The Art of Being In-Between

Anyone who has seen the Codex Florentino’s picture of Doña Marina interpreting between Moctezuma and Cortés knows that the image and idea of an interpreter standing in the space between two other people is a visual and cultural cue crucial to making sense of Latin America’s historical experience. The mere fact of adding a third term to easily paired notions of conqueror-conquered or Spaniard-Indian challenges the methodological individualism underlying so much historical writing. Broadly speaking, this is the premise of Yanna Yannakakis’s interesting book, The Art of Being In-Between.According to Yannakakis, local native leaders in Oaxaca from 1660 to 1810 served as cultural intermediaries and political brokers between colonial rulers and ruled. In performing their mediation they “held the colonial order in balance” by defusing tensions but also, ironically, by abandoning the middle space and rebelling on occasion, as she argues they did during the Cajonos Rebellion of 1700. For Yannakakis, the inclusion of native intermediaries in our historical accounts of colonial America helps answer two large questions of the historiography: how Spanish colonial rule maintained itself for so long without a standing army, and why native people rebelled when they did. Yannakakis’s intriguing move is to come at these issues from the perspective of local rule in the “periphery,” specifically Sierra Norte, a place of great ethnic diversity, linguistic difference, and pre-Hispanic antipathies, a place, consequently, where colonial power was “less centralized and more contested” than in the center.In this regard, she does an excellent job of mining provincial archives for traces of native intermediaries’ roles. Together with other recent scholars (including this reviewer) who have begun to be explicitly concerned with legal processes in colonial Latin America, Yannakakis brings much precious material to the light of day. Though attentive to linguistic nuance in the legal cases that ground her analysis, she at times abstracts too easily from the procedural complexities that frame all utterances in a judicial context. Still, by giving attention to go-betweens’ actions and words and the contexts of their production, Yannakakis makes a strong case for the analytical centrality of go-betweens’ cultural and political brokerage. The fluidity and contingency that their mediation created set the baseline for relationships between colonial subjects and their rulers, opening up a space of negotiation that defined political possibilities as a continuum of responses — litigation, enforcement, flight, rebellion, and punishment — embracing all parties involved. This is what indigenous people lost under the Bourbons, argues Yannakakis in later chapters, as reformers sought to rationalize legal process by closing the space in-between that had characterized Habsburg tolerance for ambiguity.Yannakakis’s discussion raises critical issues. She asserts that “native autonomy lay at the heart of the struggle between native intermediaries and Spaniards throughout the mid-late colonial period” in Sierra Norte (p. 28). The actions of go-betweens suggest that they would not have seen the issue quite so starkly. While community autonomy loomed as large for them as for others, so did access to the colonial “state.” Indigenous communities, and those who spoke for them, sought to establish the optimal balance between the two, not merely to defend one against the other. Indeed, the role of indigenous legal intermediaries may have suffered no greater setback than abolition of the Juzgado General de Indios in 1791 after bitter Spanish complaints against Indian litigiousness. Structurally, the intermediary’s position seems to have demanded a sensitivity to the nuances of negotiation that probably could not have withstood too sharp a sense of opposition to the “state.” If Yannakakis had understood the “state” less rigidly than the category implies and more along the lines of officialdom — a congeries of officials answering to disparate urgencies and objectives — the role of native intermediaries would have stood in sharper relief. It seems likely that colonial officials no less than go-betweens “respond[ed] to competing pressures and answer[ed] to many constituencies” and that this fact was a condition of the intermediaries’ success in representing their communities’ and their own interests (p. 63). Though Yannakakis seems aware of this, frequent references to an abstract “state” that carry much of the burden of her argument in the latter chapters cut against her better instincts dictated by immersion in the sources.The book raises a further issue. Yannakakis is right that Bourbon reforms “diminished the power of native intermediaries” in an instrumental sense (p. 190). But another question lurks: when did the cultural power of intermediaries become so generalized that virtually anyone could imagine himself in the middle space between ordinary people and institutionalized power? Put another way, could it be that the power of identifiable intermediaries decreased in the eighteenth century in part because the role of go-between had become, after 250 years, so naturalized? In 1799, a lowly indigenous sharecropper in Tule, Oaxaca, cited the Recopilación de 1680 in refusing to pay a Spanish official collecting the tithe for the Cathedral in Oaxaca. This man required no third-party intermediary; he appealed on his own to the relevant law. And while he may have been speaking for himself, he was also mediating different if shared views of the colonial world — the art of being in-between in the context of a “heterogeneous indigenous identity” (p. 224). In a sense, he was his own go-between. This begs a broad question with important epistemological implications: what is implied for historical analysis once we give up the individualistic fantasy and admit that all social relations are fundamentally mediated. Yan-nakakis’s book does a great service by forcefully framing this conundrum and making clear the need for further thinking on this issue

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