Colonial Mexico Archives

The King’s Living Image: The Culture and Politics of Viceregal Power in Colonial Mexico by Alejandro Cañeque (2004)

Latin American popular culture presents two common tropes about Spanish colonial rule. One is the representation of viceroys as autocrats who ruled without any institutional constraint. This perception “explains” the authoritarian tendencies of Latin American societies in the postcolonial period. The other trope ironically undermines perceptions of authoritarian control by highlighting the margin of discretion that colonial officials enjoyed in the application of the law. One example of this flexible interpretation of the law is a famous phrase uttered by the Spanish American bureaucrats when a royal order came from the metropolis: “I obey but I do not comply” (obedezco pero no cumplo). Officers used this prerogative in some cases to avoid enforcing certain royal policies that they thought might be harmful for the territories in the New World where they ruled in representation of the king. This trope “explains” the apparent disregard of modern Latin Americans for the law. Neither of these representations of colonial rule is accurate.

Alejandro Cañeque’s The King’s Living Image invites readers to reconsider many of the misconceptions about Spanish America found in Latin American popular culture. Cañeque argues that we cannot understand the colonial Spanish bureaucracy with our modern conceptions of the state. In fact, Cañeque refutes the centralizing and autocratic vocation of the Spanish Monarchy for most of the colonial period (until the beginning of the eighteenth century) because those elements associated often with the modern state simply did not appear there. Without a standing army and an extended and centralized bureaucratic apparatus, how did Spain rule over almost a whole continent? Central to the author’s argument is that political beliefs and institutional practices were crucial in sustaining viceregal power and colonial rule. Spaniards imagined the state as a human body in which each body part (institution) played a key role in the system. The king represented the head, but even a king could not move if his legs did not respond. At the institutional level, the king could not procure good governance in the kingdom without the help of his most trusted councilors working in those institutions. The collective action of the whole created a sense of community among all its members.

Cañeque reinforces this idea by stating that political power was transmitted from God to the community, which then transferred it to a king. Thus, the monarch had the absolute obligation to rule for the benefit of the people and the common good. Justice and good governance became the ideological foundations of the Spanish Monarchy. Their fulfillment depended on the cooperation of the head and the different body parts. Shattering misconceptions about despotism in the Spanish Monarchy, Cañeque claims that this system of government had its analogy in heaven, where God was assisted by the Seraphim, who had the job of purging, illuminating, and perfecting the hierarchies below them. In this framework, the author analyzes the administrative hierarchy in Spanish America from the upper echelons to the local forms of government. Through his study of Viceroyalties, and Audiencias and Cabildos, Cañeque shows how the Spanish Monarchy was structured in a way that any site of power reflected a higher level.

Cañeque focuses in the figure of the viceroy, who represented the living image of the king, playing the role of the head of the political body in Spanish America. Mirroring the celestial court, viceroys had to be exemplary rulers for their subjects. Like the king, they had to rule by virtue, and not by force. If we add to this their mission of dispensing justice, we now can understand the famous phrase “I obey but I do not comply.” Viceroys and other colonial officials did not enforce certain royal policies when they were thought to be contrary to the justice and the laws of the kingdom. Certainly, they could abuse this prerogative for other goals, but its purpose was not the disregard of the law but the protection of the larger conception of justice.

If the viceroy represented the living image of the king, how did the king project his power through the viceroy? Symbolic representations, such as triumphal arches, processions, and the magnificence and pomp in the viceroy’s public appearances, all constituted and sustained viceregal power. People today would see mere spectacle and vanity. But these were the means through which authority was legitimated, especially when coercion on a grand scale was simply impossible. Symbols and political rituals were fundamental for the legitimization of power. Consider modern states and their use of symbols to command respect and loyalty. Think about the purpose of national hymns, or the splendor of national parades. Allegiance to the nation’s flag evokes the same feelings that people would have experienced by seeing the public appearance of the king’s living image in the figure of the viceroy.

Cañeque’s The King’s Living Image is a readable and well researched contribution that serves as a wake-up call to reexamine many of the misconceptions that have informed Latin American popular culture about Spanish American colonial power.

Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes edited by Gabriela Ramos and Yanna Yannakakis (2014)

By Abisai Pérez Zamarripa

This collective book is about the role of Indian thinkers as actors who preserved pre-Columbian knowledge within the new social order and recreated it to enforce or contest Spanish imperial rule. The book editors integrated several essays of top historians that explain how indigenous intellectuals in the colonial Andes and Mexico were important for the success of both the Spanish authorities and Indian elites in reaching political power and legitimacy.

Together, the book’s articles offers a comparative perspective of colonial Mexico and Peru focusing on the indigenous scholars’ lives, productions, and epistemological networks. This comparative analysis shows that knowledge production was more culturally and linguistically diverse in Mexico than in the Andes. On the one hand, Spanish prevailed on the Quechua as the principal written medium. This meant the indigenous people of the Andes had to learn a new foreign language to achieve social mobility and the Spanish government could centralize more rapidly its political power in the Andean region. On the other hand, in colonial Peru, Spanish rule gradually marginalized the Inca quipu system –records expressed with numerical terms while in colonial Mexico the Mesoamerican pictographic writing tradition –codex with images and words that recorded all kind of information– rapidly adapted the Castilian alphabet scripture. This exemplifies how the Spaniards were reluctant to utilize the numerical system of the Inca people while they accepted the continuity of the Mesoamerican tradition of communicating whole ideas by combining images and words. In her contribution, Gabriela Ramos suggests that the former centralized power of the Inca empire limited knowledge to very few hands while in Mexico the fragmented structure of the Aztec empire allowed a linguistic diversity that survived Spanish colonization. Ramos explains how the indigenous language, Quechua, became the lingua franca in colonial Cusco and Lima., The standardization of one language allowed the Spaniards to exert control more effectively, but also allowed natives to use the legal culture to their own benefit.

The essays also explain how indigenous intellectuals used their ancient knowledge to transform and thus critique, resist, or accommodate with the colonial system. Religious orders played an important role in the critique of power through evangelizing and educating the natives. John Charles addresses this in his study of Jesuit colleges in the colonial Andes. He demonstrates that Jesuit schooling allowed young indigenous nobles to learn the Spanish law and language to protect local self-rule and their family’s interests and investments. Andean nobles who were schooled by Jesuits did not hesitate to confront corrupt Spanish authorities using their knowledge in the litigation process. Alan Durston offers another example of resistance by Indians thinkers. He analyzes the Huarochirí Manuscript (Quechua language text that describes the traditions and myths of the natives of pre-Columbian Peru) to explain how an indigenous intellectual and nobleman prioritized local indigenous traditions that expressed historical narratives through ancient Inca myths, the huaca tales. Durston shows that indigenous writers chose to preserve their ancient records instead of embracing completely Europeans forms of knowledge.

Concerning the issue of the political adaptation of Indians to the colonial system, María Elena Martínez provides one of the most compelling aspects of the book, a study of the political functions of Indian genealogies in central Mexico and Peru. Martínez shows that genealogical narratives empowered Indian noblemen in both regions by adapting ancient traditions to understanding the Spanish conquest as a pact of vassalage with the Spanish crown. During the 17-18^th centuries, indigenous intellectuals created a great variety of títulos primordiales (Titles of land in colonial Mexico referring both to the pre-Columbian and colonial periods) and visual representations of dynasties (Peru) to retain or gain privileges from the crown. Those genealogical narratives shows that natives elites in colonial Peru conceived of Spanish rule as a peaceful and voluntary transfer of power between the Indians and the Spanish crown, not as a military conquest.

All the authors in this collection have a clear and concise writing style and use a wide range of primary sources: chronicles, confesionarios, trial records, lawsuits, petitions, contemporaneous histories, photographic representations that combines European and Indian forms of knowledge, and so forth. Particularly, the authors show how the analysis of chronicles and histories shed light on the intellectuals’ networks and the role of Indian scholars in preserving the oral memory of native societies that today are not well known. For instance, John F. Schwaller examined the productions of the brothers Fernando de Alva Ixtlixochitl and Bartolomé de Alva. The first served to interpret and translate the native history into models that were understood by the Spanish rulers while the second used his wide knowledge of native religious practices to enforce a better Christianization. For her part, Camila Townsend shows that Nahua historian Don Juan Zapata and other Nahua historians claimed to be the responsible for preserving their communities’ memories. The essays of Schwaller and Towsend also are also remarkable as they include an insightful analysis of the Nahuátl language. Yanna Yannakakis examined the translation process for understanding the relationship between indigenous people and the legal system. She argues that translation practices in colonial Mexico led to a process of commensuration, that is, the Spanish and native languages established a common ground so that Christianity could become comprehensible both for Spaniards and indigenous communities. She demonstrates how the Zapotec language integrated the Christian notion of sin to create a discourse on criminality, which the Indian elites then used to dispute colonial power.

This collection of essays draws attention to the importance of intellectuals in the construction of alternative ways to achieve power and social mobility. The Indian intellectuals of colonial Mexico and the Andes demonstrated the validity of the common idea that “knowledge is power.” And it is power because it offers a pathway to contest or to improve the ways that people interact with their rulers.

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The Archaeology and History of Colonial Mexico by Enrique Rodríguez Alegría (2016)

In this study of the social significance of material culture in Mexico City and Xaltocan in the early colonial period, Rodriguez Alegría uses a variety of sources, including archaeological evidence relating to food consumption, catalogues of ceramic sherds from several dig sites in these cities, and wills, stock lists, and auction records. His use of archaeological data and historical records together reveals the benefits of incorporating disparate kinds of evidence: the archaeological data on food and material consumption filled in the blanks of historical records, which often leave out explicit descriptions of such daily practices.

The works of historians and anthropologists frequently overlap in theme and subject, however, the two disciplines gather and use evidence differently. Rodríguez Alegría argues that such differences should not stand in the way of interdisciplinary investigations. His main contribution is a discussion of the ways scholars conceptualize their methodologies. He asserts that in an interdisciplinary study, there should not be a contest over which kind of evidence is more worthwhile. Rather, researchers should pay careful attention to the implications of the interpretative strategies they use.

Part of what makes his methodology innovative is his acceptance of the inherent incommensurability of archaeological and historical evidence. He outlines common interpretative strategies used in each of these disciplines, openly acknowledging the differences between them. For archaeologists, analogical reasoning is common because it allows them to utilize “known behaviors in the present” in order to shed light on “unknown behaviors [of] the past.” Historians, on the other hand, tend to conceptualize evidence from their documents as synecdoches, “where qualities or practices found in a document or a few documents are replicated to stand for wider processes or patterns in a society.”

In his openness to the contradictions that result from simultaneously using these distinct methods, Rodríguez Alegría creates a provocative rejection of the established practice of seeking an uncontested line of reasoning. He asserts that the incorporation of more evidence fundamentally creates a more nuanced understanding, even if all the pieces do not come together to neatly form a single image. As a result, both the synecdoche favored by historians and the analogy used in anthropology have their place in a single work.

Rodríguez Alegría provides numerous examples of the benefits of interdisciplinarity, including his illustration of how quantitative and qualitative analysis of pottery fragments combine with historical data on markets and production methods to reveal new understanding of of the role of pottery in these cultures. In that sense, the writing and presentation style achieves the important goal of encouraging cross-disciplinary understanding.

The most compelling aspect of this work is the author’s insistence that scholars redirect their attention towards a more critical analysis of how they interpret their evidence. Forcing this awareness about discipline-determined approaches to data analysis promises new insights, but it also presents potential problems. At some point, scholars have to assert a coherent narrative, or at least a conceptual image, of the phenomenon under investigation. That process inherently requires a selection of relevant information. If scholars choose to incorporate apparently contradictory data collected outside of their discipline, they could face criticism for knowingly promoting an argument that goes against some of the data. It is possible that the scholarly community as a whole would resist this approach because of the widely ingrained attachment to uncontested narratives that Rodríguez Alegría criticizes.

This work prompts an important reexamination of disciplinary divisions and approaches to the interpretation of evidence. It fundamentally brings the question of what makes a document representative of a larger phenomenon to the forefront of historical analysis. Furthermore, it encourages scholars to think about how their investigation engages with contextual information from unwritten sources. Overall, Rodríguez Alegría’s book opens up an important discussion on the value of questioning the validity of even the most standardized interpretive strategies. As he points out, establishing a narrative is fundamental for historians because of its apparent utility in illustrating change over time. It is also, however, a method that reflects our aesthetic preference for presenting information this way. Both historians and anthropologists must, therefore, aim to break down barriers that would prevent the fruitful sharing of methodologies between disciplines.

Also by Brittany Erwin on Not Even Past:

The Museo Regional de Oriente in San Miguel, El Salvador
The National Museum of Anthropology in in San Salvador

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Peace Came in the Form of a Woman by Juliana Barr (2007)

by Justin Heath

“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners…all howl(ed) in a barbarous tongue…riding down upon (the posse) like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning…”: So begins the longest, most vivid sentence in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West.

As a young reader of gothic fiction, I always believed that Cormac McCarthy had an unrivaled sense for the macabre. More so than any other contemporary writer, he painted violent and terrible scenes that not only rattled my sense of poetic justice, but also delighted my curiosity about the darker recesses of the imagination. More so than I knew at the time, this mix of impressions also affected McCarthy’s more sophisticated readers. Even as he praised the book as the ultimate realization of the old western as a genre, the literary critic Harold Bloom evidently found it difficult to finish the novel. “The first time I read Blood Meridian,” Bloom confessed, “I was so appalled that while I was held, I gave up after about 60 pages.”

As an aspiring historian, what now catches my attention is not these sensational popular depictions of the Southern Plains tribes, or the “Wild West” in general, but the resonance of these otherwise careworn images in the scholarship of Borderlands Studies. Put simply, most books and articles within this academic sub-discipline still uncritically focus on a narrow range of topics — all replete the familiar scenes of violence, horror, and death.

Juliana Barr’s Peace Came in the Form of a Woman, a study of inter-ethnic diplomacy in the borderlands of Texas, marks an exception to this general trend. In this award-winning book, Barr investigates Hispano-Indian relations in the distinctive setting of the Texas borderlands, where nomadic societies, such as the Comanches and the Apaches, dictated the practices of peace-keeping to their allegedly more powerful Spanish neighbors to the south.

At the northern edge of colonial Mexico in the eighteenth century, a consortium of soldiers, ranchers, and mission Indians were in no position to dictate the terms of peace in the distant lands of “the Far North.” Left without the means to impose their will, the outposts of Texas, such as Bexar de San Antonio, had little choice but to adapt to the local culture of peacekeeping as practiced by their more resourceful indigenous neighbors. This multicultural landscape that Barr illustrates was held together not by signed treaties, maps, or anything of the Spaniards’ diplomatic reckoning, but by the extensions of honorary kinship that transcended “racial” differences between culturally unrelated groups. Within this essentially familial understanding of inter-group networking, Barr argues that it was women – as opposed to men — who served the central role as mediators.

When the Spanish decided to settle the lands of “Los Tejas” in the 1690s, the administrators in Mexico City hoped to install a buffer territory of Catholic missions and Spanish forts along the northern periphery, so as to forestall the advancement of unconquered peoples of “El Norte.” Without any such buffer, continued raids on the more prosperous regions of present-day Mexico threatened to obstruct the extraction of natural resources in one of the world’s first prominent export-oriented economies. Such a view of the geopolitical landscape seems to have guaranteed ineffectual half-measures to contain raiding activities.

A replica of the Mission San Francisco de los Tejas, the first Catholic mission established in East Texas in 1690 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Barr’s study illustrates radical changes in the conduct of borderland diplomacy. In their earliest encounters with nomadic groups like the Caddos, the Spanish often entered into indigenous camps in full regalia, bearing the sacred image of Our Lady of Guadeloupe, who assumed a central place in these processions. Noticing that the Spanish brought no women with them, the Caddos recognized the image not as innately holy figure, but as a proxy for an otherwise absent feminine presence that customarily attended peaceful negotiations between indigenous groups. The men who greeted the Spanish envoys paid homage to the female image by kissing the icon of Santa Maria. The colonists, for their part, interpreted this gesture as auspicious, signaling the Caddos’ eagerness to convert to the Catholic faith. This inference was tragically mistaken, Barr observes, since missionaries would be the choice targets in future raids. Resistance to Catholic missionaries during the first half of the 18th century would also spark decades of violence between the natives of Texas and these recent Spanish arrivals. Although the Spanish always had the ambition to occupy the region, they always lacked the means to locate, much less subjugate, these equestrian peoples.

By the end of the 18th century, after decades of countless defeats, the Spanish townspeople became increasingly sensitive to the significance of women in these diplomatic visits. When the Comanches visited San Antonio in 1772, for instance, the governor of Texas was eager to point out that a woman came at the forefront of the convoy. The implications of such cultural adaptations and what they entailed for colonial-indigenous relations serves as the primary focus of Barr’s inquiry.

Barr’s study occasions some truly thought-provoking discoveries. By her estimation, peaceful coexistence in Texas had little to do with overcoming perceptions of “racial differences,” since the category of “race” was essentially a European concept that carried little weight in the borderlands. Rather, the complex web of kinship relations focused on the movement of wives, mothers, and daughters – whether voluntary or coerced — to locations that arranged for their safe keeping. As Barr emphasizes, it was the extension of a feminized domestic space across tribal boundaries that brokered trust between men. For this reason, the presidio forts, originally designed to carry out the military occupation of Texas, served as the primary meeting grounds of what Barr terms inter-group “hospitality” networks. In these presidios, the annual distribution of gifts between families and tribal bands cemented peaceful ties between culturally unrelated peoples who often did not speak the same language.

Treaty of Peace by John O. Meusebach showing Colonists with the Comanches in 1847 (via Prints and Photographs Collection, Texas State Library and Archives Commission)

Like most innovative studies, Barr’s impressive work also has its shortcomings. For starters, whenever peaceful relations did break down, Barr is perhaps too eager to blame Spanish diplomatic clumsiness or cultural cynicism. The accuracy of these accusations aside, there is more to the picture than a question of mere prejudicial attitudes. By all accounts, the financial strain of “hospitality” was more considerable than Barr lets on. Many of the Comanches’ demands included items that were not locally produced in Texas. To obtain these gifts in a timely fashion, the treasurers and governors had to maintain a tight logistical operation that connected distant suppliers from Louisiana, Coahuila, and many other places. All of this put a strain on the coffers of the local outpost town, where money was almost always in short supply.

A second problem is Barr’s use of kinship terms. What do words like “brother” mean between former combatants in the 18^th-century Southwest? By focusing on the indigenous outlook on peacekeeping, the Spanish experience seems underappreciated, especially when one’s honorary sibling appears more like an extortionist than a guest? On the other hand, by sidelining the idiom of cultural groups, we risk injecting Eurocentric categories into our analysis of events where Europeans were merely one of several groups involved? This problem has a renewed urgency among scholars of Borderlands. With specialists such as Pekka Hämäläinen entertaining notions of a “Comanche Empire,” perhaps it is time that historians turn to the political nuances of South Plains’ speech for much needed clarification.

In spite of these problems, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman is a compelling read. By examining the Spaniards’ adaptation to new cultural surroundings, Barr undercuts the assumption that the peripheries of the Empire were essentially static, underdeveloped communities that awaited their inevitable incorporation into more culturally “advanced” or “rationalized” societies. By focusing on the practice of peacekeeping, Barr shows that Europeans and their descendants held an illusory monopoly over concerns for regional stability, long-distance trade, or extensive social networking. Other groups actively sought to arrange for amicable relations, even if they sought these ends through alternative means.

Also by Justin Heath on Not Even Past:

Review: Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain by Nancy van Deusen (2015)

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Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico by Daniel Nemser (2017)

By focusing on the relationship between race and physical space, Nemser analyzes colonial concepts of race through an unexpected and innovative lens. His investigation of concrete structures and their effect on the creation of Mexico’s caste society spans the Spanish colonial period, from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Examining the dynamic among the indigenous, Spanish, and mestizo populations in Mexico City, Nemser claims that the conceptualization of race in colonial Mexico developed not only through interpersonal relationships but also grew out of the physical separation of peoples into distinct spaces.

Nemser focuses on four key spaces: religious congregations, mestizo schools, urban neighborhoods, and the city’s royal gardens. Ultimately, he finds that the physical separation of cultural groups implicitly created the subordinate status of non-Spanish populations. These racialized spaces, then, cultivated and institutionalized the inequality still found in Mexico today.

Nemser begins his discussion with the first Spanish efforts to separate indigenous populations into religious settlements known as congregations. He builds upon this foundational Spanish-indigenous dichotomy by then investigating the paradoxical existence of the mestizo and the segregation of Mexico City’s neighborhoods. Initially, biracial mestizos appeared to be the perfect mediators to bring the Spanish Catholic faith to indigenous populations. However, by the end of the sixteenth century, mestizos’ role in society had declined from missionary to vagabond. The subsequent separation of mestizos into different schools and neighborhoods further cultivated their reputation as dangerous and untrustworthy. Finally, Nemser experiments with a much more conceptual argument. Focusing on early modern Spanish understandings of botany, he asserts that the organization of the city’s botanical gardens throughout the nineteenth century acted as the predecessor to the scientific racism characteristic of the twentieth century. As imperial botanists in Mexico City separated plants into distinct spaces and micro-climates based on their biological characteristics, new concepts of biopolitics developed to address New Spain’s growing multiracial population.

A painting showing the casta system in eighteenth-century Mexico (via Wikipedia)

Nemser structures his book in a way that capitalizes on accessibility to the reader. Each of the four core chapters discusses an increasingly more complex separation of space. The reader thus moves from concrete religious congregations to more abstract botanical divisions. This allows Nemser to delve into the complexity of racial separation in the colonial era without confusing readers. Finally, he utilizes the introduction and conclusion to tie these colonial concepts back to the modern era.

Infrastructures of Race relies on public resources such as administrative reports, academic debates, and urban surveys that allow Nemser to demonstrate how Spanish officials restructured urban spaces into racialized areas. Due to the nature of the sources, it is difficult to gauge the indigenous perspective. As such, Nemser’s analysis emphasizes the role of elite administrators in codifying race but cannot provide the indigenous response to such separation.

Infrastructures of Race provides a compelling discussion of the role of physical spaces in creating and solidifying definitions of race in society. Weaving a narrative between established theory and new research, Nemser has created an investigation that is both innovative and accessible to the reader. Taking care to consistently maintain the relevancy of the colonial caste system to modern Mexico, Nemser sheds light on both historical racial organization and contemporary institutional racism. Both academic and non-academic audiences will find Nemser’s work thought provoking.

Antonio de Ulloa’s Relación Histórica del Viage a la America Meridional

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Jerónimo Antonio Gil and the Idea of the Spanish Enlightenment, By Kelly Donahue-Wallace (2017)

How can the life of an artisan who specialized in punchcutting and engraving help us shed light on “the idea of the Spanish Enlightenment”? Donahue-Wallace offers an illuminating perspective on the Enlightenment through the biography of an expert medal caster, Jerónimo Antonio Gil, whose career took him from provincial Zamora to Madrid and ultimately to Mexico, where he became the founder of the first royal academy of the arts in the New World.

Had Gil lived in the seventeenth century he would have become a painter, churning out religious canvasses in his native Zamora. Had Gil moved to Madrid, he would have become a criado (servant) for a stonecutter or a wood carver or an oil painter, never an artisan letrado (intellectual). When Gil left Zamora in the 1740s, however, he got a stipend to attend the new Academia de San Fernando in Madrid where he learned to cast dies for commemorative medals, to cut letter punches and counterpunches for typesetting, and to carve copper plates for engravings. He was also trained to master a literary and historical national canon in the vernacular. Gil got an education to copy the great masters but also to produce his own original designs in neoclassical style. In short, Gil was educated to become a civil servant, one of many officials in the Bourbon dynasty charged with creating a new specialized national print culture and regalist media. Donahue-Wallace explores the many medals, engravings, drawings, and typographic samples Gil produced in a career that spanned more than fifty years, twenty of which in Mexico.

Letter punches for the Royal Print. Jerónimo Antonio Gil, from *Catálogo de la exposición Imprenta Real. Fuentes de la tipografía española*. Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (Public Domain).

Donahue-Wallace uses Gil’s career to make several larger arguments. First, she demonstrates the newfound importance of print culture in mid-eighteenth-century Spain. An ancien regime that had long been centered on literacy and the pushing of paperwork suddenly realized that modernization, renewal, and geopolitical survival demanded a turn to print as reason-of-state. The Bourbon invested heavily in the training of artisans (either at home or overseas) to eliminate Spain’s secular dependency on the expertise of typographers and engravers from France and the Low Countries. The new culture of print pushed a “national” and regalist project via the promotion of historical, religious, scientific, and literary texts. Gil, for example, carved and designed many copperplates to illustrate collections of national architectural monuments, antiquities, and coins as well as to illustrate books of anatomy, engineering, religion, and literature (including editions of El Quijote and the Bible). Gil also designed dozens of commemorative medals and coins to celebrate the lives of monarchs as well as the myriad institutions these monarchs had created. Coins were not only currency but also non-ephemeral media to circulate like engravings.

*Don Quixote knighted by the innkeeper at the inn*. Jerónimo Antonio Gil design and engraving. Don Quijote (Ibarra, Madrid, 1780), via author.

Second, Donahue-Wallace shows that in the second half of the eighteenth century poor provincials could accumulate wealth, honor, and political power as artisans. Donahue-Wallace offers the biography of a metal caster, cutter, and engraver whose status did not come from originality and genius. Gil nevertheless became prestigious enough to direct a national art academy and wealthy enough to amass one of the largest private collections of paintings, books, scientific apparatus, and curiosities in late-eighteenth-century New Spain. A poor Zamorano punchcutter rose through the ranks of the state bureaucracy to achieve nobility and wealth.

Third, Donahue-Wallace suggests that there was greater room for pedagogical innovation in Mexico than in Madrid. Donahue-Wallace follows Gil both as a student of the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid and as the founder and director of the Academia de San Carlos in Mexico. Both academies were named after the monarchs that decreed their creation (Ferdinand VI and his half-brother Charles III, respectively). San Fernando operated both as a public school to train painters, sculptors, architects, and engravers and as the recruiting space of apprentices for professors. The young Gil received a public education in the evenings at San Fernando, where teachers checked his drawing skills before live models, casts, or prints. During the day, however, Gil went to the household of the school’s leading printer-medal caster. Gil worked for almost a decade as the criado of Tomas Francisco Prieto, one of the teachers of San Fernando. To declare independence from Prieto, the master patriarch, Gil had to create an alternate network of patrons. When Gil went to Mexico to lead the Academy of San Carlos, he deliberately eliminated the master-criado traditions of San Fernando. Going against the authority of the professors of architecture, painting, sculpture, and engraving, Gil created in Mexico an academy in which masters could not recruit students as apprentices. Gil engaged in a twenty-year long battle, until his death, with second-tier Spanish artists who saw themselves entitled to use the academy to get pliant, skilled labor. Gil created an academy of art in Mexico in which teachers received large enough salaries to be expected to be full-time professors, not freelance agents in search of apprentices and commissions.

Façade of the original Academy of San Carlos (built as a new school to train minters in the 1780s). Today it is the Museo Nacional de las Culturas (via author).

Fourth, Donahue-Wallace shows that Enlightenment modernity emerged organically out of the institutions of the ancien regime; it was not an outside competing force. The idea of a public sphere of circulating prints, for example, was a Bourbon strategic initiative. Artisans relied on the good will of patrons for employment, commissions, and success, not bourgeois anonymous market forces. Finally, those struggling to liberate the youth from the clutches of master-apprentice guilds behave like old-fashioned patriarchs themselves. Donahue-Wallace demonstrates that, for all the novelty of his pedagogy, Gil remained embedded in the patriarchal values of the ancien regime. Gil arrived in Mexico with the blueprints to build a mint school right next to the stables of the viceregal palace. He also arrived with an entourage of four students, two of whom were his own children. The original school immediately transmuted into the Art School of San Carlos, to train not only printers but also sculptors, painters, and architects. San Carlos went up as two-story elongated rectangular building, one-half of which was occupied by horse stalls and storage rooms for food, forage, and wood. The upper quarter was Gil’s residency, which included salons and cabinets for San Carlos’ official acts. The lower quarter held the school’s workshops and tool rooms. It also included four tiny rooms for criados. Gil kept his sons and assistants tied to his patriarchal control for some twenty years. For these four “students,” the Academy became a boarding school. As Gil’s criados they were not allowed to set up their own households.

Miguel Costansó, *Plano y projecto de una nueva oficina para la talla y troqueles de la Real Casa de Moneda*, 1779 (Archivo General de Indias,MP-MEXICO,770 – 1)

Donahue-Wallace has written an important text on the relationship between artisans and the Spanish Enlightenment on both shores of the Atlantic. The book follows Gil and his artifacts in painstaking detail and offers a wide panorama of an ancien regime struggling to catch up while unwittingly devouring itself.

Kelly Donahue-Wallace, Jerónimo Antonio Gil and the Idea of the Spanish Enlightenment (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017).

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Seeds of Empire, By Andrew Torget (2015)

By Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

Andrew Torget’s Seeds of Empire places the early history of nineteenth-century Texas squarely within the political economy of slavery, cotton, and geopolitics. Torget shows that Spanish Texas had become an utterly dysfunctional polity. A royalist bloody response to the creation of autonomous creole juntas almost led to the annihilation of the Tejano population. Tejas found itself unable to pay the Comanche tribute precisely at the time that the Mississippi River cotton boom required large imports of horses. Comanches raided the already weakened Tejanos.

Tejanos found in Anglo entrepreneurs like the Austin family a viable escape from a decades long crisis. The Austins brought Anglo, land-hungry colonists across the Sabine River into Eastern Texas in the early 1820s by offering legalized slavery. There were many Anglo land speculators around but none delivered what the Austin did, namely, cunning diplomatic work to keep republican, antislavery, federalist Mexicans and pro-slavery Anglo colonists moderately satisfied.

Stephen F. Austin (via Good Free Photos).

Torget describes the spatial partition of Texas that ensued. In the west, there were thin communities of Tejanos working as pro-slavery lobbyists in Coahuila and as importers of Anglo goods to satisfy the demands of La Bahia, Goliath, and San Antonio. In the east, there were swelling communities of Anglo settlers setting up plantations along the banks of the Colorado, Brazos, and Trinity, while churning out bales of cotton for New Orleans markets. Torget never explains why Tejanos did not themselves become cotton planters. There were Tejanos in Nacogdoches who monopolized the Comanche trade of horses and there were many well-off Tejano war-of-independence-refugees in New Orleans. Both could have used their political and commercial advantages to push Anglos out of the business of producing cotton with slaves, for Tejanos were not squeamish about slavery. For centuries Tejanos incorporated Apache criados (servants) into their household and drove thousands of Chichimeca captives into the silver mines of Parral and Zacatecas and into the cattle ranches of Nuevo Leon. Tejanos did not hesitate to feed the Caribbean royal galleys and fortifications with slaves. Be that as it may, a deep ethnic chasm did open between east and west Texas. This spatial and political balance, however, unraveled the moment the elites of Mexico City decided that they were losing control over the northern frontiers. Mexican conservatives, therefore, abolished slavery, terminated land contracts, and sent the army to remove the Anglo settlers.

Torget demonstrates that it was a small, fleeting tactical decision by Santa Ana that sealed the faith of Texas in 1835, as thousands of Anglo colonists were in fully disorganized retreat to the safety of the Louisiana border. At the Brazos, however, Santa Ana split his army into two fronts to block the retreating forces of Sam Houston from crossing the Sabine. Houston stopped fleeing and turned around to engage Santa Ana’s forces. This was the moment Texas became an independent republic nobody wanted, including the Anglo colonists. Tejanos were the ones who lost the most as useless lobbyists. They had to give up lands and the rights of citizenship.

William Henry Huddle’s painting, Surrender of Santa Anna, shows the Mexican general surrendering to a wounded Sam Houston after the battle of San Jacinto in 1836 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Torget shows that the Lone Star State remained an utterly nonviable state for a full decade (1835-45), trapped in the logic of much larger geopolitical balances that pitted Great Britain, the USA, and Mexico against one another. Five of these ten years, however, witnessed an unprecedented cotton boom in the Mississippi Cotton Kingdom. It brought tens of thousands of additional colonists and black slaves to the riverine banks of Eastern Texas and new merchant warehouses to the Galveston Bay. But the boom did not bring any changes in riverine infrastructure, a sovereign port, or a national merchant marine. There was no functioning state, no mechanism to collect taxes, and no diplomatic working corps.

Britain sought to convince Texans to gain diplomatic recognition by becoming a free-labor cotton republic. Texans responded by creating a constitution that banned any black person who had been manumitted from residing within the new nation. The United States had no interest in annexing Texas because it would upset the balance between northern and southern states.

Map of the United States, 1845 (via Wikimedia Commons).

The plight of Texas worsened as the cotton boom went bust in late 1839. The only thing that Texas did well was to organize militias to bleed the raiding Comanche. Torget explains how the geopolitical logjam was broken the moment France finally recognized Texas in 1844. To secure one of the most important sources of cotton for its economy, Britain had no choice but to also recognize Texas. It was only then that Anglo Texans got what they had always wanted: annexation into the United States. Incorporation delivered a functioning government, protection against international anti-slavery forces and Mexican invasions, and a windfall for land speculators as land prices rose to the equivalent of those in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Cotton, Slavery, and Empire are categories that explain rather well the origins of Texas as a white supremacist state, utterly dependent on the federal government from its very inception.

Andrew J. Torget. Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850. Charlotte: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

More by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra on Not Even Past:
Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States, by Felipe Fernández-Armesto (2014).
Re-Reading John Winthrop’s “City upon the Hill.”
Magical Realism on Drugs: Colombian History in Netflix’s Narcos.
Prof. Cañizares-Esguerra discusses his own book, Puritan Conquistadors.

Corpses, Canoes and Catastrophes: An 18th-Century Priest’s Resume

By Susan Zakaib

Sometime in 1737, a Catholic priest climbed into a canoe to save his parishioners’ souls.

The cleric in question, Bernardino Pablo López de Escovedo, was a humble vicario—a parish priest’s assistant—working in a parish called Xaltocan, north of Mexico City. Xaltocan’s head priest had fallen ill and abandoned his post, leaving López de Escovedo to handle the parish on his own.

The timing could not have been worse. A horrific epidemic—which would kill about 200,000 people by 1739—was devastating central Mexico, and by 1737 it had reached Xaltocan. As the area’s sole remaining cleric, López de Escovedo’s priority was to conduct confession for all his sick parishioners before they died. The task was not an easy one: so many died so rapidly that López de Escovedo had trouble keeping up. He became so busy giving last rites that, “three days of the week, he could not eat more than a mug of chocolate, from the… time when he went out—two in the morning—until he got back at eleven or twelve the next night…”

During his long working hours, López de Escovedo was surrounded by death. According to his account, his indigenous parishioners were afraid to touch the corpses of their brethren, and often refused to bring him the bodies of the dead. To ease their fears, “although dressed in a cloak and surplice, he lifted the dead with his own hands, placing them in the casket,” so that they could be buried. At other times, López de Escovedo brought the ill together so he could deliver last rites for all of them at the same time. To ensure that parishioners did not overhear one another during this private ritual, the priest “was obliged to use his sash to cover his face and that of the sick person, suffering the intolerable smell and sweat that they left imprinted upon his face…”

The Virgin of Guadalupe watches over the dead during the epidemic, which contemporaries referred to as “Matlazahuatl.” Fontispiece from Cayetano Cabrera y Quintero’s Escudo de Armas de México, 1746.

The epidemic soon reached a small island, which lay in the midst of the now-defunct Lake Xaltocan. In a little chalupa (a type of canoe), López de Escovedo and a sacristan (church caretaker) traversed the lake’s choppy waters to conduct confession for the island’s sick and dying. The stormy lake proved too much for the small boat: during the hour-and-a-half-long journey, “the waves came up with such ferocity that the boat was about to sink…” The sacristan “went along draining the canoe with his hat unceasingly,” and managed to keep them more or less afloat. Meanwhile, López de Escovedo found himself submerged in water, holding up the consecrated host in hopes of keeping it dry. Finally, they arrived at island and, “by the divine and immense piety of the Lord, even with all these dangers and discomforts… not one sick person died without having first received the Sacraments of Penance and Last Rites.” Many perished on that small island, but thanks to López de Escovedo’s dedication, every soul was prepared to enter the next life.

This story is remarkable in its detail and dramatic flair. Yet its source is not a novel or a historical opus; rather, it is part of López de Escovedo’s resume.

Given that the purpose of López de Escovedo’s resume was to impress his superiors, we can’t know for sure whether his tale is true. In colonial Mexico, priests who sought a benefice (paid jurisdiction over a parish) submitted méritos—lengthy resumes of anywhere from 3-10 pages–to a committee of ecclesiastical examiners. Priests used their méritos to state their qualifications and explain to these committees why they should receive a parish post. López de Escovedo may well have embellished his tale to portray himself as a hero; perhaps his parishioners saw his deeds in Xaltocan differently.

Regardless of their authenticity, stories like this one were common in the resumes of colonial-era priests. Most clerics used their méritos to state who their parents were, describe their educational background and academic accomplishments, list their previous parish experience, and note their accomplishments during past assignments. Like López de Escovedo, many also included stories about their experiences on the job. While most of these narratives were less hyperbolic than López de Escovedo’s, they tended to share similar characteristics: they highlighted the suffering these men had endured as parish priests, and their perseverance in the face of adversity.

While to modern readers the inclusion of such melodramatic episodes might seem counterintuitive, this was a sensible tactic in the context of the 18th-century Mexican Church. Most priests in central Mexico during this period owned a copy of the Itinerario para parochos de indios, a manual for priests’ duties written by Alonso de la Peña Montenegro, bishop of Quito, and first published in 1668. Montenegro quoted the decrees of the Council of Trent—another book that priests frequently carried with them—which stated that the duties of a parish priest were “such a laborious burden that the shoulders of angels were afraid to carry it.” He argued that shouldering this burden was a Christ-like act, since serving as a parish priest was “so difficult and overwhelming that Jesus Christ himself felt its incomparable weight” when he served as the pastor and guardian of disciples who he knew would betray him. Having learned from Montenegro that their hard work and sacrifices made them Christlike, many priests must have felt that the difficulty of administering parishes was what made the job worthwhile.

The Council of Trent meeting in Santa Maria Maggiore church, Trento (Trent). (Artist unknown; painted late 17th century). Via Wikipedia.

However, not all clerics included stories of pain and perseverance in their méritos. By far, clergymen who were relatively poor and undereducated were most likely to take this approach. Priests who were wealthy and very well-educated had plenty to boast about without resorting to dramatic tales: they could list their extensive academic achievements, mention the important people they knew, and describe the expensive gifts they had lavished upon their parish churches. Dr. Joseph Francisco Vásquez de Cabrera, who applied for a benefice in 1709, was one such cleric. Dr. Vásquez wrote in his méritos that he had not bothered to list his accomplishments in university, since he had always been at the top of his classes. Nevertheless, he spent pages painstakingly noting every examination, thesis defense, and public debate that he had completed during the course of his studies. He also stated that, during his time working as a parish priest, he had built a new chapel, adorned the altar, and added a “very expensive” sculpted silver and gold cross, among other generous donations.

Lacking such boast-worthy accomplishments, clergymen with fewer funds and degrees often highlighted their perseverance instead. In doing so, they proved that they had earned a promotion, that they were willing to undergo what they saw as Christlike suffering, and that they had what it took to fulfill their duties under harrowing circumstances. Hence López de Escovedo’s epic narrative. Although he had done well in school, his dismal finances prohibited him from continuing his academic career beyond his bachelor’s degree. With his vivid story, he sought to show that what he lacked in educational accolades, he made up for with nearly boundless dedication to the Church and to the spiritual wellbeing of his parishioners.

López de Escovedo’s strategy appears to have worked: after submitting his méritos in 1749, he received the benefice of Oapan, in modern-day Guerrero. Yet his success paled in comparison to that of Dr. Vásquez, who attained the benefice of Taxco in 1710. Also in Guerrero, Taxco was a much more desirable benefice than Oapan, with a significantly better salary. Although López de Escovedo’s gripping resume was enough to land him a job, his perseverance was no match for education and wealth.

This article was originally published on the author’s website on September 15, 2015

Material is from my forthcoming dissertation, “Built Upon the Tower of Babel: Language Policy and the Clergy in Bourbon Mexico,” The University of Texas at Austin, 2016. Méritos of Bernardino Pablo López de Escovedo and Joseph Francisco Vásquez de Cabrera are located in the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City (Bienes Nacionales 199, exp. 12 and Bienes Nacionales 338, exp. 2 respectively).

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