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Abstract
Diego Muñoz Camargo's Descripción de la ciudad y provincia de Tlaxcala (1585) is a well-known reference on the history of Tlaxcala that scholars have studied to better understand Tlaxcalan participation in the conquest of Tenochtitlan, its relationship with the Spanish Crown, and the author's selective approach to local history. Often, these approaches present the historian as acculturated or Hispanized because of his celebration of the Spanish or criticism of local religious practices. This article complicates such approaches in order to show the complex ways that the author approached issues of cultural difference. Examining Muñoz Camargo's recourse to colonial discourses of morality, I argue that the author molds and tailors these discourses to fit local Tlaxcalan circumstances. In doing so, I show how he humanizes Tlaxcala's ruling elite while exemplifying the inherent ambivalence of moral authority in Colonial New Spain.
Notes on contributor
José Espericueta is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Dallas. His research interests include colonial mestizaje and identity, sixteenth-century Spanish evangelization, and questions of transculturation/hybridity in Latin America and the United States. He is the recipient of his university’s King/Haggar Scholar Award for Research and Travel in both 2014 and 2015. He has a recently published article on Juan Bautista de Pomar’s Relación de Texcoco in Hispania and an article on Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in Estudios, a journal published by the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM).
Notes
1. In addition to receiving official recognition as son of a conquistador, Muñoz Camargo helped reaffirm Tlaxcalan exemptions from royal tributes. The privileges involved several affirmations of prior rulings, such as the exemption of Tlaxcalans from labor services, the re-confirmation of the indigenous government as established in 1545, and the relief of all tribute payments (Gibson Citation1952, 232–33). For an expansive history of the alliance between Tlaxcala and the Spanish conquistadores as well as post-conquest Tlaxcala, see Martínez Baracs Citation2008.
2. The full title of the questionnaire, commonly referred to as the Relaciones geográficas questionnaire, is Instrucción y memoria de las relaciones que se han de hacer para la descripción de las Indias, que Su Majestad manda hacer para el buen gobierno y ennoblecimiento de ellas. It will be referred to, hereafter, as the Instrucción y memoria.
3. Although Voigt specifically examines some of the particularities of the Historia de Tlaxcala, Muñoz Camargo's edited and expanded version of the Descripción, the historiographical questions remain the same for both texts.
4. Recent decades have seen increased attention on the arbitrary nature of systems of racial and ethnic classification such as the sistema de castas and the problems that arise when assuming their capacity to authoritatively define racial and ethnic identities. Undoubtedly, Magnus Mörner's Race Mixture in the History of Latin America (Citation1967) has proven to be a foundational text for distinguishing sociocultural and biological approaches to mestizaje. More recently, María Elena Martínez's Genealogical Fictions has located the sistema de castas in a larger Iberian context, associating concerns over blood purity in contemporary concerns over religious conformity, while also noting the fluidity and ambiguity that characterized the classification system (Citation2008, 3). Ultimately, while racial and ethnic classifications cannot be ignored, they likewise cannot be understood as all-encompassing with a unidirectional power to define. To this end, Fisher and O’Hara's call to study ‘contact points’ which provide ‘a space where ideas of social difference, of otherness and sameness, of us-them were realized and became tangible’ is particularly useful (Citation2009, 22). Orienting studies of mestizo (or Amerindian) writers along the lines of his or her agency allows us to consider more fully the engagement with and manipulation of discourses of otherness.
5. Pomar's text, the Relación de Texcoco (1582), was also a response to the Instrucción y memoria questionnaire. It was, however, much more limited in its breadth and arguably more celebratory of pre-Hispanic history. See López y Magaña (Citation1980) for a discussion of the lineage and inheritance of the Texcocoan chronicler, and Espericueta (Citation2015) for a location of Pomar's text within the scope of the Instrucción y memoria questionnaire.
6. To be certain, recent studies of mestizaje have avoided essentialism and highlighted an intrinsic diversity. Colin MacLachlan rejects a biological focus on the mestizo individual in favor of a ‘definition of a Mestizo [as] a person who functions within a modified culture drawn from both the indigenous and European historical-cultural experience: in short, those who embrace cultural mestizaje and organize their personal life and behavior accordingly’ (Citation2015, 6–7). Serge Gruzinski takes a similarly expansive approach to mestizaje, identifying it as a common occurrence in history that involves negotiation and compromise amongst culturally distinct groups. For Gruzinski, Catholic evangelizers had a relevant role to play in cultural mestizaje and in some cases created the very conditions for it through the conversion process (2002, 194). Gruzinski's mestizaje is neither an ethnically based approach nor a celebration of synthesis, but rather a theorizing of processes of contact throughout history.
7. See Ortiz and Santí Citation2002, Rama Citation1982, and Pratt Citation1992.
8. Recent studies have provided helpful ways of envisioning indigenous and mestizo authors, their identities, and the complex ways they addressed local histories and colonial contexts. Regarding Fernando de Alva Ixtilixochitl's identity within (and outside) Texcoco, see Benton Citation2014. Amber Brian's article ‘The Alva Ixtlilxochitl brothers and the Nahua intellectual community’ offers a helpful reminder to envision colonial texts as ‘products of cultural negotiation’ (Citation2014, 207). As far as the creative negotiations between ‘New World’ realities and classical Roman models (and the degree to which the former disrupted the latter following the conquests of both the Nahuas and the Incas), see Lupher Citation2003, and MacCormack Citation2007.
9. See Rappaport for a discussion of the situational flexibility of the category ‘Spaniard’ in colonial documents (2014, 10).
10. Even so, this Tlaxcaltecan identity need not fully overshadow Muñoz Camargo's mestizaje. His position as a mestizo in Tlaxcala, a república de indios, was actually cited against Muñoz Camargo when a group of indigenous Tlaxcalans accused him of ‘malfeasance and excessive tribute exaction’ (see Mörner and Gibson Citation1962, 564–66).
11. Stafford Poole's Juan de Ovando (Citation2004, 108–15) provides a useful discussion of some of the moral concerns that guided Juan de Ovando's inquiry into the good governance of the colonies. Regarding some of the epistemological concerns behind the venture, see Mundy Citation1996, 23–27.
12. See Burkhart Citation1989, Poole Citation1992, Pardo Citation2004, Díaz Balsera Citation2005.
13. Florescano likewise locates this providential perspective in a broader historical context, particularly a Hebrew tradition that saw history as ‘una revelación de los designios de Dios, una manifestación del plan divino. El pasado y el acontecer histórico tenían un sentido propósito final que para los judíos residía en el cumplimiento de las promesas de Dios al pueblo elegido y que más tarde se interpretó como la salvación universal, no sólo del pueblo judío’ (Citation2002, 144). See also Baudot Citation1995, Brading Citation1991.
14. Durán's text, subject to the Crown's prohibitions on writings related to indigenous customs and histories, was not published until the nineteenth century (Cline et al. Citation1973, 82).
15. The book of 4 Ezra, 13 (40–43): ‘These are the ten tribes which were led away from their own land into captivity in the days of King Hoshea, whom Shalmaneser the king of the Assyrians led captive; he took them across the river, and they were taken into another land. But they formed this plan for themselves, that they would leave the multitude of the nations and go to a more distant region, where mankind had never lived, that there at least they might keep their statues which they had not kept in their own land’ (see Charlesworth Citation1983, 522–23).
16. Question fourteen is worded as follows: ‘Cuyos eran en tiempo de su gentilidad, y el señorío que sobre ellos tenían sus señores y lo que tributaban, y las adoraciones, ritos y costumbres buenas o malas que tenían’ (1984, 28).
17. Skeptics of the Jewish origins narrative included Juan López y Velasco, Royal Historian and Cosmographer and administrator of the Instrucción y memoria. Velasco argued against the theory, positing instead a strait that might have connected the Americas with Asia in his Geografía y descripción universal de las Indias (1574): ‘la peregrinación de diez tribus de Israel […] y también algunas ceremonias judáicas que se han hallado en las Indias; que en efecto todas son conjeturas flacas […] lo más verosímil parece, estar continuados estos dos mundos … ’ (Citation1894, 3–4).
18. The veracity of this statement is doubtful and the names do not appear in Cabeza de Vaca's writings.
19. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra locates Spanish Catholics alongside British Protestants, finding in both a similar colonizing discourse. He argues that both ‘deployed similar religious discourses to explain and justify conquest and colonization: a biblically sanctioned interpretation of expansion, part of a long-standing Christian tradition of holy violence aimed at demonic enemies within and without’ (Citation2006, 9). See also Brading's discussion of demons in Motolinía's writings (1991, 106–7).
20. Despite prohibitions on indigenous histories and the confiscations of Sahagún's texts, their continued circulation throughout New Spain is evident. Weighing in on the virtue of Franciscan ethnographies, Muñoz Camargo references Sahagún, Jerónimo de Mendieta, and Motolinía as authoritative sources on native practices: ‘los […] conocí y conozco, y vi parte de sus obras escritas a mano, los cuales con mucho cuidado y curiosidad supieron y entendieron muchos secretos de los naturales, porque los inquirieron con vigilancia católica para desarraigar sus idolatryas’ (1984, 55).
21. Velazco notes that the notion of consuming human flesh for purposes other than ceremonial ones is highly questionable. Rather, it was part of a holy practice as a type of mystical communion (2003, 152–53).
22. For Jaime Cuadriello, this conversion is relevant both legally and symbolically as ‘the moment of the creation of a new law, both holy and political, for this allied territory’ (Citation2011, 20).
23. See Alva Citation1952, 1:502, and Pomar Citation1986, 69–70.
24. At the same time, it might also evidence the influence of a more Dominican approach that sought in indigenous histories a level of natural reason that attested to a civilization in pre-conquest societies. See Brading Citation1991, 90.