In Conclusion

This week, we read six articles.
• Elizabeth Archuleta, “Memorializing Po’Pay and Oñate, or Recasting Racialized Regimes of Representation,” New Mexico Historical Review (Summer 2007):317-337.
• Kathy Freise, “Contesting Oñate: Sculpting the Shape of Memory,” in Expressing New Mexico: Nuevomexicano Creativity, Ritual, and Memory (233-252).
• Phillip Gonzales, “History Hits the Heart”: Albuquerque’s Great Cuartocentenario Controversy, 1997-2005,” in Expressing New Mexico: Nuevomexicano Creativity, Ritual, and Memory (207-232).
• Alfredo Jiménez, “Don Juan de Oñate and the Founding of New Mexico: Possible Gains and Losses from Centennial Celebrations,” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 7.2 (Spring 1998): 109-128.
• Menchú, Rigoberta. “The Quincentenary, a Question of Class, Not Race: An Interview with Rigoberta Menchú, Latin American Perspectives, 1992.
• Stern, Steve. “Paradigms of Conquest: History, Historiography, and Politics. Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 24 (1992), 1-34.
• Vargas Llosa, Mario. “Questions of Conquest: What Columbus Wrought, and What He Did Not,” Harpers Magazine, December 1990.

First, Elizabeth Archuleta covered the conflicts over statues of Juan de Onate and Po-Pay. Archuleta reminds us, “Cultural production is never power-neutral” (321). The rhetoric of the polarized sides of the conflict reflect aspects of contemporary racialization and its links with the past.

The Gonzales article discssed the quadricentennial of the conquest of New Mexico. Conflicts over a proposed scultpture of Juan de Oñate ignited a political battle; the author says that the symbolic violence of conflict over Oñate reflects the actual violence of the past (219). Pueblos opposed memorializing the violent conquistador Oñate (who cut off the feet of Indians who resisted him—an action for which the Spanish colonial government in Mexico hauled Oñate into court and convicted him). Hispanics saw him as a heroic figure, bringing civilization to the continent. Both sides were arguing for their version of a collective identity that was really just identity politics.

Frieze discusses the actual sculpture that was created after the political battle Gonzales describes. It was a divided memorial. One part, “La Jornada,” was full of figural sculptures, represented Oñate and the settlers—the Spanish side of the conquest. The other part of the memorial is dubbed “The Environment,” and is a spiral path that visitors actually walk through, leading to a spring, or representation of the womb of the earth, at the center. Frieze points out that these two monuments are physically separated—connected only by a plaque that many visitors may not even actually read—much like the collective memory of the events. She says that monuments like these give shape to the past in the way that they portray it.

Jiminez joins the debate about remembering the violence of the conquest, making the point that historians’ role is to embed the violent events of conquest—whether Oñate’s deviant acts of violence or Popé’s uprising—in their own cultural and historical contexts. Jiminez calls for resisting the “good guy” and “bad guy” stereotypes from Western movies, and trying to achieve historical objectivity.

Rigoberta Menchú, indigenous activist and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, adds another voice to the conversation. Menchú calls for ending the oppression of indigenous Americans, including the undervaluing of their precolumbian history and the celebration of the “discovery” of the Americas. She emphasizes that the issue is a class struggle more than a racial one.

The historian of world history Steve J. Stern analyzes 1492 as a loaded symbol and deals with the intersection of history, historiography, and politics academically. Stern says of the commemoration of 1492, “For indigenous Americans, and many Latin Americans and indigenous sympathizers, the event invites a denunciation of five centuries of exploitation and ethnocide, a commemoration of five centuries of resistance and survival against formidable odds. But ethnic critique can cut in several directions at once.” Stern points out that the Black Legend and stereotypes of the Spanish abound. Stern notes that remembering 1492 can take the form of progressive multiculturalism or conservative backlash (e.g. the Hispanophilia that Archuleta and Gonzalez were discussing). Stern does not think that we can achieve a nonpolitical reading of 1492, and of Conquest. Rather, he argues that it should be understood according to its own times. There was no single meaning of conquest even as it was enacted—even among the conquerors, who were divided by internal hierarchies, factions, and power struggles. An example of this would be the Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas’ critique of the empire—which was motivated by political struggles within the Catholic church.

Stern also points out that the Black Legend of Spanish avarice and cruelty do a disservice to the complicated nature of the Spanish Conquest and the indigenous response to it. Stern writes, “Amerindian peoples simply refused to concede a Spanish monopoly on access to high authority, social reward, and policy debate” (18). They reinvented Spanish cultural and political forms, interpreted the conquest on their own terms, and competed with the Spanish economically—and in every other way. When we remember the conquest today, Stern argues we must remember that there was no clear meaning of conquest as it happened. Rather, it meant different things to different players—conquistadors, settlers, indigenous entrepreneurs, and others.

Mario Vargas Llosa’s article thoroughly reproduces the Black Legend—and unwittingly demonstrates all that is wrong with it. Oh, where to begin! His claim that the Inca were conquered by 180 Spaniards because they were poor decision makers is patently absurd. Vargas Llosa reproduces the myth of native desolation, and the myth that a few “Great” Spaniards defeating indigenous hordes. This is a cautionary tale about history as myth, and what happens when memory is reduced to a stereotype and a tragic literary narrative.

The subject of the Spanish conquest—especially how we deal with remembering and teaching and thinking about the violent aspects of it—is complicated. Yes, there were certainly acts of violence. But the Black Legend reduces a very complicated, negotiated reality into a caricature that does great violence to historical truth. Issues of collective memory, and memorializing history, often depend on modern notions of identity.

Think of the New Mexicans fighting over statues of Oñate and Popé. Imagined histories of valorous conquest in the name of civilization, or of the wholesale destruction of a helpless native world, can take over. The collective memory of medieval violence acted against one group or the other can rise up to epic proportions in our own time.

But the Black Legend was not the reality of the Spanish conquest. The sixteenth century was a complicated world, where there was violence on both sides. Indigenous allies of the Spanish played a huge role in that violence. People on both sides made pragmatic choices in the face of great change. There was a great deal of cultural convergence that shaped the conquest, and led to communication and miscommunication and “double mistaken identity” (where each side assumes a given event is functioning according to its own cultural interpretation).

At the end of the day, this course has taught me a great deal about both the Spanish conquest and the practice of history. The Black Legend is out. Complicated, messy, historical reality is in—and it’s infinitely more interesting.