Rereading the Conquest

Rereading the Conquest: Power, Politics, and the History of Early Colonial Michoacán, Mexico 1521-1565, by James Krippner-Martinez, is a poststructural, postmodern investigation into the textuality of history. Much of the book is what James Lockhart would call “stunning textual pyrotechnics,” but that probably would not bother Krippner-Martinez, because he pays little heed to the Lockhart School of Latin American history.

The book is divided into two parts, the second of which is much more successful than the first. Krippner-Martinez is at his best explaining the ways that late colonial conservative creole identity manifests itself in historical texts. In Part II, Chapter 4 deals with the Crónica de Michoacán, written in 1788 by Franciscan intellectual Pablo de Beaumont. Here, Krippner-Martinez “seek[s] to evaluate how a distinct historical context and various subjective factors influenced a specific text, one that rewrote the narrative of the conquest of Michoacán” (115). Krippner-Martinez convincingly argues that Beaumont writes in a space between Baroque and Enlightenment intellectual contexts, and because of this, the Crónica displays an interesting and complicated relationship between the rational and supernatural. The work is a sort of union of opposites, as “Beaumont’s Enlightenment skepticism clashes with his profoundly held conviction that the Spanish Conquest of the Americas had been divinely ordained” (127). Beaumont correctly understood that the Spanish Conquest was not an event, “but rather represented a process constantly challenged and continually recreated over time” (132).

In Chapter 5, Krippner-Martinez seeks to understand and historicize the construction of the “Tata Vasco,” or “Father Vasco” myth surrounding Vasco de Quiroga, and the ways that people have appropriated that myth in the modern era. The author writes, “here I contend that the traditional image of Vasco de Quiroga as a saintly father figure, who understood and was beloved by his Indian charges, is an after-the-fact reconstruction, rooted more in colonial discourse, creole perceptions, and the formation of modern Mexican nationalism than the sixteenth-century past” (152). Here, he makes his case well.

Part I is somewhat less convincing, although it has its strong points as well. It is good that the author resists the “great man” myth surrounding leading figures of the Spanish conquest. For example, he says, “although Nuño de Guzmán was brutal, it would be wrong to view him as exceptional” (36). At times, Krippner-Martinez’s analysis dovetails nicely with the Lockhart school. He writes, “there is absolutely no evidence … that the ‘native king’ defined his obligations to Spanish colonialism according to the norms of the colonizers” (17). And his argument that the Spanish “sought to justify colonial rule by demonstrating what Spaniards believed to be the ‘perverse otherness’ of indigenous peoples, conceived of in sexual and other terms” is excellent, if not entirely new (118).

Despite these insights, Krippner-Martinez’s allegiance to postmodern theory pushes him into discussions of power and resistance that do not always fit the subject. Spanish power was not so consolidated in 1530 as to be Foucaultian. Resistance, too is a slippery concept. The word is so laden with meaning—it conjures up an image of the archetypal downtrodden hero rising up in ethnic solidarity to resist the evil hegemonic power destroying his way of life. But the gritty, business-as-usual, daily reality of conquest and colonization was less thrilling and more complicated. James Lockhart shows us in Of Things of the Indies that the convergence of Spanish and Mesoamerican cultures allowed for a great deal of continuity between the pre and post-contact periods that precluded a great deal of resistance, at least among sedentary indigenous peoples.

John A Kicza, a student of James Lockhart, reviewed Rereading the Conquest in his review article New Interpretations of Colonial Mexico from the Conquest to Independence, appearing in Volume 40, Number 3 (2005) of the Latin American Research Review. Kicza writes, “Regarding most of the extant secondary literature on these documents as limited if not wrong headed, Krippner-Martinez makes little use of it.”

Because Krippner-Martinez has ignored the insights of the Lockhart School, Chapter Three is terribly problematic. He seems to admire many sixteenth century missionaries in Latin America, and somewhat sanitizes them. Krippner-Martinez glosses clerical hypocrisy, writing “at least in some cases … the sixteenth century clergy was not always beyond [sexual] temptation” (100). Some cases? Not beyond temptation?! This is a gross understatement.

Contrast this with a 1589 Maya petition to have a local priest removed. The document appears in Mesoamerican Voices: Native-Language Writings from Colonial Mexico, Oaxaca, Yucatán, and Guatemala, edited by Matthew Restall, Lisa Sousa, and Kevin Terraciano (all students of James Lockhart). Here, the indigenous community complained of their holy missionary, “Until they recompense him with the sin of fornication, he does not give the women confession” (Restall et all p. 168). Another example from Restall et al is the 1774 petition against four friars in the Mani Region: “But look at their excessive fornication, putting their hands on these prostitutes’ vaginas, even saying mass like this. God willing, when the English come they may not be fornicators equal to these priests, who stop short only at carnal acts with men’s asses. God willing that smallpox be rubbed into their penis heads. Amen.” (Restall et al p. 169).

Krippner-Martinez discusses the meanings of the colonial discourses of gender. He explores Spanish reasons for using sexuality to “other” indigenous people, explaining that this process legitimizes Spanish dominance in the colonizers’ eyes. But this is not enough. He fails to grapple with clerical wickedness, the persistence of indigenous religious forms, and the ways that Catholicism adapted to Indian beliefs.

Krippner-Martinez has high aspirations for the book and uses fresh methods. But I found Rereading the Conquest disappointing. At the end of the day, despite his postmodern textual analyses and insights into the production of myths and texts, the author reproduces both the black and white legends. Once again, the “bad” conquistador is contrasted with the “good” missionary.