Indigenous Latin America Archives

Colonial Chalices: Colonial Latin America Through Objects (No. 4)

Chalice (Cáliz) Mexico City, 1575-1578 (via LACMA)

This series features five online museum exhibits created by undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin for a class titled “Colonial Latin America Through Objects.” The class assumes that Latin America was never a continent onto itself. The course also insists that objects document the nature of historical change in ways written archives alone cannot.

Lillian Michel’s exhibit focuses on colonial chalices, one of the most sacred objects of the Eucharist. Unlike many other colonial objects that incorporated indigenous techniques and materials, silversmiths charged with the production of chalices were strictly regulated. There was little room for the incorporation of indigenous materials, let alone indigenous religious sensibilities. Chalices therefore can better document the arrival of new European styles in art and architecture than changes in indigenous traditions.

More from the Colonial Latin America Through Objects series:

Of Merchants and Nature by Diana Heredia López
Nanban Art by John Monsour
Andean Tapestry by Irene Smith

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.

Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-Century Colombia, by Nancy P. Appelbaum (2016)

By Madeleine Olson

What occurs when elite driven narratives about national identity dramatically different differ from the realities people experienced? During the nineteenth century throughout Latin America, when national boundaries were just beginning to become coherent, the upper echelons of society constructed tales about their nations that often vastly differed from lived experiences.

Between 1850 and 1859, the Chorographic Commission traveled the territory of present day Colombia in an attempt to map the land and the people who lived there, using chorography, or detailed representations of a particular region. Sponsored by the government of New Granada (an older name for Colombia), the commission produced a wealth of maps, texts, illustrations, as well as travel journals and diaries, in order to construct the image of a unified nation. Implicit in the commission’s initial mandate was the assumption that it would justify the existing administrative order by making that order appear natural.

The visual culture it produced, however, depicted a nation that was far from cohesive, with regional individuality and diversity. Instead of portraying a unified nation, the commission presented the country as fragmented into different, and often opposing regions, inhabited by racially and culturally distinct races, that reinforced assumptions of Andean and white mestizo superiority. In this new book, Nancy Appelbaum expands our understanding of this central paradox, demonstrating that the commission’s materials reveal some of the ways that Colombian elites grappled with the challenges posed by varied topographies and diverse inhabitants.

The leaders of the Chorographic Commission included both foreign members and others who were born and bred in New Granada. Two of the key figures on the commission, whose writings play an important role throughout the book, were Agustín Codazzi and Manuel Ancízar. Born in Italy’s papal states and a Napoleonic war veteran, Codazzi was in fact first contracted to map the Venezuelan provinces, which had seceded from Gran Colombia, in 1830. The secession precipitated Gran Colombia’s dissolution into Venezuela, Ecuador, and New Granada. Manuel Ancízar, a Colombian lawyer, writer, and journalist, joined Codazzi on the Commission in 1850.

Gran Colombia and modern countries (via Wikimedia Commons).

Using personal correspondence between Codazzi and Ancízar, Appelbaum argues that although the creation of the commission reflected nationalist aspirations of the government, it was fundamentally shaped through its leaders’ own exposure to foreign culture. The geographic writings of Prussian Alexander von Humboldt, as well as Italian Adriano Balbi, strongly influenced Codazzi’s and Ancízar’s initial overviews, as they “draped themselves in the ‘mantle of Humboldtianism’ to emphasize their own scientific legitimacy.” Inspired by Humboldt, Codazzi divided the terrain of New Granada according to the differing altitudes, winds, and vegetables that he encountered. The ideological influence of Humboldt, together with Balbi’s schematic list methodology, helped the Commission create a novel and distinct approach to chorography that was more affordable than the fashionable trigonometric survey.

The detailed accounts produced by Codazzi and Ancízar on the commission’s initial expeditions to the highland region of Antioquia and the Pacific lowland, comprised not only field reports, but also included detailed watercolors created by the commission’s first illustrators in order to depict the populations they encountered. Through comparing the perceptions noted in the field reports with the pictorial representations, the tension comes out between the inclination to show these regions as homogenous when the commission clearly experienced great heterogeneity of the people and customs.

William Price, Typical Inhabitants of the Province of Medellín (via World Digital Library).

This visual culture reflected a literary and artistic current in nineteenth-century Latin America called costumbrismo, or using descriptive prose and dialogue to verbally paint a local scene, emphasizing the customs and particularities of that locale. Within these works, tipos “types” that organized the population into component parts defined by race, occupation, and place, were created to provide both a visual and discursive way to manage the heterogeneity that the commission encountered. In William Price’s Tipos de Medellin, the commission’s artists displayed idealized images of people one would encounter when visiting these places. These images of the racial types that the commission produced updated the eighteenth-century genre of casta paintings for the republican era.

As the commission moved into the tropical lowlands and the eastern plains, Appelbaum further elaborates how the illustrations were largely aimed at an external audience in order to attract immigrants and economic investment to the region. The commission’s efforts were not meant to simply represent the landscape, they were also to transform it in the service of economic advancement. Codazzi believed that these areas, rich in agriculture and livestock, could support many more people than their sparse, midcentury population. Elites defined the tropics, for instance, as being filled with disease, poverty, and backwardness, making it a desirable region for colonization and improved methods of production. The commission took on an ethnographic dimension, as studying the population became an integral part in determining the economic capabilities of the land. Reports, maps, and paintings that Codazzi, Ancízar, and others, produced provided abundant information aimed to facilitate the conquest of the regions they mapped and studied.

Manuel María Paz, Provincia del Chocó: Aspecto esterior de las casas de Nóvita (via World Digital Library).

Applebaum goes on to discuss the methods that mid-nineteenth-century intellectuals living in the highlands around Bogotá employed to rationalize their claim over the local populations. By emphasizing the glorious origins and civilization of the Andean region around Bogotá, at the expense of lower “savage” climates, intellectuals reinforced Bogotá’s claim over this topographically disparate territory. Codazzi projected national history into the ancient past by weaving geology, archeology, and history together and referencing the past as “history” rather than prehistory. They placed themselves, not the local indigenous populations, who ultimately were the Commission’s guides, at the top of the intellectual scale to read the cataclysmic past.

Carmelo Fernández, Piedra grabada de Gámesa. Provincia de Tundama (via World Digital Library).

After Codazzi died in 1859, elites left behind tried to make sense of his project and battled each other over meanings and representations of the nation. Although members of the commission had high hopes for the mass reproduction and circulation of the materials they produced, that did not occur. Chorography and the work of the Chorographic Commission died with Codazzi, supplanted later in the nineteenth century by newer forms of mapping which are still common today, such as topography.

Although the work that the Chorographic Commission created between 1850 and 1859 was not as widely received as hoped, the spatialized and racialized regional hierarchy inherent in its visual materials would be reproduced and refined within Colombian scholarly and popular discourse. By no means the originator of this fragmented discourse, the Commission’s cartographic project formed the basis for most maps of Colombia into the early twentieth century.

Gracefully written, integrating over thirty images and maps, Mapping the Country of Regions offers a fascinating window into both the visual culture produced during the nineteenth century in Colombia, and the ways that territories, boundaries, and state-lines are constructed. Appelbaum’s contextualization of her source base that she makes explicit within her analysis heightens her claims about the use of geographic, ethnographic, and visual methods to secure territory. This theme of racialization of geographic hierarchy is not solely limited to Colombia, as ideas about how race and region have historically informed each other throughout Latin America. The blending of analysis with visual representation enables this book to be of use for those interested in not only Latin American nation-state building, but this methodology of combining visual and textual analysis would be of value for anyone incorporating visual culture into their own work.

Nancy P. Appelbaum, Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016).

Also by Madeleine Olson on Not Even Past:
A Texas Historian’s Perspective on Mexican State Anticlericalism.

You may also like:
Antonio de Ulloa’s Relación Histórica del Viage a la America Meridional, by Haley Schroer.
Casta Paintings, by Susan Deans-Smith.

Painters, Pigments, and the Making of the Florentine Codex

When Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahagún arrived in New Spain (Mexico) in 1529, he embarked on an extraordinary project: the compilation of an encyclopedic compendium of the world of the Aztecs in the wake of the Spanish conquest a decade earlier.

Finally completed between 1576 and 1577 – essentially Sahagún’s life’s work – the result was the Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España (the General History of the Things of New Spain). Sometime between 1578 and 1584 the manuscript was taken to Spain and by 1588 Sahagún’s Historia found its way to Florence, part of the Medici family’s magnificent collections. How exactly the Historia came into Medici hands remains unclear but that is where it still resides today, in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, which explains how the Historia became more commonly known as the Florentine Codex.

Sahagún’s motivations for such an ambitious project can be found in his linked objectives to compose works in Náhuatl — the Aztecs’ main language — and to gain an understanding of the religious and cultural beliefs of the indigenous peoples in order to facilitate their meaningful conversion to Catholicism. Sahagún is often described as “the first anthropologist” or “ethnographer” because of the methods he employed in the collection and analysis of the information he gathered. His “ethnographic” practice included collaborations with indigenous elders as cultural informants from central Mexican towns. He also worked closely with Christianized young indigenous students and “grammarians” – indigenous scholars able to read and write in Latin, Spanish, and Náhuatl – and who Sahagún had taught in the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, a school established in 1536 specifically to educate the sons of indigenous elites in grammar, rhetoric, and theology.

Sahagún framed a series of questions for the indigenous elders on a wide range of topics that included their pre-conquest religion and rituals, natural history, education, and medicine, as well as on the Spanish conquest. The indigenous elders’ responses to Sahagún’s questions were recorded through their “paintings” — a pictographic and ideographic form of writing. The indigenous “grammarians” and scribes, in turn, translated their responses and transcribed them into Náhuatl written in the Latin alphabet. To complete the process, Sahagún provided abbreviated Spanish translations of the Náhuatl responses and indigenous artists or tlacuilo provided illustrations.

The Florentine Codex (folio 80) by Bernardino de Sahagún (1499-1590) . Via Wikimedia Commons.

This process is embodied in the characteristics and physical appearance of the Florentine Codex. Composed of twelve books, a total of some 2,400 pages of text accompanied by a staggering 2,468 ink and color illustrations, and organized by individual topic (e.g. “Book I. The Gods,” “Book VII. The Sun, Moon, and Stars and the Binding of the Years”), the result is a bilingual codex with its pages divided into two parallel columns of Náhuatl and Spanish text.

Although scholars have long acknowledged the inestimable value of the textual descriptions contained within the Florentine Codex, less attention has been paid to the illustrations in their own right. Fortunately, that is changing thanks to Diana Magaloni Kerpel’s innovative research and her insistence that we need to think about the Florentine Codex “as a work of art.” Her study illuminates the creative processes at work in the Florentine Codex and the indigenous artists behind them.

Sahagún identified by name the four indigenous “grammarians” and three scribes with whom he worked, but his illustrators remain anonymous. With meticulous attention to different artist’s techniques such as treatment of line, profiles and proportions of human figures, and how clothing was painted, Magaloni Kerpel identifies the hands of twenty-two painters at work in the Florentine Codex. Included in this number are four “well-trained” master painters. Based on their individual signature styles, Magaloni Kerpel names them Master of Both Traditions, Master of the Three-Quarter Profiles, Master of Long Noses, and Master of Complex Skin Coloring. In the case of the Master of Both Traditions, for example, Magaloni Kerpel argues that his figures show his mastery of both pre-Hispanic painting traditions and Renaissance techniques. But, even more tellingly, she observes how he used the two traditions to denote time and space – “indigenous past or the colonial present.” She also speculates that the painters may have represented themselves in the depictions of artists that appear in the Florentine Codex in Book XI, giving us an even more intimate sense of their individuality. Equally significant is her analysis (in collaboration with conservators) of the artists’ use of what she terms “symbolic colorants.” Colorants were made from both organic (plants, flowers, insects) and mineral pigments and both could be used to make similar colors. What mattered to the artists, however, were not just the colors but also their sources – from above the earth or below it –which endowed them with particular symbolic power. As Magaloni Kerpel argues, the images in the Florentine Codex should not be considered “as mere illustrations to the texts, but as self-contained visual narratives that sometimes revealed and sometimes concealed a world of their own.”

With a nuanced appreciation for the actual fabrication and materiality of the Florentine Codex, Magaloni Kerpel’s research is an outstanding example of scholars’ new approaches to the Florentine Codex. Paying attention to the illustrations as works of art and thinking about the codex as an artifact and not just as a text to be mined for information, helps us to understand in provocatively fresh ways not only its creation but also the cultural exchanges and collaborations unleashed by the Spanish conquest and its aftermath both locally and globally.

Works referred to and additional sources:

Diana Magaloni Kerpel, “Painters of the New World: The Process of Making the Florentine Codex” in Colors Between Two Worlds: The Florentine Codex of Bernardino de Sahagún, edited by Gerhard Wolf and Joseph Connors (Florence, 2011)

A video of a lecture by Diana Magaloni Kerpel

A digital version of the Florentine Codex can be accessed here and here.

An English translation of the Florentine Codex is available as Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, trans. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, 12 volumes (Salt Lake City, 2012).

On Sahagún as an ethnographer, see Miguel León-Portilla, Bernardino de Sahagún: The First Anthropologist (Norman, OK, 2002).

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