Gibson, Lockhart, and the Merits of Analysis

As a fan of good narrative histories, and considering that strong narrative skills are not overly valued within my own field, I often find myself unfairly assuming that, while both narrative and analytical abilities are crucial to the study of history, pieces of historical analysis are somehow less readable than narrative texts. Fortunately, both Charles Gibson and James Lockhart have once again reminded me of that presumptive fallacy.

The selections from Gibson’s The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule provide a welcome, and necessary complement to the chronicle of Bernal Diaz del Castilo, the narrative of William H. Prescott, and the epistolary writings of Cortes himself. The author begins, appropriately enough, with geography. The descriptions of the Valley of Mexico abound in the aforementioned sources, but the modern reader is rightfully skeptical as to their veracity. For that matter, aside from a comment or two in the introductions, the non-specialist reader may well be unsure as to what, precisely, comprises the Valley of Mexico. Gibson’s work, as he describes it, is about change, and the physical changes of the Valley of Mexico well serves as a metaphor to describe how European and Mesoamerican civilizations inaugurated the history of Latin America. In addition to the statistics of annual rainfall, agricultural fertility, and impressive population density (more than three hundred persons per square mile [p.5]), Gibson describes, albeit too briefly, the Spanish attempts and successes (using Indian labor) at civil engineering in Tenochtitlan/Mexico City, centuries-long effort at cutting a wall in the Valley, opening the basin to the sea.  The author expresses an appreciation for the different mediums through which archaeologists and historians go about their work to study pre- and post-conquest Mexico, which is fitting, since his work is about how two distinct cultures merged, if imperfectly.

Gibson’s impressive second chapter, on the various tribes of central Mexico, cannot be fully understood by a single reading. To this non-specialist, it is a remarkable piece of delineation and explanation that may deserve to stand along as a supplementary piece in a Latin American or world history survey course; certainly it dispells any notion of the indigenous inhabitants of preconquest Mexico as in any way monolithic. Similarly, Gibson’s discussion of the emcomiendas in Chapter Four ably describes the evolution of social and political perrogatives in New Spain, including the ambiguities and conflicts resulting from that evolution (although his assertion that the encomienda system was, in essence, benign vis a vis the Indians merits further commentary early on, though he later addresses in detail both the abuses of ecomienda society and the fine line between de jure and de facto slavery).

It is no doubt easier to describe periods of relative stasis (i. e., the fifty years preceeding the Conquest) than times of transtition (the half-century after the Conquest), but Gibson pulls it off. “This was the time,” he writes, “when Indian peoples, or some of them, met the Spanish influence part way and reached positive degrees of cultural accord” (404).  Furthermore, both societies were anything but unified as concerned possible responses to the other. Gibson’s analysis describes the confusion of those decades in an articulate and revealing way, and shed much additional light on the earlier narratives.

James Lockhart’s Of Things of the Indies is, similarly, a welcome complement to the narrative sources of the Conquest, but this collection of essays reads, naturally enough, quite diffrently. Certain chapters may be more accesssible to scholars of the period (Chapter 10, “Some Unfashionable Ideas on the History of the Nahuatl Language,” for example), but others are wonderfully informative in their own right. Chapter 5 places the various uses of American resources in their contexts, including “who the immigrants were and what were their goals and needs” (121). In fact, Lockhart’s volume reads as a more subtle version of Restall’s Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquesti. The immigrants, for example–a term Lockhart consideres at least as accurate as “conqueror”–are addressed based on Lockhart’s own earlier studies, and it is refreshing to read a scholar who questions whether religious fervor was a conscious, unbiquitous, motivating factor in the appropriation of native resources: “The religious beliefs of the majority…in no way inpeded or even affected their economic activity” (126). Similarly, the early desire for gold (before silver came to dominate) was not the result of a simple “medieval” affinity with the shiny metal, but a pragmatic need for cash money.

Throughout the volume, Lockhart makes it clear he views himself as a social historian, and his essay on the merchants of early Latin America describes the evolution, or rather importation, of the different stages of the merchant classes (as well as the companies for which they worked), thus suporting his argument that ecomonic history is a root of social history. (I am not sure I agree, but Lockhart supports his assertion more than adequately.)

To close, Lockhart prvides a thoroughlly enjoyable and thoroughly subjective memoir-essay describing his own path to the historical profession. I am not sure is fits in with the earlier essays in this anthology–in fact, I am sure it does not–but, to this hopeful novice, “A Historian and the Disciplines” provides both a breath of fresh air and, once again, serves to illustrate the fact that we all write from the perspective of the times in which we live and work.