Memories of Conquest

To understand the indigenous view of the conquest, Laura Matthew tells us, “requires a reimagining of the conquest itself” (p. 2). We have traditionally asked, as she points out in her introduction, how Cortez, with his handful of companions, could have conquered Mexico and Central America. The answer, of course, is that they did not, at least not on their own. The conquest took almost 200 years to complete, and much of it was carried out by the indigenous allies of Cortez, Alvarado, and the other conquistadores. These allies sometimes even took the initiative and operated independently of the Spanish. The main contingent came from Nahuatl- speaking areas of central Mexico, but there were soldiers from the Mixtec and Zapotec zones of Oaxaca as well. These men considered themselves to be conquistadores as well, and they made this a prominent part of their colonial identities. The Spanish were the first to acknowledge the invaluable contribution their indigenous allies made to the colonial project and awarded their central Mexican and Oaxacan soldiers a special status, the most important part of this being an exemption from personal tribute. When this exemption was first challenged in the sixteenth century, Spanish veterans of the conquest came to their old comrades’ defense.Matthew focuses her study on the Mexican allies of the Spanish who, after the conquest of Guatemala, settled in Ciudad Vieja, a town located in the Guatemalan high lands. She shows how they continued to speak Nahuatl right through the colonial period and how, through lengthy lawsuits, they defended their status and maintained a distinctive identity as Spanish- allied conquerors of the Maya well into the nineteenth century. She uses a great variety of sources, including the Lienzo de Quauhquechollan — of which she offers a skillful interpretation — and a pictorial manuscript in the indigenous style, as well as the traditional archival sources. She also spent time in Ciudad Vieja, whose people, she reports, are keenly aware of their history as Spanish allies and conquerors of the Maya even though they no longer speak an indigenous language.On a more general level, Matthew uses the Ciudad Vieja case to explore the dilemma of a people who play key supporting roles in a colonial project but at the end of the day are still among the colonized. For the people of Ciudad Vieja there was a constant question about boundaries. Over time, more and more people were able to claim descent from the original indigenous allies of the Spanish. Yet the value of this status depended in part on its being the exclusive identity of a relatively small group of people. If too many people were able to except themselves from tribute payments, the whole purpose of the colony would be undermined. Thus the descendants of the Mexican allies time and again faced the prospect of their privileges being watered down or completely eliminated, in part because so many others were claiming a similar exception and in part because colonial officials did not recognize their status, either out of ignorance or because they were actively seeking to end these special rights. This in turn caused the descendants of the conquistadores’ indigenous allies to draw sharp lines between themselves and other indigenous people, highlighting their cooperation with the Spanish, their sincere acceptance of Christianity, and later their familiarity with Spanish. So the descendants of the Mexican allies, who spoke an indigenous language and suffered some of the same discrimination that indigenous people typically experienced in the colonial regime, had to distance themselves from others who shared their Mesoamerican heritage, repeatedly memorializing their role as conquerors and their status as being more “civilized” than the surrounding Maya.This is a very well- written and informative book that explores an important but, until relatively recently, neglected topic in Latin American colonial history. One thing that Matthew should continue to explore is the militias formed by the indigenous inhabitants of Ciudad Vieja. It is becoming increasingly clear that military service for indigenous people — through things like the militias Matthew describes, the raising of detachments in indigenous areas to fight in the wars of independence, the practice of impressment by national armies during the late nineteenth century, or the early twentieth- century formation of revolutionary bands in indigenous areas — has been a very important catalyst for change, helping to define indigenous nationalism and to escalate ethnic conflict in certain periods. In Ciudad Vieja Matthew has perhaps the earliest example of this phenomenon, and it is hoped that she will have more to say on the topic in the future

Ancient history · Archaeology · Colonialism · CONQUEST · Ethnology · Indigenous · Nahuatl · Tribute · History · Latin American history and culture

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