Constructing the Past

Rereading the Conquest is a thoughtful and careful interrogation of the principal textual evidence for early colonial Michoacán. Krippner-Martinez offers a postmodern critique of the surviving texts, seeing them not as impartial evidence, but as texts carefully constructed for the purposes of their authors. The Proceso contra Tzintzincha Tangaxoan, for example, is not merely a record of the trial and execution of the Michoacán Cazonci, but is also an artifact from the trial itself. Examining the construction of texts such as the Proceso provides valuable insight into the societies that created them. Furthermore, Krippner-Martinez argues that the construction of texts is the result of relationships of power, that it is not only modern scholars who use these texts as a means of ordering and understanding a society, but also the authors, who themselves engaged in such ordering. The text is not the past, but a representation of it. In Rereading the Conquest, the memory of the past is as much an object of study as the past itself. The memory of the past is an important tool in the creation of identities and the construction of societies, and Krippner-Martinez demonstrates that the memory of the conquest of Michoacán played an important part in the ordering of later Michoacán societies, and indeed, still does in the present. In his interrogation of these texts, Krippner-Martinez brings to the fore the role of violence in the establishment of Spanish authority in Michoacán. Violence manifested in various ways, and in turn the participants interpreted violence through an array of social, cultural, and political lenses. Rereading the Conquest does an excellent job of illuminating the complex attitudes about violence in the sixteenth-century Spanish empire, demonstrating that violence was not merely an accepted part of the imperial process, but a topic of discussion among both the conquerors and the conquered.