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Culture, Power, and Society in Colonial Mexico
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A PLAGUE OF SHEEP: ENVIRONMENTAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE CONQUEST OF MEXICO. By MelvilleElinor G. K. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. 203. $54.95 cloth.)
MEMORY, MYTH, AND TIME IN MEXICO: FROM THE AZTECS TO INDEPENDENCE. By FlorescanoEnrique. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. Pp. 282. $32.50 cloth, $14.95 paper.)
OUR LADY OF GUADALUPE: THE ORIGINS AND SOURCES OF A MEXICAN NATIONAL SYMBOL, 1531–1797. By Stafford PooleC. M. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995. Pp. 325. $40.00 cloth.)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2022
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Footnotes
∗
I wish to acknowledge the comments and insights of Cheryl English Martin, who kindly read a first draft of this essay.
References
Notes
1. See Eric Van Young, “Recent Anglophone Scholarship on Mexico and Central America in the Age of Revolution,” Hispanic American Historical Review 65, no. 4 (1985):725–44. Here he argued that more research could profitably be done by historians on the popular classes, Indian and non-Indian, and that much could be gained by developing approaches to mentalités, working from the material and the behavioral to the symbolic, the ideological, and the affective. See also Van Young's more recent reflections on mentalities and cultural history, “Mentalities and Collectivities: A Comment,” in Patterns of Contention in Mexican History, edited by Jaime Rodríguez O. (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1992), 337–53; and Van Young, “Conclusion: The State as Vampire—Hegemonic Projects, Public Ritual, and Popular Culture in Mexico, 1600–1900,” in Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Public Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexico, edited by William H. Beezley, Cheryl English Martin, and William B. French (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1994), 343–74. See also the penetrating essay by William B. Taylor, “Between Global Process and Local Knowledge: An Inquiry into Early Latin American Social History, 1500–1900,” in Reliving the Past: The Worlds of Social History, edited by Olivier Zunz (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985). Here Taylor argued for a more “connected history” of early Latin America that would pay closer attention to the study of social change over long periods of time. This kind of history would demand closer examination of the “special importance of the state in the social history of early Latin America in terms of relationships and structures that mediated between local groups and global processes, relationships and structures that often were hidden behind what would appear on a chart of offices and duties” (p. 165). Also useful in thinking about local and global formations is Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “From the Margins,” Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 3 (1994):279–97.
2. For two succinct overviews of recent literature, see Janine Gasco, “Recent Trends in Ethnohistoric Research on Postclassic and Colonial Central Mexico,” LARR 29, no. 1 (1994): 132–42; and John Kicza, “Recent Books on Ethnohistory and Ethnic Relations in Colonial Mexico,” LARR 30, no. 3 (1995):239–53.
3. A representative sampling includes Patricia Seed, To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico: Conflicts over Marriage Choice, 1574–1821 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988); Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America, edited by Asunción Lavrin (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), especially the essays on colonial Mexico by Lavrin, Ruth Behar, Richard Boyer, Thomas Calvo, and Serge Gruzinski; Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991); Familias novohispanas, siglos XVI-XIX, edited by Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 1991); and more recently Richard Boyer, Lives of the Bigamists: Marriage, Family, and Community in Colonial Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995). For examples of works that have examined ways in which subordinate groups engage, deflect, or otherwise modify colonial policies and practices, see Juan Pedro Viqueira Albán, ¿Relajados o reprimidos? Diversiones públicas y vida social en la Ciudad de México durante el Siglo de las Luces (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1987); Doris Ladd, The Making of a Strike: Mexican Silver Workers' Struggles in Real del Monte, 1766–1775 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988); Solange Alberro, Inquisición y sociedad en México, 1571–1700 (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1988); Susan Deans-Smith, Bureaucrats, Planters, and Workers: The Making of the Tobacco Monopoly in Bourbon Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992); and Cheryl English Martin, Governance and Society in Colonial Mexico: Chihuahua in the Eighteenth Century (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996).
4. Scholarly reactions in general (not just among Latin American colonial historians) range along a spectrum from hostility to critical engagement to indifference. On the “linguistic turn,” see Eric Van Young's comments in “The Cuautla Lazarus: Double Subjectives in Reading Texts on Popular Collective Action,” Colonial Latin American Review 2, nos. 1–2 (1993): 3–26. Also see Patricia Seed's discussion of the revival of politics and the concerns with language, rhetoric, and representation of “the Other” raised in studies of colonial discourse in “Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse,” LARR 26, no. 3 (1991):181-200; Florencia Mallon, “The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies: Perspectives from Latin American History,” American Historical Review (1994):1491-1515; and the essays in The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America, edited by John Beverley and José Oviedo (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993).
5. Examples include Serge Gruzinski's discussion of the transformation of indigenous memory in The Conquest of Mexico: The Incorporation of Indian Societies into the Western World, 16th-18th Centuries (Oxford: Polity, 1993); David Frye, Indians into Mexicans: History and Identity in a Mexican Town (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996); the essays in Beezley et al., Rituals of Rule; and Francisco Javier Cevallos-Candau, Jeffrey A. Cole, Nina M. Scott, and Nicómedes Suárez-Aráuz, Coded Encounters: Writing, Gender, and Ethnicity in Colonial Latin America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994).
6. See for example the stimulating discussions of hegemony in Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico, edited by Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), especially William Roseberry, “Hegemony and the Language of Contention,” 355–66, 361. The processual and transformative characteristics of hegemony have been stressed also by Raymond Williams in “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” in Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies, edited by Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 407–23, 413. On colonial Mexico, see the essays in Beezley et al., Rituals of Rule.
7. See Taylor's discussion of approaches to the colonial state in “Between Global Process,” pp. 140–66. Here he suggests that historians look at “bundles of relationships” and examine the interactions between state and local society through analyses of mediators and brokers, cultural hegemony (mentalities of subordination), the law, and elites. Views continue to differ as to the importance of the colonial state. Van Young, for example, has argued that we should take the state back out and that what mattered to most people was community, not state. See “The Raw and the Cooked: Elite and Popular Ideology in Mexico, 1800–1821,” in The Middle Period in Latin America: Values and Attitudes in the 17th-19th Centuries, edited by Mark D. Szuchman, 75–102, 94 (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1989). More recently Richard Boyer has suggested in his fine study of bigamy that social clusters (relatives, neighbors, work associates, and clienteles) “more than the formal institutions of church and state, did most to shape daily life in colonial Mexico.” See Lives of the Bigamists, 3.
8. Leslie Byrd Simpson, Exploitation of Land in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1952).
9. Ida B. Altman and Reginald D. Butler, “The Contact of Cultures: Perspectives on the Quincentenary,” American Historical Review 99, no. 2 (Apr. 1994), 478–503, 498. Recent works that deal with Spanish “taming” of the environment, especially in supplying water to the newly constructed Spanish cities, include Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, “Water and Bureaucracy in Colonial Puebla de los Angeles,” Journal of Latin American Studies 25, pt. 1 (1993):25–44.
10. The study has been criticized on the grounds that Melville did not use archaeological methods to establish whether there was much pressure on the land before the conquest or a tendency toward land degradation; whether the use of wood for fuel was as low as Melville believes; and whether the long-standing association between maize and maguey was not already a sign of a certain aridity. See the review by Juan Martínez Alier, Journal of Latin American Studies 27, pt. 1 (1995):221–22.
11. See Beezley et al., Rituals of Rule. Also see the interesting collection of essays entitled “Spectacle in Colonial Mexico” in The Americas 52, no. 3 (1996), special issue.
12. See D. A. Brading's magisterial treatment of these themes in The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
13. Gruzinski's discussion of related issues regarding the transformation of indigenous memory in The Conquest of Mexico provides an illuminating comparison. Also see his highly suggestive “Images and Cultural Mestizaje in Colonial Mexico,” Poetics Today 16, no. 1 (1995):53–75.
14. For a broader treatment of colonization of languages, memories, and space in central Mexico (and to a lesser extent in colonial Yucatán and Peru), see Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), especially pt. 2, “The Colonization of Memory.” A useful complement to this study for the post-independence period is Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, México profundo: Reclaiming a Civilization (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996). For thinking about the past-present relationship intrinsic to the concept of memory, see Frye, Indians into Mexicans. For useful methodological considerations, see Richard Johnson and Graham Dawson, “Popular Memory: Theory, Politics, Method” in Making Histories: Studies in History Writing and Politics, edited by Richard Johnson, Gregor McLennan, Bill Schwarz, and Daniel Sutton (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 205–52, esp. 211–15; and Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory (London: Verso, 1994).
15. William Taylor also reminds historians that the Virgin of Guadalupe was not Miguel Hidalgo's first choice either because he planned his uprising to coincide with the fair of the Virgin of San Juan de los Lagos, not with the feast of Guadalupe. According to Taylor, “Guadalupe's importance as a national symbol for Indians and common people may have been more a result of the war … than a motivating force in it.” See Taylor, “Between Global Process,” 161. See also his discussion in “The Virgin of Guadalupe in New Spain: An Inquiry into the Social History of Marian Devotion,” American Ethnologist 14, no. 1 (1987):9–33.
16. As Taylor has suggested in his discussion of the Virgin of Guadalupe and the cult of the Virgin Mary of the Immaculate Conception, “the published works of priests sometimes treat Mary directly, but they cannot be assumed to represent popular beliefs and rarely contain evidence that bears on the political significance of religious beliefs that are much more likely to be found in criminal trial records, civil suits.” See Taylor, “Between Global Process,” 156. An excellent visual study of Guadalupe that complements Poole's work is the unfortunately out-of-print Imágenes guadalupanas: Cuatro siglos (Mexico City: Fundación Cultural Televisa, 1987).
17. See Taylor, “The Virgin of Guadalupe”; and Linda A. Curcio-Nagy, “Native Icon to City Protectress to Royal Patroness: Ritual Political Symbolism and the Virgin of Remedies,” The Americas 52, no. 3 (1996):367–91.
18. See for example Writing without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes, edited by Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter D. Mignolo (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994).
19. For further elaboration on the survival and function of Mexican paintings, see Gruzinski's perceptive discussion in The Conquest of Mexico; see also his Painting the Conquest: The Mexican Indians and the European Renaissance (Paris: Flammarion, 1992). James Lockhart also illustrated Robertson's influence in his superb study of the colonial Nahua. See Lockhart's discussion of artistic phenomena in The Nahuas after Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), 426.
20. Jeanette Favrot-Peterson, The Paradise Garden Murals of Malinalco: Utopia and Empire in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993). Also suggestive for approaches to visual culture and consideration of the problems and possibilities of interpretation of visual representation is Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450–1650, edited by Claire Farago (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995).
21. Favrot-Peterson, Paradise Garden Murals, 178.
22. As Charles Gibson's discussion of indigenous artisans pointed out, “Indian craftsmanship from the start received the full approval of the Spanish state.” See The Aztecs under Spanish Rule (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1964), 399.
23. See Tsing's stimulating discussion of “margins” as the sites from which “we see the instability of social categories,” in “From the Margins,” 279.
24. On the casta population of colonial Mexico and its African dimension, see the doctoral dissertation of Herman L. Bennett, “Lovers, Family, and Friends: The Formation of Afro-Mexico, 1580–1810,” Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1993.
25. Michael Scardaville, “(Hapsburg) Law and (Bourbon) Order: State Authority, Popular Unrest, and the Criminal Justice System in Bourbon Mexico City,” The Americas 50, no. 4 (1994):501-25, 520.
26. Elizabeth Kuznesof, “The Construction of Gender in Colonial Latin America,” Colonial Latin American Review 1, nos. 1–2 (1992):253-70, 268. See also Irene Silverblatt's recent discussion, “Lessons of Gender and Ethnohistory,” Ethnohistory 42, no. 4, (1995):639–49.
27. On the same topic, see Frye's discussion of the indigenous petitioners' use of the metaphor of fathers and sons in local politics in Indians into Mexicans, 77–87.
28. Cheryl English Martin draws similar conclusions regarding governance in general in eighteenth-century Chihuahua by officials who lacked formal legal training and favored equitable treatment and prudent conciliation. See Martin, Governance and Society in Colonial Mexico, 82.
29. For further discussion of colonial society in New Mexico, see Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came.
30. Cutter cites, for example, Scardaville's “(Hapsburg) Law and (Bourbon) Order,” and Woodrow Borah, Justice by Insurance: The General Indian Court of Colonial Mexico and the Legal Aides of the Half-Real (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983). But Cutter does not take advantage of the comparative issues that these works raise for the roles of law in colonial society.
31. See Gutiérrez's brief but contrasting discussion of alcaldes in New Mexico in When Jesus Came, 302–3.
32. Taylor, “Between Global Process,” 162–63. In addition to the works by Borah and Scardaville just cited, see Five Centuries of Law and Politics in Central Mexico, edited by Ronald Spores and Ross Hassig (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University, 1984); and the recent carefully crafted study by Susan Kellogg, Law and the Transformation of Aztec Culture, 1500–1700 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995).
33. The other two studies in the trilogy are Brading's highly influential Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971) and Haciendas and Ranchos in the Mexican Bajío (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
34. William Taylor's forthcoming study will no doubt provide illuminating insights into the multifaceted relationships between parish priests and their rural parishioners in colonial Mexico. See Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, forthcoming). See also Luisa Zahino Peñafort, Iglesia y sociedad en México, 1765–1800: Tradición, reforma y reacciones (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1996); and María del Pilar Martínez López-Cano, Iglesia, estado y economía, siglos XVI al XIX (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1995).
35. See Brian Larkin's suggestive discussion in “The Common Life Controversy in Puebla de Los Angeles, 1765–1781: Gender, Hegemony, and Religious Representation,” M.A. thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1994. Here he examines convents as “nodal points of political, social, and cultural currents.” Larkin argues persuasively that a number of influences shaped nuns' decisions to accept or reject the common life in Puebla, including their religious piety, sensibilities, and understanding of the monastic life and “how patronage relationships between the Mexican and Pueblan elites and the convents on the one hand and the urban poor on the other enabled some nuns to withstand encroachments of episcopal authority over their lives.” See Larkin, “The Common Life Controversy,” 3, 13.
36. The introduction of the Carmelites in Oaxaca was financed by the Marquesa de Selva Nevada, María Antonia Gómez Rodríguez Pedroso; that of the convent and college of the Company of Mary in Mexico City, known as La Enseñanza, was financed by María Ignacia Azlor, sister of the Marquesa de San Miguel de Aguayo. See also Asunción Lavrin's discussion in “In Search of the Colonial Woman in Mexico: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Latin American Women: Historical Perspectives, edited by Lavrin (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1978).
37. See C. A. Bayly, “Rallying around the Subaltern,” Journal of Peasant Studies 16, no. 1 (1988):110-20, 115.
38. Taylor, “Between Global Process,” 165–66.
39. Revisionist approaches to religion emphasize religious innovation rather than decline and focus on proactive transformation rather than what has been termed the “crisis-solace model.” For a stimulating discussion, see the essays by Daniel Levine, “Constructing Culture and Power” and “Popular Groups, Popular Culture, and Popular Religion,” in Constructing Culture and Power in Latin America, edited by Levine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993). For examples related to colonial Mexico, see Van Young's interesting discussion in “The Cuautla Lazarus.” Here he comments that the testimony he examined begins to indicate “how very basic religious thinking and imagery were to ordinary people's view of the world, of politics, and of political protest and violence,” 9. Boyer's Lives of the Bigamists sheds light on the interplay between folk beliefs and popular understandings of church doctrine. See also the essays by Linda Curcio-Nagy and Clara García-Ayluardo in Beezley et al., Rituals of Rule.
40. See Scardaville's discussion in “(Hapsburg) Law and (Bourbon) Order”; and Eric Van Young, “Islands in the Storm: Quiet Cities and Violent Countrysides in the Mexican Independence Era,” Past and Present, no. 118 (1988):130–55.
41. Florencia Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 323.
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