s friendship with Abraham
Ortelius, on whose behalf the theologian interceded with Philip II to secure Ortelius’s appoint-
ment as royal cosmographer of Spain. Perhaps the most famous of the maps, then and now, was
that which charted the alleged Hebrew migrations to the Americas and elsewhere.
In a nutshell, Arias Montano’s hermeneutics consolidated the material riches of the New
World—primarily, gold and silver—into a divine reward for the Spaniards who had ostensibly
rediscovered the biblical Ophir, where God had ordained that the descendants of Noah’s three
sons should reunite through the Spanish conquest of the Americas.12 Additionally,Arias Montano
elaborated on the thesis that Hebrews were the first inhabitants of Spain under King
Nebuchadnezzar II (sixth century B.C.), which had issued from Jewish, converso, and Christian
exegetes and historians (see Gómez Canseco and Fernández López in Arias Montano 2016:
pp. 50–54). For obvious reasons, both of Arias Montano’s theses were irreconcilable with limp-
ieza de sangre statutes in the Spanish world (Gómez Canseco and Fernández López in Arias
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Montano 2016: pp. 50–54). They caused enough discomfort to have the Biblia sacra withdrawn
from circulation in Spain, and expurgated and restricted elsewhere.
Llano Zapata entered the Hebrew theory of Amerindian origins through a backdoor: an
article on the lode stone (“De la piedra imán”).With insistently blunt language, he strikes down
here the crux of Arias Montano’s theory:
Many have reasoned that Solomon’s fleet, which departed from Asiongaber, Port of
Idumea, could not have completed such a prolonged voyage by sea without the pilots
who directed the fleet being privy to the secret of the nautical stone, which would not
have been hidden from that wise King. These [authors] would have it that the term
peruain as it is read in Holy Scripture means our Peru.This, if we stick to the strict sense
of the Hebrew term and to the corruption of the American term, lacks any foundation
whatsoever, no matter how Arias Montano tries to defend it.
[Muchos han pensado que la flota de Salomón que salió de Asiongaber, Puerto de
Idumea, no podia haber hecho tan dilatado viaje al océano sin ser instruidos los pilotos
que la conducían en el secreto de la piedra náutica, que no se ocultaría a aquel sabio
Rey. Quieren éstos que la dicción peruain que se lee en la Escritura Santa sea nuestro
Perú. Esto, si estamos al riguroso sentido de la voz hebrea y a la corrupción de la ameri-
cana, carece de todo fundamento, por más que Arias Montano lo defienda.]
(2005b: vol. 1, art. 12, point 5, p. 298)
The hermeneutical road that connected Perú with the Hebrew parvayim, or perú, had been trav-
elled in both Jewish and Christian exegetical literatures: Arias Montano probably took it from
French cosmographer Guillaume Postel, member of a converso family (Gómez Canseco and
Fernández López in Arias Montano 2016: 54, n. 47 and n. 48). In García’s Origen de los indios, he
devoted book four to Arias Montano’s theory and a patient rebuttal of the same, especially the
alleged etymological connection between paruayim and Perú. In the margins, Torquemada’s edi-
tor González de Barcia cited Postell, and he repeatedly cited Calmet’s version of the Bible and
exegetical works on the same published in the years 1707–1716, including the interpretation
and map of the biblical Ophir, which the Frenchman situated far from the Americas.
Before turning to Llano Zapata’s theory of Amerindian origins, I wish to underline that he
critiqued existing theories of Amerindian origins against the backdrop of significant transforma-
tions in knowledge-production. He was writing Memorias when private and royal cabinets of
curiosities were being reassembled into museums (Delbourgo 2017; Mauriès 2011) and other
scientific institutions. One of Llano Zapata’s aforementioned sources, Ulloa, parlayed his pris-
oner-of-war experience in England into a scientific opportunity: members of the Royal
Academy took him to meet leading naturalists and to visit London’s private collections and
nascent museums. In 1752 he founded Spain’s Royal House of Geography and Cabinet of
Natural History (Real Casa de la Geografía y Gabinete de Historia Natural), comprised of naturalists
and geographers whom Ulloa chose and directed until 1755 (Montero 2003, pp. 21–24; Puig
Samper 1995, pp. 114–118; Pelayo 1996, pp. 261–263). Llano Zapata’s theory of the earth upheld
the Old Testament account of the Flood, as had Ulloa’s own theory (Ulloa 1748), and both natu-
ralists braided a theory of the earth and a theory of Amerindian origins. Their mental models
manifested themselves textually in a georacial architecture: their narratives showcased assem-
blages of non-human objects (plants, stones, precious minerals, and so forth), put together based
on their experiential and theoretical knowledge. They selected and ordered these objects in
order to bolster their geological (at that time geographical) and racial edifices (Hill 2019).
176
Llano Zapata’s theory of Amerindian origins

Although absent in the critical literature on theories of Amerindian origins (Huddleston 1967;
Gliozzi 1977), Llano Zapata’s own theory is laid out in a vast footnote to his article on precious
stones and minerals (I, art. 10, n. 119, pp. 238–241). This placement reflected an analogical
hermeneutics as well as the ontological conviction that minerals were not dead matter: they
could grow, die, and tell stories about the human past and present. Whether Llano Zapata
intended it or not, his segue between non-human and human conveys to us a vital materiality
that does not, I insist, decenter the human (Bennett 2010; Aloi 2018, pp. 196–197), but does
counterbalance human agency. He initially turned to Huet’s widely cited Histoire du commerce et
de la navigation des anciens (1716), in which the bishop held that Egyptians and Phoenicians were
the only documented long-distance navigators in ancient times. The Phoenicians, ancestors of
the Carthaginians (1716: p. 27), demonstrated to the Hebrews, who were masters of the Promised
Land (Canaan), the wealth and power of maritime trade, which Solomon needed in order to
build the Temple. Phoenicians were especially active on the East coast of Africa, the region
known as Ophir in Solomon’s era (1716: pp. 30–31). Huet’s authority and popularity assisted
Llano Zapata in establishing that Ophir was not Peru, and that neither Hebrews nor Canaanites
settled the New World after the Flood.
The French Protestant Samuel Bochart (1599–1667), who argued (1707) that pre-Columbian
peoples were descendants of Phoenicians, themselves Canaanites, is acknowledged in Memorias.
Still, Llano Zapata copies almost an entire page from Huet to contrast Bochart’s theory (Huet
1716: 67–68; Llano Zapata 2005b: vol. 1, art. 10, n. 119, p. 240). The bishop marshaled ancient
authorities to argue that in addition to their Old World colonies, Carthaginians had discovered
and inhabited an enormous island in the ocean, Isla Afortunada, distant from the Cádiz Strait. A
storm, caused by the strong wind out of the East that is characteristic of the Torrid Zone, carried
Carthaginians to western islands. These lands would later be known as América.
Next, Llano Zapata summons Le Gendre, marquis de Saint Aubin, for whom the Phoenician
theory of Amerindian origins revolved around the Carthaginian admiral Hanno’s lost periplus,
or logbook, of his expedition along the entire coast of Africa. Greek and Roman historians
claimed that the periplus included voyages to new lands, during which the sun was on Hanno’s
right, suggesting that the descendants of the Phoenicians had reached Isla Afortunada, or the
islands that would later be called America (Le Gendre and de Saint Aubin 1741: 697–698; Llano
Zapata 2005b: 241, n. 119). Llano Zapata took away two points from his reading of Le Gendre,
who had read Huet: first, that the lost periplus of admiral Hanno’s voyages was historical; and,
second, that Europeans were not the first people to round the Cape of Good Hope (Llano
Zapata 2005b: 241, n. 119).
The upshot, which Llano Zapata’s readers would have grasped immediately, was that the
Phoenicians or their direct descendants made it not only to the Cape of Good Hope but also to
Cape Horn, in Tierra del Fuego, nexus of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Just as Pedro Álvarez
Cabral came upon the coast of Brazil while sailing along the coast of Malabar, so too “the
Phoenicians could have discovered and populated those parts of the world […]” [“pudieron los
fenicios haber descubierto y poblado aquellas partes del mundo […]”] (Llano Zapata 2005b:
241, n. 119). Llano Zapata’s ensuing conclusion resolutely illustrates how theories of Amerindian
origins intersected theories of the earth:
And although it might be argued that this land, or Atlantic Island, did not extend more
than 300 leagues beyond the Columns of Hercules, who knows if it formed a conti-
nent with our western islands or with Brazil in another age? This is not hard to believe
177
Ruth Hill
when experience makes us see, that on this earthly globe, what before was sea is now
land, and land what before was sea.
[Y aunque se quiera decir que esta tierra o isla Atlántica no se extendía sino 300 leguas
más allá de las columnas de Hercules, quién sabe si fue ella en otro tiempo un conti-
nente con nuestras islas occidentales o con el Brasil? Esto sin mucha fuerza se puede
creer cuando la experiencia nos hace ver que en este globo terráqueo hoy es mar lo
que antes era tierra, y tierra lo que antes era mar.]
(Llano Zapata 2005b: 241, n. 119)
Llano Zapata’s experiential reading of the earth’s surface had a sterling pedigree. John Ray,
esteemed theorist of the earth and member of the Royal Society of London, had made the very
same claim with respect to the earth’s immersion sequences (1692; 1713), and Llano Zapata
twice mentioned Ray in his Memorias (Llano Zapata 2005b: pp. 464, 469). Although the
Peruvian’s geological works from 1747 have been attributed to Late Scholasticism (Peralta Ruiz
2007), he actually espoused a dynamic model of the earth (Llano Zapata 1863: pp. 146–147;
Llano Zapata 1747: pp. 6–7), which would become even more so after the publication of Juan
and Ulloa’s Relación histórica (1748). Not long after, Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon,
would publish the tenet “sur le changement de mer en terre & de terre en mer” in support of
his own theory of the earth (1750: p. 105).
Conclusion
In Llano Zapata’s Memorias, “antiquities,” or material objects from the remote past such as the
unexplored caves that I mentioned earlier, warranted his theory about the origins of New World
peoples and his theory of Amerindian origins. However, he did not recur to Torquemada’s fossils
of race—the alleged bones of New World Nephilim remembered as Quinametin. Llano Zapata
was not beholden to Late Scholastic concepts, methodologies, or assemblages of New World
nature. Nor was he an intellectual lightweight worthy of Gerbi’s ridicule. The criollo naturalist’s
theory of the earth as well as his theory of Amerindian origins relied overwhelmingly on eigh-
teenth-century authors and his own observations of nature in Spain and the Spanish Atlantic.
Llano Zapata melded direct observation and Enlightenment authority in defense of diluvialism—
and, in a veiled manner, Copernicanism. While doing so, he forged a theory of Amerindian ori-
gins that was radically different from the theories of historians and theologians in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries.
Notes
1 For a succinct outline of the genre during the long eighteenth century, see Rudwick (2005, pp. 133–139).
2 Modern editors of Memorias were unable to identify Alexandre’s reference guide (1748), which circu-
lated this modern belief. Llano Zapata identifies it as Diccionario botánico.
3 Two chemists whom he frequently cited, Martin Lister and Jan Baptist van Helmont, are likely suspects.
See Roos (2007, pp. 77–79). However, so many top-shelf scientists of the 1740s and 1750s appear in
Memorias that it is difficult to hazard more than an educated guess.
4 The bibliography on diluvialism is enormous. See Rudwick (1976, pp. 72–93); Rudwick (2010,
pp. 73–88); Rappaport (1997, pp. 136–172); Rousseau and Haycock (2000, pp. 135–136); Sequeiros San
Román (2002, pp. 36–48); Pelayo (1996, pp. 55–92).
5 Israel (2002) appears to mistake Dulard’s poem (1749) for Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle’s essay on
the existence of God (1742).
178
6 The quantitative weight of León Pinelo’s unpublished manuscript of El Paraíso en el Nuevo Mundo has
been convincingly established by Garrido Aranda (n.d. in Llano Zapata 2005b), who provides not only
the percentage of Llano Zapata’s citations of the work vis-à-vis other sources but also numerous exam-
ples of the Peruvian’s copying of León Pinelo’s work without attribution.
7 On Montesinos’s Ophir interpretation, see MacCormack (2007, pp. 269–272). Tord (1998, pp. 130–
131) links Montesino’s thesis that the Incas were Hebrews to Montesino’s purported converso origins.
See also Hyland (2007); Gordon (2017).
8 It had been suggested that his mentor, Franciscan Jerónimo de Mendieta, had given him the manuscript
that Torquemada later published under his own name. See “Carta,” in Llano Zapata (2005b, p. 566). In
the revised and corrected edition of Monarquía Indiana (1723) that Llano Zapata consulted, the allega-
tions are confronted. See Torquemada, “Proemio a esta segunda impression de la Monarquía Indiana. El
Impresor al Lector” (1723), vol. 1: unnumbered pp. 3–5. See Carlyon’s comments (2005, pp. 37–38) on
the Proemio.
9 Llano Zapata consulted the second, 1723 edition, anonymously revised and expanded by González de
Barcia. See Carlyon (2005, pp. 118–164).
10 A similar argument was put forth in 1746 by the royal chronicler Lorenzo Benaducci Boturini, whose
work (1933) the Peruvian knew (“Carta,” in Llano Zapata, Memorias, p. 563). In Monarquía Indiana,
however, the origins theory was more fully developed, as Calancha and Llano Zapata knew well.
11 Kauffmann Doig’s work (1996), unlike the present study, attributes the proliferation of theories of
Amerindian origins to the exotic nature of the discovery of America. That the polyglot Bible, with its
striking Apparatus sacer of maps and treatises, embodied the genre of geographia sacra is undoubtedly true,
as Shalev (2010) has argued. See also art historian Brekka’s recent study (2012).
12 On Postell, Arias Montano, and Acosta, see Gliozzi’s brilliant and unparalleled study (1977). See also
Romm (2001, pp. 40–41); Popkin (1989).
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Tord, Luis Enrique. 1998. “El ultimo quipucayamoc.” Lienzo 19: 129–150.
Torquemada, Juan de. 1723. Los veinte y un libros rituales i Monarchía Indiana, edited by Andrés González de
Barcia. 3 vols. 2nd, revised and expanded ed. Madrid: Oficina de Nicolás Rodríguez.
Vetancurt, Augustín. 1971. Teatro mexicano: Descripción breve de los sucesos ejemplares históricos y religiosos del
Nuevo Mundo de las Indias. Facsimile ed. Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa
Woodward, John. 1726. An Essay toward a Natural History of the Earth and Terrestrial Bodies, Especially Minerals,
as Also of the Seas, Rivers, and Springs, with an Account of the Universal Flood and of the Effects that It Had upon
the Earth. Rev. and enlarged ed. London: Thomas Edlin.
———. 1735. Géographie Physique ou Essay sur l’Histoire Naturelle de la Terre. Translated by M. Noguez and
revised by R. P. Niceron. Paris: Briasson.
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10
THE “CANNIBAL COGITO”
AND BRAZILIAN
ANTROPOFAGIA
Radical heterogeneity or “family resemblance”?
Luís Madureira
Lévi-Strauss famously asserts that of all “savage practices,” cannibalism is “the one we find the
most horrible and disgusting” (1961, 385). For René Girard, too, the ritual consumption of the
bodily fragments of dead ancestors or slain enemies has a “frankly disagreeable nature” and is
“often regarded as an aberration” (1989, 274). As Phillip Boucher writes, cannibals are “the
ignoble savages par excellence” (1992, 19). Nevertheless, both Girard and Lévi-Strauss
(apparently reproducing Montaigne’s familiar perspectival inversion) swiftly proceed to rela-
tivize the loathing they evoke. Thus, for Girard, cannibalism, despite its ostensible repulsive-
ness, is readily intelligible in the context of his sweeping comparative analysis of sacrificial
rites. Concomitantly, Lévi-Strauss alludes to the underlying similarities between “savage” and
“civilized” religious convictions: “We must realize that certain of our own usages, if investi-
gated by an observer from a different society, would seem to him similar in kind to the can-
nibalism which we consider uncivilized” (1961, 386). Peter Hulme corroborates Lévi-Strauss’s
and Girard’s appraisals, considering the practice “the mark of unregenerate savagery” (1986, 3).
Ultimately, though, he questions whether any indigenous group (in the Caribbean, at least)
ever engaged in ritual anthropophagy (1986, 79).
In his wide-ranging study of the deployment of the cannibal trope in the Americas, Carlos
Jáuregui recalls that the term caníbal is one of the first neologisms to emerge from the early
modern contact zone. Echoing Hulme, Jáuregui underscores that it also constitutes a linguistic,
ethnographic and “teratological” misunderstanding [malentendido] (2008, 14). For Hulme, this
equivocation “puts the association between the word ‘cannibal’ and the eating of human flesh
into doubt” (19); we simply “do not know” whether “the Caribs really, as a matter of custom and
practice, [ate] human flesh” (79). For Jáuregui, cannibal is the “master signifier” for colonial alter-
ity (2008, 13–14): “the cannibal tells the time of savagery” (Jáuregui 2008, 109) [“El caníbal
marca la hora del salvajismo”]. Neither Hulme nor Jáuregui go quite so far as William Arens
(1979), who famously reduces the practice to a pervasive, unsubstantiated myth propagated to
oppress and enslave indigenous peoples. Nevertheless, they concur that, either as a trope or a
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Luís Madureira
signifier, “cannibal” “has gained its entire meaning from within the discourse of European colo-
nialism” (Hulme 86). It has served “to prop up imperialism’s discursive edifice, [forging] close
links between the imputation of cannibalism and the conquest of America” (Jáuregui 2008, 15,
77). In this way, their principal concern, as Jáuregui puts it, is neither the cannibals themselves
nor the dietary habits of this or that aboriginal group, but rather the cultural meanings of
cannibalism (Jáuregui 2008, 22). In Hulme’s words, their analyses center on how cannibalism
operates as a key feature of “the discourse of colonialism” (3).
Although I fundamentally concur with Hulme’s and Jáuregui’s ground-breaking critiques, I
take a different tack in the reconsideration of the trope and practice of anthropophagy that
follows. As with Lévi-Strauss and Girard, my aim is also to understand the practice from a com-
parative perspective. As Phillip Boucher notes in his gloss of Neil Whitehead’s careful assessment
of the historical evidence of Carib cannibalism, though we certainly ought to examine early
modern European accounts of the practice “with skeptical caution,” we should not dismiss them
offhand (1992, 6). Like Whitehead’s, my working assumption in this chapter is that there is evi-
dence of “ritual cannibalism of war captives among both the Caribs and other Amerindian
groups” (1984, 69). In this regard, the far-reaching cultural and intellectual implications of what
Isabelle Combès names the “cannibal tragedy” (1992) are considerably more pertinent to my
analysis. It was this drama that the Tupinambá Indians of coastal Brazil purportedly performed
on a few crucial occasions before horrified European eyes.The rich and varied accounts of these
performances (either by eyewitnesses or hearsay) have proved invaluable to subsequent ethno-
logical reconstructions of the ritual, as well as speculations about its function and meaning. As
Girard asserts, “the Tupinambá occupy a prominent place in the intellectual history of modern
Europe, [serving] as models for the pre-eighteenth-century portrait of the ‘noble savage,’ who
was shortly to play a great role in the history of Western humanism” (1989, 274).
It is perhaps to the Tupi’s lasting contribution to European political thought that Brazilian
modernist Oswald de Andrade (the epitome of the “cosmopolitan literato” and pugnacious homo
ludens, in Alfredo Bosi’s apt characterization [2007, 357]), mordantly refers in his iconic and play-
fully iconoclastic 1928 Manifesto antropófago: “Without us, Europe wouldn’t even have its poor
declaration of the rights of man” (1972, 14).1 Published in the first issue of the Revista de
Antropofagia, the Manifesto launched Brazil’s short-lived, yet far-ranging anthropophagy move-
ment. Deriving its inspiration from the canonical definition of ritual cannibalism as an extreme
form of revenge, a “practice destined exclusively to enhance the vital force of those who p erform
it” (Méttraux 1950, 266), modernism’s metaphoric anthropophagy likewise denotes a violent
and arguably “indiscriminate” incorporation of “alien” cultural “forms and contents” into the
national body (Bosi 1992, 333). By the early 1930s, the Manifesto’s author had repudiated the
“anthropophagic measles rash” (Andrade 1971, 38), in the wake of his political turn to
Communism. For the next few decades, anthropophagy was largely consigned to oblivion. In
the late 1960s, however, it experienced a vibrant and sustained revival. Since then, it has arguably
become a recurring national “obsession” that endures as “a central notion in Brazilian culture”
(Rocha 2011, 648). Nonetheless, the efficacy and disseminating potential of the metaphor
extends well beyond the confines of Brazilian cultural history.
Counter-discourse or “misplaced idea”?

In such a context, João Cezar Castro Rocha’s rejection of the “blameworthy effortlessness” with
which Brazilian intellectuals insist on viewing anthropophagy as distinctively Brazilian (2011,
667) seems slightly incongruous. Indeed, Rocha’s attendant plea to expand “the geographic
borders” of the “anthropophagic strategy” (2011, 667), to change “the monotonous recipe for
184
The “cannibal cogito”
national identity” (1999, 5), appears already to have been heeded. As Jáuregui indicates, the trope
of cannibalism has played a vital role in the “definition of Latin American cultural identity,” from
early modern European constructions of the New World as “monstrous and savage” to twentieth-
and twenty-first-century cultural narratives in which the cannibal has been varyingly redefined
in terms of “the construction of (post)colonial and ‘postmodern’ identities” (2008, 15). More
recently, Jáuregui has argued that anthropophagy “has become an obligatory genealogical foun-
dation for contemporary academic debates on hybridity and postcolonialism” (2012, 22).
A cursory glance at the critical bibliography on anthropophagy readily corroborates Jáuregui’s
contention.Thus, Haroldo de Campos maintains that antropofagia entails “a transculturation; bet-
ter yet, a ‘transvaluation’: a critical view of history as a negative function (in Nietzsche’s sense),
capable as much of appropriation as of expropriation, de-hierarchization, deconstruction” (1981,
11–12). Jorge Schwartz argues that Andrade’s manifesto deploys “one of the most original strate-
gies developed in Latin America to resist inevitable processes of colonization” (1999, 164).
Eduardo Subirats contends that the movement “opened the way in a counter-direction to that
of the European avant-garde” (1999, 176). Albeit acknowledging that the current cultural and
political moment differs substantially from the one in which the Manifesto was produced, Carlos
Rincón asserts that “the [anthropophagic] metaphor becomes indispensable for the search for
new models of cultural appropriation” (1999, 348). And Vera Follein de Figueiredo affirms con-
currently that “the indigenous anthropophagic ritual is recuperated as the metaphor for a non-
exclusive world view; consumption would imply the recognition of the Other’s values” (1999,
239). As Sara Castro-Klarén suggests, the Manifesto seems to have turned into a “commonplace”
instance of a colonial or subaltern culture’s capacity to assume an active, indeed “aggressive” and
ultimately transformative posture with respect to the absorption of extraneous cultural materials
(2000, 297). Similarly, García Canclini regards anthropophagy as a modernist “antecedent” to
postmodern practices of “decollecting and deterritorialization” (1995, 242), whereas Mignolo
(incorrectly ascribing the concept’s authorship to Mário de Andrade) posits it as a model of
“border thinking,” a knowledge produced from a subaltern perspective that supplants the
constricting logic structuring the idea of “civilization” (2000, 303). While I have insisted that
modernist anthropophagy cannot but acknowledge its indebtedness to and embeddedness in the
very culture it seeks to undo, in my own reading of the movement (Madureira 2005, 51), I have
likewise proposed anthropophagy as a mode of vengeful incorporation of colonialism’s cultural
and epistemological legacy. Nevertheless, despite its wide currency, this is by no means an
unchallenged perspective.
Roberto Schwarz, for instance, dismisses antropofagia as a nationalist abstraction, an empty
analogy that “throws absolutely no light on the politics and aesthetics of contemporary cultural
life” (1992, 9). Similarly, for Neil Larsen, the movement “represents little more than the effort to
outsmart rhetorically the dialectic of dependency” (1990, 81). Even more dismissively, Hans
Ulrich Gumbrecht reduces the Manifesto’s relevance for contemporary literary studies to its
time-bound invocation of “a future that never became a reality” (1999, 198).2 Beyond that, the
German critic concludes morosely, “there is not much else, I am afraid, in terms of aesthetic
quality or of philosophical complexity, the author of the Manifesto antropófago could brag about”
(1999, 198). In a more balanced and nuanced overview of the movement, Jáuregui, defining
anthropophagy as the aesthetic production of a cosmopolitan bourgeoisie disconnected “from
any social movement or actual decolonization effort,” regards efforts to grasp it as an adumbra-
tion of a postcolonial critique of coloniality as unwarranted (2012, 27). Interestingly, this assess-
ment coincides with Oswald de Andrade’s own self-critique as a bourgeois “clown,” an
incredulous servant of the class of which he confesses to have been the “cretinous, sentimental
and poetic sign” (1971, 38). More recently, however, Jáuregui appears to have modulated his
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Luís Madureira
stance in an examination of the relatively unknown textual production of Osvaldo Costa, one
of the early contributors to the Revista de Antropofagia. Asserting that Brazilian scholars of
Modernismo have “unfairly ignored” Costa’s contributions, Jáuregui uncovers in his “alternative
voice … an example of what Walter Mignolo aptly calls border thinking” (2015, 12, 7). Ultimately,
however, whether antropofagia is indeed “decolonial very much avant la lettre,” as Eduardo Viveiros
de Castro proclaims in the preface to a recent study of Andrade’s Manifesto (2016, n.p.), or
whether it is “a powerful counter-discourse to colonial continuities,” as Carlos Fausto maintains
(2001, 21), is only tangential to the central question that occupies me here.
As I mention above, I have sought elsewhere to understand it as an effort to elaborate a sus-
tained thinking about alterity, as a form of resistance to and absorption of the West, to cite
Jáuregui’s assessment of Oswaldo Costa’s reformulation of the trope (2008, 441; 2015, 5).
Nevertheless, and as the late Neil Whitehead astutely points out in his critique of my analysis of
the movement, I consistently neglect to “disaggregate the Tupinological texts [sixteenth-century
European chronicles as well as the modernist appropriations of these source documents] to trace
specific kinds of readings or borrowings from these materials” (2008, lv). He adds generously
that such close scrutiny of these early modern source texts would not be “necessarily relevant”
to the specific terms of my discussion (lv). In the present reconsideration of the trope, practice
and conception of cannibalism, I should like to explore precisely the relevance of the link
between actual and metaphoric cannibalism (to the extent that a reconstruction of this “original”
or “real” ethnographic ground is viable). Intimately related to the problem of engaging with
“subaltern” or indigenous thought, of a putative “rearticulation and appropriation of global
designs by and from the perspective of local histories” (Mignolo 2000, 39), the question I should
like to investigate more closely below thus pertains precisely to the fraught relationship between
the anthropophagic metaphor and the conception and practice of cannibalism among the Tupi.
Such a comparison must necessarily reckon with the inescapable conundrum that by the early
eighteenth century the Tupi were no more than a memory. Jáuregui’s remark concerning the
lack of an indigenous perspective on the cultural practices and beliefs observed and reported by
fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europeans (“there was no Carib Garcilaso who might have
displaced hegemonic discourses and left behind ‘the version of the vanquished’” [2008, 64]) is
particularly germane in the case of Brazil’s Tupi. Given this irremediable void, they endure, in
the main, as distorted figures in the very European writings which register and often paradoxi-
cally legitimate their annihilation. It is to these texts, marked by “exaggeration and unfortunate
circumstances” (Combès 1992, 24), that both antropofagistas and ethnographers must turn in
order to recover the meaning of ritual cannibalism. The symbolic lesson which the Tupinambá
impart to the former remains of course irreducibly figural. As Brazilian anthropologist Carlos
Fausto notes, Andrade’s naked cannibal is but “a figuration removed from effective indigenous
realities” (1999, 76).
Antropofagia and the “cannibal cogito”

The key question I should like to pursue, then, is whether “Tupi cannibalism … indeed stand[s]
in the way of the intellectual project of the movimento antropofágico,” as Sara Castro-Klarén con-
tends (2000, 312), or whether the antropofagista figuration, along with its “ferocious humor”
(Viveiros de Castro 2014, 143), is compatible with the anthropological and metaphysical “truth”
of ritual anthropophagy, as Viveiros de Castro has recently suggested (2016, n.p). Are these two
moments defined by a radical heterogeneity, or can we discern what Wittgenstein calls “family
resemblances,” “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing: sometimes
overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail” (1986, 32). Neil Whitehead discerns a
186
broader and underlying similitude between the reiterated “barbarity” of the ritual and the soci-
etal logic of coeval Europeans. For him, the principal link between the collective “cannibal
tragedy” and the theatricalization of violence in European public punishment and execution
resides in the close connection between “the destruction of the bodies of the condemned” and
“the reproduction of society,” even though in the European case the victims were excluded
rather than incorporated (2008, lxvi–lxvii). In the last instance, however, Whitehead’s caveat
strongly suggests that despite the presumptive contiguities between New World cannibalism and
state-sponsored spectacles of violence in the Old World, a crucial and irreducible discontinuity,
concerning the scale, aim, and conceptual underpinnings of the two “scenes” of bodily destruc-
tion, remains. Contradictorily, the analogy ultimately underscores the incommensurability
between the two rituals.
Conceding that his sympathies lie with the antropofagistas (2001, 21), Carlos Fausto argues
that the “metaphor of anthropophagy [is] congruent with indigenous representations” of the
practice and discloses “a deep understanding of cannibalism as a practical and conceptual opera-
tion” (1999, 81, 76). For Viveiros de Castro, the fact that Oswald de Andrade was “a man without
a profession,” that he was never a tenured intellectual from the periphery and remained unaffili-
ated with “any North-American university,” contributes signally to the Manifesto’s subversive
potential (2016, n.p.). Tellingly, in somewhat comparable fashion, Montaigne deems his infor-
mant, that “simple and rough fellow … fit to bear true witness” precisely because, unlike the
professional intellectuals of the time, who “never show you things purely as they are, [but rather]
bend and disguise them,” he can show things purely as they are (1999, 98). Given Viveiros de
Castro’s vigorous defense of the Manifesto’s author as “the most directly—and subversively—
philosophical” of Brazilian writers (2016, n.p.), it seems ironic that Castro-Klarén draws pre-
cisely on the Brazilian anthropologist’s reading of Tupi “metaphysics of predation” to ground her
assertion of a radical distinction between Tupi thought and what Viveiros de Castro calls Oswald
de Andrade’s explicit and “barbarous” appropriation of a field “officially” identified with the
“academic discipline” of philosophy (2016, n.p.). According to Viveiros de Castro, it is not prop-
erly speaking a “body” or substance that is consumed in the act of cannibalism.3 In an early
articulation of this thesis, he designates the ritual as a “supreme form of spiritualization,” an
attempted immortalization through sublimation of the corruptible element of the human being:
Tupinambá society included its enemies, and did not exist outside its relationship with
the Other—a generalized heteronym, an “external” dialectic of human sacrifice, the
necessity of alien deaths and of death at alien hands … the incorporation of the incor-
poreal, a becoming-enemy: that is cannibalism; the opposite of the Narcissistic suction
of identification: it is he who eats that both others and becomes other.
(1986, 666, 669)
Acknowledging her indebtedness to Viveiros de Castro’s work, Isabelle Combès understands the
act in terms of a surpassing [dépassement] of the human condition in diverse forms. For the vic-
tim, whose killing epitomizes the warrior’s “beautiful death,” the ritual guarantees admittance
into the mythical Land Without Evil (1992, 188). On the other hand, the slayer, whom custom
enjoins from participating in the cannibal feast and who has, in the course of the act, become
uncannily akin [étrangement semblable] to his victim, is equally assured of a favorable posthumous
destiny (188). Those who consume the victim’s flesh (and on this point Combès’s interpretation
of the ritual deviates substantially from Viveiros de Castro’s) experience a supersession of their
human condition “from below” (155), “regressing in some fashion to the animal portion that
comprises humankind” (170). For Viveiros de Castro, the body consumed in the anthropophagic
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Luís Madureira
ritual becomes “a sign with a purely positional value” (2014, 142). In other words, it was “the
enemy’s relation to those who consumed him,” that is, his condition as an enemy, that was ulti-
mately incorporated. This operation, which Viveiros de Castro fittingly designates as the “can-
nibal cogito,”4 is thus defined by the assimilation of the signs of the victim’s “alterity” with the
aim of reaching “his alterity as point of view on the Self: Cannibalism and the peculiar form of
war with which it is bound up involve a paradoxical movement of reciprocal self-determination
through the point of view of the enemy” (2014, 142–143). In Philippe Descola’s cogent account
of this singular “mechanism of constitutive otherness,” the Tupi’s ritual anthropophagy:
is not a narcissistic absorption of qualities and attributes, nor is it a contrastive opera-

tion of differentiation (I am not the other that I am eating); it is, on the contrary, an
attempt to “become other” by incorporating the enemy’s position vis-à-vis me, for this
will open up a possibility for me to get out of myself [sortir de moi-même] so as to see
myself from the outside, as a singularity (the one whom I am eating defines who
I am).”
(2013, 255; 2005, 352)
Exo cannibalism, along with other affinal practices associated with indigenous groups from the
lowlands of South America, responds to the same overriding “metaphysical” necessity: the only
way to construct a self [faire du soi] is by concretely assimilating alien persons and bodies, not as
life-giving substances, trophies that bestow prestige, or captives who provide labor,5 but as indi-
cators of that external gaze that they bring to bear on me, by reason of their own provenance.”
(Descola 2013, 255)
There is certainly a distinction between the process of “becoming Other” subtending ritual
cannibalism and the exclusive, aphoristic “interest in what is not mine” that the Manifesto mem-
orably proclaims: “Só me interessa o que não é meu.” For Castro-Klarén, nowhere is this rift
more perceptible than in Andrade’s later and more conventionally philosophical reflection on
anthropophagy (2000, 197).
Less than two decades after his public repudiation of antropofagia as Modernismo’s bout of
measles, and in the wake of his disenchantment with Brazil’s Communist Party, Andrade
returned to his project of recovering and appropriating the practice’s utopian promise from a
philosophical standpoint. Aside from sundry essays and speeches, perhaps the best-known of
these later writings on anthropophagy is A Crise da filosofia messiânica (The Crisis of Messianic
Philosophy), a thesis presented in 1950 as part of his candidacy to a professorship in Philosophy,
Science and Letters at the University of São Paulo (which he never received). The essay devel-
ops and systematizes the Manifesto’s lapidary aphorisms, whose conceptual debts to Marx,
Nietzsche, and Freud are already evident (Madureira 2005, 36–39). In A Crise, Andrade defines
anthropophagy as a “metaphysical operation,” a Weltanschauung or “mode of thought” linked to
humanity’s primitive phase (1972, 77). The envisaged reversal or transvaluation of the history
and philosophy of the West, as well as the attendant reclamation of a primitive, “Dyonisian” past,
derive significantly from Nietzschean vitalism and critique of values. As Benedito Nunes
remarks, a geopolitical division between North and South informs Andrade’s account of
humanity’s socio-historical evolution (1972, xlix). World history is accordingly defined by a
transhistorical dialectical antagonism between primitive and civilized humanity, which splits
into a series of interrelated binarisms: i.e., a humanistic cultivation of leisure [otium] negated by
the capitalist or Protestant work ethic [nec-otium] (ócio versus negócio [trade or commerce], in
Portuguese), a “matriarchal” or “natural” culture opposed to (and by) “patriarchal” civilization.
Patriarchal culture thus constitutes the second or negative moment of the dialectic, while
188
anthropophagy emerges as the third or sublatory term, the “synthesis” of natural and civilized
man (1972, 79): “Keyserling’s technicized barbarian” in the Manifesto (1972, 14), “technicized
natural man,” and “the technicized restoration of an anthropophagic culture” in A Crise (1972,
79, 129). As Jáuregui remarks, notwithstanding its developmentalist optimism and abiding cre-
dulity in technology’s liberatory promise, A Crise “announced a time of alterity [un tiempo-otro]
which remains valid even today” (2008, 460).
For Castro-Klarén, in Tupi metaphysics (as elucidated by Viveiros de Castro), “there is no
place for the dialectical thought” (2000, 311) that Andrade deploys in what Augusto de Campos
terms “the only original Brazilian philosophy”6 (1975, n.p.). She replies emphatically in the
negative to the Manifesto’s signature interrogative (“Tupy or not Tupy,” “one must ineluctably
acknowledge that the answer … must indeed be not Tupi on all counts”), arguing that “the force
of the discourse of Tupi anthropophagy, a subalternized knowledge,” ultimately subverts both
the Manifesto’s “dialectic and its revolutionary claims” as well as A Crise’s conceptual scaffolding,
that is, “the European root system [that] suffocates the Tupi anthropophagic metaphor” (2000,
313). As I mention above, antropofagia has been variously regarded as a counter-discourse, a
cogent example of what Walter Mignolo calls border thinking, even an instance of transcultura-
tion: “Every past that is ‘other’ to us deserves to be negated” (Campos 1981, 12). In Mary Louise
Pratt’s elegantly concise definition, transculturation describes “how subordinated or marginal
groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan
culture”; it thus signifies a relative yet crucial degree of agential prerogative: “While subjugated
peoples cannot readily control what emanates from the dominant culture, they do determine to
varying extents what they absorb into their own, and what they use it for” (1992, 6). Similarly,
Mignolo characterizes border knowledge (or border thinking) as a discourse “conceived at the
conflictive intersection” between the rhetoric, philosophy and science produced from the per-
spective of modern colonialism and knowledge (or “gnoseology”) produced “from a subaltern
perspective,” from “the perspective of colonial modernities in Asia, Africa, and the Americas/
Caribbean” (2000, 11). While classifying Tupi anthropophagy as a subalternized knowledge,
Castro-Klarén’s reading appears to preclude the kind of double (or dialectic) “subaltern,” and
productively contradictory operation that Pratt, Mignolo and several other like-minded critics
ascribe to the interaction between dominant epistemologies and subordinate or local knowl-
edge forms. The subalternized “cannibal cogito” must thus remain inexorably incommensurable
with its modernist or “decolonial” recuperation.
The sustained questioning, indeed satirization of the utopian appropriation of indigenous
cultures has been a staple of contemporary Brazilian “nativist” novels at least since the 1960s, that
is, since the “tropicalist” revival of modernist anthropophagy. In Antonio Callado’s Quarup
(1967), for example, a folklorist devises a tortuous theory about the formation of the Brazilian
“mentality” based on the Amazonian legends of the tortoise Jabuti, and travels to the rain forest
to test out his ideas. However, at the end of his journey he finds the autochthonous denizens of
Brazil’s geographic center in an advanced stage of decay, mortally wounded by their contact
with “civilization.” Bereft of their former vitality, ravaged by fever and dysentery and alienated
from their sustaining rituals and myths, they resemble “skeletons emerging from primeval caves
to dwell in the realm the living” (2000, 361). In Callado’s A Expedição de Montaigne (1982), an
even more parodic “white savior,” a Carioca journalist whose knowledge of “the jungle” is
reduced to the urban, human-made forest of Tijuca, proclaims himself “a liberator of foresters,
anti-bandeirante expeditionary, counter-Cabral, non-discoverer,” and embarks on a mission “to
shove a tidal bore [pororoca] up Brazil’s white history and, after a brief five-century break, restore
the broken balance” (1982, 11). Once he reaches his destination, a Camuirá village in the heart
of the Amazon, a shaman mistakes him for a nineteenth-century German ethnologist and
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Luís Madureira
proceeds to incinerate him alive inside an Amazonian hawk cage. Although the narrator specu-
lates that the activist may have, in his imagination and in the pangs of his agony, elevated his own
immolation to the hallowed heights of Joan of Arc’s martyrdom, his absurd sacrifice will remain
unknown, unregistered either “in writing or by living voice” (122). The author-narrator of
Bernardo Carvalho’s fictional biography of the ill-fated American ethnologist Buell Quain
regards the Xingu indigenous territory “as the very image of hell” (2007, 87). For him, the
Krahô Indians are “the orphans of civilization,” afflicted by an “irremediable … neediness”
(“uma carência irreparável” [2006, 109]), constrained to sustain an unequal relationship of
dependency with a white world they strive in vain to grasp (2007, 132). In the end, despite his
pledge never to forget them, the narrator “abandoned them, like the other whites” (2007, 133).
The foregoing perfunctory commentary gives but short shrift to the depth and complexity
of these texts. It seems nevertheless plausible that they trouble, or at least call into question the
persisting “anthropophagic” notion, which Darcy Ribeiro, for example, ratifies, that contempo-
rary Brazilians “continue to be Indians in the bodies [they] possess and in the culture that illu-
mines and guides” them (1996, 13). In the more satirical and polemical vein of Ribeiro’s Utopia
Selvagem, “we Brazilians are … detribalized, de-indianized, deracinated Indians … Indians have
travelled across the centuries. [They] will be part of the civilization of the future” (1982, 122).
Comparably in a broad sense to Castro-Klarén, Callado and Carvalho insist on the incommen-
surability between the indigenous and the “civilized” modern worlds. They implicitly dispute
Ribeiro’s correlative assertion that “the anthropophagic battle cry” [o grito antropofágico] embod-
ies the authentic national “being”:
With Oswald, we eat our most sober and austere repast in order to assume our [true]
being in the face of the foreign rabble [estrangeirada] […] [we] devour [what is foreign]
and turn it into the compost that makes us blossom.
(1982, 33)
Yet Castro-Klarén does not halt at a repudiation of nostalgic or utopian figurations of Brazil’s
indigenous peoples. For her, the “cannibal cogito” becomes the privileged sign of a “subal-
ternized” disruption of the characteristically Western incorporation of alterity, of the sort of
“synthesis” (Aufhebung) or dialectical thought that informs Oswald de Andrade’s recovery of
anthropophagy. As such, her critical discourse recuperates (or appropriates) the Tupi in turn as
the exempla of a philosophical thinking or “transvaluation [that] would open the path to writing
a history articulated on dimensions other than the category of the self ” (2000, 312).The role the
Tupi play in her analysis, then, comes somewhat paradoxically to typify the centripetal engage-
ment with cultures from the periphery of the modern West that Roy Wagner describes as a form
of cultural self-fashioning. In the West’s anthropological study of other peoples, the latter become
foils, “invit[ing] comparison as ‘other ways’ of dealing with our own reality. We incorporate them
within our reality, and so incorporate their ways of life within our own self-invention” (Wagner
1981, 100–101). In Descola’s ironic gloss of this passage, European ethnologists and cultural crit-
ics “are forced into a kind of well-meaning cannibalism [cannibalisme bienveillant], as they repeat-
edly incorporate non-moderns’ objectivization of themselves into our own objectivization of
ourselves” (2013, 81).
Anthropophagy and perspectivism

Could we trace instead even the faintest outline of a contiguity, draw a distant “family resem-
blance” between antropofagia and Tupi ritual cannibalism? Or, is the modernist appropriation of
190
the practice irremediably tainted by a colonizing impetus, by an “impenitent nostalgia,” as

Descola designates it (2013, 87)? Is it always and inescapably untenable to posit Andrade’s
Manifesto, as Viveiros de Castro appears to do, as adumbrating the “comparative” or “symmetri-
cal” anthropology that Latour defines in his classic text, which “no longer compares cultures,
setting aside its own, which through some astonishing privilege possesses a unique access to
universal Nature [but] compares natures-cultures” (1993, 96)? More recently, Latour asserts that:
comparative anthropology now has the means to renew a dialogue which seems to me
more fruitful than the ones suggested by UNESCO or by the tiresome resentments of
anti-imperialism. For the first time, perhaps, we no longer have any barbarians either
outside of our boundaries or, most importantly, in our midst.”
(Latour 2009, [76])
Descola grasps this perspectival “symmetry” as essentially a matter of situating:
our own exoticism as one particular case within a general grammar of cosmologies
rather than continuing to attribute to our own vision of the world the value of a stan-
dard by which to judge the manner in which thousands of civilizations have managed
to acquire some inkling of that vision.”
(2013, 88)
As Viveiros de Castro explains, Latour’s notion of symmetrical anthropology (Latour 1991)

intersects at least partially with the “reverse anthropology” Roy Wagner proposes as a possibility
for engaging with non-Western and non-modern cultures (2014, 50). As Wagner argues,
“anthropology will not come to terms with its mediative basis and its professed aims until our
invention of other cultures can reproduce, at least in principle, the way in which those cultures
invent themselves” (1981, 30). A reverse anthropology would thus assume, as its point of depar-
ture, the questionable adequateness of the term “culture” as a descriptor of tribal societies, and
subsequently enable a literalization of “the metaphors of modern industrial civilization from the
standpoint of tribal society” (Wagner 1981, 30). If such a symmetrical or reverse anthropology
were to emerge, it would be necessarily premised on the existence of:
a powerful indigenous intellectual structure that is inter alia capable of providing a

counter-description of the image drawn of it by Western anthropology and thereby
capable, again, of “returning to us an image in which we are unrecognizable to
ourselves.”
(Viveiros de Castro 2014, 55)
Viveiros de Castro’s reading of modernist anthropophagy allows for the likelihood that it antici-
pates or at least partially coheres with this perspectival symmetry of reversal. By contrast, Castro-
Klarén’s interpretation of the movement brooks no such adumbration.
In the remaining pages of this chapter, I seek a way out of, or, perhaps more accurately, a way
around this impasse. I attempt to pay heed both to the discontinuities and resemblances between
modernist anthropophagy and the “cannibal cogito,” while tentatively sidestepping a wholesale
subsumption or reduction of the metaphysics of ritual anthropophagy to speculative reason. By
mooting the possibility of reflecting upon “the diversity of customs in the world without suc-
cumbing either to a fascination with the exceptional or to a refusal of the positive sciences,”
Descola indicates a possible path to follow (2013, 85). Viveiros de Castro brands Descola’s
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Luís Madureira
postulate that four core ontologies determine the underlying variables of social existence as a
“completely analogist” intellectual enterprise. Nevertheless, he concurs to an extent with his
French colleague:
keeping the values of the other implicit does not mean celebrating whatever transcen-
dent mystery it supposedly keeps enclosed in itself. It consists in refusing to actualize
the possibles expressed by indigenous thought, making a decision to maintain them,
infinitely, as possibles—neither derealizing them as fantasies of the other nor fantasiz-
ing that they are actual for us.”
(2014, 196)
Hence, comparability between cultures (for instance, the “comparison” resulting from the
encounter between anthropologists and indigenous peoples) does not necessarily entail “episte-
mological transparency” (Viveiros de Castro 2014, 85). As with any translation, cultural transla-
tion is underpinned by what the Brazilian anthropologist defines as equivocation, understood not
in the empirical sense of the myriad of “deformations and shortcomings” that can undercut the
validity of anthropological discourse, but as “a properly transcendental category, a constitutive
dimension,” the “condition of possibility of anthropological discourse that justifies [its] exis-
tence” (89). Ineluctably circumscribed to and indeed, to a considerable degree, determined by
its own time and place (or “mis-place,” in Roberto Schwartz’s well-known formulation),
antropofagia is thus the result of a mode of cultural and aesthetic “translation” which “takes up
residence in the space of equivocation” (Viveiros de Castro 2014, 89). As an operation grounded
and sustained by the interrogation of any “original univocality” or “essential similarity” between
how the Tupi viewed ritual cannibalism and what the modern anthropophagists had to say about
it, antropofagia, as I have noted elsewhere, is necessarily indebted to and embedded in the very
cultural and philosophical tradition it seeks to displace (Madureira 2005, 51). It cannot but dis-
close its conceptual dependency on what Gayatri Spivak has called the “magisterial texts” of the
West (1999, 7). Whether antropofagia indeed “emerges only in the form of vestiges and traces
inscribed in history as the potential to subvert history’s very temporality” (Nodari 2011, 479) is
a question I shall intentionally leave open. What seems nevertheless plausible is that it may, “at
the same time,” be “decolonial … avant la lettre” (Viveiros de Castro 2016, n.p.), or “congruent
with indigenous representations” of the ritual (Fausto 1999, 81), and “suffocated” by European
philosophy’s “root system” (Castro-Klarén 2000, 313): a discourse produced by and largely
addressed to a masculine subject (Jáuregui 2008, 422). Notwithstanding its consciously revolu-
tionary or ostensibly anti-patriarchal ethos, an unmistakably masculinist gaze pervades Andrade’s
writings. It is to this contradiction that I now turn.
The “women’s portion”: gender and sexual cannibalism

Nowhere is this masculinist perspective more visible than in Andrade’s association of anthro-
pophagy with a matriarchal order which the patriarchal logic that presumably subtends modern
Western civilization allegedly deposes. It is for the return of this “matriarchy of Pindorama,”7 as
the Manifesto puts it, for a matriarchal revolution, that antropofagia calls. Castro-Klarén faults
Andrade for relying excessively on the work of nineteenth-century Swiss antiquarian J.J.
Bachofen for his construction of matriarchy, thus straying from “the path of Tupi thought”;
instead, he “allowed himself to be seduced by the simulacrum of matriarchy” (Castro-Klarén
2000, 312). Similarly, Jáuregui contends that, while “anthropophagic matriarchy certainly had an
emancipatory horizon, the Subject of this liberation remains stubbornly masculine” (2008, 422).
192
“The mother occupied the problematic place of alterity: savage nature, primitive other, pre-logic
mind, and so on” (Jáuregui 2012, 27). Emanuelle Oliveira goes beyond questioning the conven-
tional figuration of the matriarch in Andrade’s Manifesto and subsequent philosophical writings
and argues that his texts “end up reaffirming the same structures [he] assumes to be repudiating,
since they privilege a phallocentric discourse” grounded on the phallus as the synecdoche for an
“irrational” and disruptive (i.e., primitivist and revolutionary) potential (1999, 270, 265). Oliveira
founds her argument on close readings of assorted sections of Andrade’s Serafim Ponte Grande, the
“composite” and “hybrid” text fashioned out of “scraps and ‘samples’ of several possible books”
(Campos 1971, 98–99), the “novela-carnaval” (Jáuregui 2008, 449) that the modernist author
himself describes as a sort of threnodial valediction to antropofagia: “Necrology of the bourgeoi-
sie. Epitaph of what I was” (Andrade 1971, 119).
The section to which I now briefly turn, which Oliveira does not analyze, is titled precisely
“Os Antropófagos.” Since it closes the book, following a fragment called “O fim de Serafim,”
one might read it as a “final word” of sorts on the movement. The section, which Haroldo
Campos classifies as Serafim’s “real ending” and, alternately, “the new beginning of everything”
(108), stages a scene of unbridled and polymorphous sexuality aboard the ceaselessly traveling
ocean liner El Durasno (sic). This transfiguration of the cannibal feast into a phallic ritual evi-
dently figures the anthropophagic revolution, laying down “the basis for a “future … liberated
humanity,” “an anonymous society with a priapic foundation” (Andrade 1971, 196). A lengthy,
decontextualized and substantially “doctored” epigraph from Jesuit Father Antonio Ruiz de
Montoya’s Conquista espiritual (1639) inaugurates and, in a sense, sets the tone for the priapic
excess governing “Os antropófagos.” The fragment is intended to illustrate the mid-sixteenth-
century religious and political conflict between Jesuits and colonists. Jesuit missionaries saw the
early settlers as a direct threat to their goal of spiritually “conquering” the Indians, since the
latter routinely engaged in sexual contact through concubinage with and exploitation of
Amerindian women, in some cases adopted “native customs,” including consuming human flesh
and going naked. In Andrade’s version of the passage, the Fathers express compassion for a
“Christian,” who humbly informs them that he has been proffering assorted items of his own
clothing to the Indians as a means of bringing them into the Christian fold (1971, 195).8 Soon
after the man’s departure, the clerics discover to their chagrin that he had in fact used his gar-
ments to seduce “several young girls and maidens who were to remain in his service and he hit
the road with them” (195). As rendered by Andrade, the passage effectively blends some of the
Manifesto’s central tenets: its “reaction against clothed man,” “against every catechism,” “against
antagonistic sublimations … brought over here in caravels,” “against the truth of missionary
peoples” (1972, 13–14, 17). Above all, it reaffirms its stance “against [the Jesuit Father José de]
Anchieta” and resolutely in favor of “the patriarch João Ramalho, founder of São Paulo” (1972,
19), “God’s declared enemy” (Callado 2004, 160–161), who famously fathered countless mestiço
children who would go on to serve as interpreters and go-betweens, or the vanguard of colonial
settlement.
Significantly, the agency of this ribald rejection of Christian morality belongs to a sham
European Christian whose libertine and presumably liberatory apostasy is mediated by and
ultimately ratified through the appropriation and exploitation of the bodies of indigenous
women. In his rendition of Montoya’s text, Andrade expunges a key reference to the fact that
the Spaniard had actually “auctioned off his garments … [to purchase] with each item either an
Indian woman or a boy” (Montoya 1892, 33). What in the original was a condemnation of the
colonists’ prevalent practice of capturing and enslaving Indians becomes in Andrade’s “transla-
tion” a validation of the “emancipatory” anti-clericalism, iconoclasm and unrestrained eroticism
of Brazil’s early colonists. Even before it would find its canonical expression in Gilberto Freyre’s
193
Luís Madureira
study of the formation of “the Brazilian family under the patriarchal economic regime” (Casa-
grande e senzala), this portrait of sixteenth-century settlers as uncompromisingly irreligious and
sexually amoral predominated early twentieth-century Brazilian letters. Paulo Prado’s Retrato do
Brasil [Portrait of Brazil] (1928), for instance, refers to the “astounding” and immeasurable
“immorality of the first settlers,” their “unruliness and dissolution,” describing the “erotic over-
stimulation” (superexcitação erótica) ostensibly defining “the colonial experience in the first half of
the sixteenth century” (1981, 34–35, 46). The locus classicus of this enduring myth of Portuguese
colonization is the text Andrade later ranks among Brazil’s “totemic books,” Casa-grande e senzala
(1991, 217). Echoing Prado, Freyre claims that, “the atmosphere in which Brazilian life began
was one of near sexual intoxication, the European leapt ashore only to slide into naked Indian
woman” (2003, 161). The role which this inaugural interracial “romance” played in the process
that Stuart Schwartz denominates ethnogenesis (1996) was not only a staple of Modernismo’s
“cosmic race” narratives, but of dominant Brazilian constructions of race and identity widely
disseminated since.
To a substantial degree, these plausive accounts of ethnic and cultural hybridity embody
what Laura Stoler calls “formulaic moral narratives,” whose plots (“at once too transparent and
too opaque”) may epitomize either a redemptive “universal romance” or a “colonial tragedy” of
sexual violence and exploitation (2010, xxii). Most of the trenchant critiques of these masculin-
ist eulogies of foundational miscegenation—such as Angela Gilliam’s, who argues that they
constitute a narrativization of white male privilege (1998, 65) that elides “the predatory sexual-
ity that affected the lives of indigenous and Black women” (2003, 100)—would doubtless fall
under the latter category. Rather than belabor Stoler’s pertinent point here, I should like to
focus on the rhetorical conversion of what Gillam understands as a “disembodiment of wom-
en’s potential for power and authority in their own lives” (2003, 100), and Robert Young regards
analogously as “the opposite of any form of contestation by the subaltern or oppressed [that]
offers them no form of agency or means of resistance” (2006, 115). This “disempowerment” is
turned precisely into a peculiar “form of agency.” Hence, Paulo Prado alleges coyly that, “in
matters of love,” indigenous women favored European men, “perhaps for priapic consider-
ations” (1981, 45). Freyre, too, portrays native women as willingly “giv[ing] themselves to
European men in exchange for a comb or the shard of a mirror […] the more wanton [ardentes]
rubbing themselves against the legs of those they took for gods” (2003, 161). Freyre contends,
in fact, that the women’s “priapism with regard to white men” stems from their preference for
the European male’s overactive libido (“they are always ready for coitus” [2003, 171]), and for
their more endowed genitalia (“among certain peoples of color the genital organs are generally
less developed than among white men” [170]). Given this coterminous discursive context, one
may licitly wonder whether the “priapic foundation” of the “liberated humanity” rehearsed
aboard El Durasno (Andrade 1971, 197) is indeed “anthropophagic.” Or, is it rather a modernist
(or nativist) projection of the European conqueror’s unfettered sexual desire? Indeed, even the
emancipatory anti-clericalism that both Oswald de Andrade’s novella and the Manifesto profess
is part and parcel of this foundational romance, to borrow Doris Sommer’s familiar term. In
keeping with this master narrative’s plot structure, Freyre relegates the Jesuit’s evangelizing mis-
sion to a sustained effort “to destroy, or at least castrate, every virile expression of an artistic or
religious culture that went against Catholic morality” (2003, 178). As the Manifesto concurs,
Anchieta aims at the “sublimation of the sexual instinct,” to impose a “clothed and oppressive
[…] missionary truth” upon the indigenized and oversexed Ramalho (1972, 19), the prolific
patriarch who wanted only “to fornicate with lots of women, without rendering account to any
priest” (Torero 2000, 103).
194
As Whitehead writes of early modern representations of anthropophagy, the cannibal feast

“became a scene of monstrous excess and an intense … atmosphere of casual and gruesome
violence” (2010, 98).Vespucci, for instance, watches in horror as “the women [hacked a] Christian
into pieces, and … roast[ed] him before our eyes” (1992, 89). Pigafetta attributes to an old
woman’s gnawing (“like an infuriated bitch”) at her son’s slayer the origin of the cannibal ritual
(1995, 10). The Brazilian accounts of amoral and intemperate sexual activity between indige-
nous women and European settlers reproduce the overt sexualization that Whitehead identifies
in Theodor de Bry’s illustrations for the 1593 edition of Hans Staden’s True History. Whatever
historical truth lies behind such kindred portrayals of indigenous women’s unbridled eroticism
in the early decades of the colonial encounter, to ascribe to them a voracious sexual craving for
European males is also to overturn and subordinate to a structure of male desire what Michel de
Certeau has called “the Western phantasm” of the vagina dentata (1988, 233).9
Their improbable agency notwithstanding, indigenous women in modernist representations
of the colonial encounter seem ironically to be relegated to the same subaltern position they
allegedly occupied in precolonial Amerindian societies: “fathers … are the agents; and … moth-
ers are no more than sacks … in which children are bred” (Anchieta 1933, 452). If, as a conse-
quence of their unions with European settlers, Amerindian women acquire a semblance of
agency, their role as “the physical basis of the Brazilian family,” as well as what Freyre designates
their “social and economic usefulness” to Brazil’s colonization, is reducible to their domestic
labor and procreative function (2003, 162, 185). According to Isabelle Combès, the metaphysical
meaning of the “women’s part” in the anthropophagic ritual hinges likewise on their reproduc-
tive function. Although their consumption of human flesh allows them to transcend their human
condition, it does so in an “original” fashion, different from that of the men (1992, 189). As
Whitehead asserts, early modern illustrations of female cannibals dismembering the corpses of
sacrificial victims depict practices that are “clearly marked as a male prerogative” (2010, 98).The
ritual cannibalism women practice does not entail the “supreme form of spiritualization” that it
represents for their male counterparts. For, unlike men, they cannot gain entrance into the
mythical Land Without Evil after death. Combès conjectures nonetheless that through the ritual
ingestion of human organs (the heart and lungs), and by virtue of the fact that they are the bear-
ers of life, women come to occupy a privileged place “between humans and gods” (193). The
mother in Oswald de Andrade’s construction of anthropophagic matriarchy may well occupy a
“problematic place of alterity,” as Jáuregui contends (2012, 27). It may indeed constitute a seduc-
tive “simulacrum” (Castro-Klarén 312). In the end, however, while the subaltern place to which
modernist anthropophagy consigns women may stray from “the path of Tupi thought” (Castro-
Klarén 312), it also resonates with the Tupi’s unequivocal patriarchal strain. Rather than answer-
ing with a categorical “no” the Manifesto’s fundamental question (“Tupy or not Tupy”), one
ought perhaps to respond more cogently with an ambivalent “Tupi and not Tupi.”
Notes
1 All citations from the Manifesto are from volume 6 of Oswald de Andrade’s complete works [Obras
completas]: Do Pau Brasil à Antropofagia e às utopias: manifestos, teses de concursos e ensaios.
2 For a more detailed engagement with Gumbrecht’s dismissal of the Manifesto antropofágico, see my, “‘Flat
Carnivalesque Intention of Being a Cannibal’ Or, How (not) to read the Cannibal Manifesto” (2011a),
or “Intenção Carnavalesca de Ser Canibal” (2011b).
3 In this way,Viveiros de Castro completely reverses Marvin Harris’s “materialist” thesis that the redistri-
bution of meat from sacrificial victims could well have significantly increased the protein and fat con-
tent among the ritual’s practitioners (1991, 235).
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Luís Madureira
4 Although the Cartesian reference seems evident enough here,Viveiros de Castro may also be nodding
at the Manifesto’s (in)famous play on Hamlet’s ontological dilemma: “Tupy or not Tupy that is the
question.”
5 Interestingly, for Darcy Ribeiro, the fact that the Tupi devoured rather than enslaved their prisoners
stems directly from the rudimentary nature of their system of production: anthropophagy constitutes,
therefore, “an expression of the relative backwardness of the Tupi peoples” (2009, 31).
6 Viveiros de Castro cites the phrase approvingly in his preface to Azevedo’s book (2016, n.p.).
7 Brazil, or “the land of palm trees” (from the combination of the Tupi-Guarani word for palm tree
[Pindob] and rama [land or region]).
8 In Montoya’s text, which relates the Jesuit campaign in the Paraguayan province of Guairá, he is
described more specifically as a “secular Spaniard” (“español seglar” [32]).
9 As Vespucci claims, “they showed themselves to be very desirous to copulate with us Christians” (64).
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11
PRESUMPTIONS OF EMPIRE
Relapses, reboots, and reversions in the
transpacific networks of Iberian globalization
John D. Blanco
The final scene of the recent Spanish movie Oro (dir. Agustín Díaz Yanes, 2017) pays enigmatic
homage to the Europeans’ first arrival at the western edge of the New World, where sixteenth-
century explorer and conquistador Vasco Núñez de Balboa concluded his expedition across the
Isthmus of Panama (now traversed by the Panama Canal) in 1513 (spoiler alert).The film follows
the misfortunes of conquistador Martín Dávila: many of these experiences seem to draw freely
from Balboa’s life and times (as well as those of López de Aguirre). Failing to find a legendary
city where the buildings and streets were made of gold, the character Dávila and his lone surviv-
ing companion from the original expedition instead encounter a modest coastal hamlet whose
adobe buildings contain sprinkles of gold dust; and when the sun sets across the Pacific, the town
radiates a glow that has inspired the legend. Beyond this settlement lies the great ocean: looking
very much like the ocean surrounding the Iberian Peninsula, from where Columbus had set sail
at the end of the previous century. Faced with a “discovery” so unfathomable, so vast, so abstract,
and—because it is so abstract—at once meaningless and full of promise, the protagonist endows
it with the only meaning his imagination can provide: planting a stake with a flag into the shift-
ing sand beneath him, and pronouncing the entire ocean to be under the exclusive jurisdiction
of the Spanish Crown (see Figure 11.1). His self-reflexive stare at the camera intends to convey
at once the presumption, absurdity, hubris, and Quixotesque nature of Dávila/Balboa’s claim.
What network of laws and institutions, what archive of knowledge would dare cast a net so
great as to encompass the unexplored remainder of the globe: enfolding it beneath a mantle of
either Divine Providence, or universal monarchy, or both? And in the wake of the seeming
impossibility of enforcing such a claim, what legacies of the undertaking would remain? These
two questions inform the current literature and historiography of the Spanish Pacific between
the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Among these, I highlight four key concepts that link the
voluminous reports, royal decrees, memoirs, and chronicles assiduously documenting the
Spanish presence overseas. They are: (1) the attempted territorialization of the sea, embodied in
fictions of a Terra Australis (great southern continent) and the doctrine of mare clausum; (2) the
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John D. Blanco
Figure 11.1 Still from Oro (dir. Agustín Díaz Yanez, 2017): Dávila claims possession of the Pacific Ocean
and all adjacent territories for the Spanish Crown.
deterritorialization and reterritorialization of regional economies spurred by the Iberian pres-

ence in the Pacific; (3) the changing role of missionaries with the decadence and relapse of
millenarian aspirations and their concomitant instrumentalization as agents of “spiritual con-
quest”; (4) the counterpoint process of frontierization in the age of political centralization.
These themes frame the exhaustion of the Spanish vision of conquest, as the dispersion of the
military, economic, and religious forces into unconquered space would engender decadence and
corruption at their furthest reach as well as new forms of life and society. The rhetorical and
theological traces of these frames belie the withdrawal of an actual infrastructure and material
basis of hegemonic claims in the Pacific. At the same time, however, the colonial legacy in its
cultural and religious dimensions would initiate the transculturation and mestizaje of local com-
munities negotiating the process of change and continuity in a space defined as much by a
frontier politics as by a metropolitan one.1
Terra Australis, 1609: in lieu of an Ocean

In Ángel Rama’s last, unfinished work La ciudad letrada (The Lettered City, 1984), the well-
known Uruguayan literary scholar and critic argued that the Spanish imagination envisioned
the conquest in terms of the projection and insertion of European-style cities and names on a
map (“like a checkerboard”) in which the Latin American continent appeared first as an empty
page, terra nullis (17–29).The corresponding arrival of an army of priests, officials, and scribes—a
lettered or literate class—to the Americas would gradually fill in the blanks with an imaginary
order corresponding to those initial coordinates established by adventurers seeking El Dorado.2
Quite a different problem presented itself on the open sea, which was sighted by Spanish con-
quistador and explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa in 1513: a vast uncharted space during a time
when the theory of Copernicus remained controversial, and seafaring explorers lacked the abil-
ity to fix longitudinal coordinates. Balboa’s arrival on the western edge of the hemisphere hap-
pened barely twenty years after Columbus’s first voyage across the Atlantic. In fact, the conquest
of the imperial kingdom of the Aztecs by Hernán Cortés would not begin for another eight
years [in 1519] following Balboa’s “discovery,” to be succeeded by Ferdinand Magellan’s expedi-
tion to circumnavigate the globe [in 1521] and the conquest of the Incan Empire by the Pizarro
brothers in 1524. The contemporaneity of these events conveys a sense of the common history
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Presumptions of empire
and culture shared by these men up to that point: what Reinhard Koselleck might call their
“space of experience” and “horizon of expectation” in an age of radically changing perspectives
about the world and universe (2004, 255–275).
Yet that background, framed by a common experience and set of expectations, also helps to
place in contrast the divergent paths of the “lettered city” on the terra firme of the Western
Hemisphere and the (mostly) landless space between the Americas and Asia. The European
imagination of this contrast can be glimpsed in the first published map of the Pacific in the 1589
edition of Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (see Figure 11.2).3 Across the central
space of the map we see the sprawling cursive script naming the Pacific Ocean, as well as its
“common” designation as the South Sea. As if to compensate for this largely empty space,
sprinkled with designations like the shallows (bajos) of San Bartolomeo (actually located off the
coast of Peru!) and the still largely unmapped Mariana Islands [Ladrones], the mapmaker has the
western coast of California (which occupies a full quadrant), as well as the western coast of the
southern continent, crammed with names given by the Spanish explorers to their territorial
possessions. In the southwest quadrant, the island of Papua, which had recently been christened
Nueva Guinea by Spanish maritime explorer Yñigo Ortiz de Retez [in 1545], a similar motif
prevails. And along the bottom of the map looms the mythical southern continent, Terra Australis,
which philosophers from Aristotle to the late eighteenth-century British explorer James Cook
believed to exist, some explorers going so far as to assert that the hypothetical continent could
serve as a land bridge between the southern tip of South America and the archipelagoes of
Southeast Asia.4 The epistemic “reassurance” of territories, whether these concern those areas
named and claimed by Cortés, Francisco de Ulloa and Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo throughout the
sixteenth century, or the postulation of an as yet undiscovered “hidden” southern land, serves to
shrink the dimensions of the Pacific considerably. As DeLoughery observed, “[the trope of iso-
lated islands] is striking because it highlights an ideological contraction of island space and time
between the Atlantic and Pacific as a product of European expansion” (2007, 19). Into this
diminished space fly the sails of Ferdinand Magellan’s flagship Victoria, with the inscription:
It was I, O Magellan, who in circling the globe with sails unfurled, led [you] to your
new-found strait. In its circumnavigation, by which I am rightly called Victory, are my
sails become wings, my prize become Glory, my struggle become the sea. [Prima ego
velivolis ambivi cursibus Orbem, Magellane novo te duce ducta freto, Ambivi, meri-
toque vocor VICTORIA: sunt mî / Vela, alae; precium, gloria; pugna, mare.]
The Abraham Ortelius map captures at once both the originality of the historical moment
when world perspectives were undergoing radical transformation—a veritable “marvelous real,”
in the words of Cuban author Alejo Carpentier—and the profound unoriginality of the expecta-
tions these changes spurred in Spain. For what could be more unoriginal than the exploration
of the Pacific and circumnavigation of the globe as an allegory of destiny in need of completion?
In his posthumous work El gran Océano, Rafael Bernal, among other writers, traces the roots of
this tendency to the simultaneity of the Conquest and “discovery” of the Pacific with the
Reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula under the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand of Aragon and
Isabel of Castile (2012, 115).
This sensibility informed the age of Spanish exploration from the beginning: from Columbus’s
millenarian dreams of discovering the Promised Land; to the Franciscan Tomás de Mendieta’s
conviction that the encounter with New World peoples augured the imminent end of time; to
Fernando de Quirós’s belief that his “discovery” of the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific was
the land of Ophir mentioned in the Bible. What is significant here is the superimposition of the
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John D. Blanco
202
Figure 11.2 Maris pacifici, in Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum.

territorial conquest of the Iberian Peninsula upon the contemporaneous discoveries of the New
World, as well as the Pacific. For the sea to be “conquered,” it had to be filled, lettered, with the
same order or nomos that had applied to the newly conquered territories or land, beginning with
the Iberian Peninsula.Yet in the wake of this impossibility, it had to be contained, bound, just as
it appears on the Ortelius map (see Padrón 2009, 1–30). The presumed existence of a southern
land in the South Sea seems to underline this perception of what William Schurz famously
called “the Spanish Lake” (1934, 287–302). With this epistemology in place on a printed map,
the Spanish insistence on regarding the Pacific Ocean as mare clausum, that is, a “closed sea”
under the exclusive legal jurisdiction of the Catholic monarchs, seemed plausible.
Curiously, the map also had the effect of converting an expectation that had taken on the
solidity of a conviction (the future discovery of Terra Australis) into a quasi-experience. In 1609,
pilot and ship captain Pedro Fernandes de Quirós, who had sailed first with Álvaro de Mendaña
de Neira in search of Terra Australis in 1595, and again in 1605, was so convinced he had discov-
ered the fabled land that he wrote a memorial to the king describing his discovery in some detail:
“That hidden part covers a quarter of the entire globe, and large enough to fit the doubled size
of all the kingdoms and provinces over which Your Excellency presides at present.” [Aquella
parte oculta es cuarta de todo globo, y tan capaz que puede haber en ella doblados Reinos y
Provincias de todas aquellas de que V.M. al presente es Señor.] (qtd. in Zaragoza 1880, v. 1: 218).
Quirós goes on to narrate fabulous tales of Terra Australis’s diverse population, “who are emi-
nently disposed to pacification, Christian conversion, and contentment” [han de ser facilísimos
de pacificar, doctrinar y contentar] (qtd. in Zaragoza 1880, v. 1: 219); and who lived in a country
where fruit grew easily and sources of meat (as well as silver, pearls, and gold) abounded
(220–222). Quirós’s messianic Providentialism led him to identify and name the islands that his
expedition discovered the Solomon Islands, after the islands mentioned in the book of Psalms
around the figure of Solomon (Psalm 72:1–10 passim., King James Version 2020).
The inversion of the space of experience and horizon of expectation for Spanish explorers
like Quirós—to the degree that the imminent expectation of the discovery of a southern con-
tinent became the presumption of a fulfilled prophecy—testified to a radical disorientation in
the coordinates that anchored the “four corners” of the world, and the attempt by Spanish
explorers to grasp the new reality with expectations deriving from the old (see Marx 2015, 5).
Was it any coincidence that Quirós styled himself as a “new Columbus?” Yet the fact that the
mapping of the Pacific Ocean was radically changing the space of experience for the world, and
that this space of experience conflicted with the understanding of the world framed by Spain’s
original horizon of expectations, can be illustrated by the stark contrast between Quirós’s
famous 1609 memorial and a short pamphlet written by the young Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius
the same year, on the occasion of a dispute between the Dutch and the Portuguese (then united
with Spain during the period of the Iberian Union [1580–1640]) over the seizure of a
Portuguese vessel in the waters of Dutch ally, the Sultan of Johore. Called Mare liberum, the
pamphlet describes a situation that later political philosophers would take as the basis for con-
structing a new international legal order: a situation in which large parts of the earth consisting
of great bodies of water “cannot be made proper,” that is, belong to any sovereign or individual
by right of seizure, possession, or occupation, precisely because the sea cannot by nature be
seized, possessed, or occupied (Grotius 1916 [1633], 20). This assertion, and the short treatise
that develops it, contain a series of corollaries that introduce an emerging spatial order: one
organized not around the decipherment and fulfillment of past prophecies, but rather the asser-
tion of an empirical fact upon which a wholly new horizon of expectations must be based (see
Schmitt 2003).
203
John D. Blanco
Manila-Macao-Mexico, 1565: in lieu of a network

With the death of Quirós, the Spanish age of exploration came to an end. Spanish monarchs
beginning with Philip II increasingly faced the prospects of weighing Spain’s transoceanic claim
to dominion, against the anticipated burden of overseas administration and the costs and accom-
panying dangers that a permanent base in or near Asia would certainly incur. In fact, the found-
ing of Manila in 1571, which economic historians peg as a convenient date for considering the
birth of a world economy, was not a foregone conclusion. After the failure of two previous
expeditions to find a westward sea route to the Spice Islands and to colonize the Philippines,
Philip II enjoined the Augustinian friar Andrés de Urdaneta, formerly a pilot and one of the few
survivors of the 1526 Loaysa expedition, to accompany Miguel López de Legazpi in the con-
quest and colonization of the Philippines. Even after Urdaneta’s discovery of the eastward-
blowing trade winds (or “westerlies”) across the Pacific, Legazpi remained doubtful Spain would
ever find a foothold in the lucrative spice trade (predominantly pepper and cloves) controlled by
the Portuguese and organized around trading routes in Goa, Malacca, and the port-city of
Macao. Add to this the revolt of the Netherlands against Spanish rule, and the outlook for a
permanent Spanish colony in the Philippine archipelago looked ever more improbable.
It is Legazpi’s dual recognition of (1) the conspicuous number of Chinese traders in the major
native settlements of the islands in the archipelago he has visited and (2) the popularity of silk as
a commodity in the Philippines, with the prospect of securing a profit margin in the silk trade
with China that would rival that of spices in the Moluccas among the Portuguese, that convinces
the Admiral otherwise (see Chaunu 1962, 555–580). With the relatively new dependence of the
sixteenth-century Ming Emperor on silver as the currency of the Middle Kingdom’s taxes and
the abundant supply of silver being extracted from the Potosí mines in Bolivia and the mines in
northern Mexico, the fundamental components of the enterprise we know as the Manila galleon
(also called Não de China) were established.5 From 1590 to 1811, with few exceptions, the trans-
Pacific galleon route was officially traversed twice a year, with its westward cargo consisting
primarily of “friars and silver” (a common expression of the period) and its eastbound cargo
consisting mainly of silk, although luxury items as diverse as porcelain, Japanese lacquerware,
ivory, and spices made their way to the Americas (see Ruiz Gutiérrez 2016, 171–278).
Yet the identity of Manila as entrepôt and emporium, birthplace of the world economy and
bastion of the Spanish presence in Asia, gives rise to several anomalies that contradict our com-
mon extrapolations of this city and the Spanish Pacific more broadly. Carlos Martínez Shaw and
Marina Alfonso Mola (2014), as well as Serge Gruzinski (2010), for instance, consider how the
establishment of Manila and the galleon trade became the catalyst for “the first,” Iberian global-
ization. Yet in stark contrast to the image of an expanding network, other economic historians
have repeatedly insisted on the almost complete dependence of Spain’s fortunes on only one
major yet limited circuit—the trade between Mexico and Manila—which was based primarily
on the demand for silver in the Chinese economy (Flynn and Giráldez 1995, 201–221). This
observation constitutes one of the key moments in the development of Andre Gunder Frank’s
provocative thesis: “the entire world economic order was—literally—Sinocentric.... It was only
the nineteenth-century Europeans who literally rewrote this history from their new Eurocentric
perspective” (Frank 1998, 117; see also Pomeranz 2001, 194). This perspective of the galleon
trade calls into question both the global pretensions of the Manila galleon trade, as well as the
process John Phelan identified as the “(partial) Hispanization” of the Philippines” by reorienting
world history around the Sinicization of the Philippines and the Pacific, which is highlighted by
these and other writers; or specifically, Spain and Europe’s insertion and assimilation into a
Sinocentric world economy.6
204
We arrive here at a paradox. The consequence and corollary of the birth of world trade, as
Gruzinski colorfully portrays it, is the encounter and mestizaje among peoples from the four cor-
ners of the world: half-coerced by what he calls “the Iberian mobilization,” or displacement of
traditions through the legacy of conquest; and half-seduced by the enormous wealth and exposure
to the world’s commodities through arbitrage trade and commercial capital. Every stopover and
way station of the Manila galleon became a hub for illicit activity, from Ladrones Island (Guam)
to the Californias in the Western Hemisphere, and involving peoples from all over the globe. But
curiously (and conversely), this displacement or deterritorialization of traditions, epistemologies, and
lifeworlds or “cosmovisions” in the wake of the Spanish encounter with the Amerindian and
Pacific worlds obscures a corresponding struggle over the reterritorialization of improvised and ad
hoc networks in the New World and Pacific involving divergent cultural identities and their cor-
responding spaces.7 On the American side of the Acapulco-Manila galleon trade, then, Mexican
and Peruvian Creoles vied with peninsular Spanish “gachupines” in Manila and Seville over the
financing and control of trans-Pacific commerce, even as the Crown unsuccessfully prohibited
most forms of transoceanic trade among Spain’s overseas colonies with one another.8
Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the disregard for these laws mani-
fested itself in the proliferation of contraband, corruption, and venality of government offices
which, when combined with the expedient and convenient use of the law when advantageous,
gave rise to what Mariano Ardash Bonialian (2012) calls a “semi-informal economy,” which sup-
plied Chinese goods up and down the Pacific coast (259–365).9 This trade also accounts for at
least three times the amount of silver crossing the Pacific than the official records of the Manila
galleon show (Frank 144–145). It would only be a matter of time before the Creoles, buttressed
by their ability to develop inter-regional trade and purchase the sale of government offices,
would come to counsel the viceregal authorities on the art of governing Spain’s Amerindian
subjects, and eventually, tie eighteenth-century ideas of enlightenment and freedom to a con-
sciousness of their economic power and deeper cultural knowledge of the Americas.10
The Spanish establishment of the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade, then, led primarily not to the
consolidation and articulation of a Spanish trans-Pacific economic network, throughout the
Americas, but rather the proliferation of alternative contraband, semi-informal networks that
shaped regional economies closely tied to Creole identities.
On the other side of the Pacific, a slightly different situation obtained, with both Mexican
Creoles and peninsular Spaniards in Manila unsuccessfully resisting the encroachment of both
the Chinese and the Portuguese, the latter of whom adroitly monopolize commercial relations
with China through their rival entrepôt port-city of Macao.11 Spain’s attempts to restrict the
Chinese control of trade resulted in the revolt and massacre of the Chinese community in 1603,
which was followed by further Chinese revolts in 1639, 1663, 1686, 1762, and 1772 (Corpuz
2005, 1: 308–310). But in spite of these repressive measures, by the late seventeenth century the
Chinese were not only responsible for the retail trade that supplied the Acapulco-bound galle-
ons; they and their mestizo progeny were also responsible for the inter-provincial shipping trade
throughout the archipelago (ibid.).
As the history of corruption, fraud, contraband, and the proliferation of informal and semi-
informal economies amply demonstrate, the projection of a Spanish economic network could
not rest on mercantilist principles where monarchial and viceregal power were weak; nor could
it rely on policies enforcing secrecy through the censorship of information about Spain’s over-
seas possessions.12 What name, then, can we give it? Are “Iberian mobilization,” “Sinicization,”
and the birth of the transoceanic “semi-informal economy” of American Creoles exclusive,
overlapping, or synchronized with the articulation of a network of trans-Pacific identities,
cultures, and communities?
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John D. Blanco
Hagåtña/Agaña, 1695: in lieu of Christianity

Robert Ricard’s classic work The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico (1966 [orig. pub. 1933]) docu-
ments the foundation and spread of Christianity by the mendicant and missionary friar religious
orders in New Spain between 1523 and 1572. More than any other work in recent memory, it
popularized the term “spiritual conquest” as a shorthand way to describe both the complemen-
tarity and the tension that has always existed between the religious and worldly or “temporal”
goals of Spain’s overseas conquests. However, a glance at the way the term conquista espiritual
(and its cognates) were employed in the colonial period suggests a relatively late date in the
appearance of this rhetoric. The term also seems to have been employed most frequently outside
the major centers of Mexico (City) and Lima, i.e., in those areas untouched by the original
Spanish conquest and considered either the frontier outskirts of Spain and Portugal’s dominion
or the neighboring kingdoms of the Pacific—Japan, Paraguay, Chile, Guam, the Philippine
archipelago, and even India and Tibet.This distinction is important because it highlights at once
the frontier character of Spain’s trans-Pacific network and the perpetually incomplete, protracted
nature of Spain’s claim to its overseas possessions. Finally, an understanding of just what the
trans-Pacific spiritual conquest entailed recenters the mission as the frontier institution par
excellence (pace Bolton).
If we leave aside for a moment medieval conceptions of the Crown and Church as comple-
mentary orders united in the same ultimate goal of universal Christian salvation, as well as theo-
ries of Monarchia Universalis promoted by Renaissance writers like Tomasso Campanella and the
anti-Machiavellian writers, the rhetoric of “spiritual conquest” seems to respond to a series of
specific circumstances that obtained in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. The
anonymous Jesuit play (presented in the form of a colloquy) written at the turn of the seven-
teenth century, La conquista espiritual del Japón, seems to be an early use of the phrase (see García
Valdés, in Arellano et al. (eds.) 2007, 35–57). This meaning of spiritual conquest as an extension
of the “Iberian mobilization” in the aftermath of Spain’s overseas explorations and territorial
claims came to encompass all areas of conflict in which specifically missionaries were called
upon to restore or enforce Spanish ideas of peace and civil society [policía]. As it turns out, these
areas represented much of the Americas and the Pacific between the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, as well as Portuguese India.
These areas all had in common two immediate points of reference in the late sixteenth cen-
tury. The first is Philip II’s attempt to consolidate and enforce the rights of royal authority and
patronage of the Church and the project of evangelization overseas. Early enthusiasm for a more
cooperative effort between the Pope and the Crown had soured considerably under the chal-
lenges of the Church’s ministers to the legitimacy of Spanish rule, the open conflict between the
mendicant missionary orders in New Spain (beginning with Las Casas), and the diocesan prel-
ates over the jurisdiction and privileges of spiritual authority. Add to this the vicissitudes of papal
loyalty to the Church’s original concessions to the Crown (see Shiels 1961). Philip II’s response
involved a threefold tactic: (1) reasserting and extending the right of royal patronage against the
claims of the Church’s independent jurisdiction of authority, through the codification of those
rights under Spanish law; (2) elevating and increasing the autonomy of the Council of the Indies
to administer royal patronage of the Church overseas; and (3) reining in the autonomy of the
missionary orders by extending more direct Crown control over the nature, scope, and direction
of Christian conversion. The publication of the Spanish Council of the Indies’ De la governación
spiritual de lasYndias (1571–1572) inaugurates Spain’s attempt to reassert the legitimacy of Spain’s
possessions overseas, whose foundation would lie not primarily on the principle of conquest but
rather that of conversion and colonial resettlement of Christian communities.
206
The coincidence between the publication of De la governación spiritual de las Yndias, and “El
Adelantado” Admiral Miguel López de Legazpi’s establishment of Manila in 1571, illustrates the
degree to which the conquest of the Philippines and ensuing administration of the islands under
Spain’s dominion depended on the explicitly political role of the missionaries (see Schwaller
1986, 253–274). Following the reassertion of the Crown’s authority over spiritual as well as
temporal matters overseas, Philip II authorized the Royal Ordinances of Pacification and the
Laying out of Towns [Ordenanzas para descubrimientos, nuevas poblaciones y pacificaciones, 1573]. In
it, the Spanish king makes clear that the settlement of lands not already settled would take place
not under the rights of conquest, as it had under the conquistadors, but rather the promise of
Spanish government:
Los descobrimientos no se den con títulos y nombre de conquista: pues habiéndose de

hacer con tanta paz y caridad como deseamos, no queremos quel nombre, dé ocasión
ni color para que se pueda hazer fuerza ni agravio a los indios. [Forbear that any titles
and the name of conquest accompany any present and future discoveries: for insofar as
the matter (of colonial settlement) ought to be conducted with all the peace and char-
ity that we desire, we do not want the name (of “Conquest”) to give any occasion or
excuse for using force or injury against the Indians].
(Charles Gibson, cited in Lamb, ed. 1995, 126 [translation modified])
The ordinances also outline the role of the religious in teaching the Indians how to live in a
“civilized manner” [policía, lit. political or civil society], and sternly insist on the avoidance of
conflict and theft of any Indian property on the part of the Spanish settlers (see Nuttall 1921,
743–753; Sheridan Prieto 2013, 61–90). The identification of the Spanish conquest of the
Philippines and other Pacific possessions as a pacification rather than a conquest, then, owes itself to
primarily this new principle of Iberian governance under Philip II.13
Yet given the prevalent frontier character of the New World and Pacific—the segregation of
Spaniards and Indians into two “republics” with their attendant privileges and responsibilities,
the concentration of wealth and Spanish settlement in cities or near the silver mines (Zacatecas
and Potosí), the aforementioned mestizaje of Spaniards and Indians—the missions were in fact
better known as zones of protracted war.14 The reference to endless conflict with the native
peoples of the Americas and the Pacific begins perhaps with the “second conquista” or war
between Spain and the Chichimecs of northern Mexico [1550–1590]. During this period, mis-
sionaries like Fr. Guillermo de Santa María (O.S.A.) begin to invoke the existence of a war that
continues even after the stated goals of “population, pacification, and conversion” have been
met—una guerra viva [a living war] (Sheridan Prieto 63–64). In a similar vein, in 1665 Dominican
Fr. Hector Polanco (O.P.) describes the “living spiritual conquest” in the Philippines as a main
reason why missionaries should not be subject to the authority of the king’s royal patronage:
One cannot follow [the model of replacing missions with secular parishes] that obtains
in Peru or Mexico, where for many years the Indians have been reduced to the Faith
and in obedience to Your Majesty and the ministers in the tranquil and pacific posses-
sion of these Christian lands. In the Philippines the religious remain in a state of an
ongoing [viva] spiritual conquest, hoisting high the banners of the Faith and Christian
religion...and unless one attempts the reduction of these Indians with humility,
patience, good temperament, example, and orthodoxy, the ferocity of their nature and
customs will not be held in check, and they will destroy the Christian kingdoms
already fashioned.
207
John D. Blanco
[no se siguen en el Perú y México en donde los Yndios ha muchos años que están
reducidos a la Fe y obediencia de Vuestra Magestad y los ministros en quieta y pacífica
posesión de las Christianidades. En Filipinas están los ministros en viva conquista espiri-
tual, enarboladas las banderas de la Fe y Religión Christiana... [y] si no se tratara de
reducir estos con humildad, paciencia, buen tratamiento, ejemplo y doctrina no se
contuviera la ferocidad de su natural, y costumbres, y destruyeran a las Christianidades
que ya están formadas].
(cited in Colín and Pastells 1904, 734–735, italics added)
As if to emphasize his meaning, Fr. Polanco catalogs the many revolts and uprisings that have left
the islands in a state of total ruin. “These Christian kingdoms,” he concludes, “need spiritual
soldiers who will work without rest to assure their fealty to God and Your Majesty” [[A]quellas
Christiandades...necesitan de soldados espirituales que trabajen sin descanso en ellas para asse-
gurarlas para Dios y Vuestra Magestad (737)].The migration of the language of “conquest,” from
a political to a spiritual realm, was employed by Frs. Santa María, Polanco and their contempo-
raries to argue against the interference of royal authority in the work of the missions (Colín and
Pastells 739).
Such insistence on missionary autonomy, however, did not preclude friar and Jesuit recourse
to violent means to help enforce the pacification mission, as the case of Guam and the Mariana
Islands demonstrates. While Ferdinand Magellan had claimed the island as a Spanish territory
during his attempted circumnavigation of the globe in 1521, it was only in 1668 that Jesuits,
under the leadership of Fr. Diego Luis de Sanvitores, undertook the “spiritual conquest” of the
Ladrones Islands, which Sanvitores renamed the Marianas. With the outbreak of native resistance
to the policies of so-called pacification, Christian conversion, and resettlement [reducción], Fr.
Sanvitores was martyred. The ensuing Jesuit requests for military backup, however led to the
assignment of military commander Damián de Esplana, who became notoriously corrupt; and
between the forced reducciones or concentration of the populations in coastal towns, the ensuing
outbreak of epidemics with every arrival of the Manila galleon to the Marianas, and the atroci-
ties committed upon the hapless population by Spanish soldiers, the Chamorro people revolted
in 1684 and laid siege to the Spanish fort town of Agaña for four months.15 Jesuit leadership of
the mission quickly ceded to military punitive expeditions against rebels, the wholesale destruc-
tion of native villages originally under the protection of the Jesuits, policies of forced concentra-
tion, and “scorched earth” tactics employed by both Spanish military leaders and the Chamorro
resistance. The transformation of Spain’s “spiritual conquest” in Guam and the Marianas into an
old-fashioned conquest, with the Jesuits in tow, ravaged the islands for the next thirty years. In
1695, acting Governor General José Quiroga completed a last, brutal campaign against native
resistance, and forced the rest of the population into concentrated settlements, further reducing
the original 149 settlements to seven.16
One year before the 1684 revolt, Fr. Francisco García (S.J.) (1683) wrote an exemplum of Fr.
Diego Luis de Sanvitores’s martyrdom, summing up the fruits of the spiritual conquest in the
Marianas:
The Christian Faith was planted in the Mariana Islands without arms, so that they
would know about the law of peace.... But since the Devil, enemy of happiness of all
souls, began to arm the Barbarians against the religious ministers, the conservation of
the labor already begun necessitated...that Christ’s ministers go about with a soldier
escort.... Such was the price of this spiritual conquest.
208
[Plantóse la Fe en las Islas Marianas sin armas, para que se conociese que era ley de
paz.... Mas como el demonio enemigo de la felicidad de las almas, empezó a armar los
Barbaros contra los Ministros Evangélicos, fue necesario para conservar la labor
comenzada...así los Ministros de Christo...anduviesen con escolta de soldados.... Ha
sido precio en esta espiritual conquista].
(García 1683, 590)
Could Fr. García have anticipated that the majority of the “55,000 Christians” by his estimate
would be dead by the turn of the century?
Alta California, 1794: in lieu of a (vanishing) colonial subject

An image taken from the major scientific expedition launched by the Spanish Crown between
1789–1794, the Malaspina Expedition (after its leader, Italian navigator Alessandro Malaspina),
depicts the indigenous method of individual warfare among the natives encountered by the
expedition in the Franciscan missions and near the Spanish garrisons established along the coast
of “Alta California” (present day California: see Figure 11.3).17 In several strokes, the artist cap-
tures the four major options available to the indigenous peoples who confronted the encroach-
ment of the Spanish presence on the west coast. Many natives, like the ones armed with bows
and arrows in the image, initially resisted the establishment of the Franciscan missions. Where
resistance proved impossible, some natives fled to the outskirts of the western frontier, which
remained largely terra incognita while others succumbed, tacitly accepting the Spanish yoke of
pacification.
The fourth “option” is harder to define: it involves the fact that most cycled through a mix-
ture or sequence of these options in the course of a lifetime, perhaps even several cycles. The
image conveys what California mission society shared with all Spanish missions throughout the
trans-Pacific region: namely, the perpetually incomplete and protracted nature of the conquest,
Figure 11.3 M
odo de pelear de los Indios de California, pencil sketch attributed to José Cardero (artist), ca.
1792. Instituto de Historia y Cultura Naval, Madrid (Spain).
209
John D. Blanco
which led to the constant collapse and reconstruction of the missions on the one hand, and on
the other, the constant retreat of the natives to regions beyond Spanish reach.18 The discontinu-
ity of the mission manifested itself episodically—in mission revolts and desertions, followed by
search and recapture expeditions that brought runaway Christian neophytes back to the
mission—as well as progressively, as evidenced by the gradual depopulation of the missions over
the course of the eighteenth century due to a combination of disease epidemics, infant mortality,
migration to the fort-towns or presidios established alongside the missions, and flight into the
interior hinterlands of North America (see Jackson 1944, 65–143).19 This double movement has
been conceptualized in several ways throughout the Pacific region—from John L. Phelan
(1961)’s thesis on the “partial Hispanization” of the Philippines, to the revision of Phelan’s thesis
by Rainer Buschmann, Edward Slack, and James Tueller (2014) to encompass the Pacific world
under “Mexican,” or “archipelagic Hispanization.” Matthew Restall (2004) describes the presi-
dio-mission dynamic as the process of protracted colonialism; and Ana Cecilia Sheridan (2013)
has adopted the term frontierization to capture the back-and-forth expansion and contraction of
Spanish authority in accordance with the “living war” it generated throughout its overseas king-
doms. The Pacific “Rim” constituted the arena and laboratory for these cycles, in which layers
of discontinuous and uneven forms of cultural mestizaje and transculturation relapsed, reverted,
or combined with translocal collaborations as well as conflicts vis-à-vis the Spanish presence.
Fr. Francisco Palou (O.F.M.) served as presiding director of the missions in first, Baja
California, and later Alta California [1768–1773]. He described the resentment and hostility
against the encroachment of the Spanish coastal missions on native indigenous communities,
which broke out in the 1775 indigenous revolt at the San Diego de Alcalá mission in a rhetoric
that was by now familiar to the trans-Pacific missions:
The enemy, [Satan] envious and resentful, no doubt because the heathen in that terri-
tory were being taken away from him, and because the missionaries, with their fervent
zeal and apostolic labors, were steadily lessening his following, and little by little ban-
ishing heathenism from the neighborhood of the port of San Diego, found a means to
put a stop to these spiritual conquests.
(qtd. in Carrico 1997)
Ignored by Palou and his brethren, however, are the dramatic shifts of power and influence
among the European powers after the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). The intense rivalry
between Bourbon France (to which Spain had been allied since the 1700 War of Spanish
Succession) and England had ushered in a new age of exploration focused on the Pacific, for the
discovery of trade routes and islands that could serve as filling stations for ships.20 Technological
developments in instruments of sailing and navigation assisted in a series of circumnavigations
and scientific explorations of the Pacific, among which stand out those undertaken by the
British naval commander James Cook (1768–1780) and French navigator Jean-François de
Galaup, Comte de la Pérouse (1786–1789?). In 1788, the British established a colonial settle-
ment composed primarily of prison inmates, in New Holland—later renamed “Australia,” in
honor (or parody) of the fabled Terra Australis. One year later, and on the side of the Western
Hemisphere, British traders clashed with a new Spanish settlement in Nootka Sound (St.
George’s Cove), which had been established that same year to repel the encroachment of Russian
fur hunters and traders. An indirect consequence of this imbroglio was the Spanish Crown’s
decision to officially relinquish its claims to exclusive sovereignty over the Pacific (in 1790).
For the Spanish Crown and administration under enlightened “Frenchified” [afrancesados]
councilors, the expansion of missions and garrisoned forts in the Alta California region entailed
210
not so much the ongoing pursuit of a Renaissance world-view, but rather an attempt to occupy
coastal lands under Spanish possession in order to preempt the expanding presence of France
and England. The age of spiritual conquest was exhausted: no decision better illustrates this
understanding than the Crown’s decision to expel the Jesuits from all the territories under
Spain’s dominion between 1767–1768.21 By contrast, the Malaspina Expedition intended to
solidify and build upon Spain’s territorial claims to the coast through the suturing of past claims
of discovery and occupation with present scientific observations of the nature and the peoples
of putatively Spanish lands—what Buschmann called the reconciliation of “revealed” (or archi-
val) and “experienced” (or empirical) knowledge (2014, 154–187). While the stated goal of the
expedition was to produce a maritime world atlas, based on surveys of the lands and littorals of
Spain’s Pacific possessions, Malaspina was also directed to verify or disprove the questioned exis-
tence of a “Northwest passage” connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans by water; and to
investigate the presence of the other European powers overseas.
It is uncertain whether Malaspina’s surveys would have contributed significantly to the preser-
vation of the Spanish presence in the Pacific; or if his studies would have stimulated economic
development through an in-depth survey and analysis of the coastal territories; or if they would
have served the creation of a post-imperial network of commercial waterways. After all, the eigh-
teenth-century revival of silver mining on the American continent, and the resumption of Chinese
demand for silver bullion, provided some basis of optimism for Spain’s otherwise diminished sta-
tus during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (see Flynn and Giráldez (2002, 405–410)).
Infact, just prior to the 1789 expedition, Malaspina led the commercial circumnavigation of
the world under the auspices of the newly formed but somewhat short-lived Royal Philippine
Company [1785–1815], which aimed to counterbalance the opening of the Manila port to free
trade by establishing a royal monopoly over the importation of Chinese and Indian goods.22
In any case, we will never know the effects of Malaspina’s fact-finding expedition: upon
returning from his journey, he was charged with conspiracy against the Spanish Crown under
state (prime) minister Manuel Godoy, and sentenced to ten years in prison. The results of his
surveys, reports, and studies, which the government had intended to publish in a seven-volume
edition, were instead confiscated and locked in a repository until nearly a century had passed
(Spate 1983, 2: 177). After serving seven years of his ten-year prison term, he was released under
petition of First Consul of the French Republic, Napoleon Bonaparte, and spent his few remain-
ing years in Italy (d. 1810). Among the works he penned while in prison was an Enlightenment
critique of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, in which he questioned the novel’s recognition as a literary
epic on a number of grounds: most notably, the seeming absence of moral consequences to Don
Quixote and Sancho Panza’s adventures for both the protagonists and their interlocutors (see
Malaspina 2005 [1796]; and Manfredi, in Giménez, ed. 2006, 181–220). He may as well have
written another treatise in a similar vein: this one critiquing a quixotic Spanish monarchy that
had struggled for centuries to reconcile the past glories of territorial expansion and the promise
of universal deliverance from the Enemy, with the creation of colonial societies that paradoxi-
cally expanded the area of frontiers and frontier society with every attempt to reduce it.
But as fans of the Quixote can readily attest, the idea is everything.
Notes
1 See Gruzinski (2010, 44–48, 93); and Bernal (2012, 39–40).
2 For a recent critique of this imaginary, see DeLoughery (2007, 8–19).
3 See also Padrón (2009, 1–30).
4 For an account and analyses of the mythical Terra Australis, see Pimentel (2001), in Elizalde, Fradera, and
Alonso, (2001, 2: 27–38).
211
John D. Blanco
5 In addition to Schurz (1934), see Chaunu (1960–1966), and Yuste López (1984).
6 See Bernal (2012, 237 and 501). See also Corpuz (2005, 1: 300–317). Corpuz mentions, among other
things, that there were already twice the number of Chinese as Spaniards residing in the Philippines by
1590 (301); by 1768 they were estimated at about 20,000 (309). While their numbers went down with
the decline and abolition of the galleon trade in 1811, the number of Chinese-Filipino mestizos went
up steadily after 1760 (311).
7 For a more nuanced exploration of these ideas see Deleuze and Guattari (1980, 508–510).
8 These decrees were issued in 1591, 1593, 1595, 1604, 1609, 1620, 1634, 1636, and 1706. See Schurz
(1934, 366–367).
9 See also Schurz (1934, 185–189, 369), Elliott (2007, 226–229), and Yuste López (2013, 185–105). On
the Spanish transpacific slave trade involving Chinese and native Filipinos, see Seijas (2015).
10 See Elliott (2007, 226–229); also Brading (1991, 601–602), Alberro (1992, 13–26), and More (2012).
11 See Chaunu (1962, 555–580) and Seijas (2015, 32–72).
12 On Spanish reliance on European ignorance of the Pacific as virtually the sole protection of its overseas
claims to possession, see Portuondo (2009, 103–140).
13 For an incisive contrast between the changing role of the missionaries in the New World vs. the
Philippines, see Elizalde and Huetz de Lemps (2015, 185–220).
14 On the “myth of completion” of the Spanish conquest, see Restall (2004, 64–76).
15 See Hezel and Driver (1988, 140–141). Spate (1983) writes: “Sanvitores...might have been able to hold
the military men in check; after his death the mission in effect was carried forward behind a creeping
barrage of sheer terrorism.... [B]y early 1681, death and flight to the northern islands had so depopu-
lated Guam that there were not enough people to raise supplies for the Galleons” (2: 115).
16 Spate (1983, 2: 117). In the most recent estimate, between 1521 and 1700 the island’s population fell by
about two thirds—from between 24,000–28,000 to about 8,000. The Crown addressed the severe
depopulation by resettling natives from the Philippines and Caroline Islands to staff the garrisons and
forts and build the towns.
17 A reproduction of this and other images from the Malaspina expedition to California can be found in
Cutter (1960).
18 See Jackson (1944, 37–38, 164–166).
19 For a comparative example of desertion, flight, and relapse of the missions in the Philippines, as well as
figures on depopulation, see Corpuz (2005, 79–80 and 598–668); and Newson (2009, 9–99).
20 See Elizalde, in Elizalde, Fradera, and Alonso, (2001, 315–339).
21 The Jesuit missions in Baja California were transferred to the Franciscans as well as the Dominicans
after the Jesuit expulsion. In sharp contrast to the attempted restrictions imposed by the Crown on
missions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, here the missionary orders were given wide lati-
tude in ministering to the “material and moral interests” of Christian converts: see Jackson (2005).
22 This initiative conflicted with the investment of Spanish colonists in the “semi-informal economy”
established through and around the Manila galleon trade, and led to the demise of both the galleon
trade and the Royal Philippine Company in the early nineteenth century.
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Ricard, Robert. 1966. The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico: An Essay on the Apostolate and the Evangelizing
Methods of the Mendicant Orders in New Spain, 1523 –1572.Translated by Lesley Byrd Simpson. Berkeley:
Ruiz Gutiérrez, Ana. 2016. El galeón de Manila (1565 –1851). Intercambios culturales. Granada: Editorial
Alhulia.
Schmitt, Carl. 2003. Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum. Translated by
G. L. Ulmen. New York: Telos Press.
Schurz, William Lytle. 1934. The Manila Galleon. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.
Schwaller, Joseph. 1986. “The Ordenanza del Patronazgo in New Spain, 1574–1600.” The Americas 42 (3):
253–274.
Seijas, Tatiana. 2015. Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Sheridan Prieto, Cecilia. 2013. Fronterización del espacio hacia el norte de la Nueva España. Mexico City:
CISEAS.
Shiels, W. Eugene. 1961. King and Church.The Rise and Fall of the Patronato Real. Chicago: Loyola University
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Yuste López, Carmen. 1984. El comercio de Nueva España con Filipinas, 1590 –1785. Mexico City: Instituto
Nacional de Antropología e Historia.
———. 2013.“De la libre contratación a las restricciones de la permission. La andadura de los comerciantes
de México en los giros iniciales con Manila, 1580–1610,” in Un océano de seda y plata. El universo
económico del Galeón de Manila, edited by Salvador Bernabéu Albert and Carlos Martínez Shaw.
85–106.
Zaragoza, Don Justo, ed. 1880. Historia del descubrimiento de las regiones austriales hecho por el general Pedro
Fernández de Quirós,Vol II. Madrid: Imprenta de Manuel G. Hernández.
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12
IMPERIAL TENSIONS,
COLONIAL CONTOURS
Jesuits, slavery, and race within and beyond
the Portuguese Atlantic
Hugh Cagle
Stray cases
Were it not for their unusual Atlantic itineraries, neither Miguel García nor Gonçalo Leite
would be of much interest to historians. The basic outlines of their careers are as unremarkable
as those of most of the other Jesuits who fanned out across Portugal’s empire in the latter half of
the sixteenth century. García was a professor of theology at the Jesuit college (colégio) in Bahia
from 1576 to 1583. Leite arrived in Brazil in 1572, where he became the first professor of phi-
losophy at the college until he returned to Portugal in 1586. Like so many of their contempo-
raries in those years, the two Jesuits quickly staked out positions opposing enslavement of the
native peoples of the Brazilian littoral. García criticized even his own missionary order for its
dependence upon a “great multitude of slaves” (a multidão de escravos) (Leite 1938, vol. 2, 227).1
Leite went so far as to refuse to confess slave owners, whom he denounced as “murderers and
thieves” (com muitos casos acêrca de cativeiros, homicídios, e muitos agravos) (Leite 1938, vol. 2, 228).
This, of course, was a stance that earned Jesuit missionaries the ire of other Portuguese colonists,
especially plantation owners, and led to charges and counter-charges of corruption, conspiracy,
and immorality. At least in its general outlines, this story is well known even to colonial histori-
ans outside of the relatively small community of specialists in early Brazilian history (e.g. Alden
1969; Castelnau-L’Estoile 2000). But what distinguished the cases of Miguel García and Gonçalo
Leite was that, under pressure from the Portuguese Mesa da Consciência e Ordens (the “Board of
the [Royal] Conscience,” which oversaw ecclesiastical affairs), the two men were soon recalled
to Iberia. García returned to his native Spain where, according to one leading Jesuit historian, he
disappeared from the historical record altogether. Leite returned to Portugal three years later,
was posted to the Jesuit College of São Roque in Lisbon, and cared for the diseased and infirm
until he died of plague in 1603 (Leite 1938, vol. 2, 227–228).
Their removal from the colony was a stunning reversal. García and Leite were parts of an
emerging strategy meant to resolve a serious threat to the Jesuit mission in Brazil. Throughout
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Portugal’s empire—but especially in Portuguese America—the Society of Jesus confronted a

severe shortage of personnel. Acrimonious debate among leaders of the Brazilian mission had
given way by the early 1570s to a possible solution. Colonial colleges would be created not only
to educate the sons of wealthy Portuguese settlers but also to serve as boarding schools for the
recruitment and education of native children. From among both of these groups, some young
men would be selected for Jesuit service, sent to universities in metropolitan Portugal for further
education and possible ordination, and then returned to the colony as members of the Society
(Cagle 2018, 189–190). The entire plan hinged, of course, on staffing colonial colleges with
priests and professors like García and Leite.
So why would the Society of Jesus recall personnel vital to its Brazilian mission? The problem
was not simply that García and Leite opposed the practice of Indian enslavement but that they
objected to the practice of slavery altogether—for both natives and Africans alike. And they did
so on very specific grounds. Theirs was a technical objection to the way in which slavery was
practiced. As they knew from their own university education, a corpus of theoretical writing on
the concept of just war outlined the circumstances in which a person could be reduced to slav-
ery—namely: upon capture in wars waged in defense of the Christian faith, wars begun only after
opportunities for peaceful political submission and Christian conversion had been refused. Then
and only then was enslavement licit (Russell 1975, 127–212, 267–268, and 271–291; Muldoon
1979, 3–28, and 55–126; Bennett 2003, 31–50). Once enslaved, the two parties—owners and
bondsmen—were enjoined in a relationship of reciprocal but unequal obligation. In Portuguese
America, slaves were to faithfully do their master’s bidding; masters were to adequately house and
feed their slaves and, in cooperation with local clergy, ensure their moral and spiritual edification.
It was this question of the circumstances of enslavement that so preoccupied the two Jesuits. And
it was precisely this issue that García drew attention to in an impassioned letter to his superiors
in Rome: “I cannot believe,” he wrote frankly, “that they [slaves in Brazil] have been licitly
obtained” (Leite 1938, vol. 2, 227) (de maneira nenhuma posso tragar, maxime, por não poder entrar no
meu entendimento serem lìcitamente havidos).
What made their objections so troubling to contemporaries on both sides of the Portuguese
Atlantic was not only that they had questioned the practice of slavery but that they had done so
just as Atlantic slavery itself was undergoing an important transformation—one that proved to
be of world historical importance (Blackburn 1997; Thornton 2012). The trade in enslaved
African persons had been integral to Atlantic seaborne commerce since at least the fifteenth
century (Green 2013). Free and enslaved persons of African descent had participated in the
settlement of Brazil from its beginnings. But it was only in the early 1580s, that African slaves
became the primary source of colonial manual labor and began to outnumber indigenous slaves
in the cane fields and sugar mills that turned the Brazilian northeast into a profitable sugar
colony. As that happened, the heated arguments between Jesuits and sugar planters over access to
Indian labor had finally begun to subside (Schwartz 2004, 158–200). Indeed, Jesuit leaders then
and later argued for the use of African slaves as a substitute for natives—and hence as a solution
to the problem of native enslavement. African subjugation underwrote Native American con-
version. By the time García left for Lisbon, even the Jesuit college of Bahia in which he lived
and worked now owned some seventy Guineans (Alden 1996, 509). The vociferous condemna-
tions of García and Leite threatened to reignite the conflagration, destabilizing an increasingly
profitable colonial enterprise. The two Jesuits were silenced as part of a pragmatic arrangement
between the Society, the Portuguese Crown, and sugar interests on both sides of the Atlantic.
These two stray cases of Jesuit dissent—what little I have found of them—pose larger ques-
tions about Jesuits, slavery, and race than may at first be evident. They challenge even the basic
contours of the history of slavery in the Iberian Atlantic. They highlight the persistent
216
Imperial tensions, colonial contours
limitations of comparative studies of slavery.They point to the possibility of histories of dissent

within the Society of Jesus. And they call into question the adequacy of the Atlantic frame-
work itself.
Departures
Until recently, questions of race and slavery have been preoccupied with the origins question:
an explanation of the emergence of forms of social stratification predicated on claims of essen-
tial, innate human difference. One of two dominant approaches is a cultural one, which charac-
terizes works as distinct as Winthrop Jordan’s influential White Over Black and James Sweet’s
more recent essay on “The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought” (Jordan 1968; Campbell
and Oakes, 1993; Sweet 1997). Jordan was concerned primarily with the English experience.
But he had argued influentially that English approaches to colonial labor and attitudes toward
persons of African descent were learned from the Iberian, and especially from the Spanish,
example. James Sweet’s argument similarly tied racial attitudes in the Americas to Old World
interactions. In medieval Iberia, Sweet contended, Spaniards and Portuguese acquired an essen-
tialist vision of persons of sub-Saharan descent as a consequence of their experience under
Islamic rule and through their interactions with Muslim slave traders in Islamic North Africa.
For Sweet it was from the broader Islamic world that Catholic Iberians learned to see sub-
Saharan peoples in general as a culturally and intellectually degraded form of humanity.
As micro-historical accounts that took seriously both culture in general and cross-cultural
interactions in particular (between the English and the Spanish in the Atlantic, and between
Spaniards, Portuguese, and Muslims in Iberia), these contrast sharply with the other dominant
approach to the emergence of race-thinking as it was connected to slavery, which is macro-
historical, largely structural, and variously focused on combinations of status, class, mode of
production, and competitions for land and labor (Russell-Wood 1982; Blackburn 1997; Eltis
2000; Wolfe 2001). While these latter tend to pay too little attention to culture, approaches like
those of Jordan and Sweet are not entirely convincing either. Interactions between slaving
nations and among different regimes of slavery on both sides of the Atlantic were surely impor-
tant for the formation of notions of bodily difference in the colonial Americas. But in their
handling, colonial perspectives seem over-determined by attitudes exchanged among a narrow
range of Old World peoples—between Englishmen and Spaniards or between Spaniards and
Muslims. Such approaches also tend to sideline earlier encounters and interactions involving
other Christian slave-trading nations in the Mediterranean (e.g., Verlinden 1970; Constable
1998; McKee 2004), as well as those later between Europeans, Africans, and New World peoples
in American colonies (e.g., Restall, ed. 2005). Much recent work taking a cultural approach has
also tended to rely on dubious assumptions about culture itself. Complex attitudes about iden-
tity and human difference are taken to have remained intact through time, across regions, and
among distinct human communities. This approach allows far too little room for contingent
cultural formations, cultural translation, and the creative invention, reinterpretation, or recon-
figuration of ideas in the face of unforeseen colonial exigencies (Gruzinski 2002; Falola and
Childs, eds. 2004; Matory 2005). Racism itself has too often appeared as a trans-historical
phenomenon—a set of attitudes that passed intact from one group to another.
More recently, historians and other scholars have begun to use carefully contextualized
encounters and interactions to highlight the multiple and fragmentary character of historical
notions of human difference and nascent ideas of race (Gruzinski 2002; Martínez 2008; Gómez
2017).They have explored the ways in which enslaved and otherwise marginalized persons have
appropriated, deflected, redirected, redefined, or otherwise manipulated the classificatory
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impulses of Iberian colonial regimes (Bennett 2003; Owensby 2008; Rappaport and Cummins
2012; Ramos and Yannakakis, eds. 2014; McKinley 2016; Aidoo 2018). And they have docu-
mented the diachronic shifts and marked inconsistencies that characterized the ways that six-
teenth- and seventeenth-century clerics themselves began to racialize concepts like slavery and
freedom (Mattos 2006; Hill 2017; Nemser 2018).
The cases of García and Leite bear on both sets of issues—the still-important question of
race-making and of the ever-shifting boundaries of slavery and freedom in colonial Latin
America. This is in part because they also open questions that have seemed more or less settled.
First among these is the legal framework through which Africans and the indigenous peoples of
Brazil were attached to the Portuguese colonial state. The medieval elaborations of a just war
theory may have helped form the legal basis on which both Africans and Native Americans were
incorporated into Iberian Atlantic empires. But there were important differences in those slave
regimes too—differences that now sustain distinct scholarly literatures even within the field of
Brazilian colonial history.
The legal issues surrounding the enslavement of sub-Saharan African peoples were presumed
to have been settled during the period of West African exploration in the fifteenth century—
long before the colonization of Brazil. At the urging of members of the ruling Portuguese
House of Aviz and after lengthy inquiries by specialists of both canon and civil law, Pope
Eugenius IV issued a succession of bulls legitimating Portuguese military-cum-commercial pur-
suits in the Kingdom of Fez (Morocco). Beginning with the bull Rex regum issued on
September 8, 1436, interest in legitimating a Christian conquest in North Africa inaugurated the
process by which legal rhetorics drawn from Roman, canon, and natural law were variously
brought to bear on African persons in Morocco and beyond, constituting the enslaved African
subject (Bennett 2005). Although slavery had been formally inscribed into Iberian law in the
thirteenth century with the siete partidas (the Castilian legal code based on Roman law), the
arrangement promoted by members of the Portuguese House of Aviz and sanctioned by
the pope made slavery the primary pathway for the Catholic conversion of African peoples.
Because the bull used the more capacious language of “Africa” (in Africanis partibus) and because
it did not distinguish between pagans (who did not yet know Christianity) and infidels (who did
but who refused to convert and who actively challenged Christian sovereignty), the bull could
be interpreted, geographically, to include not only the Kingdom of Fez but the Canary Islands,
and West and sub-Saharan Africa. And indeed the Portuguese and others managed to expand the
papal remit so that inhabitants from those places all became susceptible to enslavement (Sweet
1997, 157–159; Russel 2000, 153–161 and 249–251; Bennett 2003; Mattos 2006, 43–55; Green
2013, 75–76; Muldoon 1979).
The legal basis for the inclusion of indigenous South American peoples into Portuguese
colonial society in Brazil differed. Although there were examples of critics, such as the New
Christian and sometime Dominican Fernão de Oliveira, who questioned the application of the
just war framework (Oliveira 1555), there was no Portuguese analog to the well-known Las
Casas-Sepúlveda exchange in Valladolid in 1550 by which the Spanish Crown put the humanity
of New World peoples on trial, legitimated native subjugation, and secured its claims of sover-
eignty in the Americas. Portuguese policies toward Brazil’s native peoples took shape more
slowly, less formally, and partly as a consequence of countless ad hoc arrangements. Papal support
for Iberian endeavors in the New World and hence the legitimacy of Iberian claims in the
Americas rested in part on conduct toward, and the ultimate conversion of, native peoples
(Shiels 1961). But unlike the Portuguese practice in sub-Saharan Africa, Portuguese policies
toward the indigenous peoples of Brazil were not conceived in terms of a religious crusade; nor
was slavery intended to be central to the relationship (Marchant 1942; Schwartz 1985;
218
Braga-Pinto 2003). The earliest surviving records reveal that the Portuguese Crown had pro-
scribed the practice of enslavement of Tupí-speaking peoples by dyewood traders stationed
along the Brazilian coast. The royal posture of non-involvement effectively permitted the prac-
tice nonetheless. Indian enslavement began immediately and spread rapidly, especially in the
wake of wars against the Caeté during the 1560s, under the governorship of Mem de Sá. But
when the Portuguese king Dom Sebastião finally promulgated an official Indian policy in 1570,
a whole array of labor arrangements—slavery least favored among them—were conceived as
pathways to political, economic, and cultural integration (Marchant 1942; Kieman 1973;
Schwartz 1978; Johnson 1987).
From the outset, then, while Catholic authorities and Portuguese promoters of African
campaigns envisioned slavery as the principal pathway for the conversion of sub-Saharan peo-
ples, and it was as slaves that they were intended to be integrated into the Catholic communities
of Portugal’s American colonies, the same was not true for the indigenous inhabitants of
Portuguese America. Much more than any other single institution in colonial Brazil, the Society
of Jesus was central to the perpetuation of that difference.Within about a decade of their arrival
in 1549, Jesuit missionaries had begun to acquire and deploy their influence to argue for native
resettlement, missionary tutelage, and the integration of índios through labor arrangements that
included slavery but which emphasized the creation of free village-based communities (aldeias)
of devout subjects of the Crown. To mitigate the enslavement and attendant abuse of the pre-
dominantly Tupí-speaking peoples of the Brazilian littoral, the Jesuits vigorously promoted the
importation of African slaves. Although in practice Crown support was inconsistent, the Jesuits
were prime beneficiaries of the formalized Indian policy finally enacted by the Crown in 1570.
Jesuits became the guarantors of indigenous well-being, and necessary intermediaries between
Portuguese and native communities.
Hence the issue raised so dramatically by García and Leite: from the Jesuit point of view,
Amerindian enslavement was supposed to raise questions that African enslavement did not.
García and Leite refused that distinction. By attempting to bring the enslavement of African and
Amerindian peoples into the same legal frame, García and Leite collapsed not only the distinc-
tions that their contemporaries drew and which ultimately underwrote the divergent historical
experiences of inclusion and exclusion in Portuguese America. They also collapsed the distinc-
tions that continue to sustain separate historiographies (but see, for example, Restall, ed. 2005;
Langfur 2006).
The cases of García and Leite do, however, suggest alternative approaches to Atlantic slavery.
As an example of the ways in which religion impinged on the practice of slavery, they present an
unusual challenge to the well-known Tannenbaum thesis. According to Frank Tannenbaum, the
Iberian legal tradition combined Roman law (the siete partidas) and Church canon law in ways
that endowed slaves with a legal and moral personality, and that in turn mitigated against the
most severe abuses of chattel slavery and the most rigid forms of race-based social stratification
(Tannenbaum 1946). Like the original formulation, most critiques of the Tannenbaum thesis set
Anglo-American and Iberian American examples against one another (Degler 1971; Blackburn
1997; Sweet 1997; Landers 1999). The cases of García and Leite serve as reminders that distinct
legal frameworks for forced labor could and did emerge side by side simultaneously—not only
under the same colonial regime but within the same colonial colleges, urban households, and
rural plantations. Clearly, blanket accounts of Iberian law and comparisons across European
empires predicated on formal religious and legal differences alone are insufficient to account for
the development of disparate regimes of Atlantic slavery.
Then there are issues related to the characterizations of the Jesuit order and the geographical
frameworks that continue to bound historical analysis. The silencing of García and Leite
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Hugh Cagle
suggests that there remain untold histories of dissent within the Society of Jesus. Jesuit attitudes
toward slavery, so the literature tends to suggest, were more or less uniform. Historians of the
Society (then and now) have tended to marginalize or even disregard dissent. The Jesuit histo-
rian whose work has preserved what remains of the lives of García and Leite, for example, dis-
missed their views as mere attempts to gain personal notoriety. He suggested that it was because
of their personal ambition, which was anathema to the collective enterprise of the colonial
mission, that the two dissidents were removed from the colony (Leite 1938 vol. 2, 227–229).
Other historians have stressed the forging of an ideological alignment between Jesuits and plant-
ers (Mörner 1967; Sweet 1978; Vainfas 1986). Such treatments take dissent as the exception
rather than the rule. Indeed, this image of members of the Society strictly adhering to a mono-
lithic Jesuit “way of proceeding” is such a fixture in the literature that Jesuit historian John
O’Malley foregrounded a critique of the idea in his otherwise uncontentious study of the
Society’s early years (1993, 7–9). More recently, the inescapable diversity of Jesuit perspectives
on slavery has led scholars to eschew reductive treatments of the supposed force of patristic
writings (such as those of St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas) in determining Jesuit attitudes
toward African enslavement (e.g., Costigan, ed., 2005). Not only did dissent clearly characterize
Jesuit efforts to accommodate the practice of slavery but a wider Atlantic frame, taking in (for
example) the views of Alonso de Sandoval at the Jesuit college in Cartagena several years later,
suggests that the cases of García and Leite were neither aberrant nor isolated at all (Morgan
2000; Olsen 2004; Germeten 2008). Rather, they participated in a wider discourse on African
enslavement that variously critiqued and accommodated the practice throughout the Atlantic. A
comprehensive intellectual history of African slavery within the Society of Jesus remains to be
written. But it will have to grapple with the diversity, rather than uniformity, of perspectives.
Of course, Jesuit missions were not merely an Atlantic phenomenon. Instead, especially in
Portugal’s empire, the Asian apostolate was more prestigious. It was the preferred destination for
outbound Jesuits. Indeed, it was the draw of Asia—its riches, its populous cities, its perceived
cultural and political sophistication—that made Atlantic destinations pale by comparison, and
which made native recruitment, colonial colleges, and professors like García and Leite so crucial
to a successful Brazilian mission in the first place. Once diverse intellectual currents within the
Society begin to come into focus, it is worth asking whether the Atlantic is even the appropriate
scale at which to look for answers. After all, even though slavery was not as central to Portuguese
and other European empires in Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (but see
Chatterjee and Eaton, eds. 2006; Seijas 2014), it is still true that Jesuit leaders worked within—
and were sensitive to—the wider imperial horizons of their metropolitan patrons. And just as the
Portuguese Crown wrestled with the possibilities and limitations of its empire, so too did well-
connected, policy-minded Jesuits attempt to reconcile Crown and missionary ambitions. Jesuit
approaches to slavery in the Portuguese Atlantic were perhaps sensitive to the shifting fortunes
of the empire globally. Understanding slavery in Portuguese America might require a perspec-
tive larger than the Atlantic itself. The question of slavery is just one way in which the Asian
theaters of Portuguese empire might have become important to Atlantic possibilities.
Even though my aim is to chart global interconnections, I suggest that, methodologically,
culture and representation remain critical starting points. Even though large-scale global studies
have tended to downplay, ignore, or outright dismiss cultural specificities in favor of institutions,
macrostructures, and the longue durée, cultural representations remain useful because, among
other things, they provide clues to the grounds on which groups interacted with one another.
Representations are indices of both highly local ambitions and the preoccupations of individual
participants in an encounter; but they also reflect the wider structural relationships of which
they were a part and the cultural fields in which they were enmeshed. Carefully contextualized
220
representations can be used to link distinct levels of analysis (Adas 1998). Through them, global
histories can be made sensitive to locally situated ideologies of race, gender, and religion among
many others (Burbank and Cooper 2010; Bethencourt 2014 are efforts to reconcile culturalist
and structuralist approaches). In the remainder of this essay, I undertake a close analysis of Jesuit
rhetoric and pay particular attention to representations of the master-slave relationship. I do so
to ask not whether and why the Society of Jesus supported the development of divergent forms
of forced labor in Brazil (pace Tannenbaum and his interlocutors) but to ask on what terms they
did so and how and why those terms changed over time.
García and Leite had clearly failed to navigate the fraught terrain of Portuguese imperial
political economy.The charged environment in which the two Jesuits operated and the grounds
of their removal from the colony amount to clues that can help link the contingencies of the
empire and the particular conditions that enabled or foreclosed missionary discourse in Brazil.
The examples of García and Leite raise sweeping historical and historiographical issues. But
these questions are too big for their cases alone to answer. To understand the interplay between
structures, ideas, and agency requires an historical member of the Society whose influence and
whose cognizance of the imperial context in which he and the Society operated might be more
easily established. Through the life and work of the Portuguese theologian, diplomat, and mis-
sionary Antônio Vieira (1608–1697), it is possible to demonstrate not simply how Catholic mis-
sionary orders collaborated in African enslavement and the construction of Atlantic slave societies
but also (and more interestingly) how, why, and on what grounds powerful individuals might
attempt to insinuate themselves and their organizations into the master-slave relationship—and
what, if anything, Portugal’s empire in Asia had to do with it.
The case for Vieira

Born in Lisbon but raised in Brazil,Vieira was an influential diplomat and missionary who was
equally at home in the court circles of metropolitan Europe and in the company of powerful
indigenous headmen at the mouth of the Amazon River. Vieira would become a prolific
author—eight volumes of his sermons circulated throughout the Atlantic world when he died
in 1697—and he remains one of the central Portuguese literary figures of the seventeenth cen-
tury. Particularly to specialists of the Spanish Americas,Vieira may be best known as the author
to whom Sor Juana responded in a letter that would lead to her own fall from favor (Juana Inés
de la Cruz 2009 [1690]). His rise to prominence was meteoric. In 1626 and still a neophyte, his
superiors selected Vieira to author the Jesuit Annual Letter from Brazil. By 1630 he had begun
to teach courses in rhetoric in the Jesuit College at Olinda. At the end of Spanish dominion over
Portugal and its empire in 1640, Brazil’s viceroy dispatched Vieira as part of the delegation sent
to assure the new king of the colony’s trust and obedience.Vieira soon gained the support and
confidence of Dom Joao IV, delivered sermons to elite circles at the Portuguese court when he
was named court preacher in 1644, and traveled to Holland and France in 1646 and 1647 as an
envoy to negotiate a peace with the Dutch, who continued their assault on Portugal’s extrater-
ritorial holdings. He was the architect of an extremely controversial plan to exchange
Pernambuco for a lasting peace with the Dutch; and he opposed metropolitan Portugal’s support
of its colonists’ revolt against the Dutch in Pernambuco in June of 1645. Among Vieira’s most
contentious proposals was the creation of the short-lived Brazil Company, which relied on New
Christian and Jewish financiers to revitalize trade with the Brazilian northeast (Hanson 1981,
ch. 6; Cohen 1998).
In Brazil,Vieira was instrumental in making the Amazon a focus of the Society’s missionary
fieldwork and, between 1653 and 1661, he effectively consolidated the position of the Jesuits in
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the region as mediators between unconverted indigenous and colonial Catholic communities.
In 1659 he arrived on Marajó Island at the mouth of the Amazon River, where Indians had
thwarted repeated Portuguese attempts at armed conquest, and brokered the peaceful submis-
sion of forty thousand of the so-called Nheengaíba Indians to Jesuit control. The next year in
Ceará, Vieira led the conversion of the formerly Dutch-allied Tapuia to Catholicism, bringing
them under Jesuit tutelage as well. He had championed legislation promulgated in 1655 that
placed Indian laborers of the Amazon under Jesuit administration. By 1660, the Jesuits claimed
to have settled nearly 200,000 Indians into 54 aldeias scattered throughout lower Amazonia
(Hemming 1984, 173–180; Cohen 1998, 155–173).
Vieira was keenly aware of the performative aspects of both writing and speaking, and he
frequently combined his roles as statesman and preacher. During the War of Restoration against
Spain (1640–1668), he repeatedly lobbied the clergy, nobility, and lower classes of metropolitan
Portugal to sacrifice on behalf of their resource-strained kingdom (Hansen 2000, 446). In Brazil,
when the Society came under attack from Jorge de Sampaio, the powerful attorney of Maranhão,
Vieira was the author of the lengthy Resposta aos capítulos que deu contra os religiosos da Companhia
(“Response to the allegations given against the members of the Company [of Jesus]”), which
detailed and defended at length Jesuit accomplishments in Brazil (Cidade and Sérgio 1951–1954,
vol. 5, 174–315; Boxer 1963, 14–19; Cohen 1998, 54–118).
Given his close connections to the Portuguese court, his prominence in discussions of
imperial strategy and political economy, and his influential role in missionary fieldwork, it
mattered that Vieira was one of the most outspoken advocates of African slavery in Brazil and
of Portugal’s continued slaving in West Central Africa. His letter to the Marquis of Nice in
1648 summed up his point of view. “Without negros,” Vieira wrote, “there is no Pernambuco
and without Angola there are no negros” (sem negros não há Pernambuco, e sem Angola não há
negros) (Azevedo, ed. 1925–1928, vol. 1, 234). His many letters to officials in both the colony
and Europe frame his decision in just those terms (e.g., Cidade and Sérgio, eds. 1951–1954,
vol. 3, 712–714). Yet Vieira always felt, too, that enslaved persons of African descent were a
possible constituency for Jesuit missionaries. As a young Jesuit, he believed the Society was
responsible for converting both South American and African peoples. In addition to the three
standard vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience to God,Vieira also elected to take additional
vows, pledging himself to missionary work among New World indigenous peoples and
Africans alike. He studied both Tupí-Guaraní and Kimbundu. To Vieira, the conversion of
both groups was an integral part of the Society’s global mission and an extension of the work
of conversion that, as Vieira well knew, engaged Jesuit energies from Angola to India and
China (Azevedo, ed. 1925–1928, vol. 1, 455–464; Cidade and Sérgio, eds. 1951–1954, vol. 5,
299, 308, 318; Boxer 1963).
To that end,Vieira delivered a small number of sermons directly to African slaves—members
of the Black confraternity of Nossa Senhora do Rosário—and their masters and overseers in the
colony. Here I am concerned with two of these.Vieira preached the “Sermão décimo quarto” in
Bahia on St. John the Evangelist’s Day (December 27) of 1633. He wrote and delivered the
second sermon, the “Sermão vigésimo sétimo” sometime in the late seventeenth century (Alves,
ed. 1907–1909, vol. 11, 255–286 and vol. 12, 301–334 respectively). Close reading of these texts
reveals how an influential Jesuit missionary wrestled with the complexities and internal contra-
dictions both of Portugal’s vast American colony and also its empire. Most immediately, Vieira
had to reconcile his role as a Jesuit charged with fulfillment of royal pretensions to the conver-
sion of millions of Amerindians with his individual position as a Catholic missionary, which he
took to entail the care for all human souls—which in Portuguese America included both
Amerindian and African.
222
The “Sermão décimo quarto” and the “Sermão vigésimo sétimo” were profoundly sensitive
to the changing economic, political, and social currents in the colony but, taken together, reveal
as well how Vieira wrestled with the exigencies of global empire. Wealthy, powerful fazendeiros
(colonial sugar planters) often viewed Jesuit policies as antithetical to their own economic inter-
ests and as a source of social, economic, and political tension in the colony. But these sermons
illustrate the bare, if circumspect, acquiescence of one influential Jesuit to the exclusionary and
violent colonial order. That did not mean that Vieira abandoned African slaves altogether, how-
ever. Ecclesiastical authorities regularly expressed concern that planters worried far too little for
the conversion of their slaves. And Jesuits were often critical of the secular clergy who they
believed were less than diligent in their catechizing efforts. A careful reading of Vieira’s sermons
shows how an influential Jesuit might attempt to insinuate himself and the missionary Church
into the master-slave relationship. What were African slaves’ obligations to their adoptive society
and what were that society’s obligations to its newest, if most degraded, members? Who had
authority over them and what were the terms and theoretical limitations of that authority? In
other words, what problems did African enslavement pose for Portugal’s attempt to construct a
devout Catholic colony in the Americas?
Vieira’s answer to questions like these were in part a consequence of the combination of
pragmatism, messianism, and sense of historical destiny that shaped so much of his thinking
more generally (Cohen 1998). Indeed, it was this potent combination that allowed Vieira to
reconcile the apparent contradiction in the Jesuits’ promotion of African but not Indian enslave-
ment (Ricard 1961; Boxer 1963; Vainfas 1986; Cohen 1998). But Vieira’s views on the terms
and conditions of African enslavement in Brazil were neither fixed nor one dimensional.
Rather, they can be read collectively as a set of shifting, strategic attempts by one Jesuit to pal-
liate sugar planters and imperial authorities and at the same time limit planter abuses and ensure
the Catholic instruction and conversion of African and African-descended slaves. Of the mul-
tiple rhetorics available to Vieira he would consistently take as his starting point the obligations
of reciprocity—enslavement in exchange for Christian salvation—that attended the master-
slave relationship as it was inscribed in the now long-standing papal arrangements established
for Portuguese Atlantic endeavors in the fifteenth century (Russell 1975, 162, 172–178). Yet
Vieira’s formulation of that relationship and the place of the Jesuit missionaries within it
changed over time. These shifts reflected the shifting political and economic fortunes of
Portugal and its global—not just its Atlantic—empire.
Bodies, souls, empires

By the 1610s, Africans and African-descended persons had supplanted indigenous communities
as the primary source of slave labor along Brazil’s northeastern littoral (Alden 1969; Schwartz
2004). The colonial arrangement by which African subjugation underwrote Native American
salvation grew more salient. Concerns about the place of forced African laborers within the
Catholic Church and the place of the Church and its emissaries within the master-slave rela-
tionship deepened. In 1633, in the “Sermão décimo quarto,” Vieira attempted not only to rec-
oncile the missionary project with the imperial exigencies that required Jesuits to accept African
enslavement, but also to address questions about the place of enslaved Africans in the work of
the missionary Church.
Planters and other slave owners, as well as ecclesiastical authorities, often argued that enslave-
ment was the price for salvation.Vieira’s perspective was similarly rooted in the obligations of
reciprocity. But the theory of just war focused on a relationship of mutual obligation between
masters and slaves: as slaves supported the material well-being of their owners so masters
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Hugh Cagle
attended to the spiritual growth of their slaves. Vieira configured the arrangement differently.
The crucial relationship—and hence the terms of reciprocity—was that which obtained
between slaves and the Church. Masters were incidental to the salvation Vieira proffered, not
the key to it.The nature of this relationship was familial rather than contractual. Labor in Brazil
became a chance to pay a debt owed to God and especially to the Virgin Mary (Alves, ed.
1907–1909, vol. 11, 270–284).
This was not a vision that minimized violence and suffering. To the contrary: violence and
suffering were vital to the constitution of familial bonds. Vieira placed particular emphasis on
ties that were either maternal (linking slaves to the Virgin Mary) or fraternal (linking them to
Jesus Christ). Repeated recitation of the rosary during torturous days of labor at the mill became
a central act of devotion to the Holy Mother and a way to continually reaffirm African and
African-descended slaves’ commitment to—and belonging in—the broader family of the
Church. Vieira similarly used violence and suffering to identify bonded laborers as brothers of
Christ, in one of the most striking passages likening the daily brutality visited upon plantation
slaves to the suffering of Christ on the cross. Earthly suffering through spiritualized labor in the
engenho was a vehicle for veneration and a pathway for salvation. It characterized the experiences
of Africans’ Holy brother and, like Christ, their suffering was their consecration (Alves, ed.
1907–1909, vol. 11, especially 275–276).
In all of this,Vieira had to resolve an apparent contradiction between African slaves’ member-
ship in the compassionate family of Christ and the violence which they suffered daily at the
hands of fellow Christian masters and overseers. He did this by constructing a history in which
suffering was normalized. It was part of a divinely sanctioned plan, a common earthly experi-
ence of the devout. Through biblical exegesis, Vieira explained that those who suffered most
were also the most devout (Alves, ed. 1907–1909, vol. 11, 270).
The sermon of 1633 was strategically timed and its message was pointed. In the face of dra-
matic economic dislocation—the calamitous Dutch capture of Pernambuco in 1630 (Schwartz
1985, 177–185; Schwartz 2004)—and in the midst of contentious relations between clergy and
sugar planters—a situation in which planters’ care for the spiritual lives of their slaves was always
found wanting by secular and missionary clergy alike—the 1633 sermon to slaves and planters
constituted both a reminder of the importance of the conversion of African and African-
descended slaves and a case for the centrality of the missionary Church to that enterprise. By
asserting the primacy of spiritual obligation and insisting upon thorough, formal indoctrination,
Vieira created a place for Jesuit priests in the relationship between masters and their African
slaves—indeed the role was enacted in the sermon’s very delivery. Jesuits were to have an active
role not only in administering sacraments and ensuring the proper instruction of the rosary and
its attendant meanings, but in policing the behavior of masters and slaves, and in explaining the
new faith and elaborating an historical trajectory by which apparent contradictions were
resolved.
Events over the ensuing decades would force Vieira to reconsider that position. The 1630s
turned out to be a point of inflection for Portuguese fortunes generally—not only in Brazil but
throughout the empire—that inaugurated what Sanjay Subrahmanyam has described as a period
of imperial “retreat” and which led to a reconfiguration of imperial political and economic
interests that turned the Atlantic, rather than Indian Ocean Asia, into a focus of Crown policy.
In the Atlantic, the Dutch captured and settled Pernambuco beginning in 1630, seized the São
Jorge da Mina castle in 1637, and did the same to the slave port of Luanda in 1641. These in
turn disrupted the slave trade to Brazil. In Asia, losses and other challenges were both numerous
and costly. They included a decline in revenue from intra-Asian trade after the Mughal capture
of Hughli in the Bay of Bengal in 1632, losses in Ceylon and the adjacent coast and the
224
attendant shrinkage of the Portuguese cinnamon trade, the periodic Dutch blockade of Goa,
and increasingly restricted access to trade with the Japanese and the attendant collapse of silver
trade for Portugal in 1639 (Subrahmanyam 1993, 164–180, 182–188). Consequently, by the
1660s, the Atlantic replaced the Indian Ocean as a focus of Portuguese imperial economic and
administrative activities. Ships returning from Asia increasingly called at Salvador as private trad-
ers sold Asian drugs, spices, and especially textiles on their own accounts to make up for the
money they could no longer make in Asia (an aspect of intra-colonial trade that was only legal-
ized in 1672). Increasingly, too, outbound ships on the carreira da Índia stopped at Bahia to load
powdered tobacco (for snuff) and sugar (for both alimentary and medicinal purposes) to be sold
in Goa and Macau. All of this, according to Subrahmanyam, meant that that the Asian trade
became “integrated with and perhaps even subsidiary to the trade to Brazil” (Subrahmanyam,
1993, 41; van Veen 2000; Strum, 2013).
Vieira, who was in Rome in the early 1670s and who maintained vigorous epistolary
exchanges with countrymen and contacts spread from London to Paris and Lisbon, was acutely
aware of these transformations and the geostrategic maneuverings of competing empires in
Europe and Asia that underlay them. In the same years, he advocated for imperial reform in
response to these global challenges.Vieira was among a number of influential Jesuits who pro-
moted the creation of a joint-stock company financed by New Christian merchants, supported
by a new military force of some five thousand men-at-arms, and accompanied by a renewed
missionary presence spread across the Estado da Índia. The proposal failed, signaling his dimin-
ished influence at the court of Prince Regent Dom Pedro. In 1681, in the wake of this defeat,
Vieira returned to Bahia (Hanson 1981; Cohen 1998).
Even after Portuguese colonial forces recaptured Pernambuco in 1654, the Brazilian sugar
trade remained badly weakened. Pernambuco, its milling infrastructure and fertile lands badly
damaged, would never recover. Bahia remained central to the colonial sugar economy, but efforts
were now underway to invigorate sugar production in the northern regions of Grão Pará and
Maranhão. Always poorer and less productive, and fed by the inland slaving of the bandeirantes,
the region remained far more dependent on the labor of cheaper indigenous captives than on
the more expensive enslaved Africans.Vieira promoted the slow but eventual shift from indige-
nous to African slaves and as early as 1669 penned a brief that detailed how the Crown might
facilitate it. He proposed what in 1682 became the Companhia do Estanco do Maranhão, which
was to supply the region with as many as six hundred African slaves per year. The Maranhão
Company (like its predecessor the Brazil Company) was short lived and African would not sup-
plant Indian slavery in the north until the mid-eighteenth century (Carreira 1983; Alden 1986).
In April of 1680, before his departure for Bahia the next year,Vieira also secured confirmation
from Prince Regent Dom Pedro that control of Indian labor in the Brazilian north remained in
Jesuit hands. The Maranhao Company’s monopoly on (and lackluster performance in) the
importation of African slaves combined with Jesuit control of Indian labor led to a rebellion
among planters and their temporary expulsion of the Jesuits in 1684 (Baleno 2002).
It was sometime in the early 1680s, in the midst of failure and setback, that Vieira wrote and
delivered the second of his sermons to an audience of planters and slaves of the brotherhood of
Nossa Senhora do Rosário. Like his earlier sermon of 1633, the “Sermão vigésimo sétimo” evinced
an abiding concern for the spiritual well-being of African slaves. Yet, well aware that imperial
fortunes hung substantially on the productivity of the Brazilian sugar trade, aware too of the
impoverished and more precarious situation of colonial sugar planters, and sensitive to the
unusually strained relations between the Society and northern planters, Vieira addressed the
form and meaning of the master-slave relationship. He was both more explicit and more cau-
tious. The sermon ultimately modified the vision he had proffered decades earlier. The “Sermão
225
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vigésimo sétimo” reallocated responsibility for African conversation and salvation. Anxious to
promote the expansion of plantation agriculture and to avoid inflaming tensions with planters,
Vieira articulated a vision that divested the African slave community of the evangelical efforts of
the Jesuits, as well as of other colonial clergy. Vieira now placed responsibility for the spiritual
lives of enslaved Africans entirely on the backs and in the hands of the slaves themselves.
From the opening passages of the oration,Vieira was unflinchingly candid about the divergent
material, bodily, and moral circumstances of the master and the slave. Highlighting vast disparities
in this way set in high relief what Vieira saw as the depredations of planters as a group. It also
focused attention on the relationship between the productivity of the bodily labor of the enslaved
and the material prosperity that planters derived from it. And that, in turn, allowed Vieira to draw
a sharp distinction between the body and the soul, and in so doing reemphasize the temporal
authority of masters over their African slaves (Alves, ed. 1907–1909, vol. 12, 302–305).
Of course, the distinction between body and soul was a deeply rooted feature of Catholic
cosmology (Sweet 1978, especially 92; Mello e Souza 1993, 147–159). But in a colonial slave
society on the frontier of Western Christendom, where the nascent commodification of human
life threatened to give more power to secular authorities—and in which the Jesuit order and the
secular clergy were continually at odds over authority for the spiritual life of African and
African-descended laborers (Leite, ed. 1938)—this distinction could be made to do strategic
rhetorical labor. For it meant that masters owned only one half of the African subject, that of the
body (Alves, ed. 1907–1909, vol. 12, 305–306). Despite the slaves’ degraded status, preached
Vieira to his late seventeenth-century audience, African and African-descended slaves them-
selves were in possession of their souls.
The implications, at least rhetorically, were far reaching. It allowed Vieira to establish firm
limits on what masters could and could not do to their bonded laborers. Masters owned—but
also had the responsibility to care for—the flesh alone. Slaves owned—but also had the respon-
sibility for—their souls. It was their duty to police their own comportment and to obey the
Catholic precepts that could guarantee their own salvation. This meant that, first, some forms of
slave resistance were thus deemed legitimate (Alves, ed. 1907–1909, vol. 12, 321). It also insinu-
ated, second, that even as Vieira was unwilling to cede total dominion over African-descended
slaves to their masters, he was now also unwilling to make the case for a more assertive role for
the clergy in mediating that relationship.
Toward an imperial history of slavery and race in Brazil

Vieira’s sermons serve not only as an index of the ways in which individual perspective, imperial
tensions, and colonial exigencies all converged to produce highly particular, shifting formula-
tions of the master-slave relationship in colonial Brazil. But, as Brazilian historians have long
argued, the Society of Jesus was among the few colonial institutions powerful enough to manip-
ulate the terms and metaphors with which colonial Brazilian society conceived of both slavery
and human difference (Cardoso in Vainfas 1986, 10). A precise measure of Vieira’s influence on
wider, societal notions of embodied human difference would be speculative and is beyond the
scope of the present chapter. But the increasingly marginal place of African and African-
descended slaves as targets of missionary activity, as envisioned by Vieira, was entirely consonant
with other shifts which, taken together, do indeed appear to point to a more sweeping transfor-
mation in race-thinking in Portuguese America in the late seventeenth century.
According to Stuart Schwartz, it was precisely in this period of the late seventeenth century
that those born in Brazil who claimed more illustrious peninsular heritage began to draw clear
226
lines of distinction between themselves and poorer Portuguese immigrants on the one hand and
between themselves and Brazil’s now-expansive Black and mulatto populations on the other. He
described this process as the “hardening . . . of racially based attitudes of hierarchy . . . [by which]
the native-born colonists began to assume the role of nobility and to differentiate themselves
from the rest of the population” (Schwartz 1987, 40). Schwartz drew particular attention to
colonial efforts to construct genealogies linking prosperous colonial families to metropolitan,
Old-Christian origins. A range of additional evidence has begun to emerge to support and
extend Schwartz’s claim. This period, according to Laura de Mello e Souza, saw the demoniza-
tion of non-Catholic rituals and greater ecclesiastical scrutiny (Mello e Souza 1993, pt. 2). And
James Sweet has argued that, in this same period, as prominent whites increasingly but secretly
participated in African divination and healing rituals, they simultaneously began to denounce
them publicly—drawing connections between specific rituals like calundú and diabolical powers
and satanic sympathies (Sweet 2003, 144–152). Economic disruptions of the period may have
helped propel these processes of social and cultural segmentation. In Brazil, most sugar was pro-
vided to mill owners by smallholding cane growers (lavradores de cana). As Brazilian sugar became
less profitable, countless members of the colonial population faced the prospect of downward
social mobility. And that may itself have enhanced the appeal of claims to a privileged status
rooted in descent and marked by color and cultural affiliation. Inasmuch as his sermons accom-
modated missionary divestment from the spiritual lives of persons of African descent and allowed
for African slaves’ increasing marginalization within an idealized Catholic body politic, Vieira’s
work not only implicated Jesuits in these broader transformations. They also reveal the ways in
which imperial tensions, colonial contingencies, and individual perspectives combined to shape
early modern race-thinking.
Note
1 This and all other translations are my own unless otherwise noted.
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Wolfe, Patrick. 2001. “Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race.” American Historical
Review 106: 866–905.
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13
THE CARIBBEAN
CONUNDRUM
José Antonio Saco’s Hispanic archive
and the Black Atlantic
Eyda Merediz
Cuban intellectual, José Antonio Saco (Bayamo, Cuba 1797–Barcelona, Spain 1879) is a paradig-
matic figure in nineteenth-century Cuba and the Hispanic Caribbean. Contrary to most coun-
tries in Latin America that achieved emancipation from Spain by 1824, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and
also the Philippines had a long colonial history that only ended with the Spanish-American war
in 1898.Thus, Saco remains a colonial author in a century of constant independence wars where
nevertheless Cuba was widely known as the “ever-faithful isle” with racial complexities that
David Sartorius has framed in terms of unexpected loyalties that allow for the persistence of
empire (2013, 1–20). Saco is not only seen as a key actor in the rise of Cuban nationalism and
cultural identity, but also as an important historian, writer, and polemicist who studied the insti-
tution of slavery from a national, regional, and transatlantic viewpoint as well as from a universal
perspective. His critique of slavery was modified in accordance with a fluctuation of political
allegiance that united Spain with its Caribbean colonies from one government to another; yet
he maintained his adherence to a legal framework as a reformist. His theoretical approach to the
Atlantic slave trade and the racial configuration of Cuba (including neighboring islands) simi-
larly evolved through the years, often resulting in assessment of his thought as contradictory or
insufficiently conceived. These critiques, most certainly, recall the acerbic criticism written
about one of Saco’s most valuable historical and inspirational sources, Bartolomé de las Casas
(1484–1566).
José Antonio Saco and his times

Saco’s biography and the inventory of all his multifarious and dispersed writings have been
amply documented and circulated from his first publications printed and compiled during his
lifetime (1858) to other posthumous editions (1881, 1883, 1893), including the extensive com-
mentary, editing, and reprintings by Fernando Ortiz (1881–1969) in 1932 and 1938 and beyond
(notably, the recent 2001 Clásicos Cubanos edition in Cuba and 2002 MAPFRE edition in
Spain of Saco’s complete works). Saco continues to be integral to studies of Cuba and the
Hispanic Caribbean, to the formation of a literary canon in the nineteenth century, the
231
Eyda Merediz
articulation of race and racial discourses, the sugar plantation, and the role of intellectuals in the
process of nation-building (Figarola Caneda 1921; Fernández de Castro 1923; Ortiz 1929,
1938b, [1940] 1978; Moreno Fraginals 1960, 1978; Guerra 1970; Le Riverend 1979; Torres-
Cuevas 1984, 2001; García González 2008; Gárciga in Saco 2012). Historical studies have capi-
talized on these topics not only in the national setting, but also in a transnational comparison
with Puerto Rico and other islands. Similarly, Saco is studied within the context of a transatlan-
tic fabric of ideas, texts, and debates that shaped liberal thought in the nineteenth century as
well as the articulations of freedom and independence (i.e., Knight 1970; Paquette 1988; Pérez
1988; Naranjo Orovio and Puig-Samper 1990; Schmidt-Nowara 1999, 2011; Scott 2000;
Gónzalez-Ripoll et al. 2004; Bergad 2007; Opatrny 2010; Naranjo Orovio and Buscaglia 2015;
Zeuske 2016; Gónzalez-Ripoll 2017; Naranjo Orovio 2017). His writing has received signifi-
cant attention not only in Cuba but among Hispanists in the European and North American
academy for the vast topics covered: natural history, science, statistics, education, economy, litera-
ture, health, chemistry, philosophy, archeology, journalism, climatology, criminality, immigration,
jurisprudence, technology, and other encyclopedic themes relevant to his epoch (Gónzalez-
Ripoll 2017, 149–150).
As disciple of the revolutionary independent and abolitionist prelate Félix Varela (1788–
1853) at the San Carlos and San Ambrosio Seminary, Saco eventually became a philosophy
professor after Varela left the seminary. At first,Varela had been chosen to be a representative to
the Cadiz Constitutional Courts in Spain and shortly after he took a definitive exile in the
United States. Ortiz sees Saco’s academic post as the start of his influential role in the education
of young Cubans, something Varela himself had accomplished previously. Saco also influenced
intellectual currents as the editorial director of the Revista Bimestre Cubana from 1932–1934
(published by the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País and founded in 1831). The time he spent
in the US was also important because of his collaboration with Varela in the publication of a
polemical liberal journal, El mensajero semanal (1828–1831), which was eventually prohibited
from circulating in Cuba for what was perceived as airing a covert hostility toward Spain. When
the infamous Miguel Tacón became Governor and Captain General of Cuba in 1834, Saco was
exiled from Havana for his perceived dangerous ideas; he was banished to the town of Trinidad
in the central region of the island. However, Saco instead chose to self-deport to Spain, the
center of colonial power (Ortiz 1938a, xx). Ortiz best captures this gesture by emphasizing the
motives for Saco’s journey to the root of absolutism, a means of “deflecting evil, correcting mis-
takes, insisting on justice, creating allies and … demanding respect” (“a desviar malevolencias, a
vencer errores, a pedir justicias, a crear amigos, … a exigir respetos” 1938a, xx). Like Varela who
lived out his life in exile and died in the United States, Saco died in Europe, after a brief and
only visit spent in his beloved Cuba in 1861 (Ortiz 1938a, xvi).
Saco, as part of the white Cuban criollo elite, was very much involved in constructing a
nationalist project and a collective identity in the absence of a national state; this project could
only be achieved through writing, that is, crafting a discursive Cuba (see Llorens 1998, 75). The
question of Black slavery was central to his intellectual milieu and to any formulation of a cohe-
sive national agenda in the Caribbean that, nevertheless, he imagined as a spectrum of increasing
whitening. His consistent viewpoint in favor of suppressing the slave trade early in the century
no doubt responded to the model inaugurated by Haiti of a sweeping revolution in which a
Black majority was placed in power to the demise of the white masters. It also responded to the
treaty signed by England and Spain in 1817 in which Spain was pressured to stop the trade from
1820 onward. Thus, Haiti served Saco as a cautionary tale for Cuba, with further confirmation
found in the role that abolition played in the devastating North American civil war. The treaty
of 1817 provided the legal bases that Saco would uphold until his death due to incongruencies
232
The Caribbean conundrum
between de jure and de facto practices. He lent his voice to reject the slave trade outright but his
assessment of the institution itself was another matter (see Ortiz 1938b, 37–64).The case of Cuba
with its particular history of indigenous and Black slavery in the Hispanic Atlantic took him
down an ambiguous, meandering path that fosters polymorphous readings as Gónzalez-Ripoll’s
analysis of the general use of “race” in Saco’s writings shows (2017, 153–161). In fact, his posi-
tion, which is not progressive enough in light of current formulations of critical race theories, in
his lifetime granted Saco a political reputation of being an advocate of independence from Spain,
a sympathizer of annexation to the US, as well as an abolitionist traitor. Needless to say, Saco was
thought a rebel, much to the surprise of Fernando Ortiz, as he wrote years later (1938a, xx), but
Saco’s opinion against annexionism became indisputably clear (1848, 1850, 1853).
There is no doubt that Saco was perturbed by the question of slavery. From his first publica-
tion about vagrancy in Cuba (1831) to his commentary on Notices of Brazil (1833), passing
through his comparison between Cuba and English colonies (1837), his arguments to suppress
the trade (1845) to his last text on slavery and the revolution in Spain (1868 and widely available
in its French version of 1869; and included in 1881, 443–55), the centrality of the topic is clear.
Indeed, he engaged in an ambitious multivolume project that traced the history of slavery and
servitude from remote times until the early 1800s, with particular attention to the forms of
indigenous slavery during the conquest and colonization of America as well as study of the
origins and proliferation of the African slave trade during colonial times (three volumes appeared
in 1875–1877 and one in 1879 while two others were published posthumously in editions reor-
ganized and annotated by Vidal Morales y Morales in 1883 and 1893). In fact, his relevance to
colonial studies stems from his investigation and insertion of the transatlantic slave trade of
indigenous peoples from the Americas within a broader discussion about slavery, as analogous to
the African slave trade but, significantly, in the direction of west to east or from one region to
another across the Americas.
Saco confesses on the first page of his monumental history that slavery was not something he
researched in books but that he experienced first-hand because he was born among his parent’s
slaves and eventually inherited a few briefly after their untimely death (1875, 1). The infamous
institution permeated all sectors of society in Cuba, not only sugar and coffee plantations, but in
small farms and urban settings. In later study researching historical accounts, Saco found the con-
firmation of what he calls the “poison” of slavery present in all human histories. In his practical
assessment of Cuba’s economic and political condition he did not evolve towards the abolitionist
path that Felix Varela eventually traced before him, although Varela’s position itself was limited by
notions of security (Rojas 2013, 43; see Varela [1822] 1938). Instead, Saco shared the ideas of patri-
cian reformers from Western Cuba such as Francisco Arango y Parreño (1765–1837), who was
instrumental in the modernization of the sugar industry in the island (Arango y Parreño 1952),
Schmidt-Nowara 1999, 20; Gónzalez-Ripoll and Álvarez Cuartero 2009). Nevertheless, Fernando
Ortiz makes a clear distinction between the hacendado Parreño and Saco, the professional bour-
geois, and rescues the reputation of the latter (as Torres Cuevas suggests 1984, 10–11). In Saco’s
vision, suppression of the slave trade would lead to the gradual end of slavery without any sudden
or drastic consequences for the progress of Cuba, including the stability of the agriculture and
economy of the island, the empowered saccharocracy, and the white population in general.
Entering the archive

The intellectual project of Saco and his fellow literati, Domingo del Monte (1804–1853), José
de la Luz y Caballero (1800–1862), and others involved the founding of the short-lived Cuban
Literary Academy, which was the basis for the later creation of individual members’ tertulias,
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Eyda Merediz
conferences, and journal publications that attempted to define the specificity of Cuban culture
and defended the right of Cubans to think independently in terms of arts, culture and a wide
array of issues. Saco’s specific perspective, a product of his delving into colonial history and
slavery, allowed him to access the Hispanic archive and the vast resources of the chronicles of the
Indies as the foundational discourse for an Americanism that legitimized the criollo’s double
affiliation to both the colonial power and to the native land. In this quandary, the emerging
liberal criollo subject could position himself as a national, or even a pan-Hispanic-Caribbean,
champion and continue to aspire to provincial political rights across the Atlantic. Saco’s readings
of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Fray Juan de Torquemada, Christopher Columbus, Hernán
Cortés, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Bernardino de Sahagún, Fernando de Alba Ixtlilxóchitl,
Francisco López de Gómara, Francisco Javier Clavijero, Félix de Azara, Juan Bautista Muñoz, as
well as letters, documents, and legal ordinances, together with French and German sources,
contributed to his emerging perspective on historiography.
Saco’s use of Juan Bautista Muñoz’s writings (1745–1799) is important because the Spanish
Official Cosmographer was at the center of the most ambitious project to write the history of the
New World in the eighteenth century of which only one volume was ever published, in 1793.
However, Muñoz is better known for his founding of the Archivo de Indias almost a decade before;
a modern archive, which Daniel Nemser considers not only as part of the Foucauldian discursive
system that normalizes erasures but also as a culturally-specific place of eviction and violence
born out of “methodological disputes and the geopolitics of imperial competition” (2015, 124).
Involved in a serious battle with the Royal Academy of History, Muñoz was convinced that the
chronicles of the Indies were unreliable and primary archival sources were needed for rewriting
history. For Muñoz and his supporters at the Royal Court, well known and lesser known docu-
ments from the early years of contact would help forge a geographic, natural, and political history
of the Spanish conquest and colonization of America, as prescribed by the Council of Indies
(Nava Rodríguez 1989). Although the Director of the Academy, the Count of Campomanes
(1723–1803), and his followers agreed in principle, the rewriting of history for them had to
respond to another methodology, that of Scottish historian William Robertson (1721–1793). As
Jorge Cañizares Esquerra has argued (2001, 170–203) the nature of the disagreement was episte-
mological. Muñoz objected to the Protestant’s ideological adjustment of history to the new sci-
ence of political economy, inaugurated by David Hume and Adam Smith. The translation and
annotation of Robertson’s History of America ([1776] 1788) was unacceptable for Muñoz who saw
it as a representative of the anti-Catholic Enlightenment at odds with the Spanish empire and its
civilization.
Saco inherited the historiographic transformations prevalent in the eighteenth century along
with the scrutiny of primary sources that motivated his predecessors. Bartolomé de las Casas’
Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1552) and the unpublished Historia de las Indias
(1527–1560s) became key pieces in his historical quest (see English translations by Andrew
Hurley 2003 and Andrée Collar 1971b, respectively). Both texts are featured prominently in
Saco’s citations as well as the Décadas (1601–1615) by Royal Chronicler Antonio de Herrera y
Tordesillas, who used, sometimes verbatim, large sections of Las Casas’ historiographical texts,
passages that were criticized by Muñoz and others. Las Casas and his Brevísima relación de la
destrucción de las Indias (Las Casas 1821, 2003; Bolívar 1983) served as political ammunition for
the independence movements in the continental Americas, for the most part completed by
1824. The influence of this text is evident in the writings of Venezuelan revolutionary Simón
Bolívar (1815) and Mexican intellectual Servando Teresa de Mier (1821), for example, but the
means by which Las Casas became useful for a Cuban moderate in an island that did not see the
end of colonial rule until 1898, is less obvious.
234
Recovering Bartolomé de las Casas

In the copious pages written by Las Casas, Saco found a combative stance against forms of slav-
ery disguised as legal institutions such as the encomienda, along with an incipient nuanced anthro-
pological gaze that encouraged miscegenation, a masterful use of forensic or judicial rhetoric,
the agenda of a reformist often vilified as extremist, and a figure mired in controversy regarding
the introduction of African slavery in the Americas (see Giménez Fernández 1953; Hanke 1959;
Arias and Merediz 2008).
From his exile in Spain and France, Saco not only consulted relevant texts and archives but
also waged an active campaign in favor of printing Las Casas’ two monumental histories, The
History of the Indies and the Apologética historia sumaria, written by Las Casas between 1527 and
the 1560s. Although these are Las Casas’ most impressive historiographic works, they had
remained unpublished until then. The Historia was overlooked by the Real Academia de la
Historia, which decided to first publish Fernández de Oviedo’s text instead. Saco accuses the
Academy of playing politics since it looked favorably into the publication of Las Casas in 1817–
1819 because of the interest that the Brevísima relación had occasioned, but changed its mind
completely a decade later, after most of the American republics had become independent.
Indeed, Bolívar’s call for the creation of a federal structure, Gran Colombia, encompassing many
of the former colonies of Spain, had echoed the rabid condemnations common in the writing
of the Dominican, and even proposed to name the new capital city after Bartolomé de las Casas
(1983). By 1832, however, the Academy saw little value in Las Casas’ Historia arguing that much
of what was valuable of the text had been already copied or cited by Herrera’s Décadas. Saco
sought to correct the injustice and called for returning to the original source, not the mediated
texts, stating that he could write many pages demonstrating how indispensable Las Casas’ text
was in providing a legitimate history of the Hispanic Atlantic. As a flagrant example, Saco brings
up Herrera’s misleading statement about Las Casas and the African slave trade (1865, 50–53; see
Matos Arévalo 1994) that fueled a long-lived legend.
Las Casas’ pronouncements with respect to indigenous rights, the Crown’s economic and
social policies, and the Church’s approaches to evangelization were controversial as they often
constituted oppositional discourse (1971a, 1992, 1995, 1988–1998). Yet they were never per-
ceived as inconsistent. As far as the Atlantic slave trade was concerned, however, Las Casas has
been the subject of many scornful attacks as he was often singled out as a major promoter of the
African slave trade to alleviate or substitute for Indian forced labor, given the rapid decimation
of the Arawak in the Caribbean. His writing also brought about fervent defense of his discourse
and Saco spearheaded this trend. In addition to thoroughly researching the source of the legend,
Saco also revealed the missing connection between Las Casas’ early remedies to avoid colonial
devastation in the Memoriales (1516, 1518) and his subsequent retraction.
Las Casas’ Memoriales (proposals or petitions) proved crucial for the history that Saco wanted
to tell but even more important was his Historia de las Indias. The first, Memorial de remedios of
1516, attests to Las Casas’ desire to find a solution to the problem of Indian decimation and sug-
gests, in his eleventh remedy, that Black or other African slaves should be brought to Indian
communities to work in the incipient mining industry (27–28). As Saco, Ortiz, and more
recently Pérez Fernández demonstrated with exhaustive details of yearly documentation on the
slave trade, Las Casas was capitalizing on a practice of transatlantic slavery that had been in place
since 1501 and an approach to labor replacement that was already being considered by officials
and encomenderos. He was specifically suggesting the importation of African slaves—both Black
and white—to America from Castile (ladinos) and not directly from Africa/Guinea (bozales), and
his petition was similar to those brought forth at that time by officials, citizens, and members of
235
Eyda Merediz
religious orders (Pérez Fernández 1991, 1995, 21–65). Between his first interventions in 1516–
1520 and his ultimate retraction, Las Casas requested African slaves again in 1531, 1542, and
1543 (Pérez Fernández 1995, 91–93). However, according to Pérez Fernández, Las Casas seemed
to have changed his opinion after a trip to Lisbon in 1547—certainly earlier that traditionally
thought—and he writes a denunciation in his Historia de las Indias, which was more than thirty
years in the making (1995, 112–123).
Precisely in the Historia, Las Casas withdraws from his earlier perspective once he realizes that
African slaves were unjustly captured and sold. He makes this new evidence available in those
chapters dealing with the Portuguese and Castilian expansion into the Canary Islands and Africa
(1951, 90–148; bk. 1, chs. 17–27, more specifically in 143–44; bk. 1, ch. 27). Furthermore, he
includes evidence in those pages dealing with the Caribbean in the context of the sugar cane
plantation and in outlining the presence of what he calls punitive plagues in the New World and
implying that slave rebellions were one of them (1951, 176–178; bk. 3, ch. 102; 273–276; bk.3,
ch. 129). For Saco it was clear that the publication of the Historia would have permanent conse-
quences for the history of Spanish America and for Cuba since neither he nor Las Casas would
accept being labeled as promoters of slavery or what would later be called a negrero in the nine-
teenth century.
As recently as 1991, Pérez Fernández turned to dismantling the legend of Las Casas as a pro-
moter of the slave trade once again and tried to put an end to what was seen as his contradictory
stance towards human rights and a clear bias against Blacks (see also Lavou Zoungbo 2001).This
idea was invented in Europe by white enlightened intellectuals in the second half of the eigh-
teenth century, mainly by Corneille de Pauw (Recherches philosophiques sur les américains, ou,
Mémoires intéressants pour servir à l’histoire de l’espèce humaine, 1768–1769) who opposed Rousseau’s
theory of the “bon sauvage.” De Pauw affirmed that Las Casas conceived of the plan of establish-
ing a definitive trade of Black slaves with America (Pérez Fernández 1991, 36–37). The descrip-
tion of Las Casas as a promoter of slavery was perpetuated by Guillaume Thomas François
Raynal (Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements des Européens dans les deux Indies, 1770
and 1783 in English), who followed Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, and thus passed
it along in the English language to William Robertson, among others (1991, 38–39). Significantly,
Robertson commented on this theme: “Las Casas … in the warmth of his zeal to save the
Americans from the yoke, pronounced it to be lawful and expedient to impose one still heavier
upon the Africans” (Robertson 1788, 1:320–321; see also Adorno 2008, 21–32).
It was Saco who traced the problematic source of these statements to 1601, to the pages of
the official Royal Chronicler Antonio de Herrera who had access to Las Casas’ unpublished
manuscript of the Historia de la Indias, just as Saco did more than two centuries later. Herrera’s
report (dec. II, bk.2, ch. 20) contained a damaging statement that later was repeated hyperboli-
cally by Martín Fernández de Navarrete (1825) in his compendium of discoveries of the
Spaniards at sea: “In order to mitigate Indian suffering, Casas authorized and established the
trade of Black slaves to the islands of the New World as if they were not rational beings.” (“Casas
por aliviar a los indios, autorizó y estableció el tráfico de los negros para las islas del Nuevo
Mundo como si éstos no fuesen racionales,” quoted in Pérez Fernández 1991, 33 and 40). To
Saco’s dismay, the same statement was repeated by his own contemporary, the Spanish intellec-
tual José Amador de los Ríos, prompting Saco’s rebuttal:
If such words had been said by a foreigner … an apology would have been sought …
but coming from a Castilian who writes during the second half of the nineteenth
century, who is featured prominently in the república de las letras, who has been a
notable member of the Academy of History in Madrid where the manuscript of Las
236
Casas’ Historia is housed. That this Castilian repeats today such outdated accusations,
silencing the fact that Las Casas himself recognized his error and regretted it, proves
that Mr. Amador de los Ríos did not read it well or simply engaged in hateful
partisanship.
(Que esas palabras las hubiese estampado un extranjero… alguna disculpa merecería…
pero que un castellano que escribe en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX, que figura ven-
tajosamente en la república de las letras, que ha sido miembro notable de la Academia
de la Historia de Madrid, en cuya biblioteca se conserva manuscrita la Historia de las
Indias del Padre Las Casas, que ese castellano repita hoy tan añejas acusaciones,
callando… que el mismo Las Casas conoció y se arrepintió de su error, prueba que el
señor Amador de los Ríos o no leyó… o incurrió en la odiosa nota de parcial.
Saco 1932, 173–174)
Saco, however, read Las Casas’ writings with great insight. He read the Memorial already included
in Llorente’s 1822 edition, carefully read the unpublished Lascasian manuscript as well, and even
read Robertson, most certainly in its French translation. Saco’s keen eye and Caribbean interests
revealed nuances that would forever change the manner in which history was transmitted; Saco,
in fact, defied the filtering process of northern European letters.
Saco was indeed an early apologist of Las Casas precisely because he understood the
Dominican’s place in a Caribbean and universal oppositional genealogy to slavery that led to
other dissenting voices. Saco was familiar, for instance, with the writing of Bartolomé Frías de
Albornoz (1519–1573), a Spanish lawyer who lived in Mexico. His Arte de los contratos, published
in Valencia in 1573, questioned the legality of the centuries-old practice of enslaving war cap-
tives. Contrary to the usual excuse that enslaving heathens and Christianizing them saved their
souls (as Prince Henry of Portugal stated when he received his “royal fifth” from the more than
two hundred slaves brought to Portugal in 1444), Frías de Albornoz thought that no African
benefited from living as a slave in the New World and that the Church could not justify the
violence of the slave trade (Thomas 1997, 146). Nevertheless, regarding the Portuguese enslav-
ing of Ethiopians, Frías de Albornoz was much more hesitant than Las Casas who categorically
declared it illegal (Pérez Fernández 1995, 194). Saco also read and quoted texts of the Jesuit
Alonso de Sandoval (1647) who spent years in Cartagena de Indias in the “ministerio de los more-
nos.” Although Sandoval was not an abolitionist, he documented the suffering of slaves at the
hands of cruel masters and was deeply concerned with their evangelization (see the work of
Larissa Brewer García in this volume).
Saco was probably less familiar with other writers within the Hispanic tradition who wrote
from the same vein of argumentation. He does not cite, for example, the Jesuit priest Miguel
García (Brazil 1580) who, similar to Fr. Antonio de Montesinos (1475–1540) condemned the ill
treatment of Indians in Hispaniola, and refused to confess slaveholders, as Las Casas had also
prescribed in one of his 1552 treatises, Rules for Confessors (1965, 853–913).There is no mention
of the historian Juan Suárez de Peralta (Mexico 1540–1613) and his book Noticias históricas de la
Nueva España in which he expresses surprise that there were not more voices protesting the
treatment of African slaves, noting that there was much outcry in favor of the Indians. For him,
a darker skin color was the only difference (“No había otra diferencia más de ser más subidos de
color y más prietos” [50]). His book, like Las Casas’ Historia, was only published almost three
centuries later in 1878 (see Merediz and Salles-Reese 2008, 177–186, which advanced some of
the arguments made here). Unknown to Saco, Las Casas definitely inaugurates an antislavery
framework that is radicalized by others like Francisco José de Jaca (1645–1690), a Spanish
237
Eyda Merediz
capuchin friar who lived in Venezuela, Colombia, and Cuba in the seventeenth century. From
Havana, Jaca wrote a treatise, Resolución sobre la libertad de los negros y sus originarios, en estado de
paganos y después ya cristianos ([1682] 2002), directly advocating emancipation and equality; thus,
he contributed to a Caribbean genealogy of legal defiance of Black slavery that has been thought
to have flourished much later (Jaca 2002; Moreno Orama 2016; see also Andrés Gallego 2005
for wider overview of comparative arguments in favor and against slavery and Bethencourt’s
2013 critical transhistorical tracing of racisms).
In part, due to the intervention of Saco who envisioned Las Casas as the keystone for a
Cuban and Caribbean ethos, his two overlooked histories were officially printed, the Historia de
las Indias (1875) and much later the Apologética historia sumaria (1909). Las Casas offered a model
of Hispanism that was perfectly digestible for the criollo national and transatlantic project, the
place where Saco positioned himself. This positioning allowed for multiple identifications with
Spain, a complex of simultaneous rejection and acceptance. Las Casas was a transatlantic figure
whose dissenting positions and constant legal arguments built the most effective critique against
colonial abuse in the Americas. He fought against the encomienda system and its perpetuity, advo-
cated for peaceful evangelization, constantly argued before the Crown on behalf of the indige-
nous population, and actively sought legal remedies. Like Las Casas before him, Saco sought to
reform the colonial structure from a civil and legal framework but without totally severing
political ties with Spain. He sees in Las Casas a redemptive model of Hispanism, one that is
capable of self-critique and a correction of a course of action, that provides a path to reform not
revolt, which very much legitimizes his own standpoint. At the end of his long life, in his Tratado
de las doce dudas (1564), Las Casas adopted a more radical stance that openly questioned the legal-
ity of the Spanish conquest and went as far as proposing indigenous restoration and restitution
in the case of Peru, but Saco was not concerned at all with this final turn as it was even less
known and probably not applicable to the Caribbean and its early experience of colonization.
The question of miscegenation, that concerned Saco and his contemporaries, was already
posed within the strange combination of utopian and pragmatic ideas contained in Las Casas’
first Memorial where, as a young cleric, he presented to the Crown a comprehensive list of rem-
edies for a colonial administration in crisis. In addition to the eleventh remedy discussed above,
in the third remedy Las Casas envisions a settlement of married Spanish farmers (labradores) who
would take under their tutelage five Indians with their respective families with whom they
would share life, work, and profits. Ultimately, Las Casas sets in motion the seed of mestizaje, a
plan in which European and indigenous descendants would naturally end up marrying each
other (1516, 25).This is the direct result of Las Casas’ nuanced anthropological gaze that did not
see Europe’s and Christianity’s others as naturally inferior nor lacking in dominion, that is, the
right to lordship and property as many of his later works would show more clearly. Nevertheless,
as Carlos Jáuregui and David Solodkow noted, “Las Casas proposes a mestizo modernity in which
the material contradictions of coloniality are forged,” consequently, to populate and also to mix
(mestizar) became the basis for government and the fundamental axis of Latin American biopoli-
tics (143).
Saco, as amply discussed by Ortiz and others, also embraced miscegenation as the inevitable
and desirable whitening of the nation. Saco advocated for the diminution and eventual extinc-
tion of the Black race in Cuba, hence his stance against the slave trade and his favoring of white
immigration, in his own words, with “white faces” and hardworking habits from all over the
world (1938a, xxvi–xxviii). For Saco, whitening was of primary importance to attain political
respect; thus, he sees as advantageous the union between “white men” and “Black women,”
replicating the gendered asymmetric formula of Las Casas between European men and indige-
nous women. He also rejected the idea that the mulatos were to blame as having major
238
responsibility in Haiti’s bloody revolution. Saco’s acceptance of the anthropological gaze found
in Las Casas perhaps mitigated the influence of biologically justified theories of the inequality
of the human races that began to take root in Europe in the nineteenth century, which led to
scientific racist theories and eugenics. Nevertheless, as Jerome Branche has argued “the criollo
embrace of mula-tez hides a more serious problem: the suppression of the (darker) slave masses
who might emerge as the protagonists of any real project for social change” (2006, 115).
Theorizations in the Spanish Caribbean

This intellectual history is important to evaluate the contributions of Las Casas and Saco in
theorizations of the Hispanic Caribbean. Fernando Ortiz himself developed a major theoreti-
cal approach to cultural exchange and his legacy is multifaceted as the volume edited by Font
and Quiroz in 2005 illustrates. As an ethnographer and public intellectual, Ortiz sets Saco
apart; he turns to re-edit his publications, writes prologues to the writings, and intently ana-
lyzes his works. By the 1940s Ortiz proposed his own theory of transculturation that dismisses
race as a deceitful construction (1975, 1978), a departure from his early thought at the turn of
the twentieth century, which was receptive to ideas of racial positivism and the criminalization
of Afro-Cubans. The extent to which Las Casas functions as a pristine foundational figure in
the works of Saco from the start or later becomes an elaborate projection within Fernando
Ortiz’s own genealogy for Cuba’s process of transculturation, is a debatable issue but one with
the same end result. Ortiz highlights Las Casas and his intellectual project in his prologue to
Saco’s volume on Indian slavery (1932, vii–lv), and he inserts his own defense of Las Casas
regarding Blacks in his master narrative Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar or Cuban
Counterpoint (1978, 300–355; and also in a 1952 article). Purposefully, Ortiz makes Las Casas
into a protagonist of Cuban cultural history along with the native tobacco and the Indians
who smoked it, as well as the imported sugar and the Black slaves who produced it. He feels
compelled to revisit the issue of Las Casas as the promoter of the African slave trade taking
readers through the motions of the origins of the false accusations again and Las Casas’ learn-
ing process and his ultimate retraction. Following in the steps of Saco, who provided archival
evidence for the arrival of the first Africans in the Americas as well as researching the early
ordinances that authorized the trade, Ortiz provides additional archival evidence of a continu-
ous trade that had little to do with Las Casas. And finally, Ortiz goes as far as discrediting the
Jesuits, who historically had received a lot of praise and credit for their role in the promotion
of an anti-slavery ideals, for not having attained the sweeping critique Las Casas had proposed
much earlier than they did.
Ortiz’s insistence responds, no doubt, to a long-standing misconception that surrounded the
figure of Las Casas, which Saco first unveiled with mixed success. His revisionist obsession that
places Las Casas along with “la cuestión negra” at the center responds to the fact that he is con-
scious of being the heir of the nineteenth-century criollos who built their own national project
upon a colonial past tied to Las Casas. Ortiz’s contribution is precisely the recognition that what
starts as a Cuban and a Hispanic Caribbean project serves as a more general model for a hybrid
Latin American paradigm, one which rejects acculturation in favor of transculturation; that is, all
cultures in contact have influence and themselves are equally influenced to therefore create
something new and transformed. For Ortiz, Las Casas could not be dismissed, because the
Dominican was the originator and transmitter of certain knowledge that anticipated modern
notions of ethnographic relativity, international laws regarding conflicts among nations, and
above all, incipient human rights. Most importantly, Las Casas is again, for Ortiz as he was for
Saco, the redeemable facade of Hispanism. Las Casas allows Caribbean intellectuals to resolve the
239
Eyda Merediz
criollo predicament. They can embrace Blackness, mulatez, tranculturation, as well as Hispanism,
and a critical colonial legacy of Spain as long as it is embodied by Bartolomé de las Casas.
Another important theorization regarding the Hispanic Caribbean was articulated by
Antonio Benítez Rojo in his Repeating Island (1989), which de la Campa still finds worthy of
analysis two decades after its initial success and alongside Édouard Glissant’s ideas (2012). In his
book, Benítez Rojo includes a chapter on Las Casas that he rehearsed in an earlier essay,
“Bartolomé de las Casas” (1988). Here he revisits once more Las Casas’ passages in the Historia
de las Indias that touch upon Black slavery and offers a critical take on Las Casas’ repentance and
guilt. He explores the Dominican’s biblical rhetoric of plagues, pointing out the uncanny paral-
lelism between the plague of ants that attacked Hispaniola and the plague of Blacks that facili-
tated the birth of the sugar plantation in the Caribbean (1989, 69–147; 1988, 239–258). Benítez
Rojo sees Las Casas as a fundamental figure in his theorization of the Caribbean space as a
meta-archipelago that repeats itself. Nevertheless, his partial postmodernism and his mostly
Cuba-centric corpus of Caribbean literature has been criticized as has the conceptualization of
Las Casas as both proto-postmodern and proto-Caribbean (De la Campa 1999, 90–103).
Malcolm Read offers further insights in the shortcomings of Benítez Rojo’s psychoanalytical
approach to Las Casas by exposing his flaws. For Read, Benítez Rojo’s version of Las Casas’ guilt
for having suggested bringing Black slaves to the New World cannot be read in terms of an
inversion of the master/slave dichotomy in which the runaway Black slaves become the tor-
mentors of the innocent white settlers (2002, 60–85).
José Buscaglia-Salgado’s more recent reflections on Las Casas in Undoing Empire (2003,
92–127), on the other hand, accepts this inversion suggested by Benítez Rojo. For Buscaglia, Las
Casas is not only tied to the origins of the plantation and the criollo discourse, but he also sets in
motion the politics of mulataje, since Black slavery yields to mulatto culture. Although Read’s
critique of Benítez Rojo applies also to Buscaglia’s reading of the episode in the Historia de las
Indias, Buscaglia’s revision of Las Casas’ plagues goes further and accuses the Dominican of being
on the side of the ‘real’ victims, the European settlers or indianos. Thus, he projects in Las Casas
a fear of the “Black” plague that threatens to ruin his utopian vision in which Indians and
European farmers can coexist in peace.
It is not accidental, however, that Benítez Rojo sets up his version of a Lascasian Caribbean
genealogy by quoting José Antonio Saco, nor is it surprising that Buscaglia Salgado builds up his
transatlantic genealogy on the work of Saco as well, for any genealogy implies a retrospective
gaze that fragments, distorts, and selectively establishes a textual beginning. In this case, the
Lascasian corpus serves this purpose. Saco was the first to promote this foundational figure but
also helped frame more contemporary articulations that attempt to theorize the Hispanic
Caribbean as it grappled with slavery, race, nation formations, and modernity.
The Hispanic archive and the Black Atlantic

José Antonio Saco and his active agenda to shape the Hispanic archive placing Bartolomé de
las Casas as a cornerstone for a Caribbean, transatlantic, and ultimately global history of slavery
can explain in part the complexities of the debates that ultimately led to his contradictory
liberal positions. Although Saco was aware of French and British discussions about abolition-
ism, the Cuban circumstances and the numerous examples of slave rebellions in Haiti, Jamaica
and Guadeloupe determined his ultimate position in favor of a gradual and controlled elimina-
tion of slavery and consequently Blackness. Ironically enough, Saco’s ideas were not criticized
by Cuban independentists like José Martí, but by Republican Spaniards on the other side of
the Atlantic, like Rafael María de Labra (Rojas 2013, 44–46). Saco became instead a key
240
mediator for more contemporary theorizations advanced by Ortiz and Benítez Rojo who
looked into the colonial past and the Lascasian legacy for articulating the basis for a Cuban
national imaginary and a Caribbean ethos.That is, Fernando Ortiz’ vision of a process of trans-
culturation and Benítez Rojo’s readings of a paradoxical and complex repeating island and the
birth of the plantation, both in dialogue with history. It is in Saco’s work where the relevance
of the Hispanic archive in what has been more recently coined the Black Atlantic begins to
take shape.
The debate opened by Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic (1993) was an important one that ques-
tioned the notion of history as progress and claimed an alternative modernity tied to the slave
ship, which both interrogates location and dismantles periodization. Nevertheless, Gilroy’s prop-
osition has been criticized for its neglect of South Atlantic and African histories (Gikandi 1996,
147) as well as its marginalization of the Iberian Atlantic because of its reliance on the British
colonial experience (Gabilondo 2001, 91–113). In his articulation of the Hispanic Atlantic,
Joseba Gabilondo proposes a dialogue with Gilroy that allows for the Black Atlantic also to
become Hispanic and to establish a metadiscourse that would not renounce “its double and
irreducible bind to particularism and universalism” (2001, 100).
In this way, the Hispanic Atlantic, which is marked by the early imperial history of Spain as
told by Bartolomé de las Casas, also has its particularity in the intersections of nationalism and
coloniality predicated by José Antonio Saco and cannot be fully explained by Western, franco-
or anglo-centric theorizations. Saco thus can shape a notion of Hispanism, filtered through Las
Casas, that facilitates multiple and contradictory identifications with Spain, slavery, and racial
discourses that allows him to anchor his national, Caribbean, and universal historiographical
project in the intersection of the Hispanic and the Black Atlantic. In the end, key pieces within
the Hispanic archive have a prominent place in Caribbean intellectual genealogies that include
a dialogue with restrictive notions of modernity and universality, revealing in the process, how
slavery and the experience of indigenous and Black slaves cannot be erased nor the early histo-
riography that accounted for it, however imperfect, ambivalent, and mediated they may be.
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Torres-Cuevas, Eduardo. 1984. La polémica de la esclavitud. José Antonio Saco. Havana: Editorial de Ciencias
Sociales.
———. 2001. “Introduction.” In José Antonio Saco, 1–99. Vol. 1. Biblioteca de Clásicos Cubanos. Havana:
Imagen Contempóranea.
Thomas, Hugh. 1997. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870. New York:
Touchstone.
Varela, Félix. [1822] 1938. “Memoria que demuestra la necesidad de extinguir la esclavitud de los negros en
la isla de Cuba, atendiendo a los intereses de sus propietarios.” In Historia de la esclavitud de la raza africana
en el Nuevo Mundo y en especial en los países américo-hispanos, by José Antonio Saco, edited by Fernando
Ortiz, 5–17.Vol 4. Havana: Editorial Cultural.
Zeuske, Michael. 2016. “The French Revolution in Spanish America.” In The Routledge Companion to the
French Revolution in World History, edited by Allan Forrest and Matthias Middell. 77–95. London:
Routledge.
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PART III
Materialities and archives

14
MATERIAL ENCOUNTERS
Columbus’s Diario del primer viaje
and the objects of colonial Latin American
and Caribbean studies
Raquel Albarrán
This chapter examines how material objects shape representations of the Caribbean, and by
extension of the New World, in Christopher Columbus’s Diario del primer viaje (1492–1493).
Columbus’s first impressions come to us from the account of his ship log documenting aspects
of his travels in search of a new trade route to Asia.This document, which Columbus originally
presented along with other reports of his travels to the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella,
has been lost to contemporary scholars. However, before its disappearance it was partially tran-
scribed, edited, and commented on by the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas in the
sixteenth century. Although the presumed text of Columbus’s ship log bears significant evi-
dence of Las Casas’s authorial intervention, it offers a vital picture of Columbus’s original
words, albeit an incomplete one (Zamora 1993). In what scholars recognize now as the recon-
stituted text of the Diario, the materiality of the objects desired, found, or exchanged provides
a consistent thread between the pre- and post-“discovery” phases of Columbus’s narrative, thus
suturing the crisis of intelligibility that the encounter with the New World produces. Focusing
on this process of materialization, I show how incorporating the study of material culture and
materiality into studies of the encounter—and, more broadly, into studies of the colonial
period—can help enrich our understanding of the colonial world. Furthermore, new insights
arise regarding the place of objects in familiar narratives of colonial possession, exchange, and
domination as we analyze them from a materially-based perspective.The emergence and adop-
tion of this multi-layered paradigm has greater implications for the interdisciplinary nature of
the field, providing a common thread across the varying disciplinary approaches and method-
ologies represented in it.
Material culture, materiality, and colonial Latin American

and Caribbean studies: an overview
Material approaches in the study of the Caribbean, as was the case in many other parts of the
world, had their origins in the work of amateur scholars known as antiquarians. To these indi-
viduals we owe many of the earliest interpretations of Taíno and Arawak cultures in the region.
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Most antiquarians were intellectuals or members of the European and Creole (criollo) elites
working in a number of distinguished professions such as medicine, law, writing, journalism, and
politics (Curet 2011).Throughout the nineteenth century, European and local antiquarians were
involved in the early efforts of, on the one hand, identifying and excavating Indigenous sites and,
on the other, buying, collecting, and exhibiting Indigenous artifacts. Antiquarian pursuits led to
the consideration of the fragments of history as material evidence. Later archaeological explora-
tions exhumed ruins and artifacts that incited questions about the appropriate methods and
sources for writing such history, often producing an autonomous framework of interpretation
with which to cross-examine official narratives.
As L. Antonio Curet (2011) observes, however, the majority of the individuals and orga-
nizations tasked with investigating material records in the Caribbean were not scientific or
academic in nature. Since the second half of the twentieth century and despite these obstacles,
the now-classical archaeological studies of, among others, Eugenio Fernández Méndez (1972),
Luis Chanlatte Baik (1976), José Juan Arrom (1989), Kathleen Deagan and José María Cruxent
(2002), and Reniel Rodríguez Ramos (2010) have contributed to a richer understanding of
pre-Hispanic and colonial material histories. Their work has served as a cornerstone for
newer generations of archaeologists working across the Caribbean. The aforementioned con-
ditions fostered a certain degree of interdisciplinarity in the study of the region’s material
history, a characteristic equally shared by the emergent wave of material studies taking place
in the academy.
Across multiple fields of knowledge (including the humanities, the social sciences, and the
natural sciences), the “material turn” has brought into sharp focus the critical potential of objects
and other types of material phenomena. This term encompasses a broad range of conversations
that traverse different fields of inquiry and disciplinary orientations. Below, I will touch upon
two major currents that are part of the material turn: (1) “material culture studies,” including a
host of other paradigms displaying affinity for the study of material objects; and (2) “new mate-
rialisms,” with a brief discussion of other types of speculative realism, as this philosophical ori-
entation is also known.
The field of “material culture studies” focuses on the physical study of objects (artifacts) in
order to unearth new narratives grounded in material histories. Although the precise origins
of the term “material culture” are unclear, we can locate its antecedents in the nineteenth
century (Buchli 2002). It was then when the American historian William H. Prescott coined
in his travelogue the term “material civilization” (1843, 330). He used it to describe the physi-
cal and technical aspects of Aztec culture at the start of the Spanish conquest in 1519, in a
series of vignettes about the market of Tenochtitlan. Prescott’s use of the concept was in line
with dominant theories of cultural achievement, which positioned the world’s “races” in hier-
archical relation to and always below the social formations of the Old World. Clearly, nine-
teenth-century historians were not the first nor the only ones to place value on material
culture; in fact, material objects have been important to Western culture, from antiquity to
early modernity and beyond. Some of the countless examples include the proliferation of ves-
sels in Roman representational iconography; the vital role attributed to Christian relics in
medieval spirituality; or the resurgence of still life painting (bodegones) during the Spanish
Baroque (Swift 2007; Bynum 2011; Zuese 2015). However, after Prescott, a specific notion of
material culture evolved in scholarly literature from the colonialist legacies of European
expansion (of which collections were an integral part) and the birth of modern consumer
culture. Initially housed within the twin disciplines of anthropology and archaeology, material
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culture studies gradually expanded to the consideration of a wider set of physical phenomena
examined through a diversity of ideological and disciplinary perspectives.1 Today, the study of
material culture includes any tangible manifestation of the physical world, from art, technol-
ogy, architecture, and the built environment to nature, landscape, and physical bodies, human
or otherwise. It may sometimes include as well investigations into language, sound, perfor-
mance, and media.
Explicitly or implicitly, material culture studies center the organization of human sociality in
relation to the material world—with varying degrees of proximity to historical materialism in
the legacy of Karl Marx. Therefore, the way humans and societies use, produce, consume, and
exchange objects and material culture is as important as the practices and behaviors surrounding
them. Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1986) coined the term “the social life of things” to refer
to the porous and sometimes ambiguous boundary between persons and things in social rela-
tions. In art history, literature, and cultural studies, the study of objects and material culture has
generated a substantial critical production. This research includes, for example, the study of
Blackness and material culture in Renaissance England; material histories in American culture
(what Bill Brown has called “a sense of things”); the circulation of objects in imperial Spain; and
“thing theory” as a theoretical approach that interrogates the subject-object divide (Hall 1995;
Brown 2003; Barnard and De Armas 2013; Price 2014).
Another quite distinct but interrelated orientation focuses on the philosophical and/or sci-
entific study of material objects. While there is no unified theory of materiality, scholars work-
ing within or in relation to the emergent paradigm of “new materialisms” agree that matter is
“a key component of events, lives, and worlds” (Shomura 2017, ¶ 2). For them, materiality can
be defined as the physical processes that inform the study of matter, but more importantly so,
as the ways in which these processes generate structures of signification through different levels
of meaning and agency. Jane Bennett’s (2010) “vibrant materialism” is an ethical-speculative
methodology that reanimates the vastness, the incommensurability, and the mundanity of mat-
ter. Leaving no stone unturned in the landscape of Western knowledge production, new mate-
rialisms maintain a transversal relationship with preceding systems of thought, from Lucretius’s
atoms and Cartesian-Newtonian conceptions of matter to Martin Heidegger’s notion of the
object, Simone de Beauvoir’s embodied materialism, the materiality of the sign in Jacques
Lacan, and the materialist ontology (the study of being) of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
(Coole and Frost 2010). At the same time, a solid anchoring in feminist and queer methodolo-
gies has been from the beginning a defining feature of new materialisms, as evidenced in the
pioneering contributions to the field by Judith Butler (1993), Karen Barad (2007), and Rosi
Braidotti (2013).
No less axiomatic tenets of the new materialisms are their departure from dualism (or binary
thinking), anthropocentrism, and linguistically based analyses. Mexican philosopher Manuel De
Landa contends, for instance, that “[a]ny materialist philosophy must take as its point of departure
the existence of a material world that is independent of our minds” (in Dolphijn and van der
Tuin 2012, 38). Consequently, new materialists embrace a post-Kantian metaphysics (the study
of reality) that distributes agency across human and more-than-human agents alike. It is thus
often said that the new materialisms have brought about a new wave of posthumanist thought.
Generally speaking, this means that new materialists either complicate or flat out reject subjec-
tivity, proposing instead new ways of thinking causality across matter, language, and meaning—
what Donna Haraway (2004) has called our “material-semiotic reality” or what Karen Barad
(2007) has termed “intra-actions.”
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Raquel Albarrán
The philosophical movement known as “object-oriented ontology” is another branch of

speculative realism. It emerged during the first decade of the twenty-first century to vindicate
the phenomenological study of objects themselves, outside and beyond the purview of human
interaction (Harman 2002; Bryant 2011; Bogost 2012). Most notably, the French philosopher
Quentin Meillasoux has developed a critique of “correlationism” (the relationship between
being and thought) to inquire about what can exist in the absence of rationality (in Dolphijn
and van der Tuin 2012).
Despite the allure of a subjectless ontology, some argue that we may not need or want to
entirely let go of subjectivity—particularly in its post-Foucaultian manifestation, which theorizes
how mechanisms of subjection shape and mold the contours of embodied, institutionalized
power. Accordingly, the now displaced subject of speculative realism is met with stern criticism
by scholars of race. In the words of Denise Ferreira da Silva,“wishing the subject out of existence
by holding onto an independent object without attending to how one informs the other is not
enough for announcing a whole new philosophical age” (2017, ¶ 1). The decolonial élan of
Ferreira da Silva’s words stresses the continued critical valence of subject-oriented paradigms,
precisely because the restitution of the (racialized) subject is at the heart of radical critiques of
objectification. Such critiques were first articulated in modern race theory and the fields of
colonial and post-colonial studies by Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon. Writing at the height of
the négritude movement in France and the French Caribbean, Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism
(1950) coined the term “thingification” (chosification in the original French) to name the particu-
lar violence of commodification that the colonized endure. In other words, “thingification”
refers to the process by which the colonizer negates the personhood of the oppressed to further
dominate and submit them, both materially and symbolically. For Césaire, then, colonization
equals dehumanization ([1950] 2001, 42). Similarly, in Black Skin White Masks ([1952] 1967),
Fanon suggests that the colonized find negative representation in the ontology of the colonial
object. For Fanon, such an object is a figure for the wide-scale destruction and fragmentation of
the world brought about by European colonization, and the place of the abjected Black subject
within this regime of power. Current scholarship in new materialisms has yet to seriously engage
with the history of dehumanization embedded in colonial articulations of materiality and object-
hood, which tacitly or explicitly take the (racialized) colonial subject as the debased, less-than-
human grounds of the species—what Sylvia Wynter has termed “the coloniality of being/power/
truth/freedom” (2003, 327–328). It is however promising that in recent years some of the most
daring examples of new materialist thought take a definitive stance against imperialism, colonial-
ism, capitalism, and the ecological destruction of our planet—all phenomena that locate causality
in human agency. Critiques of this nature can be found in the works of Arun Saldanha (2007),
Mel Chen (2012), Monique Allewaert (2013), Kim TallBear (2015), and Anna Tsing (2015).
Research on the material histories of the conquest and colonization of Latin America and
the Caribbean is still in its early stages, and relatively dominated by methodological approaches
stemming from the disciplines of art history, anthropology, and archaeology. T hese disciplines all
engage with material culture, albeit in their own distinctive ways. From the vantage point of the
history of art, Daniela Bleichmar and Peter Mancall (2011) and Alessandra Russo (2014) identify
networks of collaboration that position New World aesthetic productions at the center of
European art. Barbara Mundy and Dana Leibsohn (2012) study Indigenous objects beyond the
themes of absence and resistance, introducing “circulation” and “materiality” as analytical rubrics
that account for the complexity of the study of Native material culture, especially in relation to
early modern imperial histories. Carolyn Dean (2014), on the other end, moves away from rep-
resentational logics to demonstrate that Indigenous communities in the Andes adhered to a
richer notion of presence than the one afforded by the Eurocentric gaze. More recently, social
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and cultural historians have incorporated material analysis into their study of the encounter, the
conquest, and the viceregal period. One example of this type of historical analysis is Tamara
Walker’s Exquisite Slaves (2017). Walker analyzes the sartorial practices of slaves in eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century Lima, Peru to argue that slaves negotiated their gender, race, and status
through their choice of clothing and accessories.
Judging by their contributions to the field in recent years, material perspectives have also
gained traction among literary and cultural critics, who have begun to engage with the study of
objects and materiality more generally to expand the analysis of colonial textual sources. This
research began appearing in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, though its ante-
cedents can be traced back to the work of Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz. Ortiz’s
Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (1940) approaches consumable goods like tobacco and
sugar as objects with cultural agency. This critical study has become a foundational example of
how to theorize material contact and exchange from the colony to the present. In Things with a
History (2019), Héctor Hoyos builds upon Ortiz to sketch a Latin American aesthetic tradition
that he terms “transcultural materialism.” While oriented toward contemporary literary produc-
tion, Hoyos offers a paradigm that effectively integrates traditional Marxist approaches with new
materialism, thus expanding the spatial and methodological range of new materialist studies as
well as paving the way for regional scholars working on other periods and archives.
The technological developments of Native communities are key to redefining many of the
terms of debate. In this vein, one can locate Gustavo Verdesio’s (2001) dynamic account of the
colonial Indigenous cerritos, or ritual mounds, located in present-day Uruguay; and Galen
Brokaw’s (2010) historico-linguistic assessment of Andean mnemonic knots (khipus). The vast
scientific and philosophical production of colonial subjects in the Americas, Indigenous and
otherwise, has received attention at the hands of Ivonne Del Valle (2009), Orlando Bentancor
(2017), and Allison Bigelow (2020). From a different angle, Daniel Nemser (2017) traces the
relationship between materiality, race, and spatial technologies of population control. The eco-
nomic dimension of the colonial project has been carefully examined by Elvira Vilches (2010),
who studies the commercial, material, and symbolic life of gold in early modern Spain. Straddling
colonial and contemporary processes in the larger Atlantic world, Rachel Price (2014) discusses
the epistemic forces that have led scholars to re-invest in the language of materiality. Price does
not ignore either the dehumanization imposed by slavery nor the objectification of Blackness,
conditions to which post-emancipation artists and intellectuals in Cuba and Brazil were espe-
cially attuned, in myriad and complex ways.
Material analyses produced by the major disciplinary frameworks, as succinctly represented
above, have similarly shown us that the study of the material world—whether directly, through
artifacts and other material representations, or indirectly, through information about them col-
lected in textual and visual sources—invariably complicates our understanding of colonial
dynamics. This research is by nature comparative, transatlantic, and global, as material exchanges
between the Old World and the New produced multiple, often surprising itineraries that chal-
lenge monolithic conceptualizations of the dynamics between metropole and colony.
Furthermore, the study of material processes can help bridge the gap between the different
disciplines that constitute the fulcrum of colonial studies about the New World. Below, I discuss
two productive directions for this research.
First, as Césaire, Fanon, and others have observed, a critical reassessment of colonial object
cultures, in all their kaleidoscopic dimensions, illuminates the imperial/colonial processes that
subsidize the iniquitous objectification of Indigenous, Black, and otherwise racialized colonial
subjects in the Americas. I will return to and elaborate upon this idea toward the end of the
chapter, in a discussion of colonial object ontologies, which is the term I propose for the resistance
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Raquel Albarrán
of the oppressed to the dehumanizing force of colonial objectification. Second, critically engag-
ing with colonial objects and materiality reconnects the increasingly interdisciplinary practices
of scholars in the field of colonial Latin American and Caribbean studies with the vexed histo-
ries of production, circulation, and reception of colonial textual and visual sources.
We need not be new materialists in order to recognize that objects and other types of mate-
rial culture do possess their own type of agency. This generally means that under different cir-
cumstances material referents appear in our interpretive horizon and perform cultural work
independently from the texts and images that populate Western ideas of language and significa-
tion. However, it bears remembering that a great number of colonial textual and visual sources,
if not the majority, were accompanied by or produced under the influence of different types of
physical media. In many cases these acted as supplement, and/or as substitute, to the traditional
tools and material supports of lettered culture. This is the case, for instance, if we consider the
immediate conditions of production, circulation, and reception of Columbus’s ship logs, of
Hernán Cortés’s accounts, and of the sixteenth century Relaciones geográficas—an exhaustive
questionnaire designed by the royal cosmographer Juan López de Velasco in 1577 to obtain
information about the nature of the Spanish American lands and its peoples.
Along with the letters and official reports he presented to the Spanish monarchs in 1493,
Columbus brought with him to Europe about ten Taíno Indians. Wearing golden masks with
precious stones and carrying tropical birds and other seemingly exotic items, the Taíno and their
material culture were paraded from Seville to Barcelona, between March and April of that year
(Deagan and Cruxent 2002, 15; Vilches 2004, 209). In what must have been considered an exu-
berant display of New World marvels, the Taíno and the Spaniards’ strategic representation of
their material world became the first and perhaps only contact with the newly “discovered”
lands European audiences would experience until further explorations took place. Many more
tokens extracted from the Indies would soon follow. Twenty-five years after the first “discover-
ies,” Cortés’s approach to gathering Aztec material culture was more systematic. In the inventory
of July 10, 1519 that the conquistador compiled a few months after taking settlement in Veracruz
(appended to the “Carta de Cabildo”), Cortés refers to the spectacular, marvelous, but also mon-
strous nature of about 180 Indigenous objects that were to be sent to the royal family. T he
content of this shipment included substantial quantities of gold, silver, jewels, shields, feathers,
and garments that were to be received in addition to the Royal Fifth (quinto real) that by law
reserved for the Crown one fifth of all the confiscated, found, or extracted metals and commodi-
ties coming from overseas. The practice of procuring and shipping Indigenous objects all across
Europe, and to places as distant as the Moluccas and Algiers, is one that Cortés would continue
until his last days (Russo 2011). In the case of the much later Relaciones geográficas, the artifacts
chosen to accompany the questionnaires were maps including detailed sketches of the surveyed
colonial cities and their environs. Though the survey was exclusively addressed to colonial offi-
cials, their lack of familiarity with the Spanish American lands resulted in most (if not all) of the
maps painted in response to the questionnaire being produced by Indigenous artists, particularly
painters or tlacuilos from the Viceroyalty of New Spain.2 As Margot Beyersdorff indicates, these
maps accompanied the officials’ reports and together were “sent to the Council of the Indies
from where they were later disseminated to private or state manuscript collections and reposi-
tories in Europe and the Americas” (2007, 133). For each of the cases above, the objects, material
culture, and even biological specimens that were gathered, collected, and sent abroad were not
only evidentiary of the material realities of the New World, they also activated the sensory and
otherwise aesthetic experience that subtended every imperial act of domination.
The rich conditions of textual-material interaction evidenced in Columbus, Cortés, and the
Relaciones extend as well to the rest of colonial Latin America and the Caribbean. Consider, as
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Material encounters
example, Andean colonial writings that were created in close dialogue with Indigenous presen-
tational media such as khipus and sacred stones (huacas), such as Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s
Comentarios reales (1609) (Cornejo-Polar 1994; Mazzotti 1996). In the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries, other types of accounts in New Spain relied heavily on the archaeological
remnants of a pre-Hispanic past, such as the proto-scientific treatises produced by Creole anti-
quarians (Cañizares-Esguerra 2001; More 2013). From Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngoras’s early
archaeological studies to Antonio de León y Gama’s scholarly efforts to decipher Indigenous
material records, materiality gained primacy alongside writing as a contested domain and an
influential avenue of legitimation for Creole discourses of the time (Albarrán 2016). Numerous
other examples have pushed scholars to move beyond the analytical limits imposed by canonical
written sources, which only adds to the quality and methodological diversity of the research
(Rappaport 1994; Verdesio 2001; Cummins 2002; Salomon 2004; Del Valle 2009; Dean 2014;
Bigelow 2020). In each case, it is important to keep in mind that even as they exploited textual-
material interactions, colonial regimes of intelligibility also sought to suppress them, thus cleav-
ing and abstracting materiality from the representational operations that were essential to the
survival and reproduction of imperial discourses and practices. It might prove fruitful to deter-
mine when, precisely, and under what set of circumstances material objects and materiality were
left out of colonial written sources—and our analyses of them. In the meantime, the idea that
the critical study of objects, material culture, and materiality can bring us closer to understand-
ing the original conditions of production, circulation, and reception of colonial texts, as well as
the cultural work they perform for audiences and institutions in the present, is most productive,
and deserves our full consideration.
In his widely influential book What do Pictures Want? (2005), W. J. T. Mitchell interrogates the
conditions that bind material culture to the study of imperial practices. He asks: “What would it
mean to think of empire in terms of a broad range of objects and object types?” (146). To
Mitchell’s provocative question about the primacy of objecthood to empire, we can add a host
of new ones. What cultures of the object were prevalent in medieval Europe at the turn of the
fifteenth century? What sort of objects were paradigmatic of the colonial exchange? On the one
hand, what notions of materiality were at work when Christopher Columbus arrived in the
Indies; on the other, what were those unique to the development of Indigenous and African
cultures? How do we factor in these often-competing notions of objecthood and materiality
into our analyses of this momentous historical juncture? How does attending to material culture
and materiality shift our idea of the representational structures that operate in colonial Latin
American and Caribbean texts? What sorts of implications might this have for the study of
colonialism in the region, and colonialism at large? While not all these questions are answerable
within the scope of this chapter, I offer them here as an invitation for further dialogue. Below, I
continue my inquiry at the intersection of material culture studies, new materialisms, and colo-
nial Latin American and Caribbean studies. I proceed to analyze how one of the foundational
texts of the Spanish colonial imaginary in the Americas, Columbus’s Diario del primer viaje
(1492–1493), mobilizes the representational language of material objects to make sense of a new
reality outside of Europe, and to craft a discourse of power and possession that runs across the
pre- and post-“discovery” phases of the narrative.
The materiality of Columbus’s first Atlantic crossing

The uninitiated reader of Columbus’s ship log is often tempted to skim through the first seven-
teen pages or so of the account. During this period the Genoese captain and his crew spend
close to five weeks mired in confusion as they sail across the Atlantic. Except perhaps for the two
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Raquel Albarrán
conflicting reckonings Columbus keeps of the distance traveled (from which he subtracts a good
number of leagues in the daily reports to his crew), there is something utterly formulaic—even
monotonous—in the string of non-events that precede the “discovery” of the New World on
October 11, 1492. From September to October the sailors traveled westward day and night, see-
ing little beyond open water, sky, and heavenly bodies. When they did, however, the repertoire
of their sightings was rather limited. It included various species of birds traveling alone or in
flocks; marine wildlife such as fishes, crustaceans, and dolphins; countless patches of free-floating
seaweed approaching the Spanish vessels; and the occasional object, usually garbage or refuse,
spotted off in the distance. No matter how random or insignificant, the Admiral interprets all of
these things as unequivocal signs of land.
During this period the narrative transitions, as the Columbian experience transforms, from a
natural order of classification and intelligibility to an increased sense of uncertainty that “mirrors
the actual error of the sailing course” in search of referents for the trade centers of eastern Asia
(Vilches 2004, 208). The first recognizable signifier—the ship—is obvious and expected, even if
things get off to a rocky start on September 6 when they depart from the last port of call in La
Gomera. Upon crossing paths with a friendly caravel, the Admiral learns that the king of Portugal,
Dom João II, had sent a group of envoys to capture him in punishment for his association with
the Castilian monarchs (Columbus 2005, 45). This contextual reality, affirmed by the technolo-
gies, artifacts, and provisions available to the expedition, becomes increasingly precarious as the
narrative progresses. Five days later Columbus’s projected image of the ship as a sign of power
and economic advantage begins a slow process of erosion that over the coming weeks of the
voyage would conclude in shipwreck.
The opening event in the narrative demise of this signifier (the ship) takes place on September
11 when the crew identifies a fragment of the mast of a medium-sized vessel: “That day they
sailed on their course, which was west, and they made 20 leagues and more; and they saw a big
piece of mast from a ship of 120 toneles and they could not salvage it” (“Aquel día navegaron a
su vía, que era el Güeste, y anduvieron 20 leguas y más, y vieron un gran troço de mástel de nao
de ciento y veinte toneles, y no lo pudieron tomar” Columbus 2005, 46).3 This brief entry does
not contain further details that would help situate the mast within its proper navigational frame-
work. Thus, it is doubly dislodged, as a fragment of a fragment, from its structural place in the
main body of the phantom vessel, and by extension, from the Western narrative of economic
gain and cultural expansion of which the ship is symbol. Here the object at sea lends credence
to Jane Bennett’s vitalism, which calls to “detach materiality from the figures of passive, mecha-
nistic, or divinely infused substance” (2010, xiii). The mast fragment, coupled with the crew’s
failure to apprehend it, marks a liminal stage in the transition from the Old World to an unknown
order—or rather a state of disarray and uncertainty that references an even bigger possibility of
failure looming in the horizon. Made of wood reminiscent of Jesus’s cross, the mast initiates the
chain of materialities of the Diario. In a fateful coincidence that defies the generic conventions
of the travel log, the mast fragment prefigures the eventual shipwreck on December 25 that
would lead to the establishment of Villa de Navidad, a fort constructed in Hispaniola from the
salvaged lumber of the Santa María (Columbus 2005, 145–147).
The mast fragment also alerts us to the fact that the category of European material culture
experiences a crisis of deterritorialization in the space of the sea. This crisis signals a state of
vulnerability for European civilization that would be equated with nudity and chaos in the later
textual corpus of the conquest, as José Rabasa aptly points out in his commentary to the two
editions of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios (first published in 1542) (2000, 79–82).
Similarly to the use of clothing in Cabeza de Vaca’s later account, objects and material culture
serve as the tacit language by which Columbus will express his fears and sense of uncertainty
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Material encounters
about the voyage.This sense of uncertainty is first encoded in the image of the ship, and particu-
larly in the material agency of the mast fragment adrift, which marks the mariners’ initial separa-
tion from the European landmass toward an exploration of the unknown.
In medieval times, the sea was thought to connect the tripartite structure of the earth (Europe,
Asia, Africa). More than the sea, it was perhaps the dark and dangerous forest that was the paramount
symbol of the unknown, represented in the opening stanzas of Dante Alighieri’s inferno in the
Divina Commedia (1308–1321). Columbus himself was familiar with a vast repertoire of texts that
ranged from Ptolemy’s Geographia (c. 150 AD) to Marco Polo’s Travels (c. 1300); this made him an
active participant of the reading and writing culture of his time. Perceptibly, six days after seeing the
mast, on September 17, Columbus and his crew encounter something like a forest in the open sea:
They saw much weed and very often and it was vegetation from rocks and it came
from a westerly direction; they judged themselves to be near land. The pilots took the
north, marking it, and found that the compasses northwested a full point [i.e., eleven
and one-quarter degrees]; and the sailors were fearful and depressed and did not say
why. The Admiral was aware of this and he ordered that the north again be marked
when the dawn came, and they found that the compasses were correct. The cause was
that the North Star appears to move and not the compasses. When dawn came that
Monday they saw much more vegetation and what seemed to be river weed, in which
they found a live crab that the Admiral kept; and he says that those were sure signs of
land because they are not found [even] 80 leagues from land. They found the seawater
less salty since leaving Canaries and the breezes always softer. Everyone went along
very happily and each ship sailed as fast as it could so as to see land first.They saw many
dolphins and the men of the Niña killed one. The Admiral says here that those signs
were from the west where I hope in that mighty God in Whose hands are all victories
that very soon He will give us land. On that morning he says that he saw a white bird
which is called a tropic bird and which does not usually sleep at sea.
(Vieron mucha[s] yerva y muy a menudo y era yerva de peñas y venían las yerva<s>
de hazia Poniente. Juzgavan estar çerca de tierra. Tomaron los pilotos del Norte, mar-
cándolo, y hallaron que las agujas noruesteavan una gran cuarta, y temían los marineros
y estavan penados y no dezían de qué. Cognosciólo el Almirante, mandó que tornasen
a marcar el Norte en amaneçiendo, y hallaron qu’estavan buenas las agujas. La causa fue
porque la estrella que parece haze movimiento y no las agujas. En amaneçiendo aquel
lunes vieron muchas más yervas y que pareçían yervas de ríos, en las cuales hallaron un
cangrejo bibo, el cual guardó el Almirante.Y dize que aquellas fueron señales ciertas de
tierra, porque no se hallan ochenta leguas de tierra. El agua de la mar hallavan menos
salada desde que salieron de las Canarias, los aires siempre más suaves. Ivan muy alegres
todos, y los navíos, quien más podía andar andava por ver primero tierra.Vieron muchas
toninas y los de la Niña mataron una. Dize aquí el Almirante que aquellas señales eran
el Poniente “donde espero en aquel Alto Dios, en cuyas manos están todas las victorias,
que muy presto nos dará tierra”. En aquela mañana dize que vido una ave blanca que
se llama rabo de junco que no suele dormir en la mar.)
(Columbus 2005, 48)
A pair of clearly defined narrative sequences structures this journal entry, together forming a
compendium of adversities embedded within a providentialist framework.4 The first narrative
sequence is bracketed by the sighting, on two separate occasions, of different kinds of weed, an
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Raquel Albarrán
indexical manifestation of the natural world that appears at a moment of epistemological crisis,
and which is interpreted by all parts of the crew as proof of a measurable distance from land.
Oblivious to variations of the earth’s magnetic forces across navigational lines and meridians—a
phenomenon observed by Chinese cosmographers as early as 720 AD—the pilot’s compasses
angle toward the North Star, but their needles decline to the northwest instead. However, a few
hours later the needles return to their correct position. It is then when the Admiral presumes,
incorrectly, that the swarms of nest-like bundles floating toward their ships are made of endemic
species of weed that grow, respectively, in stones and rivers of the East Indies (“it was vegetation
from rocks” [“y era yerva de peñas”] and “they saw much more vegetation and what seemed to
be river weed” [“vieron muchas más yervas y que pareçían yervas de ríos”]). In truth, Columbus
is likely to have encountered the vast deposits of seaweed and refuse carried into the Sargasso
Sea, a massive oceanic region in the north Atlantic named and charted by Portuguese seafarers
in the fifteenth century. The speculative geography of this passage is, however, not a choice at
random. Capitalizing on both the productive semiotics of forest and treasure, its assemblage
recalls Donna Haraway’s notion of “naturecultures.” The lattice filigree of yellow ochre and
green algae enclosing the Spanish ships washes away uncertainty by conjuring instead remote
images of possibility, of unclaimed swaths of precious stones and riches such as emeralds and
gold (both of which are harvested and extracted from mature stones and bodies of water).
Adumbrating such promise is the language of amorphous materiality, at once nature and acci-
dent, coordinate and symbol. During the second narrative sequence, a live crab is found nestled
in one of the many parcels of algae surrounding the Castilian vessels. Although it is utterly
unclear what the Admiral’s plans for the specimen are, we are told that he saves it for a future
occasion—perhaps to stave off a prospective famine aboard ship, to display as a natural curiosity,
or to sell upon returning to Europe. If anything, the crab seems to affirm Columbus’s idea that
the bundles of weed are conglomerates of land or fragments of islands approaching the
expedition.
The account escalates following this event into a succession of declarative statements in which,
following Beatriz Pastor’s analysis, direct comparison, superlatives, and repetition become key
rhetorical strategies in the narrative discourse of the Diario (1988, 35). Ocean waters grow in
douceur, marine winds become decidedly gentler, almost breezy.5 A pod of dolphins catches the
sailors’ attention. Similar to the marine flora and fauna previously encountered, these creatures
too allow Columbus to extrapolate conclusions based on vague preconceptions. With each new
development what were once timid hopes become undisputable certainty: land must be near.
Incongruences are quickly dismissed. Major setbacks are reframed in such a way that they appear
to fade into the day-to-day paltriness of the narrative. The whirlpool of blood left by the killing
of a dolphin, for instance, is replaced by the image of a white seabird with elongated tail feathers
overflying three forlorn Castilian ships, now restored to a place of power and enchantment.
Rescates and the material culture of the first contact

On October 11, 1492, the first contact between the Spanish and the Taíno takes place on the
island of Guanahaní.This encounter is immediately defined by the exchange of rescates, bartered
objects such as red caps, beads, cotton thread, and spears that served to consolidate social and
economic bonds between the two groups:
I, he says, in order that they would be friendly to us—because I recognized that they
were people who would be better freed [from error] and converted to our Holy Faith
by love than by force—to some of them I gave red caps, and glass beads which they put
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on their chests, and many other things of small value, in which they took so much
pleasure and became so much our friends that it was a marvel. Later they came swim-
ming to the ships’ launches where we were and brought us parrots and cotton threads
in balls and javelins and many other things, and they traded them to us for other things
which we gave them, such as small glass beads and bells. In sum, they took everything
and gave of what they had very willingly. But it seemed to me that they were a people
very poor in everything.
(“Yo,” dize él,“porque nos tuviesen mucha amistad, porque cognoscí que era gente que
mejor se libraría y convertiría a nuestra sancta fe con amor que no por fuerça, les di a
algunos d’ellos unos bonetes colorados y unas cuentas de vidrio que se ponían al pes-
cueço, y otras cosas muchas de poco valor, con que ovieron mucho plazer y quedaron
tanto nuestros que era maravilla. Los cuales después venían a las barcas de los navíos
adonde nos estávamos, nadando, y nos traían papagayos y hilo de algodón en ovillos y
azagayas y otras cosas muchas, y nos las trocavan por otras cosas que nos les dávamos,
como cuentezillas de vidrio y cascaveles. En fin, todo tomavan y daban de aquello que
tenían de buena voluntad, mas me pareció que era gente muy pobre de todo….”)
(Columbus 2005, 59)
Through the practice known as rescatar, translated by Alessandra Russo as “to salvage” or “to
recover,” trifles were exchanged for gold and land.6 The benefits of this mode of material and
symbolic exchange were thus conceived as twofold. On the one hand, it helped Columbus and
his Spanish cohort win the Natives’ trust and, on the other, it aimed to “recoup what had been
invested in the expedition by bartering objects in an openly unequal exchange” (Russo 2011, 4).
In many instances, the Natives approached the Spanish vessels in their canoes in order to get
more trifles. Among the rescates offered by the Spaniards were also hawk bells, broken crockery,
shards of glass, leather tags, and lace points. On very rare occasions, usually when interacting
with a principal figure such as Guacanarí, the cacique of Hispaniola, this stock included objects
of greater value such as a carnelian necklace, an ornate tapestry, and pieces of clothing.The social
life of the objects offered by the Natives followed, in principle, a similar itinerary. Cotton balls,
spears (azagayas), and foodstuffs were more commonly bartered, though to the delight of the
Admiral nucay, the Arawak word for “gold,” and gold jewelry were occasionally part of the
exchange as well. As several commentators have remarked, following Las Casas’s notes on the
margins of Columbus’s manuscript, much of what was believed to be gold was in fact tumbaga
or guanín, an alloy of gold, silver, and up to 60% copper that was imported from the South
American mainland (the Taíno did not know the technique of melting metals) and magasita or
fool’s gold (Saunders 1999, 246; Gužauskytė 2014, 97).
In a second revealing episode from the post-“discovery” phase of the Diario, Columbus is
made aware of the expediency with which the Indians traded the Spanish trifles among them-
selves, and across different islands.7 A mere four days after Columbus’s mistaken landfall, traces of
European material culture penetrate the Antilles more rapidly than the Spanish expedition
(Gruzinski 2001, 7–18; Russo 2011, 20). On his way to the island of Fernandina, Columbus
comes across a man in a canoe who carries a basket with what Columbus presumes are
Indigenous valuables (a piece of their bread, red earth, and tobacco leaves). To his surprise, this
basket also carries glass beads and two Spanish coins (blancas). At other times, Columbus himself
breaks the protocol of reciprocal exchange, but keeps up with the practice of giving the Indians
something of little to no value in order to appear friendly. As José Piedra indicates, the Natives
also “read” Columbus’s material desires, and are critical agents in the interpretive processes that
259
Raquel Albarrán
reorganize each group’s systems of value (1989, 52). On October 15 an Indian approaches the
Spanish ships in order to barter a ball of cotton.When the man refuses to come inside, Columbus
captures him and proceeds to give him a red cap, green glass beads, and a pair of hawk bells:
And later I saw, on land, at the time of arrival of the other man—[the man] to whom
I had given the things aforesaid and whose ball of cotton I had not wanted to take from
him, although he wanted to give it to me—that all the others went up to him. He
considered it a great marvel, and indeed it seemed to him that we were good people
and that the other man who had fled had done us some harm and that for this we were
taking him with us. And the reason that I behaved in this way toward him, ordering
him set free and giving him the things mentioned, was in order that they would hold
us in this esteem so that, when Your Highnesses some other time again send people
here, the natives will receive them well. And everything that I gave him was not worth
four maravedíes.
(Y vide después en tierra, al tiempo de la llegada del otro a quien yo avía dado las cosas
susodichas y no le avía querido tomar el ovillo de algodón, puesto qu’el me lo quería dar,
y todos los otros se llegaron a él, y tenía a gran maravilla, e bien le pareció que éramos
buena gente, y que el otro que se avía fugido nos avía hecho algún daño, y que por esto
lo llevábamos.Y a esta razón usé esto con él, de le mandar alargar, y le di las dichas cosas,
porque nos tuviese en esta estima, porque otra vez cuando Vuestras Altezas aquí tornen a
enbiar no hagan mala compañía; y todo lo que yo le di no valía cuatro maravedíes.)
(Columbus 2005, 65)
In reading this passage, the question that begs to be asked is why does Columbus reject the
Indigenous ball of cotton? A speculative answer may note that by refusing reciprocity Columbus
asserts his superiority, fashioning himself as a benefactor toward the Taíno. In failing to receive
the object that the Indian has come to trade, he turns the Spanish rescates into gifts.
In his groundbreaking work The Gift (1966), Marcel Mauss theorizes the gift as a powerful
commodity and a social interaction that establishes hierarches between peoples and objects.
Mauss observes that with the gift there comes a promise of another gift to be given or returned
at a later date (1966, 9–16). Columbus does not accept the cotton ball, but this does not mean
that he does not take, symbolically and materially, so much more. According to Vilches, the
economy of the gift bridges Columbian notions of difference and value which stand in for “the
wealth that Columbus promises but is not able to produce” (2004, 205). It is interesting to note
that in the Diario the typical dyad of the gift—the giver and the receiver—is expanded to
include a third agent in the dynamic of exchange: the Spanish monarchs. One-way exchange
establishes a bond of promise, servitude, or debt that can only be repaid with a monumental
offering. In refusing to accept the rescate Columbus effectively appropriates everything that sur-
rounds it in the name of the monarchs, which are expected to claim, in person or by proxy, “the
gift” that the Indians will give them: the full totality of the New World and every living and
non-living, objectifiable and/or quantifiable entity it contains. This is explicitly stated a mere
half a page later when another Indian comes into the presence of the Spaniards bringing tobacco
leaves and other rescates. Once more, Columbus instructs his crew not to accept them, stating
that the intention behind this action is so that the Indians may give everything to the Spaniards
at a future date—“when Your Highnesses send [others] here, those who come will receive cour-
teous treatment and the natives will give us of all that they may have” (“cuando Vuestras Altezas
enbíen acá, que aquellos que vinieren resçiban honra y nos den de todo lo que oviere.” Columbus
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Material encounters
2005, 66).The emphasis here in gaining and possessing the New World is made manifest through
the material exchanges that take place—or fail to—between the Spaniards and the Taíno.
The narrative of material possession and exchange runs parallel to the discourse and perfor-
mance of territorial possession that Columbus documents during the early stages of the voyage,
which grants him—as proxy for the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella—ownership of
the lands and peoples of the Antilles. Columbus’s ritual of territorial possession begins, ceremo-
niously, on the day of his mistaken landfall:
The Admiral brought out the royal banner and the captains two flags with the green
cross, which the Admiral carried on all the ships as a standard, with an F and a Y, and
over each letter a crown, one on one side of the + and the other on the other. Thus
put ashore they saw very green trees and many ponds and fruits of various kinds. The
Admiral called to the two captains and to the others who had jumped ashore and to
Rodrigo Descobedo, the escrivano of the whole fleet, and to Rodrigo Sánchez de
Segovia; and he said that they should be witnesses that, in the presence of all, he would
take, as in fact he did take, possession of the said island for the king and for the queen
his lords, making the declarations that were required, and which at more length are
contained in the testimonials made there in writing.
(Sacó el Almirante la vandera real y los capitanes con dos vanderas de la Cruz Verde,
que llevava el Almirante en todos los navíos por seña, con una F y una I, ençima de cada
letra su corona, una de un cabo de la + y otra de otro. Puestos en tierra vieron árboles
muy verdes y aguas muchas y frutas de diversas maneras. El Almirante llamó a los dos
capitanes y a los demás que saltaron en tierra, y a Rodrigo d’Escobedo escrivano de
toda el armada, y a Rodrigo Sánches de Segovia, y dixo que le diesen por fe y testimo-
nio cómo él por ante todos tomava, como de hecho tomó, possessión de la dicha isla
por el Rey e por la Reina sus señores, haziendo las protestaciones que se requirían,
como más largo se contiene en los testimonios que allí se hizieron por escripto.)
(Columbus 2005, 59)8
But by October 15 this juridical performance, which renders land as both spatial object and
uncontested property of the Spanish monarchs, conflates the search for riches with the geo-
graphic extension of the East Indies, now an operational archipelagic unit:
And since from this island I saw another larger one to the west, I spread sail to go for-
ward all that day until night because [otherwise] I would not yet have been able to
reach the western cape of the island, to which island I gave the name Santa María de
la Concepción. And close to sundown I anchored near the said cape in order to find
out if there was gold there, because these men that I have had taken on the island of
San Salvador kept telling me that there were very large bracelets of gold on their legs
and on their arms. I well believe that all they were saying was a ruse in order to flee.
Nevertheless, my intention was not to pass by any island of which I did not take possession,
although if it is taken of one, it may be said that it is taken of all.
(Y como d’esta isla vide otra mayor al Güeste, cargué las velas por andar todo aquel día
fasta la noche, porque aún no pudiera aver andado al cabo del Güeste, a la cual puse
nombre la isla de Sancta María de la Conçepçión; y cuasi al poner del sol sorgi açerca
del dicho cabo por saber si avía allí oro, porque estos que yo avía hecho tomar en la isla
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Raquel Albarrán
de San Salvador me dezían que aí traían manillas de oro muy grandes a las piernas y a
los braços. Yo bien creí que todo lo que dezían era burla para se fugir. Con todo, mi
voluntad era de no passar por ninguna isla de que no tomase possessión, puesto que, tomado de
una, se puede decir de todas.)
(Columbus 2005, 64, my emphasis)
The use of the verb “to take” (tomar) here is significant. It inserts the islands (sometimes sum-
marily identified from aboard the Spanish ships) in the chain of materialities that the Admiral
“finds” and proceeds to confiscate, and connects the acts of preemptive material possession tak-
ing place during the 35-day journey across the Atlantic with the discourse of property that
undergirds the post-“discovery” account of the Diario.
As Consuelo Varela (2014) shows, in official writings following the first ship log, Columbus
will establish himself as a “mediator” of New World materialities. Since the late fifteenth century,
moving westward will circulate foodstuffs such as rice and sugar, clothing, needles, weapons,
medicine, and some animals; from the New World will flow gold, silver, pearls, tobacco, spices,
brazilwood, and cocoa beans, among other products (Varela 2014, 45). In both directions, Natives
from Africa and the New World will be commodified as slaves and put to work upon materia
prima.Though Columbus is only partially responsible, this is a story with monumental repercus-
sions for our “Earth Island,” a term employed by Elizabeth DeLoughrey to provincialize our
planetary imagination (2019, 8). Now more than ever, the material histories of small places such
as the islands of the Caribbean invite us to consider the ways in which the various environmen-
tal and representational crises of the Anthropocene (the newly-declared geological age brought
about by human activity) are, in great part, one and the same with the global history of domina-
tion inaugurated with early modern colonialism.
Colonial object ontologies

In the 1950s, during the second wave of decolonization that swept the global south (Maldonado-
Torres 2016), Frantz Fanon, the Black Martinican author and psychiatrist, critiqued the complic-
ity of the object in the architecture of colonial life. By likening his subaltern, racialized experience
to that of “an object in the midst of other objects,” Fanon intimated that if there is one ontology
that embodies the violent longue durée of colonialism and coloniality it is that of the object
([1952] 1967, 109). If for Fanon the coloniality of material objects spells dehumanization, for
Columbus it articulates the original operations that ensure Spanish mastery over the new lands
and its peoples. While buttressing the productive potential of material culture studies and new
materialisms for the study of colonialism and coloniality, colonial object ontologies are a deco-
lonial response to the long history of objectification of the (racialized) colonial subject, thus
harnessing the resistance of the colonized to the dehumanizing force of colonial materiality. In
allowing critiques such as Fanon’s to inform our readings of object cultures in the colonial world,
vital space opens up between the study of material agency and the objectification of the oppressed,
so that our work remains accountable to the differences and tensions between these unequal
conditions of materialization. Reading Columbus against the grain of the objects encountered,
exchanged, and possessed thus serves as a powerful heuristic device for animating the materiality
of the encounter and the first exchanges between Europeans and Indigenous communities in the
New World, and of the colonial world at large. So that instead of simply asking how colonial
objects are negotiated by colonial subjects, or to what ends, we become open to noticing what
is done to, through, and by different articulations of colonial mattering and objecthood (Mitchell
2005; Shomura 2017, ¶ 9). To be sure, this is an ontological question, as Fanon suggests, as much
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Material encounters
as it is a methodological one. Material analyses within colonial Latin American and Caribbean
studies, and elsewhere, invite us to cut across the methods that circumscribe modern disciplinary
formations, in order to produce kaleidoscopic critiques that are better attuned to the enormity
of the problems at hand. Although separated by more than four centuries and diametrically
opposing ideological perspectives, Columbus and Fanon seem to coincide on the following:
Colonialism thrives on objects; but objects, also, give shape to the experience of colonialism and
its afterlives. Colonial objects are active instruments of empire’s reproducibility, and perhaps its
final frontier. Through their physical, visual, and textual proliferation, obdurate presence, and
trans-historical survival, colonial objects articulate countless possible human and more-than-
human constellations of colonial experience that are as of yet unaccounted for.
Notes
1 For a summary and theorization of the processes that led to the institutionalization of material culture
as a category of scholarly analysis, see the Introduction by Buchli (2002) to his edited volume.
2 Beyersdorff notes that there are informational gaps and important distinctions for the Relaciones pro-
duced in the viceroyalty of Peru: “It is uncertain how many of the survey reports were completed for
the provinces of Peru and thereafter received by the Council of the Indies. As far as is known, the
cabildo authorities of fourteen provinces composed relaciones of their respective jurisdictions between
1582 and 1586. However, none of these reports, known as the Relaciones Geográficas de Indias: Perú,
apparently, included the traza [urban grid] of surveyed towns and territory in Peru as required in assign-
ment ten” (2007, 133).
3 All English translations of the ship’s log come from Dunn and Kelley (1991).
4 Zamora contextualizes Columbus’s voyage as a spiritual narrative in which Columbus usurps the place
of Christ: “The journey became an imitatio Christi, carried out not only in the name of Christ but in
the same evangelical manner of traveling undertaken by the Savior himself ” (1993, 97).
5 Rabasa discusses Columbus’s use of the term dulzura in the first chapter of Inventing America (1993, 68).
6 Varela notes that the term rescate was also used in Columbus’s 1492 capitulación (license, charter) to refer
to the slave trade of Caribbean Natives (2014, 44).
7 Anthropologists Cassá (1974) and Helms (1988) study pre-Hispanic trade and hierarchies of value in
the Americas and the Circum-Caribbean. From an archaeological standpoint, important research has
shed light on the trade networks and societal structures established by Native groups; see Cody (1990)
and Crock and Petersen (2004).
8 The acts of possession performed by Columbus anticipate the juridical logic of the Requerimiento. In the
context of this document, Seed (1995) studies the “ceremonies of possession” that provided the ratio-
nale for “just war” or conquest. Beyond its discursive aspects,Wilson and Elliot give us insight into how
conquistadors behaved on the ground, so to speak. Many improvised and original practices surfaced in
the performance of possession, from planting a cross, flowing banners, and naming, as does Columbus,
to cutting trees, meeting with Indigenous chiefs, and erecting Spanish camps (Wilson 2002, 155; Elliot
2006, 31).
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15
IT COMES WITH THE
TERRITORY
Indigenous materialities and Western knowledge
Gustavo Verdesio
In the last three decades, colonial Latin American studies produced by language and literature
scholars have thrived.They have produced a significant amount of serious, innovative, and some-
times inspiring work. However, since at least 2001, the field has been criticized for having paid
too much attention to symbolic systems and textual evidence, forgetting about the enormous
realm of material culture (Verdesio 2001a). Very recently, a few (that is, not too many) studies
have paid heed to that criticism and have focused on material aspects of the colonial period (Del
Valle 2009; Arias 2010; Vilches 2010; Bentancor 2017; Nemser 2017). However, if what one
wants is to learn about indigenous material culture in particular, one still needs to look else-
where. That is why in this chapter I am going to review some of the ways in which other disci-
plines administer what is known and what can be said about the indigenous past through the
study of its materiality. In what follows, we will get a general idea of the research inspired by
phenomena characterized by a material foundation, such as stone architecture and monumental-
ity, diverse forms of organizing and exploiting the land, and different kinds of indigenous objects.
Toward the end of the chapter, I will discuss the ways in which a study that includes not only
indigenous material cultures of the past but their own bodies as well, has helped me to better
understand both the colonial past of what today is the State of Uruguay, and its present. In order
to show how this move has affected my academic practice, I will discuss the repatriation of
indigenous human remains, and the reemergence of the Charrua Indians in the last decade of
the twentieth century. Because some have wondered about the relationship between those for-
ays into both the remote past and the present, I promise to explain (after we discuss the research
produced in the last few decades on indigenous material culture) the reasons behind this move
that has occupied the last two decades of my research agenda.
Indigenous material cultures

Yet, before commenting on specific investigations, let us briefly reflect on the implicit founda-
tions that legitimate and give credibility to the enterprise of reconstructing the past of indige-
nous societies. The foundation for the extravagant pretense of recovering a human trajectory in
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the form of a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end, comes from the idea that there
is such a thing as a world. This idea has a lot in common with Martin Heidegger’s concept of
world, where human beings and objects are part of a network comprised by a high number of
entities that, as a whole, generate a universe of meaning (Inwood 1997, 32). The name of that
universe of meaning is “world.” It is that totality that gives meaning to individual entities. The
world, then, is a horizon of understanding (Heidegger 2003, section III of the First Part; Blattner
2008, 63). It is only by accepting this premise that scholars can postulate the possibility of recon-
structing, out of some of its fragments (i.e., objects and pieces of objects), the complete story of
a specific society from the past. By themselves, those fragments do not mean much. This is an
idea shared by archaeologist Margaret Conkey, who states that artifacts and things do not have
an existence isolated from the human world, but they are immersed in a social context (Conkey
1999, 140). It is thanks to their belonging to a universe of meaning that one can shed light on
theirs. It is from this cognitive position, I insist, that scholars believe that the reconstruction of
past worlds through the interpretation of its material remains is possible. My intention is not to
debate this assumption, but simply to state that it is the notion that underlies most historical and
archaeological endeavors. In the following pages, we will see several attempts to unearth (this is
not just a metaphor) societies and epochs from material fragments.
Monumentality, architecture, and the organization

and exploitation of the land
Perhaps the indigenous material objects that have attracted more attention in the history of
Western disciplines are monuments. This also applies to non-indigenous societies from the past
such as Rome, Greece, and Egypt, among others. This phenomenon is to be expected, for those
constructions were built precisely with the intention of making a lasting impression on potential
(present and future) observers. Monuments do not only guide the gaze; they also organize the
territory. They are territorial markers that provide symbolic content to social life. Once the
societies that built them disappear, those sites continue to provide meaning for both locals and
visitors, as well as for scholars and laypersons. This is why both archaeologists and the general
public have paid special attention to places like Machu Picchu or Chichen Itza, where Andean
and Mesoamerican architecture exhibit their greatness and beauty. However, although some of
those sites, like Machu Picchu, were “discovered” over a century ago (1911), it was only in the
1980s that serious studies of the site started to shed light on its nature. From the time when
Hiram Bingham found the ruins (thanks to his Native guides, who appear in the photographs
of the expedition, but are not mentioned in his writings), lots of nonsense has been said about
them, including his first hypothesis: that the site was Vilcabamba, the last redoubt of the Incas
who resisted the Spanish forces that occupied Cuzco. In fact, despite the solid conclusions
reached by some of the most rigorous studies of the last three decades (like the ones that appear
in the book edited by Richard L. Burger and Lucy C. Salazar (2004), a good part of the public
continues to believe that the site hosts a city (and a lost one, at that) instead of a royal estate
(something like an Inca Camp David) built by Inca Pachacuti. The persistence of these miscon-
ceptions might be explained by, among other causes, the insistence of many of the site’s guides
on repeating them to exhaustion.
This kind of place attracts first world visitors in search of spiritual (sometimes mystical) experi-
ences, intoxicated with that messy mix of ideas known as New Age, where oriental religions coexist
with indigenous peoples’ beliefs. This is wonderfully portrayed in the film co-directed by anthro-
pologist Quetzil Castañeda1 and Jeffrey D. Himpele, where one can see all kinds of tourists in search
of contact with superior spirits and/or extraterrestrial beings (Himpele and Castañeda 1997).
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It comes with the territory
This is a phenomenon common to other ruins like Machu Picchu, according to Jorge A. Flores
Ochoa (2004). In this kind of place, one can find guides announcing the possibility of making
contact with superior beings from other galaxies, while others present the construction of the site
as a bilateral effort between aliens and Incas. It seems reasonable to attribute these theories to the
pervasive prejudice that prevents average Western citizens from believing that societies that did not
use iron, beasts of burden, or the wheel could have achieved such heights in architecture and engi-
neering—it is difficult for them to understand that Natives could have reached certain results
through means different from the ones used by Western societies.
There are studies, like Lisa Breglia’s Monumental Ambivalence, that discuss policies on the con-
servation of heritage sites like the aforementioned Chichen Itza. In Breglia’s interpretation of
the possible motivations of a significant number of the tourists, she suggests that what constitutes
their pleasure has its foundation in the hermetic containment of the site, that separates them
from the daily lives of the Maya of the present (2006, 101). But said pleasure is also made possible
by the efforts deployed by the machinery of tourism to hide the conditions of production of the
archaeological site (Breglia 2006, 101). In this way, the tourist is liberated from seeing that there
is a reterritorialization of the site that hides a reality that Breglia describes as “Mayas reconstruct-
ing Maya ruins” (Breglia 2006, 101). The commodification of the site is what hides the Maya
workers’ labor involved in the production of the site (Breglia 2006, 101). We are before a mate-
riality that is not innocent: it is a space produced both to generate economic profit and to
strengthen national patrimonial discourses.
It is also a space, as Himpele says in minute 9:00 of the film he co-directed with Castañeda,
in which archaeologists cleared the jungle to build ruins (those modern replicas of Maya ancient
cities), presenting them as empty, vast ceremonial centers (Himpele and Castañeda 1997). The
intervention of archaeologists in this landscape was not limited to clearing the vegetation: as
Castañeda says (in minute 8:00 of the film, pointing to a wall that visitors believe to be ancient),
construction elements were added to shore up the buildings that were being affected by the high
number of tourists (Himpele and Castañeda 1997). According to Castañeda, “archaeologists lit-
erally carved Chichen Itza out of puro monte (out of the “pure jungle”), as the locals today pro-
claim, and inscribed their vision of the Maya onto the jungle, creating ‘ruins’” (Castañeda 1996,
104).The author states that those “ruins” are not built only of material remains of excavated and
restored buildings and artifacts: the remaining trees were carefully selected, the discarded stones
too, paths and tourist stands were built, and garbage cans were placed, in order to become an
integral part of the site (Castañeda 1996, 98). Maybe because of all this, Lynn Stephen says, in a
review of Castañeda’s book, that we are before a site reconstructed in a hyper-real fashion that
can be considered “a life-sized scale-model replica of Chichen Itza as itself ” (1997, 781).
This construction process allowed the Western imagination to conceive of this area as a city
built by the indigenous peoples of the past. In this way, researchers made the emergence of a new
object of study possible and prompted the creation of a series of archaeological sites. This might
be a good place to remember that the desire to produce objects of knowledge can be fulfilled
thanks to a power differential that, as Edward Said explained a long time ago, makes it possible
for the Western observer to place her or himself in a privileged position vis-à-vis the others
being observed (1978). That is to say, there are geopolitical situations in which certain society is
able to produce knowledge on its others.This kind of production of knowledge is unidirectional
and ignores the opinions of the peoples being observed, which are usually dismissed as folklore
or superstition.
One of the things to which we should pay attention in this type of site open to the public
is the way in which space is regulated through the establishment of restrictions and liberties
for the visitors in relation to their interactions with monuments and other objects in the site
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(Breglia 2006, 109–110). All archaeological sites have rules to control access and circulation, and
one can find signs with instructions and warnings for the visitors. This conditions not only the
way in which we see the material culture of indigenous societies of the past, but also the way
in which we relate to it. An extreme case is the archaeological site known as The Octagon, in
Newark, Ohio, a monumental mound complex (earthen constructions of conical shape) built in
the period known as Hopewell (2100 BP–1500 BP), that contains, among other constructions,
an observatory from which the moonrise can be seen. In 1910 it was leased to the Moundbuilders
Country Club, which developed the site as a golf course. (The lease, renewed by the State of
Ohio in 1997, will continue until at least 2078). For this reason, the site remains closed to the
general public most of the time; it can be visited on only four days per year: April 8 and 9,
July 30, and October 7 (Ohio History Connection 2018), which is unacceptable for a place that
should be considered as part of the heritage of Native American peoples. This author was able
to visit the site on two occasions, confirming that even when visiting the site, freedom of move-
ment is rather limited—not so much for golf players, who are allowed to play among the ancient
mounds. This tendency to regulate the practice of space unevenly is a way of exerting control
over a territoriality that precedes the arrival of Europeans in the Americas. The control of the
territoriality of the other can be seen also in other mound sites like Chillicothe, Moundville,
and others that I have been able to visit. They all have signs with instructions that regulate the
practice of space, hierarchizing some places over others. These regulations are dispositives to
ensure that those sites mean exactly what the state wants them to mean, and that they are prac-
ticed in a manner that is acceptable for whatever national narratives they intend to reinforce.
In this case, one can see how the nation-state appropriates an indigenous site as heritage, in a
way that prevents the descendants of its builders from even accessing it. The resignification of
the site as a golf course necessitates an authoritarian control of the space that makes sure that
most indigenous meanings are erased from its surface.
It should be noted that mounds can be found in the Midwest, the American Bottom, and the
Southeast of the United States. From the first impressions of Western observers, who thought
they were the product of the efforts of groups as different as the Phoenicians, the Vikings, the
Lost Tribe of Israel, and extraterrestrials (Silverberg 1986), there was a tendency to deny the
agency of local indigenous peoples, for, according to said observers, those societies could not
have built such impressive works. Perhaps this is a good moment to say a couple of words about
some of the reasons that may be behind the incredulity of Western observers before the works
built by indigenous peoples from the past. One of the most determinant ones is an evolutionary
conception that animates many of our opinions and ideas. In the main narrative of this concep-
tion of the history of the species, the forms of human social organization are seen as part of an
ascending path, as if humans were climbing a ladder that goes from the simplest forms of orga-
nization to the most complex ones. In this narrative, simple equals inferior or primitive and
complex means superior or civilized. But this evolutionary narrative, as Norman Yoffee has
persuasively argued, has never been confirmed by the archaeological record—he has not been
able to find, for example, a chiefdom that turned into a state (2005, 31).This is, according to him,
just a myth among those who have dedicated their careers to studying ancient societies. However,
myths are persistent and, because of their existence, humans in general, and indigenous peoples
in particular, who organize themselves in small groups of high mobility, are viewed by the
Western gaze as groups that rank very low on the evolutionary scale or, even worse, as relicts
from the past of the species. As Johannes Fabian (1983) has rightfully pointed out, they are
denied coevalness and they are placed automatically in the past, which is particularly aberrant
when it comes to indigenous peoples of the present. Unfortunately, this still happens in the work
of archaeologists and other scholars who study the past of indigenous societies.
270
It is probably unfair to mention the work of one author in particular, but because it is used in
many undergraduate classes across the United States, I am going to briefly refer to Michael E.
Moseley’s The Incas and Their Ancestors (2001). This book offers a panoramic view of Andean
archaeology, in which the author, after discussing the geophysical characteristics and ecology of the
region, offers, in chapter III, a description of what he calls “The Inca Model of Statecraft,” which
reviews Inca conceptions about the cosmos, a description of the system of social organization
known as ayllu, and the Inca statecraft proper (2001, 51–86). It is only after describing the ways in
which the Inca had control of the territory and its inhabitants that he discusses, chronologically,
what archaeologists have called periods, each one of which has a proper name (Early Horizon,
Early Intermediate, Middle Horizon, etc.) and specific archaeological records. Interestingly, while
he analyzes the distinctive traits of each period, the author emphasizes the importance of some of
them, for they were later appropriated by the Inca and used to build their statecraft model or to
enrich their material culture. In this narrative, each significant trait acquires importance only if it
has become a contribution to the glory of the Inca. This goes to show us that even when serious
scholars talk about indigenous societies they run the risk of falling into a perspective that postu-
lates a sort of progression toward a more perfect, more civilized form of social organization. In this
case, the civilization forged by the Inca, described at the beginning of the book, becomes the
highest point of a historical trajectory whose only telos was to lead to the Inca state.
Indigenous monumentality has also been studied by other disciplines besides archaeology.
For example, art historian Carolyn Dean has attempted to interpret what she calls a culture of
stone. In her homonymous book, she investigates Andean perspectives on stones, articulated
through the rocks themselves as well as through Andean stories about stones (2010). In so doing,
she issues a caveat: the need to avoid the aesthetic criterion used by Western culture to study the
Andean constructions made of stone (2010, 1). Instead, she proposes a challenge: to imagine
stones as Andean peoples of the past did (5). One of the things that need to be taken into
account in that endeavor is that, in that conceptual universe, stones were viewed as sentient and
as connected to life in a complementary relationship: living beings can be turned into stone and
stones can become living beings (5). In that world, stones were viewed as inhabitants or owners
of villages and places with whom it was possible to have relationships and conversations, whom
it was necessary to feed, and, sometimes, also to dress (8). Dean’s book is innovative, and it is full
of sharp and surprising observations, but it has a problem: its data sources. The sources are the
stones themselves, ethnographic studies of the present, and colonial chronicles produced by
Spanish observers. It could be argued that it is absolutely necessary to resort to the latter in order
to understand the peoples of the region who did not leave intelligible records about their beliefs
and cultural practices. Yet, it is undeniable, as Dean herself acknowledges, that Europeans were
not able to comprehend their Andean informants (Dean 2010, 19). In spite of this, her work can
be placed among the most suggestive on the material world of ancient societies.
A research project that questions the reliability of colonial chronicles for the study of pre-
Columbian societies is the one led by Michael A. Malpass, who organized a volume (Provincial
Inca) that combined the study of the colonial ethnographical record and the excavation of sites.
The idea behind the project was to see how rigorous colonial texts were in relation to the control
exerted by the Inca in different provincial sites, using archaeology as an independent method of
verification (Malpass 1993, ix). Malpass asked himself: “Were large polities such as the Chimu
incorporated in the same fashion and according to the same rules as small ones like the Uru? Were
there distinctions among different areas with respect to imperial administration?” (Malpass 1993,
8). In order to find out, scholars had to define what Inca culture is, who and/or what its markers
were or, more difficult yet, how to recognize them archaeologically (Malpass 1993, 8). The Inca
material culture elements they took into account are related to architecture, the settlement plan,
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engineering works, pottery, and a few other artifacts (Malpass 1993, 9). For example, they took
into account the housing complex known as kancha, which consisted in a series of houses placed
around a courtyard, as well as the long, rectangular hall known as kallanka (Malpass 1993, 9). The
results were very interesting, because the excavations showed the limitations and the lack of reli-
ability of the sources: some Inca settlements that the chronicles present as vital administrative
centers appear unimportant after the archaeological investigations. And, on the contrary, some
settlements considered as of lesser importance by the documents exhibit a greater deployment of
administrative control by the Incas. Finally, the book, based on the different degrees of presence
of Inca material culture in the diverse places under their control, reaches the conclusion that there
was significant variability in the way in which the Inca administered them (Malpass 1993, 11).2
Studies on the materiality of other indigenous spaces of high visibility are abundant. For
example, in the Andean region, the Nazca lines and the ceques of Cuzco have received significant
attention,3 and agricultural systems have been abundantly studied.4 For lack of space, I will only
mention some studies on the exploitation of the land in the Amazon basin. For a long time, it was
believed that silviculture was a human nineteenth-century invention. However, recent studies
conducted in tropical landscapes indicate that many of those places considered as natural r ainforests
are, in actuality, the result of human practices. Charles Peters has studied several sites and has found
evidence of human manipulation. In order to see those human activities not visible at a glance
(due to the ideological blindspots of Western observers), Peters needed to modify his perceptual
habits (2000). That was what allowed him to find clear evidence of human agency in the land in
the form of home gardens kept by the nuclear family, managed fallows, and the most difficult to
see human-made landscapes: managed forests (Peters 2000, 205–214). According to Balee (Raffles
and Winkler Prins 2003), approximately 12% of the Amazonian rainforest is of biocultural origin.
Unfortunately, according to David Lentz, researchers today share an idea (a prejudice) on that
kind of landscape: that nature was, before the arrival of Europeans, pristine, untouched by humans
(2000). That idea, according to Raffles and Winkler Prins, presents indigenous peoples as passive
subjects, incapable of producing substantial changes in that vast and overwhelming landscape
(2003, 166, 168). This is in tune with another Western belief that Michel de Certeau discussed
many years ago: the image of America as a blank page (a passive entity) waiting for the European
subject (the one with agency) to arrive and leave an imprint (1988, xxv).
Against this myth, studies that show human agency in the Amazonian landscape propose a
different relationship between indigenous peoples and nature, emphasizing the material modifi-
cation of the landscape performed by them. These cases, if viewed from the right perspective,
can teach us a couple of things about what we can and cannot see—about something we could
call regimes of visibility: the rules that condition our gaze and, therefore, have an impact on what
we can and cannot perceive. It is especially relevant to be aware of these regimes of visibility
when one is trying to identify indigenous materialities, for, as we have seen, one is less prone,
due to ideological bias, to recognize human agency when the actors are indigenous peoples
(Verdesio 2010a, 343, 347).
Objects
A survey of indigenous materialities of the past would not be complete without a reference to
the research dedicated to the non-monumental objects produced by indigenous peoples.
The number of books and articles produced by ethnohistorians and archaeologists is too great
to be reviewed here. For this reason, I am going to pay special attention to those that have stud-
ied the ways in which indigenous peoples recorded information in the past. I am referring to
record-keeping devices such as Mesoamerican codices and the stellae of Mayan monuments.
272
The research produced on those objects has laid bare some of our most persistent beliefs and
prejudices about the intellectual capabilities of indigenous peoples.
A good start for the exploration of the growing field of alternative literacies is the pioneering
book Writing without Words, co-edited by Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter Mignolo. Two of the
assumptions the collection intended to disprove were: the belief that writing equals recorded
oral discourse (Boone and Mignolo 1996, 5) and the one that proposes an evolutionary narrative
that shows how from the most “primitive” recording systems, societies keep creating more
sophisticated ones until they reach the perfection achieved by the best of them all: the alphabetic
one (Boone and Mignolo 1996, 6). The problem with the evolutionary model that sees the
human universe that way is that it is not universal: there have been independent local develop-
ments that are unrelated to Western history (Boone and Mignolo 1996, 13). Against this kind of
conception, the definition of writing Boone proposes in the introduction of the book is broader
and more inclusive: writing “is the communication of relatively specific ideas in a conventional
manner by means of permanent, visible marks” (Boone and Mignolo 1996, 15). In the book we
find a number of studies that give an idea of, but do not exhaust, the great variety of approaches
that have developed in the field in the last three decades: literacy among the ancient Maya, read-
ings of specific codices (for example, Cospi), the body in Mixtec writing, Nahua cartographic
histories, and several others.
Let us focus on the research on Mesoamerican codices, studied from the beginning of
colonial times. These are long folded sheets containing a semasiographic form of writing,
which comprises ideographic signs that do not correspond to a phonetic, living language.They
are made, depending on their origin (Mixtec, Maya, or Nahuatl), of the fiber from the agave
plant or of bark paper from the fig tree or amatl. The many efforts made to decipher the Maya
code are exemplary for the understanding of the aforementioned Western prejudices about
indigenous people’s intellectual prowess. In his Breaking the Maya Code, Michael Coe discusses
the many failed attempts at the interpretation of these codices, laying bare the interpretive
limitations of Western scholars for the understanding of other cultures’ achievements.
Throughout his book, we see a large number of researchers proposing all kinds of hypotheses,
some of them ridiculous (like those advanced by the Jesuit Atanasius Kircher (1602–1680),
who believed in the relationship between Egyptian hieroglyphs and Maya writing) and some
of them rational and productive (Coe 1999). During that process, cultural prejudice and racism
played a fundamental role in the academic endeavors in the field of Maya studies. An interest-
ing case is Eric Thompson, a very influential British scholar whose view of the Maya portrayed
them as a peaceful society ruled by benevolent sages who spent most of their time watching
the skies. He used all his power to fight and ridicule the ideas held by a soviet scholar, Yuri
Knorosov, who suggested that in order to understand the Maya writing system, it was neces-
sary to postulate that it has a phonological aspect—that is to say, that some of the signs in that
writing represent sounds existent in a spoken language. Interestingly, this intuition is the same
held centuries ago by Bishop de Landa (the religious authority responsible for the burning of
a significant number of Maya codices), but nobody seemed to have taken it seriously. Thanks
to Thompson’s animadversion to Knorosov, the decipherment of the Maya code was delayed
for decades. However, as Coe underscores, history agreed with the soviet scholar: the studies
by David Stuart, the American Champollion, confirmed the existence of phonetical elements
in Maya writing.
Yet, it would be unfair to blame Thompson’s actions exclusively for the delay in the deci-
pherment of the Maya code, for it is also possible to blame a prejudice, prevalent among scholars,
against the potential relevance of the Maya speakers of the present for the decipherment of the
writing system created and used by their ancestors. Sadly, they were never consulted about it.
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This is the story of how the phonetic element of Maya writing was discarded and the investiga-
tions were conducted behind the backs of speakers of the language. Once again, as in the case of
Amazonian silviculture, we see how the Western gaze ignores the agency of ancient indigenous
societies and indigenous peoples today.
The list of indigenous objects studied by Western institutions and disciplines is very long.
This means I am not going to be able to talk about some significant ones, such as khipu,5 pottery,
lithic industries, or Thomas B.F. Cummins’s important book about keros, a type of wooden
drinking vessel (2002). Nor am I going to talk about the territorial representations produced by
indigenous peoples, such as the ones contained in the Relaciones Geográficas.6 I am going to dis-
cuss, instead, those indigenous objects stored and exhibited in museums and universities. But
before I do that, I will have recourse to Heidegger’s ideas in “The Thing,” where he talks about
the thingness (that is, what makes a thing be that particular thing and not something else) of a
specific object: a jug. According to him, the jug’s thingness lies in its condition as a vessel: we are
going to notice what that thing is when we fill it (Heidegger 1971, 168, 169). I, instead, would
like to talk about a different object: a specific indigenous pipe coming from the excavation of a
funerary site. In this case, we can say it is a pipe if we can fill it with tobacco and smoke it. If that
thing is in a museum showcase, it cannot be considered as a pipe, for it has lost, at least temporar-
ily, its thingness—that is, it cannot be used as what it is. Being exhibited in a museum prevents
it from fulfilling the functions for which it was built: to be smoked and, in this case, to lie on a
grave next to the remains of a human being.
In order to illustrate my argument, I will refer to an anecdote (that I owe to John Low, personal
communication, 2012) that took place a few years ago in the anthropology museum of one of the
most prestigious universities in the United States. In that museum there was a pipe exhibited in a
showcase. This situation propitiated a reaction from a Native American visitor, who, carrying his
drum, started to visit the museum every day as a sign of protest. On one of those days, one of the
employees approached him and, after long deliberations, the museum decided to retire the pipe
from the showcase. The Native American visitor argued that the pipe (which exhibited a clear
cracking but was repaired by the museum’s technicians), in his cultural tradition, needs to be
stored with the parts separated: to put it together was a sort of desecration—not to mention the
act of excavating the grave and exhibiting the object. After a quick consultation of the records that
accompany the artifacts stored in the museum, and to add insult to injury, employees found that
the parts put together did not belong to the same pipe. This story illustrates, I believe, an attitude
typical of our culture, which consists in representing indigenous objects not so much as how they
are but as how we think they must be. In this case, somebody from the museum thought that it
was not a good idea to exhibit a broken pipe, deciding to put it together—probably in order to
make it more presentable. This is a clear violation not only of the ends for which the pipe was
made (the uses for which it was destined) but also of the morphological status of the object when
it was found: the parts of the pipe needed to remain apart for the rest of its social life.
What happened at that museum was possible only because of the great power differential that
exists between the culture that produced the pipe and the one that attributes itself the right to
exhibit it. In some cases, indigenous objects are exhibited as art, which operates a distortion of
the object’s ontological status, of its morphology (as in the case of the pipe), and its functions (it
cannot perform the ones for which it was made, for it lies in a showcase that protects it as an
artistic object). In other words, the exhibition of the artifact is staged from the perspective of
Western categories that have nothing to do with the values and principles that ruled the indig-
enous world that produced that object.
274
The materiality of the indigenous past (and present) in Uruguay

I started to develop an interest in the study of indigenous materialities about a couple of decades
ago. I was a little bothered by the disparity between my knowledge of European cultural tradi-
tions and my knowledge of indigenous ones.The consequence of this state of affairs was that my
work on past territorial practices on the lands that are controlled today by the Uruguayan state
was quite slanted: I did not know very much about the practices of the indigenous peoples who
inhabited that territory. That is why I decided to try to reconstruct indigenous itineraries by
reading ethnohistorical textual sources against the grain. I was relatively happy with the results
but, unfortunately, that line of work allowed me to account for only some of the territorial
practices of the Charrua or Guenoa after the arrival of Europeans to the region.7 For this reason,
I started to explore what another discipline (archaeology) could offer when it comes to shed-
ding light on indigenous pasts. In this way, by learning about their pre-Columbian past, I tried
to get a better understanding of indigenous territorial practices during the colonial encounter—
in particular, although not exclusively, through the study of the construction and use of earthen
structures known as “Cerritos de indios” from the years 5000 BP to the sixteenth century
(Verdesio 1997, 1999, 2000, 2001b).
In order to justify the inclusion of present-day indigenous peoples in the field of colonial
studies, it might be useful to tell the story of how I realized that they are subjects before whom
we, scholars of colonial Latin America, should not remain indifferent.This story has the Whitefish
River tribe from Canada as the collective protagonist: they had been claiming, from the begin-
ning of the 1980s, the human remains of several individuals and the associated funerary materials
(obtained in a 1938 excavation) stored at the University of Michigan’s Museum of Natural
History.The problem was that the museum’s interpretation of the current legislation (NAGPRA:
Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) stated that the institution was not
obliged to return remains to tribes not federally recognized by the government of the United
States. Whether this is a correct interpretation or not, the problem with the museum’s position
is that it did not take into account the historical, political, and ethical overtones of the claim.The
faculty members of the Program in Native American Studies at the same university, did, though:
we opposed the museum’s decision.The President of the University and her lawyers agreed with
us and, in 2005, the University of Michigan returned the human remains and associated materi-
als to the tribe.8 What impressed me the most was both the importance indigenous peoples of
the present assigned to the remains of their ancestors and how crucial it was for their dignity as
a people to recover them. This experience completely changed the way in which I view the
meaning and reach of my role as an expert on indigenous studies.Yet, besides the ethical aspect
intrinsic to this kind of conflict, I was also struck by the irruption of the materiality of indige-
nous peoples of the past in the present. It was this complex relation between different temporali-
ties that made me think that one cannot study indigenous pasts without taking into account the
consequences one’s work might have for the heirs of that past.
Unfortunately, for a long time, some scholars have demanded respect for what they think is
their right to investigate, stating that rationality and science are on their side, while accusing
indigenous peoples who reclaimed the bodies of their ancestors of basing their actions on emo-
tional and religious motivations.This is one of the consequences of the conflictive history of the
relationship between, on the one hand, indigenous peoples, and, on the other, scholars and the
state. Archaeologists and physical anthropologists have acted, from time immemorial, without
ever feeling the need to consult with the descendants of the human groups who built the
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archaeological sites they study. Even today, especially in countries where there is a much less
developed legal regulation of repatriation or restitution of human remains, many archaeologists
refuse to do consultation with indigenous peoples related to the sites they are investigating. One
of the reasons behind this situation is the scholars’ tendency to consider indigenous peoples as
objects of study instead of viewing them as subjects with knowledge, agency, and rights.
Unfortunately, there are still many archaeologists and physical anthropologists who do not
understand that the legislation on the restitution of human remains belongs to the realm of
human rights and, therefore, has precedence over the regular law—say, over heritage legislation
(Verdesio 2011).9
My contact with the problematics that affect present-day indigenous peoples led me to
develop an interest in another form of materiality that occasionally bothers both academics and
regular citizens: the living bodies of indigenous peoples. From the moment of the “discovery” of
the Americas, European empires, first, and nation-states, later, as well as practitioners of academic
disciplines, have had serious difficulties in understanding, and relating to, indigenous peoples. In
the present, regardless of whether they live in remote areas like Amazonia, in reservations, or in
cities, they have posed all kinds of challenges to European societies. For starters, their ontological
status is always uncertain and their contemporaneity or coevalness, as we have already seen, is
often denied or put into question. Moreover, the physical presence of indigenous peoples poses
all kinds of challenges to states like those in Latin America, that have been built upon the sub-
jugation of the Natives. The situation is even worse in states like Uruguay, where the kind of
colonialism developed on its lands was of a particular kind: settler colonialism.
There is a growing bibliography on this kind of colonialism, which developed in places like
Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, and, I argue, in Uruguay, and in parts of
Argentina. It is a form of colonialism that is not based on the exploitation of vast numbers of
indigenous peoples with the intention of obtaining the highest surplus value possible, but on the
actual occupation and exploitation of the land by the settlers themselves (Veracini 2011). This is
why the strategies used by settlers include the forced assimilation, displacement, and/or extermi-
nation10 of the indigenous population (Veracini 2011, 2–3). This logic responds to the main
objective of the settlers: to have access to the territory (Wolfe 2006, 388, 393). The originary
violence that founds the settler colonial state takes the form of a dispossession that needs to be
confirmed and legitimized by the majority of its citizens on a daily basis. In some societies, they
do so not only by denying the rights of indigenous peoples to their lands, but also by ignoring
their mere existence.The reason behind this kind of strategy is that settlers, once they have already
taken possession of the land, demand that the Native leave, disappear or assimilate and, for that
very reason, the best form of resistance for indigenous peoples is to continue to exist (Veracini
2011).This is so because settler colonialism, unlike the most pervasive colonialism that developed
in Latin America, does not aspire to persist or to be perceived as colonialism, but to disappear as
such (Veracini 2011). In this type of colonial situation, then, the most effective strategy of resis-
tance for indigenous peoples is, in the words of Patrick Wolfe, to simply stay at home (2006).
This is precisely what happens in Uruguay, which proudly presents itself as “a country with-
out Indians” that does not suffer from that Latin American endemic “illness”—what José Carlos
Mariátegui called “el problema del Indio” (1978, 35, 40). However, in the last thirty years or so,
a number of activists have claimed indigenous (more precisely, Charrua) identity. The activists
are part of a process of ethnogenesis that some have called reemergence.11 One of their goals is
that Uruguay ratifies Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization, the only inter-
national legislation that has binding force for ratifying nation-states. This ethnic reemergence, a
276
phenomenon unknown to Uruguay throughout its life as an independent nation, has taken a lot
of people by surprise, because the work of the first generation of anthropologists (Daniel Vidart,
Renzo Pi Ugarte) and their followers (Leonel Cabrera and Carmen Curbelo, just to mention a
couple), has been unanimous in decreeing the extinction of indigenous life in the Uruguayan
territory (Verdesio 2014). This continuity in the denial of indigenous presence of Charrua (or
any other) Indians in Uruguay by scholars who study the past is not something one should take
lightly: it has affected the activists’ chances to advance their human rights agenda.
In a context where everybody thinks of themselves as a descendant of Europeans, the irrup-
tion of those bodies in the public sphere has been received with disapproval and, sometimes,
verbal violence: all kinds of adjectives and insults have been aimed at the activists (Verdesio
2014).This rejection of the movement of ethnic reemergence by vast segments of the population
should not surprise anyone, for they are the beneficiaries of the foundational orginary violence
typical of settler colonialism, whose consequences are now enjoyed by the non-indigenous citi-
zens of the Uruguayan nation-state. They probably suspect that the only thing that can lay bare
the structure and the dynamics of the settler colonial system is the persistence and survival of
indigenous peoples who identify themselves as such.The subversive power of that human mate-
riality helps us understand the complex relationships between the present and indigenous pasts,
between colonialism, coloniality, and settler colonialism, and, last but not least, between our
work and some of the subaltern groups of the present. Other academic associations, like the
American Anthropological Association (AAA), in their code of ethics have, in order to protect
the human subjects with whom they work, guiding principles such as “do no harm.”12 It is our
responsibility, too, to be aware of the consequences of our work for the struggles of indigenous
peoples of the present as well as to be careful not to give new life to colonial prejudices and
misrepresentations that could harm them.
Notes
1 Castañeda also wrote a book, entitled In the Museum of Maya Culture, on the reception and consumption
of Maya ruins and their role in the creation of identities.
2 Another book that combines the use of colonial documents (the colonial visitas) and archaeological
excavations is Negotiated Settlements by Steven A. Wernke, who undertakes an investigation of the suc-
cessive uses, by different societies over time (through the pre-Inca, Inca, and colonial periods), of a site
in the Colca Valley, in the highlands of southern Peru (2013).
3 See, for example, the work by Anthony Aveni (2000), Nicola Massini et al. (2016) (on the Nazca lines)
and the research by Tom Zuidema (1964), and Brian Bauer (1992) (on the ceque system).
4 See for example, the groundbreaking work by Clark Erickson on the raised fields (a pre-Hispanic sys-
tem abandoned before the arrival of the Spaniards) in Llanos de Moxos, Bolivia, (1992) and (1993).
5 Another kind of record-keeping device developed by indigenous peoples of the past: a material artifact
that comprises threads and knots made of cotton or wool. The most important scholars in this field are
Frank Salomon (2004) and Gary Urton (2003) and (2017). Marcia and Robert Ascher,William Conklin,
and others, have contributed chapters to a book edited by Urton and Jeffrey Quilter, that offers a rea-
sonable overview of khipu studies at the time of publication (2002). Maybe the only significant con-
tributor missing in that volume is Galen Brokaw (2010), author of the book A History of the Khipu.
6 The most influential work on the relaciones geográficas was produced in the nineties by Walter Mignolo
(1990) and (1995) and Barbara Mundy (1996). Also, see Kelly McDonough’s essay in this volume.
7 Recently, Jeffrey Erbig has succeeded in offering a very compelling picture of the itineraries of Charrua
and Guenoa Indians in the Uruguayan territory in the second half of the eighteenth century and the
first half of the nineteenth (2016).
8 I was also involved, in 2007, in another case—this time in the Province of Santa Cruz, in the Argentinean
Patagonia (Verdesio 2010b).
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9 Lacking more space to address this topic, the reader can consult, in order to get a clearer idea about the
central issues of the discussion, the books by Devon Mihesuah (2000), C. Timothy McKeown (2013),
and the volume edited by Cressida Fforde, Jane Hubert, and Paul Thurnbull (The Dead and Their
Possessions). The only repatriation of human remains in Uruguayan history took place in 2002: the
Charrua cacique Vaimaca Pirú was brought back to Uruguay from Paris, but the process, originally
initiated by an association of descendants of the Charrua (ADENCH), was appropriated by the
Uruguayan state (Verdesio 2010b).
10 See the work by Scott Lauria Morgensen for a biopolitical view of the logic of settler colonialism
(2011).
11 For a discussion of the terminology to be used to discuss the cases of indigenous peoples who have
been declared extinct by scholars and politicians, see the dossier compiled by Mariela Eva Rodríguez
for Conversaciones del Cono Sur (2017).
12 See the American Anthropological Association blog (2019).
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Zuidema, R.T. 1964. The Ceque System of Cuzco. The Social Organization of the Capital of the Inca. Leiden:
E. J. Brill.
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16
CREOLE KNOWLEDGE
IN COLONIAL MEXICO
Religion, gender and power
Stephanie Kirk
Religion—both the institutional and liturgical practices of the Church as well as the cultural
impact in society of the ideology and behaviors it initiated—lay at the heart of the Spanish
imperial endeavor, the concurrent evangelization project, and the development of new American
mentalities. Enrique Dussel explains that, for the Spanish Crown and its agents, there existed a
“fundamental ambiguity” between the projects of colonization and evangelizing (1981, 38).
Broadening this perspective, Nelson Maldonado Torres (2017), drawing on the theories of Sylvia
Wynter, explains how “religious discourses contributed not only to the expansion of the existing
empires, but also to the legitimization of ideas such as race” (549). He details how the European
“discovery” of the Americas challenged “theocentric models of creation and salvation” creating
a more secular point of view (what he calls “religious-secular”) allowing for European empires
such as Spain to take on the belief of a “non-homogenous” humanity in which they occupied a
position of privilege wherein God had “truly made the world for them to enjoy and exploit its
resources” (550). According to Maldonado Torres, this way of thinking engendered a “racist and
religious-secular humanism” that lay at the heart of Western modernity predating and eventually
inventing “formal categories of race” (550). Religious and epistemological domination also
brought into being new gendered ideologies that wielded great influence in the formation of
institutions and practices related to Christianity. Dussel (1981) underscores the imposition of a
clearly demarcated racial and gender hierarchy in which the conquistador emerged as “man of
respectability” whilst “the most alienated of all” was the Indian woman (5).
In seventeenth-century New Spain, knowledge had become one of the central currencies of
colonial power because of its connection to elite masculinity and the institution of the Church.
Religion, erudition, and masculinity came together in colonial Mexico to construct a variant of
what Raewyn Connell has dubbed “hegemonic masculinity” (2005, 72). Connell also pluralizes
masculinity, making us aware that it is not indeed monolithic but instead exists in a series of
subordinate and dominant positions. Elite clergy and members of the religious orders occupied
powerful positions in intellectual, cultural, and political life, wielding power not only over
women but also over huge numbers of marginalized and subordinate men.These Creole authors
formed a tightly-constructed network of similarly educated men who stood united in a com-
mon purpose of advancing their American patria while simultaneously remaining loyal to the
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Spanish imperial project.1 Higher education in New Spain became synonymous with an eccle-
siastical career with churchmen controlling almost all educational institutions along with the
printing and circulation of literature and other materials, thus becoming, as Dussel explains, “the
primary organism responsible for and committed to the perpetuation of the Hispanic world
view” (1981, 43). The Jesuits, in particular, placed erudition at the heart of their New Spanish
enterprise and in the colleges they built in urban areas they educated the sons of influential
colonial Creoles as a way of securing benefactors for their wider mission of saving souls, coun-
tering metropolitan prejudices about New World degeneracy and as a means of consolidating
genealogical power through the shaping of generations of young men in their own image (Kirk
2016, 63–65). Although some educational opportunities existed for indigenous men, they were
not plentiful and Afro-Hispanics and other castas found themselves excluded from educational
institutions as did women. In this way, knowledge production in New Spain became highly-
gendered and racialized as well as exclusively connected to the imposition of Christianity.
The role of knowledge in the success of the colonization and evangelization project cannot
be underestimated. Aníbal Quijano describes this relationship thus: “Europe’s hegemony over
the new model of global power concentrated all forms of the control of subjectivity, culture, and
especially knowledge and the production of knowledge under its hegemony” (2000, 540).Walter
Mignolo (1995) has called this mechanism of domination the “hegemony of the letter” and
demonstrates how the Spaniards used books and writing to subordinate and erase indigenous
knowledge and impose their own epistemological systems in the service of religious and politi-
cal authority. Formed in the crucible of New World Catholic realities these new ideological
socio-cultural formulations found themselves crystallized in the literary and cultural production
of colonial Creoles who forged their own intellectual and political traditions and attempted to
negotiate the foundations of what Anna More terms “local patrimonial orders” (2013, 44).
In the latter part of the sixteenth century and in the seventeenth, the formation of Creole
knowledge must be characterized as unstable since it couldn’t free itself from Western epistemol-
ogy nor imperial allegiances but, at the same time, colonial Creoles attempted to position them-
selves as both generator and communicator of dominant American knowledge. In their writings,
Kathleen Ross describes a constant “wavering of language from dominant to subordinate posi-
tions” resulting in “subversions of European models even when those models are consciously
being imitated” (1993, 7). Colonial Creoles would strategically engage and manipulate indigenous
knowledges to promote their own local, dominant knowledge over the metropole since, as Linda
Alcoff explains,“Amerindian peoples were not considered to be in a position to present their own
epistemic credentials, much less to judge European ones” (2008, 81). I am using dominant knowl-
edge in the way that Foucault (1997) developed it to indicate the relationship between knowledge
and power and to elucidate how dominant knowledge existed in tension with other forms of
knowledge against which it defined itself. Creole knowledge differentiated itself from subjugated
knowledges reveling in the superior power dynamic they wielded over those whose stronger
claim to autochthony they discounted. The presence of these subjugated knowledges demon-
strates the limitations of the Foucauldian model for the colonial Mexican context given what
Alcoff has dubbed Foucault’s “colonial unconscious” (2008, 80). As she explains, Foucault “char-
acterized the formation of disciplinary power-knowledge regimes as originating within Europe,
and presented the development of the modern episteme in such a way that divorced it from its
colonial context” (80).Walter Mignolo’s theorizing of decoloniality takes some of Foucault’s work
on knowledge and power as a starting point for his work on decoloniality but he radically departs
from Foucault with his focus on the extreme impact of the “epistemic effects of colonialism.”
(Alcoff 2008, 80). For Mignolo, coloniality must be foregrounded to understand how knowledge
functions as its chief weapon as well as to grasp the systemic effects it engenders:
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Creole knowledge in colonial Mexico
“‘Science’ (knowledge and wisdom) cannot be detached from language; languages are
not just ‘cultural’ phenomena in which people find their ‘identity’; they are also the loca-
tion where knowledge is inscribed. And, since languages are not something human
beings have but rather something of what humans beings are, coloniality of power and of
knowledge engendered the coloniality of being.”
(qtd. in Maldonado-Torres 2007, 242)
Given the precariousness of Creoles’ access to power through knowledge how do we conceive of
their place within the colonial system? Following Jorge Klor de Alva, Yolanda Martínez-San
Miguel explains that the “Creole social sector could not be thought of as a foreign oppressive force
within the American context” (2008, 16). At the same time, their whiteness protected them from
the dehumanization of colonialism, what María Lugones terms the “process of active reduction of
people, the dehumanization that fits them for the classification, the process of subjectification, the
attempt to turn the colonized into less than human beings” (2010, 745). In their quest to cement
power in society through the production and dissemination of knowledge, Creole authors found
themselves thus complicit to a certain extent with society’s repressive colonial structures. Authors
such as Bernardo de Balbuena, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora
enjoyed the patronage of the viceroys and other members of the colonial administration. At the
same time, all authors demonstrate, to varying degrees, the ambiguity that Creole subjects embod-
ied as they picked their way through the colonial minefield that awarded their literary voice less
power than that of their peninsular counterparts. The colonial Creole did not make common
cause with those to whom the colonial matrix of power, in Aníbal Quijano’s famous formulation,
directed its most rigid forms of oppression. The texts I have selected to analyze in this chapter
reveal how knowledge and religion operate as twin poles of preoccupation and as mechanisms for
the consolidation of power within the Creole literary and cultural landscape. The questions of
race, ethnicity and gender function as lenses through which we can view the discursive contours
of religion and knowledge and their relationship to the coloniality of power in Creole texts.
Scholarship trends on Creole religion, knowledge and gender

The study of religion in Colonial Latin America is as broad as the practices it analyzes. Scholarship
on Creole religion, with which I concern myself here, has investigated local American practices
as well as the Church’s role as the official liturgical promoter of Tridentine values in the New
World. An important subfield of the study of colonial region focuses on how Creole women
accessed religious agency in convents, often through writing. Foundational studies include Word
from New Spain, (1993) by Kathleen Myers (a translation and scholarly edition of the spiritual
autobiography of the poblana nun, Madre María de San José), the decades-long work of Asunción
Lavrin on the lives and writings of Mexican nuns which culminated in Brides of Christ (2008)
and Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela’s Colonial Angels (2000). The latter, perhaps more than any other
study, examines the specific transformations Creole women brought to bear on the convent
space. In addition, my own Convent Life in Colonial Mexico (Kirk 2007) explores how Creole
nuns constructed and lived in communities despite the Church’s attempt to impose control.
In counterpoint to these studies of Creole nuns, we find Mónica Díaz’s, Indigenous Writings from
the Convent (2010), a groundbreaking study of the first convent for indigenous women in
Mexico, Corpus Christi, founded in 1724. Alongside specialist studies on convents, we also find
important anthologies that address a wide spectrum of religious cultures and devotions includ-
ing Stafford Poole and Susan Schroeder’s Religion in New Spain (2015), which offers insight on
the all-encompassing nature of colonial religious culture and Martin Nesvig’s Local Religion in
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Colonial Mexico (2006) which presents essays tracing the development of local religious practices
across a broad swathe of New Spanish Christian communities.
Creole knowledge and Creole intellectuals have also been a topic of interest for scholars of
New Spain. The work of Anna More and Kathleen Ross on the polymathic baroque intel-
lectual, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora has traced the intricacies of how the baroque com-
plexities helped crystallize a Creole consciousness around questions of sovereignty (More) and
history (Ross). In 2013’s Baroque Sovereignty More traces the scholarly and ideological under-
pinnings of Sigüenza y Góngora’s construction of a “Creole archive” that reflected his self-
fashioned American authority within the imperial hierarchy and that posited the Creole as
being “on top of the racial hierarchy” thanks to what she terms “their own virtue, purity of
blood, and local knowledge” (2013, 7). Ross situates Sigüenza y Góngora as the Creole histo-
rian par excellence who struggles with what she terms the “need to define New World history
from an American perspective” (1993, 41). Sigüenza accessed his Creole subjectivity through
the writing of history that “lay outside standard boundaries and genres” (77). My own most
recent work, most pertinently my monograph Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Gender Politics
of Knowledge (2016), builds on these two strands of religion and Creole intellectualism together
through a study of the seventeenth-century New Spain scholarly milieu in which the nun and
poet, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, inserted herself by dint of her spectacular erudition and
despite the opposition she faced because of her gender. Sor Juana’s self-representation as a
female American intellectual both mirrored and confronted that of the male Creole intellec-
tual whose identity became bound up in questions of power as we shall see in the texts I will
discuss in what follows.
Balbuena: knowledge production and religion in Grandeza mexicana

Born in Valdepeñas, Spain in 1526, the cleric and poet Bernardo de Balbuena (d. 1627) came to
Mexico as a young man in 1584. Although he spent only a few years in Mexico City, the content
of his most famous work—the epistolary poem Grandeza mexicana (1604)—revolves around the
splendors of Mexico City. Balbuena (2006) divides his poem into nine thematically arranged
chapters in whose discourse, the poet tells us in the opening “Argumento,” we will find all
“cifrado” (encoded) (59). Doña Isabel Tobar, a wealthy widow and friend of the poet, plans to
come to the capital to profess as a nun and asks him to describe the city to her. Balbuena frames
his portrait of the city in gendered terms as he offers Isabel a “perfectísimo retrato” (most perfect
portrait) of the urban center, laying out his vision of the city for a woman who will in all likeli-
hood never experience it since she will spend her life in permanent enclosure (63). He offers a
public, masculine vision of the city that presents information on a variety of topics that display
the city’s global commercial might. In Balbuena’s telling, Mexico becomes the center of world
commerce replacing Spain as the axis of economic connection and serving as an intermediary
between East and West (Fuchs and Martínez-San Miguel 2009, 682). This commercial domi-
nance accrues economic benefit and allows Mexico, Balbuena implies, to underwrite the costs
of a sophisticated religious and intellectual New World center. The conquest—the origin story
of this version of the city—presenting instead a vision that centers on the institutionalization of
the colony and the concomitant occidentalizing urbanization (69).2 The vanquished indigenous
subject, moreover, is almost absent from the poem and instead finds representation solely through
its lowly but crucial contribution to the city’s commercial enterprise with Balbuena’s infamous
description of the “indio feo” (ugly Indian). This denigrated symbol makes his sole appearance
in the penultimate stanza of the poem where we see him filling the Spanish fleet with tribute
(2006, 124).The conquest, moreover, has reached a definitive end. A true Pax Hispánica reigns in
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Mexico: “Solo el furioso dios de las batallas/aquí no influye” (Only the ferocious god of war
wields no influence here) (81).
Balbuena promotes an urban universe which Barbara Fuchs and Yolanda Martínez-San
Miguel describe as “concebida simultáneamente como fuente de riqueza y como sostén del
proyecto imperial hispánico (epílogo y capítulo último)” (simultaneously conceived of as a
source of wealth and as shoring up the Hispanic imperial project (epilogue and final chapter))
(2006, 676).The closely intertwined areas of knowledge production and religion serve as two of
the most important foundations of this imperial project. The poet dedicates one of Grandeza
mexicana’s nine chapters to a description of “Religión y estado” (Religion and the State) in the
great metropolis but the stanzas do not narrate the evangelization of the indigenous peoples but
instead center on the foundation of the New Spanish religious orders. Balbuena, according to
Monika Kaup, “glosses over” the connection between religion and materialism (2017, 268) but,
I would say, he instead forges a link between them. In Chapter XIX and throughout the poem
he evokes the glorious material manifestation of religion in the form of the architecture that will
distinguish the new city.The association of the city with transplanted western knowledge began
with the first stanza when the poet presents the urban space as a tabula rasa awaiting the cultural
imprint of the Spaniards: “Bañado de un templado y fresco viento/donde nadie creyó que
hubiese mundo” (63). (Bathed by a temperate and refreshing breeze/where no one believed a
world existed). The male religious orders will become the producers and disseminators of this
dominant knowledge and Balbuena dedicates a stanza to each of the orders who had established
themselves in New Spain at the time of the poem’s writing and under whose rules only whites
could profess. He describes, for example, the Jesuits: “la compañía y santo relicario/del nombre
de Jesús; su gran concierto/de profeso, colegio y seminario” (the society and holy reliquary
bearing Jesus’s name; their great assembly of professed house, college and seminary) (2006, 108).
As Balbuena does here with the Jesuits, the descriptions of all the male orders highlight their
contribution to the capital’s erudition. Although he offers lyric praise to the various female
orders, he does so within a gendered framework. He emphasizes their virtue and, in many cases,
their adherence to the vow of cloister, unique to the female communities and assuming an
unprecedented symbolism in the perceived hostile New World environment.3 Of the rule of
St. Monica he writes “De la gloriosa Mónica la grata/clausura y voluntario encerramiento” (of
glorious Monica/joyful cloister and willing enclosure) (2006, 109).
Balbuena’s gendering of knowledge production in his depiction of the religious orders will
be repeated in the spiritual biographies and other writings these same religious orders them-
selves generate as, in the seventeenth century, Creole religious texts come to dominate the print-
ing press. Thanks to their burgeoning demographic base, Creole identity and culture begin to
crystallize in this period. The Mexican printing press, subject to a wide variety of imperial
constraints on the publishing of fiction, directed much of its output to religious publications that
told of the exemplary lives of hermits, visionaries, mystics, ascetic nuns and learned priests and
fomented the special characteristics of baroque Creole piety.
Andrés Pérez de Ribas and Juan Antonio de Oviedo: Creole Jesuit

masculinity and spiritual exemplarity
Literature that told of male religious exemplarity exposed the New Spanish reader to a mascu-
line world of religious action, exteriority and power through the experiences of men of the
religious orders as well as their secular Church counterparts who fulfilled their apostolic mission
as teachers, scholars and missionaries. One of the greatest responsibilities a male religious could
assume was that of the missionary who would bring the word of God to those living in the
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ignominious darkness of idolatry. Of singular importance in this regard is Historia de los Triunfos
de Nuestra Santa Fe entre gentes las más bárbaras … conseguidos por los soldados de la milicia de Ia
Compañía de Jesús en las misiones de la Provincia de Nueva-España (1645) the Spanish Jesuit, Andrés
Pérez de Ribas’s compendious history of the missionary efforts of the Society on the Northern
frontier. The 13-volume work describes the foundation of the Jesuit missions in Sinaloa and
Sonora, and the Jesuits’ evangelization work among the indigenous peoples there between the
years of 1590 and 1644. Pérez de Ribas provides biographies of the Jesuits martyred there, offer-
ing testimony to their religious exemplarity and masculine courage.
One of these men is the Jesuit protomartyr of New Spain, Gonzalo de Tapia (1561–1594),
who was killed in Tavoropa, Sinaloa in 1594 by the cacique Nacabeba and to whom Pérez de Ribas
dedicates part of Book II. In Pérez de Ribas’s text, religion, empire and masculinity become predi-
cated on the religious knowledge the martyr’s body generates.The Jesuit martyr embodied manly
sacrifice and imitatio christi made in the name of the Jesuit mission of saving souls. Lavrin explains
that New World accounts of martyrdom did evoke those of the early Church but, at the same
time the world they encountered bore little resemblance to the ancient world they had read about
and therein they met “people who were unlike any other” and who were to become “one of the
most difficult adversaries Christianity had ever met” (2014, 132). Therefore, it became supremely
significant for Pérez de Ribas to present the martyr’s death in the most glorious of terms, evoking
comparisons with the martyrs of the early Church, but at the same time recreating in the text a
specifically local and New Spanish theatre of martyrdom. As Maureen Ahern explains, through
Pérez de Ribas’s text the Jesuits created an “evangelizing epic” featuring their own “frontier mar-
tyrs” (1999, 15). The male body in pain becomes the bearer of hegemonic masculinity and
Christian evangelical knowledge as death infuses it with the ultimate power. In the case of Tapia,
the conversion of the indigenous peoples to whom he had ministered for many years finally
comes to pass owing to the events set in motion by his suffering and ultimate death:
Más glorioso fue el triunfo que consiguió con su muerte el bendito Padre Tapia (…)
pues lo que en la vida no pudo alcanzar de él, en un año entero de amonestaciones que
le costaron su vida, exhortándole con amor de Padre, a que reconociese sus pecados y
sus vicios, y no fuese tropiezo de las almas; todo eso lo alcanzó en el cielo en para la
hora de la muerte de Nacabeba.4
(1944, 242)
(More glorious was the triumph that blessed Father Tapia achieved with his death
(…) since what in life he could not achieve after a year of the warnings that cost him
his life, exhorting, with a Father’s love, that he should acknowledge his sins and vices,
and not be an obstacle to these souls; all this he attained in heaven an hour after the
death of Nacabeba.)
Other Jesuit biographies present erudition as the path to divine favor rather than the spec-
tacular suffering of the martyr. The martyr’s masculine forbearance, however, figures in the
representation of these other exemplary religious men and so even in biographies of clerics who
spent much of their lives as teachers and scholars we hear tell of the physical stress of difficult
journeys or of men who exhausted themselves through untold hours of study.The biography of
Antonio Núñez de Miranda (1702), erstwhile confessor of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and
authored by his fellow Jesuit, Juan Antonio de Oviedo, depicts the great knowledge that
Núñez—the “biblioteca viva de la Compañia” (the Society’s living library)—accumulated dur-
ing arduous years of Jesuit education and that he communicated to New Spanish society through
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his writings, his work as confessor, and as professor at Jesuit colleges in Mexico and Guatemala.
Oviedo (1702) recounts Núñez’s own Jesuit education in detail and then, in a distinctive Jesuit
genealogical maneuver, recounts how he subsequently trained others both for admission to the
Society or for secular service to Creole society attempting to mitigate through this spectacular
erudition Spanish metropolitan disregard or even contempt for Creole intellectual ability.
Oviedo represents this intellectual activity in terms of a quest for masculine hegemony, narrating
a scene where Núñez is called upon to debate a group of learned Dominicans. Thanks to his
rigorous Jesuit preparation in erudite disquisition he triumphs over all, leading to one of the
Dominicans to declare him victorious, proclaiming: “Padres míos, ya es menester más que ordi-
narios estudios, porque es mucho hombre al que ha venido” (1702, 23) (Fathers, we have need
of more than ordinary studies as a great man is among us).
Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora: religious hierarchies of race

and gender
The foundation of multiple New Spanish convents, predominantly in the seventeenth century,
produced the female subjects whose exploits would fill hagiographies along with the male confes-
sors who would guide them and write their stories.The limitations enclosure exacted on the nuns
and the restrictions on their education and intellectual activity all promoted an embodied female
piety and holy ignorance that offered a glaring contrast to the apostolic athleticism and intellectual
prowess of religious men described in the biographies above.The contours of this female religios-
ity, once manifested in textual form, proved attractive to a reading public whose interest was
piqued by the protagonists who were frequently cloistered women engaged in extreme mortifica-
tion and enjoying vividly narrated visions. The Mexican convents, whose early foundations coin-
cided with the galvanization of the Counter-Reformation, inherited the prohibitive gender
ideologies developed in the Western Christian tradition in which women threatened moral recti-
tude owing to their uncontrollable sexual impulses. New World cultural specificities in which
alternative configurations of race and ethnicity threatened to undermine white racial purity
shaped these ideologies. The endowing of exemplary women with intellectual alterity serves as a
key maneuver in the ecclesiastical establishment’s strategic co-optation of female religiosity.
Paraíso occidental, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora’s 1684 history of the foundations of the con-
vent of Jesús María is a deeply complex and multifaceted text. Contained within its pages are a
series of vidas, or spiritual biographies, of some of the women who inhabited the convent. The
first of the text’s three books details the founding of Jesús María, the second tells of the prodi-
gious religious life of the nun, Marina de la Cruz, and the third book introduces the exemplary
nun, Juana de la Cruz, who left Jesús María to establish the discalced Carmelite convent of San
José. Appended to this third book are concise biographies of nuns and other personages con-
nected to the convent. Marina’s story, as told by her confessor, Pedro de la Mota, and rewritten
by Sigüenza, offers a perfect example of female holy ignorance as promoted by the masculine
ecclesiastical hierarchy. Marina enters the convent as a wealthy widow and Sigüenza details the
humiliations she undergoes in proving her renunciation of the world and accepting the lowly
status of novice. After a difficult beginning during which God punishes her for the sins of vanity
and profane affections by grotesquely killing off her daughter, Marina enthusiastically embraces
bodily abjection in the pursuit of exemplarity. Sigüenza recounts the repugnant results of
Marina’s corporeal privations as well as the visions with which God rewards her. On one such
occasion, Marina becomes possessed of the ability to write verses but deems herself unworthy
of such a gift: “Qué es aquesto? ¿Quién a mí me ha hecho poeta? ¿Quién es que me ilustra mi
entendimiento rudo y le sugiere semejantes palabras a mi torpe lengua?” (What is this? Who has
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made me a poet? Who has enlightened my lowly understanding and brought such words to my
clumsy tongue?) (1995, 169). Marina deems an emotional and embodied connection to the
divine more suitable than a rational one. The many constraints on a nun’s life and, indeed, writ-
ings, make it unsurprising that so many women “bypassed rationality to enter into mystical
communication with God” (Franco 1989, 4). Convents functioned as one of two ways that the
Church could control white women’s sexuality, the other of course being through marriage.
This control “would ensure the preservation of a criollo group that would continue to dominate
the Indian, African, and increasingly mixed-race masses” (Ross 1993, 11). Convents like Jesús
María became “bastions of racial selection” (Lavrin 2008, 20) where despite early clerical
attempts, women of color were only admitted as servants. It was not until 1724 and the founda-
tion of a convent for indigenous noblewomen when native females lived in the convent as
nuns.5 At the end of Paraíso occidental, almost as an afterthought, Sigüenza includes three short
narratives of two indigenous servants and one black female slave who worked in Jesús María.
Like the white nuns who precede them in the book, Sigüenza intends for the retelling of these
women’s lives to inspire others to exemplarity. This represents no inclusive gesture on his part,
however. These women serve as spiritual paradigms despite their identity as women of color.6
In the case of Petronila de la Concepción, an indigenous woman who lived as a donada in the
convent, he inserts his brief telling of her life into an exemplary frame, stressing, however, that
she learned this behavior from the white nun whom she served and who, potentially, she con-
tinues to serve in Heaven:
Ser santo el que con santos comunicare es aforismo del mismo Dios, y aquí nos ha de
dar una pobrecita India comprobación ilustre, asistióle a la M. María de la Concepción
como su criada cuando vivía, y así tengo por justo el que también aquí la acompañe,
pues a lo que debemos creer se gozan ahora juntas en las delicias del cielo.
(1995, 282–83)
(Saintly is she who lives with Saints is one of God’s aphorisms, and here we find the
shining example of a poor little Indian woman. She worked as a servant of Mother
María de la Concepción during the latter’s lifetime, and I know that she also accom-
panies her in death, since I have been given to believe that together they are enjoying
Heaven’s delights.)
Francisca de San Miguel, India, and María de San Juan, negra, share a chapter and Sigüenza
boasts of his textual economies claiming “para que sea una sola la digresión, me parece muy
conveniente el ponerlas juntas” (1995, 286) (so there might be just a single digression, it
seems to me most convenient to put them together). None of the three women question
their lowly place in the convent hierarchy and Sigüenza presents constant reminders of their
humble origins, portraying them as “humilde,” (humble) “pequeña,” (small) or “pobrecita”
(poor little woman). Regardless, God chose to bestow His favor upon them and Sigüenza
explains how, nonetheless, each woman remained meek. In the case of María, the black slave,
God enabled her to confront the devil when he appeared while the nuns were at choir.
She rose fearlessly from the floor where she was crouched in her usual position and bade him
be gone, which he did: “y avergonzado aquel espíritu de soberbia de que así lo tratase una
pobrecita” (that arrogant spirit felt ashamed to be treated in this way by such a lowly crea-
ture) (1995, 290).7
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Sigüenza represents the two indigenous women, Petronila and Francisca, as the lowliest of
Christians but offers no explanation for why this should be, overlooking their idolatrous ancestry.
Their humble status remains unquestioned and, seemingly, obvious to all. The equivalence between
non-whiteness and subservience at the very end of Paraíso occidental contrasts with its beginning where,
in a very American framing of the New Spanish convents, Sigüenza describes the Cihuatlamacazque,
the Aztec priestesses who guarded the temple of Huitzilopochtli in pre-conquest Mexico. He likens
them to Roman vestal virgins, thus endowing them with the patina of civilization comparisons to the
classical world engendered. While, of course, the author depicts their religious practices as barbarous
and idolatrous, he treats the aristocratic and virtuous Cihuatlamacazque with a respect bordering on
reverence and presents them as the American exemplars and ancestors of the Creole nuns of Jesús
María:“Y si hasta ahora al repetido ejemplo de lasVestales Romanas le conmovían los ánimos piadosos
de las Cristianas Doncellas, no sé yo porque no ha de ser más eficaz, y activo el que aquí he propuesto”
(And if up until now the frequent example of theVestalsVirgins of Rome would move the pious souls
of Christian maidens, I see no reason why what I propose here should be any less effective and useful)
(1995, 56).8 But he makes no connection between these indigenous women and the humble servants
he describes at the end of the book who are indeed the Cihuatlamacazque’s true ancestors.
We see this gesture repeated in a pair of Sigüenza’s other texts. In Teatro de virtudes políticas que
constituyen a un príncipe (1680), Sigüenza also invokes the pre-Christian past to distinguish the
Creole present. But in Alboroto y motín de los indios de México (1692), he divorces the native past
from its colonial present in order to make it available for Creole appropriation. As Carlos Jáuregui
explains in reference to the scornful way Sigüenza describes the natives who revolt against the
viceroy in 1692 in Alboroto y motín: “como sabemos—y Sigüenza mismo lo deja en claro—entre
los indios alegóricos y los alzados en armas y listos a quemar su sagrada biblioteca hay mucho
trecho” (as we know—and as Sigüenza himself made it clear—there’s a huge gulf between the
allegorical Indians and those up in arms and ready to burn down his precious library) (2003, 211).
In 1680, Sigüenza secured a commission from the Cabildo of Mexico City to write a text to
accompany a triumphal arch as part of a series of festivities to welcome the new viceroy the
Marqués de la Laguna, the aforementioned Teatro de virtudes políticas. Sor Juana received the same
charge from the Cathedral to design the other arch and explain the motifs in writing which she
did in the Neptuno alegórico. She followed the conventional route of employing allegorical
Greco-Latin figures to praise her noble subject, explaining one of the great similarities between
the viceroy and the ancient god:
Cupo a Neptuno en suerte el mar (como ya queda dicho), con todas las islas y estrechos.
¿Qué otra cosa fue esto, que ser Su Excelencia Marqués de la Laguna, General del Mar
Océano, con todos los ejércitos y costas de Andalucía?
(2007, 369)
(Neptune brought good fortune to the sea along with all the straits and islands. Who
other could this be than his Excellency, Marquis of la Laguna, General of the Ocean,
with all the armies and coastal areas of Andalucía?)
Pablo García calls Sor Juana’s homage to the incoming viceroy “brillante pero convencional”
(brilliant but conventional) (2009, 220). Sigüenza y Góngora, on the other hand, aflame with
“amor por la patria” (love for the fatherland) rejected European allegories and instead promoted
the tlatoque or indigenous rulers as the model the Viceroy should embrace and Anna More
emphasizes the “novelty” this gesture represents (2013, 113). Not content with offering an
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innovative angle on the traditional imagery used in these contexts, Sigüenza also critiques those
who adhere to the old models:
Estilo común ha sido de los americanos ingenios hermosear con mitologías ideas de
mentirosas fábulas las más de las portadas triunfales que se han erigido para recibir a los
príncipes. No ignoro el motivo, y bien pudiera hacer juicio de sus aciertos. Si ha sido
porque de entre las sombras de las fábulas eruditas se divisan las luces de las verdades
heroicas.
(5–6)
(It has been a common custom of the most brilliant American minds to embellish the
triumphal arches erected to welcome Princes with the mythological ideas of fallacious
fables. I am not unaware of the reason and could easily pass judgment on their findings.
Perhaps it has been that among the shadows of these learned fables they glimpse the
light of heroic truths.)
While Sigüenza operated under the illusion that his Creole erudition in some way advanced an
indigenous perspective, at the same time the format and scope of Teatro de virtudes echoed the
education of Christian princes of the European Renaissance tradition and flattened any possibil-
ity for an indigenous genealogy to present itself on its own terms (Adorno 2011, 35). As critics
have noted, Sigüenza traffics in a remote and monumentalized indigenous past disconnected
from the reality of its colonized descendants. The natives themselves disappear, replaced by a
Creole history that appropriates an indigenous past in the service of self-aggrandizement at the
expense of the metropolitan imperial power base (García 2009, 231).
Sigüenza almost completely excises any references to indigenous religious practices, knowl-
edge or beliefs. While he refers to “barbaridades” (barbarities) and employs other similar words
to vaguely evoke their practices, he attempts instead to show their suitability for Christianity
rather than detailing their own beliefs, explaining: “erraron los gentiles en el objeto no en el
culto” (the gentiles mistook the object of worship not the worship itself) (62). In the lyric sec-
tions dedicated to each tlatoque, the author makes scant references to the sacred in the praise he
directs at each, only occasionally invoking their “piedad” (Tizoctzin) or, in the context of a vic-
tory in battle, obscurely invoking their prayers (Motecohçuma Ilhuicaminan) which, like “sagra-
das ardientes flechas,” (flaming sacred arrows) go directly to heaven (64).9 Not only does he
choose to desacralize the Aztec monarchy, he also places Huitzilopochtli, patron god of the
Mexica, god of war and “the god whose appetite for sacrificial victims” provided the impetus
for the flowery wars, among the genealogy of Mexican sovereigns he references (Harris 2010,
85). While the Aztecs ascribed human origins to Huitzilopochtli, Sigüenza’s incorporation of
him into the pantheon of tlatoque is curious, especially since he desired to avoid referencing
Aztec religion and ritual. Instead, the god who Durán and Mendieta had portrayed as “la imagen
misma de un demonio” (Jáuregui 2003, 210) (the very image of a demon) becomes instead a
rather anodyne and pious sovereign whose “acciones de fe constante” (actions of perpetual
faith) mark his leadership style and who maintains God at the forefront of all he does (39).Thus,
Sigüenza decontextualizes and transforms this most bloodthirsty of deities into a representation
of good government and the Aztec past can, as in Paraíso occidental, serve the Creole present and
secure its future. For Sigüenza, the sacred practices of the Aztec religious/knowledge system
have no place in Teatro de virtudes and he nullifies the role of the tlatoque in the propagation of
the divine.
290
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: gendering Creole knowledge

A close contemporary of Sigüenza y Góngora, the work of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz permits us
to study the complexities of Creole knowledge and religion through the lens of the coloniality
of gender. Her existence as a female Creole intellectual functions as a rebuke to coloniality’s
gendered logic. She embodies the characteristics Lugones deems as constitutive of resistant sub-
jectivity: “Legitimacy, authority, voice, sense, and visibility” (2010, 74). Knowledge allowed her
to participate in the production of epistemes characteristically advanced by men. This is not to
say she slavishly reproduced male ideas and obediently adhered to their precepts. A woman of
genius and education who possessed her own ideas, she entered fearlessly into debate with male
intellectuals.The resistance the Church offered to her work demonstrates the masculine anxiety
that pervaded its institutional sites of learning.
But how do we position the knowledge produced by Sor Juana within the colonial power
structure? Did her works support or challenge coloniality? In the recent much-discussed
Mexican telenovelized version of Sor Juana’s life, Juana Inés, we see a young Nahuatl-speaking
Sor Juana who ardently advocates for the welfare of indigenous subjects and freely offers
feminist views on a range of subjects. Sor Juana was not, of course, an avant la lettre feminist
and social justice activist. She did, however, engage with the complexities of indigenous reli-
gion in the loa to the auto sacramental El Divino Narciso (2007) where, making use of the
distance allegory permitted her, she offered a vision of the conquest and evangelization that
recognized the importance of sacred ritual to the Aztecs while remaining loyal to a Christian
and Creole vision of America.The loa opens with two indigenous allegorical figures, Occidente
and América, who are discussing the feast of “el dios de la semilla” (the seed god). Here, Sor
Juana’s text finds some common ground with Sigüenza’s within the framework of the baroque
festival in which the indigenous faithful dance the tocotín in celebration of the dios de las semi-
llas: “por una parte y otra bailan indios e indias, con plumas y sonajas en las manos” (indige-
nous men and woman dance around, with feathers and bells in their hands) (2007, 117).
Moreover, as does Sigüenza, she highlights the question of indigenous nobility and antiquity
when she introduces these characters, describing them as: “Nobles méxicanos,/cuya estirpe
antigua,/de las claras luces/del sol se origina” (Noble mexicans/whose ancient lineage/
descends from the bright rays of the sun) (2007, 117). Unlike Sigüenza, however, she confronts
details of indigenous religions that made the appropriation of their past so fraught for the
Creole intellectual, addressing the rite of sacrifice and its role in indigenous cosmography and
attempting to present it in the context in which it was employed by gesturing to its role in
the maintenance of the social order. One of the two indigenous characters, Occidente (“Indio
galán, con corona”—a gallant Indian, wearing a crown) describes the “sacrificios cruentos/de
humana sangre vertida,/ya las entrañas que pulsan/ya el corazón que palpita,” (cruel human
sacrifices that spill human blood, here pulsating entrails, there a heart that still beats) (2007,
117). América, his wife and “india bizarra” (dazzling Indian woman) counters, explaining: “Y
con razón, pues es solo/él que nuestra monarquía/sustenta, pues la abundancia/de los frutos
se le explica” (and with reason, it is this [sacrifice] alone that upholds our monarchy, and the
abundance of fruits demonstrate it) (2007, 117). The Christian couple, Celo (described as a
“Capitán General, armado”—Captain General, bearing arms) and Religión (a “Dama
española”—a Spanish lady) also engage in debate as they discuss the most effective way to
evangelize the idolatrous Indians. While both agree that native religious practices can best be
deemed “supersticiosos cultos” (superstitious beliefs) they differ on how to make those who
practice them abandon these rites. Celo embraces violent means while Religión favors a
peaceful path to conversion. For Jáuregui (2003), the duality in Sor Juana’s representation
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Stephanie Kirk
responds to the two intellectual traditions she inherited on this topic: one the d emonological—
Durán, Motolinía—and the other the syncretic—Las Casas (210–211). For this critic, the
figure of Religión with her proposal of conversion through non-violent means embodies Las
Casas’s thought in Sor Juana (215). As a scholar who hewed closely to the Jesuit tradition, Sor
Juana also drew on their syncretic philosophy as she engaged with the thorny and alienating
question of the indigenous religious rite of sacrifice (Jáuregui 2003, 216). Celo and Religión,
however, demonstrate a desire to collaborate in converting the natives. This mutual action and
ideology indicate the impossibility of separating military action from religious in acts of con-
quest, colonization and evangelization as well as in the texts that were written in justification.
Sor Juana’s loa shows her acknowledgment of the intellectual tradition underpinning this
thorny relationship and permits her to present Creole knowledge of indigenous traditions at
their most complex.10
Conclusion
Colonial Creoles wrote their texts under a variety of circumstances and do not constitute a
monolithic bloc. Although Sor Juana, for example, faced major constraints as she attempted to
pursue a scholarly life due to the dearth of educational opportunities for women and the disap-
proval of the Church hierarchy, in some ways she enjoyed greater advantages than Sigüenza y
Góngora owing to the level of patronage she received from the viceroys. Sigüenza himself,
expelled from the Jesuits at a young age, wrote from outside the security of the order but none-
theless echoed their tenets in his work and longed to return to the safety of the fold from which
Pérez de Ribas and other Jesuit authors engaged in intellectual activity. It is difficult, further-
more, to compare the intellectual life and publishing trajectory of Sor Juana to that of other nuns
who wrote.11 These women crafted their spiritual biographies at the behest of and under the
control of their confessors who would then take ownership in multiple ways over these texts.
Despite their significant differences and disparate experiences, however, these writers find them-
selves linked in a network that placed the New World Church at its center. All drew their Creole
knowledge from both its institutional and liturgical practices as well as its popular rituals and
local mentalities and all negotiated their precarious path within the colonial matrix of power
that rendered them vulnerable to the vagaries of imperial dominance but also complicit in its
mechanisms of exclusion and subordination.
Notes
1 For an explanation of the meaning of patria for the Creole author see Anna More (2013).
2 In a few other lines, he references the “nunca vencidos escuadrones” (unvanquished squadrons) of the
Aztec people who cede finally to the Spanish: “dando a su imperio y ley gentes extrañas/que le obe-
dezcan; y añadiendo al mundo/una española isla y dos Españas” (handing over to their empire and laws
strangers who will obey them; and adding a Spanish island and two Spains to the world)” (2006, 68).
3 For a discussion of the general circumstances surrounding the foundation of colonial Mexican convents
see my Convent Life (Kirk 2016).
4 The Spanish captain of the soldiers who accompanied the missionaries executed the cacique in retalia-
tion for Tapia’s death. No longer under his malevolent influence, many of his people finally accept
Christ and receive the sacrament of baptism from the Jesuit missionaries.
5 For further information on the topic of convents for indigenous women along with the attendant racial
politics, see Díaz (2010).
6 Joan Bristol’s study of the vida of Juana Esperanza de San Alberto, an Afro-Mexican woman and slave
in the San José convent in Puebla, demonstrates how a discourse of exceptionalism attends the descrip-
tion of her piety in that despite her blackness she may be revered (2007, 56).
292
7 For a detailed discussion of the place of Afro-Mexican women in the colonial convent, see Bristol’s
(2007) chapter on Juana Esperanza de San Alberto.
8 For a discussion of this gesture see Ross (1993, 68).
9 García interprets this section as a prefiguration of Christianity. He also explains how here Sigüenza
directly refutes Durán who had critiqued Moteuczoma I for engaging in idolatry and superstitious
practices (2009, 228).
10 I agree with Jáuregui that Sor Juana’s loa does not represent an “apología” (apology) for Aztec religious
practices (2003, 210).
11 It is important to note that while other nuns did write spiritual texts and religious poetry Sor Juana’s
case is unique in terms of the genres she worked in in—secular poetry, philosophy, theology, science—
and in the wide circulation of her works in print in both Mexico and Spain.
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Balbuena, Bernardo de. [1604] 2006. La grandeza mexicana. Compendio apologético en alabanza de la poesía. 7th
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Bristol, Joan. 2007. Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches: Afro-Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century.
Connell, R. W. 2005. Masculinities. 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Díaz, Mónica. 2010. Indigenous Writings from the Convent. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Dussel, Enrique. 1981. A History of the Church in Latin America: Colonialism to Liberation. Translated by Alan
Neely. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.
Foucault, Michel. 1997. “The Political Function of the Intellectual.” Translated by Colin Gordon. Radical
Philosophy 17: 12–14.
Franco, Jean. 1989. Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico. New York: Columbia University
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Fuchs, Barbara, and Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel. 2009. “La grandeza mexicana de Balbuena y el imaginario
de una ‘metrópolis colonial’.” Revista Iberoamericana 75 (228): 675–695.
García, Pablo. 2009. “Saldos del criollismo: el Teatro de virtudes políticas de Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora a
la luz de la historiografía de Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl.” Colonial Latin American Review 18 (2):
219–235.
Harris, Max. 2010. Aztecs, Moors, and Christians: Festivals of Reconquest in Mexico and Spain. Austin: University
of Texas Press.
Jáuregui, Carlos A. 2003. “‘El plato más sabroso’: Eucaristía, plagio diabólico, y la traducción criolla del
caníbal.” Colonial Latin American Review 12 (2): 199–231.
Juana Inés, de la Cruz. [1689] 2007. “Loa para el auto sacramental de El Divino Narciso.” In Sor Juana Inés de
la Cruz. Obras completas. 15th ed. Mexico City: Porrúa.
———. [1680] 2007. Neptuno alegórico. In Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Obras completas. 15th ed. Mexico City:
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Kaup, Monika. 2017. “Mexico City’s Dissonant Modernity and the Marketplace Baroque: Salvador Novo’s
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254–282. Leiden: Brill Rodopi.
Kirk, Stephanie. 2007. Convent Life in Colonial Mexico: A Tale of Two Communities. Gainesville: University
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———. 2016. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Gender Politics of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico. London:
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Lavrin, Asunción. 2008. Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
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———. 2014. “Dying for Christ: Martyrdom in New Spain.” In Religious Transformations in the Early Modern
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17
THE COLONIAL LATIN
AMERICAN ARCHIVE
Dispossession, ruins, reinvention
Anna More
Emerging from the post-structuralist critique of historical studies, the “archival turn” approaches
archives as material, spatial and discursive orders that actively structure knowledge of the past.
Two theoretical paradigms in particular have grounded critical approaches to the archive. The
first defines archives as institutions embedded in structural power relations.What might be called
“archival power” militates against the idea that the archive is either a neutral medium or at best
an impediment to be overcome for objective historical reconstruction. In his early work, Michel
Foucault used the term “archive” in a broadly anti-materialist sense, as a figure for discursive
totality. His later work exposed the individualizing or collective ways that this discursive totality
is tied to a capillary power formative of both space and bodies.1 Jacques Derrida’s related
approach has dissected the power captured by the term archive as etymologically tied both to
origin and command. For Derrida, the archive is a spatial order that confers power to its guard-
ians through an artifice of origin and control over memory (1996). These approaches have
understood archives in the broadest sense, as any organizational system of storage and retrieval
of documents. As opposed to these skeptical post-structuralist approaches, others have viewed
the archive as a form of information management and have traced the emergence of historical
archives in a more celebratory manner without explicitly addressing the structural effects of
archives on historiography.2
A second critical approach has investigated archives as phenomenological spaces with both
material and sensory effects on research. Often stemming from actual investigative practices,
these studies reflect on the practice of writing history from the minutiae of archival labor.3
Documents are material objects, archives are social spaces and the practices of reading, note-
taking and interpreting mountainous records are bodily ones “where the reader experiences
beauty, amazement, and a certain affective terror” (Farge 2013, 31). Yet these studies say little
about the archive’s relationship to forms of power in the present. Studies that draw their evi-
dence from imperial contexts have provided a much broader consideration of the social and
political impact of archives.4 Given the collusion of archives with colonialism and slavery, histo-
rians have approached archival documents not as “tear in the fabric of time” (Farge 2013, 7) but
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Anna More
as structurally fragmented by colonialism or even as a “mortuary” for lives abruptly and prema-
turely extinguished from the record (Fuentes 2016, 146). These accounts of power and violence
in the archive often note the effects on the historian and advocate for modes of writing that are
speculative and reparative.5
Studies of the Latin American colonial archive have emerged in dialogue with these critical
approaches while grounding their reflections on the specific relation between archives and
Iberian empires.6 Indeed, Iberian empires contributed directly to the emergence of state archives,
as the overseas expansion of monarchies and ecclesiastical orders demanded a bureaucratic
record and governing institutions (Friedrich 2018, 16–28). Because Iberian institutions of gov-
ernance and religion were tightly bound with their European counterparts, often what can be
said about the European archive can also be stated for the Iberian imperial archive. Like the
European archive, the archives of Iberian empires are dusty and labyrinthine.They give glimpses
of subjects and provide insights into mentalities.Yet they are also marked by a violence beyond
that which was experienced in the European metropolis. The cultural destruction, forced labor
and the projects to radically transform nature and society across vast geographies both empow-
ered and limited documentation in the Iberian world, distorting or entirely eliminating records
for certain populations. The apostolic fervor of Christianization and the divergences between
European and local institutions created suspicions and misunderstandings that augmented and
focused religious violence. As Stoler has written, archival forms in colonial contexts were part of
a greater attempt to govern what was often deemed chaotic and barbaric, better destroyed than
preserved (Stoler 2002, 97–98, 101–2).7
In Latin America this ethos underlies periodic attempts to gather and centralize documents
in general archives as well as the abandonment of collections. From documents that crumble
at the touch to new attempts to digitize records, the initial foundations of the Latin American
archive in the colonial period still permeate its forms in the present.8 Amid the numerous
small tragedies that continually occur throughout the region, where archives on slim budgets
face problems of theft, sagging infrastructure and challenges to preserving voluminous collec-
tions, there have been particularly resounding losses such as the devastating 2018 fire that
destroyed the National Museum and its collection in Rio de Janeiro.9 The record of the Latin
American colonial period is thus subject to paradoxical extremes. While imperial bureaucrats
produced voluminous documentation, there are also immense lacunae in the written record.
Attempts to control an empire with universal pretensions have co-existed with abandonment
and purges of the past. The Latin American colonial archive is permeated by the excessive
violence required to govern populations in various degrees of unfreedom. It is also the site of
surprise and resilience that undoes master narratives of the past and the present. Writing his-
tory that makes explicit the structure and consequences of such an archive is inevitably a
political project.
To address the ways that Iberian colonialism and its ongoing legacy actively constructs the
Latin American colonial archive, this chapter will focus on three fundamental movements:
destruction as dispossession, the archive as ruin, and collection as reinvention. The Latin
American colonial archive was a particular form of “accumulation by dispossession” that resulted
from enslavement, forced migrations and the appropriation of land and material culture.10 If all
archives are subject to hazards and decay, Iberian imperial archives have been particularly built
on violent destruction or appropriation of collective practices of memory and record-keeping.
At times, this destruction was deliberate, but at other times it was the indirect result of the inter-
ruption of social institutions or the removal of communities from their territories. In the after-
math, archives provided a filter for truth and state-authorized legitimacy for some objects and
documents while others were deliberately abandoned or destroyed.
296
The colonial Latin American archive
Given their intimate relationship to destruction, Iberian imperial archives may be understood
as ruins, in the sense that Walter Benjamin gave the term: remnants of the past that are structur-
ally incomplete and frozen in time (More 2013, 50–52). Understanding the Latin American
archive as a ruin underscores the interests and pressures involved in salvaging or collecting mate-
rial objects in a colonial context. From artifacts in private collections, to ruins built into the
landscape, to the documentation of non-material practices by bureaucrats or inquisitors, preser-
vation inevitably involves interpretation, recomposition and reinvention. Archivists group and
categorize artifacts following logics tied to their own whims or institutional objectives and
produce new readings of documents through culturally conditioned hermeneutics. In a colonial
context, objects are made enigmatic or “untranslatable” (Russo 2014, 6–7) as their contexts
become scrambled. While attempts to reorder these objects may indicate creative responses or
recovery after the loss of the original context, the violence in the colonial Latin American
archive is never far below the surface. Indeed, the whitewashing of colonial violence persists in
the naturalization of social categories such as “Indian” or “slave” as well as juridical and archival
processes built around colonial identities (Bryant 2014; van Deusen 2015; Seed 2015).
The colonial archive, in this sense, is the site of struggles that also take place in other material
realms: over land, resources, and structures of governance. Acknowledging the continuity
between archival and social conflicts has required that researchers adopt ethical and political
stances while working in colonial archives. Archives are institutions that interpellate researchers
according to their race, gender and other markers of identity that reach back to the colonial
period. Including an analysis of the archive, then, has rightfully been seen as the necessary first
step in writing histories that can move beyond the conditions set in place by Iberian coloniza-
tion. At times, archival critique has led to a wholesale abandonment of the archive as complicit
with colonial violence. At others, it has galvanized efforts to appropriate the archive as an institu-
tion and to advocate for greater public investment. In either case, the archive ceases to be an
inert and neutral medium for historical study and instead becomes a formal and institutional
structure for acting upon the politics of the past in the present.
Archival dispossession
Under the aegis of centralized monarchies, Iberian imperial expansion demanded written
documents, bureaucratic agents, and juridically sanctioned violence for control over territories.
When Iberian monarchies invaded and occupied distant territories, they negotiated with non-
European polities and states, at times within the context of intense competition with other
Europeans. From points along the geography of Iberian expansion, European agents of differ-
ent types wrote to one another and to metropolitan centers of the Church and state, producing
narratives, reports, letters, and juridical accounts. These documents were, in turn, stored in
repositories throughout the Iberian empires and beyond. Archives of written documents, in this
sense, were always key to Iberian colonialism. But archival accumulation was also subject to
colonial conditions: papers went astray or were lost in shipwrecks, accounts were falsified to
favor parties involved, and local officials and notaries decided what constituted information of
value and what should be left to the dustbin of history. Above all, while written documents
were kept for posterity, other artifacts were often subject to destruction or abandonment.
Beginning as early as the Spanish and Portuguese expansion into Northern and Central
Africa, these fundamental factors shaped the archives of Iberian Africa, Asia and the Americas.
The Portuguese and Castilian occupation of African islands in the fourteenth and fifteenth cen-
turies provided a template for Iberian occupation of the Americas, including economic models
based on sugar cultivation, enslaved labor, and trade for precious metals. Undertaken within the
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context of the religious wars between Christian and Islamic states, Iberian expansion into Africa
also generated a parallel apostolic campaign that sought to convert non-Christians. Within this
context, little of African culture was deliberately salvaged and safeguarded and objects deemed
diabolic were even subject to destruction. Trade and contact, meanwhile, transformed both
African and European cultural forms in subtle or obvious ways. With the conversion of Kongo
kings, religious art and artifacts adopted Christian motifs while remaining crafted with African
materials and artisan traditions (Fromont 2014). In other regions where Christianity did not take
hold, written documents are scarce and those that exist are of more exclusively European origin
(Green 2012, 21–22).
Archives of this early period are thus particularly prone to a disparity between visual and
written media, often with little to connect or contextualize the two. In the case of early Iberian
Africa and the African diaspora, the discrepancy between African-made artifacts and European
records creates insurmountable breaches in historiographical interpretation, often to the detri-
ment of an African perspective on European territorial occupations and the slave trade. In the
European record, Africans rarely appear by name while written records such as narratives and
histories sought to elevate the status of Europeans at the helm of invasions, warfare and trade.
From its earliest beginnings the transatlantic slave trade subjected those enslaved to a violence of
abstract calculation of sales and profit. Thus the archive of the slave trade overwhelmingly regis-
ters enslaved Africans through a handful of terms. Even though Portuguese in Senegambia,
Congo and Angola, the earliest regions of the slave trade, documented their knowledge of lin-
guistic and cultural polities in their interactions with Africans, enslaved captives were most often
recorded by pecuniary terms such as “black” [negro] and “piece” [pieza, peça] (Vila Vilar 2014,
185–191). Given that the documents of the slave trade reflect the interest of those who profited
from the capture and sale of humans, the archive of the slave trade has demanded affective,
imaginative and intellectual tools to offset its structural lacunae.11
In the Americas, the plantations and urban contexts of slavery generated more documenta-
tion, including juridical processes, inquisitorial records, ecclesiastical histories and reports of real
and imagined rebellions. While spanning greater social detail than the violent language of calcu-
lation from the middle passage and Africa, these documents were almost always recorded from
the perspective of colonial governance. To reconstruct Afro-Latino social life, researchers must
bring creative tools to interpretation of an archive biased along the grain of race, class and gender.
By shifting their questions, historians have been able to find Black lives “hiding in plain sight”
(Edwards 2020), in religious accounts (Brewer-García 2019), court disputes over property and
manumission (O’Toole 2019), and criminal cases involving status goods and clothing (Walker
2017). While urban contexts in which enslaved people lived and worked have thus come into
view, the nature of Black societies in rural contexts, particularly runaway (maroon) societies, is
subject to a more limited historical record (Price 1996; Reis and Gomes 1996). When research-
ing and writing on people who were exposed to physical and psychological violence, who either
fled slave regimes or attempted to avoid state detection, researchers have done extraordinary
work to find stories in the archive and to reconstruct others by piecing together its fragments.
If the archive of the transatlantic slave trade overwhelmingly focuses on finance and gover-
nance, the archive of the Iberian occupation of the Americas was built on the dispossession of
indigenous land, material culture and practice.To the extent that Iberians recognized indigenous
forms of record-keeping, they alternately destroyed or appropriated artifacts in acts of violence
that paralleled the destruction of religious locales. In many regions, such as that of the Taino who
were the first to experience Spanish invasion in the Caribbean, the accumulated effects of con-
quest and social decimation have made the reconstruction of pre-Columbian cultures almost
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fully dependent upon non-written remains (Arrom 1980; Arias 2015, 16). In cases such as the
Tupi practice of anthropophagy, indigenous social practices were documented by highly skepti-
cal or otherwise resistant European witnesses (Whitehead 2000). Even before openly attacking
Tenochtitlan, Hernán Cortés systematically sacked and burned Nahua temples. In the Andes, the
seventeenth-century extirpation of idolatry campaigns resulted in the public burning of per-
sonal objects that the extirpators had identified as sacred [huacas].
One of the earliest and most notorious acts of destruction of indigenous objects was by the
Franciscan friar Diego de Landa (1524–1579), who in 1562 burned numerous codices of the
Yucatec Maya (Farriss 1984, 291; de Landa 2017). His own account reproduces fragments from
what he burned as a means to justify the necessity of such violence. While Maya glyphs may be
found throughout the region on built structures, only a handful of pre-Columbian codices
survived de Landa’s bonfire. The act underscores an irony: often the very institutions that tar-
geted some objects for destruction also salvaged and safeguarded others. These movements
cannot be segregated, as often they were simply distinct responses to what the Church deemed
idolatrous or demonic. The most extensive account of the pre-Columbian central valley of
Mexico, for instance, is contained in the Florentine Codex [Códice florentino], an encyclopedic
project that covered aspects of pre-Columbian culture, including religion, family life, education
and work. Relying on indigenous youth trained at the Colegio de San Juan de Tlatelolco to
gather information and write the encyclopedia, the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún
(1499–1590) finished twelve books in parallel texts in Nahuatl and Spanish, accompanied by
detailed illustrations. The collaboration between Sahagún and the indigenous researchers and
writers is still little understood, but the relative autonomy of the three parts of the text, none of
which perfectly translates the other, and the fact that Sahagún felt the need to heavily edit the
Spanish translation suggest that the indigenous authors had a strong influence over the content
(Terraciano 2010, 62).
While pre-Columbian practices might have employed a number of visual or material means
to codify and store information, the conquest left many of the institutions responsible for repro-
ducing this knowledge destroyed or in tatters. Colonial projects such as the Florentine Codex
ended up employing some pre-Columbian scribal practices in modified forms, thus inadver-
tently carrying them on. One of the most extensive records created through continuous prac-
tices of this sort are the Geographical Relations [Relaciones Geográficas] created at the end of the
sixteenth century in New Spain. As part of a bureaucratic program to gain knowledge of his
expanding empire, Phillip II requested that regional governing bodies send in responses to a
survey that covered local history, territories and census information. In New Spain the responses
from indigenous communities themselves often reflect upon the destruction of local forms of
memory during and after the conquest. Many maps included in the reports mixed indigenous
and Spanish spatial and cartographic concepts. The community histories also mixed indigenous
and Christian references, at times not even registering the events of the conquest (Gruzinski
1993, 79). While these community responses provide documents for an expanding imperial
bureaucracy, by gathering together what is left of pre-Columbian systems of knowledge they
also record indigenous archival functions that continued at the edges of Iberian control. In the
preface to the Mayan cosmogonic book of the Popol Vuh, for instance, the anonymous scribes
enigmatically refer to having to “write about this now… bring it out because there is no longer
a place to see it, a Council Book” in what appears to be a reference to the need to document
beliefs that were under attack or disappearing (Anon 1996, 63; Tedlock 1996). These are only
the clearest examples of how indigenous forms of record-keeping engaged the destructive after-
math of conquest and colonization.
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Archival ruins
The colonial Latin American archive could thus be said to contain the ruins of indigenous and
African material culture and practices. After the Spanish and Portuguese conquests, of course,
the landscape of the Americas was littered with the material remnants of pre-Columbian cul-
tures. These physical remains were reminders of past political, cultural and sacred institutions
destroyed, displaced or appropriated by the Iberian colonizers. Material ruins of the monu-
mental structures of the Incan and Mexica polities were the most spectacular, but one could
extend the concept of the ruin to cover less visible changes to the land as well. For the Tupi
and Tapuia peoples of the Atlantic coast of what would eventually become Brazil, the destruc-
tion wrought by rapacious logging and internecine warfare among competing Europeans must
have been just as notable (Dean 1995, 66–90). Later, the large-scale commodity agriculture and
mining, as well as the urban engineering projects such as the drainage of Lake Texcoco
[desagüe] in Mexico City appropriated indigenous technologies, at times destroying and at
other times diverting these to new political ends (Candiani 2012). In Uruguay, cattle ranching
has contributed to the destruction of indigenous mounds that are literally built into the land-
scape (Verdesio 2001).
Yet ruins included not only visibly abandoned structures, but all objects and practices whose
original use and significance were altered under Spanish and Portuguese dominion. Whereas
colonial indigenous memory in Mexico has been called a “torn net” (Gruzinski 1993, 15) it
would perhaps be more productive to understand how surviving forms and practices became
part of the colonial archive, preserved and resignified as archival ruins. At times, the ruins within
the colonial archives were brought to the fore, as in the famous Royal Commentaries [Comentarios
reales] (1609) in which the Cuzcan mestizo, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539–1616), justified his
need to write the history of his royal Incan ancestors because Cuzco was “destroyed before it
was even known” (Garcilaso 1999, 50). The ruin becomes a significant metaphor for his writing
of history, which he calls a “labyrinth” in reference to the ancient maze found under the ruins
of the largest Incan fort, Sacsawaman (Mazzotti 1996; Cortez 2018, 65). By the end of the sev-
enteenth century, European Americans (creoles) were also taking an interest in pre-Columbian
ruins in their midst. Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora (1645–1700), the Mexican polymath who
was an avid collector of indigenous codices and artifacts was also fascinated by the standing pyra-
mids of Teotihuacán, the legacy of the Toltecs, predecessors to the Nahuas in the central valley
of Mexico (Bernal 1980; More 2013, 56).
Archival ruins haunted the colonial Iberian Americas as material reminders of a past whose
original project was simultaneously palpable and inaccessible to the archivists. The interest
among elite creoles in indigenous ruins was tied to other forms of archival consolidation and
state-building. While it is clear that the Iberian colonial states did not fully control the produc-
tion and archiving of documents, state-aligned institutions were most often responsible for ini-
tiating documentation, safeguarding it in material and spatial ways, and policing its purpose,
access and use. Colonial archivists inevitably preserved these remains for purposes distinct from
their original context, most often to further the interests of the Iberian states or the Church.
Indeed, aside from those few but spectacular instances when individuals such as Guaman Poma
de Ayala or communities such as the Maya Ki’che’, who preserved the Popol Vuh, appear to have
acted autonomously to write or to protect patrimony, documentation in the colonial archive
was produced by practices linked to elite economic and governmental interests. When they did
exist, moreover, indigenous archives were created within the scope of Iberian imperial projects.
Entering into the archive inevitably involved participating in the project of preservation under
Iberian colonialism.
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In fact, it is precisely this mediating nature of the colonial archive that permitted the docu-
mentation of social diversity across the hemisphere. To take the complex example of the
Inquisition, the core goal of rooting out heresy ended up documenting its extension and het-
erogeneity. Inquisition records also provide one of the richest archives of enslaved and free
Africans and their descendants. While the Spanish Inquisition early on exempted indigenous
subjects from its jurisdiction, seventeenth-century extirpation of idolatry campaigns in New
Spain and Peru employed similar forensic techniques and had parallel objectives of eliminating
“idolatrous” residues in colonial Christianity (Gruzinski 1993, 146–183; Mills 1997). In the end,
this attempt to document and punish has provided a storehouse of information on colonial
social practices, from sacred to sexual.Yet inquisitors recorded these practices for the purpose of
eradicating them and thus do not deliberately reconstruct the social context in which they
occurred. The present-day researcher is faced with the challenge of parsing out practices from a
record tainted by categories such as “idolatry” and “unnatural” [contra natura] sexual practices
(Tortorici 2018).
Despite producing voluminous documentation, such disciplinary institutions of the colonial
Iberias were far from systematic. The appearance of non-elite colonial subjects in the state
archives was almost always the result of happenstance. One can think, for instance, of the Maya
translator who aided the Spanish, commonly known as Malinche (c. 1501–1550). Although
Bernal Díaz del Castillo (1496–1584) declared that without her the conquest could not have
happened, there is a paucity of basic information about her life (Townsend 2006, 5). At other
times, if they were caught up in a complex juridical case, otherwise anonymous subjects could
appear delineated with some complexity. Stretching across three continents, the documentation
of the eighteenth-century African healer Domingues Alvares (c. 1710–1749?), who was captured
and enslaved in West Africa, freed in Brazil and then subsequently imprisoned by the Inquisition
and exiled to Portugal after his healing abilities had garnered him fame, permits the reconstruc-
tion of his life in surprising detail (Sweet 2011). Other times, non-elite subjects proved to be
able participants in the colonial legal structure and appear, even incongruously, in records that
were not intended to favor their positions (O’Toole 2012; Kazanjian 2016).
The entrance of common subjects into the archive inevitably involved mediation, ranging
from negotiation with petty bureaucrats to commoners who insisted on being heard by officials
in quests for justice (Burns 2010; Delgado 2018; More and Premo 2018).The function of docu-
menting and archiving depended to a great extent on related local conditions. These might
include the discretionary power of low-level officials or notaries, the politics of institutions such
as the Inquisition, or popular legal culture and access to courts. Notaries in Cuzco, Peru, for
instance, were instrumental in deciding what to document, most often for immediate political
or financial gain rather than the interest of the colonial state (Burns 2010). At times this discre-
tionary power meant that subjects might appear, objects might be salvaged or perspectives that
are more local than imperial might be registered in documents. At other times, such as in the
spectacular case of the Portuguese slave trader Manuel Bautista Perez (1589–1639), active in
Upper Guinea, Cartagena de Indias and Lima in the first decades of the seventeenth century, a
bureaucratic sweep caught many extraneous and personal documents in its net (Newson and
Minchin 2007, 15–17).
To call an archive a ruin is to assume that in destroying contexts or attempting to control
non-Iberian practices, colonial governance preserved the memory of these practices in ways that
continued to influence colonial culture. But while the archive may be considered a ruin in the
positive sense, as an index or pointer toward what lies just beyond or contrary to its governmen-
tal purpose, this same characteristic has also been understood to be a mode of “capture” of
reluctant subjects. As scant mention of runaway slaves appears in documentation in the African
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theater of enslavement or on runaway slave communities in the Americas, those who do not
appear in the record might very well be understood to have escaped (Krug 2018, 9–10). Of
course, evidence of escape always depends on this archival register; finding subjects entirely out-
side of the record is impossible. In the case of a negative presence in the archive, that is, research-
ers must begin with the barest traces or marshal alternative archives and then interpret in the
speculative mode. Ruins, in other words, attract and seduce precisely because of the missing
spaces where structures have been partially destroyed. When pursuing deviance in the archive,
whether sexual or otherwise, the researcher, like the inquisitor, is determined by an affective
force of attraction or repulsion and perhaps by the ambivalence of desire (Tortorici 2018).
Archival reinvention
Current researchers thus cannot be fully divorced from the archival sedimentation of the many
hands and political decisions that have gone into preserving the past. The researcher, of course,
has a distinct role as an interpreter that is often at odds with the institutional purpose of the
archive. Yet the archival turn has exposed the extent to which the archive wields a particular
power that accrues through the segregation, ordering and enclosure of documents. In his influ-
ential meditation on the archive, Jacques Derrida writes that “there is no political power without
control of the archive, if not of memory” (1996, 4). All researchers must negotiate with this
institutional power to gain access to the archive. Yet Derrida’s account does not reflect the
diverse forms of documentation and the potential for alternative archives present in colonial
Latin American societies.These multiple archives provide contradictory or competing narratives
of the past and certainly divergent views of the importance of these for the present. Many times,
the institution of the archive itself becomes the crowning achievement of governance, one that
consolidates a longer battle over documents and their meaning. Even before they enter the
archive, therefore, researchers must navigate the politics of these competing histories and inter-
pretations of the Latin American past, some of which are embedded in documentation and
others of which are barely visible.
These multiple stories available in the archive are often the result of overlapping processes of
documentation and storage. Understanding this, Iberian empires attempted at key moments to
consolidate their archives into singular or “general” archives: the Spanish in Simancas in the
sixteenth century and in the Archivo General de Indias in the eighteenth; the Portuguese in the
medieval Torre do Tombo and in the combined archives of the Overseas Council [Conselho
Ultramarino] and the State Department of Naval Affairs and Overseas Domains [Secretaria de
Estado da Marinha e dos Domínios Ultramarinos] in the eighteenth century (Martins 2018, 40).
These attempts at consolidation only underscore the fact that most preservation has fallen to
smaller and more local efforts, like individual collectors or local state and Church institutions.
The history of the archive of colonial Latin America, then, must include the efforts of these
myriad archives and the power afforded to archivists. However seemingly insignificant, such as
the personal project of an individual collector, archives were often linked to militant purposes,
especially when larger political institutions seemed to falter. Attempts to create a general archive
composed of smaller archives, such as the establishment of the Archivo General de Indias in the
eighteenth century, were also attempts to create order out of the “confused forest” [selva con-
fusa] of past archives (Slade 2011, 206). The general archive, therefore, is an eminently political
project that aims to appropriate space and institute order at moments of renewed state-building
(Rufer 2016, 166).
These sedimented attempts to salvage the past give the colonial Latin American archive a
sutured and haphazard composition. Beginning with Hernán Cortés’ conquest of Tenochtitlan,
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objects were preserved and displayed as trophies in European courts if deemed to be symboli-
cally important or converted into bullion or other direct forms of wealth if not (Johnson
2011, 89). The history of the destruction or dispersal of indigenous objects from the time of
Iberian invasion to the present illustrates how collections, libraries and archives have often com-
peted with or complemented one another. This history is itself difficult to research, with objects
passing through various hands, at times arriving and being consigned to forgotten corners of a
collection or being associated with general categories that have little correspondence to the
original purpose of the object or document. Discoveries such as that of the encyclopedic manu-
script of Guaman Poma de Ayala (c. 1535–1616?) are often little more than a recognition of the
value of a manuscript that has been known for centuries (Adorno 1992, xliii–iv). In some rare
cases, it is possible to trace the history of a collection and, in this way, to elucidate how the
archive itself, as a composed order, could be used to bolster political narratives.
There is perhaps no more spectacular and detailed case of the intersection between preserva-
tion and political interest than the collection of the Mexican polymath, Carlos de Sigüenza y
Góngora. An elite creole, Sigüenza y Góngora espoused an antiquarian’s interest in the indige-
nous past at the moment when the Spanish Empire was faltering on the global stage. For Sigüenza
y Góngora, salvaging objects “pertaining to matters of the Indies” was a means to refound local
governance in Mexico in the face of Spanish imperial decline (More 2013, 254–55). Tellingly,
however, the majority of Sigüenza’s indigenous collection came from one source: Fernando de
Alva Ixtlilxochitl (ca. 1578–1650), a mestizo from the ruling line of Texcoco outside of Mexico
City who, in the previous generation, had himself been a collector of objects relating to his
region (Brian 2016). Sigüenza’s appropriation of the Ixtlilxochitl collection was a bid to promote
the history of indigenous nobility against what he interpreted, during the massive 1692 uprising
in Mexico City, as the resentful history of indigenous commoners who sought vengeance for the
conquest and a return to pre-Columbian religion (More 2013, 180). The most compelling story
that can be told from a case such as Sigüenza y Góngora’s, then, is about the power of the archive
to ground and align local political projects at key turning points in Spanish imperial history.
While the most powerful archives were undoubtedly aligned with Iberian imperial power,
collections such as Ixtlilxochitl’s and Sigüenza y Góngora’s could introduce nuances into this
power. Archival projects such as these were also woven through different expressive genres, giv-
ing new symbolic meaning to objects. In her short theatrical piece preceding the religious play
the Divine Narcissus [El divino Narciso] (1689), for instance, the Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de
la Cruz (1648–1695) referenced the Mexica practice of ingesting seed statues representing the
war god Huitzilopochtli not as an instigation to present rebellion but as an analogy to commu-
nion and thus precursor to Catholic conversion (Merrim 2010, 190–2). Non-Europeans also
appropriated European forms for their own purposes. Throughout the Americas, for instance,
festival performances featured indigenous and Black confraternities who performed by adapting
the European form with non-European cultural practices such as music and dance (Taylor 2003;
Voigt 2016; Fromont 2019). Many times, objects included in these archives, whether elite or
non-elite, are irreducible to any one cultural origin or purpose. While these images in the colo-
nial Latin American archive express dissonant perspectives, in some sense all colonial texts that
take up non-European topics might be said to be archival in a similar way.
Conclusion: archival reading, archival writing

When the archive as a historical and political construction comes into view in scholarship, the
relationship of the researcher to what might otherwise be understood to be the bureaucratic
minutiae of the archives itself becomes a reflection of archival power. The politics of closed or
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open archives, their exclusive or public nature, their spatial and physical conditions, their differ-
ent receptiveness to researchers depending on status, gender and race all become part of the
interpretation of how archives serve as arbiters of truth. Whether researching in the Archivo
General de Indias on the dispossession that preceded its foundation (Nemser 2015), studying
manuscripts on the location of a Colombian plantation under the watchful gaze of the portrait
of the patriarch (Barragán 2017), or attending to the imaginative and performative recreation of
the case of a Mexican dual sex subject (Martínez 2014), the archive becomes an affective space
that makes political demands on researchers.
An archival reading requires a greater attention to the origin of information, its genealogy of
contexts beyond the text, its own history of dispossession and appropriation and the politics of
legibility as a mode of access. This approach demands an ethics and a politics that is presentist
but attuned to a sedimentation of actions, not all of which can be proven in a record that is often
complicit with governmental interests. The archival writing of history that results from these
inquiries tests the boundaries of disciplinary modes of truth or exposes deeply held assumptions
about being and action. Many of the most provocative archival approaches to colonial Latin
American texts employ a speculative tone, acknowledging the limits of evidence and comple-
menting what can be known through alternative sources or the imagination. The existence of
certain subjects in the archive, at times against all odds, can be the basis for a realignment of our
very assumptions about freedom and survival (Kazanjian 2016). When faced with a “story that
cannot be told” from the archive, on the other hand, speculative historians have turned to com-
posite portraits, as of women violently subjected to slave governance in Barbados (Fuentes 2016)
or “critical fabulation” to imagine the subjects of violence barely registered in the archive of the
slave trade (Hartman 2006). At the limit point of this narrative speculation and speech, archival
expression finds form in scattered words and letters on the blank page, as in M. NourbeSe
Philip’s Zong! (2008) a poetic invocation of the voices missing from the records of the slave trade.
If all archives stave off death, decay and abandonment, the colonial Latin American archive is
marked by its constitutional violence. Archives are built to tame this violence, to bring order to
unruliness and heterogeneity or to domesticate and contain rebellion. Bringing the archive into
view rather than treating it as a neutral medium has necessarily brought to the fore this structural
violence in ways that link the colonial past to the present. To study the archive, then, has meant
to resist ideas of neutrality, objectivity and empiricism that have framed other historiographical
approaches. Once the archive is understood to be grounded on colonial structures, the disrup-
tions, eruptions and silences that it contains appear less as gaps to be filled in than points to
speculate about what might be done with its ruins. By acknowledging these structural forms of
violence and admitting speculative forms of expression, critical archival approaches to colonial
Latin America have pushed the limits of historiography to a new poetics and praxis.
Notes
1 Foucault’s influential use of the term “archive” may be found in The Archeology of Knowledge in which
he defines it as “the general system of the formation and transformation of statements” at any given
time (1972, 146). On Foucault’s approach to capillary power and bodies, see Butler (1997, 83–105).
Foucault himself was working directly from Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of origins in The Genealogy
of Morals. See Foucault (1977).
2 See, for instance, Marcus Friedrich’s The Birth of the Archive (2018). Bruno Latour’s action-network-
theory has been instrumental to studies of early modern global knowledge networks. See, for example,
Steven Harris’s work on Jesuit correspondence and information management in Harris (1996, 1999).
3 Arlette Farge’s The Allure of Archives (2013) and Carolyn Steedman’s Dust (2002) have both taken as
their object their own research in the archives of early modern France and England, respectively.
304
4 Ann Stoler’s work on the colonial Dutch archives of Indonesia (2009) or Marisa Fuentes’ work on the
archives of racialized and gendered violence in seventeenth-century Barbados (2016) have exposed the
structural ways in which archives embedded extractive and governmental violence in these contexts.
5 Saidiya Hartman advocates “critical fabulation” (2006, 11) as a means to supplement and counteract the
constitutional limitations of the archive of slavery, to write history “with and against the archive” (12).
6 The first work to take on the archive as a critical tool for studying colonial Latin America was Roberto
González Echevarría’s Myth and Archive (1998), which was inspired by Foucault’s approach to the
archive as a discursive condition. Antony Higgins, Constructing the Criollo Archive (2000), Stephanie
Merrim’s The Spectacular City (2010), my Baroque Sovereignty (2013), Amber Brian’s Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s
Native Archive (2016), Enrique Cortez’s Biografía y polémica (2018) and Zeb Tortorici’s Sins against Nature
(2018) all draw on various critical traditions mentioned in this article. Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the
Repertoire (2003) takes a very different approach to textual investigations by working with performance
as a form of embodied memory. As mentioned above, the African diaspora and the slave trade is another
source of investigation of the archive, this time not limited to Spanish and Portuguese sources. For a
recent collection of essays that draws together many of these strands, see Gorbach and Rufer (2016).
7 In this sense, the archive follows the governmental function that Ángel Rama (1984) attributed to “the
lettered city” from the colonial period on.
8 For an ambitious digitization project, see the Slave Societies Digital Archive: https://www.slavesociet-
ies.org/. Digitizing, however, erases the original information on ordering and origin of documents
(Bianca Premo, participation in the roundtable “Archives Burning,” American Historical Association,
2019).
9 For a moving reflection on the fire as the result of state abandonment, see Alexandra Prado Coelho’s
(2018) interview with the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.
10 The phrase “accumulation by dispossession” is David Harvey’s (2004). For an insightful application to
the consolidation of the General Archive of Indies in eighteenth-century Spain, see Nemser (2015).
11 See below for a discussion of the work of Marisa Fuentes (2016), Saidiya Hartman (2006) and
M. NourbeSe Philip (2008).
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18
MATERIALITIES AND
ARCHIVES
Colonial materialities and the history of art

The study of colonial materialities has historically been primarily situated within the history of
art and architecture. As a specialized subfield, colonial or viceregal art of the Americas was slow
to develop, becoming established well after the art of the Ancient Americas (i.e., pre-Colum-
bian), Modern, and Contemporary Latin American art. Pre-Columbian was the first subfield to
emerge in academe from the 1920s to the 1940s, tied to national foundation myths (as in
Mexico), and flourishing more fully in the 1960s and 1970s (Bailey Waddell 1978, 1; Boone
1979, 2; Klein 2002, 131–8; Garrigan 2012, 70). Scholarship on Modern and Contemporary art
burgeoned in the wake of the Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s that brought fame
to such writers as Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa,
and others (Herrera and Gaztambide 2017, 3–8). The field of colonial art did not begin to
thrive until the 1980s and 1990s, as evidenced by publications and university hires (Bailey,
Phillips, and Voigt 2009, 1; Cembalest 2010). Negative perceptions of colonial art, with its
“impure” mix of European and indigenous influences, and its association with colonization and
the Catholic Church, seem to have impeded earlier scholarly study (Bailey Waddell 1978, 2–3;
Cembalest 2010). Some art historians found colonial art and architecture derivative and defi-
cient in comparison to contemporaneous European art. For precisely the reasons that delayed
its study—its hybridity or even “impurity”—colonial art began to be considered as on the
“cutting edge” of art historical study in the first decades of the 2000s (Bailey, Phillips, and Voigt
2009, 1; Cembalest 2010).
The earliest scholarship in colonial art and architectural history was produced in Latin
America and Spain, developing later in the US. The first publications and faculty positions in
colonial art date to the first half of the twentieth century. In Mexico, the art historian Manuel
Toussaint (1890–1955), described there as the creator of “the discipline of art history,” founded
the first faculty chair in Viceregal Art in 1936 at Mexico’s Universidad Nacional Autónoma de
México (UNAM) (Weismann 1967, vii). Toussaint published a number of important studies of
colonial art in Mexico in the 1920s to 1940s, including the 1924 volume Iglesias de México, co-
authored with Dr. Atl and José Benítez, and his 1948 Arte colonial en México, which laid out the
entire field of colonial art for the first time (Weismann 1956a, 269). In Spain, the distinguished
art historian Diego Angulo Íñiguez (1901–1986) was another seminal voice. He authored key
early studies of art and architecture from the 1930s to the 1950s, including the important survey
Historia del arte hispano-americano, first printed in 1943. Angulo’s distinguished career began in
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1922 at the Museo del Prado, where he later served as director (1968–1971), followed by a pro-
fessorship at the University of Granada in 1925, which he left to take up the newly created chair
of Hispano-American Art at the University of Seville, established in anticipation of the 1929
World Fair (Calvo Serraller 1986; Pérez Sánchez n.d.). In 1934 Angulo was named scholar in
residence at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. While there, he discussed with
Toussaint the idea of establishing a specialized art historical laboratory or institute at UNAM,
similar to the Laboratorio de Arte at the University of Seville, as a means of promoting Mexican
art (Krieger 2009, 176). Subsequently, in 1935, the Laboratorio de Arte was established, its name
changing to the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas in 1936, and its journal, Anales del Instituto
de Investigaciones Estéticas was created, both under the auspices of the University of Seville’s
Laboratorio de Arte (Weismann 1967, viii; Krieger 2009, 173). The study of colonial art in
Mexico was thus conditioned from its origins by scholarly frameworks imported from Spain.
Early studies of colonial art in South America emerged around the same time as in Mexico, in
the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. They were hampered by nationalist rivalries between the various
countries that had once comprised the same viceroyalty (Bailey, Phillips, and Voigt 2009, 3–6).
In the US, several scholars began to work on colonial art in the 1930s and 1940s, among
them George Kubler (1912–1996), who began to teach at Yale University in 1938, and Sidney
David Markman (1911–2011), specialist in Central American and pre-Columbian art and archi-
tecture, who taught at Duke University from 1965 until his 1981 retirement (Wilder 1941, 6;
Klein 2002, 133; Howerton & Bryan 2011). The first course at a US university on colonial art
was taught by Kubler in 1939–1940 at Yale University (Klein 2002, 133;Wilder 1941, 6). During
the upheaval of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) some Hispanists shifted their focus to Latin
America, including Harold E. Wethey (1902–1984), professor of history of art at the University
of Michigan from 1940 until his 1972 retirement. Wethey produced an early and important
Andean history, Colonial Architecture and Sculpture of Peru in 1949 (New York Times 1984, B8;
Wethey 1949).
Large, state-supported museums dedicated to colonial art were not founded until the twen-
tieth century, but foreign interest in the display and exhibition of Mexican objects dates back to
the post-independence period after 1821 when early collectors from across Europe as well as
North America traveled to “discover” Mexico. One early British enthusiast, William Bullock,
returned to England to organize the country’s first exhibition of “Ancient and Modern
Mexico,” held at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly in 1824 (Bullock 1824). In the US, systematic
collecting dates to the 1930s, when the Denver Museum began acquiring colonial art (Cembalest
2010). The first survey exhibition of Latin American colonial art in the US took place in 2006,
under the direction of curator Joseph Rishel at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Rishel and
Stratton-Pruitt 2006). In Mexico, the first museums specifically devoted to viceregal art were
founded in 1964, the Museo Nacional del Virreinato in Tepotzotlan and the Pinacoteca Virreinal
de San Diego in Mexico City, the latter collection moving to the renovated Museo Nacional de
Arte in 2000. The Museo de Arte in Lima, a major museum in South America, which includes
colonial art, was founded in 1961. The Museo de Arte Colonial de Pedro de Osma in Lima,
formerly a private collection, opened to the public as a museum in 1987.
Styles and nomenclature in colonial art and architecture

Colonial art history has been the main locus for studies of colonial materiality in the twentieth
century. Major concerns of early studies included preserving and documenting material objects
as well as describing their unique stylistic traits. Some foundational scholars, such as Toussaint,
followed by Hungarian-American Pál Kelemen (1894–1993), employed labels from European
310
art, resulting in Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo art in the Americas (Toussaint
1948; Kelemen 1951). Others proposed new labels to recognize the unique nature of viceregal
cultural production, necessarily raising the question of indigenous artistic influences or survivals
after the conquest, a topic discussed and debated to this day. The most frequently used style
descriptive was a racial label, “mestizo,” meaning “of mixed race” (i.e., mixed indigenous and
European). It was first used in the 1940s by art historians Angulo and Wethey to characterize the
“mixed” style of colonial art (Angulo 1943; Wethey 1949; Black 2016). The term gained popu-
larity among art historians attempting to distinguish colonial cultural production from that cre-
ated in Spain (Kelemen 1951; Toussaint 1967). Spanish art historian José Moreno Villa
(1887–1955), who fled to Mexico in 1936 due to Spain’s civil war, proposed the term “tequitqui”
in 1941, Náhuatl for “one who pays tribute,” referring to artworks created by Native artists
under Spanish domination (Moreno Villa 1941, 1949). The term was crafted in imitation of the
Spanish style label “mudéjar,” from the Arabic word “mudajjan,” meaning “tamed” or “domesti-
cated” (Moffit 1999, 64). It was a convenient classification to describe art created by Native
artists under colonial rule, such as works produced under the direction of friars at missions. The
carved decoration of outdoor chapels, called “posa” chapels, as at the Franciscan site of Calpan,
Mexico, is typical.While the subject matter reflects Catholic iconographies, the execution of the
imagery preserves indigenous sculptural technique (Figure 18.1).
One of the earliest advocates for indigenous survival in the art of the Americas was German-
born art historian Alfred Neumeyer (1901–1973), who published a pathbreaking article in 1948
in The Art Bulletin, the flagship journal of the College Art Association (Neumeyer 1948).
Neumeyer, who earned his doctorate at the University of Berlin, was part of the wave of
German-Jewish refugees fleeing Europe in the 1930s, leaving Germany in 1935 for Mills
College in Oakland, California (New York Times 1973; Arts in Exile 2020). Neumeyer’s ground-
breaking article, “The Indian Contribution to Architectural Decoration in Colonial America,”
laid out an argument in favor of Native influence on colonial cultural production in both
Mexico and Peru. In addition to the term “mestizo,” he also used terms such as “syncretic” and
“admixture” to describe this art. He cautioned against comparing colonial art to Spanish, instead
contextualizing it in relation to other analogous hybrid or “fringe” cultures. In his estimation,
the art of the colonial Americas was similar to that produced in the Roman empire, Ireland, the
outskirts of Europe, Asia, and Africa.To Neumeyer, colonial art was folk art, an art of the people,
one that employed “mestizo,” or mixed style.
He also proposed a method by which to identify the unique nature of colonial art: systematic
comparison to European art, through which one could separate out stylistic particularities.
(Neumeyer 1948, 109).While the challenges and inherent bias of this comparative method seem
obvious today, Neumeyer’s approach fostered the identification of Native stylistic survivals, iden-
tified in sculpture and architectural ornament, including carved grooves, beveling, and incising;
a preference for flatness; the valuation of negative space, an appreciation of abstraction, and visual
complexity (Neumeyer 1948, 109–10).
Neumeyer’s early promotion of Native survivals in colonial art did not immediately find
support among other art historians. In fact, the next generation of scholars in this field took an
opposing point of view, articulated by Yale professor Kubler, one of the first people to train spe-
cialists in the arts of the colonial Americas in the US. In a much-quoted essay from 1961, “On
the Colonial Extinction of the Motifs of Pre-Columbian Art,” Kubler suggested that looking for
indigenous influences or survival was like “a search for the fragments of a deep-lying shipwreck,”
similar to performing an “autopsy” or “dissection of the corpse of a civilization” (Kubler 1961,
14–34). Whatever did manage to survive, he suggested, was absorbed into the dominant culture
and emptied of meaning, in the process becoming a tool of oppression (Kubler 1961, 15).
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Figure 18.1 Posa Chapel, Franciscan convent, founded 1548, Calpan, Puebla, Mexico.
Photo credit: Gianni Dagli Orti/The Art Archive of Art Resource, NY; reproduced by permission.
Notably, Kubler opposed the use of the popular style label “mestizo,” pointing to its “burden of
racial meaning,” preferring “tequitqui” in the case of Mexico or the designation of “folk art”
(Kubler 1961, 17).
Did the “mestizo” label carry with it an historical residue of adverse colonial stereotypes?
First used to describe people of mixed race in the Americas beginning around 1550, the term
carried a negative connotation throughout the colonial period (Forbes 1993). Did it influence
how colonial cultural production was viewed? Kubler proposed other terms (as noted above), as
well as “Indo-Hispanic.” Mexican researcher Constantino Valerio Reyes (1922–2006) suggested
“indocristiano” or “Indo-Christian” (Reyes-Valerio 1978). Scholars working on Andean art also
created new labels to describe a parallel stylistic mixture, including “ibero-andino,” “indo-peru-
ano,” “Hispano-indio,” and “criollo” (Mújica Pinilla 2016).
312
Not all art historians agreed with Kubler. Some argued that the use of the term “mestizo”
was an early attempt to recognize the unique qualities of Mexican art. For example, the eminent
Toussaint used it to refer to the “fusion” of Spanish and Indian, perhaps a precursor of such
words as “hybrid” to describe colonial cultural production. The author John McAndrew, in his
comprehensive study of sixteenth-century architecture in Mexico, used the term “mestizo” in a
similar manner (McAndrew 1965, 196–201). The label was still in common use among art his-
torians in the late twentieth century.
The ascendance of a related classification, that of “tequitqui,” accompanied the rise of “mes-
tizo” to prominence. First proposed by Moreno Villa in 1941, he employed the term “tequitqui”
to describe carved atrial crosses that preserved indigenous style. Mexican scholars, in particular,
have used the term “tequitqui” in an attempt to recognize the continued vitality of indigenous
artistic traditions after the conquest (Aguilar-Moreno 2005). Others, though, characterize
“tequitqui” art in demeaning tones, describing it as unoriginal, awkward, and stylized, albeit
delightful or charming (Wilder Weismann 1956b, 70; Early 2001, 33, 120). Such value judgments
suggest that Mexico’s indigenous artists were visually less literate than European ones. Arguably,
such scholarship also promotes a vision of the Spanish conquest as total and complete, leaving
little room for indigenous agency, resistance, or new colonial creation.
It is significant that the first scholars to propose “mestizo” as a stylistic descriptive were
Wethey and Angulo, who, as primarily Hispanists, were familiar with a similar dilemma in
Spanish art, that of a syncretic artistic tradition influenced by multiple outside sources. Indeed,
Spanish art does not fit easily into pre-established categories for European art. A preoccupation
with stylistic labeling continued to be a major concern in studies of Spanish art even into the
1980s and 1990s. Several leading Hispanists, from Jonathan Brown and Alfonso Pérez Sánchez to
the semiotician Victor Stoichita, have remarked upon the “eclectic,” “unoriginal” nature of
Spanish art. Svetlana Alpers, in her 1985 article on Las Meninas, proposed that Spanish art could
be defined by its unresolved, unsettling combination of the two conflicting modes of Italian and
Dutch representation (Alpers 1983, 31–42; Brown 1992, 1999; Pérez Sánchez 1992; Stoichita
1995, 7–9). A corollary to this idea of Spanish art as “eclectic” was an assumption of its inferior-
ity in comparison to Italian and French art (Brown 1991, 149). Because Spanish art was difficult
to categorize or seemed eclectic, it was therefore considered to be provincial, derivative, and
inferior. The prevailing view of Spanish art as a provincial stylistic mishmash easily transferred
across the Atlantic, to be applied readily to colonial cultural production, now mixed additionally
with indigenous visual traits. Kubler, in fact, described colonial art as “provincial” (Bailey, Phillips,
and Voigt 2009, 9).
These two opposing art historical positions—one advocating for indigenous survival and the
other convinced of its destruction by European conquest—structured much early scholarship
on colonial art. Historians were the first to document that indigenous cultures did not disappear
with European colonization, as noted by Klein (2002, 134, citing Gibson 1964; Adorno 1979,
1986; Lockhart 1992, 1993). Early studies of colonial manuscripts bridged the fields of pre-
Columbian and colonial art history (Robertson 1956, 1959; Bailey Waddell, 1972; Boone 1983,
1989). A number of Klein’s own art history graduate students at UCLA, initially trained as pre-
Columbianists, began to uncover and document the extent of indigenous survivals in the colo-
nial period. Important early studies of manuscripts, paintings, maps, and kero cups, among other
works, clearly demonstrated the extent of Native survivals in colonial art throughout the
Americas (Bailey Waddell 1972; Peterson 1985, 1993; Cummins 1988, 2002; Dean 1990, 1993;
Leibsohn 1993, 2009; Cortez 1996, 2002; Boone and Cummins 1998; Boone 2000). Jeanette
Favrot Peterson’s 1993 book on the Malinalco frescoes suggested that despite their status as
“subject peoples,” indigenous artists painted covert subversive codes in Catholic mission art. In a
313
postmodern twist, Thomas B. F. Cummins posited that we see Native presence in the seeming
absence of obvious influences in South American architecture, and specifically in the context of
Cuzco’s main plaza (Cummins 1996). Dana Leibsohn noted the multi-dialectical nature of colo-
nial pictorial languages in maps in sixteenth-century Mexico (Leibsohn 1996). AtYale University,
Barbara Mundy filed her dissertation investigating indigenous maps in sixteenth-century New
Spain, the first comprehensive study of the subject, later published as a book (Mundy 1993,
1996).1 Significantly, none of these scholars felt it necessary to marshal racialized language in
their work (Dean and Leibsohn 2003). Furthermore, and in opposition to the idea articulated in
Kubler’s 1961 article that likened indigenous culture to “a deep-lying shipwreck,” this new
scholarship sought to rejoin, not separate, the study of colonial and pre-Columbian material
cultures (Klein 2002, 134).
As a result of this new research, created under the influence of postcolonialism, a scholarly
and philosophical movement that sought to recognize the aftereffects of colonialism (Hall 1996;
see Maldonado-Torres in this volume), scholars pursued new terms to describe this unique
artistic production. The term “syncretic,” originating in religious studies, and first used in art
history by Neumeyer in 1948, became popular (Arroyo 2016, 140–1). Other scholars attempted
to understand colonial art through concepts such as acculturation or transculturation, the former
encoding assimilationist discourse and the latter highlighting cultural encounter as exchange
(Arroyo 2016, 133–44). Inspired by postcolonial theorists such as James Clifford, who stressed
the complexity of all cultural production, the term “hybrid” became fashionable. His counsel
that it is impossible to identify any pure “Indian-ness” after the point of cultural contact warned
scholars of the dangers of romantic longings for “authentic” Native cultures (Clifford 1988).
Others attempted to understand these works through concepts such as Homi Bhabha’s third
space or mimicry (Bhabha 1994), in an attempt to move past the assimilationist subtext of previ-
ous terms, including “hybrid,” which seemed to valorize Europeanness (Katzew 2011). Instead
of considering art made by indigenous makers during the colonial period as poor imitations of
European models, some art historians began to consider the possibility of camouflage or new
artistic inventions (Peterson 1993; Afanador-Pujol 2010, 293–307).
By about 2000, the term “hybrid” had emerged as a favorite. The prize-winning article
“Hybridity and Its Discontents,” authored by influential art historians Carolyn Dean and Dana
Leibsohn, critically assessed the usage of the term (2003). They suggested that the type of cul-
tural differences art historians are attuned to mattered little to colonial beholders. In fact, there
is little in the historical or archival record to suggest that colonial beholders were preoccupied
with deciphering indigenous, European, and/or Asian differences in artistic or cultural objects.
Finally, Dean and Leibsohn pointed to gaps in art historians’ usage of the term. What about
“invisible hybridity,” for example, when Native labor was used to construct a building but no
visible trace of that remains? Additionally, they suggested that current usage of “hybridity” by art
historians seems to reify differences between European and indigenous visual cultures. Their
critique zeroes in on how scholars have long searched for an essentialized “Indian-ness” to dis-
tinguish viceregal cultural production from Spanish art forms. More recently, the search has
begun for identifiable traces of Asian and African influences.
A fascinating example demonstrates the risks of this approach, namely, the art historical study
of the painter Juan Gerson, artist of the ceiling decoration in Tecamachalco, Mexico. Initially,
scholars were misled by the artist’s last name, thinking he was of Flemish descent. Not surpris-
ingly, they detected the influence of Flemish prints on his paintings. When someone uncovered
archival documents suggesting that the artist was indigenous, suddenly, art historians began to
observe the survival of pre-Columbian pictorial conventions (Camela Arredondo et al. 1964;
Landa Abrego 1992; Dean and Leibsohn 2003, 22) (Figure 18.2).
314
Figure 18.2 Juan Gerson (sixteenth century), Scenes from the Old and New Testament. Paintings by
Native artist, after 1562. Church and Franciscan monastery, founded in 1541. Tecamachalco,
Puebla, Mexico. © Giles Mermet/Art Resource, NY; reproduced by permission.
This search for an essentialized Indianness finds inspiration in studies of Spanish art, where
scholars have long been engaged in defining “Spanishness.” The practice is perfectly expressed
by Oskar Hagen, in his Patterns and Principles of Spanish Art, published in the 1940s (Hagen 1948).
His introduction maintains that: “The art of every nation is as thoroughly impregnated with
racial elements of expression as is its language. … the sum total of these racial elements, whether
they are encountered in the language or in the art of a nation, discloses an underlying national-
psychological disposition … ” (Hagen 1948, 4). The remainder of his book endeavors to define
the elusive Spanishness of Spanish art.
Raced discourses, of course, are not unique to the study of viceregal or Spanish art, and were
a prominent feature of the field of art history at its foundation, as analysis of Heinrich Wölfflin’s
1915 Principles of Art History demonstrates. Wölfflin’s treatise on Renaissance and Baroque art
attributed European stylistic differences to the “peculiarities of national imagination,” present in
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“the very blood” of its citizens” (Wölfflin 1950, 106).These differences were part of seeing itself,
as “the modes of vision are refracted by nationality” (Wölfflin 1950, 235). Thus, according to
Wölfflin, stylistic variation results from inherent, essential, biological differences between the
“races.” Not surprisingly, throughout the twentieth century and even today in the twenty-first,
discussions of artistic style have often been bound up with essentializing notions of race. Take
the example of Latin American and Latinx art, frequently described as colorful, emotional,
political, and exuberant, traits that align with racial stereotypes (Black 2019a, 6).
The connections between the historiographies of Spanish and Latin American colonial art
have escaped serious commentary, partly because of the disciplinary separation in the study of
Spain and the Americas. Colonial art provides a revealing historiographic case study because it
exists both inside and outside of the imagined boundaries of the “mother country.” Challenging
the traditional division between Europe and the “New World” provides one fruitful avenue for
future research (Black 2006). As postcolonial theorists have correctly insisted, colonialism did
not just occur in the colonies but also in the colonizing country. Scholars are looking beyond
the Native/European binary, though, to transatlantic and transpacific exchanges, considering the
influence of Asian and African arts and cultures in the Americas (Bailey, Phillips, and Voigt
2009, 15).The newest research, as exemplified by recent work on the eighteenth century, situates
colonial painting in the Americas within both global and regional contexts (Katzew 2017).
Finally, the debate over terminology has not been resolved. In the words of specialist Gauvin
Bailey, “scholars have increasingly acknowledged the difficulty of applying simple words like
mestizo or hybrid – although we have yet to come up with better terms …” (Bailey, Phillips, and
Voigt 2009, 15).
New developments in decolonial studies offer potentially fruitful paths, innovative avenues of
politically engaged scholarship that imagine a radical new future (Cohen-Aponte 2017).
Decolonial approaches challenge Eurocentrism, and Eurocentric notions of universality; they
make visible Michel Foucault’s history of power as they perform what Walter Mignolo has called
“epistemic disobedience” (Mignolo 2011, 122–23; Maldonado-Torres 2016 and in this volume).
Decolonial approaches also have a strong activist arm, rooted in indigenous rights movements,
in contrast to postcolonialism, which arguably primarily occurred in the academy (Smith 1999).
Mignolo’s call for “epistemic disobedience,” elaborated from postcolonial theorist Gayatri
Spivak’s “epistemic violence” (Spivak [1988] 2010) is particularly useful in the face of so-called
universality, helpful to unsettle art historical assumptions that some art is of higher quality than
other, or that scholars should respect national and chronological boundaries. It encourages an
approach to art history that dares to inquire into art history’s history, its discourses, its hidden
biases and agendas. A decolonizing approach to colonial art has the power to transform not just
the academy, but everyday lives.
The material turn and enconchados: a case study

During the recent “material turn” in the humanities of the 1990s and 2000s, scholars renewed
their attention to material objects and their actual physical make up or materiality.The “material
turn” was characterized as a reaction to digitalization by some. Bill Brown, known for his devel-
opment of “thing theory” in the late 1990s and early 2000s, suggested that an interest in things
was also a reaction against “theory.” He wisely warned, however, “Taking the side of things
hardly puts a stop to that thing called theory” (Brown 2001, 3; Miller 2005, 1–50; Rosler et al.
2013, 34, 15, 19).
Developments in the new field of “technical art history,” research based on collaborative and
interdisciplinary work among art historians, conservation scientists, and museum curators, also
316
fostered an interest in materiality, understood to mean the study of the materials of artworks,
identified by scientific techniques. In actuality, such work dates back to the 1920s. Edward
Forbes, at Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum, founded the first program in technical studies
in 1928—the Department for Conservation and Technical Research, known since 1994 as the
Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies. Interdisciplinary research began to
develop more rapidly in the wake of such scientific advances as infrared reflectography in the
1970s and dendochronology in the 1980s. In 1972, the National Gallery in London began pub-
lishing the National Gallery Technical Bulletin, featuring interdisciplinary, collaborative work.
These new interdisciplinary collaborations, and in particular those of technical art history, moved
materiality studies forward.
Materials can reveal considerable information about the conditions that surrounded an
object’s creation—trade, economics, and technology. How can art historians, historians, and
other scholars use this new technical knowledge to study the availability, selection, transport, and
creation of these newly identified materials? What can these materials tell us about how art-
works were created or how they produced meaning? What can we learn about the access to, and
distribution of, both materials and the resulting artworks? We test these questions, as well as the
challenges posed by the unique objects created in the colonial Americas, in a brief case study of
enconchados, unusual, hybrid, multimedia artworks created in New Spain (Mexico) during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Colonial enconchado paintings, hybrid objects that combine iridescent shell inlay with oil
painting on wood panel, illustrate the complexity of cultural genesis in the colonial Americas as
well as the benefits and limits of academic approaches to materiality.2 To date, art historians have
identified several hundred surviving examples from New Spain, or Mexico. Archival documents
identify names of some artists, most notably, members of the González family, as well as patrons,
including the viceroy, high-ranking creoles, and other elites. A number of important enconchados
were acquired by the Spanish court, including the 24 panel Conquest series possibly created for
King Carlos II (Madrid, Museo de América) (Ocaña Ruiz 2013, 129). Today, enconchados are
mostly found outside of Mexico, in European churches and collections in US museums. Much
about these artworks has baffled art historians—their origins, influences, and style.
Scholarship to date has concentrated on tracing the varied artistic influences at play in encon-
chados. Scholars have focused on the Asian roots of the Mexican enconchado technique of shell
inlay. Originating in China during the Song period (960–1127), mother-of-pearl inlay then
spread to Thailand, India, Japan, and Korea. An example from China—a sumptuous twelve-panel
screen, Spring Morning in the Han Palace, which dates from between 1662 and 1722 (Figure 18.3),
roughly contemporaneous with the Mexican enconchados—can be considered representative of
the technique. Constructed from wood, the screen is covered with black lacquer and embel-
lished with mother-of-pearl mosaic, crushed shell, and gold foil inlay (Leidy 2006, 9–50, espe-
cially 40–41). The artist or artists used iridescent shell to create all parts of the scene
represented—figures, architecture, and landscape elements.
Art historians have additionally noted very close and important links to Nanban objects,
Japanese export ware imported to New Spain via the Manila galleon, then often shipped to
Europe (Armella de Aspe et al. 1990, 12; Castelló Yturbide 1990, 140–2; Rivero Lake and
Vallarino 1997, 246; Rivero Lake 2005). Singling out Japanese influence on Mexican enconcha-
dos makes sense, given Spanish attempts to missionize, colonize, and conduct trade in Japan in
the early modern period (Bailey 2006, 57–69; Miyata Rodríguez 2009; Sanabrais 2009a, b).
Works in the style of “Nanban,” which translates as “southern barbarians,” referring to
Europeans, and specifically to the Portuguese and Spaniards, reflect a combination of European
and Asian artistic influences. Intended for use by missionaries or to be traded, typical Nanban
317
Figure 18.3 W
omen in the Palace, detail from Spring Morning in the Han Palace, Qing dynasty, Kangxi period
(between 1662 and 1722), 9 ft 4 5/8 × 24 ft 8 1/16 in. (286.1 × 752 cm). The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York, purchase, The Vincent Astor Foundation Gift, 2001.
works are made of lacquered wood, and include liturgical objects such as lecterns, portable
altars, furniture, and other decorative arts. Building upon the idea that Nanban art was the
major artistic source of inspiration for enconchados, recent research by Mexican art historian
Sonia Ocaña Ruiz draws on the material evidence of the artworks themselves, and in particu-
lar, their frames. The floral decoration of enconchado frames is strikingly similar to Nanban art
(Ocaña Ruiz 2009, 129).
These similarities notwithstanding, the major scenes themselves depart significantly from
Japanese Nanban or other Asian models, due to the privileging of both iridescence and reality
effects. The unique representational strategies devised by enconchado artists can be seen in exam-
ples created by Miguel and Juan González, the best-known masters of the genre, including
panels from the Conquest series, one of the best known and most closely studied sets of encon-
chados, as well as an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the most common sacred subject repre-
sented by enconchado artists (Armella de Aspe et al. 1990, 82) (Figures 18.4 and 18.5). These
works, like most other enconchados, selectively employ the mosaic technique.
Dated to around 1698 and signed by Miguel González, the Virgin of Guadalupe (Figure
18.4) (Katzew 2010) is framed by the standard four Guadalupan apparitions. The dove of the
Holy Spirit appears above Mary’s luminescent figure, balanced below by the symbol of the
founding of Tenochtitlan, an eagle on a cactus.This enconchado preserves its original frame, deco-
rated with symbols of the Immaculate Conception. In the main image, shell mosaic is used
selectively to render draperies, feathers, and architectural elements, typical of Mexican enconchado
artists. Similarly, in a panel from the Conquest series, dated 1698 and signed by both Juan and
318
Figure 18.4 M
iguel González, Virgin of Guadalupe, circa 1698, oil on canvas on wood with mother-of-
pearl inlay (enconchado), 49 × 37 in. (124.46 × 95.25 cm). Los Angeles County Museum of
Art, Los Angeles.
Miguel González (Vargaslugo 1994), shell is selectively employed to characterize the shiny
armor of the Spanish and Aztec soldiers (Figure 18.5).
Nanban and other Asian art seem to have been one source of inspiration for the enconchados
but the selective use of shell mosaic is different from the use of shell either only on frames or
consistently employed throughout the composition. Instead, viceregal Mexican artists selec-
tively used shell for strategic ends. In contrast to possible artistic sources of inspiration, shell is
almost never used for figures’ faces or bodies in enconchados, but most frequently for drapery, and
also to replicate metal, stone, flower petals, or feathers, as in the case of depictions of armor,
architecture, roses, or angels’ wings. In other words, in New Spain shell tended to be used to
319
Figure 18.5 M
iguel González and Juan González, Conquest Battle Scene, detail from The Conquest of Mexico,
1698, oil on canvas with cardboard and mother-of-pearl (enconchado), 80 4/5 × 48 in. (205 × 121
cm). Museo de América, Madrid. Album/Art Resource, NY.
320
replicate potentially shiny, iridescent materials. Thus, the use of mother of pearl is not solely
decorative, as in many of the Japanese Nanban works or other potential sources. This is a major
innovation by New Spanish artists. Furthermore, the color of the shell varies considerably in
Mexican enconchados, in contrast to most Asian examples of shellwork, the latter privileging
either luminous white pearl shell or naturally occurring iridescent pinks and greens. Mexican
enconchados demonstrate a greater variety of colors, due to the use of varying shells, but also to
the application of oil glazes and varnishes brushed over the mosaics. As a result, the shell inlay
helps further the creation of reality effects.
Asian art may not be the only influence at play here. Other sources for the use of shell may
also be pertinent. Shell mosaic has been used around the world from time immemorial to create
aesthetically pleasing objects. Enconchados may also be linked to shellwork in the indigenous
Americas and to Islamic-influenced and Indo-Portuguese artworks as well as European sources.
In the case of Mexican enconchados, the source of the shell was Mexico itself, specifically
the Pacific coast of Baja California, according to period sources, and possibly also the coast
near Oaxaca. Both were important pearl fishing areas. Shells, the discarded by-product of the
search for pearls, began to be sold to supplement income from the pearl fisheries in Mexico
as early as the seventeenth century (Black 2019b). The shell used in enconchado paintings
derives from Pinctada mazatlanica, also called La Paz pearl oyster, which is found in the eastern
Pacific from Baja California to Peru (Armella de Aspe et al. 1990, 22, 24; Landman and
Mikkelson 2001, 32–33).
In the case of enconchados, the prevalence of shell mosaic around the world and throughout
history, the scope of world trade, and the early modern movement of peoples and objects around
the globe render traditional comparative strategies of visual analysis inadequate to establish a
secure or convincing visual or chronological genealogy. Enconchados are thus both powerfully
global and profoundly local. They offer a fruitful case study precisely because of these
complexities.
The challenges of researching enconchados are similar to those presented in a recent study of
an altar cloth from San Miguel Tzinacantepec, Mexico, dating from the seventeenth or eigh-
teenth century (Tepotzotlan,Viceregal Museum) (Russo 2014, 1–15). Similar to the multimedia
composite structure of enconchados, this cotton altar cloth combines various artistic traditions and
contains a perplexing array of iconography and decorative elements crafted from feathers. Its
style, iconography, and even its date have challenged art historians’ attempts to unlock its secrets.
Is it indigenous, or derived from European popular art? Russo’s suggestion of “untranslatable”
as a label to categorize such objects seems apropos. Influenced by Aby Warburg’s theorization of
“difficult objects,” Russo borrowed the term from French philosopher and philologist Barbara
Cassin, who writes, “to speak of untranslatable does not signify that these terms … are not or
cannot be translated—the untranslatable is rather what one never stops (not) translating” (Cassin
2004, xvii; Warburg 2004 [1923], 293–330; Russo 2014, 6). Russo proposes this new qualifier,
“untranslatable,” as a corrective to the current vocabularies used for colonial art, which she
rightly deems inadequate (Russo 2014, 6).
Can a focus on the materiality of enconchados, on their shiny amalgamated surfaces, created
from shell, oil pigments, and colored varnishes, help us move beyond the impasse of untranslat-
ability? Indeed, their iridescent surfaces inspire us to rethink art historians’ quests for ultimate
visual precedents, neatly articulated genealogies, and definitive artistic sources. Instead, what can
a focus on surfaces tell us about such early modern artifacts? Can they help propose a new way
to think about early modern art and globalization?
It seems impossible to completely identify the complex network of sources that inspired the
creation of Mexican enconchados. No art historical language seems to exist to explain the genesis
321
of these objects. Like Russo’s altar cloth, the origins of these artworks can be situated in multiple
locales and temporalities; such works demonstrate that it is impossible at times to use style to
trace an object’s origins. Furthermore, to describe enconchados as “hybrid” seems inappropriate if
we retain the term’s original political sense of describing objects that employ visual tactics to
oppose colonization, that is, strategies of indigenous agency (Dean and Leibsohn 2003, 5, 7–9,
13–15). The current use of “hybrid,” focused on indigenous-European mixtures, also skirts the
complexity of the potential sources here.
The complexity of the genesis of enconchados, and the challenge of explaining their creation,
led us to Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, which employs the great mathemati-
cian Leibniz’s theories of folds, pleats, curves, twisting surfaces, curvature, and movement as a
model for thinking about the world (1993). Folds, pleats, and curves represent ideas that cannot
be pinned down, that do not constitute straight lines, concepts that muddle separation—analogs
to the enconchado paintings. Such an approach, one could argue, also exerts its interpretive ener-
gies on the surface, eschewing the “depth” of traditional art history, by which we mean attempts
to pinpoint sources, or identify artists’ intent. Instead of attempting to isolate “sources” for the
enconchados or identify the ethnicity of the artists, this chapter has chosen to focus on the encon-
chados’ surfaces of iridescent shell, their scintillating reflections and glinting highlights.
Embracing a different viewpoint—the surface—allows us to relinquish the impulse to identify
cause, intent, or origin.
The fabrication of enconchados in New Spain—with so many potential sources of inspiration,
so many layers—shows how the early modern world was folded; how all was folds, unfolds, and
refolds; how the whole world was connected; how time and space can become compressed.
Enconchados, then, have the potential to deterritorialize art history, to shrink the early modern
world. As such, they provide a new model for thinking about what has been called globalism
before globalization, to paraphrase a roundtable discussion convened by the journal October in
2010 (Yiengpruksawan et al. 2010).
Concluding thoughts: colonial archives

The “archival turn” of the 1990s inspired critical inquiry into what constitutes an “archive”
(Simon 2002, 102). Despite the fact that when one thinks of “archives,” official documents
guarded in government buildings come to mind, various collections, objects, and practices can
comprise an archive. Protests, performances, and other events constitute alternative archives
(Taylor 2003). Material objects, which leave tangible traces of the past, function as an archive,
acting as primary data or even constituting “surviving historical events” (Prown 1982, 3). The
best-known archives utilized by scholars working on the colonial Americas are those compiled
and created by the colonizers. Indigenous archives, on the other hand, while including written
documents and material objects, also include ancestral knowledge passed down orally and
through embodied actions; they present a differing point of view (Smith 1999;Terraciano 2010).
In the face of assumptions about the truth value of documents or archives, Michel Foucault
(1925–1984) reminds us that “discourse has not only a meaning or truth, but a history.” (Foucault
1972 [1969], 125). An archive represents “the law of what can be said,” that which defines enun-
ciability, that which we regard as knowledge. Scholarship benefits from attempts to glimpse its
structure, origin, and biases (Foucault 1972 [1969], 125–29). As an alternative to the flawed
notion of positivism, and its suppositions of objective truth, Foucault offered “positivity,” or
what he called the “historical a priori” (Foucault 1972 [1969], 125–29). What is possible to
regard as documentation, knowledge, or facts given the borders of a particular episteme or defi-
nition of truth?
322
A new study of the Archivo General de Indias (Seville, Spain), the major archive for the early
Americas, has linked its creation to the invention of the idea of “Latin America” in the second
half of the eighteenth century. The Archive of the Indies was created by dismembering already
existing archives in Spain, a process that helped separate Spain from the Americas in the political
imagination. Thus, its creation coincided with the emergence of the notion of coloniality
(Hamann 2018).
Similarly, Cecelia F. Klein has documented the partitioning of the fields of pre-Columbian
and colonial art history by surveying publications on Mexico since the sixteenth century,
twentieth-century museum exhibitions, and course offerings at US universities. Before the
mid-nineteenth century, texts written on Mexico’s past did not separate the ancient from the
colonial world, instead joining the two together in historical continuum (Klein 2002, 131).The
terms “pre-Columbian, pre-Hispanic, and colonial” did not appear until the mid-nineteenth
century (Klein 2002, 132).This nomenclature was firmly in place in academe by the 1960s. She
interprets the move “as a largely conservative, if not reactionary, political strategy that has fos-
tered an historical impression of pre-Columbian peoples as culturally uniform and static”
(Klein 2002, 131). Klein has further argued that the two time periods were separated in order
to cast colonial as “pre-Modern” and Western (Klein 2002, 133–34). Similarly, Néstor García
Canclini has demonstrated the linkage between the indigenous and the “folk,” or “the people”
(el pueblo) in nineteenth-century Mexico. The staging of this notion of “the people” as a
group “fatally rooted in tradition,” was central to the emergence of nationalism in nineteenth-
and twentieth-century Mexico (García Canclini 1995, 145).
In line with Foucault, Klein reminds us of the difficulties of describing our own archive,
because we are conditioned by its rules (Klein, 2002, 130). But for all the difficulties and chal-
lenges of scholarship, and for all the problems in studying archives or materiality, documents,
objects, or practices, investigating the past is a valuable endeavor. Knowledge of history can help
us in the contemporary moment, by providing strategies to combat current and future chal-
lenges. Which histories are authorized and who is empowered to narrate them?
Notes
1 Other dissertations on colonial art defended before the 1990s at Yale include Barbara Anderson (1973);
Thomas Reese (1974); and Humberto Rodríguez-Camilloni (1981); all cited in Completed Dissertations–
Yale University Department of the History of Art. Because these were not primarily concerned with indig-
enous survivals in colonial art, they are not discussed in the text.
2 This section is drawn from conference papers I have given on enconchados in Zurich, University of
Zurich (2012); Mexico City, Franz Mayer Museum (2013); the Getty Research Institute (2014); and
UC Riverside (2014). See Villaseñor Black (2019b).
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19
PORT CITIES AS SITES OF
SPATIAL KNOWLEDGE IN
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY
SPANISH AMERICA
Mariselle Meléndez
In the field of colonial Latin America, space has served as a critical tool to approach the diverse
ways in which individuals interacted with others on a daily basis.1 Circumscribed spaces such as
the convent, casa de recogimientos or brotherhoods and more open spaces such as the street or the
ocean have helped us to understand how identity and spatial constructions came to define the
way in which colonial Spanish America was conceived as a fluid space of contact and how its
inhabitants envisioned themselves within the spaces in which they actively lived. In particular,
and as I have stated elsewhere, geography has always played a central role in the many narratives
that emerged about the Americas from the perspective of chroniclers, cosmographers, and car-
tographers as well as colonial authorities (Meléndez 2009). Indeed, space still represents a pro-
ductive analytical tool to think about the diverse political and cultural dimensions that defined
colonialism in the Americas.
This chapter examines the relevance that geographic space had in the eighteenth century
when thinking about cultural and political interactions in the Americas. Taking into consider-
ation Joseph L. Scarpaci’s statement that “Spain’s geography of conquest and empire relied
squarely upon forts and ports” (2011, 98), my analysis is centered on how colonialism operated
through the particular site of the port that as a central eighteenth-century contact zone, facili-
tated flows of information, policies, material goods and people. In particular, I look at ports and
port cities as regions of transoceanic engagement in which ideas were formed and circulated. In
addition, I pay particular attention to how in some instances race and social relationships in the
frontier became part of the discursive envisioning of the port. Following Henri Lefebvre’s dis-
cussion of “spatial practice,” I discuss the role that the visual and written envisioning of the port
cities played in the European and colonial imaginaries of the late colonial period. With “spatial
practice” Lefebvre refers to the manner in which an individual “propounds and presupposes”
society’s space in an attempt to master and appropriate it, while also deciphering it (1998, 38).
In the case of the texts analyzed here, this spatial practice is discursive in nature and is deeply
rooted in continuous attempts to envision the port as a space that can potentially be mastered.
Geographically, the chapter will center on five South American ports: Cartagena de Indias,
Callao, Guayaquil, Buenos Aires, and Montevideo. The following questions will guide my dis-
cussion: Why is it relevant to look at ports as sites of local and global contact? How, through the
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Port cities: sites of spatial knowledge
written and visual representation of ports, was coloniality shaped and sustained? To what extent
did ports as spaces and places enable us to critically understand the ways in which Spanish
America was viewed, understood, and discursively produced to the rest of the world? Among
the primary texts to be discussed are government accounts, legal documents, and cartographic
representations pertaining to the late eighteenth century, in which the port is envisioned as a
space in need of management and control due to its transient nature in which individuals come
and go on a daily basis. In sum, I contend that through the written and visual representation of
ports, coloniality, as a constitutive part of modernity, was shaped and sustained.2
The spatial nature of ports

In the eighteenth century, the word “puerto” was understood as “a secure area guarded from
wind, where ships can safely enter and find shelter from storms” (Diccionario de autoridades 425).3
The port was originally thought of as a safe place because it protected ships from strong winds
and storms, serving as a haven against danger. Metaphorically speaking, it also meant asylum,
protection, and shelter. Physically, ports referred to bays, coves, inlets, recesses of seas or lakes, or
the mouth of a river where ships could enter safely (Webster’s Universal Dictionary of the English
Language 1282). The word came from the Latin “portus, a portando” implying that through
ports, goods and merchandise are brought to the mainland (Tesoro De La Lengua Castellana 1381).
There is a legal aspect to this view of the port, given that in law, a port was conceived as “a
place where persons and merchandise are allowed to pass into and out of a country; a place
where there is a constant resort of vessels for the purpose of loading and unloading with provi-
sion made by the government of the country for enabling them to do so” (Webster’s Universal
Dictionary of the English Language 1282). Indeed, in Book III, Title Seven, Law iii of Recopilación
de las Leyes de los Reynos de las Indias (RLI), the Crown demanded that colonial governmental
authorities “pay special attention and care to the prevention of risk and defense of the Ports.”4
Furthermore, in Law ii of the same book, the Crown demanded that viceroys, captains, and
governors of the Indies not allow any individual to “produce plans or descriptions” of the ports
without governmental consent.5 Ships were also prohibited from entering or leaving the ports
at night without governmental consent (Book III, Title VI, Law xiiii). Spanish authorities per-
ceived ports as places that needed to be constantly surveilled, given that through them people
and goods were in constant movement. This fluidity challenged the colonial authorities’ wishes
to control the ports and contributed to the emergence of the port as a spatial practice centered
on ideas of management and control.
In the preface to Atlantic Port Cities, Philip D. Curtin suggests that there are two ways of study-
ing the history of ports; one is by looking at the relationship between port cities and their hin-
terlands, and the second, by focusing on the cultural and social relationships that emerge among
“groups of people within the city itself ” (1991, xi). Although these constitute two ways in which
we can understand the historical, economic, political, and social character that made ports such
fascinating places, there are certainly other ways to understand the significance of ports as sites of
spatial knowledge. With spatial knowledge I refer to the critical thinking of the port as a space
and place. Taking into consideration the boom and decline that some ports suffered in the eigh-
teenth century as a result of changes in the Atlantic commerce system,6 it would be appropriate
to examine how ports and port cities which were active and successful during the early European
Atlantic expansion, such as Callao or Cartagena de Indias, envisioned their decline in spatial
terms. Conversely, it would also be very productive to see the process in reverse, by studying how
colonial authorities and local individuals envisioned ports and port cities that experienced an
economic growth in the eighteenth century, such as Buenos Aires and Montevideo. In the
329
Mariselle Meléndez
following pages, I am interested in examining the written and visual constructions of those ports
which endured an economic and social decline in comparison to those who enjoyed a boom in
“free trade” and those which were trying to find an active place within the free trade such as the
case of the port city of Guayaquil. We must take the word “free” lightly because as Gabriel B.
Paquette argues, “Far from ‘free’ to both the merchants who paid steep customs duties and the
majority of Spaniards who remained excluded altogether from transoceanic commerce, the
reformers sought to protect the ultramarine economy from foreign interference in order to
expand the benefits derived from imperial trade for the Crown” (2011, 104).
Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss have argued that “ports constituted the core of intel-
lectual as well as material life. Ideas generally travelled with merchants and their goods” (1991,
7–8). However, how does one envision a space and place characterized by fluidity and the con-
stant fluctuation of people and goods? How do ideas originate, change, and transform? Did
colonial authorities, foreigners, and local inhabitants envision the ports and their cities in the
same way? To address some of these questions I would like to focus on the case of the ports of
Cartagena de Indias and Callao, which enjoyed great success up to the eighteenth century and
compare them to the ports of Santa María de Buenos Aires and Montevideo, which in the eigh-
teenth century witnessed more political attention. In the midst of this development, we find the
case of the port city of Guayaquil, which was trying to become more active in commercial trade
as a result of the 1778 Tratado de Libre Comercio. All of these ports share a significant presence of
the black population as a result of the high number of African slaves that arrived there as part of
the slave trade and as a source of labor.7 This in itself shaped and defined the social and cultural
interactions that took place in these ports and that I believe are crucial to understand the type
of coloniality that emerged there.
Re-envisioning ports: containing chaos, disorder, and freedom

In the second half of the eighteenth century, and as a result of the 1778 Tratado de Libre Comercio,
colonial authorities increased their efforts to monitor and control human and commercial
movement into new official ports of entry.8 In the case of South America, the Port of Callao was
no longer considered the official port of entry but rather one of many from which commercial
exchange could be conducted. The same applied to the Port of Cartagena de Indias, which
functioned as a “junction” in the trade and communication between Spain and Peru (Grahn
1991, 170). Furthermore, one must take into consideration that since the second half of the
seventeenth century, “a perceptible shift” affected the commercial relevance of well-established
ports, such as Callao and Cartagena, while the attention and significance of Mexican-Caribbean
ports increased (Knight and Liss 1991, 4). If prior to 1778, colonial authorities were confronted
with the challenge of securing the two main South American ports, what then happens when
other ports officially and legally open their coasts to free trade? It is important to consider how
the notion of the port as a space and place is perceived among those competing for access to free
trade. As I will demonstrate, Spanish authorities and local colonial authorities tried to control
the anxiety, risks, and chaos that the official opening of the coasts brought to their government.
This was reflected by their interest in strengthening their military efforts, their desire to control
the entry of foreigners to the ports and port cities, and their attempts to limit the freedom of
local merchants in conducting open trade.
A Royal Decree issued in July 1791 captures the desperate attempt of royal authorities in trying
to control the influx of foreigners entering and residing in the port cities. The decree aimed to
secure the “well-being and tranquility of the State.”9 In trying to fix what had become a chaotic
space, the king imposed strict rules as to how to prosecute the foreigners who were populating the
330
port and its adjacent areas and that were threatening the “tranquility” of his kingdoms. The king
states, “it is imperative that the status of foreigners residing in my kingdoms be clearly determined
without misrepresentation, differentiating the temporary residents from the permanent residents”
(Real cedula de S.M. y señores del consejo).The authorities were very concerned about the temporary
residents who remained in the port cities with no official permit, as this population had grown
with the opening of new ports to free trade.The main goal was to require all foreigners to register
as temporary residents to better distinguish them from those who had been granted residency and
to prevent the former from enjoying the privileges given to residents in order to avoid the “dire
consequences” [“fatales consecuencias”] of having illegal foreigners living permanently in the port
cities. The king asked colonial authorities to keep an official list of all foreigners living in the port
cities, including their “homeland, religion, trade or destination, and the purpose of their residency”
in the territories. He was very emphatic about examining every foreigner who arrived in the ports:
“the licenses and passports of those who arrive in the ports and places of commerce will be exam-
ined, and entry from elsewhere will be prohibited without the express consent of the Royal
License” [se examinaran las licencias y pasaportes con que vengan algunos a los puertos y plazas de
comercio, y se impedira la entrada por otras partes sin expresa Real Licencia] (Real cedula de S.M.
y señores del consejo). Authorities were required to interview foreigners and question whether they
were interested in remaining as temporary residents or if they wanted to apply for residency. The
latter implied having to become a subject of the Crown and to profess the Catholic faith:
Permanent residents must be Catholic and swear loyalty to the religion and to my sover-
eignty before the law.They must renounce foreign law and any relation, union, or depen-
dence to their Country of birth, promising not to use its protection nor that of its
ambassadors, ministers, or consuls
[los avencidados deberan ser Catolicos, y hacer juramento de fidelidad a la religion, y a mi

soberania ante la justicia, renunciando a todo fuero de extranjeria, y a toda relacion, union
y dependencia del Pays en que hayan nacido, y prometiendo no usar la protección de el
ni de sus embajadores, ministros o consules].
(Real cedula de S.M. y señores del consejo)
Failure to comply resulted in being sent to the galleys or expelled from the American territories.
Those who requested temporary residency were prohibited from taking on jobs that entailed
financial benefits:
they may neither practice the Liberal Arts nor artisanal work in these kingdoms with-
out proof of residency. Consequently, they may not become merchants…nor any type
of retail vendor, tailor, seamstress, hairdresser, or shoemaker. They may not become
doctors, surgeons, or architects, unless they obtain a license or by my explicit mandate.
This prohibition also means that temporary residents may not become the servants or
dependants of any vassal or subject of mine in these kingdoms.
[que no pueden ejercer las Artes Liberales, ni oficios mecanicos en estos reinos sin avecin-
darse, y por consecuencia no pueden ser mercaderes de vara, ni vendedores por menor de
cosa alguna, sastres, modistas, peluqueros, zapateros, ni medicos, cirujanos, arquitectos, &c,
a menos que preceda licencia o mandato expreso mio; comprendiendose en esta prohibi-
cion la de ser criados y dependientes de vasallos y subditos mios en estos dominios.]
(Real cedula de S.M. y señores del consejo)
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Mariselle Meléndez
To hold these jobs, foreigners were required to obtain an official license and they were only
granted residency for two months. The rules also applied to all foreigners seeking refuge or
shelter. The king ordered no exception to these rules. It is clear that ports were viewed as those
places where most vigilance had to be observed. The spatial fluidity that characterized them
made it very difficult to keep track of every entry and departure made by individuals. Ironically,
the decree did not make any reference as to how the Crown was going to facilitate these poli-
cies, other than stressing the responsibility of the local government authorities as the enforcers
of these rules.
Taking into consideration the commercial nature of the ports, it was important for the
Spanish authorities to regulate every aspect of the negotiations that took place there. This had
to contend with the fact that local authorities found it extremely difficult to control the constant
threat of foreigners wanting to attack the ports and their cities. Colonial authorities in the ports
of Callao, Cartagena de Indias, Guayaquil, Santa María de Buenos Aires, and Montevideo made
it clear to Spanish authorities that the security of the ports represented a constant challenge and
caused fear and anxiety. For example, the viceroy of the Nuevo Reino de Granada, Dn. Josef de
Ezpeleta, expressed these concerns to the King in 1796 in his Relación del gobierno del Exmo. Sor.
Dn. Josef de Ezpeleta en este Nuevo Reino de Granada.10 In a section on “fortification and artillery,”
Ezpeleta acknowledges the impossibility of completely and effectively protecting the coastal
areas of the ports and their surroundings. He states:
If one considers the fortifications as the defense and stronghold of the Kingdom,
attempts should be made to establish them according to the expanse of the coasts and
in the multitude of docks that appear across them. One’s imagination would be amazed
to envision a project so disproportionate and difficult to execute, and even if it were
possible to achieve, it would be impossible to procure the necessary troops for such
extensive garrisons nor fortune to maintain them.
[Si consideradas las fortificaciones como defensa y antemural del Reyno, se hubiese de
tratar de establecerlas a proporción de lo que dilatan sus costas y de la multitud de
surgideros que franquean, asombraia hasta la imaginación de un proyecto tan desmesu-
rado y de tan difícil ejecución y aun cuando fuese posible conseguirlo, no lo seria el
tener la tropa necesaria para tan extendidas guarniciones ni caudal para mantenerlas.]
(Ezpeleta 1989, 294)
Viceroy Ezpeleta considers the coastal areas, including the port city of Cartagena, as a space that
is impossible to protect and manage and one that is under constant threat.The physical construc-
tion of a wall is viewed as a project so excessive and difficult that its execution would be nearly
impossible. The open nature of the coasts challenged any attempt to contain them, as these
spaces were characterized by their porous, fluid, and dynamic nature.The attempts to turn them
into secure places or safe havens were truly illusory. Ezpeleta listed the reasons for this impossi-
bility: “The greatest defense from invaders found on these coasts and frontiers stems from their
bad temperament11 and lack of population and resources” (Ezpeleta 1989, 294). Environmental
challenges and a lack of man power and resources, made the notion of a protected space an
impossible task. To this, he added that the deterioration and outdated fortifications of the port
city, despite the renovations made in 1786, were insufficient to defend it. He himself engaged in
the expensive work of closing the bay entrance of Bocagrande and invested 10,000 pesos annu-
ally in maintaining the only open entrance to the port, Bocachica, from which sand brought to
the entrance by the ocean current represented a constant problem (see Figure 19.1). Ezpeleta
332
Figure 19.1 Plano de Cartagena de Yndyas (1790) by Juan de Mota. Library of Congress.
demonstrates his frustration with the natural elements when he says that the efforts in Bocachica
“will be in vain in the future, as it seems that the forces of Nature would conquer art’s efforts”
(Ezpeleta 1989, 295). The viceroy stresses the impossibility of achieving total control of the
physical contours of the port as the port was itself at the mercy of nature (Figure 19.1).
Ezpeleta proceeded to detail the money he had invested in the dredging of the channel, the
improvements made to the fortifications during his tenure, the ships he had brought in to defend
the port, and the campaign to clean up Bocachica. He was also able to establish more bastions,
such as Santa Clara and La Cruz, and to close the northern part of the plaza. To this, he added a
long list of things that still needed to be done, such as the construction of walls around the
neighborhood of Getsemani and the repairs to specific fortresses and bastions strategically
located around Cartagena de Indias. Ezpeleta’s Relación underlines the challenges faced in the
transformation of coastal spaces into port areas, which were and still are, by nature, characterized
by their openness. In order to secure the port, it was paramount to secure the open space of the
sea. As Philip E. Steinberg indicates, after the arrival of the Europeans in the Americas, the sea
“shifted from being a space of mysterious danger to being a space without nature, impossible but
also remarkable” (2001, 105). Consequently, the port as a space and place suffered the constant
threat entailed in the openness that surrounded it. As Mario Hernández Sánchez-Barba argues,
“the enormous area to monitor and the extreme lack of population in the coastal territories,
resulting in large empty spaces,” made the efficient protection of the ports and their coastal areas,
and their defense against foreign attackers impossible (1992, 234).
Authorities in the Audience of Quito described similar challenges when protecting the port
from foreign attacks. In a document entitled, “Relacion que expresa el numero y estado de
Baterias, Puentes y obras de Fortificacion, que se hallan en esta Plaza segun reconocimiento ante
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mi y testigos, por los Maestros nombrados del efecto del dia 12 del presente mes” dated April
1790, a colonial representative named Gabriel de Labayen described the poor state of the port.12
With regard to the battery of San Carlos, located in the port, Labayen explains:
Its state is in absolute need and requires immediate repair to avoid total ruin…the
foundation is poorly built and its struts are built with mangrove, a type of lumber that
is never used for such objectives due to the ease with which it rots]
[“Su estado es de una necesidad absoluta y pronta de atender a su reparo para evitar la
total ruina…su piso por estar mal construido, y sus riostras ser de mangle, madera que
nunca se destina para semejante objeto por su facil corrupción se hallan ya entera-
mente podridas y confundidas con la misma tierra.”]
(1790, Milicias, Expediente 1, Archivo Histórico
Nacional de Ecuador (AHNE)
Labayen describes the port as a ruined space that, due to its poor construction, now finds itself
in a rotten state. Indeed, this part of the port’s fortification is found to be totally useless due to
its corrupted condition. He adds that these struts are found to be entirely rotten and in such a
state that they are not stable enough to be used. He draws attention to the poor state of its roof
and the constant water leaks that have rotted the floors. Because of this, all of the beams are rot-
ten as well.The reason why Labayen deemed it important to let colonial authorities know about
the debilitating state of this particular post is because this battery was a strategic point from
which to protect the access to the Río Daule, one of the main rivers bordering the coastal city.
Two years later, another document was drafted by the Commander and Captain of Militia of
Guayaquil, Juan Manuel Benítez y Tabarez, to the President of the Highest Royal Court in 1792.
The document, “Instruccion particular que deven observar los dependientes del Resguardo del
Puerto y Provincia de Guayaquil,”13 underscores the apprehensions expressed by colonial
authorities in their attempts to control the port and its adjacent areas. For example, Instruction
No. 16 stated that for every ship that arrived at port, there should be an official assigned to watch
over the ships’ arrivals, “prohibiting those aboard from unloading any cargo, personal effect, pas-
senger, or crew member while in transit. Once the ship is docked, only the master of the ship
may provide the registry, and after thorough examination, may disembark” [“sin permitir que se
desembarque en el transito ningun equipaje, ni efecto alguno, pasajero, ni empleado en este
buque, solo el Maestre que podra venir con el registro, y estando dado fondo observara la misma
orden hasta pasarle visita”] (1792, Milicias, Expediente 14, AHNE). Even the ships with official
licenses were monitored closely due to the fear of smuggling illegal goods or people. It was
considered paramount to keep social order in place by monitoring who came into the port city.
In this regard, the fifth instruction stipulated that “as long as the dependent is stationed to guard
the Port, Customs, the landing dock and the shipyard, he will not allow the close proximity of
gambling, music, or general uproar and will maintain all possible order” (1792, Milicias,
Expediente 14, ANHE). The area adjacent to the port had to be physically clear of any social
gathering to avoid any disturbances that could jeopardize the safety of the port. Once again, the
port as a space and place was envisioned as one in which the comings and goings of certain
people had the potential to contribute to chaos and disorder.
Nevertheless, colonial authorities in Guayaquil were fully aware of the impossibility of main-
taining total control of the coastal areas surrounding the port. In an addendum to the
“Instruccion,” Juan Manuel Benítez y Tabarez added that the proposal to surround the port city
“with stakes” was ineffective, not only due to its cost but also because even if “the Plazas are
334
surrounded by a protective wall” they “are not exempt from contraband, and that it is still neces-
sary to have subjects stationed as guards to protect against illicit activities” (1792, Milicias,
Expediente 14, ANHE).14 Again, the port city is perceived as a space that is impossible and costly
to protect in its entirety, as it requires the physical presence of strongholds and of many people
to guard it. Nevertheless, Benítez y Tabarez made clear that efforts to enforce security should not
stop, as if properly in place these instructions had the potential to contribute to a manageable
control of the port and its adjacent areas.
In Relación de gobierno del Excmo. Señor Virrey del Perú, Fray Don Francisco Gil de Taboada y
Lemos, presentada à su succesor el Excmo. Señor Baron de Vallenari. Año de 1796, Taboada y Lemos
expressed similar concerns, as he viewed the Port of Callao and its adjacent coastal areas as dif-
ficult spaces to manage. The viceroy wrote his Relación as a guide to his successor, underscoring
that his tenure from 1790 to 1796 could be considered “the most calamitous time period of the
World” (1859, 303). His account was based on both his own experiences governing the viceroy-
alty and on the many “geographic maps” he studied. He refers to the Port of Callao and its
adjacent capital of the kingdom, Lima, as the “global warehouse of the kingdom” due to the fact
that prior to the 1778 Tratado de Libre Comercio, Callao was considered the official port of South
America (1859, 106). For Taboada y Lemos, protecting the port and the coastal areas was para-
mount to the happiness and order of the viceroyalty, or as he called it, “the true happiness of the
State” (1859, 304). Indeed, for the former viceroy, the “increased number of ports, coves, and
docks” running north to south were considered “the key to the entire Kingdom [of Peru]”
(1859, 305–306). For Taboada y Lemos, ports had to be valued as spaces that were key to the
commercial, political, and social prosperity of the kingdom. Of course, the potential stability of
the ports was constantly threatened by foreign powers due to Spain’s military battles against
other European nations such as England and France. According to Taboada y Lemos, the Pacific
Ocean had ceased to be considered dangerous to the British forces “since the English are no
longer scared of the dangers of the Pacific Sea” (1859, 306). At the time, the coastal areas from
Peru to Chile were viewed as some of the most difficult terrain to navigate due to their rocky
nature and strong ocean currents.
In the chapter entitled,“Plan de defensa de las costas del Peru, proporcionado à lo despoblado
de ellas, escaseces de tropas y otras varias circunstancias actuales,” Taboada y Lemos underscored
the challenges of adequately protecting the ports and coastal areas. He commented, “The extent
of the coasts’ desertion and their impressive width requires an infinite number of troops, impos-
sible to establish, in order to maintain these lands” (1859, 321). For him, the expanse and lack of
population of the extensive coast made the protection of the rest of the country impossible.The
Port of Callao was insufficient to secure the safety of the hinterland and its population from the
intrusion of foreigners, especially due to its poor state. In this sense, the port itself fell short in
fulfilling the military protection of the kingdom as the “500 leagues of coast” were too much to
protect (1859, 350). For Taboada y Lemos, what happened in the coastal areas had significant
repercussions on the safety of the hinterland. Although he was concerned with Callao’s ability
to protect the capital city of the viceroyalty in Lima, it was the matter of the hinterland which
occupied most of his concerns.15
In his efforts to draw attention to the improved defense of the coasts in order subsequently to
protect the interior,Taboada y Lemos sent a map to the king that visually delineated the openness
of those coasts and their intrinsic connection to the interior. The map was executed in 1792 by
the cartographer Andrés Baleato and entitled “Plano del Virreynato del Perú. Arreglado á algunas
observaciones astronómicas y varios Planos particulares de las Yntendencias y Partidos que com-
prehende. Hecho de orden del Exmo. S.Virrey Fr. Dn. Francisco Gil y Lemos” (Figure 19.2). The
map was ordered by Virrey Fr. Dn. Francisco Gil de Taboada y Lemos. It was first published in
335
Mariselle Meléndez
336
Figure 19.2 “ Plano delVirreynato del Perú.Arreglado á algunas observaciones Astronómicas y varios Planos particulares de lasYntendencias y Partidos que comprehende”
(1792) by Andrés Baleato. Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid.
“Discurso preeliminar en que se manifiesta el Patrimonio y recursos del Perú, con las demás
aptitudes que reconoce para el Comercio” and later published by Joseph Hipólito Unanue in his
Guía política, eclesiástica y militar del Virreynato del Perú para el año 1793. The bottom of the map
delineated the coast of the viceroyalty by visually highlighting its length from north (left of the
map) to south (right of the map), including entrances to rivers and even small islands such as Isla
de Lobos in the north and Isla Blanca in the south, known later as part of the Guano Islands.
Within the image, the ocean area was littered with names of coastal regions connected to the
mainland through fluvial systems which were easily delineated on both sides of the map to better
understand its connection to the interior.Taboada y Lemos recreates this imagery in his account,
while also emphasizing those strategic points where security should be implemented through the
presence of “Commanding Generals of the Coast.” Even the creeks and springs adjacent to the
coast had to be monitored; this is why they are prominently depicted on the map.These generals
were to be stationed in the ports where they would learn about “the ports, docks, and beaches
where enemies could disembark, and the paths that led from the coast to the provinces in the
mainland” (1859, 328).What I find most fascinating about the map and Taboada y Lemos’ Relación
is the insistence on envisioning the ports and coastal areas as spaces which, by nature, presented
great challenges to the kingdom. For him, the outer and inner areas were intrinsically connected
and both deserved equal military attention, even if the coastal areas functioned as the faces of the
regions. The map draws attention to this dynamic by representing the fluvial arteries accompa-
nied by words in an attempt to visually connect the coast and the interior. In addition, as we have
noticed in the case of Cartagena de Indias and Guayaquil, the port and its adjacent areas were ever
more challenging to guard against foreign forces and nature itself (Figure 19.2).
Managing the southernmost ports and the racialization of space

I would like to conclude this chapter by drawing attention to two lesser known ports which were
officially granted permission to engage in free trade as a result of the 1778 Tratado de Libre Comercio:
Buenos Aires and Montevideo, which as Alex Borucki reminds us “were the southernmost
Spanish ports in the Atlantic” (2015, 2). In the case of Montevideo, the port and the city were
under the jurisdiction of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata.16 Several proceedings (“actas”) of
the Royal Consulate of Buenos Aires in the 1790’s attested to the busy roles both ports played in
the commerce of black African slaves as a result of the opening of these ports to direct traffic with
the African continent. For example, in the month of October of 1794, proceedings which stipu-
lated rules that needed to be in place for “the free trade of slaves” in the port of Santa María de
Buenos Aires were published.The citizens of the port city of Montevideo requested an extension
of eight days so that “the commercial ships carrying black slaves into that Port” should remain
there longer.This request was denied by governmental authorities with a decisive “in no way will
this written stipulation be extended” (“Actas de este Real Cabildo de Buenos Ayres. Año 1794.”
Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires, (AGNA)).17 Spanish authorities wanted to have tight
control of the trade; they monitored these transactions as much as possible, starting by recording
everything that was brought out of and into the ports. Their attitude toward these merchants
reflects the anxiety local Spanish authorities felt about how free trade was conducted in these two
port cities, especially with the direct purchase of African slaves to be sold in both ports.18 The port
cities again were envisioned as fluid spaces in need of social control.
Tomás Antonio Romero, a merchant from Buenos Aires known as the “Middleman of black
slaves in Buenos Aires and Montevideo,” obtained royal permission in 1791 to directly export
250,000 pesos worth of hides (“cueros”) or “fruit of the country,” as he called it, to foreign ports
in Europe in exchange for the purchase of African slaves to eventually be sold in both port
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cities.19 However, local authorities in Buenos Aires decided to amend the permit to allow him
instead only 100,000 pesos in “cueros.” This decision forced Tomás Antonio Romero to engage
in a lengthy four-year legal process, in which he defended his right to export the original sum
granted instead of the 100,000 pesos. The colonial authorities in Buenos Aires insisted that “cue-
ros” could not be considered a “fruit” and that the large numbers of leather exports could harm
the cattle population, consequently causing “harm to the national trade” (Comerciales,
Expediente 22, Archivo General de la Nación Argentina (AGNA). But bearing in mind that in
the legal document Romero is introduced as “the only vassal in these ports of Rio de la Plata who
has focused his fortune on the direct trade of black slaves” (Comerciales, Expediente 22, AGNA),
it would not be surprising if the authorities’ dispute over the definition of “fruit” actually dis-
guised their fears over the extent of the power that Romero was acquiring through the slave
trade. However, what I find fascinating about this case in the context of my discussion, is the view
of the ports as spaces prone to danger. The “free” aspect of the “free ports” entailed a constant
threat and, as such, it required governmental control. Indeed at one point Romero tells authori-
ties that he cannot comprehend their “fearful concerns” and that it was illogical that his proposed
trade would represent a national threat:
Despite the outstanding variety of reasons I have given to demonstrate that the great
harm done to the national Trade and the Royal Treasury and State is purely fictional and
imaginary, it was decided to follow the decision of the Royal Consulate regarding the
direct removal of the hides to the foreign ports of Europe” [“A pesar de la prodigiosa
variedad de razones con que se ha demostrado por mi parte, que es puramente fantas-
tico, e imaginario el abultado perjuicio que al Comercio nacional, a la Real Hacienda,
y al Estado, represento seguirsele la junta del Real Consulado por la extracción directa
de cueros para puertos extranjeros de Europa.]
(Comerciales, Expediente 22, AGNA)
In addition, according to Romero, the authorities were also wasting a great opportunity in the
slave trade by obstructing the entrance of more blacks to the ports as slaves to help in the labor
force. What Romero seems to emphasize is the fact that obstacles to legal trading would con-
tribute to more contraband. It is important to remember that since the seventeenth century in
Buenos Aires, and due to a lack of colonial surveillance, as George Reid Andrews reminds us,
“contraband traffic in all manner of merchandise” became prevalent there (1980, 11). As Andrews
adds, “Royal attempts to control it proved useless because it was so profitable that it generated
handsome bribes for the local law enforcement officials” (1980, 11). As the contraband contin-
ued as a way of life, even after the opening up of the port for trade, individuals such as Romero
fought to monopolize the market.
Movement in the port’s adjacent areas was strictly monitored through “Bandos” (“proclama-
tions”) issued by governors of these two port cities in the second half of the eighteenth century.
For example, in Buenos Aires, the governor at the time, Pedro de Cevallos, issued a proclamation
in 1766 stipulating that to maintain “the good order of the city” it was necessary to “forbid the
indecent dances which the Blacks are accustomed to have, and to prohibit meetings among
them, nor with Mulatos, Indios, or Mestizos”; or that people should not engage in hiding and
providing freedom to black slaves. The regulation added, “[a]nd that no person in this city nor
in its jurisdiction hide male or female slaves under any pretext or motive, nor give them any
encouragement to escape” (Bando, Libro 3, AGNA 1766 ). Five years later, the new governor of
Buenos Aires Juan José de Vertiz y Salcedo issued another proclamation (Bando) establishing that
“all vagabonds or persons with no employment, livelihood, nor master leave this city within
338
three days” and that failure to do so would result in them being deported to the Falkland Islands
(Bando, Libro 3, AGNA 1771). Spatial control of racialized groups was considered paramount in
the port areas to guarantee social order and control.
The situation was not much different in the port city of Montevideo, where strict social control
of the inhabitants was also a grave concern. Governor Don Joseph de Andonaegui stated that
homeless and unemployed people were to be expelled from the city, “I order and command that
within fifteen days the vagabonds and idle people within this City leave its jurisdiction and never
return” (Bando, Libro 1, AGNA 1745) and failure to do so would lead to a six-year sentence in the
prison of San Felipe de Montevideo.20 Indians, mulattoes, and free blacks of young age would suf-
fer the same fate and be sent to the prison of San Felipe de Montevideo if they were caught in the
streets. Foreigners who were not married were also to be expelled in a matter of twenty days and
failure to leave the city would also result in jail time in San Felipe (Bando, Libro 1, AGNA 1745).
In another Bando issued by the same governor, commercial interactions with people suspected of
being foreigners, indigenous people, blacks, and mulattoes was forbidden due to the illegal transac-
tions and robberies which took place among them. The governor added that he prohibited any
legal resident from Spain or of Spanish descent of the port city, especially general store owners
(pulperos) from purchasing anything from non-Spanish individuals,“that from this day forth no one
shall buy anything from an Indian, Black, Mulatto, or any other foreign person or person suspected
of being foreign” as these people engaged in the selling of stolen property (Bando, Libro 1, AGNA
1747).21 Merchants and residents who engaged in trade with them would suffer physical punish-
ment in the public streets, a sentence of six years of manual labor on the construction of the port
of Montevideo, and the loss of all their capital goods (Bando, Libro 1, AGNA 1747).
Finally, in the last decade of the eighteenth century, more regulations were put into effect to
monitor and control black slaves entering the port and port city. In 1793, Viceroy Nicolás
Antonio de Aderrondo proclaimed another Bando “to prevent the serious harm and detriment
that the introduction of negros bozales could bring upon the public safety of the city [of
Montevideo].”22 The governor stipulated that all enslaved blacks imported directly from Africa
(negros bozales) brought to the port of Montevideo were to pass by a specific point of entry in
the port, “they must disembark precisely on the barracks and in no other place” and they were
supposed to be inspected to make sure that they were “free of any contagious disease” (Bando,
Libro 5, AGNA, 1793). Furthermore, during this time, the movement of the negros bozales around
the port was tightly monitored, as they were only allowed to bathe in a specific creek adjacent
to the port and no other place: “It is also prohibited that said negros bathe in any other place than
the Creek that was established by the guards” (Bando, Libro 5, AGNA, 1793). Failure to obey
these regulations resulted in the imposition of severe fines. Postings of the proclamations were
to be placed in strategic places in the port city to serve as a reminder of how strict the surveil-
lance should be. The “Bandos” pertaining to the port city of Montevideo, as was also the case in
the port city of Buenos Aires, demonstrate the colonial authorities’ views of ports and adjacent
coastal areas as places prone to illegality and social disorder.These, among many other proclama-
tions issued in particular after the 1776 establishment of the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata and
after the opening of both ports to free trade in 1778, underscore consistent attempts by colonial
authorities to manage and control these fluid spaces of physical mobility in which blacks, along
with mestizos and indigenous people, were viewed as a constant threat. To complicate matters,
that time period coincided with the rise of the slave trade in these areas. According to Borucki,
it is estimated that “[n]early 70,000 captives arrived from both Brazil and Africa between 1777
and 1812” (2015, 2). As Borucki adds, although this vast region “was not a plantation society,
large urban black communities and social life typical of the most important slave trading ports
in the Americas developed here during the late eighteenth century” (2015, 3). Ports and port
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Mariselle Meléndez
cities continued to be viewed as those spaces most susceptible to foreigners including people of
African descent, who continuously attempted to infiltrate the social order. This social order was
desired by colonial authorities but impossible to achieve, due to the number of fluvial areas con-
nected to it and the impossibility of protecting the coastal areas with military power. Untamed
water represented the most dangerous ally of the port cities.
Final remarks
Mario Hernández Sánchez-Barba argues that with the expansion of Spain to the Americas,
“cultures were connected through the interoceanic communication” (1992, 21). To this, I must
add that it was in the ports and port cities where these diverse cultures converged to produce a
dynamic and fluid spaces. Ports indeed became places of contact where spatial interactions
occurred and were transformed on a daily basis. In this sense ports became sites of local and
global contact where people with different interests and social, racial, and national backgrounds
interacted legally and illegally, contributing to a population that was mobile, transient, but some-
times rooted in the particular interests that brought them there and which most times were
commercial in nature. To this extent ports as spaces and places enable us to critically understand
the ways in which the outer areas of Spanish America were viewed, understood, and discursively
produced to the Spanish government and the rest of the world.
Henri Lefebvre reminds us that representations of space are the result of the manner in which
a space is “lived” by its “inhabitants” and “users” but also by the manner in which others imagine
it in order to change it and to discursively appropriate it (1998, 39). The works discussed in this
chapter attest to these representational practices delineated by Lefebvre.The documents show the
ways in which colonial authorities envisioned the ports as spaces in which ideologies of domina-
tion and social control were guided by the experience and knowledge that living in the port cities
granted them. Deciphering the space as a spatial practice guided their views of the ports as places
that needed to be managed and controlled within the confines of the cities adjacent to them.
Their respective representations of space via decrees, proclamations, accounts, and visual represen-
tations underscore a feeling of impossibility as well as their persistent desire to appropriate it
through the power of the law. Nevertheless, coastal areas adjacent to the official ports added to the
uncertainty over total control. For the authors discussed, ports and port cities were the results of
the experiences they had while living there and how the authors “recognized themselves in them”
(Lefebvre 1998, 45).Through the written and visual representation of ports, enlightened forms of
coloniality reemerged as ports were never seen as totally independent from the cities. Nevertheless,
the mobilities enabled by the ports and their physical attributes represented a challenge to colonial
authorities in their attempts to regulate, manage, and control the ports as spaces and places.
Notes
1 For a thorough discussion of the central role that space has played as a critical tool in the field of colo-
nial Latin America, see Meléndez (2009).
2 In the context of my analysis it is important to differentiate between two often quoted terms: colonial-
ism and coloniality. As Nelson Maldonado-Torres clearly explains, “Colonialism denotes a political and
economic relation in which the sovereignty of a nation or a people rests on the power of another
nation, which makes such nation an empire. Coloniality, instead, refers to long-standing patterns of
power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and
knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administration” (2010, 97). It is within
this understanding of coloniality that we can consider the written and visual representations of ports as
discursive venues that shaped patterns of power relations while producing new knowledge about the
340
cultural encounters that took place in these geographic spaces. For a more in-depth discussion of the
interconnectedness between coloniality and modernity, please see in particular the articles by Arturo
Escobar, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Walter Mignolo, and Aníbal Quijano in Globalization and the
Decolonial Option (2010).
3 All translations are mine unless otherwise specified. I would like to thank Laura Cummings (University
of Illinois) for her assistance with some of the translations.
4 All quotes from Recopilación de leyes de los Reynos de las Indias (RLI) will follow the original orthography.
In addition, all legal Spanish documents cited in this chapter will follow the original orthography.
5 According to this law, plans and descriptions of cities, villas, forts, posts or any other place were
forbidden.
6 Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss state that after 1650, the collapse of the “orderly system of ships”
that connected Spain to the Atlantic and the small ships sent to South America contributed to the
decline of the northern ports of South America (1991, 4). For example, more than half of the imports
to Spain came from Mexican Caribbean ports and in particular Veracruz (4).
7 Another case that I analyze in my larger project is the one of Portobello in which piracy contributed
to a significant number of African slaves fleeing to this less surveilled port.
8 Prior to 1778, the strict imperial commercial routes established by the Crown required that treasure
fleets depart from the Yucatán channel, stopping in Cabo San Antonio and Havana before continuing
on to La Florida, the Azores Islands and then finally, to Spain. This was known as part of the northern
fleet while the southern fleet “carried the commerce of South America via Portobello and Cartagena”
with Callao subsequently becoming a major port of entry (Kuethe 1991, 14).
9 Hereafter, I will cite the document as follows: “Real cedula de S.M. y señores del consejo.”
10 According to the Leyes de Indias, Law XXIV, Title III, Book III, every viceroy was required to write an
account of what he had done during his governance and what still needed to be done. The accounts
became a guide for future successors in an effort to facilitate the governing of the American
territories.
11 “Temperament” at the time was defined as “the constitution of the air or environment in terms of the
cold, heat, humidity, or dryness” (Diccionario de Autoridades, 1990, 240).
12 This document is found in the Archivo Histórico Nacional de Ecuador under Milicias, Expediente 1.
13 This document is also found in the Archivo Histórico Nacional de Ecuador under Milicias,
Expediente 14.
14 In this document Benítez y Tabarez addresses Don Luis Muñoz de Guzmán, who was the Superintendent
and Subdelegate of the Royal District of Guayaquil. Muñoz de Guzmán compiled Benítez y Tabarez’s
instructions to send them to the king, Charles IV.
15 Taboada y Lemos does devote a section of his Relación to the role that the port of Callao had in the
protection of Lima from potential foreign invasion.
16 As a result of the Bourbon reforms, the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata was established in 1776. The
newly established viceroyalty had jurisdiction over regions of Upper Peru (Real Audiencia of Charcas
(today Bolivia), and regions of what are today Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay, with Buenos
Aires as the capital.
17 These documents are found in the Archivo General de la Nación in Buenos Aires, Argentina under the
title “Actas de este Real Consulado de Buenos Ayres. Año de 1794.” Libro 1ro.
18 For a detailed discussion of slavery and the slave trade in the Río de la Plata since the first import of
African slaves into the region in 1534, see the third chapter of George Reid Andrews’s book, The Afro-
Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800–1900 (1980). It is important to note that in 1701 Spain had already
granted the French Guinea Company permission to conduct trade operations in these territories due
to the inefficiency of the Portuguese Cacheu Company (Andrews 1980, 25). Eventually, due to the
Crown’s dissatisfaction with the French company, permission was granted to the British South Sea
Company to hold asientos (royal concessions) between 1715–1750.
19 Romero wanted to export the “cueros” to England, Portugal, and the Netherlands. He made clear to
colonial authorities in Buenos Aires that it was crucial that they allow him to freely conduct trade with
the main ports in these countries (Comerciales, Expediente 22, AGNA 1793).
20 The “Bando” was emitted by Spanish brigadier Don Joseph de Andonaegui, who was also captain and
governor of the provinces of the River Plate between 1745–1756.
21 This Bando is titled, “Por cuanto, sin embargo de los repetidos bandos publicados…”
22 The title of this policy is, “Para precaver los males y prejuicios que pueden seguirse de la salud publica
de las introducciones que se hacen a esta Capital de partida de Negros Bozales.”
341
Mariselle Meléndez
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20
SPATIALITY AND DISCOURSE
IN THE REGION OF LA PLATA
Loreley El Jaber
Mud and hunger

After we returned to our fortress (…) a settlement and a fortress were built for our captain
General Don Pedro de Mendoza and a mud wall around the city the height one can reach
with a foil. This wall, too, was three feet wide, and what was erected today came tomorrow
to the ground again; more people did not have anything to eat and they were starving and
suffered from a great shortage….1
[Después que nosotros vinimos de nuevo a nuestro real (…) se levantó un asiento y una casa
fuerte para nuestro capitán general don Pedro de Mendoza y un muro de tierra en derredor
de la ciudad de una altura hasta donde uno puede alcanzar con un florete. También este
muro era de tres pies de ancho y lo que se levantaba hoy se venía mañana de nuevo al suelo;
a más la gente no tenía qué comer y se moría de hambre y padecía gran escasez….]
(Schmidl [1567] 2016, 16)
From Luis Ramírez, (a member of the Sebastián Caboto's expedition), to the first founder of
Buenos Aires, Pedro de Mendoza, failure and deceit haunted the colonization of the Río de la
Plata. Paradoxically, Ramírez’s letter from July 10, 1528 renders the place name of the river and
the region within the context of a failed venture. Seeing his dreams shattered over difficulties
encountered he writes:
I truly say to Your Majesty that in the whole journey we did not work as much or
endure as many dangers as in fifty leagues that we journeyed up [the river]…we
endured so many difficulties that I have to admit to Your Majesty, I do not think there
are enough words to be able to describe them.
[digo de verdad a Vuestra Majestad que en todo el viaje no pasamos tantos trabajos ni peli-
gros como en cincuenta leguas que subimos por él [río] … pasé infinitos trabajos, y tantos
que yo doy fe a vuestra majedad, no creo bastase lengua de hombre a poderlos contar.]
(1941, 1: 96–97)
Nearly 10 years later, in one of the last communications by the Adelantado Don Pedro de
Mendoza, he pleaded for “a single pearl or jewel, if you would have one for me because I have
nothing to eat in Spain” (“alguna perla o joya sy ovieredes avido para mi que saveis que no tengo
344
Space, movement and writing
que comer en España”) (Mendoza [1537] 1941, 2: 190). Colonists’ letters sent to Spain from Río
de la Plata, such as these, painfully questioned the promise of the mythical land. For Ramírez
each defeat marked the impossibility of reaching the gold-bearing lands that had fueled so many
expeditions into South America’s interior. This was true for Mendoza and many others across
the Americas. Upon entering the inferno of the cursed and harsh “tierra malsana” (unhealthy
land), conquistadors, settlers, and missionaries demystified the imperial imaginary, and all expec-
tations of economic and spiritual gain, even of the exotic aesthetic qualities described in accounts
of the still unknown parts of the continent.
After the first settlement of Buenos Aires, in June 1536, Pedro de Mendoza (ca. 1499–1537)
sent an expedition toward the Querandíes people for food, which had been withdrawn by them
all of a sudden. Natives had been amicable since the beginning by facilitating much-needed
provisions but the settlers’ demands led to an indigenous rebellion. Severe consequences for the
Querandíes, who lost, were supposed to follow, but without captives and only scarce food sup-
plies, the Spaniards had lost too. At this critical juncture, Mendoza attempted to establish a clear
and distinct boundary, a frontier demarcating physical and socio-cultural spaces; but he failed
again.The Querandíes crossed the boundary and became intrusive enemies. The wall crumbled—
the same wall that served as a protective barrier to secure the first European settlement.
Hunger became the most significant driver of colonial transgressions affecting the soldiers’
way of life, crushing their moral compass. Degraded Spaniards ate rats and feces; to put it another
way, barbaric Christians consumed themselves. Nothing had been so extreme as these descrip-
tions. Transatlantic accounts of heroic conquests, which had been circulating in Europe since
Columbus’s 1493 letter, were unknown amid the misery and self-degradation that distinguished
reports from the Río de la Plata region.
Landscapes such as this one, overwhelmed imperial subjects. In accounts of conquest or
defeat, the riverine topography of the Río de la Plata swayed the colonists’ moral judgment and
social dynamics, thus defining and redefining their identities. The muddy soil, an intrinsic qual-
ity of the region, threatened all modes of containment; but in the conquistadors’ writing, the
mud, as a trope, epitomizes the challenges encountered after each act of possession. The mud
swallowed everything that was built. In such unwelcoming conditions without the possibility to
build or to move forward because of starvation, the geographical space took over. It made the
wall crumble and, with it, immediate expectations of imperial expansion.
The experience and trope of mud and hunger define the first colonial settlements at Río de
la Plata (see Figure 20.1). Yet historical accounts of the failed conquest and settlement of this
territory are seldom told. In the field of literary and cultural studies, there is a noticeable lack of
critical attention toward colonial discourses on the conquest of Río de la Plata. Critical
approaches by Ricardo Rojas (1960), Cristina Iglesia (1987), and Gustavo Verdesio (2001)
sought—against the grain of patriotic assessments— to restore the sense of spatiality, a move that
stepped away from the obvious iteration of hunger that marked their accounts.
Considering their efforts, I bring to the forefront the need to reconstruct the plurality of
experiences and affective responses to Other spaces. To do so, this chapter reexamines the geo-
graphical construction of the region (Río de la Plata and the Jesuit Province of Paraguay), which
allows me to untangle the connection between practices, topographies, and tropographies (map-
pings of speech acts or “the writing of motions through a landscape” [Kelen 2007, 64]). I focus
on the territory and its political, intercultural, and gnoseological implications. This perspective
allows me to account for the plurality of meanings that characterize territorial space (Arias &
Meléndez 2002; Gregory 1998). From this perspective, I propose the reconstruction of a net-
work of interacting bodies and discourses that are always in constant movement. As Henri
Lefebvre reminds us, “Space is not a passive locus of social relations” (1991, 11).
345
Loreley El Jaber
Figure 20.1 “ Hunger in Buenos Aires,” in Ulrico Schmidl,Vera historia admirandae cuius dam navigationis
quam uldericus Strawbingensis, ab Anno 1534 usque ad anum 1554, in American vel novum
Mundum, iuxta Brasiliam & Rio della Plata…. (Levinus Hulsius, Nüremberg Edition, 1599.
Work in the public domain)
With their people as with their women

While Mendoza, afflicted by syphilis, dictated instructions for Juan de Ayolas (ca. 1510–1538), the
latter, having gone up the Paraguay River to the port of La Candelaria, had marched toward the
western region in search of the White King and the Sierra de la Plata. Before departing for Spain and
dying at sea, Mendoza asked Domingo Martínez de Irala (1509–1556) to wait for Ayolas, who had
been named by him as his lieutenant in Buenos Aires. But the promotion did not materialize. (Martínez
de Irala), who later became governor, depopulated the port in 1541 and marched toward Asunción.
Fifteen months later, without yet having reached the Río Grande,Ayolas returned to the now deserted
settlement just to be killed by the Payaguá Indians together with all of his companions.
Depopulation was triggered for several reasons: hunger, the uncertain wait for Ayolas—from
whom there was no news—the fear of a possible rebellion by the numerous surrounding tribes
(i.e., Payaguá, Querandíes, and Charrúas) (Peña 1904, 5), and the advantages of relocating to the
shores of the Río Paraguay. Indeed, they established the Outpost of Nuestra Señora de Santa María
de la Asunción. On the one hand, the new outpost was closer to the Sierra de la Plata; on the other,
the region of Paraguay offered indigenous labor to satisfy Spanish ambitions (Assadourian 1992).
The relocation did not relate solely to specific and conjectural circumstances; it also responded
to the need to reconfigure colonial space. Thus, the forced movement of people needs to be
understood in socio-economic terms: gold, bodies, and waterways were the key elements to
guarantee commerce. Waterways made possible communication and transfer in two directions:
346
to move the loot from the entradas and to access the goods received from Spain. As laid out in
this corpus, gold and bodies were conceived as precious commodities. Indian bodies had an
exchange value, and their acquisition and exchange established the status of whoever could
afford such a “possession” (El Jaber 2001).
Before the settlers’ relocation, Irala buried a letter at the site ([1541] 1898). The letter offers
a warning to future expeditions about the dangers of the region and persuades them to move to
the new location with Guaraní natives for labor (including women), who could effortlessly be
converted to Christianity. The abundance of bodies represents the affective-economic construct
of excess. Asuncion became a strategic place, the “promised city,” and space that by occupation
was transformed and consumed (see Figures 20.2 and 20.3). It is important to note that Irala had
the power over its commodities (space and new colonial subjects for service). But although the
acquisition of native bodies as slaves was a common practice among settlers, the difference lies
in the legitimacy of domestic arrangements or marriages to indigenous women on which colo-
nial settlements thrived. Irala promoted intermarriage to an extreme; for instance, he forced the
rebellious Spaniards to marry their mestizo daughters if they wish to save their lives (Díaz de
Guzmán [1612] 1974).This strategic tool of coloniality was implemented as part of the strategic
“alliance code” (El Jaber 2011) created to achieve harmony among different indigenous groups
through their unions. It came to be called the “cuñadazgo,” which further justified Spaniards’
ordering of the territory on the grounds of family ties. Alliances allowed for the acquisition of
lands populated by native inhabitants who had geographical knowledge and were skilled as war-
riors and guides. These unions were mutually beneficial. For the Guaraní they were rooted in
Figure 20.2 Frederik de Wit, Noua et accurata totius Americae tabula 1660. (Work in the public domain)
347
Loreley El Jaber
Figure 20.3 D
etail of the area corresponding to Paraguay from the Map by Frederik de Wit, Nova et
accurata totius Americae tabula 1660. (Work in the public domain)
their own cultural practices of intertribal exchange, and in the new context, they served as a
strategy to gain allies (Meliá 1997; Susnik 1975).
The Guaraní rejoices significantly/for seeing himself related to the Christians:/each of

them assigned a wife/parents, and closer relatives./Oh pity for seeing so pitiful,/that
from these young women all brothers,/to those who cohabit,/nowadays are called
cuñados!/The situation reaches a point such,/that each one lived as they liked: who had
the most beautiful Indian wife,/is judged to be better, and more spirited-/(…) In this
case there was no amendment,/for a bad custom generally it was,/who had agreed to
put on the rein,/without exception would cut down it all;/they learn from school and
from the stores/the rest about this will learn from Irala;/who although agreed on many
things,/about flesh undomesticated.
[El Guaraní se huelga en gran manera/de verse emparentar con los cristianos:/a cada
cual le dan su compañera/los padres, y parientes más cercanos./¡O lástima de ver muy
lastimera,/que de aquestas mancebas los hermanos,/ a todos los que están amanceba-
dos,/les llaman hoy en día sus cuñados!/A tal término llega aquesta cosa,/ que cada
cual vivía a su albedrío: aquél que india tenía más hermosa,/se juzga por mejor, y de
más brío./(…) No había en este caso alguna enmienda,/por ser en general costumbre
mala,/que aquel que convenía poner la rienda,/sin guarda de excepción todo lo tala;/
aprenden de la escuela y de la tienda/en esto los demás todos de Irala;/ que aunque era
de muchas cosas concertado,/en esto de la carne desenfrenado./.]
(Centenera [1602] 1998: Canto IV)
For Irala and the vast majority of the soldiers, power was held by the number of bodies which
could be counted by their side. He didn’t bother with issues of morality that scared away priests
348
who insisted on describing Asunción as the “Sodoma del Plata” (Salas 1960). The alliance with
the Guaraní was maintained from 1541 to 1543 after its founding; however, years later, the
Indians faced a new reality: Europeans no longer recognized intermarriage and the bond it
established with Spaniards who married native women. As a result, the Guaraní declared war.
The reconfiguration and use of space and bodies that Irala and his men deployed would become
the key points of dissidence and conflict with Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (ca. 1500–ca. 1559).
He was sent by the Crown as Adelantado in 1541 when the prospects of economic gain were still
high. During that time, Ayola’s experience remained unknown in Madrid. At the court, the only
concern was for the needs of the survivors from the Mendoza expedition.When Cabeza de Vaca
arrived in Santa Catalina, he learned of the move and depopulation of the port and therefore
decided to march toward Asunción. Upon entering the settlement, he was immediately forced
to manage the chaos, violence, irreligiosity, and dismissal of administrative policies. The unman-
ageable colonists forced natives into slavery, punished them, took their women, and even, when
jealous, risked their own lives (Cabeza de Vaca [1545] 1906; [1555] 1985).
Given the freedom with which Indians were mistreated, Cabeza de Vaca attempted to rees-
tablish order by underscoring Old World values and rules. He dictated a series of ordinances
intended to reinstate governance, civility, and change the behavior of the soldiers. He prohib-
ited the Spaniards from having contact with or marrying native women, from collecting debts
owed to his Majesty, from removing any natives from their land, thus diminishing the labor
force. It was not permitted to sell, hire, or exchange free natives as slaves (Adorno and Pautz
1999). Ordinances were carried out in the spirit of colonial laws as Cabeza de Vaca sought to
impose an imperial morality (of which the Adelantado, considered himself to be an example, as
he wrote in his own account and as was reiterated in the writings of his notary, Pero Hernández
([1545] 1906). Cabeza de Vaca prohibited cohabitation and violence, yet he fought indigenous
groups resisting conversion. When one is reminded of his experience in New Spain’s northern
frontier, such proclaimed morality and performance of power in the Río de la Plata, seems out
of character. In view of the absence of riches imagined, the encomiendas (land and bodies)
gained in value. Irala’s last letter to the Consejo de Indias literally alluded to the imperial pro-
duction of this space, which demonstrates the currency of Henri Lefebvre’s ideas to the colo-
nial context:
After having seen the excessive efforts of those who conquered this province and the
little profit gained, and how the Indians have nothing to offer but themselves (…)
I divided the land among three hundred and twenty or so men, so it helped them bear
all their work and all such Indians who were thus shared out were up to twenty thou-
sand. (…) [I did it] to compensate the conquistadors for their age and labor. In my
opinion your majesty should order all these distributions to be granted in perpetuity
(…) because if this is not done, I believe that (…) it will be impossible to live in this land.
[Vistos los trabajos excesivos delos conquistadores desta provincia y el poco provecho
dello y como los indios no tienen otra cosa con que poder servir sino solamente sus
personas (…) repartí la tierra en trescientas y veinte o más hombres para que les ayu-
dasen a sobrellevar sus trabajos y todos los dichos indios que así se repartieron serían
hasta veinte mil (…) [Lo hice] por dar a los conquistadores algún alivio por estar viejos
y cansados. Mi parecer sería que su majestad mandase que todos los dichos repar-
timientos (...) [fuesen] perpetuos (…) porque si esto no se hace me parece que (…) en
esta tierra no se puede vivir.]
(Martínez de Irala [1556] 1941: 485)
349
Loreley El Jaber
Although the desire for gold and bodies needed for the encomienda continued to be a priority
for the metropolis, Irala’s letter communicates a conclusive reality: in the region of La Plata, the
encomienda is the only reward for the “excessive efforts” without “profit.” Thus, this is the proce-
dure that brings new meaning to the body of the native. In the end, the legality inscribed in the
regulations imposed by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca is resented. His leadership and ideas about
good government are questioned due to his lack of knowledge about the land. That is why he
ends up imprisoned as a traitor to the king. As explained by Ralph Bauer (2003), what is at stake,
in this case, is the dispute on geopolitical grounds between the Crown and insubordinate settlers
with neo-feudal ambitions. The resulting entanglements of power are repaired in epistemic and
ideological terms given different forms of knowledge and ways of thinking in the production of
coloniality (El Jaber 2014).The native population is central to such a dispute: the Other is a basic
commodity for the construction of social space for both the Crown and the settlers. Therefore,
after Cabeza de Vaca is imprisoned and sent to Spain, Irala restores his position by putting back
in place the imperial order that Cabeza de Vaca had undermined. “Rancheadas” (violent captures
of women, youngsters, and children as well as goods) and trade with Brazil came back due to
their great potential for profit. Irala installed a governing policy and turned his back on Spain,
to focus on the interior of the land and its borders. It is precisely at the frontier spaces where the
real potential of the land can be found. Irala’s powerful command, combined with the appetite
of his peers created a new colonial vision for the world, that of the mestizo asunceño (mestizo
from Asunción). The result is quite different from the failures experienced by Pedro de Mendoza
or Cabeza de Vaca. He was chosen by most people as interim Governor of Río de la Plata at
various points in time (1539–1542/1544–1548/1549) until his death, although not acknowl-
edged by the king until 1555, when there was no one left to compete against him for the asiento.
As an unquestioned military leader of popular appeal and strong form of government, Irala can
be conceived as the genesis of Argentina’s caudillismo.
The Guaraní, encomienda and reduction

Although the Spanish population fosters the colonial conception that maintains an essential dif-
ference with the Indian, the idea collides with the advantages that, according to the Guaraní
socio-cultural universe, the kinship system offered them. The actions that take place in the ran-
cheadas and on the bodies of the native encomendados evince the idea that the concepts of
“friends,” “allies,” even “brothers-in-law” were void of meaning. The Indians’ reactions to the
violence had two movements: either withdrawal or resistance. The rebellion of 1545–1546 con-
stitutes the Guaraní’s general response to the harassments experienced at the hands of the con-
quistadors (Susnik 1975), as well as the event that accounts for the “emergence of an indigenous
conscience under construction,” which can be observed, for example, in a tactic of resistance
that involved joining forces with other tribes—unthinkable at other moments (Roulet 1993).
After the defeat of the Guaraní uprising, the natives expressed their opposition by running away
as well as through apathy and indolence, by abandoning their duties or taking their own lives.
Priest Martín González said in 1570 that due to the abusive treatment, Guaraní women, in an
attempt to free their children from mistreatment, would kill them in their wombs or would not
breastfeed the newborns so that they died. Others ate soil, or anything that could put an end to
their lives sooner (Roulet 1993, 256). Guaraní encomendadas even harmed their own bodies,
which can be understood as an acknowledgment of the power of their masters. The experience
of the encomienda had profound consequences not limited to their pessimism but also in the deep
trauma that marked their lives. Escaping to the mountains, running away from their lands and
kin can be read as another way of putting an end to a life that had neither identity nor agency.
350
On the other hand, breaking the bond by moving away opened up the possibility of survival,
freedom, and renewal. For indigenous people, their mountains, rivers and soils have always been
sacred. Prior to the arrival of the first conquistadors space already had political-cultural mean-
ings. With the flows and movements created by so many Guaraníes escaping to the mountains,
new political and social consequences were felt in shifting demographics, regional economy, and
much more.
If what prevails is this resilience by subtraction of commodities, what happened to the aware-
ness of a native identity reaffirmed with the rebellion of 1545? Even more so, what were the
consequences for the territory and the bodies that remained at the Río de la Plata when the
encomienda became the only meaningful political-economic system?
It will be necessary then to wait for the Jesuits and their reductions—those settlements of
Guaraníes, promoted by the Fathers of the Compañía de Jesús, to guard their identity as vassals
of the Crown—to find out if the native peoples found a new means of resistance or at least a
way to escape their misery (Wilde 2009). Guaraníes were threatened, on one side, by their inte-
gration into the new encomienda system of semi-slavery; and, on the other side, by the hunting
of the bandeirantes paulistas—men originally from São Paulo who captured and imprisoned
indigenous people for slavery. We should bear in mind that upon the creation of the Jesuit
Province of Paraguay, Father Diego de Torres Bollo was designated as Provincial to direct the
activities of the Compañía de Jesús and address the abuses of the natives.2 Following the Lascasian
perspective, according to Torres, the reduction and encomienda were two incompatible systems;
therefore, his first measures consisted in setting free the Indians assigned to the Compañía and
guaranteeing conditions of autonomy for the missions. These measures, together with a self-
sustained economic organization, in addition to traditional institutions and structures, were
readapted to the new missionary spaces. In the missions, the Jesuits turned their utopian dream
of the recovery of a threatened culture into reality. On the other hand, for the Guaraníes, the
missions represented the only way out from domination and slavery.3
The proposal to release Indians from ten years of forced labor in the mission found its first
opposition among colonists at nearby settlements given that they depended on the encomienda
system for their subsistence—especially for the harvest and processing of yerba mate (Sarreal
2014). Although the initiatives of both Torres and the Jesuits were criticized for promoting the
isolation of the Guaraníes (Asúa 2014), their relationship with the missionaries led them to a
new way of life in the reductions. The space of the mission contributed to a new Jesuit-Guaraní
identity shaped by religiosity, responsibilities, and a sense of community created by the environ-
ment of the mission. Reductions in the riverine region of the Paraguay and Uruguay waterways
became what Denis Cosgrove describes as identitary spaces (1989). The Guaraní became war-
riors and vigilantes of the territory against other indigenous groups but mostly against the
Portuguese, who destabilized the Spanish colonial dynamics of the Río de la Plata from the early
years of missionary settlement (see Figure 20.4).4 What started as a spontaneous indigenous
organization against the bandeirantes would become another military tactic of the Crown to
secure imperial territory from enemies at the frontier both Portuguese and indigenous
(Guaycurús, Payaguás, Mbayás, Charrúas, Bohanes, and Minuanes). To confront the recurring
actions of Portuguese enslavers, the Jesuits obtained the concession for the use of firearms by
Indians who became skilled with these weapons.
The Jesuit-Guaraní military alliance created to resist the Portuguese banderiantes became
permanent militia (Avellaneda & Quarleri 2007). Their presence not only assured the success of
the reductions but also transformed the internal structure of missions (Neumann 2000a; Kern
1982). What had been described as the initial isolation of the missions was forgotten—in part
because Jesuit designs that imagined outward expansion of the missionary space, also influenced
351
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Figure 20.4 M
apa de la governación del Paraguay, y de la de Buenos ayres by José Cardiel. It represents the 30
Jesuit reductions, ranches, and mate plantations between the rivers Paraná and Uruguay.
(Work in the public domain)5
352
the spatiality of the Guaraní reductions. To imagine isolated reductions negates social, cultural,
economic, political, and military dynamics affecting the Guaraníes directly, as key actants of the
functioning of the reduction, and also as royal militia. It has been argued that the missions were
established out of the need to demarcate borders, especially those with the Portuguese territory
(Barcelos 2000). One needs then to consider their permeability as the key aspect of this complex
zone of interaction among imperial and colonial subjects with different affiliations.
The Treaty of Madrid (1750) and the case of the Guaraní wars:
toward a policy of mobility
If time-space compression can be imagined in that more socially formed, socially

evaluative and differentiated way, then there may be here the possibility of developing
a politics of mobility and access. For it does seem that mobility, and control over
mobility, both reflects and reinforces power.
(Massey 1994, 150)
In January 1750, the Crowns of Spain and Portugal signed the first treaty of limits—Treaty of
Madrid—deleting for once and for all the straight line of Tordesillas and changing the geopolitical
thinking about the vast continental regions of South America. With regards to the Río de la Plata
region, the treaty meant for Spain the return of Colonia del Sacramento by relinquishing to Portugal
the territory lying to the east of the Uruguay River and the north of Ibicuy, where seven Jesuit
missions had been established. Although the treaty negotiated over other territories, the concession
of the missions to Portugal constitute the beginning of a conflict that resulted in the so-called
“Guaraní war.”6 Reduced natives compromised by the treaty were authorized to remain under the
Portuguese or to move to the new territories under Spanish jurisdiction. Clearly, the only option
was moving. The forced displacement of the Guaraníes from their villages implied, as stipulated in
the treaty, that the missionaries would withdraw with all their properties, taking the Indians with
them to settle in Spanish territory. Immovable assets such as churches, houses, their respective yer-
bales, cotton fields and cattle ranches, were to be handed over to the Portuguese.The Guaraníes felt
the contradiction: how could the king himself have given them weapons to defend their lands
against the bandeirantes paulistas and now everything that had been built was turned over to them?
To execute the terms of the treaty, a demarcation commission was organized, whose activities
included monitoring the exodus of some 30,000 Indians belonging to the missions (Motoukias
2000). But the exodus did not occur, and the consequences foreseen by the Jesuits were as ter-
rible as they were certain. As Father Bernardo Nusdorffer describes, in 1750, the Jesuits could not
believe that the Treaty was real: “it was judged impossible that Spain permitted the terrible con-
sequences” (se juzgaba imposible que España consintiese por las fatalísimas consecuencias”)
(Nusdorffer 1755, 142). Once the treaty was confirmed, he was responsible for put into action
the transfer of the seven settlements (San Nicolás, San Luis, San Lorenzo, San Borja, San Miguel,
San Juan, and San Ángel) directly affected by the new demarcation line. Although there were
several missionaries who were reluctant to fulfill the orders, the majority were impelled to com-
ply, even if the treaty was considered “most iniquitous,” as described by Tadeo Henis in 1754.
Provincial Father Joseph de Barreda, in his letter dated January 19, 1753, exhorts the missionaries
to obedience. He argues that the options are not many: the missions do not have the strength to
go against the Monarchy’s sovereign power. The situation was even worse if we consider the
slanders of instigation and collaboration with the rebellious Indians from local authorities and
key advisors to the Crown. In fact, the conflagration of circumstances will end up undermining
353
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the strength of the Company and propitiating a negative climate culminating in the Jesuits’ final
expulsion from the region in 1767. Although the Jesuits considered the Spanish officials’ behavior
displeasing, the writings of the Jesuits, as shown in the letter to Barreda, supported the measures
of the treaty. Thus, it was understood that they either had to obey or suffer the consequences.
The Relación del Padre Bernardo Nusdorffer sobre el plan de la mudanza de los 7 pueblos, desde sep-
tiembre de 1750 hasta fines de 1755 (Account of Father Bernardo Nusdorffer regarding the plan to move
the 7 settlements, from September 1750 through the end of 1755) (1755), may be the one to reveal the
implications of native obedience at the reductions. Nusdorffer (1686–1762) describes the activi-
ties in the missionary territory. Pragmatic in his role as Superior in charge of the reductions,7 he
instructs on how the move will be carried out, the difference between the time given (1 year),
the minimum time needed to carry it out (3 years), and the new settlement for each town. In the
text, the land per se recovers the central role it had somehow lost through the primacy that the
economic aspect had gained by means of the encomiendas and the religious one by the reductions.
The Jesuit historian states that, although “it was clear that moving out seemed strange to them,”
“se veía que la intimación a la mudanza les era cosa muy extraña” (Nusdorffer 1755, 142), the
natives’ initial response was that of obedience.
Upon the Superior’s question about where they wanted to settle, the answers reflected the
complexities of the moment and their own knowledge of the territory. It was not an easy answer
considering the characteristics of the land, the vulnerability of its frontiers in the event of an
attack from indigenous or European enemies, and at the same time the memory of the previous
cession and annexation orders of plots of land. This last matter was addressed by the Jesuits
because the terms of the treaty were not clear and it was important for the missions affected.
Which conditions—apart from freedom, extension and potentiality—should the newly chosen
lands have? The Indians, disoriented by the Father Superior’s question, appeal to their history in
the territory, thus seeking to restore the path traced by their ancestors. For example, those from
San Borja wanted to go to their grandparents’ mate plantations, but this was not recommended
due to the proximity to Río Grande and, therefore, to the Portuguese.The people of San Miguel
proposed a return to the site where their village had once been before their ancestors fled from
the Portuguese, but the number of families that made up the current village made it unfeasible.
It was challenging to decide where to settle given constant threats faced in the new territo-
ries, which explained the affective memory of the places they had left behind. It was not difficult
to reject the relocation order on behalf of the monarch and the Jesuits. This is the context that
steered the rebellion. Actions by the Luisistas were emblematic of the seven settlements, they
moved forward and backward once and again due to the presence of the Charrúas, whose force
in the region could not be ignored. Because of the Charrúas, they returned to the reduction.
Their hesitation and constant movement were also political. Even when the Luisistas maintained
that “they did not excuse themselves from complying with the king’s will,” “no se excusaban
con esto de cumplir la voluntad del rey” (Nusdorffer 1755, 179) such persistence in the old mis-
sions would be understood by the Crown as contempt, which would have to be punished,
therefore, causing a war.
Concrete acts in the region in conflict included the withdrawal and holding of a place of
their own, and the political nature granted to the land. During the missionary period these actions
seem to have been blurred. This happened because the Jesuit-Guaraní militia functioned as the
only shock force of the Crown in the Río de la Plata, and it marked a difference with respect to
other indigenous militia in other parts of America (Ganson 2003).That reaction was maintained
by the Guaraní not only in terms of royal obedience, but mainly in relation to the previous
actions of the Portuguese and other indigenous partialities toward them. The logic of tribal
revenge was then coming into play, re-signifying war action. Thus, the movement over the
354
land—conceived many times as their own—is once again significant; the situation no longer
entails a withdrawal or defense only, but a reappropriation.
If the king deprives the Guaraní of their place to defend the territory and make the land an
item for negotiation, then the natives will establish that the land is not up for negotiation in all
of their letters and statements.They will declare that the land has an owner and a value, the result
of their generations of labor: For them, what was previously declared by the king does not
become undone by a treaty which, on the other hand, was still highly improbable:
You see here what our saint King Felipe V communicated to us in 1716. Take good
care of my land and of yourselves, do not let your enemies and my enemies do you any
harm. (…) I will certainly not take you away from your land or will trouble you in
anyway (…). Because this is what the king wrote to us, we the caciques of San Juan
and other Indians do not believe [the request from the treaty]. We have not been con-
quered by any Spaniard, it was because of the Fathers’ message and way of thinking that
we became vassals of your king.
[Ves aquí lo que nuestro santo Rey Felipe V nos avisó el año 1716. Cuidad muy bien
mi tierra y también de vosotros mismos, que no os hagan mal vuestros enemigos mis
enemigos. (…) Yo ciertamente no os sacaré de vuestra tierra ni tampoco os molestaré
en cosa alguna. (…) Por esto que el Rey nos escribió, nosotros los caciques de San Juan
y los demás indios no creemos. Nosotros no hemos sido conquistados por español
alguno, por razón y palabra de los Padres nos hicimos vasallos de vuestro Rey.] (Caciques
e indios del pueblo de San Juan al gobernador de Buenos Aires, José de Andonaegui. San Juan,
16 de julio de 1753.
(Mateos 1949; Meliá 1997)
The Guaraní writings are powerful and eloquent.The issue in the letters is not the commitment
to obey the King as vassals but rather, that “they could not persuade themselves that the king,
having promised them the lands, now wanted to pass on their ownership to their enemies”
(Cortesão 1969, 133). The only way to explain this nonsense was that the king had been
deceived. “Who would believe this?—Henis asks himself—that the Indians might find them-
selves in such a state and in such a situation that, in order to serve the king and to be loyal to
him, it is necessary to take up arms against the king himself.” (“¿Quién creyera esto?—se pre-
gunta Henis—Que las cosas de los indios estén en tal estado y se hallen en tal situación que, para
servir al Rey y prestarle fidelidad, sea necesario tomar contra el mismo Rey las armas”) ([1754]
1836, 542). The Guaraní defense of the land was not an act of rebellion but the absolute oppo-
site, especially if we consider the Guaraní’s loyalty and role in protecting the Spanish territory,
which they intended to continue exercising. They had consciously chosen to become subjects
accepting all the responsibilities entailed in vassalage to the Spanish Crown.
One important aspect of the Guaraní rebellion is their use of writing.These vassals “by reason
and speech” began to write letters, testimonies, and reports of the sort that demonstrate their
understanding of the power of writing (Jara and Spadaccini 1992). By writing, the caciques
discovered the function of epistolary exchanges, which until then had been a prerogative of the
friars or the notarial secretaries (Neumann 2000b, 164).Writing letters became a key weapon for
defense and attack, a strategic element of battle. As Henis writes “mail flew from town to town,”
reproducing a spatial itinerary with their own political-territorial content. Letters and missives—
whether between the leaders of the various indigenous groups or addressed to the governors in
office—made writing a means of negotiation and decision about the Guaraní-Jesuit territory.
355
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Once the caciques understood the value and power of written discourse, letters sent to Spanish
governors, Jesuits, and Portuguese colonists began to be intercepted, opened, and read (particu-
larly those with the official seal) to be concealed or destroyed (Neumann 2004; Neumann and
Wilde 2014).
The Guaraní archive emerged around this event: the traumatic concession of lands to the
Portuguese after the Treaty of Madrid. Writing began to be used for the defense of territorial
space, which defined their native identity—threatened by the events and imperial mandate
affecting the Jesuit missions. Discursive practices were used to describe and defend native spaces;
geography (“writing of the earth”) constituted an identitary discourse and instrument to protect
and fight for contested territories. In this protean moment, the Guaraní, by their actions inscribed
themselves in the territory—they were the embodiment of the territory, as a metaphor, which
represented the cultivated land that they had been defending for generations.
Bernardo Nusdorffer states that Miguelista Indians went out to observe and report on the
campaigns. Upon examining the trace of the surveyors, they found “two stone columns built
with the coat of arms of the two crowns and looking at them very slowly the Indians finally
knocked them down saying that because they had the Portuguese arms, they should not be in
these places” (1969, 199). Please note the defensive role, the suppression of this function breaks
to some extent the military alliance with the Jesuits, as well as their identity as reduced Indians
who lost an important role they had been granted. The statement by the Indian chief San Juan
still resonates: “We have not been conquered by any Spaniard, because of the priests we have
become vassals of your King.” Indigenous communities were there to move the columns and
“defend them for Spain, as they have defended them until now [because] these were their lands
since the beginning of the world and God had given them and his grandparents were buried
there” (Nusdorffer 1969, 199). For San Juan, Spain, the king, and the presence of the Guaraní
ancestors all play an equal role in legitimating the native’s actions. Physical movement and
migration per se restored the ancestral value of the land; thus, empowering the Guaraní people
to identify their “true” enemy, the Portuguese. The unidirectional flow of empire was broken
(Brückner 2003; Doyle 1986; Kumar 2017), yet the bond with the Jesuits shaped by the mission-
ary experience marked their identities. The Jesuits moved, yet the Guaraní returned to their
ancestral territory, that same space that had been appropriated for the original missions and from
which the native rebellion was launched. After learning about the power of letters for legal dis-
putes, natives began to write about their rights to the land, therefore inscribing in writing their
territoriality (Mignolo 1986). These are the cultural transactions surrounding the uprising and
final resolution of the Guaraní defense of the territory. In this context, we must examine these
events and the subsequent attack by European forces to quell the only rebellion of its kind in
the region of La Plata.
Conclusions
Under Spanish rule, the spatial construction of the La Plata region has been defined by futile
entradas (the Spanish expeditions of exploration and plunder), the founding of colonies and
settlements, depopulation, forward and backward journeys, and the creation and dismantling
of frontiers.Thus, one can expose a complex history of these entanglements revealing multiple
cultural, political, religious, and economic factors. Its territorial specificity and geographical
imaginary collided with the natives’ attachment to their territory and resistance. The history
of resistance cannot be told without unlikely alliances that were formed around mutual inter-
ests. All of the protagonists—Mendoza and Ayolas, Irala and Cabeza de Vaca, the Guaraní
356
women, and all the Guaraníes at the missions—configured space through their respective
struggles: rebellions over the land, Jesuit undertakings before and after the treaty of Madrid,
Spanish settlements, Spanish and Portuguese disputes over a frontier in their struggle for
expansion, the acquisition of wealth, and the development of commerce. Their spatial envi-
sioning of the territory was enabled by the mobility of bodies—identities and ideologies in
motion forged space. As Milton Santos says, “Space consists of a series of object systems and
action systems that is at once indissoluble and mutually binding, and at the same time contradic-
tory” (2006, 39, emphasis added). The multifaceted textuality of the colonial experience con-
flated these interrelated processes to describe the workings of colonialism in the La Plata
Region.
Notes
1 All translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated.
2 The Jesuit province of Paraguay in 1604 encompassed a vast territory in what are now Paraguay,
Argentina, Uruguay, and parts of Bolivia, Chile and Brazil.
3 The killing of four Jesuits who sought to establish some of the first missions early in the seventeenth
century is an example of the Guaraní resistance to missionization (Altuna 2014; Hernandéz 1913). In
his report about the the first reductions, the Jesuit missionary Antonio Ruiz de Montoya ([1639] 1892,
58) distinguishes between the Guaraní who were easily reduced from those who were not. Rebelling
against the Jesuits, the cacique Miguel Artiguayé labeled the priests as “demons from hell” sent to deci-
mate his people by forbidding polygamy.
4 The Portuguese vied for Jesuit territory because of the bodies (for labor) and natural wealth provided
by that space. Furthermore, the missions offered a vantage point to access the mines of Potosí, the Banda
Oriental’s livestock, and the port of Buenos Aires. The Portuguese aimed for the western part of the
Río Uruguay because of its population, livestock and imagined wealthy mines (Quarleri 2009). With
the negotiations leading to the 1750 Treaty of Madrid, Portugal received most of the Jesuit territories.
5 To acces to a broader vision of the geographic imaginery of the Jesuits, see Furlong 1936.
6 The treaty acknowledged lands that were already occupied by Portugal in the current Brazilian states
of Paraná and Río Grande do Sul, and from Spain the Banda Oriental, where Montevideo was origi-
nally founded. It also granted exclusive navigation of the Río de la Plata to the Portuguese.
7 Nusdorffer was Superior General of all the Guaraní reductions during 1732–1739 and 1747–1752.
Between 1743 and 1747 he was the Provincial of all the Jesuit Province of Paraguay, Río de la Plata and
Tucumán. From his arrival in 1717 until his death in 1762, he dedicated his efforts to preserve Guaraní
settlements and to keep their culture intact (Furlong 1971).
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para le ynformar, y á los señores de su RReal Consejo de Indias, de las cosas subcedidas en la dicha
provincia dende que por su mandato partí destos reynos a socorrer y conquistar la dicha provincia.” In
Colección de libros y documentos referentes a la historia de América, edited by Manuel Serrano y Sanz.Vol. 6,
1–98. Madrid: Biblioteca General Victoriano Suárez.
———. [1555] 1985. Naufragios y Comentarios. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe.
Nusdorffer, Bernardo. [1755] 1969. “Relação do padre Bernardo Nusdorffer sobre o plano de mudança dos
7 povos, desde setembro de 1750 até fins de 1755.” In Do Tratado de Madrí à Conquista dos Sete Povos
(1750–1802), edited by Jaime Cortesão. Manuscritos da Coleção De Angelis 7, 139–300. Rio de Janeiro:
Peña, Enrique. 1904. La despoblación de Buenos Aires en 1541. Buenos Aires: Imprenta, Litografía y
Encuadernación de Jacobo Peuser.
Quarleri, Lía. 2009. Rebelión y guerra en las fronteras del Plata. Guaraníes, jesuitas e imperios coloniales. Buenos
Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Ramírez, Luis. 1941. Carta de Luis Ramírez, 10 de julio, 1528. In Documentos históricos y geográficos relativos
a la conquista y colonización rioplatense, edited by José Torre Revello, 91–106. Vol. 1. Buenos Aires:
Comisión Nacional del IV Centenario de la Fundación de Buenos Aires.
Rojas, Ricardo. 1960. Historia de la literatura argentina.Vol. 3. Buenos Aires: Kraft.
Roulet, Florencia. 1993. La resistencia de los guaraní del Paraguay a la conquista española (1537–1556). Posadas,
AR: Universidad Nacional de Misiones.
Ruiz de Montoya, Antonio. [1639] 1892. Conquista espiritual hecha por los religiosos de la Compañía de Jesús en
las provincias del Paraguay, Uruguay y Tape. Bilbao, ES: Editorial Corazón de Jesús.
Salas, Alberto. 1960. Crónica florida del mestizaje de las Indias. Siglo XVI. Buenos Aires: Losada.
Santos, Milton. 2006. A Naturaleza do Espaço.Técnica e Tempo. Razão e Emoção. 4th ed. São Paulo, BR: Editora
da Universidade de São Paulo.
Sarreal, Julia. 2014. The Guaraní and Their Missions: A Socioeconomic History. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
Schmidl, Ulrico (Utz). [1567] 2016. Derrotero y viaje a España y las Indias. Parana, AR: Universidad Nacional
de Entre Ríos.
Susnik, Branislava. 1975. Dispersión Tupí-Guaraní prehistórica: Ensayo analítico. Asunción: Museo Etnográfico
Andrés Barbero.
Verdesio, Gustavo. 2001. Forgotten Conquests: Rereading New World History from the Margins. Philadelphia:
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Wilde, Guillermo. 2009. Religión y poder en las misiones guaraníes. Buenos Aires: Editorial SB.
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PART IV
Language, translation and beyond

21
THE WHITE LEGEND
El Dorado, pachacuti, and Walter Raleigh’s
discovery of (Latin) America
Ralph Bauer
In the last paragraph of his The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtifvl Empyre of Gviana (1596),
Walter Raleigh reports that, during the time of the Spanish conquest of Peru, an ancient proph-
ecy was found in one of the main temples at Cuzco that foretold not only the fall of the old Inca
capital to the Spaniards but also the Incas’ eventual delivery from the Spanish colonial yoke as
well as their restoration as the legitimate lords over their former dominion. This restoration of
the “Inga” would be brought about by men from “Inglatierra,” and had, Raleigh averred, already
begun with his own expedition up the Orinoco River the year before (1595), when he searched
for “Manoa,” a fabulously rich city rumored to be located in the remote interiors of the South
American jungle. For, Raleigh explains, this “Inga” was none other than the legendary “El
Dorado,” the king of Manoa who had received his Spanish name for his fabled practice of an
annual initiation rite during which he completely covered himself with gold dust and sub-
merged in a lake (see Figure 21.1). If this Inca Dorado had hitherto remained elusive, Raleigh
appealed to his queen to “give order for the rest, and either defend it, and hold it as tributary, or
conquer and keep it as empress of the same” (Raleigh [1596] 1997, 199).
Despite Raleigh’s ardent appeal, however, Queen Elizabeth did not invest in his adventure
to discover El Dorado; and his own subsequent attempts, as well as those of his lieutenant,
Lawrence Keymis, remained as unsuccessful as had been the previous Spanish endeavors. The
several tons of ore that he brought back to London from his first voyage to Guiana and that he
thought to be rich in gold, turned out to be worthless. Worse, Raleigh’s second expedition to
Guiana some twenty years later (1617) ended in the death of his son, in Keymis’s suicide, and,
ultimately, in his own execution (in 1618) for the illegal attack that his lieutenant had launched
against a Spanish garrison, defying King James’ explicit order to honor the peace treaty with
Spain. But for all these disasters, Raleigh’s Discoverie was arguably a success in at least one
respect—not as a historical chronicle of an actual English discovery and conquest but as a rhe-
torical artifact that legitimated the idea of an English discovery—the discovery of a golden
America that had not yet been discovered and conquered by Spain but had remained hidden.1
In its dependence on the rhetoric of the “Black Legend”—the notion of the extraordinary
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Figure 21.1 M
atthäus Becker,Wie der Keyser auss Guaiana seine Edelleut pflegt zu zurichten wenn er sie
zu Gast helt. In [America. Pt 8. German] Americae achter Theil. In welchem erstlich
beschrieben wirt das Mächtige und Goldtreiche Königreich Guiana [etc.]. Frankfurt am
Main, 1599. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI.
cruelty and injustice of the Spanish conquest of America—Raleigh’s claim for an English dis-
covery might be called the “White Legend,” the notion that this secret America was a virgin
land that, like his “virgin queen” Elizabeth, had not yet been raped by Spaniards but had saved
her “maidenhead” (as he put it) to be discovered by English redeemers (Raleigh [1596] 1997,
196). This White Legend would become the dominant ideology underwriting the English
colonial project in the later conquest of “Virginia” and the so-called New World more broadly.
In this mythology of American beginnings, Anglo Americans see themselves as the heirs not of
Hernando Cortés the conqueror but of Christopher Columbus the discoverer. Thus, still in the
twentieth century, the famous Anglo-American historian Daniel Boorstin declared that “My
hero is Man the Discoverer…the world we now view from the literate West…had to be opened
for us by countless Columbuses…. All the world is still an America” (Boorstin 1985, 8, xv–xvi).
Even to this day, Columbus Day is celebrated but not Cortés Day in the United States, even
though the former never came any closer than the latter to a territory that would later become
part of that nation.2
This chapter explores the origins of this White Legend by focusing on Raleigh’s account of
his search for the legendary Dorado. As I will argue, the idea of an English discovery in (Latin)
America originates in Raleigh’s text as an act not of invention but of translation and appropria-
tion.3 Modern scholars have often read the sixteenth-century literary record about the search
for El Dorado in terms of a European projection of classical myths and medieval alchemical
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fantasies upon an American terra incognita (see Gandía 1946, 125–127; Harlow 1928; Ramos
Pérez 1973; Nicholl 1995; Burnett, 2000). Raleigh’s Discoverie, in particular, has hereby been
seen as an act of rhetorical conquest—as “writing that conquers”—within a New Historicist
critical paradigm predicated on the insight that America was not discovered but “invented” by
Europeans in the early modern period.4 But while New Historicist critics have rightly
approached the El Dorado corpus with a hermeneutics of suspicion, it would be a mistake to
read these texts solely in terms of European impositions and projections. Indeed, modern anthro-
pologists have established that the El Dorado legend has a basis not only in European classical
mythology and medieval alchemy but also in Native South American oral traditions about an
actual cultural practice among the Muisca (or Chibcha), an Indian tribe living in the highlands
of Bogotá.5 From this point of view, the legend of El Dorado might be described as an example
of what Serge Gruzinski has called a “mestizo mechanism,” an intercultural hybrid that fused
various European and indigenous traditions in colonial situations (Gruzinski 2002, 49). In a
similar vein, Neil Whitehead has described Raleigh’s Discoverie as a text that is both “enchanted”
and “ethnological” thus meriting serious consideration not only in literary but also in ethno-
historical scholarship. But while Whitehead (an anthropologist) was primarily interested in dis-
tilling ethnological information from Raleigh’s text, I wish to ask here how its “enchanted” and
“ethnological” hermeneutics interacted during the early modern period in the making of new
scientific and imperialist ideologies. As we will see, Raleigh’s claim about a prophecy of the
restoration of the “Inga” by “Inglatierra” had its roots partially in ethnological knowledge he had
cunningly obtained, translated, manipulated, and synthesized from his Spanish literary sources as
well as from the intelligence extracted from local Indians and Spanish officials. In particular,
Raleigh’s rather extraordinary claim suggests that he was familiar with the Andean apocalyptic
tradition of pachacuti, the Turner of the Earth. In Raleigh’s translation and appropriation of this
tradition, the English “discovery” of El Dorado becomes the fulfillment of this Inca prophecy—
the delivery of the Incas from the Spanish yoke by an English pachacuti. Raleigh’s dialog with his
Spanish sources in the Discoverie may thus be seen as yet another example to show that it is
impossible to understand early modern writing about America within the discrete terms of
national languages and literary histories, as the so-called European Age of Discovery was also
(and perhaps primarily) a transnational Age of Translation (see Marroquín-Arredondo and Bauer
2019, 1–26; Bauer 2019; Bauer 2003; and Greene 1999). The next section of this chapter will
provide some basic background on the so-called Black Legend upon which Raleigh’s White
Legend of the English discovery of El Dorado depended. The remainder of the chapter will
explore the textual lineages of Raleigh’s translation of the tradition of pachacuti from his Spanish
American and indigenous sources.
The Black and the Gold Legend

The Spanish conquest of America was remarkable in the long history of human warfare and
plunder not for its now proverbial cruelty and avarice but for the significant controversy it
sparked—perhaps for the first time—within an expanding imperialist culture about the justness
of subjecting others to one’s faith and way of life by the force of arms. By most accounts, this
controversy began on the island of Hispaniola on the fourth Sunday of Advent, December 21,
1511, when the newly arrived Dominican friar Antonio de Montesinos preached a sermon in
which he excoriated the Spanish conquerors and colonists for their abuses of the Indians they
held in subjection. Among Montesinos’ audience was a secular priest named Bartolomé de Las
Casas, in whom the sermon appears to have triggered a conversion experience that led him to
join the Dominican order in 1513 and become the most vociferous advocate for the rights of
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the American Indians as well as one of the harshest critics of the Spanish conquest and the colo-
nial system set up in America. In 1534, Las Casas published his De unico vocationis modo, in which
he argued that “the only way” of conversion was by peaceful means. God had permitted
Christopher Columbus to discover America for Spain, he argued, not so that individual colonists
could enrich themselves at the expense of the Indians but so that the Indians could be converted
peacefully to the only saving faith. In 1552, Las Casas published his Brevíssima relación de la
destrucción de las indias, a most graphic indictment of the cruelty of the Spanish conquest that was,
in its hyperbolic rhetoric, calculated to lend support to his lifelong struggle to protect the
Indians from Spanish abuses and exploitation. There, Las Casas described the Indians as “gentle
sheep” (ovejas mansas) who, despite their paganism, had held rightful dominion of their lands
and property before the arrival of the Spaniards, who, like “rabid wolves” (rabiosos lobos), had
fallen upon the Indians and subjected them to slavery and infernal tyranny (Las Casas 2006, 14,
117). In order to drive home his point, he offered gruesome examples of the conquerors’ cruelty
and avarice. For example, he reported that:
It once happened that I myself witnessed their grilling of four or five local leaders in this
fashion (and I believe they had set up two or three other pairs of grills alongside so that
they might process other victims at the same time) when the poor creatures’ howls came
between the Spanish commander and his sleep. He gave orders that the prisoners were
to be throttled, but the man in charge of the execution detail, who was more blood-
thirsty than the average hangman (I know his identity and even met some of his relatives
in Seville), was loath to cut short his private entertainment by throttling them and so he
personally went around ramming wooden bungs into their mouths to stop them mak-
ing such a racket and deliberately stoked the fire so that they would take just as long to
die as he himself chose. I saw all these things for myself and many others besides.
(Las Casas 1992, 15–16)
Una vez vide que teniendo en las parrillas quemándose quatro, o cinco principales y
señores (y aún pienso que avía dos, o tres pares de parrillas donde quemavan otros) y
porque davan muy grandes gritos y davan pena al capitán, o le impidían el sueño,
mandó que los ahogassen, y el alguazil que era peor que verdugo que los quemava (y
sé cómo se llamava y aún sus parientes conocí en Sevilla) no quiso ahogallos, antes les
metió con sus mano palos en las bocas para que no sonassen, y atizóles el fuego hasta
que se asaron de espacio como él quería.Yo vide todas las cosas arriba dichas y muchas
otras infinitas.
(Las Casas 2006, 20)
The conquerors had given the Christian faith such a bad name in America, Las Casas charged,
that when a Native leader, named Hatuey, was told by a Franciscan missionary that he would
never reach heaven but have to endure “everlasting torment” in hell lest he converted, he asked
whether Christians went to Heaven. When the reply came that good ones do, he
retorted, without need for further reflection, that, if that was the case, then he chose to
go to Hell to ensure that he would never again have to clap eyes on those cruel brutes.
This is just one example of the reputation and honor that our Lord and our Christian
faith have earned as a result of the actions of those “Christians” who have sailed to the
Americas.
(Las Casas 1992, 28–29)
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[si iban cristianos al cielo. El religioso le respondió que sí, pero que iban los que eran
buenos. Dijo luego el cacique, sin más pensar, que no quería él ir allá, sino al infierno,
por no estar donde estuviesen y por no ver tan cruel gente. Ésta es la fama y honra que
Dios y nuestra fe ha ganado con los cristianos que han ido a las Indias.]
(Las Casas 2006, 37–39)
While Las Casas generally refrained from naming the Spaniards whose crimes he exposed, he
singled out for their special cruelty the German agents of the Welser who, in 1526, had been
granted a colony in Venezuela by Charles V in repayment for the large sums of money that the
German bankers had loaned him for bribing the German dukes who elected him to the throne
of the Holy Roman Empire in 1519. From their base at Coro, the Welsers’ agents launched their
search for El Dorado and the Pacific Ocean, a quest that brought one of their leaders, Nikolaus
Federmann to the highlands of Bogotá, where he met with Sebastián de Belalcázar and Gonzalo
Jiménez de Quesada in 1539, who had also been searching for the fabled city. Outdoing the
Spanish conquerors in their cruelty and greed, the Germans in Venezuela were “more inhumane
and more vicious than savage tigers,” Las Casas wrote, “more ferocious than lions or ravening
wolves” (Las Casas 1992, 96) (“más irracional y furiosamente que crudelísimos tigres y que
rabiosos lobos y leones” [Las Casas 2006, 117]). In his mad quest for El Dorado, one of the
German commanders
took with him a vast number of native bearers, shackled together and each weighed
down by a load of three of four arrobas. Whenever one of these poor wretches fainted
from hunger or became too exhausted to carry on, they cut his head from his body at
the point where the iron collar bound him to his companions, so as not to have to
waste time unshackling him from the bearers to either side of him; his head would fall
to one side and his decapitated body to the other, and his load would then be distrib-
uted among his fellows, adding to their already heavy burdens.
(Las Casas 1992, 99)
[llevó él y los demás infinitos indios cargados con cargas de tres y cuatro arrobas,
ensartados en cadenas. Cansábase alguno o desmayaba de hambre y del trabajo y
flaqueza; cortábanle luego la cabeza por la collera de la cadena, por no pararse a desen-
sartar los otros que iban en las colleras de más afuera; y caía la cabeza a una parte y el
cuerpo a otra, y repartían la carga déste sobre las que llevaban los otros.]
(Las Casas 2006, 121)
Such were the “outrages committed against God and against divine law …[by] the inhumanity
of these Swabian—or more properly, swinish—butchers” (Las Casas, 1992, 101). (“los daños,
deshonras, blasfemias, infamias de Dios y de su ley, … por la cudicia y inmanidad de aquestos
tiranos animales o alemanes” [Las Casas, 2006, 123]).
But despite his (misleading) insinuations that these Germans may have been Lutherans (1992,
98; 2006, 120), Las Casas had made the conquerors’ cruelties and avarice proverbial not only in
the Spanish Empire but also abroad, especially among Protestant nations. Thus, his Brevíssma rel-
ación was quickly translated into multiple European languages, including Dutch, French, Latin,
and German.6 In England, there were two early modern editions, one published under Queen
Elizabeth I’s reign in 1583 as The Spanish Colonie and another one during the seventeenth-
century Interregnum as The Tears of the Indians (1656). The latter was published with illustrations
that were adapted from the copperplate engravings that had embellished Theodor De Bry’s Latin
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Figure 21.2 [ Native Americans hanged over a fire] Bartolomé de Las Casas, Narratio regionum indicarum per
Hispanos quosdam deuastatarum verissima. Francofurti [Frankfurt am Main]: Theodor de Bry &
Johann Sauer, 1598. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.
edition, entitled Narratio regionum indicarum per Hispanos quosdam deuastatarum verissima and pub-
lished at Frankfurt in 1598. That same edition also included graphic images of the hunt for El
Dorado, showing the torture and murder of chief Bogotá at the hands of several Spaniards for
having failed to supply a house of gold, as had been demanded of him (see Figures 21.2 and 21.3).
The first English edition of 1583 was translated anonymously by a “M.M.S” from a French
version by Jacques de Miggrode and published by Thomas Dawson for William Brome in
London. In a preface addressed to the reader, the anonymous translator suggested that the
Spanish nation was genetically predisposed to barbaric violence that they perpetrated in the
Americas due to its dual Gothic and Moorish (Muslim) ancestry in Europe.
behold so many millions of men put to death, as hardly there have been so many
Spaniards procreated into this world since their first fathers the Gothes inhabited their
countries, either since their second progenitors the Saracens expelled and murdered
the most part of the Gothes, as it seemeth that the Spaniardes haue murdered and put
to death in the Westerne Indies by all such meanes as barbarousnesse it selfe coulde
imagine or forge vpon the anueld of crueltie. They haue destroyed thrise so much
lande as christendome doth comprehende: such torments haue they inuented, yea so
great and excessiue haue their trecherie been, that the posteritie shall hardly thinke
that euer so barbarous or cruell a nation haue bin in the worlde, if as you woulde say
we had not with our eyes seene it, and with our hands felt it. I confesse that I neuer
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Figure 21.3 [ The torture of King Bogotá]. Bartolomé de Las Casas, Narratio regionum indicarum per Hispanos
quosdam deuastatarum verissima. Francofurti [Frankfurt am Main]: Theodor de Bry & Johann
Sauer, 1598. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.
loued that nation generally, by reason of their intollerable pride, notwithstanding I can
not but cōmend & loue sundry excellent persons that are among thē.
(Las Casas 1583, f. 2)
By the last decade of the sixteenth century, the stereotype of the cruel conqueror of America—a
stereotype that in Las Casas had transcended national boundaries to designate all false
Christians—had become associated with a distinctly Spanish national character as medieval
(“gothic”) and only partially Christian, which is to say adulterated by Moorish Islam. This ste-
reotype would become a persistent foil in the formation of national identities in Protestant
Europe during the seventeenth century and of an Enlightenment philosophy of race, progress,
and modernity emerging during the eighteenth century. Still during the nineteenth century,
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel would famously refer to Spaniards as “the Africans of Europe”
(Hegel [1827] 1989, 88).
The Black and the White Legend

Raleigh’s The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtifvl Empyre of Gviana was a seminal text in the
history of the Black Legend in England and on the Continent. After its original English edition
in 1596, it was republished in both Latin and German by Theodore de Bry as Part Eight of his
“America” series in 1599. The same year, it was also published in a separate German edition by
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Levinus Hulsius in the Protestant city of Nuremberg under the title Kurtze wunderbare Beschreibung.
Dess Goldreichen Königreichs Guianae im America, oder newen Welt, vnter der Linea Aequinoctiali gele-
gen.The preface of this edition placed Raleigh’s text in the tradition of the books of wonders and
prodigies, featuring Amazons as well as monstrous races without heads and their faces in their
trunks. And for good measure, the preface also included the story of a young virgin named
Katharina who, until age seven, never ate, defecated, or sweated and yet turned out to be a well-
shaped, lively young woman with normal speech. The editor also highlighted the economic
potential of Guiana, which boasts of “gold, precious stones, pearls, balsum, oil, pepper, sugar,
myrrh, spices, rubber, honey, silk, cotton, and Brazil wood, all of which are to be had from the
inhabitants by barter for things such as knives and “things from Nuremberg” (Raleigh 1599, 4).
In these translations as well as Raleigh’s original English version, the Black Legend is per-
sonified by the Spanish governor of Trinidad, Antonio de Berrío, whom Raleigh had captured
and interrogated about his earlier search for El Dorado. Thus, Raleigh reports that
every night there came some [of the Indians] with most lamentable complaints of his
cruelty: how he had divided the island and given to every soldier a part; that he made
the ancient cacique, which were lords of the country, to be their slaves; that he kept
them in chains, and dropped their naked bodies with burning bacon, and such other
torments, which I found afterwards to be true.
(Raleigh 1997, 28)
It is Berrío’s cruelty that caused the Indians to withhold their knowledge about the secret loca-
tion of El Dorado, thus providing an explanation of why it had not yet been discovered by the
Spaniards. By contrast, the Indians are most eager to divulge their secrets to Raleigh and become
the subjects of Queen Elizabeth, who is the sworn enemy of the Spaniards.Thus, he relates how
I made them understand that I was the servant of a queen who was the great cacique
of the north, and a virgin, and had more caciqui under her than there were trees in that
island; that she was an enemy to the Castellani in respect of their tyranny and oppres-
sion, and that she delivered all such nations about her, as were by them oppressed; and
having freed all the coast of the northern world from their servitude, had sent me to
free them also, and withal to defend the country of Guiana from their invasion and
conquest.
(Raleigh 1997, 134)
As the Indians’ deliverer from the Spanish yoke, Raleigh is rewarded with their disclosure of not
only Guiana’s geographic secrets but also their scientific knowledge of the properties of local
animals and plants, including their art of preparing a very deadly poison with which they equip
their arrows in warfare, and its antidotes. “There was nothing whereof I was more curious,” he
wrote,
than to finde out the true remedies of these poisoned arrows, for besides the mortalitie
of the wound they make, the partie shot indureth the most insufferable torment in the
world, and abideth a most uglie and lamentable death, somtimes dying starke mad,
somtimes their bowels breaking out of their bellies, and are presently discolored, as
blacke as pitch, and so unsavory, as no man can endure to cure, or to attend them.
(Raleigh 1997, 170–171)
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This remedy, commonly called curare by the Spaniards, was a mixture prepared from the
Strychnos root and bark and the subject of many fables among the European colonists. While it
is unclear whether this Native secret was actually disclosed to Raleigh, he makes great rhetorical
use of it by emphasizing that he, unlike the Spaniards who failed in their attempts at attaining
this knowledge through violent extortions, was able to penetrate this secret. “But every one of
these Indians know it not,” he writes, “no not one among thousands, but their southsaiers and
priests, who do conceale it, and onely teach it but from the father to the sonne.”Yet, he contin-
ues, “I was more beholding to the Guianians, than any other,” and “they told me the best way of
healing as well therof, as of all other poisons” (Raleigh 1997, 171). Among these remedies were
many plants, minerals, and stones with magical properties, including one that the Natives call
takua and that played an important role in Native healing ceremonies and cosmology.
Raleigh’s claim in the Discoverie that the Indians have been hiding secret information about
El Dorado and the medicinal properties of plants from the Spaniards but are willing to divulge
their secrets to the English ‘discoverers’ sheds light on the rhetorical connections more generally
between the White Legend of an English discovery, the Golden Legend of a “secret” El Dorado,
and the Black Legend of Spanish cruelty. Raleigh argues that the cruelty and illegitimacy of
Spanish rule caused the Indians to guard their secrets for discovery by their English friends, who
were thus called upon to “defend” Guiana and “hold it as tributary, or conquer and keep it as
empress of the same” (Raleigh 1997, 219). This fiction is further enhanced in Raleigh’s text by
his mimicry and ventriloquism of Native speech and ideas about the English.Thus, he writes that
I shewed them her Majesty’s picture, which they so admired and honored, as it had
been easy to have brought them idolatrous thereof.The like and a more large discourse
I made to the rest of the nations, both in my passing to Guiana and to those of the
borders, so as in that part of the world her Majesty is very famous and admirable;
whom they now call Ezrabeta cassipuna aquerewana, which is as much as ‘Elizabeth, the
Great Princess, or Greatest Commander’.
(Raleigh 1997, 134)
Thus, Raleigh emphasizes the cultural and religious affinities between Guiana and England, the
Virgin Land and the land of the Virgin Queen. Whereas the Spanish conquest represents in his
text a rape of America, the English “discoverie” amounts to a gentle “Platonic embrace” (Nicholl
1995: 289). Like Queen Elizabeth, Guiana
hath yet her maidenhead, never sacked, turned, nor wrought; the face of the earth hath
not been torn, nor the virtue and salt of the soil spent by manurance. The graves have
not been opened for gold, the mines not broken with sledges, nor their images pulled
down out of their temples. It hath never been entered by any army of strength, and
never conquered or possessed by any Christian prince.
(Raleigh [1596] 1997, 196)
Walter Raleigh and pachacuti

Raleigh’s original contribution to both the Golden and the Black Legend hereby lies in the
connection he makes between the English “Discoverie” of Guiana and the Spanish conquest of
Peru. Thus, he maintains that “Inglatierra” will deliver the “Inga” from his cruel Spanish
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oppressor. In elaborating the idea that El Dorado is none other than the Inca and that his
redemption by an English sanifex had been foretold in an ancient prophecy found at Cusco,
Raleigh’s text fuses ethnographic information garnered from the Spanish chronicles of the con-
quest of Peru and from the personal testimonies of various Spanish interlocutors.
Raleigh was an avid reader of the Spanish chronicles of the discovery and conquest. Despite
his fierce anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish sentiments, he was enchanted with the Spanish dream
of the conquest of new worlds. Moreover, for him, the exploitation of American gold was more
than a dream; it was the necessity of realpolitik that would ensure English survival in the imperial
rivalry with Spain for geopolitical hegemony. Thus, he writes that
we find that by the abundant treasure of that country the Spanish king vexes all the
princes of Europe, and is become, in a few years, from a poor king of Castile, the greatest
monarch of this part of the world, and likely every day to increase if other princes
forslow the good occasions offered, and suffer him to add this empire to the rest, which
by far exceedeth all the rest. If his gold now endanger us, he will then be unresistible.
(Raleigh 1997, 138)
Despite his polemical indictments of Spanish cruelties, Raleigh considered the Spanish conquest
as a model to be emulated, not to be superseded. “I shall willingly spend my life” in the conquest
of Guiana, he writes, “And if any else shall be enabled thereunto, and conquer the same, I assure
him thus much; he shall perform more than ever was done in Mexico by Cortes, or in Peru by
Pizarro, whereof the one conquered the empire of Mutezuma, the other of Guascar and Atabalipa”
(Raleigh 1997, 136). For Guiana, being the land of the descendants of the Incas and being
“directly east from Peru,”
hath more abundance of gold than any part of Peru, and as many or more great cities
than ever Peru had when it flourished most. It is governed by the same laws, and the
emperor and people observe the same religion, and the same form and policies in
government as were used in Peru, not differing in any part. And I have been assured by
such of the Spaniards as have seen Manoa, the imperial city of Guiana, which the
Spaniards call El Dorado, that for the greatness, for the riches, and for the excellent seat,
it far exceedeth any of the world, at least of so much of the world as is known to the
Spanish nation.
(Raleigh 1997, 136)
Guiana would be England’s Peru, only better. But the historical relationship that Raleigh con-
structs in the Discoverie between Guiana and Peru was not only one of parallelism but also one
of genealogy, as El Dorado was the descendant and heir of the Inca.
With regard to the Spanish conquest of Peru, Raleigh was excellently informed by the
Spanish historiography that had already appeared in print (see Ojer 1966, 496–497). He cites,
for example, in Spanish with his own English translation, an extended passage from Francisco
López de Gómara’s Historia general, in which the Spanish historian described “the court and
magnificence of Guaynacapa [Huayna Khapaq]” (Raleigh 1997, 137). Raleigh had also read
Pedro Cieza de León’s Crónica del Peru, which had been published in Seville in 1553 and which
provided a detailed account of the Spanish conquest. But besides drawing from the published
sources written by Spanish authors, much of Raleigh’s knowledge about South America gener-
ally, and the legend of El Dorado especially, was based on unpublished “secret” or local sources.
Raleigh’s statements on the subject suggest that one of his sources on the El Dorado legend was
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The white legend
Berrío and the oral tradition that had inspired the Spanish seekers of El Dorado. Berrío also
seems to have been one of the sources of Raleigh’s conflation between the Inca and El Dorado.
Thus, he writes that
Such of the Spaniards as afterwards endeavoured the conquest thereof, whereof there
have been many, as shall be declared hereafter, thought that this Inga, of whom this
emperor now living is descended, took his way by the river of Amazons, by that branch
which is called Papamene.
(Raleigh 1997, 138)
Berrío, while in Raleigh’s captivity, had related how one Juan Martínez, a soldier who had been
abandoned in a boat during one of these expeditions as punishment for his negligence in the
explosion of a powder store, had been captured by Native Americans and brought to a golden
city that the Indians called “Manoa,” which allegedly stood on a lake up the Orinoco River and
had been founded by El Dorado, the Golden King. Martínez (according to Raleigh) had related
how every year El Dorado “carouseth with his captains, tributaries, and governors” as they are
“stripped naked and their bodies anointed all over with a kind of white Balsamum (by them
called Curcai ) …When they are anointed all over, certain servants of the emperor, having pre-
pared gold made into fine powder, blow it thorough hollow canes upon their naked bodies, until
they be all shining from the foot to the head” (Raleigh 1997, 140).
But even before his capture and interrogation of Berrío, Raleigh had probably first heard of
the story of El Dorado from Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, an official of the Spanish crown who
had been charged with the fortification of Spain’s South American main and who had fallen
captive to some of Raleigh’s privateers in 1586 in the Straits of Magellan en route to Spain (see
Lorimer, 2006, xli; also Hemming 1978, 165). This is suggested by Raleigh’s comment that
“Many yeares since” he had knowledge, “by relation, of that mighty, rich, and beawtifull Empire
of Guiana, and of that great and Golden City, which the Spanyards call El Dorado, and the natu-
rals Manoa, which Citie was conquered, reedified, and inlarged by a younger sonne of Guainacapa
[Huayna Capac] Emperor of Peru.”7
If Sarmiento de Gamboa was indeed Raleigh’s earliest source for the connection between El
Dorado and the last of the Incas while in English captivity in 1586, the Spaniard had patently
offered up a tall tale. As the official chronicler of Peru (who had been commissioned by Viceroy
Francisco de Toledo to write the History of the Incas) would certainly have known, the last male
descendant of the Incas, Tupac Amaru, had been executed by Toledo in the main square of
Cusco in 1572—more than a decade before Sarmiento’s interview with Raleigh. In fact, one of
the main reasons why Sarmiento de Gamboa had been commissioned by Viceroy Toledo to
write a history of the Incas was precisely to justify the viceroy’s controversial decision to have
the last Inca publicly executed. Thus, in his Historia de los Incas (which was completed in 1572
but not published until the twentieth century), Sarmiento de Gamboa had provided a detailed
ethnographic account of Inca religious beliefs and practices in which the Incas were portrayed
in an extremely unflattering light as devil worshippers, polygamists, and sodomites.
The last Inca,Tupac Amaru, was the son of Manco Inca, referred to by Raleigh as “a younger
sonne of Guainacapa [Huayna Khapaq] Emperor of Peru,” who had at first been installed as a
puppet ruler by the Spaniards after their murder of his older half brother, the Inca Atahualpa, but
who had then risen up against them and laid siege to Cusco, only barely failing to retake it in
1536. After the failure of the siege, Manco Inca had withdrawn to Vilcabamba in the remote
Amazonian foothills of the Andes, where he reconstituted a neo-Inca state that existed in parallel
to the Spanish viceroyalty for some thirty years. After his assassination by some Spanish visitors,
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Ralph Bauer
Manco Inca’s resistance was carried on by his sons, first Titu Cusi Yupanki and then Tupac
Amaru, who engaged in guerilla warfare and occasional raids on Spanish merchants and ‘paci-
fied’ Indians until the final invasion of Vilcabamba by Toledo’s troops in 1572 (see Bauer 2005,
1–56). Thus, when Sarmiento de Gamboa was in Raleigh’s captivity and divulged historical and
geographical information about Peru and South America, the last Inca had been dead for some
twenty years, and the Spanish chronicler would surely have known it. Still, it is not inconceivable
that Raleigh’s confusion with regard to the history of the Incas and the story of El Dorado
originated with Sarmiento de Gamboa and his captivity in England. As we know from other
sources, Sarmiento de Gamboa frequently offered up entertaining tall tales that were probably
meant to sow confusion among the English aspirants to empire in America. For example, in his
History of the World, Raleigh relates that his captive responded to his demand for geographic
information about the Straits of Magellan with a “pretty jest.”
[W]hen I asked him, being then my prisoner, some question about an island in those
straits, which methought might have done neither benefit or displeasure to his enter-
prise, he told me merrily, that it was to be called the Painter’s Wife’s Islands; saying, that
whilst the fellow drew that map, his wife sitting by desired him to put in one country
for her; that she, in imagination, might have an island of her own.
(Raleigh 1964, IV: 684)
Whatever the origin of Raleigh’s particular confusion with regard to the story of El Dorado,
it seems likely that Sarmiento de Gamboa’s oral testimony was the main source of Raleigh’s
story about an apocalyptic prophecy found during the Spanish conquest of Cusco foretelling
the restoration of the “Inga” from Spanish oppression by a man from “Inglatierra.” Thus, in his
Historia de los Incas, Sarmiento de Gamboa had related the story of the defeat of the powerful
Chancas by the Inca Yupanki (ca. 1438-1471). The Chancas had invaded the Inca homeland
around Cusco and driven Viracocha Inca (Yupanki’s father) and his designated successor, Urco
Huaranca, to flee the capital. During the epic battle outside Cusco, the Inca Yupanki demon-
strated great bravery and was miraculously assisted by mysterious warriors descending from the
mountains, who were said to have been “sent by Viracocha, the creator, as succor for the Inca”
(Sarmiento de Gamboa 1999, 92) (“enviaba el Viracocha su criador para su ayuda” [Sarmiento
de Gamboa 2018, 202]). After Inca Yupanki’s victory over the Chancas, the Incas honored him
for his triumph “with many epithets, especially calling him Pachacuti, which means ‘over-
turner of the earth’, alluding to the lands and farms which they looked upon as lost by the
coming of the Chancas. For he had made them free and save again. From that time he was
called Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui” (Sarmiento de Gamboa 1999, 92) (“honraron con muchos
epítetos a Inca Yupanqui, especialmente llamándo[lo] Pachacuti, que quiere decir ‘volvedor de
la tierra’ queriendo decir que la tierra y haciendas, que tenían por perdidas por la venida de los
chancas, él se las había libertado y asegurado.Y de allí adelante se llamó Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui
[Sarmiento de Gamboa 2018, 203)]). Moreover, Pachacuti Yupanqui was made Inca and greatly
expanded the empire all through South America, thoroughly reorganizing all facets of the Inca
world in the process. It is because of his role as a transformer, both in war and in peace, that he
received the title “Pachacuti.”
Under Spanish rule, the Inca Pachacuti came to occupy a central role in Andean apocalyptic
resistance movements as early as the sixteenth century. The Andean concept of pachacuti derives
from the Quechua noun pacha (epoch, era, time and space, or state of being) and the verb kutiy
(to return, go back, change, turn back). The concept of kuti is symbolized in Andean icono-
graphic traditions by the digging stick, taclla, with its curved hook, with which the soil is
374
The white legend
plowed. Sarmiento de Gamboa was thus literally correct when he defined a pachacuti as an
“overturner of the earth.” However, in an extended sense, the concept of pachacuti pertained also
to “cycles of time and space and cataclysmic events” in Andean cosmogony, revolving around
“oscillations of time/space in which periodic catastrophes define moments of transition separat-
ing epochs” (Steele and Allen 2004, 226–227). The legacy of the Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui as an
overturner of epochs lived on in Andean millenarian traditions from the time of the Spanish
conquest to the present in the apocalyptic expectation that another pachacuti will emerge who
will shake off the colonial European yoke, just as the Inca Yupanki had shaken off the Chanca
yoke. While in modern times, this concept lives on in the leftist indigenist political movement
originating in Bolivia, in the post-Conquest Viceregal period, the millenarian tradition of
pachacuti often revolved around the apocalyptic conflict between the Spanish king, Españarrí, and
the Inca king, Incarrí. Although the present age is dominated by the Españarrí, another pachacuti
will usher forth the victorious return of the Incarrí. Such a pachacuti appeared to have arrived
during the late 1560s, when an indigenous millenarian movement called taki unquy (dancing
sickness) arose in the Andes during which charismatic leaders called upon Andeans to resist the
viceregal state and Spanish missionaries and to return to the old worship of huacas (sacred stones
and places). Spanish officials were extremely concerned and convinced (probably correctly) that
this millenarian movement had emanated from the neo-Inca state at Vilcabamba and therefore
renewed their attempts to bring it under Spanish control, successfully invading it in 1572.8 Still,
the (post)colonial tradition of pachacuti lived on as a millenarian prophecy of a return of the Inca
bringing about an end to Spanish (or European) rule in the Andes throughout the Spanish vice-
regal period and (later) during the modern national period.
Raleigh’s sixteenth-century contribution to this mestizo mechanism was to insert a role for
himself and “Inglatierra” as an ally of “Incarrí” in the colonial Andean millenarian resistance
movement of pachacuti. In devising the narrative ploy of bringing an indigenous prophetic tradi-
tion into connection with the European arrival in America, Raleigh was possibly (even likely)
inspired also by Hernando Cortés’ Second Letter to Charles V, which had been translated into
multiple languages and printed throughout Europe. There, Cortés first told the tale that would
later develop into the Mexican national myth of Quetzalcoatl, according to which the
Mesoamerican deity had allegedly departed for the east in mythic times after being disobeyed
by his people but prophesied his triumphant return to resume his legitimate rule over Anahuac,
the high plateau of Mexico. Although Cortés, in his letter, does not yet name this deity, he
planted the seed of the legend by inventing a speech that Montezuma allegedly gave upon first
facing the Spaniards on one of the causeways leading into Tenochtitlan. According to this speech,
the Aztecs believed the Spaniards to be the emissaries of the returning god, who is called a
“chieftain” there and who would resume his rightful place as lord of Anahuac, hereby replacing
the ruling Aztec elite, who were but illegitimate newcomers. “For a long time we have known
from the writings of our ancestors,” Cortés has Montezuma say,
that neither I, nor any of those who dwell in this land, are natives of it, but foreigners
who came from very distant parts; and likewise we know that a chieftain, of whom
they were all vassals, brought our people to this region. And he returned to his native
land and after many years came again, by which time all those who had remained were
married to native women and had built villages and raised children. And when he
wished to lead them away again they would not go nor even admit him as their chief;
and so he departed. And we have always held that those who descended from him
would come and conquer this land and take us as their vassals. So because of the place
from which you claim to come, namely, from where the sun rises, and the things you
375
Ralph Bauer
tell us of the great lord or king who sent you here, we believe and are certain that he
is our natural lord, especially as you say he has known of us for some time. So be
assured that we shall obey you and hold you as our lord in place of that great sovereign
of whom you speak; and in this there shall be no offense or betrayal whatsoever.
(Cortés 1971, 85–86)
[Muchos días ha que por nuestras escripturas tenemos de nuestros antepasados noticia
que yo ni todos los que en esta tierra habitamos no somos naturales de ella sino estran-
jeros y venidos a ella de partes muy estrañas.Y tenemos ansimesmo que a estas partes
trajo nuestra generación un señor cuyos vasallos todos eran, el cual se volvió a su natu-
raleza.Y después tornó a venir dende en mucho tiempo y tanto que ya estaban casados
los que habían quedado con las mujeres naturales de la tierra y tenían mucha gener-
ación y fechos pueblos donde vivían.Y queriéndolos llevar consigo, no quisieron ir ni
menos rescebirle por señor, y así se volvió. Y siempre hemos tenido que los que dél
descendiesen habían de venir a sojuzgar esta tierra y a nosotros como a sus vasallos, y
segúnd de la parte que vos decís que venís, que es hacia a do sale el sol, y las cosas que
decís de ese grand señor o rey que acá os invió, creemos y tenemos por cierto, él ser
nuestro señor natural, en especial que nos decís que él ha muchos días tenía noticia de
nosotros. Y por tanto, vos sed cierto que os obedeceremos y ternemos por señor en
lugar dese gran señor que decís, y que en ello no habrá falta ni engaño alguno.]
(Cortés [1520] 1993, 210–211)
It is unclear whether or not the Mexica had a pre-Hispanic prophetic tradition foretelling the
return of Quetzalcoatl.What is clear is that the speech ascribed to Montezuma is an act of colonial
ventriloquism by Cortés. From the many references that Raleigh makes to Cortés in his Discoverie,
it is also clear that Raleigh was very well informed about the Spanish conquest of Mexico, possibly
having read one of the sixteenth-century published editions of Cortés’ Second Letter to Charles
V in which the passage quoted above occurs. Similarly, Raleigh’s account of an Inca prophecy
foretelling the arrival of the English is an act of colonial ventriloquism, but it was also an act of
cultural translation and appropriation that fused in his text with the Andean tradition of pachacuti,
familiar from the writings of missionary and imperial ethnographers, into a mestizo mechanism.
The product of this mestizo mechanism was an idea of an English “discoverie” of America that
would have a long legacy in the history of British imperialism in America (see Burnett 2000).
Thus, while Raleigh’s historical endeavors in the discovery of El Dorado and his secret city of
Manoa remained fruitless, the narrative alchemy of his Discoverie laid one of the most foundational
ideological building blocks in an emergent British imperialist ideology, the fiction that the English
arrival in America fulfilled ancient Indian prophecies that foretold the liberation from the Spanish
regime of terror and oppression.The alchemy of the White Legend—of an English idea of a “dis-
covery” of America—hereby hinged on the notion that a virginal America had remained hidden
from the Spanish rapists, saving herself for penetration by an English husband.
Notes
1 For the longevity of this idea still in the nineteenth century and beyond, see Burnett (2000), especially
25–66.
2 For a critique of this mythology, see Jennings 1975 and Cañizares-Esguerra 2006.
3 On translation between imperial Spain and Early Modern England, see Fuchs 2004, 75–78; Fuchs 2010;
and Marroquín-Arredondo and Bauer 2019.
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4 Montrose 1993, 182; see also Greenblatt 1973, 55–84; Fuller 1995; Hamlin 1996; and Shannon 1998.
The classic account in this revisionist hermeneutic practice was Edmundo O’Gorman’s La invención de
América (1958); but for more recent examples of this approach, see Greenblatt 1993; Rabasa 1993;
Williams and Lewis 1993; Kadir 1992; and Householder 2011.
5 See Whitehead 1997, 72–91.
6 The classic account of the history of the Black Legend remains Gibson 1971; but also see Greer et al.
2007; and Fuchs 2007.
7 Raleigh 1997, 121–122. The earliest Spanish written account bringing the history of the Incas in con-
nection with the legend of El Dorado appears to have been written by the Spanish soldier de Pedro
Maraver de Silva, though this account was not published, and it is therefore unlikely that Raleigh would
have been aware of it; see Maraver de Silva 1576, r 28; also Hemming 1978, 43–45.
8 See Steele and Allen 2004, 226–227; also MacCormack 1988 and 1991, 285–311; and Bauer 2005.
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22
THE AGENCY OF
TRANSLATION IN COLONIAL
LATIN AMERICA
Rethinking the roles of non-European
linguistic intermediaries
Translation has an exceedingly capacious definition in early modern texts. This chapter con-
ceives of it as the linguistic exchange between two or more mutually unintelligible language
communities. Historically, five overlapping uses of this kind of translation have been studied by
scholars of colonial Latin America: translation performed for (1) military campaigns by Iberians
and their allies to invade distinct areas of the Americas; (2) historical narratives produced in the
aftermath of conquest about the Americas before, during, and after Iberian arrival; (3) legal
documents drafted as and after American territories became part of Iberian Empires; (4) texts
produced to generate and circulate knowledge about the New World’s natural resources and
technologies to extract and manipulate them in and beyond the Spanish Empire; and (5) evan-
gelism. Recent studies across this typology have placed renewed emphasis on the influence of
non-European linguistic intermediaries as agents.
Despite its centrality to these recent studies, agency itself has been the subject of little explicit
attention in them. Most scholars, in their use of the concept as a plotting device, define the agent
as the antithesis of the passive victim of physical or symbolic colonial violence. For example,
John Charles asserts, with reference to the Andean intermediaries who are the protagonists of
his study, that “Indians were historical agents and not passive victims of Spanish designs” (2010,
14) and Alcira Dueñas describes how lettered indios and mestizos “fought their way into the ciu-
dad letrada” (2010, 3). In taking such approaches, most recent studies avoid narrating the agency
of non-European linguistic intermediaries as one that clearly maps onto a dichotomous field of
action divided between “colonizers” and “colonized.” In fact, while colonial translation scholar-
ship has not explicitly engaged with postcolonial and poststructuralist critiques of agency (Butler
1993; Hartman 1997; Johnson 2003; Scott 2004), much of it resonates with those critiques. This
chapter surveys the treatment of non-European linguistic intermediaries as agents in recent
studies on translation in colonial Latin America and concludes with a reflection from my own
research on the methods and problems of analyzing the agency of translation.
379
Assessments of the role of translation in colonial Latin American military conquests have
popularly focused on Malintzin, also known as La Malinche or Doña Marina and her crucial
role in the military invasion of central Mexico by Hernan Cortés in 1519. Bernal Díaz del
Castillo’s Historia verdadera de la Conquista de la Nueva España (1632) attributes her ability to speak
Nahuatl and Mayan to the fact that she was a Nahua woman who had been given to a Mayan
community as a child (chapter 37). Cortés, according to Díaz, was able to manipulate commu-
nication with Nahuatl-speaking groups throughout central Mexico by “speaking through”
Doña Marina and Jerónimo de Aguilar, a Sevillian castaway who had spent several years as a slave
among the Maya before Cortés’s arrival in Veracruz (chapter 37). Elaborating on Díaz’s com-
ment that Doña Marina also gave birth to Cortés’s child before he wedded her to one of his
soldiers, Octavio Paz’s famous essay from 1950 describes her as both victim of rape and a traitor
to indigenous people.1 In the early 1980s,Tzvetan Todorov’s Conquest of America recast Malintzin’s
role in the conquest, arguing that she was more a willing traitor than a victim (1982 [1984],
100–101).Another decade later, Stephen Greenblatt’s Marvelous Possessions alternatively described
Doña Marina as a “tool” of Cortés (1991, 144–145). Camilla Townsend’s Malintzin’s Choices
(2006) represents a recent reassessment of the iconic interpreter, circling back to Díaz del
Castillo’s approach of focusing on her to narratively displace Cortés as the main actor of the
conquest. Townsend’s method fills out the sparse historical record about Malintzin by reading
available sources in dialogue with documents about the broader world that shaped her before,
during, and after the fall of Tenochtitlan.2
There are, of course, many other intermediaries who appear in narratives and archives about
initial Spanish explorations and military incursions in the Americas who hold a less prominent
status. Anna Brickhouse’s The Unsettlement of America (2014) highlights several. The first part of
Brickhouse’s book underscores the interruptions to colonial projects caused by native interpret-
ers, including the captured “tongues” [lenguas] described in Columbus’s diary, offering alterna-
tive readings of the directionality and consequences of translation employed in initial encounters
between European and indigenous actors than those made by Todorov and Greenblatt. The
main focus of Brickhouse’s book is Paquinquineo/Don Luis de Velasco, an Algonquian-speaking
native of the area now considered the Chesapeake Bay who left with the Spanish during one of
their initial forays into the area in 1561. Brickhouse explains that after leaving the Chesapeake
Paquinquineo converted to Christianity, becoming the namesake of the Viceroy of Mexico.
After nine years of travels across the Atlantic and the Caribbean, he participated in a Jesuit mis-
sion back to the Chesapeake in 1570. Brickhouse recounts how, upon his return to the
Chesapeake, Don Luis (as she calls him) turned against the Jesuit mission in a series of events that
she reads as a premeditated plan of unsettlement, a calculated attack intended to discourage
Spanish colonial designs. Brickhouse’s speculative readings of this and other “motivated mis-
translations” by native intermediaries emphasize the subversive effects of indigenous mediation
in early Spanish and indigenous encounters.
While much of Brickhouse’s book examines the use of translation for military exploration
and settlement campaigns, she also reflects on the translations performed to produce historical
narratives of the colonial past (the second category of this typology).3 Brickhouse does so in the
second part of her book dedicated to Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s strategic interpretation of earlier
Spanish narratives of settlement in La Florida del Inca.The third part then traces how Anglophone
British and later US translators of Iberian-American texts performed their own motivated mis-
translations of Spanish-language colonial sources to advance new projects of territorial posses-
sion. In foregrounding indigenous interpreters as agents of history rather than invisible victims
or pawns and juxtaposing them to European historians as translators of others’ historical accounts,
Brickhouse underscores that Spaniards neither had a monopoly over the ends of inter-lingual
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The agency of translation in colonial Latin America
communication in the Americas nor were they the sole benefactors of the accumulation of
knowledge to be gained by crossing the Atlantic and the Caribbean.
The study of the third type of translation—that which pertains to legal settings and
documents—has its roots in a school of colonial Latin American historiography led by James
Lockhart and his students in the 1970s, which came to be called New Philology (see Restall
2003).The methods employed and conclusions generated from this school concentrated on nar-
rating the history of native peoples that could be told through Nahuatl-language legal texts
produced after the fall of Tenochtitlan.4 Several decades later, with Yanna Yannakakis’s Art of
Being In-Between (2008), the narration of that history became explicitly organized around trans-
lation in colonial legal and administrative settings (see also Yannakakis 2012 and 2014). José
Carlos de la Puente’s recent Andean Cosmopolitans (2018) makes a significant new contribution
to this line of research by considering indigenous mediations in Andean legal archives, which
have received much less attention than their central American counterparts (see also Puente
Luna 2014). Like Brickhouse (2014), de la Puente foregrounds the circulation of non-European
networks of knowledge and indigenous travelers in the Atlantic world. Unlike Brickhouse, how-
ever, de la Puente frames Andean communities and individuals as co-producers of empire in the
Americas rather than anti-colonial agents of resistance. In conversation with scholarship on
other Andean intermediaries by Frank Salomon (1982), Rolena Adorno (1986, 1994), Alcira
Dueñas (2010), and John Charles (2010), de la Puente tells a story of Andean actors who rede-
ployed strategies of imperial relations developed under the Inca to advocate for their interests in
legal fora, petitions, and physical voyages to the Iberian Peninsula. These strategies included,
especially in the sixteenth century, using the Andean knotted cord recording system of the khipu
to support information provided in legal documents and letters to the metropolis about the
Andean communities in question. De la Puente demonstrates that the Andean intermediaries of
his study advocated on their own behalves and on behalf of larger communities (sometimes
privileging one over the other).
The newest area of study on colonial translation in which important scholarship has recently
developed involves the production and circulation of knowledge about the natural world and
technologies for manipulating it in the Americas. In particular, Allison Bigelow’s Mining Language
(2020) uses translation as a means of accessing the long-ignored influence of non-European
actors in generating knowledge about New World metals and metallurgy. Bigelow’s book com-
pellingly traces how native-language terms for metals were translated into Iberian-authored
natural histories, missionary bilingual dictionaries, and vernacular scientific treatises. She does
this to examine the “intellectual contributions of peoples whose ways of knowing have gone
largely under-acknowledged in the colonial science historiography, such as mining women,
Afro-Latin artisans, and indigenous experts” (2020, 12). The composite terms that appear in
Spanish language texts about metals and mining in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
promise important archival recoveries for Bigelow who analyzes them as evidence of the partici-
pation of non-European actors in the generation of knowledge and the labor required to extract
and manipulate the metals. Bigelow’s method combines strategies drawn from historical linguis-
tics, new materialism, intellectual history, and social history, innovatively bringing them into
conversation with translation studies.5 Like the third part of Brickhouse’s study, Bigelow then
adds another “stage” of translation to her analysis by tracing how the Iberian-language texts in
question were subsequently translated into other European languages.6
The final, much older, area of study on translation that continues to grow with recent schol-
arship is that of its use in colonial evangelical projects. Examining sources such as those com-
posed by Bernardino de Sahagún and his European and indigenous collaborators, Louise
Burkhart’s The Slippery Earth (1989) set the stage for contemporary examinations of colonial
381
evangelical translation in New Spain in her landmark study of the creation of notions of sin,
guilt, and restitution in Nahuatl.7 Earlier that decade Frank Salomon (1982) and George L.
Urioste (1982) had also authored examinations of the use of translation in Andean evangelical
projects. Several recent notable studies on evangelical translation in colonial Latin America have
combined religious-anthropological approaches employed by Burkhart with those of linguists
to characterize the changes undergone by the languages themselves as they were codified for
evangelical translation (Durston 2007; Hanks 2010; Farriss 2018).8 While scholars have noted
that many “authors” of the official translations of religious texts in the Americas were Iberians
or criollos who learned native languages (Barros 2001; Durston 2007), recent research also high-
lights the important collaboration between those Spanish and criollo language specialists and
indigenous and mestizo native-language instructors or interpreters upon whom they often
depended (Charles 2010; Brewer-García 2012; León Llerena 2014; Magaloni Kerpel 2014;
Brewer-García 2016; Bigelow 2017; Wilde 2017).9 The extent to which participation by native
speakers of non-European languages in evangelical projects indexes non-European agency in
those projects is a contentious question, however, as I will illustrate in the second part of this
chapter.
Despite their differences, the recent studies in the five areas reviewed above present colonial
translation as a dynamic process in which actors from distinct language groups in the Atlantic
world communicated with each other to produce new words, ideas, objects, and social relation-
ships. Collectively, this scholarship demonstrates that leaving behind old conceptions of transla-
tion as either faithful preservation or traitorous change allows for new stories about non-European
participation in the Atlantic world to be told.Through concepts such as the motivated mistrans-
lation (Brickhouse), the zealous adoption of legal fora and formats to make demands of the
imperial center (Puente Luna), or the composite languages of vernacular science and industry
(Bigelow), these scholars remind us that the colonial archive is bigger than previously thought
and full of interventions by actors, languages, and objects whose influence on European and
colonial societies has historically been underestimated.
Reflections on method
Despite the growth in the trend identified above, there is no consensus on how contemporary
scholars should analyze the previously underestimated roles played by non-European linguistic
intermediaries in colonial Latin America when their archival traces are so often incomplete,
inconsistent, or merely implicit. I have reflected on this question throughout my own research
on translation in the context of the transatlantic slave trade to colonial Spanish America. These
reflections have not only been informed by the historiography on translation in colonial Latin
American studies and postcolonial translation studies, but also conversations in slavery studies
about the pitfalls of over-privileging narratives of agency as resistance by enslaved or formerly
enslaved actors in the past (Hartman 1997; Johnson 2003; Helton et al. 2015; Fuentes 2016). As
part of a summary of my research on the black evangelical interpreters of seventeenth-century
Cartagena de Indias in what follows, I offer my own thoughts about why studies of translation
in colonial Latin America should avoid singularly gravitating toward stories about resistant agen-
cies of non-European linguistic intermediaries and how one might go about doing so.
My research on black linguistic intermediaries in colonial Spanish America emerged from
reading Jesuit Alonso de Sandoval’s Naturaleza, policia sagrada i profana, costumbres i ritos, disciplina i
catechismo de todos etiopes (1627). Modeling his text on José de Acosta’s De procuranda indorum
salute (1588) and Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590), Sandoval attempted to produce a
comparable evangelical method for black men and women in the Americas. To this end, his
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treatise includes a compendium of information about the nature, customs, beliefs, and behaviors
of the principal regions in Africa from which men, women, and children were being taken to
the Americas and instructions for how to use that information to evangelize the sick, exhausted,
and terrified populations disembarking from slave ships in Cartagena and other New World
ports. These populations, Sandoval explains, were particularly challenging to evangelize because
the dispersal and dispossession of the slave trade had made it so that the individuals disembarking
from slave ships often could not understand each other let alone the priests speaking only
European languages. Unlike Acosta’s argument in De procuranda indorum salute which advocates
for increased training in indigenous languages for European and criollo priests so they could
speak directly to indigenous populations in their own languages, Sandoval declares in the third
book of his treatise that priests should use black interpreters to evangelize newly arrived black
populations in the Americas (Brewer-García 2020, 88–91). He justifies this position by suggest-
ing that adopting a comparable linguistic strategy to that of indigenous evangelization would be
“morally impossible” (1627, book III, chapter 2, 234v).The languages spoken by the new arrivals
from Africa, Sandoval explains, were too many and too mutually unintelligible to justify asking
priests to dedicate years of their lives to learning any one of them. As a result, the Jesuit mission
among newly arrived black men and women would have to depend entirely on enslaved black
interpreters. Sandoval’s prescriptions for this evangelical project built around enslaved black
interpreters led me to ask about the influence the crucial-but-anonymous black linguistic inter-
mediaries of Sandoval’s treatise might have had on the Jesuits’ evangelical projects in Cartagena
and Lima and the black Christian subjectivities they sought to produce.
This line of questioning was further complicated when I read more broadly and learned that
the enslaved black interpreters who Sandoval mentions as an abstract type in his treatise appear
less anonymously in a series of related texts produced in seventeenth-century Cartagena around
the beatification inquest for Jesuit priest Pedro Claver (Proceso 1676), Sandoval’s successor in
the evangelical mission among black men and women in Cartagena. Furthermore, the black
interpreters also appear, I learned, in non-Jesuit Inquisition and criminal trials from seventeenth-
century Cartagena (AHN, Inquisición; AGI, Patronato 234). Once I knew some of the inter-
preters’ names and could read their mediated testimonies describing their work as evangelical
assistants, I had to decide how to analyze and write about these sources. After much thought and
many drafts, I determined that the best method for analyzing them involves interpreting the
distinct kinds of sources they helped produce in explicit conversation with each other and the
broader context of colonial Cartagena.These distinct sources show that the enslaved black inter-
preters became spiritual leaders and evangelizers who moved throughout the city and the port
as agents of the priests for whom they worked. Through their support of the Jesuit mission, the
interpreters helped circulate and produce written descriptions of beautiful black bodies and
souls in seventeenth-century Spanish America (Brewer-García 2016, 2020).
In calling the interpreters agents of the Jesuit mission, I note that the sources describing or
indexing black intermediaries’ influence in the Jesuit evangelical mission do not provide evi-
dence for a larger story about a “hidden transcript” (Scott 1992) that was explicitly resistant to
the broader slave labor system, the Spanish colonial project, or the Jesuit mission among black
men and women. And yet these sources nonetheless offer glimpses of unique positively inflected
language to describe blackness circulating in seventeenth-century Cartagena as well as tensions
that emerged from the overlapping of the evangelical project, the secular colonial administrative
project, and the slave labor system in Cartagena. These tensions deserve to be analyzed as more
than just innocuous glitches in a smooth historical trajectory of the establishment of successful
European dominance in the Americas. Sandoval mentions, for example, that priests need to keep
383
the enslaved black interpreters interested and invested in the evangelical task by treating them
well, giving them gifts, food, and additional medical care:
We will sweeten the interpreters with devotional goods, having also won them over by
confessing them and treating them well, because they tend to tire with the hard work
and frustration that come with this ministry.Thus, either respect or reward keeps them
with you and encourages them.
[A las mesmas lenguas saborearemos con algunas cosas de devocion, teniendolas tam-
bien ganadas por averlas confessado, y buen modo de tratallas, porque se suelen cansar
con el mucho trabajo y enfado que en este exercicio hallan, para que o el respeto o el
premio las detenga o aliente.]
(1627; book III, chapter 2, 237v)
Implicit in Sandoval’s comment is that messages translated by enslaved interpreters under physi-
cal coercion, fatigue, or frustration could be erroneous. In line with the prescriptive purpose of
his text as a method for others to follow, Sandoval downplays the problems related to the inter-
preters’ potentially inconvenient needs and desires in order to emphasize the success of his
method of translation for evangelical efforts in Cartagena.
My method of reading translation in Sandoval’s treatise and the related corpus surrounding
it creates space around the framing of linguistic translation as a process that always ensures the
complete continuity of a transferred message across a change in medium and religious conversion
as process that always enacts a complete spiritual transformation. As I adopt this approach, I linger
over the inconsistencies in the Jesuits’ practical examples of the work of translation such as those
mentioned here, asking what these moments can teach us about residual matter and meanings
created in translation that are not fully inscribed by the notions of seamless linguistic translation
and complete spiritual conversion that Sandoval proposes.
To add dimension to these reflections, I read Sandoval’s accounts in conversation with
descriptions of the work of translation conducted by black evangelical assistants in the beatifica-
tion inquest for Pedro Claver. Claver, Sandoval’s protégé in Cartagena, was considered a poten-
tial saint upon his death in 1654. Because many of his virtues were deployed in the service of
black evangelization, nine black interpreters who worked with Sandoval and Claver testify in the
beatification inquest, describing the work they performed for the mission. The most substantial
of these testimonies is related by interpreter Andrés Sacabuche “of the Angola nation” [de nación
Angola] ([1659] Proceso 1676, 99v–109v). Sacabuche’s testimony was delivered as a first-person
oral narrative, transcribed in the third person by the notary on site, and then translated from
Spanish to Italian when the manuscript of the trial traveled to Rome eleven years later. The
testimony demonstrates that along every step of the catechism and baptism process, the inter-
preters shaped the experiences and interpretations of what it meant to become black Christians
in Cartagena. Comparing Sandoval’s prescriptions to Sacabuche’s and his colleagues’ descrip-
tions of their work reveals that the tasks of translation changed over time so that interpreters
took on even greater leadership roles in the catechism process than those Sandoval proposed in
his treatise in the course of the more than thirty years that passed from the composition of
Sandoval’s treatise to the transcription of the testimonies for Claver’s beatification inquest.
A final methodological strategy for reading the scenarios of evangelical translation by black
men and women involves considering, when possible and without falling into gross generaliza-
tions, the African precedents for the black interpreters in Cartagena whom the black new arriv-
als might have used to perceive and interact with the interpreters upon arrival. For example,
384
Cécile Fromont’s study (2014) of the visual culture of Christianity in the early modern kingdom
of Kongo describes the roles played by Kongolese mestres, elite native church guardians, inter-
preters, and spiritual guides who appear throughout missionary images from the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. Fromont explains that these mestres were key facilitators for European
priests’ missionary and sacramental work and important leaders in the spreading and preserving
of Christianity even when European priests were not present. It is suggestive to consider that
West Central Africans, like Andrés Sacabuche, who came from the partially Christianized areas
of the Kongo and Angola in the early to mid-seventeenth century, could have perceived the
black interpreters working with Sandoval and Pedro Claver in Cartagena as New World itera-
tions of Kongolese mestres. Another possibility is that the multilingual Biafada (Biafara in Spanish
documents) women who served as cultural brokers, interpreters, and traders in Portuguese inter-
actions with Upper Guineans in the late sixteenth through seventeenth centuries described in
studies by George E. Brooks (2003, 55) and Philip Havik (2012, 318–319) served as precedents
and models for female black interpreters in Cartagena such as María de Mendoza, a freed
Biafada woman who testifies in the beatification inquest as having served as Claver’s interpreter
for more than thirty years ([1668] Proceso 1676, 238r).
By combining these distinct approaches, I argue that scholars must read against colonial
evangelical texts’ tendencies to alienate the products of translation from the processes, people,
and backgrounds producing them.Yet in doing so, it is equally important to avoid venturing too
far into a speculative reading that over-generalizes the intentions and effects of the intermediar-
ies’ participation. A solution I found for avoiding such an overgeneralization is to consider the
wider context in which these interpreters worked and the overlapping of the five kinds of colo-
nial translation described in this chapter’s opening typology.
For example, the two non-Jesuit sets of texts from seventeenth-century Cartagena that
describe the labor of translation performed by the Jesuits’ black interpreters show that their labor
was not confined to evangelical projects.These sources are (1) Inquisition proceeding summaries
and (2) criminal trial transcripts. Regarding their appearance in Inquisition sources, previous
scholarship has suggested that Claver, in collaboration with the Jesuits’ black interpreters, helped
black defendants secure reduced sentences for crimes of witchcraft (Splendiani et al. 1997, 145).10
These reduced sentences, compared to other cases for which some records exist, appear to be
based on successful claims of the defendants’ poor evangelization due to being unacculturated.
While these examples could provide grist for a broader story about the protection offered by
black interpreters for black people arriving in and passing through seventeenth-century New
Granada, the available evidence is too sparse to ground a solid argument (only some trial sum-
maries survive, rather than full transcripts of trials or any pre-trial depositions or confessions).
Furthermore, the appearance of a black interpreter owned by the Jesuits in a criminal trial pro-
ceeding against recaptured maroons from 1634 warns against such a generalization.
The criminal trial transcript that mentions one of the Jesuits’ black interpreters is part of a
dossier kept at the Archivo General de Indias that documents a series of conflicts between the
city council of Cartagena and two maroon communities (hereafter palenques) surrounding the
city between 1633 and 1634 (AGI, Patronato 234, R. 7, nos. 1 and 2). The dossier contains jus-
tifications for military campaigns to the hinterlands to eradicate the palenques, followed by
descriptions of the logistics of those campaigns, and then the proceedings from the criminal
trials of the black men and women who were captured and taken back to Cartagena after the
campaigns. As part of these trials, 18 captured black men and women from the palenques were
forced to answer a series of questions posed by the city prosecutor. The first 12 of the 18 who
testified in the proceedings were subsequently sentenced to execution.11 The proceedings
describe how, after giving their testimonies, their death sentences were composed, and they were
385
led to the gallows by a town crier publicizing their crimes and the punishment to which they
had been sentenced. At the gallows, the black men were strangled by wire or rope. Their bodies
were then decapitated and quartered and their severed heads and limbs were put on display
throughout Cartagena and the surrounding rural areas.
Two of the men thus executed—witnesses five and six in the trial dossier —related their
testimonies through one of the Jesuits’ enslaved black interpreters before they were sentenced to
death. The interpreter, identified in the proceedings as “Andrés Angola, ladino black slave of the
Jesuit fathers” [Andrés Angola negro ladino esclavo de los padres de la compañia de Jesus], is the
same Andrés Sacabuche from Pedro Claver’s beatification inquest mentioned above (Proceso
1676).12 The two men for whom Sacabuche interprets in the legal proceedings are Sebastián
Anchico and Domingo Anchico.What, I asked in reading the proceedings, can the transcripts of
Sebastián Anchico’s and Domingo Anchico’s translated testimonies tell us about the nature and
the effects of Sacabuche’s participation in the trial?
In the testimonies, Sebastián and Domingo claim they did not choose to flee their owners to
become maroons; they explain that they were captured by other maroons and taken to the
Palenque de Polín as slaves. According to both Sebastián and Domingo, soon after arriving in
Polín they were again taken captive when Polín was sieged by another maroon community—
the Palenque de Limón.When asked by the Cartagena investigator about their role in the attacks
carried out by the Palenque de Limón against nearby estancias, haciendas, and pueblos de indios after
their arrival in Limón, both men state that they only participated under obligation by their
“masters” [amos] in the Palenque de Limón. Sebastián Anchico, for example, recounts that “He
carried the [stolen] meat for his master” [El llebo la carne para su amo...] (AGI, Patronato 234,
R. 7, no. 2, 824r). This multiply translated testimony was first spoken by Sebastián Anchico and
then translated orally by Sacabuche from Anchico into Spanish. Sacabuche’s account was subse-
quently transcribed by the notary on site into the surviving third-person testimony in the dos-
sier.The written testimony that survives implies Sebastián Anchico’s lack of willful participation
in the attack on the estancia by referencing the task he had to carry out for his owner during it.
The other category invoked in Sebastián Anchico’s defense is that of having turned himself over
to the Spanish soldiers as soon as they heard of the soldiers’ attack on the Palenque de Limón:
“they [Sebastián and Domingo] personally turned themselves in to the whites telling them not
to kill them” […ellos mismos se entregaron a los blancos disiendo que no los matase] (ibid., 324).
Both examples from Sebastián Anchico’s testimony present Domingo and Sebastián as obedient
servants who were involuntarily taken from their captivity in Cartagena and who chose to
return to their white property owners as soon as they could. Could this shared strategy for
deflecting blame and presenting the accused as posing little threat to the slave system or white
property owners in Cartagena have been influenced by Andrés Sacabuche the interpreter, I
asked?
Comparing Sebastián’s and Domingo’s claims to innocence with those of the rest of the
testimonies in the dossier not related through an interpreter demonstrates that the categories
mobilized for Sebastián’s and Domingo’s defense in their declarations are not sufficiently unique
to their testimonies to provide evidence that Sacabuche helped shape them. Furthermore,
Sebastián’s and Domingo’s testimonies actually contradict each other regarding their conditions
of recapture. Whereas Sebastián says that Domingo and he had decided to turn themselves in
when they heard the Spanish soldiers were attacking the palenque, Domingo says that he was
running away from the “white soldiers” [soldados blancos] when he was captured (ibid., 827r).
The contradiction indexes a missed opportunity for a protective interpreter to intervene in the
translation to strengthen a plea of innocence by smoothing out inconsistencies in the two stories
386
given back to back on the same morning at the public jail in Cartagena. (In this case, because
Domingo’s declaration comes after Sebastián’s, an omission of information about Domingo’s
effort to run away from the soldiers at the moment of being recaptured would have avoided the
contradiction.)
Another conclusion to be drawn from Sacabuche’s participation in the trial is that, regardless
of his motivations or sympathies, his presence as interpreter actually helped legitimize the exe-
cutions and publicize the narrative colonial authorities wanted to tell through them. I base this
argument on reading the legal trial section of the dossier in dialogue with comments made three
months before the raids by Cartagena city council members about the urgent need to raze the
palenques. In September of 1633, a Cartagena city council [cabildo] member argued for funding
military attacks on the palenques by describing the need to enact exemplary punishment on the
maroons to avoid more instances of slave insurrection and insubordination from spreading
among black men and women across the city and surrounding areas:
The freedom is notorious with which these fugitive maroons go about burning and
destroying plantations and capturing blacks—some unwillingly some willingly—with
whom they can resist with greater force and cause damages like those that have begun.
Because of this, the black slaves on plantations and service slaves in this city are not safe;
they are almost rebelled in thought; they are waiting to see what happens so as to flee
or stay. Military intervention is so urgent and necessary that it must not be delayed
because we can already see the deaths and thefts that they have begun to carry out….
[…es notoria la libertad con que los negros fugitivos cimarrones andan quemando y
destruyendo las estançias cogiendo los negros dellas ya de fuerça ya de grado para con
mas fuerça rresistirse y hacer los daños que an comensado con que los negros de las
estançias y del ceruiçio de los beçinos desta çiudad no estan seguros y ellos casi leban-
tados de pensamiento y a la mira del efeto desto para huirse o quedarse y es tan presisa
y necesaria [la intervención militar] que no quiere punto de dilaçion porque ya bemos
los daños de muertes y rrouos qve an enpesado a hacer….]
(ibid., 21v)
The argument made by the cabildo member identifies repressing black men’s and women’s
aspirations for freedom as the principal goal of the military attacks on the palenques. The descrip-
tions of the public punishments enacted on the recaptured maroons from the raids that resulted
from the city council’s endorsement of this position should be read as orchestrated efforts to
achieve this goal.
By using an interpreter in the trials and executions of the recaptured maroons, the civil
authorities produced a more convincing perception of the guilt of those captured. In order for
the deterrent effect of punishment [escarmiento] to work, according to early modern theories of
criminal justice, audiences had to believe that those who were punished were indeed guilty of a
crime. For example, Covarrubias defines escarmiento as: “the warning and precaution to not err
in order to not receive the punishment enacted on others” [la advertencia y recato de no errar
por no incurrir en la pena, ejecutada en otros] (1611, I: 364r). Without the assumption of the
guilt of the person punished, the deterrent effect of the punishment would be null and could
instead become an index of the tyranny of the punisher. In the Cartagena palenque trials of 1634,
the use of an interpreter to record the declarations of individuals pre-selected for public execu-
tion provided an appearance of due process that would help legitimize the violence Cartagena
387
authorities were planning to enact on the recaptured maroons’ bodies. It is a legitimization for
both the black population of the city (those who were supposed to be “edified” by the punish-
ments) and the King of Spain who would receive a copy of the trial proceedings.13
Another effect of including Andrés Sacabuche in the legalizing apparatus surrounding the
exemplary executions was to publicize the trial and its consequences among the black popula-
tions of the city and surrounding areas. It was well-known among the Jesuits and prominent
inhabitants of Cartagena that Sacabuche and his interpreter colleagues communicated messages
broadly among the black men and women of the city and provincial areas as well as among black
new arrivals. Given that common knowledge, making Sacabuche participate in the trial would
have been an effective means of ensuring the circulation of news about the trial and punishment
among the broader population of black men and women in the city. It is furthermore likely that
communicating news about the trials to the Jesuits’ slaves in particular was seen as especially
urgent because in early December 1633 (a few weeks before the attacks on the palenques and
month and a half before the trials of the recaptured maroons began) nine black slaves abandoned
a Jesuit hacienda outside of Cartagena in an act read by the governor as an effort to join a
palenque (AGI, Patronato 234, R. 7, no. 2, 7v). Rather than contest or interfere in the trial held
to legitimize the executions of Domingo Anchico and Sebastián Anchico, Sacabuche’s participa-
tion helped city authorities frame the executions as a warning to discourage similar behavior in
the future by black men and women in and around the city.
I end this chapter with Andrés Sacabuche’s participation in the colonial legal archive as an
enslaved interpreter as a reminder of the pitfalls of only gravitating to stories about translation
that highlight non-European interpreters’ agency as resistance to Iberian colonial projects in the
Americas. As I have mentioned here and elaborate elsewhere, Sacabuche and his interpreter col-
leagues had a profound influence over the narratives, objects, and language produced to support
the Christian conversion of the tens of thousands of black men and women who passed through
the port of Cartagena in the first half of the seventeenth century. This influence is an important
way in which black intermediaries helped shape the terms of acceptance of Christianity and the
meanings given to it by newly arrived black men and women. Yet in telling the story of this
influence we cannot ignore the larger context of slavery and race relations in Cartagena during
this period. When required to translate for the criminal trials of the maroons in 1634, for exam-
ple, Andrés Sacabuche was interpolated as part of the criminal justice system intent on remind-
ing enslaved and free black men and women around Cartagena of their inferior status to white
property owners.
The variegated appearance of black interpreters in the colonial archive from Cartagena de
Indias does not diminish the importance of Sacabuche and his colleagues as spiritual intermedi-
aries and linguistic interpreters. It does, however, indicate that their agency in the Jesuit evan-
gelical project should not be extrapolated to make arguments about the broader anti-colonial
intentions or effects of the interpreters’ labor. We should keep such paradoxes in mind and
consider the overlapping and sometimes conflicting uses of the distinct kinds of colonial transla-
tion surveyed above when turning to translation as a lens for accessing non-European agency in
colonial archives.
Archives
AGI: Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain
AHN: Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid Spain
388
Notes
1 Paz attributes a psychological condition of the Mexican people to her foundational treason and victim-
hood (1950, 78). Alarcón (1989) traces this treatment by Paz to the mid nineteenth century and engages
Paz’s argument from a Chicana feminist perspective.
2 Karttunen (1994, 1–22) had begun writing about Malintzin with a similar methodology. See Arenal and
Martínez-San Miguel (2005) on images of Malintzin in the Lienzo de Tlaxcala. For a study that consid-
ers comparable figures in the Brazilian context, see Metcalf (2005).
3 The foundational studies of the use of translation in composing historical narratives in the early and
mid-colonial periods are Salomon (1982); Adorno (1986, 1994); Zamora (1988). Some of the most
well-known indigenous or mestizo chroniclers are Inca Garcilaso, Titu Cusi Yupanqui, and Felipe
Guaman Poma de Ayala from the Andes and Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, Chimalpahin
Quauhtlehuanitzin, and Diego Muñoz Camargo from New Spain. Unlike most of the known indige-
nous or mestizo chroniclers whose work of translation involved the author’s own translation of indige-
nous notions of the past to the European genre of the written history, in the case of Titu Cusi’s
Instrucción, there is an added layer of linguistic translation and written mediation: Titu Cusi’s orally
delivered account in Quechua was interpreted out loud in Spanish by a European priest whose mestizo
secretary then transcribed it. Another variation can be seen in the Codex Mendoza (1542), a multipur-
pose text that relates a history of the Aztec empire before Spanish arrival for a European audience
(1325–1521). As Bleichmar (2015) explains, its images were first composed by two different artists and
then interpreted into Nahuatl. Finally, that interpretation was rendered into Spanish. Like many of the
texts of the chroniclers named above, the Codex Mendoza subsequently traveled to Europe and under-
went further transformative translations in English and French.
4 Although translation itself was not a focus of analysis for Lockhart, he did examine the advent of bilin-
gualism and what he called the changing “stages” of Nahuatl language use in the voluminous sources
available for central Mexico. Several of these studies appear in Of Things of the Indies (1999).
5 For precedents from intellectual and social history, see Bustamante García (1992), López Fadul (2015),
and Norton (2017). Prieto (2011) studies Jesuit priests’ collaborations with indigenous “native infor-
mants” to study plants in the New World in the mid-colonial period, but does not consider this partici-
pation through the lens of translation.
6 For earlier considerations of translation as a means of dissemination among imperial rivals in the
Atlantic world, see Campos (2007) and Fuchs (2013).
7 These efforts have concentrated on Central America—with the twentieth-century studies of the
Chilam Balam, the Popol Vuh, and the Florentine Codex. In the Andes a comparable text is the
Manuscrito Huarochirí. Burkhart’s study built upon the scholarship of León Portilla (1958) and Klor
de Alva (1988), among others. See Magaloni Kerpel (2014) on the team of native grammarians and
artists who helped Sahagún compose the Florentine Codex.
8 For an excellent recent summary of scholarship on indigenous languages and historiography in the
Americas, see Durston (2015).
9 See also Russo (2013) on the featherworks produced by the amatecas of Central America in the six-
teenth century for evangelical purposes. The narrow definition of translation in this chapter has not
allowed me to include Russo’s important book, which uses translation as a metaphor for an argument
about the interpretive challenges posed by objects produced out of indigenous-Iberian colonial
exchanges in the sixteenth century. Another recent book that exceeds the linguistic focus of translation
of this chapter is Chakravarti’s (2018) examination of Jesuit strategies of acommodatio in Brazil and Goa.
10 See also Gómez (2017) and Redden (2013) on the relationship between the Jesuits, black slavery, and
the Inquisition as an institution in Cartagena in the seventeenth century.
11 The cover letter of the dossier declares that of the 313 captured in these raids, 23 were killed.The other
280 were presumably sold into exile. Some recent studies on the Patronato de Indias 234 dossier are
McKnight (2004, 2009),Vignaux (2007), Navarrete (2011), and Krug (2018). The following section is
an expansion of an analysis included in Brewer-García (2020, 156–160).
12 I base this identification on the fact that the interpreter in the proceedings speaks the same languages
as Andrés Sacabuche and that several of the interpreters’ testimonies in the beatification trial speak of
Sacabuche’s involvement in the 1634 maroon criminal trials.
13 As evident in the frontmatter and framing of the dossier throughout, the governor and city council
hoped the reports and trials contained in the dossier would prompt endorsement and even compensa-
tion for their “pacification” efforts.
389
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23
INTERCULTURAL
(MIS)TRANSLATIONS
Colonial static and “authorship” in the
Florentine Codex and the relaciones geográficas
of New Spain
Kelly McDonough
In this chapter, I address the complexities of communication in plurilinguistic and pluricultural

contexts, specifically in New Spain (colonial Mexico). As case studies, I discuss two large-scale
sixteenth-century data collection projects: the Florentine Codex (General History of the Things of
New Spain) and the relaciones geográficas surveys (hereafter RGs). Although the Florentine Codex
sprang from religious concerns and the RGs were concerned with the secular, both brought
together large amounts of information with the ultimate goal of solidifying Church and Crown
control in the colonial world. Together these sources allow for sustained consideration of the
always imperfect meaning-making processes of translating languages and cultures. Both projects
were collaborative endeavors between Indigenous peoples (scholars, knowledge-keepers, trans-
lators/interpreters) and Spaniards and/or criollos (American-born Spaniards), which prompts a
reflection on attributions of “authorship” in these sources (note that in this chapter “author” and
“authorship” are shorthand for recognized intellectual contribution).1 As a methodological
intervention, I problematize the long-standing attribution of authorship of both texts to
Spaniards, with Indigenous people cast in minor roles as passive “informants.” I retranslate
Indigenous contributors as “co-authors” alongside their European counterparts, arguing that
this new paradigm acknowledges Indigenous intellectual contribution and triggers a consider-
ation of Indigenous motives and cultural filters at play. From this perspective, Indigenous peoples
of New Spain were not simply being acted upon or extracted from; they too were trying to
make sense of their “Others,” translating through their own cultural frameworks.
Pluricultural and plurilingual New Spain

It is commonly thought that Spaniards immediately, and successfully, imposed their language
upon Indigenous subjects and prohibited the use of Indigenous languages as part and parcel of
the colonial project in New Spain.That is not the case (Lodares 2007; Bravo García 2015).When
grammarian Antonio de Nebrija famously asserted “que siempre la lengua fue compañera del
393
Kelly McDonough
imperio” (“that language has always been the companion of empire”), it was in the context of a
bid to convince Queen Isabella of the value of his recently completed work Gramática de la
lengua castellana (1492) (Grammar of the Castilian Language). A unified language had been key for
ancient empires of the past and, as he argued, could be as well for the Spanish imperial project
in the future—making his grammar all the more necessary and important. While we know that
Nebrija’s work went on to become influential in the so-called New World, it was not this
Castilian grammar, but an earlier one on Latin, Introductiones Latinae (1481) that would make an
impact. The latter, in fact, served as the universal model for the first grammars of Indigenous
languages in the Americas. But as for the idea that Castilian went neatly hand in hand with
Spanish conquest and colonization, that is another story altogether.
During the first two centuries of colonial rule, language policies and practices in colonial Mexico
were “uneven at best” (McDonough 2014, 41). This was due to the fact that Crown and Church
views on the subject were rarely in concert.2 While Spanish encomenderos (possessors of encomiendas,
grants of Indigenous peoples as tributaries) were initially charged with the education and evangeli-
zation of Indigenous peoples of New Spain, this untenable system was soon abolished and the task
transferred to the religious orders. The friars went on to open schools for the sons of Indigenous
nobles where they would learn “Christianity, good customs, civility, and the Castilian tongue”
(Heath 1972, 14).3 Not surprisingly, for the most part the Spanish monarchs wished for all
Indigenous subjects to learn the Castilian language (26). The Crown found it reasonable that a few
select Indigenous men memorize prayers in Latin, learn the Castilian language, and later teach both
Catholic doctrine and Castilian to their brethren. The Church, however, tasked with the imple-
mentation of such policies, soon realized that such a process was laborious and overly time consum-
ing.The Catholic priests found it far more efficient to bypass Castilian altogether in favor of learning
the Indigenous languages themselves, and then evangelizing in the Native tongue.As a case in point,
at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, the well-known school for the sons of Indigenous noble
houses established by the Franciscans in the 1530s, Castilian figured little in the curriculum.4
King Phillip II made repeated attempts to modify language policies to reflect day-to-day
life in multilingual New Spain, although often missed the mark. In 1565, he decreed that all
missionaries should be proficient in the Indigenous language of the population with which
they worked, incorrectly assuming that communities or regions were ethnically and linguisti-
cally uniform.5 Later, in 1570, he declared (albeit briefly) that Nahuatl was to be the official
Indigenous language of New Spain, common to all Native populations (Schwaller 2012).
While at first glance such a policy carried the promise of simplifying administration and evan-
gelization, it did not take into consideration the fact that tens of thousands of Indigenous
peoples did not speak or understand the lingua franca of the Aztec Empire. In the end, it would
not be until the Bourbon Reforms of the eighteenth century that the Crown and Church
would both agree that Castilian should be the language of all secular and religious contexts.
That said, Nahuatl remained a semi-official administrative language alongside Spanish through-
out the colonial period, with its use in the courts ending with Independence from Spain in the
early nineteenth century. Somewhat ironically, it was only at the dawn of the independent
republic of Mexico that Castilian was declared the official language of the land.
Bilingual/bicultural intermediaries
Successful communication hinged upon skilled bilingual and bicultural intermediaries, often
Indigenous men of some standing in their communities.6 In their roles as priests’ assistants,
scholars, local politicians, interpreters, translators, and tribute collectors, they negotiated between
multiple peoples across various socio-political and economic spaces (Yannakakis 2008, 4–8).
394
Intercultural (mis)translations
“As people of considerable linguistic talent, cross-cultural sensibility, and sensitivity to the sub-
tler aspects of human communication,” observes historian Yanna Yannakakis, “intermediaries
evoked a world of mobility and fluid boundaries” (4). Their ability to tack back and forth
between different spheres of colonial life was indispensable.
The evangelization enterprise of the Catholic Church would have been impossible without
the Indigenous men who studied under and collaborated with the priests. Under the tutelage of
the Franciscan friars at the above-mentioned Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco they studied
the holy scripture, Latin, grammar, rhetoric, and learned to write using the Roman alphabet in
their own language and in those of European origin (Kobayashi 1974; Gonzalbo 2001; Tavárez
2013). In this context they collaborated intensely with the priests in the creation of Indigenous
language doctrinal materials, vocabularies, confessional manuals, sermons, religious dramas, etc.,
although they are seldom acknowledged; historian Mark Christensen (2013) has rightly referred
to these Indigenous scholars as the “ghostwriters” of such materials. Indigenous catechists, also,
were crucial in the spread of Catholicism and in helping root out heretical behaviors in Native
populations.
There is no doubt that alphabetic writing was imposed in some settings, to the detriment of
other Native modes of communication. Yet as evidenced by the thousands of colonial manu-
scripts written in Indigenous languages, the Roman alphabet was also adopted and adapted with
great skill by Indigenous peoples to serve their own individual and collective agendas
(McDonough 2014). Native acquisition of alphabetic literacy in religious settings had effects
that rippled well beyond the confines of the Church. The religious training aimed at molding
Indigenous peoples into servile subjects unexpectedly resulted in the rise of influential interme-
diaries who moved deftly between Spanish and Indigenous worlds (Fuchs 2001, 20). Key players
in local politics, Indigenous intermediaries ran interference between Indigenous cabildos (semi-
autonomous municipal courts) and members of the Spanish political apparatus. Legal complaints
brought to the courts by Indigenous peoples relied upon the skills of the bilingual interpreter of
oral testimony, translator of written documents, and scribe.7 To them fell the formidable task of
making Indigenous histories—oral, written, and pictographic—linguistically and culturally
“intelligible” to Spanish officials while ensuring they conformed to the rigid templates of
Spanish legal documents (Valdeón 2014, 79–84; Yannakakis 2014).
Since the Spanish imperial project was at its core an extractive one, Indigenous tribute col-
lectors (tequitlatoh or tepixque) were integral to maintaining the steady flow of income, goods,
and services to Indigenous leaders and Spanish authorities. Their role was to go door to door
collecting the maize, monies, or other material objects from Indigenous commoners and deliver
them to Indigenous officials who would take their share and then transmit what remained to
Spaniards (Gibson 1964, 206–207; Lockhart 1992, 43–44). As Yannakakis (2008, 5) has pointed
out, due to their collaboration with the colonizers, Indigenous intermediaries have generally
been perceived negatively in the historiography.True, the political and socio-economic machine
of Spanish colonial rule would not have functioned without their interventions. But their work
bridging cultures also created the means for ongoing negotiations that in many situations actu-
ally favored Indigenous peoples.8
(Mis)translations: double mistaken identity, colonial static,

and untranslatability
Regardless of the skill of any translator/interpreter, there is no such thing as a completely com-
mensurable translation.9 Misunderstandings—from minor to spectacular—are unavoidable. In
the case of New Spain, incorrect interpretations were regular occurrences, but often relatively
395
Kelly McDonough
benign. Historian James Lockhart, for example, noted the phenomenon he called “double mis-
taken identity.” Indigenous people and Europeans had many analogous—but not identical—
concepts and structural systems that were misinterpreted, but usually with little consequence.
With “double mistaken identity,” Lockhart (1999, 99) opined that “each side of the cultural
exchange presumes that a given form or concept is functioning in the way familiar within its
own tradition and is unaware of or unimpressed by the other side’s interpretation.” A classic
example is the mistranslation of social/geographical organizations, specifically the Nahua altepetl
(city-state) and the Spanish cabecera (administrative center of a political jurisdiction). At first
glance they looked to be more or less the same thing—a defined geographical space with an
identifiable leader. But the Nahua altepetl was made up of several (often eight) sub-units (sub-
altepetl, calpolli, or barrios), each with its own tlahtoani, the dynastic titular head. Responsibilities
in the altepetl rotated; each sub-unit and its tlahtoani took its turn as “head” of the altepetl. In
other words, the “center” was moveable.The cabecera, however, had a fixed center with “subordi-
nate dependencies,” governed by the corregidor from the pinnacle of a strictly vertical socio-
political hierarchy. These are obviously two very different things, but the visible similarities gave
the illusion that little needed to change, which in turn helped avoid serious confrontations; each
party for the most part went about their business as usual.
Lockhart was signaling the result of interferences that made intercultural understanding
impossible: the conscious and/or unconscious inability to think beyond one’s own ontological
and epistemological borders. I think of this interference as “colonial static,” whose noise renders
a message indiscernible or invisible. Colonial static is born of an inability or conscious refusal to
put into practice a protocol of relations that views another culture as coeval. In cases of double
mistaken identity, neither culture suffered from misinterpretations. But poor translations can also
have serious consequences, particularly when there are power differences. Along these lines, in
discussions of colonial translations many scholars reference the epistemological violence that
occurred because most Europeans were bound by their own worldviews when they attempted
to understand Indigenous peoples and their cultures. That which did not fit in the European
framework, sociologist Rolando Vázquez (2011, 36–40) observed, was deemed “untranslatable,”
or unnecessary excess that was disposable.10 Because of this, Spanish translations of Indigenous
culture in colonial Mexico erased with some frequency that which did not fit within Western
ways of knowing and understanding the world (Villoro 1999; Mignolo 2003; Vázquez 2011).
The friars, for example, wrote lengthy ethnographic studies in their drive to learn about and
influence Indigenous life. Anthropologist Louise Burkhart’s (1989, 22) assessment of such eth-
nographies emphasizes that “much was missed or misinterpreted; European cultural categories
were imposed haphazardly upon Indigenous conceptual schemes. Aspects of Native culture
were sometimes redesigned as they were recorded to make them acceptable for an Indio-
Christian society.”
But Spaniards were not the only ones trying to make sense of another culture; Indigenous
peoples, too, read Europeans through their own ontological and epistemological frameworks. In
her seminal book, The Slippery Earth: Nahua Christian Moral Dialogue in the Sixteenth Century
(1989) Burkhart explained how Catholic religious concepts conformed to the Nahua world-
view, although they were deemed close enough to Euro-Christian concepts that they created a
mostly intelligible dialogue between Indigenous peoples and priests. Take the ideas of sin and
guilt, central to the Euro-Christian worldview. “Nahuatl,” Burkhart points out, “had no separate
term for guilt” (1989, 32–33). Thus, according to Burkhart, “the friars worked with the existing
system, translating culpa as tlatlacolli (damage)” (32–33). Lockhart also called attention to how
Nahuas redesigned European culture to fit their own worldview with the use of analogies and
neologisms. According to Lockhart (1994, 228), “Nahuas judged what they perceived by the
396
criteria of their own culture, forcing the new into their own framework whether it fit well or
not.” Two well-known examples are the Nahuatl term maçatl (deer), used in place of horse, and
tepoztli (copper), standing in for iron or steel. Although the Spanish terms were soon understood,
Indigenous people continued to use maçatl and tepoztli in their stead well into the second half of
the 16th century (224–226). A point to consider in thinking about Indigenous filters and their
work of reshaping European concepts: as far as we know, these recasts rarely resulted in negative
consequences for the dominant culture. On the other hand, European/criollo (mis)translations
did have damaging, and lasting, effects on Indigenous peoples. The repetition, circulation, and
internalization of the abundant negative stereotypes in Spanish sources have worked to solidify
and naturalize Indigenous peoples as inferior to the Europeans and their descendants.The estab-
lishment and confirmation of this hierarchy has then led to policies and practices of systematic
Indigenous marginalization, discrimination, and persecution with ramifications still felt today.11
Without losing sight of the perils and pitfalls of intercultural translation, it is important to
also acknowledge its positive aspects when well-intentioned parties attempt to approach another
culture on its own terms. Such interactions may foment mutual understanding, respect, and even
solidarity. Although good intention does not equate to perfect translations, as sociologist/legal
scholar Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2006, 145) has argued, when the intended outcome is to
truly try to understand each other, the potential omissions and misunderstandings can be worth
the risk. All of this is to say that intercultural exchanges are always imperfect, regardless of inten-
tion. But intention does matter; it can mean the difference between being able to tune in to the
message being transmitted, or making it impossible to hear. It helps, then, to ask why the lan-
guages and cultures are being translated. What is the desired outcome of these interactions?
What kinds of static may the involved parties encounter, and what kinds of interference are we
introducing to the analysis ourselves in the twenty-first century?
In the following section I consider these questions through a discussion of the Florentine
Codex and the RGs surveys. Both were European attempts to understand—or translate—
Indigenous peoples and the colonial world. With the information gleaned through these proj-
ects, the priests had hoped to more effectively evangelize the Indigenous population, and in
particular know the signs of incomplete or waning acceptance of Catholicism. The Crown, for
its part, wished to more efficiently utilize the people, places, and things it now called its own.
The Florentine Codex (General History of the Things of New Spain)

1550s–1570s
One of the most well-known projects of translating languages and cultures in colonial Mexico
is the sixteenth-century Florentine Codex, a decades-long collaboration between the Franciscan
friar Bernarndino de Sahagún and a host of Nahua scholars including Antonio Valeriano
(Azcapotzalco); Alonso Vegerano (Cuauhtitlan); Martín Jacobita (barrio de Santa Ana); Pedro de
San Buenaventura (Cuauhtitlan); Diego de Grado (Tlatelolco); Bonifacio Maximiliano
(Tlatelolco); Mateo Severino (Xochimilco); and unnamed Nahua elders.The twelve-book mul-
tilingual and multimedia encyclopedic work is arguably the most comprehensive extant source
treating Indigenous life before (and during) the Spanish conquest of New Spain.12
In the prologue to the entire source written by Sahagún, his stated motive for organizing this
monumental work was three-fold: 1) to gain a comprehensive understanding of pre-Hispanic
religion to head off the return of idolatry; 2) to create an exhaustive Nahuatl-language calepino/
vocabulario (dictionary/glossary) which would facilitate linguistic and cultural understanding
among priests and Natives; and 3) to document aspects of the culture that he admired (López
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Austin 2011, 355).13 Sahagún likened the project to “a dragnet to bring to light all the words of
this language with their exact and metaphorical meanings, and all their ways of speaking, and
most of their ancient practices good and evil.” At the heart of this proto-ethnographic project
was the goal of making Indigenous religious practices and general customs legible, thus ideally
controllable.
The Florentine Codex and its various iterations were completed in three phases over twenty
years, beginning in 1558 and ending in 1578.14 What is known about the data collection process
is that Indigenous leaders and elders were consulted over several years in three distinct locations,
Tepepulco, Tlatelolco, and Mexico-Tenochtitlan. The Nahua scholars asked them a wide range
of questions—generally thought to have been developed by Sahagún—related to their language
and culture. In formulating their responses, the elders cited their amoxtli, or painted books, as
well as memories of orally transmitted knowledges passed down from their ancestors. Meanwhile,
the Nahua scholars recorded the Nahuatl-language responses in alphabetic script. At some point
during the process—it is unclear if before, after, or during it—Indigenous tlacuiloh, painter-
writers, produced some 2,500 images that complemented the alphabetic text. It is generally
thought that the data collected was organized according to European conventions and translated
to Spanish beginning in 1564. Although this Spanish translation has traditionally been attributed
to Sahagún,Victoria Ríos Castaño (2014, 2015) has convincingly argued that the Nahua schol-
ars participated in this phase of the project as well.
Why were Nahua scholars and elders interested in participating in this project? An overlap
with one or more of Sahagún’s above-mentioned motives is not unimaginable. Some may have
been true believers in the new religion, or attracted to the linguistic aspects. Others were per-
haps keen to master alphabetic writing while studying their own culture. Yet others may have
been carrying out a type of salvage-scholarship, intent upon recovering and documenting
knowledges of previous generations, much of which had gone up in smoke during the friars’
earlier Native book-burning sprees. At any rate, regardless of motive, it is important to note that
the project was not just about Europeans learning as much as they could about Indigenous
peoples. Throughout the process, the Indigenous elders and scholars were learning just as much
about the Europeans. If Indigenous peoples were to influence in any way the emerging shape of
the colonial world, they too would need to know as much as they could about the “Others’”
thought and actions.
Although from the process described above the knowledges encoded in the Florentine Codex
are those of Nahuas, for the most part Sahagún has been considered to be the author.
Notwithstanding the imminent Nahuatl literature scholar Ángel María Garibay K., his protégé
Miguel León-Portilla, and certain recent studies (Terraciano 2010; Tavárez 2013; Ríos Castaño
2014) few other scholars have read the Nahua participants in the project as “co-authors.” The
tradition of denying Indigenous peoples “authorship” of texts they clearly produced, as anthro-
pologist Jane Anderson (2013) has observed, is a manifestation of Indigenous dispossession in yet
another form. Assigning authorship solely to dominant-culture participants of sources with mul-
tiple authors, in Anderson’s words, “functions as a means for maintaining hierarchies of knowl-
edge production by reducing Indigenous and non-European subjectivity and legitimating the
(ongoing) appropriation of Indigenous cultural material by non-Indigenous authors” (230).The
continued inability or unwillingness to view Indigenous peoples as more than inert consum-
ables, and to assume that they require outside (Western) mediation in meaning-making processes
is our own contemporary mistranslation.
One of the longstanding arguments for framing the Nahua elders and scholars as serving in a
passive role in the creation of the Florentine Codex is that the overall organization of the work and
the questions asked appear to have been designed by Sahagún (Robertson 1965). The structure
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of the first eleven books reflects a Euro-Christian hierarchy of beings and non-beings, beginning
with God(s) and then cascading down from humans, to animals, and finally to minerals.15 For
Walter Mignolo (2003, 199), this Western organization resulted “in the repression of Native cat-
egories to perform the classificatory operations.” Regardless of the limits that Sahagún’s way of
organizing the world (and by extension the Florentine Codex) may have imposed, Nahua world-
view is also reflected in the text. In Book 11, Earthly Things, Nahua scholars seem to have wanted
to classify animals based on their dwelling places, as opposed to strictly following an Aristotelian
species-driven schema of “like with like.” For example, the illustration of the tzicanantli serpent
who lives near ant hills is not found with the other serpents in the text, but is instead found
among the ants (López Austin 2011, 385). Although there is no extant text of the questions used
to elicit information from Indigenous elders, a reverse engineering of the answers reveals pat-
terns and the general contours of potential questions asked (365–388). These questions, as well
as those that were left unasked, shaped the kinds of data collected, and thus the vision of Nahua
culture we have access to today. In many ways, Western thought did indeed pre-determine rep-
resentations of the Nahua world before the question-answer process even began.
For all of his want of understanding the “Other,” Sahagún’s Euro-Christian paradigm of the
world impeded the possibility of a complete comprehension of Nahua culture.Take the example
of Book 7, The Sun, Moon, and Stars, and the Binding of the Years, which treats astronomy, astrology,
and philosophy of nature. In the prologue, Sahagún laments that the entire book is of extremely
poor quality. The problem was, he said, that the Natives had little understanding of the heavens
and nature. But what he failed to see was that he sought Nahua conceptualizations of the heav-
ens and nature as he understood them. How were Nahuas to have discussed such a thing with
any authority or in any detail? If Sahagún’s line of questioning had been related to Nahua cos-
movision, say the thirteen levels of the (supra)natural world or the World Tree extending in the
four cardinal directions and their associated temperatures, Book 7 would have been infinitely
more productive. The poor quality of the data in Book 7 is, as López-Austin (2011, 377) has
stated, Sahagún’s failure, not that of the Native scholars. Although it would be naïve to ignore
the friar’s colonial static, it would be equally so to assume that Nahuas had no influence what-
soever in the development of the questions in their dialogues with Sahagún or by remaining
silent on certain matters. In the end, the question of who created the questions and how the
answers were organized does not negate the fact that when all was said and done, the knowl-
edges that made it to the page—either in alphabetic script or painted image—were of Indigenous
origin. I now turn to another similarly timed collaborative project, also traditionally attributed
solely to Spaniards, the 1577 relaciones geográficas surveys.
The 1577 relaciones geográficas surveys

Similar to the other Spanish monarchs during the colonial period, King Phillip II never set eyes
on the Americas. Like those who came before and after him, he relied on letters, chronicles,
maps, and testimonies of explorers, soldiers, priests, and other officials to inform him of peoples
and places across the sea. In hopes of more efficiently governing the unwieldy Spanish Empire,
in 1569 King Phillip named Juan de Ovando y Godoy (1530–1575) visitador (royal inspector) to
the Council of Indies. He charged Ovando with formulating recommendations for more orderly
administration of the Americas. Chief among the outcomes of his observations and evaluations,
Ovando presented a series of decrees that systematized the activities of the Council of Indies;
dispatched Dr. Francisco Hernández to New Spain to carry out Spain’s first scientific study in
the Americas; and named his secretary and protégé Juan López de Velasco chief cosmographer/
chronicler of the Council of Indies.
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López de Velasco is best known for his formulation of a fifty-question (actually two hun-
dred+ bundled into fifty) survey that sought political, economic, social, and environmental data
for individual regions and towns in Spanish territories.16 Responses to the survey—today known
as the relaciones geográficas—were to have been the basis for an exhaustive atlas/chronicle of the
empire which would inform best governance and uses of available resources. Similar to the
Florentine Codex, the survey was to have functioned like a net that captured all details of colonial
life. Some questions centered on pre-Hispanic life, including ancient rulers, tribute paid to them,
religious practices, and social norms. Other questions dealt with land and environment, such as
flora, fauna, and mineral resources.Yet others focused on the current Native inhabitants—their
languages, their general health, medicinal practices, food, clothing, and so on.While the Florentine
Codex was a decades-long endeavor, the data collection process for the RGs was to have been as
quick, yet thorough, as possible. The survey was distributed throughout the Spanish Empire in
1577, and 206 were returned to Seville within two to three years. The majority, 163, came from
New Spain.17
With few exceptions, the RGs are composites of many minds and many hands, collages of
voices that register meaning-makers in the plural. The instructions to the survey stated that the
local Spanish authorities were to consult the “personas inteligentes de las cosas de la tierra” (peo-
ple knowledgeable of things of this land). Due to this mandate, most of the RGs show explicit
collaboration with local Indigenous authorities, whose full names regularly appear in the opening
paragraphs, and with some frequency their signatures alongside that of the corregidor (deputy gov-
ernor) on the final page. Other participants in the process included an Indigenous language inter-
preter, a scribe, and occasionally a priest. Indigenous women, it should be noted, were not explicitly
included in the process, and are rarely mentioned in the responses—whether due to Spanish or
Indigenous cultural norms.18 That said, their absence from the archival record does not preclude
their influence on events as community stakeholders. In most of the RGs the scribe states repeat-
edly that he is recording Indigenous voices; countless entries are prefaced with the phrase “dijeron
que” and “respondieron que” (they said that, they responded that…). There is also ample reference
to the Indigenous men consulting their painted books and oral histories as they generated their
responses. Regardless, like the Florentine Codex, the RGs are traditionally considered Spanish texts
that incidentally contain data extracted from so-called Indigenous informants.
Why are the RGs not considered just as much Indigenous sources as they are Spanish/criollo?
Is it because in all of the RGs the local Spanish authority’s voice opens the responses with the date,
place, and participants? Perhaps it is simply a matter of convenience to acknowledge one indi-
vidual as opposed to a group (as in the somewhat clunky list of Indigenous collaborators to the
Florentine Codex I provided earlier). Or maybe the issue at hand is the language of the text, as in the
idea that “Spanish language sources are Spanish”? But suggesting that Spanish-language sources
can be also-Indigenous is anathema to many who understand “authentically Indigenous texts” to be
those that reject the Roman alphabet, refuse the language of the conqueror, and/or are produced
clandestinely. But who creates the rubric of authenticity, of what is and is not “authentically
Indigenous”? Scholarly resistance to acknowledging Indigenous peoples as co-authors of what
Cynthia Stone (2004) has called “culturally-mixed” sources directs attention to our own construc-
tions of indigeneity, particularly the limits of our own categorical thinking which produces
“untranslatables.” My own reading, which continues to meet strong resistance in mainstream Latin
American literary and cultural studies circles, is that the medium, language, or level of collabora-
tion with “the conqueror” (and the filters or censorship this implies) are all inconsequential when
attributing co-authorship (or authorship) of sources to Indigenous peoples.
We know that linguistic and cultural translation projects like the Florentine Codex and RGs
were essential to processes of evangelization, extraction of resources, and certain levels of
400
Hispanization, but it bears repeating that Spaniards were not the only party translating, or the
only ones with an agenda. In assuming that Indigenous peoples were active contributors, the
need to question their rationales for participating in the project is activated. Several come to
mind: 1) it was an opportunity to speak for their community; as Duccio Sacchi (2000, 304) has
maintained, the process itself was an opportunity to formalize territorial order and have it duly
recorded; 2) it promised access to Spanish authorities who could influence future outcomes; 3)
it was a forum to demonstrate to the local community that the Spaniards recognized their
authority, thus solidifying or elevating their status; 4) it was unwise to do otherwise. The leaders
and elders of Cuzcaltán, for example, were threatened with a fine of 100 pesos de mina if they did
not participate (a sum roughly equal to a dozen horses); and finally, 5) it was an opportunity to
learn more about what was important to Spaniards, which would aid in calculating how to best
manage their relationships with them.
As was the case for the Florentine Codex, to a certain degree the questions of the RGs survey
pre-determined the overall narrative of the people, places, and things that would emerge in the
responses. For example, since there are no specific questions in the survey related to women or
children, the responses paint a picture in which women and children are non-existent. Unlike
the Florentine Codex, however, we have access to the precise questions posed in the survey.
Therefore, it is noticeable when information was not forthcoming. Questions were routinely
skipped, and more often than not, no explanation was provided for the gap. But some RGs do
explain the silences. In the RGs of Chiconauhtlan and the Minas de Tasco, both corregidores
explain that they cannot produce answers to many of the questions treating pre-Hispanic topics
since the Natives who would know of such things are all dead and the living claim to have no
recollection of such matters. Whether the six Indigenous lords of Chiconauhtlan, or the “indios
más antiguos” (the most ancient Indians) who participated in the RG of the Minas de Tasco
could not or did not wish to contribute the requested information remains unknown. We can-
not be sure if they truly had no knowledge on the subject to convey, or if they declined to
participate for some other reason. Nor can we determine if the abundance or lack of informa-
tion reflected the quality of Indigenous-Spanish relationships. For example, did detailed infor-
mation signal friendship between the Spanish and Indigenous men? Did silences signal fear or
discord?19 In the same way that we must consider motives for participation, when the Indigenous
participants are framed as active contributors we must also think of their personal and/or col-
lective decisions about what they would and would not share.
There are two obvious instances of Indigenous mistranslations in the RGs responses.The first
is related to question number two: “¿Quién fue el descubridor y conquistador de la dicha pro-
vincia, y por cuya orden y mandado se descubrió, y el año de su descubrimiento y conquista, lo
que de todo buenamente se pudieran saber”? (Who discovered and conquered said province,
and by whose order was it discovered, and the year of its discovery and conquest, as far as can be
known?). It stands to reason that the Crown sought data related to Spanish discovery and con-
quest, presumably to sort through the various claims of recompense put forth by conquistadors.
Many responses do provide the expected information, referencing one conquistador or another.
But most reach far back into pre-Hispanic history to tell the story of the first Indigenous con-
querors and settlers of the land; Spaniards go unmentioned. If the Crown had hopes of sorting
out whose claim to hacienda rights were legitimate, a response that four hundred years prior
Axayacatl had conquered the land would not be helpful in the least.
The second mistranslation is connected to question number ten, which requested a map. In
the words of art historian Barbara Mundy (1996, 91), this request “was relayed as if over frayed
wires, with signals delayed and scrambled, as often occurs in cross-cultural communication.”
López de Velasco expected a European-style chorographic map, yet the tlacuiloh responsible for
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painting a large percentage of the maps did not conceive of a “map” in the same way Spaniards
did, nor did they have similar representational conventions. The Native maps would not give
coordinates for entering and leaving the settlement, nor did they indicate precisely where archi-
tectural features or mineral resources lay. Instead they registered visual historical narratives, lin-
eages, and abstractions of geography. Indicative of the fact that for Spaniards these maps were
untranslatable, once they made their way back across the ocean they sat ignored and gathering
dust in Spanish archives for hundreds of years. We could fault Spaniards for their inability to
understand the Native maps, but I cannot help but wonder what the tlacuiloh thought of Spanish
cartography at the time. For shifting our view of the Indigenous individuals involved in the RGs
responses from neutral, passive informants to engaged co-authors implies thinking in terms of
Native concerns, desires, and of course, mistranslations.
Conclusions
Negotiations, both simple and complex, between peoples of different cultures and with varying
degrees of social, political, and economic power were routine occurrences in New Spain. In this
“linguistic and cultural mosaic” (Mignolo 2003, 65), bilingual-bicultural intermediaries translated
languages and cultures to the best of their ability.The success of such translations was inextricably
linked to the rigidity or flexibility of each party’s ontological and epistemological framework.The
ability and willingness to accept another culture’s view of the world is contingent upon the ability
to entertain the notion that the other culture is equal to one’s own. This was often a challenge in
New Spain; unyielding worldviews (colonial static) and a vertical power hierarchy affected how
messages were received on both sides. Some mistranslations were relatively harmless—as in dou-
ble mistaken identity—while others resulted in serious consequences.
In order to draw out the inherent tensions of colonial translation, I have focused on the inter-
play of European-Indigenous collaborations in the Florentine Codex and the RGs. Both were
attempts to bridge worlds in order to control lands, subjects, and/or souls. And both are examples
of successful and unsuccessful translations between colonial subjects. By shifting our view of Native
contributors to both sources from neutral assistants or passive informants to engaged co-authors, it
becomes necessary to also think in terms of Native filters and mistranslations. But to do so we must
address our own categorical thinking and possible inflexibilities that have interfered with recogniz-
ing Indigenous people as active producers and transmitters of knowledges. Retranslation in this
context implies a careful review of how and why we have traditionally attributed authorship to
dominant-culture participants in culturally mixed texts. Such efforts can and should also be
extended to anthropological and linguistic studies beyond the colonial period that rely upon
Native knowledges. Recognizing whose knowledges and voices are embedded in a text can poten-
tially disrupt centuries of mistranslating academic authority as unequivocal and sole authorship.
This in turn promises new readings of once-familiar sources as it opens up a cache of Indigenous
voices, not only to researchers but also to Indigenous peoples today who may know little of their
own history and the fascinating Indigenous men and women who created it.
Notes
1 Foucault’s intervention, of course, placed the emergence of the author as an individual assigned owner-
ship of a work in the 19th century.
2 Philologist Eva Bravo García sees similarities in terms of Church and Crown policies during the six-
teenth century (“Ambos son partidarios del cultivo de las lenguas indígenas y en ambos se produce en
un determinado momento la necesidad de recurrir a la enseñanza del castellano” (2015, 130) (“both are
in favor of cultivating indigenous languages, and for both there comes a time when it is necessary to
402
resort to teaching Castilian”). I agree with this on principle; however, it is important to emphasize that
Church and Crown positions were rarely in symphony.
3 See Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias, lib.VI, tit. 1, ley 18, 1550.
4 On the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, see Hernández and Máynez (2016).
5 See Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias, lib. I, tít.VI, ley 30, 1574, 1578.
6 Spaniards/criollos and other men of mixed ancestry were also intermediaries. In this chapter, however,
I am focusing on Indigenous intermediaries.
7 See Valdeón (2014) for an excellent general introduction to interpreters and translators in both New
Spain and Peru. Note, however, that while Valdeón posits that women also served as court interpreters—
with the daughter and granddaughter of don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza of Tlaxcala as
examples (79)—there is unfortunately no evidence to support this claim.
8 My use of the term “negotiation” follows Peter Burke (2007, 9) who posits that it is a “concept which
has expanded its domain in the last generation, moving beyond the worlds of trade and diplomacy to
refer to the exchange of ideas and the consequent modification of meanings.”
9 It is not my intention here to discuss the vast field of translation studies; others have done so skillfully.
See for example Burke (2007) and Vega Cernuda and Pulido (2013) as solid entry points.
10 The concept of untranslatability has a long history of scholarly attention. The best introduction to the
concept is the Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Cassin et al. 2014), wherein we find
the canonical perspectives of Jakobson, Croce, Ortega y Gasset, Derrida, Benjamin, and Ricoeur, among
many others. On untranslatability in colonial visual arts, see Russo (2014).
11 Of course, not all Spaniards refused or were unable to meet Indigenous culture on its own terms. As
anthropologist/historian Danna Levin-Rojo (2007) has made clear, many Spaniards were in fact open
to and persuaded by Indigenous modes of knowing and thinking.
12 Since the Florentine Codex is basically an encyclopedia—and an exceptionally unique one at that—the
immense body of scholarship on this unparalleled source hails from nearly every conceivable discipline.
For a general introduction to the source, a good place to start is León-Portilla (1999). Outside of aca-
demia, many peoples of Mexican origin in the process of recovering their Indigenous heritage (such as
Danza Azteca groups) view the Florentine Codex as akin to a Bible.
13 For Sahagún’s rationale for the project, see the prologue in the Introductions and Indexes book of the
Florentine Codex, 45–47.
14 Phase 1: 1558–1561,Tepepulco, Primeros memoriales (record of native testimonies based on memory and
painted books); Phase 2: 1561–1563(?), Tlatelolco, Códices matritenses de la real academia / del real palacio
(record of native testimonies based on memory and painted books); Memoriales con escolios (notes
explaining topics and concepts in more detail); Phase 3: 1564–1578, Mexico-Tenochtitlan y Tlatelolco,
Códice florentino (organization of texts according to European conventions) and La historia general de las
cosas de la Nueva España (Spanish-language version).
15 According to López Austin (2011, 362–363) the organization and classificatory schemes suggest the
influences of European texts including Flavio Josefo’s Arqueología, Aristotle’s Historia de los animales y las
partes de los animales, works by Alberto de Colonia, Pliny’s Historia natural, and Bartolomé de Glanville’s
De proprietatibus rerum. Book XII, which deals with the Spanish conquest, does not figure in the man-
to-mineral organization.
16 On earlier iterations of survey materials as antecedents to López de Velasco’s 1577 questionnaire, see
Cline (1972, 184–190).
17 For a detailed introduction to the RGs, see Cline (1972, 183–242) and Mundy (1996, 29–59). Sánchez
Martínez and Pardo Tomás (2014) is a good literature review of recent publications on the RGs. The
majority of the RGs manuscripts and maps are held at the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, which
has 80.The Real Academia de Historia in Madrid holds 45, and the Benson Latin American Collection
at the University of Texas at Austin has 41. The RGs have been transcribed and published in stages,
beginning with Marcos Jiménez de la Espada who published all but the New Spain corpus in 1881. José
María Asensio published the RGs of Yucatán in the late nineteenth century, and in the early twentieth
Francisco del Paso y Troncoso published most of the New Spain corpus (although some were left out
due to issues of access). René Acuña’s transcriptions and introductory matter of all of the extant RGs
from the 1980s remains an invaluable resource.
18 Both Spanish and Indigenous colonial cultures were marked by patriarchy. Lori Diel (2005, 102), for
example, has argued in her study of the visual presence or absence of Indigenous women in Aztec
(Mexica) pictorial manuscripts that “the political subordination of (Indigenous) noblewomen correlates
to the growth of empire.”
403
Kelly McDonough
19 In the short term these questions may seem unanswerable, but more focused research on protagonists
mentioned in the RGs (which Acuña began in his short introductions to each RG in his transcriptions)
may provide insights.
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24
DEFENDING THE
INDEFENSIBLE
Las Casas and the exceptions to sovereignty
Nicole Legnani
Defense: spatial, temporal and ethical axes

If the last twenty years are any indication, the invocation of the “defense of innocents” to justify
the use of violence by one foreign power against another remains alive and well. Though the
level of rhetorical complexity varies, in their various appeals to the nation, Bush (2003), Obama
(2011), and Trump (2018) have all recurred to the trope that nation-states with greater military
powers may come to the aid of peoples who are governed by tyrants—defined as those who
have used or threaten to use excessive force against their own people—to justify the United States
of America’s use of force against sovereign nation-states. Moreover, the appeal to innocence may
occur preemptively—as in the case of Operation Iraqi Freedom initiated in 2003, and in the
airstrikes directed by President Obama against Libya in 2011—or in retaliation or deterrence as
with the airstrikes ordered by President Trump against Syria in 2017 and 2018. In each and
every invocation of the defense of innocents, the turn to an economy of violence—which
measures how much is too much in relation to an often opaque and a priori set of values—
exemplifies the rationale behind these appeals to innocence and its defense, as no modern state
can make the claim to a non-violent existence vis-à-vis its own citizens or subjects. Indeed, if
the modern state is defined as the institution that holds the monopoly over the legitimate use of
physical force within a given territory (Weber 2009, 78), it would appear that in order to abro-
gate a state’s local sovereignty, and render its monopoly of violence illegitimate, “the defense of
innocents” must necessarily intercede on behalf of a superior power or set of values that trumps
local laws and customs.
More often than not, the foreign power conjures up the figure of the local tyrant, whose
actions against his own people have traditionally been compared to looting and piracy. Augustine
(354–430 CE) in his City of God against the Pagans (1998) likened “kingdoms without justice to
bands of robbers…. If, by constant addition of desperate men, this scourge grows to such a size
that it acquires territory, establishes a seat of government, occupies cities and subjugates peoples,
it assumes the name of kingdom more openly” (1998, 147–148). However, Augustine’s treat-
ment of polities governed by irrational rulers (i.e., “tyrants”) exposes an ethical vulnerability for
potential invaders, especially Christian ones: the charge that profit and not concern for defense-
less subjects of tyrants motivates the actions of the interventionists. More recently, the greed
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Defending the indefensible
motivation has been a charge leveled by critics of America’s wars in the Middle East, typified by
the anti-war slogan “no blood for oil” (Wenar 2016), but it has also served to interrogate the
rationale behind expansionist regimes. How will foreigners who claim to unseat native rulers in
the best interests of the native population ensure that they will not replace one form of “tyr-
anny” with another?
Ever since Lewis Hanke published his Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America
(1949), scholars of the colonial period in Latin America have grappled with the merits of and
the practices behind Spanish colonialism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. One of its
defining features—as opposed to French or English colonialisms—was the extent to which the
Spanish conquest’s legality became subject to dispute by prominent Spanish scholars at the uni-
versities of Salamanca, Alcalá de Henares and the Colegio de San Gregorio de Valladolid during
the sixteenth century (Menéndez Pidal 1950, 30; Hanke 1959, 107–116). In addition to evaluat-
ing the contributions of sixteenth-century Spanish theorists, such as Francisco de Vitoria (1483–
1546), Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474–1566), and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1494–1573) to the
development of international law, as it is practiced today, the debates have also led to competing
visions of Spain’s moral standing in world history, even while recognizing, as Patricia Seed
(1993) does, “that the belief that one nation’s characteristic forms of political domination are
preferable to another’s is usually only generated out of the internal terms of the argument within
a society” (651). Nonetheless, as noted by Tamar Herzog (2013), “Scholars of colonial Spanish
America are divided between those who cherish Spaniards for respecting indigenous land rights
and those who denounce them for not having done so. For the first group, Spanish respect was
enshrined in political and theological debates and in legislation and practice that from the six-
teenth century asserted that natives had rights to the lands they possessed before Europeans
arrived. For the second group, native dispossession was a dominant feature of colonial life” (303).
Included among Herzog’s first group of scholars can be found Rolena Adorno (2008) and
Anthony Pagden (1993), with Adolfo Luis González Rodríguez (1990) and Ward Stavig (2000)
in the second.
In both contemporary and sixteenth-century debates surrounding the “defense of inno-
cents,” dispossession has been interpreted politically, epistemically, but also materially. However,
it has been argued by scholars within the decolonial paradigm that our understanding today is
complicated by modernity’s own indebtedness—and, thus, our very consciousness—to the cur-
rent world system that was produced through Iberian colonialism. Aníbal Quijano (2000)
referred to this legacy at the intersection of race, capitalism, labor, and epistemic authority as
“the coloniality of power,” whose mechanisms of reproduction through systems of hierarchies,
knowledge, and culture have outlived the original regimes of domination and expansion inau-
gurated with Columbus’s first voyage. More recently, Dan Nemser (2017) in Infrastructures of Race
has explored Indigenous dispossession in Mexico within the Spanish Empire, which was both
capitalist and Christian, as a function of a system “which generated forms of disposability as well
as paternalistic care, premised simultaneously on conversion and extraction” (12).
The contradictions, and ensuing anxieties, generated by the conjunction between Christianity
and early modern capitalism through the influx of New World precious metals in Spain have
been explored by Elvira Vilches (2010) and, in more philosophical terms, by Orlando Bentancor
(2017). My aim with this chapter is to show how Bartolomé de Las Casas’s own understanding
of Indigenous dispossession by the Spanish Christian Empire became increasingly capacious
over a lifetime of scholarship and activism. By thinking through the intersection of dispossession,
liberty and “defensive” arguments with Las Casas, the chapter foregrounds the imbrication of
Christianity, capitalism and Spanish colonialism. In conversation with Las Casas, I show how the
407
Nicole Legnani
defense of innocents, and, to a lesser extent, the defense of free movement for trade and free movement for
Christian evangelization are the three juridical terms which have enjoyed the greatest privilege for
overriding local sovereignty in favor of natural law, and later, universal human rights.
Defense as the best offense

The firsthand accounts of conquest, discovery, pacification, or terror, whether by Christopher
Columbus (1451–1506), Martín Fernández de Enciso (1470–1528), Hernán Cortés (1485–
1547), Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (1490–1559), or Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484–1566) not
only founded the Latin American lettered tradition around the question of Spain’s legitimate
possession of the Indies (Adorno 2008), but also served as primary sources for the working defi-
nitions of terminology used by jurists, scholars, and theologians who are credited with laying
down the bases for international law (Hanke 1949). Based on his readings of Cortés’s letters and
the hagiographic account of the conquest of Mexico by Francisco López de Gómara (1511–
1566), Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1494–1573), renowned humanist and Aristotelian scholar, cel-
ebrated Cortés and his men for liberating the Tlaxcaltecas from the tyranny of Moctecuçoma
Xocoyotzin (1466–1520),1 and for defending the innocent from human sacrifices practiced by
the Aztecs (Sepúlveda 1997, 44).Though Sepúlveda’s position that the Indigenous peoples of the
Americas were natural slaves, in the sense explored by Aristotle (1995) in his Politics, was never
fully endorsed by the Spanish Crown, his widespread influence forced official discourse to
engage with Aristotelian categories of humanity. Jurists and scholars in Spanish universities, such
as Salamanca or Alcalá de Henares, readily recognized the arbitrary nature of justifications for
Spain’s armed appropriation of Indigenous territories in the West Indies, but they were less
inclined to question the armed presence of Spanish-chartered forces, which had led to de facto
dominion, with the notable exception of Las Casas and his followers.
As argued by the School of Salamanca, especially with respect to the articulation of legal titles
of appropriation by Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546), the Papal Donation made to Spain and
Portugal in 1494 did not constitute a legal transfer of Indigenous dominion over their commu-
nities and land to the Iberian monarchies (Schmitt 2003, 113–120).2 Vitoria (1967) contested
rights of appropriation based on imperial world domination, papal world domination, the right
of discovery, the rejection of Christianity, the crimes of barbarians, the free consent of Indians,
and divine (providential) donation; he called these seven titles “unsuitable and illegitimate” (tituli
non idonei sec legitimi). However, Vitoria (1967)’s seven “suitable and legitimate titles” of appro-
priation (tituli idonei ac legitimi) do provide important precedents for justifying exceptions to
local sovereignty: the right to free movement for trade (jus comercii), the right to preach the faith
(jus propagandae fidei), the right to protection (for Christian Indians), by papal mandate (jus man-
dati), as an intervention against tyranny (jus interventionis), the right to free choice (jus liberae
electionis), and the right to protect one’s allies or associates (jus protectionis sociorum). These rights,
Vitoria (1967) argued, could be imposed through the use of force and were, thus, a constitutive
mechanism for Spanish Christian imperialism. Anghie (2007) has also traced the genealogy of
the “war on terror” and free trade agreements to the original Spanish colonial paradigm of the
defense of innocents against tyranny that arose out of the School of Salamanca. In principle,
Vitoria (1967) rejected Sepúlveda’s arguments for Spanish titles to the West Indies that were
based on Spain’s purported cultural or natural superiority, i.e., the Aristotelian argument in favor
of subjugating weaker classes of humanity. However, when confronted with specific cases from
the Indies, such as cannibalism or human sacrifice,Vitoria (1967)’s arguments often justified the
Spanish presence in the Indies through one of the legal titles of war by appealing to the “defense
of innocents,” as Del Valle (2012) has contended. Nevertheless, Adorno (2008) has emphasized
408
that this legitimate title of war was not conceived by Vitoria as punishment for perceived crimes
against natural law, such as cannibalism or human sacrifice but, she reiterates, as a defense of
innocents against tyranny (109–113). Vitoria (1967) also agreed with Sepúlveda on the matter
of free movement for the purposes of trade and the dissemination of the faith. Opposition to the
free passage of traders and missionaries were grounds for a just cause of war. Moreover,Vitoria
(1967) defended Spain’s right to intervene on behalf of those Indians who had converted to
Christianity. In this way, the presence of Christian neophytes in Indigenous communities effec-
tively circumscribed them, creating another bracketing of territory and population within the
tautology of legitimate violence. Paradoxically, as Anghie (1996) has argued, jus gentium as dis-
cussed by Vitoria purported respect for local values, customs and laws, but served instead to
propagate Christian, European tenets as those basic principles shared by all peoples.
Namely, the invocation of rights through “natural law” imposed a standard of conduct from
a Christian perspective that guaranteed universal rights, including the right to free movement
across lands of different peoples and cultures for the purposes of trade and Christian evangeliza-
tion. Seen in this way, Christian-inflected natural law at the roots of international law today
emphasized the “universal” tributes of “all” peoples, such as their “natural” desire and right to
trade their wares (jus comercii) and to move “freely” for this purpose (liberum commercium). Coupled
with the Christian prerogative to move freely for the predication of the “true” faith, the School
of Salamanca’s recognition (or, rather, creation) of a “universal” desire to trade, when couched in
the terms of imperial respect for local mores, served as a moral buttress to practitioners of profit-
able violence in the Indies. Though Vitoria and others would question the “just war” rationale
proffered by Sepúlveda and his supporters, their articulation of jus gentium armed missionaries
and merchants with the rhetoric that whatever violence they performed in the Indies had been
done either in self-defense or in the defense of innocents.
Local cosmovisions
The confrontation between universally held values and local instances of tyranny almost always
occurs during periods of imperial or colonial expansion during which other peoples are tempo-
rally and spatially defined vis-à-vis their invaders: before and after domination by the conquering
power and within or without (both in the sense of outside of, but also lacking) the norms defining
universal order. In fact, we owe the term ius or jus gentium (laws of peoples) to the Roman
Empire and to the status of those “peoples” who were conquered and to whom ius civile—to
which Roman citizens were subject—did not apply (Solodkow 2014, 183). This invocation of
jus gentium only makes sense within an imperial context, i.e., it depends on a distinction between
a “local” norm from the “supralocal” context, such as the Roman Empire, whose laws and prac-
tices of conquest bequeathed posterity with the terminology. As long as the customs of colo-
nized or to-be-colonized peoples did not conflict with universal law, imperial magistrates were
to respect local practices. Yet, as Kamari Clarke (2009) has observed in Fictions of Justice, in her
analysis of the application of international human rights law in Africa today, many “laws of
peoples” themselves aspire to universality, as in the case of Shariah law in Africa, which has been
treated as jus gentium within the international paradigm of human rights law even though Shariah
itself makes claims to universal jurisdiction. Moreover, the “laws of peoples” could refer to law
and customs, but more broadly to the practices of a culture whose radical alterity exists beyond
colonizers’ comprehension, but not beyond their power to proscribe. “White men saving brown
women from brown men” was the phrase Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988) famously coined
in her groundbreaking essay “Can the subaltern speak?” to describe how the cause for abolition
of widow sacrifice (suttee) in nineteenth-century India was employed to justify the British
409
Nicole Legnani
invasions of South Asia. Thereafter, the abolition of suttee became a civilizing mission to save
innocent native women not only from native men but also from themselves.
The colonizers’ push to defend native innocents against native tyrants expanded to circum-
scribe the widely held practices and mores of the people purportedly in need of salvation,
defined as “tyranny” more broadly. What suttee would become for the British Empire in the
nineteenth century may be recognized in Iberian encounters with anthropophagy and human
sacrifice in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. According to Philip Boucher (1992), the
“emerging concept of Carib cannibalism” and its counterpart, the docile Taino-Awarak, were
instrumental to the development of laws that called for the enslavement of cannibals between
1503 and 1569 (16). If Columbus (1493) “in his widely publicized letter, created the dichotomy
of the gentle, pliable Arawak and the monstrous Carib, warlike and cannibalistic,” one elaborated
upon by Peter Martyr and other European writers, the Spanish “edicts in practice allowed open
season on all Indians, for anyone resisting Spanish imperialism was now considered ‘Carib’”
(Boucher 1992, 16–17).3
Spanish colonizers could override jus gentium out of a sense of Christian duty through the
many laws promulgated with reiterated declarations of “love and charity” (amor y caridad) for the
defense of the Indians, as innocents, traders, and potential Christians.The Spanish proliferation of
laws regulating the Indies—revised and expanded every ten years or less in the sixteenth cen-
tury—both inaugurate and exemplify the mechanism by which the exception, to recall Walter
Benjamin (1892–1940) in the eighth of his Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), becomes the
rule. As Daniel Nemser (2014) has argued, “this exception is not synonymous with an absence of
law, as [Achille] Mbembe (2003) at times seems to suggest (25)—if anything there is a superabun-
dance.” Faced with proliferating laws that regulated the Spanish presence and dominion in the
Indies, narratives about the conquest written in retrospect often reinforced the rationale behind
a legal and economic system predicated on both Indigenous dispossession and salvation.
Defending and defining origins

“The problem, from the start,” according to Solodkow (2014), “was how to justify the invasion
of the Americas and how to benefit from Indigenous labor without contravening either canon
or natural law” (182). Building on the work done by José Antonio Saco (1932), Carlos Esteban
Deive (1995), and Esteban Mira Caballos (1997) on Indigenous slavery in the West Indies,
Andrés Reséndez (2016) has shown that Indigenous bondage, which included the encomienda
system was—with reference to African slavery—“another slavery” for Indigenous peoples in the
Americas that operated on the frontier between Spanish laws of the Indies, which regulated
Indigenous liberty and labor, and their exceptions. Legally, Indians held in encomienda were
distinguished from enslaved Indians, who were themselves divided into two categories prior to
1530: de iure, as captives taken from “just wars” (against, for example, the cannibals) and de rescate,
through the trade of Indigenous slaves who had first been enslaved by other Indigenous people,
prior to the arrival of the Spanish.
In the encomienda system, Indigenous peoples gave tribute in labor or in kind to holders of
encomienda (generally, former conquistadors) in exchange for Christian tutelage (Lockhart and
Schwarz 1983, 138). These new subjects of the Spanish Crown, who were also Christian neo-
phytes or potential new Christians, provided valued labor to the Spanish colonies while increas-
ing the number of brethren in Christ.This enacted a horizontal expansion of universal Christian
jurisdiction, while instituting vertical social relations between Old Christians (Europeans) and
New Christians (Indigenous neophytes). As argued by María Elena Martínez (2008), this colo-
nial hierarchy reinterpreted the old/new Christian relations on the Iberian Peninsula wherein
410
“Spanish native” and “old Christian” were conflated against “foreigner” and “new Christian,” a
dynamic that contributed to racialization processes in the New World.
The encomienda system for the West Indies was promulgated by Isabel I of Castile (1451–1504)
in 1503, the same year that enslavement for unnatural practices, such as cannibalism and sodomy,
was prescribed. Cited in part in his Historia de las Indias (1527–1559), and in full in the Memorial de
veinte remedios (1542), Las Casas (1994, 1995) traces the origin of the encomienda back to the island
of Hispaniola, specifically, to a faulty reading of Isabel’s last wishes, as outlined in her instructions
to Nicolás de Ovando (1460–1511), the Governor of the Indies between 1502 and 1511. If the first
two categories of enslavement (through just war or by trade of the already enslaved) relied on ideas
of natural slavery, implicitly or explicitly articulated, with the encomienda system, as instituted by
Isabel, the forced labor of almost all Indigenous peoples would be subsumed under the logic of
defense. The three categories, with some exceptions for Indigenous elites, comprised the majority
of Indigenous populations. Even after Indigenous slavery was abolished in 1530 by Charles V
(1500–1558), and again with the New Laws of Spain in 1542, the defense of innocents played a role
in perpetuating the coloniality of social relations in the Americas. As we have seen, even these laws
that abolished Indigenous slavery allowed for exceptions in the case of cannibals.
Whereas Spanish policy for Indigenous enslavement prescribed the defense of innocents
(against, for example, cannibals), the encomienda system confronted the concept of Indigenous
tyranny in broader strokes, as part of Spain’s civilizing mission. Isabel I’s letter is worth quoting
extensively as it makes policy for her new Indigenous subjects based on her economy of free-
dom to embrace, but not to reject Christianity. This understanding of Indigenous freedom, and
its defense, later reappears in Sublimis Deus (1537), by Pope Paul III (1468–1549) which endorsed
the freedom and the capacity of Indigenous peoples to convert to Christianity. However, this
discourse of Indigenous freedom is double-edged, as José Rabasa (2000) has argued:
Hate speech is pervasive, indeed, constitutive of colonial situations, but the implemen-
tation of colonial rule and the subordination of colonial subjects cannot be reduced to
a modality of hate speech. “Love speech” is as central to colonization as spurting offen-
sive yet injurious stereotypes. The challenge is to understand love speech as a powerful
mode of subjection and effective violence.The most evident example is the declaration
of love “We bring you the gift of Christ’s blood,” which is bound by the explicit obli-
gation to accept the offering. This interpellation constitutes a form of love speech in
which the threat on the Indians’ life and freedom (even when not explicit) always
remains a possibility within the historical horizon if the summoning is not heeded.
(6)
Cited below, Isabel’s creation of the encomienda system for Indigenous neophytes in the New
World explicitly delineated restraints on the freedom of Indigenous people, because they were
rejecting Christianity and work for Spanish subjects. In her letter to Ovando, the Castilian queen
offered an economy of liberty (too much, not enough) that favored productive communication
and conversation between her Spanish and Indigenous subjects:
Previously, my Lord [Ferdinand II of Aragon] and I ordered that the Indian residents
and inhabitants of the Hispaniola were free and not subject to bondage in the Instructions
that we sent to Sir Nicolás de Ovando, friar, and knight commander of Alcantara, when
he was our Governor of the islands and mainland of the Ocean. I am now informed
that, because the Indians enjoy too much liberty, they escape and avoid conversation and
communication with the Christians. Even when offered wages, they do not wish to
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work and [instead] live like vagabonds, and thus they cannot be found in order to
catechize them so that they may convert to our holy Catholic faith. For this reason, the
Christians who are on this island, and live and reside there, cannot find anyone to work
on their farms and their holdings. And they [the Indians] do not help them to pan and
mine for gold on the island, which is detrimental to everyone. And because we wish
for the aforementioned Indians to convert to our holy Catholic faith, and know its
tenets, and because this can best be achieved by [enforcing] communication between
the Indians and the Christians, who try to reach out to them, on that island, helping
one another so that the island is cultivated, populated, and fruitful, and so that the gold
there is collected, so that these my kingdoms and the neighboring ones will benefit,
I outline my orders in the following Letter.4
(Por cuanto el Rey, mi señor é yo, por la instrución que mandamos dar a don frey
Nicolás de Obando, comendador mayor de Alcántara, al tiempo que fue por nuestro
gobernador a las islas e tierra firme del mar Océano, hobimos mandado que los indios
vecinos e moradores de la isla Española fuesen libres e non suxetos a servidumbre, según más
largamente en la dicha instrución [de 1501] se contiene, e agora soy informada [de] que,
a cabsa de la muncha libertad que los dichos indios tienen, huyen e se apartan de la conver-
sación e comunicación de los cristianos, por manera que, áun queriéndoles pagar sus xornales,
non quieren trabaxar e andan vagamundos [sic] ni menos los puedan haber para los
dotrinar e atraer a que se conviertan a nuestra sancta fe católica, e que a esta cabsa, los
cristianos questán en la dicha isla e viven e moran en ella, no faltare quien trabaxe en sus
granxerías e mantenimientos, nin les ayude a sacar ni coxer el oro que hay en la dicha
isla, de que a los unos e a los otros vienen perxuicio, e que Nos deseamos que los dichos
indios se conviertan a nuestra sancta fe católica e que sean dotrinados en las cosas della,
e porquesto se podría mexor facer comunicando los dichos indios con los cristianos
quen la dicha isla están, e andando e tratando con ellos e ayudándolos unos a otros para
que la dicha isla se labre e pueble e abmente los frutos della e se coxa el oro quen ella
hobiere para questos mis reinos e los vecinos della, sean aprovechados, mandé dar esta
mi carta, en la dicha razón.)
(Las Casas 1994, 1341–1342)
For the sovereign, there must be material benefits in the exchanges between the Indigenous sub-
jects (in Isabel’s letter, the natives of Hispaniola) and the Spanish Christians.Their refusal to work,
especially when there are wages to be had, is for Isabel yet another sign of the excessive freedom
enjoyed by her Indigenous subjects. For Isabel of Castile, an excess of liberty could be defined as
refusing to listen to Christian doctrine, resisting residence among Spanish Christians, and reject-
ing paid work in the fields or the gold mines. Thus, the liberty to decide one’s residence, means
of sustenance or interlocutors is excessive. Note that Isabel of Castile does not question the
Catholic missionaries’ right to move freely for the purposes of evangelization. Indeed, as we have
seen,Vitoria (1967) would later confirm the legality of using force to defend Christian missionar-
ies against any Indigenous resistance to their unwanted presence in their own communities.

A former encomendero himself, Bartolomé de Las Casas was intimately acquainted with the
encomienda system and the exceptions to jus gentium, as practiced by conquistadors and mis-
sionaries on the ground. After serving as a chaplain to conquests on the island of Cuba, and
412
suffering a crisis of conscience, Las Casas abandoned his encomiendas and enslaved Indians in
Cuba and Hispaniola in 1515, in order to advocate on Indians’ behalf before Ferdinand II of
Aragon (1452–1516) in Spain (Clayton 2012, 46). Bartolomé de Las Casas had arrived in
Hispaniola in 1502, and held an encomienda there and in Cuba where he also participated as
chaplain in a number of expeditions, including one spearheaded by Nicolás de Ovando and
another by Pánfilo de Narvaez (1478–1528) (Wagner and Parish 1967, 13–20). His conversion
to Indigenous rights’ advocacy is first marked in the written record by his penning of the
Memorial de Remedios para las Indias (1516). This Memorial, which is notorious for promoting the
replacement of Indigenous labor with that of enslaved Africans in the Indies, was one of his first
written forays into imperial policymaking and criticism.
The long career of Bartolomé de Las Casas, coupled with his prolific writing, led to some
perceived contradictions in his thought, especially with respect to the enslavement of Africans,
due to his youthful embrace of just war doctrine and acceptance of Portuguese accounts of their
encounters with the Indigenous peoples of Africa and subcontinental India. “Ironically,” as
Adorno (2008) contends, “his retrospective discovery and disclosure served only to brand him,
wrongly, as the author of black African slavery in the Americas” (11), an irony whose origins in
mainly Anglophone historiography have been traced by Eyda Merediz and Veronica Salles-
Reese (2008), and Lawrence Clayton (2009), though revisionist readings of Las Casas continue
to have currency among hispanist scholars such as Daniel Castro (2007). During his lifetime,
only the Brevísima relación de la destruición de las Indias (1552, Las Casas 2005) and the Tratados de
1552 impresos por Las Casas en Sevilla (1552, Las Casas 1992) were published, though manuscript
copies of his more voluminous works, such as De unico vocationis modo omnium gentium ad veram
religionem (c. 1538, Las Casas 1990), the Apologética historia sumaria (1527–1561, Las Casas 1967),
and the Historia de las Indias (Las Casas 1994), may have circulated among his network of advo-
cates for Indigenous peoples in Spain and the Americas (Wagner and Parish 1967, 288–289;
Adorno 1992, 812–827).These longer works demonstrate a thorough reckoning with Aristotelian
ideas on natural slavery, and Vitoria’s just titles of war, including, notably, the three defense loop-
holes that continue to undermine local sovereignty to the present day: the defense of innocents,
the defense of free movement for evangelization, and the defense of free movement for trade.
In De unico modo, his rejection of any military defense of Christian missionaries received a
thorough theoretical and practical treatment. With this treatise, Las Casas (1990) aimed to rein-
troduce missionary work as a labor fraught with peril so as to avoid the defense of free movement
for evangelization loophole to jus gentium. His ideal missionary would not count on armed men
to guard his life, thus armed men would have no place in the social order of Tezulutlán, in
Guatemala, which Las Casas renamed “Land of True Peace” (“Tierra de la Verapaz”), where he
intended to reproduce Apostolic Christianity in the Indies. Thus, he proposed entering
Tezulutlán, in Guatemala, a place known as “warring land” (“tierra de guerra”) by the Spanish
colonizers, without any means of physical defense even though their efforts were being met
with armed resistance from the Mayan peoples there.
Indigenous peoples of designated warring lands were living a social death, already bracketed
as slaves-to-be-captured because of their insurgency. For the Dominican missionaries in Verapaz,
there were no guarantees of success and no temporal horizons to account for timely conver-
sion. As the full title of his treatise suggests—De unico vocationis modo omnium gentium ad veram
religionem (“the only way to bring all people to the true religion”)—Las Casas (1990) struggled
with the “protected” status of Indigenous Christian neophytes within larger communities of
Indigenous nonbelievers. His proposed method for conversion thus eschewed the legal loop-
hole to jus gentium that would have permitted a “divide and conquer” approach. Instead, where
Las Casas (1990) did turn to trade, he did so to place it at the service of missionary work within
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consensus-building forms of self-government in Indigenous communities. Accordingly, when

he attempted to put his ideas into practice in Verapaz, Las Casas enlisted Indigenous Christian
merchants, who already traded with the insurgent or “warring Indians” (“indios de guerra”), to
continue trading while singing of their faith in Maya. If their professions of faith were wel-
comed and the community reached a consensus to invite missionaries to preach, only then
would Spanish missionaries follow Indigenous traders into Verapaz. The emphasis on omnium
gentium both underscored the universal ambitions of his project—Las Casas was a Christian,
Dominican friar, after all—with its inherent contradictions: how to maintain the cohesion of
the people, while undergoing the fracturing and denial of self that is inextricably part of the
conversion process.
Las Casas (1994) also addressed the free movement for trade loophole in the chapters on the
Portuguese conquests in Africa (Guinea), including Columbus’s involvement in Madeira and in
the enslavement trading post in Mina, in the chapters of the Historia de las Indias written after
1552. In these chapters, Las Casas leans heavily on Ásia (1552) by João de Barros (1496–1570),
who published his celebration of Portuguese imperial enterprise in the same year that the
Brevísima was published in Seville without the customary license, valuation of pages or censure
for period publication. This reliance on Barros’s (1998) material, combined with his disputation
of the Portuguese author’s celebration of the Portuguese Empire, underscores the global and
trans-imperial turn that Las Casas’s approach took following the Brevísima, whose subsequent
reception, translation and propagation in Protestant communities led to the creation of the Black
Legend, i.e., the narrative that attributes, among other things, an exceptional nature to Spanish
Catholic violence in its overseas colonies (Greer, Mignolo, and Quilligan 2007, 1–24). The
Brevísima itself belies such an interpretation, since it also dedicates one chapter to the Fuggers (or
Fuqueros in Spanish), the German bankers turned conquistadors in Venezuela. However, one of
the main achievements of the Historia de las Indias was to widen the historical lens of colonialism
to include Portuguese and French enterprises, so as to effectively contest the universalist tenets
of imperialism comparatively, especially with regard to the free movement for trade loophole.
For Las Casas (1994), free movement for trade was little more than an excuse for armed men
to elbow their way into foreign ports. In the Historia de las Indias, he tells the story of the armada
of King Manuel I of Portugal (1469–1521), which had been sent to India in 1500 (Las Casas
1994, 1227). In the first section, the narrator’s tone conforms to official discourse, including
approval for the division of “spiritual” and “material and temporal” agents among the Franciscans
and mariners on the Portuguese expedition. Everything, notes Las Casas, was done per canon law,
including the necessary “requisitions” (“requerimientos”), a formula that would become even
more notorious in the Spanish-held Americas in the early sixteenth century.5 The Portuguese
fifteenth-century requisition not only made reference to Christ’s “charity and law of love” (“car-
idad y ley de amor”) but also to the need to respect “commerce or exchange, which is the means
by which humanity procures, fulfills and conserves peace and love, for commerce is the founda-
tion of human civilization” (“comercio o conmutación, que es el medio por el cual se adquiere
y trata y conserva la paz y amor entre todos los hombres, por ser este comercio el fundamento de
toda humana policía” Las Casas 1994, 1227).6 In this way, Las Casas recognized the ethical appeal
to the free movement for trade argument and seemed to validate it, as the exchanges of material
goods would restrain humanity within the bounds of civilized discourse. However, he introduces
the caveat, the impossibility of true dialogue in these fight or flight situations: “as long as the par-
ties do not differ in religion and belief in the truth, for everyone is obligated to have and believe
in God, in which case they could wage war ruthlessly” (“pero con que los contractantes no
difieran en ley y en creencia de la verdad que cada uno es obligado a tener y creer de Dios, que
en tal caso les pudiesen hacer guerra cruel a huego [sic] y a sangre,” (Las Casas 1994,1228). The
414
phrasing “as long as the parties do not differ in religion and belief in the truth” (“no difieran en
ley y en creecia de la verdad”) establishes a counterfactual; after all, it is only because these peoples
are not believers that they and their lands are pursued by these commercial-military enterprises
with impunity. Had the Indians been members of the Christian European community of nations,
Las Casas implies, they never would have been targeted by the commercial and military enter-
prise of the Portuguese empire. Moreover, trade as “the foundation of human civilization” was a
misnomer for material exchanges made under duress, for “even if they did not wish to, they were
to trade and exchange their things for another’s, even if they had no need for them” (“aunque no
quisiesen, habían de usar el comercio y trocar sus cosas por las ajenas, si no tenían necesidad del-
las,” Las Casas 1994, 1228 ). In the paragraph that follows, Las Casas deals his last blow against
the third exception to jus gentium, observing that the Indians of the subcontinent received the
faith “by blows” (“a porradas,” Las Casas 1994, 1228). Las Casas concludes by suspecting that,
much like their counterparts on the other side of the Tordesillas line, the Portuguese sought out
violent resistance in order to justify the slavery of the Indigenous inhabitants of the East Indies.
Conclusions
As Dipesh Chakrabarty (2002) contends, the historiographical quest for origins lures the intel-
lectual into redacting their narration, especially when the intellectual feels implicated in the
legal conservation of that foundational violence through state powers (31).This is especially true
for those violent origins which have led to modernization processes with which we may iden-
tify or sympathize, such as the defense of innocents.Yet we should be wary of how the terminol-
ogy employed by narrators and jurists in the sixteenth century and in the present alike have
shaped the symbolic and material conditions for dispossession, especially that which is legally
sanctioned by the state. In his own quest for the origins of Indigenous dispossession, which he
identified with the moral and ethical scourge of his times, Las Casas wrote the Historia de las
Indias to explore the contingencies of these historical developments on individual actions, even
as he affirmed the role of divine providence. Increasingly, his exploration of native dispossession
blurred the boundaries between state and enterprise, the East and West Indies, and among the
colonial regimes we now call early modern empires.
“Because they are free” (“porque son libres”) is a recurrent refrain in all the work of Las
Casas to refer to the Indigenous peoples (“naturales”) of the Americas, Asia, and Africa, the
peoples increasingly subject to the various yokes of European colonialism.Yet what he meant by
“free” was clearly different from the ways in which his contemporaries, such as Isabel of Castile
or Pope Paul II, or even our contemporaries, such as President George W. Bush (b. 1946) have
referred to peoples who do not and choose not to subscribe to “our” belief systems, ways of
governance, and livelihood. Instead, Las Casas (1990, 1994) proposed a radically horizontal form
of dialogue in territories he chose not to visualize as bracketed for pacification—i.e., paradoxi-
cally defined as lands and peoples destined for war—but, rather, for areas that could generate true
peace. Thus, Las Casas could be interpreted as one of the original thinkers of the decolonial
project which, as Mignolo and Walsh (2018) contend, sought a space apart from the hierarchies
that organized the systems of knowledge and culture in their reproduction of coloniality.
Notes
1 Also known as Montezuma II.
2 The so-called Papal Donation refers to the three bulls promulgated by Alexander VI (Rodrigo de Borja,
1431–1503) in 1493: Eximiae devotionis (May 3), Inter caetera (May 4) and Dudum siquidem (September 26)
415
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sought to incorporate “discoveries” made by expeditions managed by the Spanish monarchs into previ-
ous schemata for conquests of terrae incognitae developed with Portuguese sovereigns in the fifteenth
century. The bulls set the stage for the negotiations that led to the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. What
exactly the Pope had donated and whether he had the right to do so were questions hotly debated by
Martín Fernández de Enciso (1470–1528), Juan López Palacios Rubio (Juan López de Vivero, 1450–
1524), Francisco de Vitoria, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1494–1573), and
Francisco Suárez (1548–1612) to mention a few notable authors.
3 While the origins for the figures of the cannibal and the “Carib” are beyond the scope of this chapter, it
should be noted that “Carib” is an amalgam of four distinct concepts: the Caribes, whom Columbus refers
to in his Diario of the first voyage; the Caniba, referred to by Columbus in his Diario as “the people of the
Great Khan (Gran Can)”;“cannibals” (caníbales), meaning Indigenous communities characterized as idola-
ters and consumers of human flesh who could not he converted; and, finally, “Carib,” which is a modern
anthropological construct for Indigenous communities in lowland South America and the Windward
Islands of the Caribbean Basin. See Madureira in this volume, for his discussion on the cannibal trope.
4 Unless otherwise noted, all translations and emphases are my own.
5 The Requerimiento generally refers to the document used for Spanish Conquest in the New World, a
scripted performance for Indigenous enslavement or subject-making used by every conquistador, char-
tered by the Spanish Crown, between 1513 and 1542.
6 Las Casas (1994) concludes by referring to chapters 19, 22, 24 and 25 of the first book of his Historia de
las Indias to remind his readers that Portugal initiated the process of “free” trade and evangelization in
Africa (Guinea), which was later followed by Castile.
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25
THE (DIS)CONTINUITIES
OF DECOLONIZED GENDER
AND SEXUAL IDENTITY
IN THE ANDES
Michael Horswell
One of the exciting new developments in colonial Latin American and Caribbean studies to
emerge in the first part of the twenty-first century is the critical attention scholars are paying to
gender and sexuality as complex markers of identity in the early modern period.The important
contributions to the field differ depending on disciplinary focus, but most have in common a
commitment to a post-structuralist, decolonial, intersectional rereading of foundational texts
and the inclusion in the colonial canon of primary sources that were unknown or ignored by
earlier generations of scholars. The fuller treatment of identity as it relates to gender and sexual-
ity involves both the deconstruction and reinterpretation of representational language in histori-
cal and literary texts as well as a renewed consideration of the archive as a location from which
to perceive a wider range of human experience. As a result, subjects of colonial history who may
have been relegated to a footnote in earlier studies have begun to have fuller consideration as
members of the vibrant, multi-cultural milieus of the pre-Hispanic and colonial worlds depicted
in texts and other forms of historical memory. Moreover, this scholarship has opened avenues of
inquiry and understanding of the contexts in which non-normative genders and sexualities
were performed and how the legacies of coloniality have shaped the lived experiences of people
over time and continue to shape them today.
This chapter concentrates on an interdisciplinary methodology for reading the complexity of
indigenous Andean gender and sexual identity in the colonial period, though the approach is
applicable to other cultural regions of the Americas and beyond.Taking into consideration a trans-
atlantic and comparative method invested in appreciating how transcultural processes of identity
transformation must be decoded in order to discern historical, non-normative subjects’ (mis)
representation in colonial discourse, this approach also attends to the agency indigenous subjects
employed in both resisting the imposition of colonialism, and contributing to the processes of
transculturation that affect to this day how autochthonous concepts are understood. Approaching
colonial subjectivities in the Americas requires a double reading that takes into account dynamic
indigenous cosmologies and the European paradigms that attempt to displace or absorb them, as
well as African and Asian influences that often affect identity formation in the Americas. Part of
the strategy must be to interrogate terms that had been naturalized in the transatlantic exchanges
represented in chronicles and histories that became our written sources on pre-Hispanic and
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colonial indigenous cultures. The language of coloniality shaped how generations of readers con-
sidered indigenous gender and sexual cultures presented mainly through the voices of the colo-
nizer. Even the colonized indigenous voices which began to express their own versions of this
history found it necessary to make intelligible to outsiders what was irreconcilable difference or
what caused cultural anxiety in the dominant culture shaped by sex and gender normativity devel-
oped in the context of Catholicism and Mediterranean cultural history. Unconventional sources
and a greater understanding of pre-Hispanic indigenous gender and sexual paradigms must be
brought into the conversation so as to develop alternative versions of that history and open a third
space for understanding that which does not fit into binary Western notions of normativity.
The coloniality of power relations established in the historical colonial period continue to
affect Andean peoples today, many of whom ignore their ancestors’ ways of knowing and per-
forming gender and sexuality and who reproduce Western forms of prejudice and even violence.
Lugones (2008) addressed the deficiency in our understanding of coloniality in relationship to
gender systems assumed to be binary, encouraging us to “make visible the instrumentality of the
colonial/modern gender system in subjecting us—both women and men of color—in all
domains of existence” (1). On the other hand, from the beginning, and continuing to the pres-
ent, there has been work that reflects what Catherine Walsh names “the decolonial for,” which
is a form of decolonial praxis that is “… for the creation, and cultivation of modes of life, exis-
tence, being, and thought otherwise; that is modes that confront, transgress, and undo modernity/
coloniality’s hold” (2018, 18, original emphasis). As we will see throughout this chapter, these
decolonial acts of being for something other than the colonial emerged simultaneously along
with the invasion and shaped the contours of the processes of transculturation over time. In
addition, there are still others who use research on colonial Andean gender and sexuality that
emerged over the last few decades to open the door to greater agency assumed by themselves
and other contemporary queer/cuir subjects who are recuperating their own history from these
studies and performing identities with renewed pride fueled by struggles for liberation and self-
realization.1 How these artists deploy recuperated knowledge today requires a critical lens onto
the transhistorical constructions of identity and consideration of the continuities and disconti-
nuities of colonized and decolonized concepts related to gender and sexuality. The second part
of this chapter will consider a few examples of contemporary artists and writers who are doing
this decolonial work in order to “think with” them how colonial sources can be deployed as part
of contemporary decolonial praxis in the specific context of peripheral sexualities and non-
normative gender performances. This approach “to think with (and not simply about) the peo-
ples, subjects, struggles, knowledges and thought . . .” (Walsh 2018, 17) is especially important for
those of us in “outsider” positions of relative privilege but whose relational identities inspire us
to ally with other decolonial actors of today and better understand those of the past.
Queer tropes of gender and sexuality

As I argued in Decolonizing the Sodomite: Queer Tropes of Sexuality in the Colonial Andes (Horswell
2005), Spanish colonial discourse is marked by a series of tropes of non-normative gender and
sexuality, tropes that are mobilized by the early modern writers interpreting and representing
Amerindian cultures throughout the hemisphere. In the chronicles, relaciones, and histories that
constitute the primary sources of colonial studies (I will address the archive further below), one
must problematize how the narrativization of the colonial Other’s gender and sexuality infuse
observations, testimonials, and reported events in the contact zone with significance intelligible
to the European reader, but often alien to the indigenous culture being represented. The truth
claims imbedded in the texts are related to a colonial authority that legitimizes the writing and
420
The (dis)continuities of decolonized gender and sexual identity
respond to what Hayden White considered the latent desire to moralize the observed reality that
marks the tropes written into the historical record (White 1987, 14). Each chronicler or histo-
rian’s subjectivity and place of enunciation, therefore, must be foregrounded in the analysis of
indigenous identity represented in the works we read. Consequently, transatlantic reading prac-
tices become crucial in order to understand the motives behind the desire to moralize and the
effects of such a posture in the works. It is necessary to examine the tradition from which the
chroniclers and historians emerge as well as each writer’s relationship with the colonial appara-
tus. Furthermore, much of the colonial corpus has characteristics of proto-ethnography insofar
as the writers attempt to represent the Other in the newly encountered Amerindian cultures;
but, as James Clifford reminds us in his critique of twentieth-century ethnographies, those rep-
resentations are often more analogous to inventions of cultures than transparent representations
(Clifford and Marcus 1986, 2).
In this “invention” of the Americas, European colonizers imposed what Michel de Certeau
called a “scriptural economy” in which the Americas became the “blank page” to be filled with
a Eurocentric reordering of the disparate linguistic fragments that formed the indigenous cul-
tures disrupted by the conquistadors and evangelizers invading the hemisphere, the objects of
much of colonial writing (de Certeau 1984, 134). In a colonial scriptural economy, hegemonic
authority and law are inscribed on the represented bodies of the colonized; colonial morality, in
de Certeau’s terms, “engraves itself on parchments made from the skin of its subjects” (140),
whose bodies are “defined, delimited, and articulated by what writes [them]” (139). The native
bodies that perform the identities discussed in this chapter were the sites of this scriptural vio-
lence as the colonial discourse shaped a social body in which codes purged undesirable elements
from the social imaginary, and the actual physical space as well. What de Certeau termed the
“machinery of representation” operates in any scriptural economy in two ways: “The first seeks
primarily to remove something excessive, diseased, or unaesthetic from the body, or else to add to
the body what it lacks” (147, original emphasis). Non-normative sexual and non-binary gender
subjectivities were seen as dangerously “excessive” within the colonial scriptural economy in
which a dimorphic gender system was privileged. To remove these excesses, their bodies were
inscribed as morally diseased and degenerative to the colonial social body.The “troping” carried
much of the weight of these inscriptions of unacceptable excess and served to stereotype the
cultural “Other,” who, in Homi Bhabha’s terms, becomes “fixed” through the repetition of a
formulaic representation, emphasizing racial and sexual difference (Bhabha 1994, 67).
The “sodomy trope” was a common example of this differentiation, characterized by the
various “mobilizations” of the ambiguous terms and idioms that signify “sodomy.” Definitions of
the term sodomy and its derivatives gleaned from sources in the early modern period establish
a variety of meanings and referents, ranging from specific sex acts deemed “unnatural” to behav-
iors, customs and self-presentation that suggested an understanding of sodomites as a subset of
people with an identity.2 European sources consistently describe “sodomites” as a category of
people who commit “abominable sins,” transgressions that ranged from same-sex sexual acts to
masturbation, to bestiality, to any non-procreative sex act.3 Many indigenous men presenting as
non-normative, from the European perspective of normalcy, behavior or appearance, were com-
monly labeled “sodomites.” The operation of establishing the fixity of the stereotype that
appeared throughout the Americas was the repeated descriptions of “sodomites” as lascivious
and “sinful,” and as effeminate and cross-dressers (Horswell 2005, 69–80). The meaning of these
tropes was ideologically charged to justify conquest, massacres, and colonization.These ambigu-
ous descriptions and references to indigenous non-normative gender and sexuality left in colo-
nial discourse obscured a fuller understanding of a pre-Hispanic or post-Conquest identity,
which necessitates, I argue, the methodology of recovery I outline in this chapter.
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The second operation of the machinery of representation, according to de Certeau, is “mak-

ing the body tell the code” (de Certeau 1984, 148); in the colonial context, subsequent genera-
tions of indigenous and mestizos eventually acquiesce to the norms imposed and inscribed on
their bodies.They begin to perform their identities by reproducing the iterations of normativity
expressed in civil codes, questionnaires, religious rituals and disciplinary practices. In the case of
non-normative gender and sexual subjects, the European laws of compulsory masculinity and
heteronormativity enacted on colonized Andean bodies are perpetuated into the contemporary
period from these foundational moments. As de Certeau clarifies, “normative discourse ‘oper-
ates’ only if it has already become a story, a text articulated on something real and speaking in its
name, i.e., a law made into a story and historicized, recounted by bodies” (149, original emphasis).
The sodomy trope not only stereotypes the Other, but also functions as a “speech act” in its
denunciation of the abject aspects of indigenous sexuality that Europeans deemed unacceptable.
This aspect of the trope, its function as a speech act, has the unique feature of being one that
“dare not speak its name,” that is, it performs as it did since its origin as a medieval Christian
legacy that prohibited the mere pronunciation of the word “sodomy.” This not only adds to the
ambiguity of the referents of the figures of speech used in naming the offensive behaviors, but
also adds to the transculturative process of effacing what was once public performance of a sub-
jectivity and practices that were central to pre-Hispanic Andean rituality. Normative discourse
on gender and sexuality, beginning with the peninsular tradition, transformed, and was trans-
formed by, indigenous Andeans’ practices and identity through transculturation. I re-reinterpret
transculturation as a queer phenomenon in the Andes given how the sexual and gender queer
bodies of the region performed vital roles in the cultural reproduction of their pre-Hispanic
society while undergoing the scriptural violence of the Spanish tropes of sexuality in the colo-
nial period and beyond (Horswell 2005). The stories “telling the code” articulated by the colo-
nized indigenous ladino and mestizo writers were enunciated from what I characterize as the
chaupi third space of Andean culture. This queer (chlullu, odd, eccentric) space functioned as a
mediation between the colonizer and colonized and allowed the transculturated narrators to
refashion concepts, histories, subjectivities so as to be intelligible to outsiders and yet recogniz-
able to insiders, while at times protecting sacred conocimiento from official scrutiny (Horswell
2005, 18, 138). As in any case of transculturation, some things get lost, misrepresented, altered or
erased completely, while new ways of understanding the past and present are projected onto the
future. In a different study I have thought of this chaupi maneuvering by a colonial Andean nar-
rator as a “creative heresy” that foregrounds the Otherness that a subject negotiating the in-
between spaces of transculturation expresses, especially as that performance is perceived by both
their native culture and the newly dominant one (Horswell 2012, 106–108). The advantage of
viewing colonial Andean culture from the perspective of the mediating chaupi is that one
becomes attuned to the complementary sides of a colonial narrative, both the indigenous one
with its deep cultural traditions rooted in thousands of years of changing iterations of identity
and cultural practices, as well as the discursive overlay imported by the “machinery of represen-
tation” discussed above.
In addition to reading colonial printed sources, which, due to a variety of circumstances, may
not give the fullest accounting of the lived experience of colonial subjects performing non-
normative gender and sexuality, it is important to consider the archive as another site for under-
standing this history. Deborah Miranda (2010) reminds us, in her consideration of “gendercide”
through the study of the colonial California archives, that “None of these archival materials
came from unfiltered Indian voices; such records were impossible both because of their coloniz-
ing context and the prevalence of the oral tradition among California Indians that did not leave
a textual trace” (Miranda 2010, 254). Zeb Tortorici’s Sins Against Nature: Sex and Archives in
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Colonial New Spain (2018) sets the standard for how to interpret the colonial archive’s complex
recording of the lives caught up in the myriad secular and ecclesiastical courts of colonial
Mesoamerica. In addition to providing an expansive understanding of how the authorities of
the times understood behaviors deemed to be contra natura, Tortorici foregrounds the viscerality
at the center of all archival stories to reconsider how affect shapes not only the objects of our
studies but also our professional practice as researchers in the archives. He theorizes that the
visceral—“an abrupt, intense, intuitive gut response to some external stimulus” (Tortorici
2018, 31)—informs each element of how a historical document related to sex acts considered
to be “unnatural” comes into being, from the initial witness’s reaction to the viewing of the act
to the archiving of that document to the reading of the document by the modern user of the
archive. Tortorici’s attention to the “corporeal, gestural and affective signs” (86) that myriad
subjects produced and interpreted in order to articulate the accusations or defenses of their
bodily acts provides a compelling methodology to attend to both the diverse demographics of
sodomy and the reading strategies necessary to decode the archival language encountered in the
cases under study. Tortorici reminds us that archives are places of absences that are seductive as
well as frustrating; his ethnographic approach to the colonial archive explicates the complexities
of our work in them, given the “illegibility” of historical subjects like “sodomites” that confronts
the scholar and at the same time recognizes forthrightly how those absences kindle the desires
that keep us searching and reading.
Fernanda Molina’s recent Cuando amar era pecado: Sexualidad, poder e identidad entre los sodomitas
coloniales (Virreinato del Peru, siglos XVI–XVII) (2017) explores the Andean archive to understand
the experience of “sodomites” as they were represented in secular and ecclesiastical court cases
in the principal jurisdictions of the Viceroyalty of Peru. Like Tortorici, her methodology also
recognizes the value of considering the affective clues left in the testimonies of the archive.
While Molina’s study does not address indigenous sexuality in the period, her analysis of the
cases involving peninsulares and some men of the castas does help us understand the power rela-
tions that informed the same-sex relationships involved, how sodomy was related to the religious
debates of the post-Tridentine era, and the problematic question of sexual identity in the period.
Molina follows David Halperin’s notion of an early modern “model of pre-homosexuality” that
sees the sodomite as more than just a judicial subject. Her interpretation of the cases reveals
details of their lives that suggest a more expansive understanding of the contexts of the acts for
which they were accused and archived (Molina 2017, 164).
By rereading colonial narratives from the various loci of enunciation that constitute the cor-
pus of historical texts, informed by a deep understanding of the cultures involved, and by
approaching the archive with an eye and ear to the affective, visceral elements of the representa-
tion of non-normative sexuality, we can better appreciate the complexities of gender and sexual
identity in the colonial period.
Third-gender performativity, the Andean feminine

and primordial androgyny
Pedro Cieza de León, one of the first chroniclers who traveled widely in Peru in the early years
after the invasion, left us an expansive description of what I consider a third-gender subjectivity
in the Andean region, one which performed an identity that was both ritually and socially sig-
nificant to the recreation of Andean culture. Dominican friar Domingo Santo Tomás, who also
spent long periods in the region, provided this report to Cieza de León. As I have explained at
length (Horswell 2005, 102–104), both chroniclers had a Lascasian ideology that informed their
attempt to differentiate between the Incas and their ethnic rivals. Here, and later in the Inca
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Garcilaso’s accounting of sodomy in the Andes (Garcilaso de la Vega [1608] 1985), the behavior
contra natura was rhetorically isolated to non-Incas’ cultures in order to “clean” the Incas of any
suspicion that would have called into question their moral superiority in the region:
It is true that as a general thing among the mountaineers and the Yungas the devil has
introduced this vice under a kind of cloak of sanctity, and in each important temple or
house of worship they have a man or two, or more, depending on the idol, who go
dressed in women´s attire from the time they are children, and speak like them, and in
manner, dress, and everything else imitate women. With these, almost like a religious
rite or ceremony, on feast [days] and holidays, they have carnal, foul intercourse, espe-
cially the chiefs and headmen. I know this because I have punished two, one of them
of the Indians of the highlands, who was in a temple which they call huaca, for this
purpose, in the province of the Conchucos, near the city of Huánuco, the other in the
province of Chincha, where the Indians are subjects of His Majesty.
(Cieza de León 1553, 314)
Reading through the sodomy trope that informs this colonial text, we discover that at the center
of this ritual described, and perhaps the social identity represented, was a value of the feminine
that, as we shall see, evoked the primordial power of androgyny in Andean cosmography.
This Andean public performance of a third-gender subjectivity disrupted the Spanish semi-
otics of masculinity. Those described above were unintelligible subjects who perverted the
orthodox signification of sexuality and resulted in a resemantization of third-gender subjects
into “sodomites,” tropes that found their way into both civil legal discourse that attempted to
control the native populations and the texts of ecclesiastical literature and religious performance
that were the tools of evangelization. Cieza’s record of the scene of third-gender subjects in the
temple is expressed in this language that attributes such behavior to the “devil” and his “idols.”
This discourse eventually found its way into the Doctrina christiana (1584–1585), the first book
published and printed in Peru. Christian code words and phrases were substituted in sermons,
confession manuals, and catechisms to represent the moral censure of non-normative gender
and sexuality like that described above (Horswell 2005, 167–229). Reading through these tropes
to understand the pre-Hispanic performances behind the scriptural violence, provides evidence
that feminine and gender-liminal characteristics were elicited in many ritual performances dur-
ing the pre-Hispanic and colonial periods, and continue to be performed to this day. Their
gender is performative in the sense that Butler explains as the “effect of a regulatory regime of
gender differences in which genders are divided and hierarchized under constraint. Social con-
straints, taboos, prohibitions, and threats of punishment operate in a ritualized repetition of
norms, and this repetition constitutes the temporalized scene of gender construction and desta-
bilization” (Butler 1997, 16). Here, the repetition is literally “ritualized” in that the invocation of
the feminine or androgynous occurs in a ceremonial context.
Other sources provide a fuller picture of how the third-gender ritual subjectivity was a sym-
bolic position in culture-producing rituals in the context of the Andean gender culture in which
the feminine enjoyed autonomy, power, and respect. Sources as diverse as Jesuit Blás Valera’s De
las costumbres antiguas de los naturales del Perú (1590), the anonymously indigenous authored
Hurochirí Manuscript (1608), indigenous Juan de Santacruz Pachacuti Yamqui’s Relación de las
Antiguidades deste reyno del Perú (1613), indigenous Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Nueva corónica y buen
gobierno (1615), and Jesuit Pablo José de Arriaga’s La extirpación de idolatría del Perú (1621), among
many others, demonstrate that the feminine and the masculine were to be negotiated and medi-
ated through signs of androgyny reminiscent of an originary, androgynous creator (Horswell
424
2005, 137). The evocation of gender liminality is consistent with a step in the native Andean
philosophical process known as yanantin, the uniting of opposite forces (146–150). While the
corporal manifestation of this in-between position varied in the distinct textual fragments of
colonial discourse, the Andean third-gender subjectivity, sometimes referred to as the quariwarmi
(man-woman) in Quechua, was often performed as a biologically sexed male, socially recogniz-
able as third gender through cross-dressing, and at times by castration. Sexually passive in ritual
and perhaps profane occasions, they fit into the Andean kinship system as ipas, one of the native
names found in the sources, and often spoke “like women,” either in falsetto voice or by con-
forming with gendered linguistic rules of the Quechua or Aymara languages (110–112). Their
ritual roles were often related to agriculture and to the channeling of ancestors’ voices in cere-
monial contexts. In one example they seem to embody a mythic founding mother of the Inca
dynasty (151–161). In another, from native scribe Santacruz Pachacuti Yamqui, we learn they
enjoyed supernatural sanction through myths and supernatural protection from a stellar cult
figure, the Chuquichinchay. Outside the orbit of the Incas, Ana Mariella Bacigalupo (2007) found
that the “co-gendered” machi weye from the Mapuche in Chile, performed a gender identity that
varied between the masculine and the feminine in roles that involved both warfare and healing.
The machi weye’s gender variance was respected by their communities and consistently per-
formed in ritual contexts, though it was challenged by both early Spanish colonialists who
recorded them and more recent mainstream national discourses on normative gender and
sexuality.
Research has demonstrated that the third-gender or alternative-gender roles found in colo-
nial times are still performed throughout the Andes, though often modified due to the centuries
of transculturation that have affected all aspects of culture in the region. For example, ritual
norms still require the presence of transvested men, in both the chacrayupay (corn planting ritual)
and mujonomieto (ayllu border-affirming ritual) ceremonies (Horswell 2005, 154–157). These are
“temporalized scenes” of a gender subjectivity neither male nor female, but third. These perfor-
mances are mythologically sanctioned attempts by Andeans at mediating between their world,
kay pacha, and the worlds of their deities and between the complementary genders, the quari
[man] and the warmi [woman] that at times need to invoke the androgyne to reproduce Andean
culture. It is important to ask to what extent there are continuities between these ancestral forms
of performing an alternative/third/transgender identity and contemporary trans identity. How
can colonial studies shed light on the similarities and differences that manifest across the times
between the colonial and the postcolonial? Certainly, one of the constants across time is the
violence perpetrated against the people assuming these identities; just as strongly present is the
deep connection the performance of difference has to mediating between reciprocal spheres of
complementary gender expressions as well as between the earthly plane and the supernatural. As
we will see in the next section, contemporary artists, writers, and performers are reclaiming this
colonial history and giving voice to the nearly lost traditions of these pre-Hispanic and colonial
subjectivities.These performances turn a decolonial mirror back on the past as well as providing
for a praxis of being proudly different in the present through subjective accounts of alternative
gender subjectivity that are mostly absent in the colonial corpus and archive.
Contemporary decolonial aesthetics: Travestis and the

Chuquichinchay in visual and performance art
Works of what we might consider “decolonial” visual art, as well as literature and performance
art, like those I discuss below, have proliferated throughout the region over the last few decades.
These interventions into the cultural memory of the Andes are deeply connected to the colonial
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past, which is never quite past. The sample of works I will consider form part of the surge in
decolonial aesthetics that complement the approaches of other disciplines to decolonial thought
and practice. Walsh frames decoloniality as not just a method of critique but also as an approach
that foregrounds the “processes and practices, pedagogies and paths, projects and propositions
that build, cultivate, enable, and engender decoloniality, this understood as praxis—as walking,
asking, reflecting, analyzing, theorizing, and actioning—in continuous movement, contention,
relation, and formation” (Walsh 2018, 19). It befits colonial studies to consistently connect deco-
lonial readings, like the ones discussed in the first part of this chapter, to the contemporary social
actors who are performing decolonial identities informed by their own deep understanding of
the colonial legacies that have shaped their subjectivities today. In what follows I will highlight
two examples of this decolonial praxis that are in “movement, contention, relation, and forma-
tion” with the colonial history of non-normative gender and sexuality discussed above.
What would eventually be published in book form as the Museo Travesti del Perú (2008) is an
example of a decolonial aesthetic intervention in the history of the transculturation of Andean
gender and sexuality. The project began circulating in 2004 as a micro museum, pop-up exhibi-
tion and performance piece whose works were cataloged and published as a book in 2008.4
Philosopher, activist, and performance artist Giuseppe Campuzano (1969–2013) created and
curated visual and performative art produced by several Lima collectives, combined with his-
torical artifacts and archival sources, to tell the history of transvestism in Peru, from pre-Hispanic
to contemporary times. Campuzano stakes out his queer/cuir decolonial intentions in his book’s
opening essay, “Toda peruanidad es un travestismo” [all Peruvianness is a transvestism] (Campuzano
2008, 8). As I explored in a recent essay, the project is “a gesture to recover and celebrate, to
question and extend, the Baroque history of transculturation and cultural mestizaje; it is in hom-
age to the imitative and reiterative renditions of ‘Peruvianness’—the forging of identity out of
contexts of conquest and survival, colonialism and resistance, transnational capital and local
entrepreneurism” (Horswell 2016, 232).
Beginning with the colonial period, as we have seen in the discussion of methodology above,
the subject, which eventually becomes the national subject, is bound by the colony’s, and then
the nation’s, matrix of intelligible and regulated identity markers. Campuzano (2009, 2) com-
mented in an interview, “If there were such a thing as a Peruvian essence, it would be constant
metamorphosis. A Peru, an America, immersed in the transvestite processes of imposition and
agency that are constitutive of its subjects.” Subjects incorporate some characteristics into their
identity “performance” and exclude others.The accumulative effect of the successive reiterations
of these performances creates what can be understood as a national culture and identity.
Campuzano’s project is to expand that matrix to include performances excluded from the
national canon while at the same time exposing the constructedness of that canon. He recuper-
ates from colonial, nineteenth-century, and contemporary sources an expanded understanding of
the continual presence of gender duality and transgender performance from the pre-Hispanic to
the present times. Elsewhere I discussed how Campuzano deploys what I named a “Neo-
Baroque, peripheral aesthetic” (Horswell 2016) that functions as a decolonial praxis through a
proliferation of techniques from the queer/cuir neobaroque repertory while also denouncing the
ongoing violence to the trans community in Peru through a testimonial discourse. In this chap-
ter, I contemplate different objects from the museum to consider how he also employs a creative
juxtaposition of colonial discourse, the colonial archive, and contemporary newspaper accounts
to denounce the history of violence that makes up a continuity of the transgender/travesti expe-
rience in Peru. We can appreciate how Campuzano’s deconstructive readings of the colonial
canon and a visceral rereading of the archive conflate to draw our attention to both the racialized
and the sexualized violence that marks this history of the nation. He also exemplifies a decolonial
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praxis that insists on the ways travestis live “otherwise” and contribute to the fabric of the nation
by invoking the millennial Andean tradition of the feminine and androgyne discussed earlier.
In the book version of the Museo Travesti, in a section entitled “Muestrario,” Campuzano
(2008) brings together a dizzying collection of artifacts ranging from representations of the third
gender on pre-Colombian Moche ceramics, to references in colonial and nineteenth-century
documents, to contemporary art and clothing related to transvestism, to newspaper accounts of
contemporary assassinations of travestis. It is worth noting that one continuity between the book
version of the museum and the way colonial texts and archives recorded the transgender experi-
ence is the decontextualization that each system of representation perpetrated on the subjects.
The original exhibitions of the museum included travestis impersonating historical and cultural
subjects, in what seemed like a channeling of the past to the present through bodily perfor-
mances of difference, much like what the Andean huacsas did in pre-Hispanic times.5 The book
version freezes those living, corporal, and almost ritual performances into the images and texts
of the catalog. This effect of representation is analogous to the way colonial histories, chronicles
and archives also removed from their original context the sacred (and profane) performances of
third/alternative/transgender subjects, leaving them transculturated in the record. In both
instances we can appreciate the losses associated with recording in a static medium the dynamic
nature of gender and sexual identity.
In the sequence I will concentrate on here, “Preceptiva,” the reader (and presumably the
viewer of the original exhibition) is confronted with a short historical narrative on the various
prohibitions of transvestism down through history from sources ranging from the Old Testament
to citations of my book Decolonizing the Sodomite, to the Informe Final de la Comisión de la Verdad
y Reconciliación (2003). Campuzano then places a photograph of a pair of used, platform high
heels, named “La Carlita,” with the following caption:
Still wobbly from the first hallucinogen, Diosa (goddess) stretches a leg out the car’s
door. The first whistle eggs her on and her leg tattooed with crosses extends to the
pavement the enormous blue platform car patpu, Legs de ZZ Top. Gemela (twin) has
followed her. They rise up like the Twin Towers, becoming Siamese, now one, a god-
dess channeled through the spot, through the gazes of onlookers.
While her once auto loses itself in the City of the Restored Balconies.6
(Campuzano 2008, 37)
Like all of his poetic entries that “narrate” the museum, Campuzano’s tribute to his friend Carla
Aucaylle Quispe’s shoes connects the past to the present in provocative invocations of the Andean
traditional respect for gender duality and transgender performativity that was on display just
prior to this section of the museum.The shoes interrupt the historical narrative of prohibition of
transvestism with the fabulous scene of Carla stepping out in what Campuzano parodically called
“Saturday Night Thriller,” thus restoring that sacrosanct position to the national imaginary
through his micromuseum’s decolonial intervention. On the next page (and presumably on the
next wall of the exhibition) are verses from Deuteronomy 22:5 and Corinthians 11:13–15,
bringing into view the foundational Judeo-Christian texts prohibiting cross-dressing, followed
by colonial era documents from the archive that echo those prejudices. First, is an ordenanza
manuscript from 1566, with a section highlighted by Campuzano in pink, that orders the public
shaming and hair-cutting of any “Indian” found cross-dressed (38). Next, is an 1803 causa that
sentences prisoner Francisco Pro, who reportedly confessed to cross-dressing and was publically
known as a “maricón,” to be shamed by parading him around the plaza in his transvested state and
427
Michael Horswell
after cutting his hair with scissors (39). The two-page sequence concludes with a 1966 clip from
the Lima newspaper, Última hora, reporting on a police raid of a travesti party, entitled “Poli agua
fiesta de vulnerables en salón de belleza” (police spoil vulnerable persons’ party in beauty salon):
Fourteen “vulnerable persons” wearing wigs, many dressed as women, tried to flee
through a window, while screaming hysterically. But the police from Linca’s 16th
Precinct had the store surrounded […] To the sound of go-go and in an atmosphere
saturated with aromatic substances, “the girls” were celebrating the installation of what
they called their club “E.” The police had to break down the door. All of the “vulner-
able persons,” today at noon, before being brought before the court for inciting a
public scandal, will lose their heads of hair.
(39)
The decolonial move in this sequence makes visible the history of persecution of non-norma-
tive gender performance in the Andes while celebrating the heroic insistence of travestis and
their predecessors to exist. The focus on the long hair as a marker of identity and object of
punishment through time suggests a historical continuity, while the twentieth-century archive
differs from the early nineteenth given the journalistic voice that reports the news with sarcasm
and prejudice, but with a certain empathy absent in the judicial voice of the colonial causa.
Tortorici and Molina’s appeal to affect as a method of recognition of queer/cuir subjects’ possible
identity in the past, here helps us appreciate the sense of community the fourteen “vulnerable
persons” had created, all gleaned from the reporter’s inclusion of details that humanize the tar-
geted subjects of “justice,” such as the stylish music, perfumed ambiance, and celebration in a
club they tried to call their own. Campuzano continues the sequence on the following pages
with more entries that both humanize the contemporary travesti while reminding us of the
continual violence that plagues their existence. Christian Bendayán’s 2000 painting “Todos por
alguien lloramos” (We all cry for someone) is paired with a short excerpt from Mario Bellatin’s
1994 novella, Salón de belleza. Both depict the ravages of the HIV/AIDS crisis on the trans com-
munity while honoring the memory of those lost. This sense of absence of those lost is then
interrupted with the full-page reproduction of Campuzano’s own national identity card, “trans-
vested” by painting it pink and including his own travesti photo contrasted with his birth name
but with the inclusion of the letter T next to his chosen travesti name.
The final entry in this sequence, next to the photo of his National Identity Card (DNI), is a
fragment of the Informe Final (2003) issued by the Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, whose
work addressed the human rights abuses that occurred during Peru’s “period of violence” and
near civil war in the 1980s. The fragment depicts the murder of eight “travestis y parroquianos” in
the Gardenias bar in Tarapoto on April 9, 1989 by militants of the MRTA (Túpac Amaru
Revolutionary Movement). The report includes quotations taken from the MRTA’s official
weekly that justified the action in order to eradicate “social pariahs” like the “homosexual, drug
addict, delinquent, prostitute” (Campuzao 2008, 43). After listing the names of all eight of the
victims, the report concludes with a denunciation of the MRTA’s intolerance and persecution
of “sexual minorities” as a way of using popular prejudices to rally support for their cause. By
including this report next to his DNI, Campuzano makes a claim for citizenship for members
of the transgender community while connecting the most recent systemic violence against
sexual minorities with the long history of Peruvian transphobia and homophobia. Campuzano’s
juxtapositions of the performative pieces that appeal to affective solidarity with the historical
record of attempts to exclude and eliminate queer/cuir subjects from the colony/nation, antici-
pate Tortorici’s reminder that we pay attention to the “corporeal, gestural and affective signs”
428
(Tortorici 2018, 86) of non-normative sexual and gender identities in the archive; the Museo
Travesti fills in the absences that the archive actively constructed and appeals to a more empa-
thetic treatment of fellow citizens who contributed to the national narrative. The processes of
identification revealed in the Museo Travesti’s re-presentation of national history are moments of
self-recognition in a newly recovered past by transgender subjects that, as we have seen, were
marginalized and nearly erased from that history. Like narrative testimonios, Campuzano’s work
speaks for a community and denounces injustices, both old and new, all the while interpolating
the viewer or reader, inviting them to think with him from a decolonial space of gendered oth-
erwise. The Museo Travesti expresses a will, in the words of John Beverley defining testimonios
(Beverley 2008, 572), to “impose oneself on an institution of power and privilege from the posi-
tion of the excluded, the marginal, the subaltern.” This is Campuzano and his collaborators’
decolonial praxis, an embodied critique that also forges a vision of solidarity and inclusion while
re-writing the history of the nation.
This critical embodiment is taken to a synthetic climax in the work of another of the mem-
bers of the collective represented in the Museo Travesti, and whose work continues to challenge
our limited appreciation of the place of difference the third gender represented in millennial
Andean culture. Javi Nefando’s more recent photographic series,“Constelación Chuquichinchay”
(2019), revives the important role the golden feline figure Chuquichinchay, protector of “her-
maphrodite Indians” according to indigenous historian Juan Santacruz Pachacuti Yamqui (1613),
had during moments of cultural crisis and transition.7 Nefando, whose chosen last name seems
to be a homage itself to the unnamable sins of his queer/cuir ancestors, digitally lays the constel-
lation over the photograph of the body of a “sexual dissident” covered in feathers after a huayco
(mudslide) has unearthed him (or buried him, depending on one’s interpretation). In the back-
ground, a mountain rises from the desert, suggestive of a huaca (sacred place; supernatural being).
Nefando remarks in his artist’s note on the series that he wished to restore to our contemporary
imaginary the ancient Andean connections between astronomical knowledge and sacred prac-
tices like that of the third-gender ritualist whose approaches to phenomena like disease and
disaster provide productive non-western perspectives.
This work activates not only the memory of these telluric modes of thinking sexuality
and the cosmos, but also disrupts contemporary neoliberal discourse and the resulting
management of precariousness that make unintelligible and disconnect ecological pre-
occupations from dissident sexualities. All of this translates into a biopolitical double
play that on the one hand stigmatizes certain dysfunctional bodies in the sexual system,
and on the other, covers up the critical effects on the environment or the pharmaceuti-
cal industry’s role in the outbreak of new diseases and epidemics like AIDS.
(Nefando 2019)
Nefando’s piece suggests not only an invocation of what may be needed in this time of continued
upheaval in contemporary society (he mentions global warming and HIV/AIDS as two exam-
ples of crisis alluded to in the series), but also reminds us of the travails of all non-conforming
peoples in the history of the nation. His works also make allusion to the story of the seventeenth-
century “sodomites” who were blamed for a destructive earthquake in Lima in 1687. Nefando
includes a quote from the archive attributed to a Franciscan priest, Luis Galindo de San Roman,
who argued that God was angry at the people of Lima: “what has Him so angry is the nefarious
sin, sex with sex, women with women, and men with men” (Velazquez Castro, Marcel. 2013. La
mirada de los gallinazos (266) cited in Nefando (2019)). Here, decolonial art revives from the
archive a nearly forgotten past that is reminiscent of the present when more recent tragedies are
429
Michael Horswell
blamed on the queer/cuir subjects of the nation, as we saw above with the MRTA assassinations
and police actions used to cleanse society of that which is deemed contra natura. Nefando’s creative
use of feathers on the bodies of the sexual dissident/third-gender subject references both the
sacred use of feathers that adorned the bodies of pre-Colombian leaders, shamans, and deities,
while reminding us of the colonial punishments that humiliated sexual “dissidents” by parading
them through the streets with their bodies covered in excrement and feathers.
Campuzano and Nefando provide the contemporary scholar of colonial studies works that
synthesize the complexities of the history of non-normative gender and sexuality from colonial
times until today. Their interventions foreground the continuities and discontinuities of
queer/cuir identities from perspectives that offer what colonial scholars often lack when examin-
ing the colonial discourse from published histories and the fragmented archive: first person
accounts of how it feels to be both “queered” by the early modern authoritative discourses of
church and state and “reconstructed” through postmodern academic studies. At the heart of this
decolonial work is the agency of contemporary artists, scholars and performers who use their
voices and bodies to express gender and sexual identities that relish in their difference, that
express a life that is otherwise, in a long continuum of resistant performances that began in pre-
Hispanic times and intensified during the colonial period. Scholars of colonial Latin American
studies have much to contribute to the reiterations of millennial cultural conocimientos; we also
have a lot to learn from our colleagues whose reinterpretations of scholarship and original con-
tributions to our comprehension of the historical record enrich our overall appreciation and
understanding of the colonial era. Engaging with this work on its own terms also contributes to
the breaking of the verticality of North-South patterns of academic production and distribution
while opening the academy to non-Western epistemologies and a deeper grasp of the imbrica-
tions of identity that mark the complexity of both the past and the present.
Notes
1 I use the words queer/cuir to recognize the complexities and tensions in the North-South dialogue that
has emerged around the term queer. See Viteri (2017, 407–409) for a clear explanation of the debates.
Falconí Trávez et al. (2014) coined a phrase, “resentir lo queer,” as a way to problematize the use of the
term by drawing on the verb’s double meaning in Spanish: re-sentir (to feel again or to feel a different
way) and resentir (to resent or begrudge). Re-sentir appeals to the affects of the cultural specificity of the
region which appeals to my method of reading both texts and archive in relation to non-normative
sexuality and gender: “(…) nos permite analizar desde los cuerpos la compleja productividad queer en
la hibrida, heterogénea y contradictoria América Latina.” (Falconí Trávez et al. 2014, 12) [“… it allows
us analyze from the body the complex queer productivity in hybrid, heterogeneous, and contradictory
Latin America.”]
2 See Goldberg (1991, 46) and Bhabha (1994, 66) on the ambiguity that invests these tropes with power.
3 For definitions of sodomy in the colonial Americas, see Lavrin (1989), Harrison (1993), Molina (2017),
Tortorici (2018).
4 For a recent discussion of the word travesti in Latin American usage and its comparison with transvestite
and transgender, see Lewis (2010, 6–7). Lewis points out that the semantic field of the word travesti is
much wider than its English cognate transvestite and generally includes sense of self that is related as
much to (homo)sexuality as to gender (7). Campuzano (2008) defines and uses the term travesti as
embracing a wide range of trans people who have been labeled by and/or who have self-identified with
myriad terms from the colonial period to the present included in an extensive glossary of the many
terms used to signify gender non-conforming and peripheral sexualities in Peru (2008, 84–89).
5 Huacsas were impersonators of sacred huacas who performed during festivities to honor them and reen-
act their myths.
6 Translations, unless otherwise noted, are mine.
7 Javi Nefando has also used the names Javi Vargas and Javier Sotomayor. I discuss his series “La falsifi-
cación de las Tupamaro” in Horswell 2016.
430
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INDEX
Page numbers in italic indicate figures and page numbers in bold indicate tables.
Acosta, José de, 172; De procuranda indorum salute, archives, 22, 295–304; archival dispossession,
44, 49–52, 382, 383; Historia natural y moral de las 297–299; archival reading and archival
Indias, 173, 382; racialization and, 44, 49–52; writing, 303–304; archival reinvention,
Sandoval, Alonso de, and, 382 302–303; archival ruins, 300–302; Archivo
General de Indias (Seville, Spain), 234, 302,
Adorno, Rolena, 6, 9, 17, 62, 381 304, 323, 385; Archivo General de la
Age of Revolutions, 8–9 Nación, Buenos Aires, (AGNA), 337–338;
Alcoff, Linda Martin, 282 Archivo Histórico Nacional (Madrid
Alpers, Svetlana, 313 Spain), 383; Archivo Histórico Nacional de
Alva Ixtlilxochitl, Fernando de, 5, 62, 234, 303 Ecuador (AHNE), 334; art and, 314, 317,
Alvarado Tezozomoc, Hernando de, 5, 62 322–323
Amador de los Ríos, José, 9, 236–237 Arens, William, 183
Amauta (magazine), 11 Arias, Santa, 4, 5, 16, 235, 267, 299, 345
Americanness, 12 Arias Montano, Benito, 175–176
Amerindian origins: critique of theories of, Armitage, David, 10
170–176; Llano Zapata, José Eusebio, art see materialities and art
and, 177–178 Aztlán, 14
Andrade, Oswald de, 12, 184, 185–195
Anghie, Antony, 408, 409 Bacigalupo, Ana Mariella, 425
Angulo Íñiguez, Diego, 309–310, 311, 313 Bacon, Francis, 170
Anthropocene, 24, 134, 139, 262 Balbuena, Bernardo de, 86, 283, 284–285
anthropophagy, 183–195, 299, 410 Bal, Mieke, 20
antropofagia (cannibalism), 184–195; “cannibal Barad, Karen, 251
cogito” and, 186–190; exocannibalism, Barragán, Rossana, 73, 75
188; gender and sexual cannibalism, Baroque, 11–12, 86, 156, 250, 285; art, 250, 311,
192–195; Manifesto antropófago 315–316; Barroco americano, 11; Barroco de
(Cannibalist Manifesto) (Andrade), Indias, 11, 12; Barroco indiano, 11; Barroco
184–195; perspectivism and, 190–192; indígena, 11; Barroco latinoamericano, 12;
Revista de Antropofagia, 184, 186; trope decolonial aesthetics and, 426; festival, 291;
of, 184–186 intellectuals, 284; see also neobaroque
Appadurai, Arjun, 251 Barrios, Marta Milena, 140
archival turn, 302, 322 Bastian, Jeanette A., 22
433
Index
Bauer, Ralph, 25, 350 Carranza,Víctor, 95

Beauvoir, Simone de, 251 Carrasco, Salvador, 156–157
Behn, Aphra, 133 Carrasquillo, Rosa Elena, 142, 143
Bellini, Guiseppe, 6 Carrera, Magali, 77, 147
Bello, Andrés, 86; Biblioteca Americana, 8–9; cartography and cartographers, 1–2, 273, 299,
Repertorio Americano, 8–9 328–329, 402; Abraham Ortelius map,
Benítez Rojo, Antonio, 12, 240–241 201, 202, 203; Americas-centric maps,
Benjamin, Walter, 297, 410 1; Baleato, Andrés, 335–337, 336;
Bennett, Herman, 22, 24, 66 Cardiel, José, 352; Global South
Bennett, Jane, 251, 256 perspective maps, 1; Harley, J.B., on, 1;
Bentancor, Orlando, 253, 407 “Map of America” (Münster), 1–2;
Berger, John, 147 mapping, 114, 119; maps in relaciones
Beyersdorff, Margot, 254 geográficas, 399–400; Münster,
Bhabha, Homi, 17, 314, 421 Sebastian, 1–2; Plano de Cartagena de
Bigelow, Allison, 253, 381 Yndyas (1790), 333; Wit, Frederik de,
Bingham, Hiram, 11, 268 347, 348
Black intellectuals, 65–67 Carvalho, Bernardo, 190
Black Legend, 22, 45, 363–364, 365, 369–371, 414 Casey, Edward S., 24
Bleichmar, Daniela, 262 casta society, 45–46, 73, 77–79
Boazio, Baptista, 142–144, 143 Castañeda, Pedro de, 14
Boccara, Guillaume, 75 Castañeda, Quetzil, 268–269
Bolívar, Simón, 8, 94, 140, 234, 235 Castro, Américo, 10
Bollaín, Icíar, 154–156 Castro, Daniel, 413
Bolton, Herbert, 8 Castro-Klarén, Sara, 6, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190,
Boone, Elizabeth Hill, 6, 64–65, 106, 273 191, 192
Boruchoff, David A., 25 Catelli, Laura, 19, 26
Boucher, Philip, 183, 184, 410 Césaire, Aimé, 13, 18, 124–125, 252, 253
Bourbon Reforms, 74, 92, 394 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 134, 415
Braidotti, Rosi, 251 Chang-Rodríguez, Raquel, 6
Branche, Jerome, 239 Charles, John, 379, 381
Breglia, Lisa, 269–270 Charney, Paul J., 88
Brewer-García, Larissa, 22, 65 Chen, Chris, 44–45, 53–54
Brickhouse, Anna, 380–382 Chicanx canon, 13–14, 16, 17; Latin American
Brokaw, Galen, 253 studies, 17–20; literature, 14, 16, 25;
Brown, Bill, 251, 316 Mexican American/Chicanx Studies,
Brown, Jonathan, 313 13–17; see also Latinx studies
Bruce-Novoa, Juan, 14 Chichen Itza, 268, 269
Bry, Theodor de, 139, 195, 367–368, 368, 369 Chimalpahin, Francisco de San Antón, 5, 10, 62
Bullock, William, 310 Christensen, Mark, 395
Burkhart, Louise, 381–382, 396 Cieza de León, Pedro, 372, 423–424
Butler, Judith, 251, 424 cinema: Cabeza de Vaca (1990), 158; Cautiverio feliz
(1998), 158–159; cinematic gaze, 148–149;
coloniality and, 147, 149–150, 154–156,
Cabeza de Vaca (film), 158–159 158; colonization of the imaginary,
cabildos (Spanish political form), 24, 59–60, 387, 156–158; de/colonizing the labor of film,
395 154–156; Disney, 152–153; Grupo
Cabot, John, 1, 344 Ukamau, 155; Hollywood, 151–155, 159;
Calancha, Antonio de la, 171–175 indianization of the conquistadors,
Callado, Antonio, 189, 190 158–159; indianizing film, 150–152; La otra
Campanella, Tomasso 206 conquista (The Other Conquest) (1998),
Campos, Augusto de, 189 156–158; national critique of cinematic
Campos, Haroldo de, 11, 185, 193 colonialism, 152–154; New Latin American
Campuzano, Giuseppe, 426–430 Cinema movement, 154; Nuevo Mundo
cannibalism, 2, 12, 26, 408–411; see also antropofagia (New World) (1978), 156–157; Para recibir el
(cannibalism) canto de los pájaros (1995), 154–156; Pirinop:
Cárdenas Ayaipoma, Mario, 87 Meu primeiro contato (2007), 156; También la
Carpentier, Alejo, 12, 18, 201 lluvia (Even the Rain) (2010), 154–156, 158
434
Index
Clarke, Kamari, 409 de Certeau, Michel, 195, 272, 421–422

Clavijero, Francisco Javier, 23, 234 de la Cadena, Marisol, 75
Clifford, James, 314, 421 de Oto, Alejandro, 79
Códice Borgia, 100, 101, 102 Dean, Carolyn, 252, 271, 314
Códice Xolotl, 103, 104 decolonial turn, 18–19, 20, 26; “coloniality” and,
Códice Zouche-Nuttall, 103, 103 117–127; “coloniality of power” and, 118,
Coe, Michael, 273 120–122; Quijano, Aníbal, and, 117–122,
cofradías (con-fraternities), 24, 66 123–124, 126–127; Wynter, Sylvia, and,
Cold War, 13, 120 117, 122–127
coloniality, 18–21, 24–27; cinema and, 147, Deleuze, Gilles, 251, 322
149–150, 154–156, 158; gender/sexual del Monte, Domingo, 4, 233
identity and, 419–420; of power, 18, 67, DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, 134, 135, 262
71–72, 118, 120–122, 149, 155, 283, del Valle, Ivonne, 50, 52, 53, 253, 407
407, 420 Derrida, Jacques, 22, 295, 302
colonial Latinx studies, 13–17 Descola, Philippe, 188, 190–192
colonial object ontologies, 253–254, 262–263 Díaz, Mónica, 283
Columbus, Christopher, 3, 4, 6, 9–10, 64, 125, Díaz Balsera,Viviana, x, 6, 24
126; colonial object ontologies and, Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, 4–5, 60–61, 234, 301,
262–263; Diario del primer viaje, 249, 380; Historia verdadera de la Conquista de la
255–263; ecocritical turn and, 132, Nueva España, 380
137–138; film and, 154, 155; materiality diluvialism, 165–178; Copernicanism and,
of first Atlantic crossing, 255–258; 168–169, 178; Dulard, Paul Alexandre and,
rescates and material culture of first 169; Huet, Pierre Daniel, and, 168, 177;
contact, 258–262 Peralta Barnuevo, Pedro de, and, 169;
Columpar, Corinn, 148 Regnault, Noël, and, 169; Woodward, John,
Combe, Isabelle, 184, 187, 195 and, 168–169
comedias de Indias (plays on the Indies), 8 dispositif, 71–72, 79–80
Connell, Raewyn, 281 Dominicans (religious order), 65–66, 158, 207,
Cook, James, 201, 210 218, 235, 237, 239–240, 249, 287, 365,
Cope, R. Douglas, 43, 46–47 413–414, 423
Copernicanism, 168–169, 178 Drake, Francis, 142–144
Cornejo Polar, Antonio, 12–13, 74 Drake Manuscript,The (Histoire Naturelle Des Indes),
Coronado, Raúl, 25 133, 143
Coronil, Fernando, 17 Du Bois, W.E.B., 47–48, 125
corregidores (provincial magistrates), 59, 92, 401 Duckert, Lowell Nelson, 135
Cortés, Hernán, 59, 60–61, 141, 154, 157, 200, 201, Dueñas, Alcira, 379, 381
234, 254, 299, 302, 320, 364, 375–376, Dussel, Enrique D., 17, 72, 281–282
380, 408
Creole knowledge, 281–291; Balbuena, Eakin, Marshall, 8
Bernardo de, and, 86, 283, 284–285; La earthquakes: Lima–Callao earthquake (1746), 92,
Cruz, Juana Inés de, and, 283, 284, 286, 169; Peru earthquake (1687), 429
287, 291–292; Oviedo, Juan Antonio de, Echevarría, Nicolás, 158
and, 285–286; Pérez de Ribas, Andrés, Echeverría, Bolívar, 28n5
and, 286, 292; scholarship trends on ecocritical turn, 132–144; deforestation and, 133,
religion, knowledge, and gender, 141–142, 143–144; dogs and, 135–140;
283–284; Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos ecotones and, 141–142; fauna extinctions
de, and, 283, 284, 287–290, 291 and, 138–140; García Márquez, Gabriel,
créolité, 19 and, 140; Melville, Elinor, and, 132, 133,
criollismo, 6, 85–95; case of Lima, 87–91; definition 141, 144; Ozama River and, 140–143;
of, 85–86; identity and, 92–95; nationhood Raleigh, Walter, and, 134–136; river
and, 86–87; Peruvian independence and, landscapes and, 135, 140–144; sustainability
92–95 and, 134, 141, 143, 144
Crosby, Alfred, 132–133, 135 El Dorado, 363–365, 367–368, 370, 371–374, 376
cultural turn, 22, 23 Elcano, Juan Sebastián, 1
Cummins, Thomas B. F., 274, 314 Elizabeth I of England, 363–364, 367, 370, 371
Curiel, Ochy, 7 encomienda system, 59, 235, 238, 349–352, 354, 394,
Curtin, Philip D., 329 410–413
435
Index
endangered peoples and communities, 141, 142 García, Pablo, 289

endangered species, 136 García Peña, Lorgia, 25
Enlightenment, 9, 10, 12, 23, 54, 165–178, 205, García Sáiz, María Concepción, 77
328–340 Garcilaso de la Vega, el Inca, 5, 11, 62, 100, 104,
Ercilla y Zúñiga, Alonso de, 5, 9 380, 424; Comentarios reales de los incas
ethnohistory, 57–58, 60–61, 74–76, 272, 275, 365 (Royal commentaries of the Incas), 73, 76, 86,
eugenics, 74, 239 118, 255, 300
Eugenius IV, Pope, 218 Garibay, Ángel María, 57, 62, 398
evangelization, 24, 50, 65, 156, 158, 194, 206, 235, gender: cannibalism and, 192–195; queer
237, 238, 281, 282, 285, 290–291, 383–385, tropes of, 420–423; scholarship
394, 412–413, 424 trends on religion, knowledge, and
Ezpeleta, Josef de, 332–333 gender, 283–284; sexual and gender
identity, 419–430; third-gender
Fabian, Johannes, 22, 148, 270 performativity, the Andean feminine
Fanon, Frantz, 13, 148, 252, 253, 262–263; Black and primordial androgyny, 423–425;
Skin,White Masks, 124; Wretched of the Travestis and the Chuquichinchay in
Earth, 124, 125 visual and performance art,
Fausto, Carlos, 186, 187 425–430
Feijoo y Montenegro, Benito Jerónimo, 167 Gerassi Navarro, Nina, 25
Feliciano-Santos, Sherina, 5 Gerbi, Antonello, 138–139, 165, 170, 178
Ferdinand II of Aragon, 249, 261, 411, 413 Gerson, Juan, 314, 315
Ferman, Claudia, 156 Gil y Zárate, Antonio, 9
Fernández de Enciso, Martín, 408 Gilliam, Angela, 194
Fernández de Navarrete, Martín, 4, 236 Gillin, John P., 75
Gilroy, Paul, 17, 241
Fernández de Oviedo, Gonzalo, 5, 133, 141, 234,
Ginsburg, Faye, 150–151, 153
235; La historia general y natural de las Indias,
Girard, René, 183–184
136, 137
Glave, Luis Miguel, 64, 88, 95
Fernández Ortega, Racso, 140
Glissant, Édouard, 13, 122, 125, 126, 240
Fernández Retamar, Roberto, 12, 13
Godin, Louis, 92
Ferreira da Silva, Denise, 252
Goic, Cedomil, 6
Figueiredo,Vera Follein de, 185
Goldmark, Matthew, 7, 16
Figueroa, Sotero, 15
González Casanova, Pablo, 79
Figueroa,Yomaira, 17
González de Barcia, Andrés, 4, 168, 173, 176
Filer, Malva E., 6
González Echevarría, Roberto, 12
Florentine Codex, 62–63, 299, 393, 397–403
González, Juan, 318; Moctezuma Offering Gold
Foucault, Michel, 8, 147, 282, 316, 323; Presents to Hernán Cortés, 320
Archaeology of Knowledge,The, 22; on González, Juan, Harvest of Empire, 14
“archive,” 295, 322; on dispositif, 71, González, Martín, 350
72, 77, 79; History of Sexuality Vol I., González, Miguel, 318; Moctezuma Offering Gold
The, 71 Presents to Hernán Cortés, 320;Virgin of
Franciscans, 20, 209, 299, 311, 312, 315, 366, Guadalupe, 318–319, 319
394–395, 397, 414, 429 González Rodríguez, Adolfo Luis, 407
Franco, Jean, 6, 9, 152 Gónzalez-Ripoll, Armando, 233
Freyre, Gilberto, 193–195 Gosson, Renée, 134
Fuchs, Barbara, 24, 284, 285, 376, 377 Goveia, Elsa, 124
Fuentes, Marisa, 22, 66, 68, 382 Greenblatt, Stephen, 3, 377n4, 380
Funes Monzote, Reinaldo, 133 Griffiths, Alison, 152
Grove, Richard, 132, 134, 135
Galeano, Eduardo, 8; Open Veins of Latin America, Gruesz, Kirsten Silva, 14, 16, 25
The, 132–133 Gruzinski, Serge, 73, 147, 156–157,
Gamio, Manuel, 74 204–205, 365
García, Alan, 11 Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe, 5, 19, 62, 63,
García Canclini, Nestor, 128, 185, 323 122, 300, 303; Nueva corónica y buen
García, Francisco, 208–209 gobierno (New Chronicle of Good
García, Gregorio de, 168, 173, 176 Government), 57, 73, 87–88,
García Márquez, Gabriel, 140, 309 119–120, 424
García, Miguel, 215–216, 218, 219–221, 237 Guattari, Félix, 251, 322
436
Index
Gudynas, Eduardo, 3 Irwin, Robert McKee, 3, 21

Guha, Ranajit, 23 Isabella I of Castile, 249, 261, 394
Islamophobia, 53
Habermas, Jürgen, 147
Hagen, Oskar, 315 Jackson, Shona, 5
Hall, Stuart, 17, 18 James, C. L. R., 124
Handley, George, 134 Jáuregui, Carlos A., 17, 72, 183–186, 189, 192–193,
Harley, J. B., 1 195, 238, 289, 291
Hanke, Lewis, 8, 235, 407, 408 Juana Inés de la Cruz, 5, 154, 283, 284, 286, 287,
Haraway, Donna, 251, 258 291–292, 303, 333
Harley, J.B., 1 Jay, Martin, 147
Harris, Roy, 110 Jesuits, 183–184, 239, 282, 285, 292; Acosta, José
Harrison, Regina, 63, 430 de, 44, 49–52, 172, 173, 382, 383;
Heidegger, Martin, 251, 268, 274 Claver, Pedro, 65, 383–386; García,
Heise, Ursula, 134, 136 Miguel, 215–216, 218, 219–221, 237;
hemispheric turn, 12, 24–25 Kircher, Atanasius, 273; La conquista
Henríquez Ureña, Pedro, 6 espiritual del Japón, 206; Leite, Gonçalo,
Hernández, Francisco, 399 215–216, 218–221; missions and
Hernández Sánchez-Barba, Mario, 333, 340 missionaries, 206, 208, 211; Montoya,
Herzog, Tamar, 407 Antonio Ruiz de, 193; Oviedo, Juan
Higgins, Antony, 22 Antonio de, 285–286; Pérez de Ribas,
Himpele, Jeffrey D., 268–269 Andrés, 286, 292; race and, 215–227;
Hispanism, 8–10, 22, 238–241 reductions and, 351–357; Regnault,
Holt, Thomas, 44 Noël, 169; Sandoval, Alonso de, 220,
Hooker, Juliet, 25 237, 382–385; translation and, 380–386,
Horswell, Michael, 23 388;Valera, Blás, 424;Vieira, Antonio,
Huarochirí Manuscript, 5, 62 221–227
Hulme, Peter, 99, 134, 183–184 Jim Crow, 47
Huntington, Archer M., 9 Jordan, Winthrop, 217
Juan, Jorge, 89–92, 168
Iberian empires, 43; Black Legend and, 22, 45,
363–364, 365, 369–371, 414; Kagan, Richard, 8
racialization and, 45–54 Kanellos, Nicolás, 15, 16
Iberian globalization: Abraham Ortelius map, Katzew, Ilona, 77–78, 147
201, 202, 203; Alta California and, Kelemen, Pál, 310–311
209–211; Balboa,Vasco Núñez de, and, Klein, Cecilia F., 323
199–200; deterritorialization and Klor de Alva, Jorge, 17, 283
reterritorialization of regional Knight, Franklin W., 330
economies, 204–205; frontierization Konetzke, Richard, 75
and, 209–211; Magellan, Ferdinand, Kubayanda, Josaphat, 7
and, 200–201, 208; Malaspina Kubler, George, 75, 310–314
Expedition, 209, 211; mare clausum
doctrine, 203; missions and La Condamine expedition, 89, 92
missionaries, 206–211; Modo de pelear Lamming, George, 18, 125
de los Indios de California, 209; Oro La Plata, 344–357; Ayolas, Juan de, and, 346, 356;
(film) and, 199, 200; Terra Australis depopulation in, 346, 349; encomienda
(great southern continent) and, and reduction, 350–353; Guaraní and,
200–203; territorialization of the sea, 347–357; “Hunger in Buenos Aires”,
199–203, 205 346; Irala, Domingo Martínez de, and,
indigenous intellectuals, 62–65 346–350, 356; Mendoza, Pedro de,
indigenous mounds and monuments, 253, 344–346, 349, 350, 356; mobility and
268–270, 300 relocation, 346–350, 353–356; mud and
indigenous self-governance, 59–67, 414 hunger as tropes in, 344–345; Núnez
inter- and transdisciplinary engagements of Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar, 349–350, 356;
colonial studies, 20–25 Treaty of Madrid (1750) and Guaraní
interdisciplinary turn, 2, 20–22, 25 wars, 353–356
Irving, Washington, 9 Larsen, Neil, 185
437
Index
Las Casas, Bartolomé de: Brevísima relación de la Malpass, Michael A., 271–272
destrucción de las Indias, 15, 22, 234; De unico Mancall, Peter, 262
vocationis modo, 366, 413; Historia de las maps see cartography and cartographers
Indias, 234–238, 240, 411, 413–414, 415; Mariátegui, José Carlos, 11, 118–119, 121,
Memorial de Remedios para las Indias, 235, 123, 276
237–238, 411, 413; Native Americans Martell, Helvetia, 15
hanged over a fire, 368; Nuevo Mundo Martí, José, 9, 15, 240
(Retes) and, 157; Saco, José Antonio, and, Martínez, Josebe, 25
231, 234, 235–239; Sepúlveda and 218; Martínez, María Elena, 63, 73, 410
sovereignty and encomienda system, 173, Martínez-San Miguel,Yolanda, 5, 16, 18, 19, 20, 28,
206, 231; The torture of King Bogota, 369 76, 283, 285
Latin American Boom, 12, 309 Martínez Shaw, Carlos, 204
latinidad, 13, 16 Marxism, 118, 120, 121, 253
latinoamericanismo vernáculo, 13 Marx, Karl, 188, 251
Latinx/Chicanx colonial archive, 14, 22; see also masculinity, 148, 192–194, 281, 284, 285–290, 422,
archives 424–425
Latinx studies, 13–17, 28n7 materialities: colonial object ontologies, 262–263;
Latour, Bruno, 191 Columbus’s Diario del primer viaje and,
Laverty, Paul, 155 249–263; of Columbus’s first Atlantic
Lazo, Raimundo, 3, 6 crossing, 255–258; culture studies,
Leal, Luis, 14 250–251, 255, 262; enconchados
Lefebvre, Herni, 328, 340, 345, 349 (case study), 316–322; history of art and,
Leibsohn, Dana, 252, 314 309–310; “hybrid” and, 311, 313, 314,
Leite, Gonçalo, 215–216, 218–221 316, 317, 322; indigenous material
Lentz, David, 272 cultures, 267–268; indigenous
León Portilla, Miguel, 19, 62, 75, 398 materialities and Western knowledge,
León Pinelo, Antonio de, 166, 168, 169, 267–277; of indigenous past and present
170–172, 175 in Uruguay, 275–277; material culture,
Lepe-Carrión, Patricio, 74 materiality, and colonial Latin American
Levin, David Michael, 147 studies, 249–255; material turn, 316–322;
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 183, 184 Mesoamerican codices, 273–274;
Lezama Lima, José, 28 “mestizo” and, 311–313, 316;
Lima, Lázaro, 25 monumentality, architecture, and the
liminality, 137, 256, 424–425 organization and exploitation of the land,
limpieza de sangre, 43, 53, 175 268–272; Nanban objects, 317–319, 321;
Liss, Peggy K., 330 non-monumental indigenous objects,
literacy, 10, 62, 67, 273, 395; orality-literacy binary, 272–274; Posa Chapel, Franciscan
99, 105–109, 110, 114, 115 convent, 312; raced discourses and,
Llano Zapata, José Eusebio, 165–178; diluvialism 311–316; rescates and material culture of
and, 165–178; Memorias histórico, físicas, first contact, 258–262; styles and
crítico, apologéticas de la América Meridional, nomenclature in colonial art and
165, 167–170, 172, 175–178; theory of architecture, 310–316; technical art
Amerindian origins, 177–178 history, 316–317; “tequitqui” and, 311,
Lockhart, James, 57–60, 381, 396–397 312, 313; see also archives
Lohmann Villena, Guillermo, 88, 96n9 Mauss, Marcel, 260
López Baralt, Mercedes, 6 Mayans y Siscar, Gregorio de, 170–171
López de Legazpi, Miguel, 204, 207 Mazzotti, José Antonio, 76
López de Velasco, Juan, 254, 399–400, 401–402 McClintock, Anne, 148
López, Kathleen, 7, 19 McKinley, Michelle, 66
López Méndez, Luis, 8 McLuhan, Marshall, 109
Lugones, María, 7, 122, 159n1, 283, 291, 420 Medovoi, Leerom, 53
Meillassoux, Quentin, 252
Machu Picchu, 11, 268–269 Mello e Souza, Laura de, 227
Magellan, Ferdinand, 1, 200–201, 208 Melville, Elinor, 132, 133, 141, 144
Maldonado-Torres, Nelson, 17, 19 Menéndez Pidal, Ramón, 10
Malintzin (also La Malinche or Doña Marina), Menéndez y Pelayo, Marcelino, 9
60–61, 380 Merediz, Eyda, 25, 413
438
Index
mestizaje (miscegenation): as dispositif, 71–72, 79–80; New World Group, 124–125

field of Latin American colonial studies Newton, Melanie, 22
and, 71–80; history of race and, 48–49 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 185, 188
mestizaje de sangre, 72 Nirenberg, David, 45
Metcalf, Alida, 61 Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar, 5, 14, 154, 349–350,
Meyer, Stephen M., 134 356; Cabeza de Vaca (film), 158–159;
Mier, Servando Teresa de, 8, 15, 234 Naufragios, 158, 256
Mignolo, Walter, 6, 17, 19, 22, 23, 99, 105, 108, Núñez de Balboa,Vasco, 199–200
120, 121, 126, 150, 185–186, 189, 273, 282,
316, 399, 415 oceanic turn, 25
Miller, John, 134 Oliveira, Emanuelle, 193
Miller, Shawn William, 132–133 O’Malley, John, 220
Miller, Toby, 140 Omi, Michael, 43, 52–53
Mintz, Sidney, 139 Onís, Federico de, 10
Miranda, Deborah, 422 orality-literacy binary, 99, 105–109, 110, 114, 115
Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 147 Oro (film), 199, 200
Mitchell, W.J.T., 255 Ortelius, Abraham, 175, 201, 202, 203
mobility, 8, 22–23, 27, 46, 76, 227, 270, 339, Ortiz, Fernando, 12–13, 231, 232–233, 235,
353–356, 357, 395 238–239, 241, 253
Molina, Fernanda, 423, 428 Oviedo, Juan Antonio de, 285–286
Montaigne, Michel de, 183, 187
Monteiro, John, 61 pachacuti (Turner of the Earth), 365, 371–376
Montesinos, Antonio de, 155, 237, 365 Padrón, Ricardo, 24
Montesinos, Fernando de, 172, 175 Pagden, Anthony, 50, 407
Morales Bermúdez, Francisco, 94 palenques (groups of runaway slaves; maroon
Moraña, Mabel, 17, 72 communities), 24, 67, 285, 386–388
More, Anna, 22, 282, 284, 289 Pané, Ramón, 137–138
Moreno Villa, José, 311, 313 Paquette, Gabriel B., 330
Mörner, Magnus, 75 Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth, 5, 24, 26
Moseley, Michael E., 271 Pastor, Beatriz, 158, 258
Moses, Bernard, 6, 9, 11 Paul II, Pope, 415
Mulvey, Laura, 148 Paul III, Pope, 411
Mundy, Barbara, 24, 252, 314, 401 Paz, Octavio, 9, 380
Muñoz, Juan Bautista, 4, 22, 234 Pease, Franklin, 62
Münster, Sebastian, 1–2 Peguero, Luis Joseph, 137, 138
Murra, John, 58 Pérez de Ribas, Andrés, 286, 292
Myers, Kathleen, 283 Pérez, Emma, 18
Pérez Sánchez, Alfonso, 313
Napoleon Bonaparte, 211 periodization of race, 44, 45–46
Napoleon III, 8 Perlongher, Néstor, 11
Nebrija, Antonio de, 393–394 perspectivism, 190–192
Nefando, Javi, 429–430 Philip II of Spain, 175, 204, 206–207
négritude, 13, 125, 252 Picón Salas, Mariano, 6
Nemser, Daniel, 234, 253, 407, 410 Piedra, José, 259–260
neobaroque, 11, 426 pintura de castas (the presumed whiteness), 19, 147
Nesvig, Martin, 283–284 Piquer, Andrés, 167, 168–169
Neumeyer, Alfred, 311, 314 Pirotto, Armando D., 6
New Historicism, 21, 365 Pizzaro, Francisco, 141
New Spain, colonial static and “authorship” in: plantation farming and culture, 215, 219, 224, 226,
bilingual/bicultural intermediaries, 232, 233, 236, 240–241, 298, 304, 339, 387;
394–395; double mistaken identity, colonial decolonial turn and, 124; ecocritical turn
static, and untranslatability, 395–397; and, 133, 134, 141, 144; mate plantations,
Florentine Codex, 62, 63, 299, 393, 397–401, 352, 354
402; pluricultural and plurilingual New Poblete, Juan, 3, 13, 21, 26
Spain, 393–394; relaciones geográficas Polo, Marco, 2; Travels, 257
(geographical relations), 393, 399–402, 420; Poole, Deborah, 147, 148–149, 150
translation and, 393–402 Poole, Stafford, 283
439
Index
Popol Vuh, 5, 299, 300 Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage

port cities, 328–340; Buenos Aires, 328, 329, project, 16
330, 332, 337–338, 339; Callao, 328, reducción (resettlement), 59, 87, 208, 350–357
329, 332, 335, 339; Cartagena de relaciones geográficas (geographical relations), 5, 24,
Indias, 328, 329, 332, 333, 337, 339; 254, 274, 299, 393, 399–402, 420
chaos, disorder, and freedom in, Restall, Matthew, 210
330–337; Guayaquil, 328, 330, 332, Retes, Gabriel, 156–157
334, 337; Montevideo, 328, 329–330, Reyes, Constantino Valerio, 312
332, 337, 339; racialization of space Ribeiro, Darcy, 190
in, 337–340; slavery and, 330, Ricard, Robert, 206
337–340; southernmost ports, Rincón, Carlos, 185
337–340; spatial nature of ports, Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia, 72, 75, 78–79, 154
329–330 Rocha, João Cezar Castro, 184–185
Powers, Karen Vieira, 63 Rodó, José Enrique, 9
Prado, Paulo, 194 Rodrigues, Nina, 74
Prescott, William H., 9, 250 Rodríguez, Ileana, 23, 25
Price, Rachel, 253 Rodríguez Ramos, Reniel, 250
Pupo Walker, Enrique, 12, 21 Rony, Fatimah Tobing, 148
Puri, Shalini, 17 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 152
Rosenblat, Ángel, 75
Quijano, Aníbal, 18, 71, 117–122, 123–124, Ross, Kathleen, 282, 284
126–127, 149, 282, 283, 407 Rostworowski, María, 58, 64
Quiroga, José, 7, 208 Rueda Pimiento, Óscar, 139
Ruiz de Montoya, Antonio, 193, 357
Rabasa, José, 256, 411 Russo, Alessandra, 259, 262, 321–322
race: defining race, 44; identity and, 45;
limpieza de sangre and, 43, 53, 175; as Sacabuche, Andrés, 384–385, 386–387, 388
material, 44–45; “modern” conceptions Saco, José Antonio, 4, 15, 231–241, 410;
of, 43, 45–46, 52–53; periodization of biographical details, 231–233; Cuban
race, 44, 45–46; racializing practices, Literary Academy and, 233–234; Las
44–45; as social construction, 44, 48, Casas, Bartolomé de, and, 231, 234,
49; the work of race, 44; see also 235–239
mestizaje (miscegenation); racialization; Sahagún, Bernardino de, 5, 63, 234, 299, 381,
slavery 397–399, 403
racial domination, 46–48, 52 Said, Edward, 17, 269
racialization, 49–52; Acosta, José de and, 44, Saldaña, María Josefina, 25
49–52; colonial hierarchy and, 411; Salomon, Frank, 112–113, 381, 382
decolonial aesthetics and, 426; Salvatore, Ricardo, 10
Iberian empires and, 45–54; of the Sampedro, Benita, 24
“Indian”, 44–46; of knowledge Sánchez, Cristián, 158–159
production, 282; of language, 314; Sandoval, Alonso de, 220, 237, 382–385
material culture and, 252, 253, 262; Sanjinés, Jorge, 154–156
“mestizaje” and, 49, 72; of the Santacruz Pachacuti Yamqui, Juan de,
Muslim, 53; of slavery, 218; of space, 424–425, 429
142, 337–340; of violence, 48 Santos, Milton, 357
Rafael,Vicente L., 18 Sarduy, Severo, 11
Raleigh, Walter: Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Scarpaci, Joseph L., 328
Bewtifvl Empyre of Gviana,The, Schiwy, Freya, 151–152
363–365, 369–372, 376; El Dorado Schomburg, Arturo, 4, 15–16
and, 363–365, 370, 371–374, 376; Schroeder, Susan, 283
Historie of the World, 134–136; pachacuti Schwartz, Jorge, 185
and, 371–377; “White Legend” and, Schwartz, Roberto, 192
364, 365, 371, 376 Schwartz, Stuart, 194, 226–227
Rama, Ángel, 12, 62–63, 79, 200, 305n7 Seed, Patricia, 17, 23, 407
Rana, Junaid, 53 Segato, Rita, 118
Rappaport, Joanne, 72 self-governance, 59–67, 414
real maravilloso, 11, 12 self-representation, 57–68
440
Index
semiotics, 99–115; aesthesis and rationality in Torres-Saillant, Silvio, 18

indigenous American sign systems, Tortorici, Zeb, 422–423, 428–429
111–114; Andean quipu, 104–105; Códice Toussaint, Manuel, 309–311, 313
Borgia, 101, 102; Códice Xolotl, 103, 104; Townsend, Camilla, 380
Códice Zouche-Nuttall, 103, 103; Inca transatlantic turn, 24–25
quipu, 104–105, 105; media-studies transculturation, 12, 19, 21, 25, 48, 58, 185, 189,
approach to orality-literacy binary, 200, 210, 239, 241, 314, 419, 420, 422,
105–109; Mesoamerican iconography, 425, 426
100–104; rational and aesthetic modes of transdisciplinary turn, 20–22, 25
communication, 109–111; Tomatlan bill of translation, 379–388; agency and, 379, 382,
sale, 112, 113 388; black linguistic intermediaries in
Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de, 218, 407, 408–409 colonial Spanish America, 382–388;
Serra, Rafael, 15 colonial evangelical projects, 381–382;
sexual and gender identity, 419–430 Florentine Codex and, 393, 397–401,
Sheridan, Ana Cecilia, 210 402; historical narratives, 380–381;
Shohat, Ella, 148, 150, 152 Jesuits and, 380–386, 388; legal settings
sign systems see semiotics and documents, 381; Malintzin (also
Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos de, 5, 74, 89, 133, 255, La Malinche or Doña Marina) and,
300, 303; Creole knowledge and, 283, 284, 380; military campaigns, 380; natural
287–290, 291–292; Los infortunios de Alonso world and technologies for
Ramírez, 133; Theatro de virtudes políticas, 89 manipulating it, 381; in New Spain,
Simon, Joshua, 15 393–402; relaciones geográficas
slavery: Anglo-Spanish Treaty (1817), 14–15; Jesuits (geographical relations) and, 254, 274,
and, 215–227; palenques (groups of runaway 299, 393, 399–402, 420
slaves; maroon communities), 24, 67, 285, Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 14
386–388; port cities and, 330, 337–340 Treaty of Madrid (1750), 353–356, 357
Solodkow, David, 238, 410 Treaty of Tordesillas, 1
Solórzano y Pereira, Juan, 74 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 22
Sommer, Doris, 76, 194 Túpac Amaru, 373–374
Sousa Santos, Boaventura de, 397 Túpac Amaru II, 92
Spalding, Karen, 58
Spanish Golden Age, 8, 12, 123, 126, 153 Ugarte, Manuel, 9
spatial knowledge, 328–340; see also port cities Ulloa, Antonio, 92, 166, 176, 178
spatial turn, 23–24 Úrsula de Jesús, 65
Spence, Louise, 152
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 17, 192, 316, 409 Varela, Consuelo, 262
Staden, Hans, 154, 195 Varela, Félix, 232
Stahl, Peter W., 139 Vasconcelos, José, 74, 75
Stam, Robert, 147, 148, 150, 152 Veracini, Lorenzo, 71–72, 80, 276
Stavenhagen, Rodolfo, 28n9, 80n5, 124 Vera Tudela, Elisa Sampson, 283
Stavig, Ward, 407 Verdesio, Gustavo, 23, 253, 345
Stolcke,Verena, 76 Vidal, Hernán, 13, 17
Stoler, Laura Ann, 22, 72, 194, 296 Vieira, Antonio, 221–227
Suárez de Peralta, Juan, 237 Vilches, Elvira, 253, 260, 407
Suárez, Margarita, 88 Villena Fiengo, Sergio, 119
Subirats, Eduardo, 185 vitalism, 167–168, 188, 256
Sweet, James, 62, 217, 227 Vitoria, Francisco de, 407, 408–409, 412, 413
Szurmuk, Mónica, 3, 21 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, 186, 187–188, 189,
191–192
Taylor, Diana, 22 Voigt, Lisa, 24
territorialization of the sea, 199–203, 205
Theodoro, Janice, 28n5 Wachtel, Nathan, 19, 75
Thompson, Eric, 273 Wagner, Roy, 190, 191
Thompson, Lanny, 25 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 120, 149
Ticknor, George, 9 Walsh, Catherine, 415, 420, 426
Todorov, Tzvetan, 380 Warburg, Aby 321
Torquemada, Juan de, 173–176, 178 Wethey, Harold E., 310, 311, 313
441
Index
Whitehead, Neil, 184, 186–187, 195, 365 Yale Peruvian Expedition (1911), 11, 268
Williams, Patrick, 18 Yannakakis,Yanna, 61, 381, 395
Winant, Howard, 43, 52–53 Yoffee, Norman, 270
Winsor, Justin, 9 Young, Robert, 194
Wittgenstein, Ludwig von, 186
Wölfflin, Heinrich, 315–316 Zamora, Margarita, 76, 94
Wynter, Sylvia, 13, 18, 19, 117, 122–127, 252, 281 Zermeño-Padilla, Guillermo, 75
442

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THE ROUTLEDGE HISPANIC STUDIES

COMPANION TO COLONIAL LATIN

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO THE HISPANIC ENLIGHTENMENT

THE ROUTLEDGE HISPANIC STUDIES COMPANION TO NINETEENTH-

THE ROUTLEDGE HISPANIC STUDIES COMPANION TO COLONIAL LATIN

For more information about this series please visit:

SERIES EDITOR: BRAD EPPS

ISBN: 978-1-138-09295-2 (hbk)

Between colonialism and coloniality: Colonial Latin American

1 Race and domination in colonial Latin American studies 43

2 Self-representation and self-governance in early Latin America 57

3 Mestizaje as a dispositif for a paradigm shift in colonial studies 71

4 Race, ethnicity and nationhood in the formation of criollismo

5 An integrational approach to colonial semiosis 99

7 The ecocritical turn and the study of early colonial societies

8 Coloniality and cinema 147

9 Old Testament, New World: diluvialism and the Amerindian

10 The “cannibal cogito” and Brazilian antropofagia: radical

11 Presumptions of empire: relapses, reboots, and reversions in the transpacific

12 Imperial tensions, colonial contours: Jesuits, slavery, and race within

13 The Caribbean conundrum: José Antonio Saco’s Hispanic archive

15 It comes with the territory: indigenous materialities

16 Creole knowledge in colonial Mexico: religion, gender and power 281

17 The colonial Latin American archive: dispossession, ruins, reinvention 295

18 Materialities and archives 309

19 Port cities as sites of spatial knowledge in eighteenth-century

20 Spatiality and discourse in the region of La Plata 344

21 The white legend: El Dorado, pachacuti, and Walter Raleigh’s

22 The agency of translation in colonial Latin America: rethinking

23 Intercultural (mis)translations: colonial static and “authorship”

25 The (dis)continuities of decolonized gender and sexual identity

This volume is dedicated to our mentors:

Larissa Brewer-García is assistant professor of Latin American literature at the University of

Luís Madureira is professor of African cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Nelson Maldonado-Torres is professor of Latino and Caribbean studies, and of comparative

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert is a professor of Caribbean culture and literature in the

Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias

representation of Brazil as a land of cannibals, or the Southern Cone as a region inhabited by

The invention of the Latin American and Caribbean colonial period

context of production. As a consequence, many of the Latin American resonances we currently

The Latinx Americanization of colonial studies

Colonial Latin America

Colonial Latinx studies

Postcolonial and decolonial Caribbean studies

‘Post-colonial’ as we define it does not mean ‘post-independence,’ or ‘after colonialism,’

Inter- and transdisciplinary turns in colonial studies

Contributions in this volume

Rodó, José Enrique. 1900. Ariel.Valencia, SP: Prometeo.

Colonialism and coloniality

From race to racialization

If this mode of contribution is proposed in Spain or France or other nations of Europe,

(Si se propone este modo de contribución en España o Francia u otras naciones de

Conclusion: toward a new politics

The successful settler colonies ‘tame’ a variety of wildernesses, end up establishing

The mestizaje strategy and its effects

Mapping mestizaje as an object of study

constructed a methodological perspective based on a plurality of subjective points of view and

Concluding remarks and critical considerations on mestizaje

Defining the Criollo

The problem of the “nation”1

The case of Lima

Independence and the prevalence of criollo identity

Xx xxxxx xxx xx xxxx x xxxxxxx