The Conquest of Mexico

Westernization of Indian Societies from the 16th to the 18th Century

Serge Gruzinski

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780745683560
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire prémoderne

The Conquest of Mexico is a brilliant account of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, written from a new and unfamiliar angle.

Gruzinski analyses the process of colonization that took place in native Indian societies over three centuries, focusing on disruptions to the Indian's memory, changes in their perception of reality, the spread of the European idea of the supernatural and the Spanish colonists' introduction of alphabetical script which the Indians had to combine with their own traditional - oral and pictorial - forms of communication.

Gruzinski discusses the Indians' often awkward initiation into writing, their assimilation of Spanish culture, and their subsequent reinterpretation of their own past and recovers the changing Indian perceptions of the sacred and their 'absorption' of elements from the Christian tradition.

The Conquest of Mexico is a major work of cultural history which reconstructs a crucial episode in the European colonization of the New World. It is also an important contribution to the study of the relationship between memory, orality, images and writing in history.

1

Painting and Writing

It is difficult to imagine the extraordinary complexity, the population density and the cultural diversity of Mexico on the eve of the Spanish conquest. Before beginning to explore the more noteworthy characteristics of this universe, it is vital to make a detour by way of certain essential landmarks; otherwise there is too great a risk of getting lost. Central Mexico – from Michoacán and the Bajío, from the Chichimec border in the north to the region of Oaxaca in the south – is known to have accommodated a sizeable population at that time, dispersed among numerous communities and several large agglomerations. It is calculated that between 10 and 25 million souls inhabited these lands in 1519 (Cook and Borah, 1971–9), together making up a singularly dense linguistic and cultural political map. Nahuatl-speaking peoples dominated in the centre, in the valleys of Mexico, Toluca and Puebla, in the semi-tropical Morelos and part of Guerrero. The Purepecha occupied Michoacán, while in the southeast, Zapotec and Mixtec shared the mountains of Oaxaca. So much for the most powerful groups. Less numerous or less influential, other peoples had a personality, a history, that set them apart from the foregoing. Consider the Mazahua and especially the Otomí of the north of the valley of Mexico, from Sierra de Puebla and Tlaxcala; the Chontal of Guerrero; the Mixe, Trique, Chatino, and many others, of the region of Oaxaca. It is impossible to do justice to each of these groups and cultures. At the very most, one can keep in mind their diversity, their interweaving, their belonging to quite different linguistic families: Uto-Aztec for Nahuatl; Maya for Mixe, Zoque, Totonac; Macro-Otomanguean for Mazahua, Otomí and Matlaltzinca, Mixtec, Zapotec, while the Tarasc (or Purepecha) of Michoacán made up still another group. Certain languages dominated in this mosaic: Mixtec, Zapotec, Tarascan, and above all the Nahuatl of the central valleys, which served as lingua franca in the other regions.

South of the Bajío, inhabited by the nomad Chichimec hunters and gatherers, peasant societies were generally to be found, maintaining by their tribute the artisans, priests, warriors and shopkeepers in the framework of political units that the Nahua called tlatocayotl, the Spaniards translated as dominios and the Anglo-Saxons city states – although they were in fact neither cities in the Greek sense nor states in the modern sense of the term. A so-called city state was rather a vague entity made up of a political, administrative, urban centre (more or less developed, according to the ethnic group), and of a series of villages and hamlets, and even scattered farms. Among the Nahua peoples, these villages and hamlets corresponded to calpulli; in other words, to territorial units based on kinship, a relative hierarchy of lineages, a tendency to endogamy, communal ownership of land, material and military solidarity, and the cult of a tutelary god, the calpulteotl, whose force resided in an image or a sacred bundle. At least that is what one can deduce from sources that are at the same time copious, contradictory and incomplete (López Austin, 1980, I, pp. 75–80).

Embedded among the domains and the free or enforced alliances, the confederations made up more or less extensive, more or less ephemeral, more or less centralized political units after the fashion of those constructed by the Mixtec of Tilantongo, the Nahua of Tlaxcala and particularly those of México-Tenochtitlán, Texcoco and Tlacopan in the valley of Mexico. Alliances were made and unmade in tandem with the invasions and movements of people. So it was that during the three centuries that preceded the Spanish conquest, the Nahuatl-speaking tribes of the north penetrated into the valley of Mexico and mixed with local populations in successive waves. ‘Cities’ such as Culhuacán, Azcapotzalco and Coatlinchan prospered, then declined. In the fifteenth century, about 1428, Texcoco and Tlacopan, under the leadersip of the Mexica of Tenochtitlán, set up a confederation or league, the Triple Alliance, which drained tribute from the valley and from far more distant lands. Built in the middle of the lake of Texcoco, Tenochtitlán, with its network of canals, became the largest agglomeration of the American world at that time, with more than 150,000, and possibly more than 200,000 residents. However, we must be wary of seeing it as the head of a modern empire or a centralized bureaucracy, or the heart of an irresistible dominion. The ascendancy of the Triple Alliance basically took the form of the levying of tribute, the possible installation of garrisons, the imposition – or rather the superimposition – of its gods on the local pantheons, and above all the setting-up of extremely dense networks of marriages and bonds of kinship. The Triple Alliance was new and as politically fragile as earlier hegemonies, possibly because of the lack of a system of writing that measured up to its ambitions. It covered basically the centre of Mexico, that is, a territory of about 200,000 km sq. (Calnek, 1982). It did not however include Tarascan Michoacán, the domain of Tlaxcala (likewise Nahua), which alongside its allies of Huejotzingo and Cholula stood up to the Mexica and the Triple Alliance.

Finally, in the course of their migrations or their periods of settling down, all these peoples underwent a continual process of acculturation. This was recalled by some when they compared the Olmec and Toltec of old, bearers of the refinements of civilization, to the Chichimec hunters and gatherers, and even when they mentioned the Toltec-Chichimec groups that resulted from their encounter. Ancient and autochthonous peoples coexisted with the new arrivals, who assimilated the local traditions at the same time as they lent their services. We must bear in mind that these historical acculturations, these progressive passages from a nomadic to a sedentary life, formed the background of indigenous memories. We must equally beware of considering these cultures and societies as homogeneous wholes: it is established in the case of Tenochtitlán (and is doubtless true of other cities as well) that deep differences separated the urban communities, devoted to business and arts and crafts, from rural settlements. If the variables introduced by the diversity of social groups, if not of social classes, are added to these many economic, ethnic and historical levels, one gets a kaleidoscopic picture that rules out categorizing the Indian worlds as stable entities, monolithic and immobile societies, totaritarian before the term had been invented, or miraculously anchored outside history. It is equally untenable to confuse them with the farming communities or exploited marginals that they have become in our time (Calnek, 1974).

Let us stay for a while with the indigenous nobility, for it was in their midst that appeared one of the most remarkable features of these societies. Of all the groups that dominated the peoples of central Mexico – Tarasc achaecha, Mixtec tay toho, Otomí or Zapotec lords – it is the pipiltin, the Nahua nobles, who are probably best known to us (Carrasco, Broda, et al., 1976; López Sarrelangue, 1965; Spores, 1967; Olivera, 1978; Monjarás-Ruiz, 1980). The pipiltin legitimized their powers and conceived the world in which they lived by relying on the learning that they held dear. This learning recorded ways of life, traditions to be preserved, inheritance to be transmitted, all that can be designated in a general way by the Nahuatl term tlapializtli (Léon-Portilla, 1980, pp. 15–35). To the cosmos, this learning was supposed to impart a rule, a moderation, a stability. To society it provided an order, a direction, a meaning. At least so claimed the four elders who invented ‘the account of fates, annals and the account of years, the book of dreams’. An ancient patrimony, meticulously preserved, implemented and transmitted from people to people, this learning was the origin of a singularly developed system of education. Temple-schools reserved for sons of the pipiltin prepared the future rulers. Within these calmecac, wise men – ‘those called the owners of the books of paintings’, ‘the knowers of hidden things’, ‘the keepers of tradition’ – dispensed to the young nobles an education as austere as it was sophisticated, which associated knowledge with modes of speaking and ways of being. Among other things, they learned ‘verses of songs so as to be able to sing what they called divine hymns that were written in characters on painted books’ (ibid., pp. 190–204). It was this education that from birth set the nobles apart from the plebeians, the macehuales, by making them intellectually and morally superior beings, these ‘sons of the people’, these ‘hairs’ and these ‘nails of the people’, who were all dedicated to the functions of ruling (López Austin, 1980, I, pp. 443–67).

But what is undoubtedly the main thing is that all the learning that expressed and synthesized the image that these cultures – or more precisely these ruling circles – cherished of the world, flowed into two modes of expression that seem predominant and at home in the Mesoamerican world: oral transmission and pictography. So it was for the ancient Nahua, the Mixtec and the Zapotec of the Oaxaca region and also, perhaps to a lesser degree, for the Otomí. The Tarasc of Michoacán, on the other hand, seem not to have known pictographic expression, since they have left us nothing comparable to the annals or the calendars.

The cultures of central Mexico were in the first place oral cultures. They took great pains to cultivate oral traditions and to codify, verify and transmit them. In their highly variegated expressions, the Nahua sources of the colonial period have preserved a sense of this creativity. I shall give just a brief survey the better to suggest the range that it covered. The Nahua distinguished at least two major bodies of work composed of numerous and contrasting genres: cuicatl and tlahtolli. Cuicatl designated warriors’ songs and songs of ‘friendship, love and death’, hymns to gods, and poems combining intellectual and metaphysical speculation. Tlahtolli, on the other hand, were concerned with relations, narration, discourse and oratory. Also classed as tlahtolli were ‘the divine words’ (teotlahtolli), which told of deeds of the gods, the origins, cosmogony, cults and rituals; ‘stories about ancient things’ with a historical flavour; fables, zazanilli, and the famous huehuehtlahtolli or ‘ancient words’, those elegant speeches about the most varied subjects: power, the domestic circle, education or the gods.

Taught in the schools of the nobility, the calmecac, some of these pieces were recited or sung at the great festivals where the pipiltin gathered. If the huehuehtlahtolli tended to be the prerogative of the nobles and the lords, the hymns and songs of a ritual character were disseminated among the whole of the population and especially in their schools. The priest who undertook to transmit them saw to it that they were reproduced faithfully – he was given the title of tlapizcatzin, ‘he who preserves’ – while another priest was engaged in examining the newly composed songs, demonstrating that a society without writing can be quite familiar with both the true copy and censorship. It is possible that the narrator of tlahtolli was able to speak more freely if he was a pleasing and skilled reciter; but we have every reason to believe that the ‘tales of ancient things’, or the ‘divine’ narrative were also supposed to be subject to checking and censorship. Strictly controlled by institutions, tied to circumstances and contexts, oral productions were also subservient to a complex and subtle interplay of internal constraints. The transmission, learning and memorizing of this patrimony put the most varied resources to work. So it is, for example, that the cuicatl have their own rhythm, metre, style and structure. They were composed of a sequence more or less studded with expressive units – the equivalent of our verses and strophes – which were linked in groups of two. Parallelism (constructions of symmetrical phrases) and diphrasism (the juxtaposition of two metaphors to call to mind a concept, such as water and fire to designate war) were used constantly. Inserted syllables probably marked the metre, while others, of the type tiqui, toco, toco, tiquiti, perhaps indicated the rhythm and the pitch of the musical accompaniment. In general, the cuicatl cannot be dissociated from its accompanying means of expression, even if we have lost almost every trace of it. That is true of the music and dancing that occupied a significant place in public celebrations. Doubtless less varied but just as established, analogous stylistic processes structured the tlahtolli, among them parallelism, diphrasism, the piling up of predicates about the same subject, conceived to organize a temporal sequence or to make something explicit by convergent and complementary terms. Compositional techniques such as these often give these texts a disconcerting, repetitive and cumulative pace. They also undoubtedly made learning and memorizing the texts simpler, in the absence of written versions, while providing guidelines for improvisation and creation.¹

The sophistication of the compositions entrusted to oral transmission, the range of genres, the considerable significance given to teaching, eloquence and the word, must not induce us to forget that these societies also had a graphic mode of expression. If they knew no form of alphabetical writing before the Spanish conquest, they none the less expressed themselves in various media – paper of amate and agave, deerskin – which could take the form of either elongated and narrow leaves that were rolled or folded in accordion pleats, or else large surfaces that were spread out on walls to be viewed. On these surfaces the Indians painted glyphs. Pictographic expression has a long and complicated, not to say obscure, history in Mesoamerica, which cannot be summarized here (Plate 1) (Robertson, 1959; Dibble, 1971; Glass, 1975a; Glass and Robertson, 1975; Galarza, 1972). It will suffice to sketch what we know of the practices in effect in central Mexico among the Nahua peoples. They had three types of signs of unequal importance, which we cover by the term ‘glyphs’. Pictograms proper are stylized representations of objects and actions: animals, plants, birds, buildings, mountains, scenes of dance or procession, sacrifice, battle, gods and priests, etc. Ideograms call to mind qualities, attributes or concepts associated with the object depicted: an eye signifies vision; footprints designate a trip, dance, or movement in space; the headband of a noble indicates the chief (tecuhtli); shields and arrows stand for war, etc. Let us say that in general the pictogram denotes, the ideogram connotes. Finally phonetic signs, few in number, are close to the glyphic expression of western alphabets. Exclusively for transcribing syllables, these signs relate to toponymy, anthroponymy and chronology. Examples are the Nahua locative suffixes (-tlan, -tzin, -pan) that in various forms come into the composition of toponymic glyphs. This embryonic phoneticism, which the Maya and the Mixtec also knew, is like a rebus to the extent that it uses easily deciphered and identified homonyms that give a sound close to or reminiscent of the one to be indicated.

Nahua pictography on the eve of the Spanish conquest was a mixed system, whose nascent phonetization was possibly tied to the military and economic expansion of the Triple Alliance dominated by the Mexica. Repeated contacts with other ethnic groups, enemies or subjects, may have made it increasingly necessary to paint place names and the names of exotic characters, and this practice would have posed the problem of the phonetic transcription of isolated words. It cannot be excluded either that the morphological characteristics of Nahuatl lent themselves to this evolution to the extent that it was an agglutinative language, which could easily be broken into syllables. It is none the less true that there was no large-scale coupling of the written form with the word, as in our alphabets.

The pictographic, ideographic and phonetic signs were scattered no more haphazardly on the leaves of amate or agave than words are strung along the lines that are so familiar to us. The glyphs were organized and articulated according to criteria that are still not well understood. The page make-up, the scale of the signs, their relative position, their orientation, their association and grouping, the graphic links between them, are all elements constituting the meaning of the ‘painting’ and, more simply, the meaning of the reading. The colour that fills the spaces defined by the thick, regular line drawn by the painter, the tlacuilo, adds the significance of chromatic modulations, even if the Spanish saw it as a decorative element, leading them to refer to the glyphic productions by the misleading term, usual in the sixteenth century, of ‘paintings’.

Moreover, pictographic expression compressed in the same space planes that the European eye usually distinguishes for purposes of analysis, but that were probably without relevance for the Indian ‘reader’. So it was that reports that we would characterize as economic, religious or political could be grafted on a framework composed of topographical elements. Routes for the collection of tribute, prehispanic sanctuaries, a group’s signs of hegemony, were merged, composing a work imprinted with a strong thematic and stylistic unity. Even though it permits us to grasp the contents by having recourse to modern grids, our exegetical reading of the ‘paintings’ often condemns us to miss the specificity of a grasp of reality and its representation. One might add that this formal specificity is quite unlike an artifice of presentation.

Whatever its apparent depths, the pictographic field of expression is astonishingly vast. It covers fields as varied as chronicles of war, catalogues of wonders and climatic accidents, the gods, cartography, business, finance, the transfer of goods. It appears, however, that divinatory works were the most numerous: ‘books of years and times’, ‘of days and feasts’, ‘of dreams and omens’, ‘of baptism and the names of children’, ‘of rites of ceremonies and of omens to observe in weddings’.² The predominance of divinatory works can be read in the pictographic representation of a tlacuilo, where the painter is represented in the guise of an Indian holding a brush ‘above the glyph of the day’. It is true that consulting divinatory books regularly punctuated the existence of individuals and the group. One might believe that the apparently rudimentary character of the technique of expression implies an undeveloped organization of information, like that which prevailed in the ancient near east before the conquest of alphabets. And it is true that lists or inventories order the data contained in the ‘paintings’, such as lists of conquered provinces, borders, merchandise delivered as tribute, lists of years or rulers. But it would unduly restrict the significance of these documents to reduce them to inventories, primarily because the combination of things signified in the design of an ideogram enabled the Indians to express highly complex concepts and to handle the most abstract notions and the most imaginary constructions. That is true for example of the joined pictograms of water and fire used to designate the Nahua notion of sacred war; the sign ollin, to render the movement of the cosmos; the compositions arranged to depict the different ‘avatars’ of the gods. But if the ‘paintings’ are more than lists, it is because they also have a visual dimension that has sometimes been underestimated. The ‘paintings’ are images as much as texts, and demand to be treated as images. That is to say, they should be seen as perceptual as much as conceptual, which poses a problem: while we perceive this dimension intuitively, it is difficult to verbalize and thus to transcribe. Let us say that this dimension corresponds to the combinations of forms and colours, t...