To Be Indio in Colonial Spanish America

Mónica Díaz

• Publisher: UNM Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780826357731
• eBook ISBN: 9780826357748
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: Social Sciences

The conquest and colonization of the Americas imposed new social, legal, and cultural categories upon vast and varied populations of indigenous people. The colonizers’ intent was to homogenize these cultures and make all of them “Indian.” The creation of those new identities is the subject of the essays collected in Díaz’s To Be Indio in Colonial Spanish America. Focusing on central Mexico and the Andes (colonial New Spain and Peru), the contributors deepen scholarly knowledge of colonial history and literature, emphasizing the different ways people became and lived their lives as “indios.” While the construction of indigenous identities has been a theme of considerable interest among Latin Americanists since the early 1990s, this book presents new archival research and interpretive thinking, offering new material and a new approach to the subject to both scholars of colonial Peru and central Mexico.

PART ONE

Discerning Indigenous Voices

FRAMEWORKS AND METHODS

CHAPTER ONE

Artifact, Artifice, and Identity

NATIVIST WRITING AND SCHOLARSHIP ON COLONIAL LATIN AMERICA AND THEIR LEGACIES

Rolena Adorno

In attempting to present an overview of the topic “Indian identities in colonial Latin America,” I anticipated the wide variety of case studies that appear in this volume. How can I “speak” to all of them? I have decided that the most comprehensive way is to identify elements and practices that transcend the boundaries of our academic disciplines, our objects of study, and our methods of analyzing them. We all begin with artifacts that are fabricated by artifice and that can be interpreted as representing various types of identities. But the categories of artifact, artifice, and identity are neither static nor monolithic. If they are to accommodate our various fields of study, the terms themselves must be considered evocative and malleable rather than fixed or definitive. Eschewing both metaphorical associations and abstract speculations, I pursue the topic of “Indian identities” and the three categories of artifact, artifice, and identity by which I approach it, through specific examples. I trust in the revealing but not always obvious detail to illustrate the principle.

Identities, be they indigenous American or European or any permutation in between, speak as much to “what is desired” as to “what is”; they may be limited and censured from within one’s group as much as from outside it; they may be wrapped up in individuals’ unmediated daily activities even as they are “posed” on formal occasions that project them outward. The representation of identity or identities is never sui generis and unique; it always and already interacts with other representations to which it poses opposition or complementarity. In this respect, identity is as much aspirational as actual. And it is never confined to inward-looking navel gazing isolated from and uncontaminated by what it ostensibly rejects. Hence, in our consideration of “Indian identities” interacting with Spanish colonialism in the Americas, the “Spanish” is never wholly absent but is always, even though implicitly, engaged.

The examples that I present to illustrate these principles come from the viceroyalties of New Spain (Mexico) and Peru. I will focus on the study of indigenous American history and society and follow its track inward, that is, from early European or culturally creole attempts to retrieve and describe indigenous American culture to the indigenist core, where historians of native Amerindian heritage enter the scene to appropriate (or reappropriate) their own history. Then, following the track outward, I conclude by reflecting on the internationalization of the indigenous Amerindian heritage, made available to us as scholars today by efforts, from within and beyond the Americas, that took place in the Spanish colonial period and afterward.

THE CATEGORIES OF ARTIFACT, ARTIFICE, AND IDENTITY

I have devised for this inquiry a triadic scheme, consisting of artifact, artifice, and identity, to characterize the pursuits of our respective and related fields of colonial Latin American studies. A triad plus one: as Mónica Díaz renders it in our volume’s title, indio must also be considered a central concept. I choose neither Indio nor “native” but “nativist,” because the relationships that I will consider cannot exclude subjects, individual or collective, that are Spanish, or criollo, or none of the above.

Artifact: The term comes from the Latin phrase Arte factum, from ars, “skill” + facere, “to make.” Aristotle divided existing things into those that “exist by nature” and those that exist from other causes. He distinguished between natural objects and artificial objects, that is, the products of the art of making things. We can add that “an artifact necessarily has a maker or an author; hence, artifact and author can be regarded as correlative concepts” (Hilpinen 1993, 156–57). We start—we always begin—with the artifact, the thing: the codex, the carved or incised stone or monument, the hieroglyph, the map, the painting, the manuscript, that is, the self-proclaiming work on paper or the scribal archival document. The “thingness” of the objects we study allows us as scholars to appreciate the work of one another’s disciplines, even as we pursue our objects according to our own disciplinary protocols and procedures. In the typology I have proposed for this discussion, the distance from the concrete artifact to notions of identity is a journey we take thanks to the offices of artifice.

Artifice: Middle French from Latin artificium, from artificer, from Latin ars + facere. Artifice is the act of crafting; it is, first, the collection of insights that conceptualize the object and then the assorted labors that create that object, giving it its material status and unique character. At the same time the actions that constitute artifice or, better, the “artifice-phase,” make possible the acts of interpretation, some of whose results yield ideas about “identity.” The Janus-face of artifice allows us to move back and forth between our studies of the production of the object and our apprehension of its reception and, in its reception, the meanings—identities—that it might have had in its own day and the meanings, “identities,” that we attribute to it in ours.

Identity: I refer to identity in the senses that we conjure it in our academic domains of Latin American studies, and I will call it “identity making.” If Díaz’s modifier “indio” (as discussed in the context of the present volume), wobbles when juxtaposed to the entity “identity,” a similar instability affects the noun itself. “Identity,” too, might—in fact, will—waver and wobble right off the page, with or without being under the weight of its fraught, freighted modifier. I appeal here to the metaphor that Eugenio D’Ors used in defining the Baroque. He identified and separated “the forms that are weighted down” (“las formas que pesan”) from “the forms that fly” (“las formas que vuelan”) (D’Ors 2002, 89). Borrowing and redirecting his distinction for the present purpose, we can say that “identities” belongs to both categories: “las formas que pesan y las que vuelan,” that is, identities fall and identities fly, falling under the pressure of new historical or cultural circumstances as their heirs and sequels fly right into the future.

Until some decades ago, it was thought that indigenous interventions in colonial-era writings belonged to those subjects we called “informants.” But don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl (1578?–1650), the mestizo historian of Texcoco and heir to the Acolhuas who had formed part of the pre-Columbian Triple Alliance of the Central Valley of Mexico, long ago offered a telling example that gives the lie to any notion of passive, transparent, disinterested testimony suggested by the modern term “informant.”¹ Around the year 1608 don Fernando wrote that he had asked an old cacique about the origins of the Acolhua prince Ixtlilxóchitl, from whom don Fernando was himself a direct descendent. The old gentleman replied, “Well, a big eagle flew down from the sky and laid an egg in a nest. The prince was hatched from that egg!” “Don’t be ridiculous,” don Fernando writes that he replied, “That’s nonsense!” The old gentleman countered, “Of course it is, but that’s what I’ll tell you and any other fool who asks, particularly Spaniards” (Alva Ixtlilxóchitl 1985, 288). In his aspirations as a historian of ancient Mexico, don Fernando told this anecdote to illustrate the point that many such native authorities did not want to tell him what they knew of their history because, they insisted, every day they were asked about it and nothing good ever came of it.

To illustrate the concepts of artifact, artifice, and identity, I turn to the written record of manuscripts and printed books from colonial Mexico and Peru. I take four examples constituted as two pairs: the first consists of the already-mentioned Alva Ixtlilxóchitl and Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, the creole polymath of late seventeenth-century New Spain whose contributions to the theoretical and applied sciences (Trabulse 1992, 235–37) complemented his work as a historian and were grounded in his endeavors as a professor of mathematics and astrology/astronomy at the pontifical university in the viceregal capital. Sigüenza y Góngora can be credited with the preservation of many historical works pertaining to pre-Columbian Mexico, and the papers of Alva Ixtlilxóchitl were among Sigüenza’s most precious possessions. The second pair features Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, the Andean author of the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, and Fray Martín de Murúa, the Basque Mercedarian friar who spent his missionary career in early colonial Peru and recruited Guamán Poma to illustrate his history of the Incas. Both Murúa and Guamán Poma wrote histories of the Incas, but Guamán Poma made his account of ancient Andean history an imaginative and polemical preamble to his lengthy exposé of the evils of colonial society.

I will consider the workings of artifact and artifice with the pair Murúa/Guamán Poma, and identity with that of Alva Ixtlilxóchitl/Sigüenza y Góngora.

Here are the major identity-making variants I have devised for this discussion:

First, identity-making reader-writers in the Spanish colonial era who sought to publicly represent an identity and its authority through the medium of words, pictures, or other sign-making actions. (All my examples—Guamán Poma, Murúa, Alva Ixtlilxóchitl, and Sigüenza y Góngora—fit into this generic category.)

Second, identity-making reader-writers who in the Spanish colonial era sought to recover the record of the ancient historical past of the peoples from whom they were ethnically descended (Guamán Poma, Alva Ixtlilxóchitl).

Third, the identity-making actions of reader-writers who in the Spanish colonial period sought to recover the record of the ancient historical past of the peoples of the land they inhabited but to whose native past they could lay no claim (Murúa, Sigüenza y Góngora).

Fourth, identity-making reader-writers of our own times who lay genealogical or ancestral (but not territorial) claim to a native American (Amerindian) heritage.

Fifth, identity-making reader-writers of our own times who lay territorial claim to an American domain (but not to its genealogical or ancestral native legacy).

Sixth, reader-writers of our own times who lay neither genealogical-ancestral claim to native heritage nor territorial claim to its American domain, but rather study it for scholarly purposes and/or intellectual and professional gain. (Nota bene: This last binary has particularly blurry or porous boundaries. It requires us to be self-conscious and self-critical about our own identity-making pursuits at the same time as we attempt to be so regarding our objects of study.)

In sum, I posit “identity” as consisting of many varieties of appropriating actions carried out by individuals or communities, all of whom exercise agency in subscribing to, rejecting, creating, and modifying identities either individual or collective. My point is that identities are mobile, multiple, and sequential or simultaneous, even within a single subject (Adorno 1988, 11–12).

A present-day example illustrates this point. The great Andeanist ethnohistorian and one of my most influential teachers, John V. Murra (1916–2006), told me that, in the highlands of Peru where he typically did his fieldwork, he once encountered one of his Quechua-speaking Andean collaborators sitting outside the municipal ayuntamiento of the village near the site where they were working. Startled to see his friend in full traditional ceremonial dress, Murra asked him what he was doing, dressed like that. His Andean collaborator replied, “Pues, estoy ‘haciéndome el indio,’ porque así me entienden mejor el alcalde y los suyos. Lo he hecho porque vengo a pedirles algo para los míos.” Loosely paraphrased, he was saying, “Well, I’m presenting myself as an Indian, emphasizing my ethnic heritage, because this is the way the mayor and his assistants expect me to be and understand me; I’ve done it because I’ve come to request something for my people.” Here, the subject positions are multiple, and they have been enacted in sequence.

Subject positions that are multiple but simultaneous can be illustrated by an example from the Spanish colonial period as interpreted by one of its twentieth-century reader-editors. The Dominican priest and activist Fray Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566) is here the object of two reading-writing identity makers. The first is an early-seventeenth-century Dominican historian, Fray Alonso Fernández, who wrote about Las Casas: “Cuando vino [el emperador] de Alemania, [Las Casas] le propuso su causa con mucha erudición y prudencia, hablando como santo, informando como jurista, decidiendo como teólogo y testificando como testigo de vista.” (“When the emperor came from Germany, Las Casas presented his cause with much erudition and prudence, speaking like a saint, informing like a jurist, offering judgments like a theologian, and testifying as an eyewitness”) (Fernández 1611, 30). Here we see multiple, simultaneous subject positions.

The second reading-writing identity maker is a late-twentieth-century copyeditor. He came into play when I cited Fernández’s statement in a scholarly article and the copyeditor “corrected” the term “jurista” (jurist) in Fernández’s citation to “turista” (tourist). This bizarre editorial error characterizes Las Casas not as having informed the emperor “like a jurist” but rather as having presented himself to the monarch “like a tourist” (Adorno 1988, 14). In despair when I saw this error in print, I now see it not only with humor but also as a salient case of identity making. (In this regard, the ever-quotable Jorge Luis Borges is reputed once to have remarked: “Las erratas enriquecen el texto”; that is, “Errors enrich the text.”)

Let us suppose that our nameless copyeditor knew ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Indio Identities in Colonial Spanish America
• Part One: Discerning Indigenous Voices: Frameworks and Methods
• Part Two: Community and the Articulation of Identities
• Part Three: Translation and Alterity in Colonial Texts
• Part Four: Indigenous Intellectuals
• Afterword
• Index