Martín Cortés

The author of this book promises to examine the relatively unstudied life of Martín Cortés (1533–89), the second of two sons by that name born to one of Mexico's most famous Spanish colonizers, Hernando Cortés (1485–1547). Her laborious contribution to this topic will benefit sixteenth-century historians and Hispanists because she brings to light important archival sources that together with secondary sources compose a portrait of the second marqués del Valle de Oaxaca, who unlike his father was born in the Viceroyalty of New Spain (in Cuernavaca, Morelos) and was of the first generation of New Spanish creoles. And unlike his older brother Martín, the younger Martín had his right to succeed his father legitimated by his Spanish parents' marriage.One of the challenges acknowledged by the author in the book's introduction is the difficulty of establishing to which Martín sixteenth-century sources referred. An example that comes to mind is a series of autos prepared in 1557 and conserved in the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico (Instituciones Coloniales, Hospital de Jesús 53, vol. 300, exp. 117), in which both brothers provide testimony; the scribe often fails to distinguish one from the other. The author mitigates this problem by either qualifying to which Martín she refers with the terms criollo and mestizo or by acknowledging that it is not possible to understand which brother was being described by the notary or author. The resulting identity fluidity highlights the book's objective to better understand the life of the second marqués del Valle de Oaxaca through critical reading practices. Differentiating between the two Martíns also allows scholars to glimpse the life and experiences of Hernando Cortés's first son, born to the Nahua woman Malintzin (La Malinche).Beyond the introduction, the book's organization leaves this reader wanting more explicit linkages between some chapter titles and their contents. The first chapter following the introduction, “A Castilla: Los viajes de los dos Martín Cortés,” attempts to sketch the early lives of the two Martíns, but there is no meditation on their travel experiences, the nature of travel in this period, or how they were received in Spain as Spanish-speaking youths who had not been born in Spain. In this sense, the excellent archival research performed by the author would have been even better deployed within a contextualized study focused on both brothers' experiences and those with whom they interacted rather than only where and when these two men pop up in historical documents. Sometimes it feels as if the book stalls in the late 1540s, with several chapters returning to that period in which Hernando Cortés dies, some of his children marry or remarry, and the eldest assumes his role as marqués del Valle de Oaxaca, which gives rise to a sense of repetition. The author's sources are, nonetheless, adequately and consistently documented, and she should be praised for the care that she invested in her bibliographic apparatus.One area that remains understudied and that now needs to be addressed as a result of this book is the role of the Cortés women. It seems difficult to justify, in 2018, continuing to perform scholarship that excludes women, their presence, their voices, and, in particular, the way that they exercised authority in the early modern period. This exclusion resonates in a book devoted to a man made powerful in the eyes of contemporaries because of who his dad was. One way that this book does address women is through a fascinating examination of the marquesa's material life in the tenth chapter; among her effects were curious objects that included two rattlesnake heads (p. 165). Unfortunately, there is no analysis of these possessions, their cultural significance, or their likely source of origin. Hernando Cortés's female offspring likewise should be given greater attention today. We must ask ourselves what their experiences were, how they were empowered by the marquessate and the other advantages afforded by their situation in life, and how they helped to shape the colonial project on either side of the Atlantic. We should be choosing to seek out their experiences, objectives, and voices rather than presuming and perforce allowing those of men to dictate the historical record, even in a biography of Martín Cortés: the women as well as the men in his life will provide important perspective on who the man was.Scholarship on women aside, this book does nonetheless feature the activities of a creole man in a period in which European experiences and voices tend to predominate and later catch scholarly eyes. The author also tries to provide background on the marqués's mestizo brother, which together with the focus on a creole helps destabilize the relatively Western, if still masculinist, treatment of the early modern Spanish Atlantic. For this the author should be congratulated

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