Rabasa Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier

8/19/2019 Rabasa Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier

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Writing Violence on the Northe

José Rabasa


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Latin America Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nations

Series editors:

Walter D. Mignolo, Duke University

Irene Silverblatt, Duke University Sonia Saldívar-Hull, University of

California at Los Angeles


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© Duke University PressAll rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Designed by C. H. Westmoreland Typeset in Monotype Garamond by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Dataappear on the last printed page of this book.


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Contents

ix

xi

xiii

On Writing Violence: An Introduction

. Reading Cabeza de Vaca, or How We Perpetuatethe Culture of Conquest

. The Mediation of the Law in the New Mexico Corpus,–

. Aesthetics of Colonial Violence: The Massacre of Acomain Gaspar de Villagrá’s Historia de la Nueva México

. Violence in de Soto Narratives: Moralistic Terrorism inOviedo’s Historia general

. ‘‘Porque soy indio’’: Subjectivity in Garcilaso’s La Florida del Inca

. Of Massacre and Representation: Painting Hatred andCeremonies of Possession in Protestant Anti-SpanishPamphleteering

Epilogue: Before History


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About the Series

Latin America Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nations isacriticalseries.It aims to explore the emergence and consequences of conceptsused to dene ‘‘Latin America’’ while at the same time exploringthe broad interplay of political, economic, and cultural practicesthat have shaped Latin American worlds. Latin America, at thecrossroads of competing imperial designs and local responses, has

been construed as a geocultural and geopolitical entity since thenineteenth century.This series provides a starting point to redeneLatin America as a conguration of political, linguistic, cultural,and economic intersections that demands a continuous reappraisalof the role of the Americas in history, and of the ongoing pro-cess of globalization and the relocation of people and cultures thathave characterized Latin America’s experience. Latin America Other-

wise: Languages, Empires, Nations is a forum that confronts estab-lished geocultural constructions, that rethinks area studies and dis-ciplinary boundaries, that assesses convictions of the academy andof public policy, and that, correspondingly, demands that the prac-tices through which we produce knowledge and understandingabout and from Latin America be subject to rigorous and criticalscrutiny.

InWriting Violence on the Northern Frontier, José Rabasa develops theconcept of writing violence, a practice thathe places in the conict-ing writing systems of the early modern/colonial world. Rabasaopens his reection on writing violence with a discussion of twopassages drawn from the anonymous Amerindian work Historia de Tlatelolsco desde los tiempos más remotos and Bartolomé de las Casas’s Brevísima relación de la destrucción de Indias, which set the stage for a

display of violence in narrative forms as well as in narration itself These passages, representativeof pre-Columbian and colonial peri-ods, enable Rabasa to dene the particular modes the conjunctionbetween writing andviolenceassumed during the Spanish conquestof the Americas. The epilogue to this volume is a tour-de-force in which history


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and subaltern studies are no longer conceived as representations ofthe subaltern but rather as producers of subalternity. Moreover, by underscoring characteristics of the early modern/colonial period,including the making of the Atlantic world and the emergence of modern forms of capital accumulation, Rabasa challenges the con-ception of history—expressed in South Asian Subaltern Studies—that attributes the beginnings of modernity to the age of Enlight-enment. In sum, Rabasa has constructed a compelling dialoguebetween Subaltern Studies in the Americas and South Asia; be-tween the colonial legacies of the European Renaissance in theAmericas and of the European Enlightenment in Asia.

x About the Series


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Figures

. Andrés Serrano,Cabeza de Vaca, . . ‘‘Mapa de Miguel indio,’’ . . Enrique Martínez, ‘‘Razguño de las provincias de la nueuaMexico,’’ .

. Abraham Ortelius, Americae sive Novi orbis, nova descriptio. . ‘‘A bison,’’ . . ‘‘The garroting of Atahualpa,’’ . . Théodore de Bry, ‘‘The garroting of Atahualpa,’’ . . Théodore de Bry, Atabaliba Rex Peruanus à Francisco Pizarro capitur,

. . Théodore de Bry, Atabaliba de suo litro persolvendo cum Francisco

Pizarro paciscitur, . . Théodore de Bry, Atabaliba, side accepta se liberatum iri, ad diversa loca suos ablegat adferendi auri & argenti causa, . . Théodore de Bry, Franciscus Pizarrus, contra dem datam, Atabalibae gulam laqueo frangi jubet, . . ‘‘Indians in pink,’’ . . Théodore de Bry, ‘‘Indians in chiaroscuro,’’ . . Giorgio Vasari,The Night of St. Bartholomew, ca. .

. François Dubois d’Amiens, La Saint Barthelemy à Paris,ca. . . Jacques Le Moyne, Laudonnierus et Rex Athore ante columnam prima navigatione locatam quamque veneratur Floridenses, ca. . . Jacques Le Moyne,Gallorum Prefectus columnam, in qua Regis Galliarum insignia, statuit, ca. .

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Acknowledgments

This project could not have been completed without the intellectualsupport of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group. I amespe-cially indebted to Patricia Seed, Sara Castro-Klarén, Abdul KarimMustapha, Walter D. Mignolo, Ileana Rodríguez, John Beverley,and Javier Sanjinés, who made incisive readings of parts of this work. I presented versions of the chapters at a number of confer-

ences and lectures where I received comments and critiques from which I beneted greatly. Because it is impossible to name all whcontributed, I will limit myself to mentioning Maureen Ahern andDan Reff, who commented on chapters pertaining to New Mexicoand generously shared their work with me. Although it might sur-prise them to hear me admit it, my colleagues in the Departmentof Romance Languages at the University of Michigan provided an

exciting intellectual climate that made the writing of this book achallenge. My special thanks go to Santiago Colás, William Paulson, and Catherine Brown. The comments of editors and anony-mous readers of Poetics Today and College Literature and the editorialguidance of Patricia Galloway and William Taylor have all proveinvaluable. I thank my students at the University of Maryland, theUniversity of Michigan, and Berkeley, who challenged me in semi

nars I taught on sixteenth-century New World historiography. My wife and friend, Catherine Durand, read the manuscript and calledmy attention to passages that seemed unnecessarily dense, if notmystifying, for the nonacademic reader. I am also grateful to TomBoggs and Monica Weinheimer for reading the introduction with‘‘lay eyes.’’ Anna More read the manuscript with an editorial eythatwent beyond the mechanicsof the English languagebymaking

suggestions where my thoughts needed further development andclarication. I am solely responsible for the nal form. And Magaliand Pablo reminded me of the joys of play.

I am also grateful to the following for their assistance and guid-ance in their archives andcollections: ArleneShy (WilliamL. Clem-ents Library, University of Michigan), Magdalena Canellas Anoz


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(Archivo General de Indias),Florence Brouillard (Bibliothèque Na-tionale de France), Wayne Furman (New York Public Library), andAlessandra Corti (Alinari Archivi).

Chapters , , , and are revisions of essays that rst appearas described as follows. Chapter is an extensively revised vesion of ‘‘Allegory and Ethnography in Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufra- gios and Comentarios,’’ which appeared in Violence, Resistance, and Sur-vival in the Americas: Native Americans and the Legacy of Conquest, ed.Franklin Pease and William Taylor (Washington, DC: SmithsonianInstitution Press, ). Chapter , ‘‘Aesthetics of Colonial Vilence: The Massacre of Acoma in Gaspar de Villagrá’s Historia de la Nueva Mexico,’’ appeared in College Literature : ( ). Chapter is adapted from an article appearing inThe Hernando de Soto Expedi-tion: History, Historiography, and ‘‘Discovery’’ in the Southeast, ed. PatriciaGalloway, reprinted by permission of the University of NebraskaPress. © University of Nebraska Press. Chapter , ‘‘Porque Indio: Subjectivity in La Florida del Inca,’’ appeared in Poetics Today

: ( ).

xiv Acknowledgments


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On Writing Violence:An Introduction

Two brief passages offer points of entry for reecting on the con-junction between writing and violence that grounded the Spanishconquest of the Americas in the sixteenth century and continues tohaunt us all, even today. Before quoting the passages, I rst pro-

vide frames of reference that lend the citations their epigrammati-cal quality. The rst passage comes from the anonymous Historia de Tlatelolco

desde los tiempos más remotos (ca. ), arguably the rst Nahuatl textusing the Latin alphabet. Tlatelolco belonged to the same ethnicgroup as Tenochtitlan, the Mexica, but as a result of a civil war, Tlatelolco became a tributary of Tenochtitlan in . Today a

avenue in Mexico City separates these formerly independent citiesAlthough we do not have the original pictorial manuscript, theHis-toria de Tlaltelolco records an oral rendition of a pictographic history of this central Mexican city from its beginnings—desde los tiempos más remotos (from the most remote times)—in Aztlan (the mythi-cal origin of the Nahua peoples located in the northern frontier of New Spain, the present-day U.S. states of New Mexico and Ari-

zona) to the surrender of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco to the Span-iards in .Tlatelolco, like many other cities and ethnic groupscentral Mexico, provided warriors andsettlers for the Spanish colo-nization of the north starting in the s. The second quotation is from the entry on Hispaniola in Bar-

tolomé de Las Casas’s Brevíssima relación de la destruyción de Indias ( ).As implied by the title, the Brevíssima is a short tract that covers

all the areas in the Indies under Spanish rule up until , whit was rst published in Spanish. In reading the Brevíssima we haveto keep in mind that it is a political pamphlet intended to bring tothe attention of the Crown the atrocities its subjects were commit-ting in the New World. Not once in the Brevíssima does Las Casasprovide the name of a specic conquistador, thereby placing the


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blame for the destruction of the Indies on the institution of con-quest itself and not on the abuses of particular conquistadores.ThisDominican friar, however, also wrote a history that documentedthe specic atrocities, an anthropology that compared Amerindianand Old World societies, and theological tracts that theorized onthe meaning and practice of evangelization. Let this broad outlineof Las Casas suffice for now. Each of the chapters in this book addresses different aspects of Las Casas’s work and his legacy. The two passages share a nonconventional use of the term writ-

ing. As written expressions, these passages also convey the specicnature of speech as a bodilyact, that is, a temporal present in which

tone, gesture, dress, but also other accoutrements such as swords,horses, cannons, trumpets, conchs, war cries, and even mutilationsare integral to verbal performances. Indeed, these passages sug-gest a historical continuum in which speech is both at the originand at the end of writing. Note that the apparentlyarbitrary changeof verb tense in the Historia de Tlatelolco makes sense once this textis understood as a primer for oral performance. The two passages

also lend themselves to a clarication of the differences betweenthe ways writing and power were articulated in the pre-Columbianperiod and under Spanish rule.

Here is the quotation from the Historia de Tlatelolco: Then the Mexica, whose wives were Colhuaque, examined each

other: the women had brought their writings on amate paper. Andthe women, who had taken husbands there, brought their husbands’ writings on amate.

Then they consult each other and they say: ‘‘Where should we go What should we project? Since we are not dead, we can still let yoknow what wewill do. Gather together, collect all thewritings of theColhuaque that we have brought with us.’’

When they had collected all the writings onamate paper, they lled[the statue made of sticks] with pigweed paste, they covered it withamate paper, they placed a head on it and they displayed it there forthe rst time.Then they made music and composed there the follow-ing chant:

By Iztacaltzinco was renewed our mountain made of amate, after [the statue] had been fabricated anew by hand in one night. On a plain was our mounta

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made of amate paper fabricated by hand. Return again Nanociuatzin, he who bears the name of people. Allalleuaye! On a plain was our mountain madeamate paper fabricated by hand.

The Coyouacatl, the Coyolhuacatl hear the song, whose soundreaches far. And they immediately call to arms: ‘‘Oh, Tepaneca! Letus reprehend them. Are there still too many Mexica? They are wrongin calling to arms.’’1

Now the quotation from Las Casas:Otros y todos los que querían tomar a vida cortávanles ambas manosy dellas llevavan colgando, y dezíanles andad con cartas (conviene

saber) lleva las nuevas a las gentesque estaban huydas por los montes.(Las Casas [ ]: )[To others, and all those they wanted to capture alive, they would cutboth hands and would hang them round their necks, and would say ‘‘Go with the letters’’ (meaning) take the news to the people hiding inthe mountains.]

From a narrow Western understanding of writing as the record-ing of phonemes by means of an alphabet, the glyphs and paintingson bark paper called amatl, the amoxtli (book of writing) mentionedin the Historia de Tlatelolco are not writing.2 We can nevertheless rec-ognize in this founding story of the Mexica a connection betweenamoxtli and power. By recording dialogue, the Historia de Tlatelolco evokes an oral performance only to erase it, yet in citing the songin reproducing sound ( Allalleuaye! ), the Historia de Tlatelolco consti-tutes speech not only as its historical origin but also as the only way of keeping language alive, of curtailing the violence of alphabetical writing that xes orality.

In the second quotation, Las Casas speaks of the Indians’ muti-lated hands as if they were letters to be taken to other Indianshiding in the mountains.This understanding of writing is not only unconventional, but also identies writing with violence. Mutila-tion as a letter identies a form of writing that effects violence inthe process of its inscription as well as of its reception. In sendingIndians with severed hands hanging from their necks, the Chris-tians devised a heinous form of speech as bodily act in that the ‘‘let-ter’’ at once summons the Indians to recognize the new regime of

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law and conveys the force that will make the ‘‘news’’ effective. Ithe Brevíssima we learn from Las Casas that such uses of terror only led Indians to become maroons, and thus choose freedom over lifeitself.

According to the Historia de Tlatelolco, a history in Nahuatl ap-parently written in , the Mexica built a statue of Nanociuazin (a god who immolated himself to give rise to the fth sun,the last era in Nahua cosmogony) using the amoxtli that the Col-hua women had brought along with them when they intermarried with the Mexica. It is mind-boggling to imagine sixteenth-centuryNahuas using alphabetical writing to tell this founding story of

Mexico-Tenochtitlan in the midst of the fury of the missionaries who wished to destroy theirculture by burning their precious booksand breaking revered sculptures representing their gods.3 One canimagine the Nahuas wondering why the missionaries would burnthe amoxtli when they could be used to make crucixes and stat-ues of the Virgin. Nothing, perhaps, was more shocking to theNahuas writing the Historia de Tlatelolco than the Spanish will to

totally destroy their culture following Hernán Cortés’s military defeat of Tenochtitlan in . Yes, the so-called Aztecs are known burning the archives of the places they colonized, but my point isnot toopposenor toequatedestruction inSpanishand Amerindianideologies of war and conquest. The use of the amoxtli to make thestatue of Nanociuatzin testies to the power of writing among theNahuas. Was the making of the statue another modality of writing

for the Nahuas? If so, then, what is writing? More specically, whatdo we mean by writing violence in early modern colonialist dis-courses? Clearly, Spanish rule in the Americas involved more thanmilitary victory and sheer destruction.

In the course of the sixteenth century, Spanish colonial law leg-islated against using violent means to convert Indians to Chris-tianity. Legislation prescribed forms of converting and subjecting

Indians to Christianity and Spanish rule known today in academiccircles by the term ‘‘peaceful conquest’’ (see, e.g., R. Adorno , ; Poole , ; Powell , ; Hanke

cent scholars have used this term not only to paraphrase the Span-ish rhetoric of empire, but also to endorse practices prescribed bythe colonial laws. This oxymoron functions as an ironic trope that



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turns the act of conquest into a ‘‘good thing’’ as long as the con-quistadores follow the rules of peaceful colonization. Thus, thisstory line opposes ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad’’ conquistadores. When taken toits nal consequences, the oxymoron peaceful conquest entails thecontradictory notion that because there were colonial laws intendedto curtail the abuse of Indians, one cannot speak of colonialism in thesixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish Americas.The oxymoronic nature ofpeaceful conquest prompts an oppositional mode of inquirybasedonanunderstandingofviolencenotlimitedtoactsof war, but also including symbolism, interpretation, legislation, andother speech acts that scholars in different academic quarters refe

toasthe force of law.4

In chapter , I examine how literary critics, lm-makers, and ction writers have construed Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca as a proponent of peaceful conquest. These readings ignorehow the Naufragios and theComentarios embodya culture of conquest in-sofar as Cabeza de Vaca portrays himself as a benevolent and lawabiding conquistador. Cabeza de Vaca’s discourses on peaceful ap-proaches to conquest lose their originality and uniqueness once we

realize that he repeats the Ordenanzas of , a body of laws prscribing the fair treatment of Indians to the letter. Let us recall thatthese Ordenanzas didnot bar exerting violenceagainst Indians, butrather prescribed the protocols for waging just wars.

Las Casas’s Brevíssima is arguably the most inuential text on thedevelopment of Spanish colonial laws. There is more to the pas-sage linking mutilation with writing than a denunciation and in-

dictment of Spain’s atrocities in the Americas.5

However hideousthis act might seem to our sensibility, in the context of Las Casas,and sixteenth-century readers in general, mutilation amounts to anatrocity only if it is deemed unjust. The ‘‘letter’’ forces us to revisLouis Althusser’s classic formulation of interpellation, in which bymerely responding to a policeman who shouts ‘‘Hey, you there!’one subordinates oneself to dominant ideology. In Las Casas’s ex-

ample of colonial interpellation, the utterance must be revised tosay, ‘‘Hey, you there, subordinate yourself to the Crown or I’ll kilyou.’’6 But even before the ‘‘letter’’ conveyed the ‘‘news,’’ the newregime of law had already interpellated Indians by constitutingthem as inferior humans destined to serve the Spaniards.The maincontentious issue of the Brevíssima is the right of the conquistadores

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to demand that Indians subject themselves to the Spanish Crownand the further right to wage war against Indians if they refusedto subordinate themselves. It was not the act of mutilation itself that was central to Las Casas’s argument (as we will see later, torture, mutilation, and massacre remain viable modes of interpella-tion under laws prescribing peaceful colonization), but the validityof summoning Indians to surrender their political sovereignty andrecognize a new regime of law. Although papal bulls granted Spainsovereignty over the Indies for the purpose of evangelizing Amer-indians, it did not follow for Las Casas that Indians were to bepolitically subjected to the Crown or forced to accept Christianity

The Crown, in turn, co-opted Las Casas’s denunciation and callfor love and peaceful approaches to evangelization in the NuevasLeyes (New Laws) of and the Ordenanzas of (see cter ). Let these statements on Las Casas stand as provocations fofurther thought on the signicance of this great thinker.

Hate speech is pervasive, indeed, constitutive of colonial situa-tions, but the implantation of colonial rule and the subordinationof colonial subjects cannot be reduced to a modalityof hate speech.‘‘Love speech’’ is as central to colonization as spurting offensive yinjurious stereotypes.The challenge is to understand love speech as

a powerful mode ofsubjection and effective violence.The most evi-dent example is the declaration of love ‘‘We bring you the gift ofChrist’s blood,’’ which is bound by the implicit obligation to acceptthe offering. This interpellation constitutes a form of love speechin which threat on the Indians’ life and freedom (even when not explicit) always remains a possibility within the historical horizon ithe summoning is not heeded. Whereas Las Casas’s marooned in-

surgents attest that the initial call missed its mark, the mutilatedIndians not only reiterate the interpellation but also illustrate thekinds of compelling force the Spaniards will use to establish their au-thority. Violence, force, or power is integral to the law and notsimply an external instrument for its enforcement. The interpel-lated subjects have no option but to accept the terms of their subor-



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dination, the categories that dene them as inferior, and the insti-tutions that reorganize their life.We can furthermore denesymbolic violence as writing that has the performative power to establish laws. The colonial order, however, never quite succeeded in effecting themagical act whereby colonial subjects forget that colonial rule oflaw has been imposed on them, as would be the case in the Althusserian understanding of interpellation (cf. Bourdieu : )the language of violence was increasingly rareed in the SpanishCrown’s evolving codes of laws, the task then is to understandhow, in new legal codes that prescribed peaceful colonization, vio-lence was effected on a symbolic level. Thus, chapter argues tha

Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo’s condemnation of de Soto has lessto do with a ‘‘change of heart’’ toward the Indians than with thenew legal framework introduced by the Nuevas Leyes of .Threcontextual frames tend to accompany Oviedo’s allusions and ref-erences to the Nuevas Leyes: ( ) a condemnation of the behavioof Spaniards (specically those he does not hold in high regard tobegin with); ( ) an implicit questioning of the reformist program

in the Nuevas Leyes by laying the blame for the Indians’ deaths ontheir idolatry, sodomy, and weak intellects; and ( ) a direct critiquof the power of the Dominican order (concretely, Bartolomé de lasCasas). Consequently, the Nuevas Leyes function as a code Oviedogrudgingly accepted but used to advance his own policies. In thenal analysis, Oviedo’s denunciation of de Soto reproduced on asymbolic level the same violence he condemned.

Even if laws generated by the amorphous bureaucratic machin-ery known as ‘‘the Crown’’ bear the signature of the king, we cannot identify the king as the sovereign origin of power. Law intro-duces structures that seek to guarantee the objectivity of its officers,to dene the kinds of discourses explorers will produce, to regulatethe terms for subjugating Indians; this list exemplies the many ways of exercising power that exceed the individuals who utter in

terpellatory statements, review juridical cases, and write accounts The Brevíssima also manifests this diffusion of sovereign power inits refusal to identify the individuals responsible for the atroci-ties. Here it is not an issue of ‘‘good’’ versus ‘‘bad’’ conquistadorebut of denouncing the institution of conquest itself. Furthermore,Las Casas interpellates Prince Philip, who would become king of

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Spain in , by demanding that the Crown take responsibility fthe atrocities committed in the Indies—for allowing them to con-tinue after the king had been informed of their occurrence—andby declaring that no argument could be made to justify waging waragainstIndians.LasCasastellsusthathedecidedtopublishthe Bre-víssima ten years after he had written the original account and orally presented it at the court, so that Philip II would be able to read it without difficulties: ‘‘Delibere . . . poner en molde . . . para que conmás facilidad vuestra alteza las pueda leer’’ [I decided . . . to printhem . . . so that your majesty can read them with greater ease] ([ ]: ).

Let me briey return to the foundational story in the Historia de Tlatelolco to illustrate three working concepts that clarify what Imean by writing violence and the violence of writing.

Beyond the Alphabet This story of the Mexica paper statue warns us against identifying

the concept of writing violence with the use or the adoption of theLatin alphabet. The passage illustrates how writing violence is exercized by other forms of writing and exemplies how the Latinalphabet is only a tool. As do all tools, alphabetical writing affectthe mind and body of its users, and yet the expansion of the powerof communication that comes with its adoption does not automati-cally exclude earlier forms of communication and understanding

theworld.The use of the alphabet to narrate the Historia de Tlatelolco suggests that the colonizing force of alphabetical writing resides inthe ideologies that inform its dissemination and the rules that im-plement scriptural projects, rather than in the technology itself.7 Inthis context, it is worth citing Michel de Certeau’s denition of themodern scriptural enterprise in which the alphabetand the pageareincidental, actually metaphors for a capitalist mode of production:

‘‘The island of the page is a transitional place in which an industrial inversion is made: what comes in is something ‘received,’ whacomes out is a ‘product.’ . . . Combining the power of accumu-lating the past and that of making the alterity of the universe con- form to its models, [the scriptural enterprise] is capitalist and con-quering’’ (Certeau : ).The task, then, for understanding h



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the modern scriptural economy effects violence is to identify rulefor the production of knowledge and the articulation of the world,rules intended to discipline the bodies and selves of a new classof writers known in the Spanish world as letrados (literally, the let-tered ones). One could further argue along with Certeau that thealphabet is not onlya technologyused for writing laws that inscribebodies with precepts and prohibitions, but is also a tool that marksthe user by developing postures, muscles, and sensorimotor func-tions. Moreover, I do not see why these undeniable physical trans-formations should be considered more signicant than the changesbrought about by horses, diet, dress, architecture, and other prac-

tices of everyday life—let alone punishment, mutilation, torture,and massacre (see Certeau : – ). Certeau goes on tovelop the metaphor of reading as poaching in which ‘‘every readeinvents in texts something different from what they [the authors]‘intended’ ’’ ( ), a suggestion that is contextualized by JohannFabian’s statement that ‘‘imperial designs have been served, inadvertently or not, by thinking literacy mainly as the capacity to write

while neglecting that any literacycan of course only have the insidi-ous effect we ascribe to it when what is written is also read. Wheliteracy ceases to be understood as the one-way activity of inscribing this must have consequences for the global assessment of lit-eracy as an instrument of domination’’ ( : – ). Both Cerand Fabian underscore the need to reect on the different practicesof reading, which obviously cannot be limited to the disembodied

modalities of reading that have prevailed in the West since the eigh-teenth century.8 I would add that the transformation of the body that results from the adoption of Western practices need not neces-sarily annul previous habitsand formsof viewing the world,or fore-close the development of new styles of riding, cooking, dressing,dwelling, and, of course, also of writing and reading.

Let us recall that although the missionaries burned native writ-

ings in the early years of the conquest, by the early s Spanadministrators were encouraging and even sponsoring the produc-tion of texts using glyphs. It is worth keeping in mind that thealphabet does not stand for or take the place of glyphs, but repro-duces speech.The eventual decay ofpictographic writing has less todowith the adoption of the alphabet than with the disappearance of

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institutions that trained painters and interpreters who preserved ahermeneutic tradition (see Gruzinski : – ). The art of reing, of giving an oral performance following paintings, went wellbeyond the identication ofglyphs. From a contemporary perspec-tive, the identication of glyphs is a relatively simple task whencompared with the elucidation of the kinds of oral performancesthat interpreted the pictorial texts. Even when wehave such perfor-mances, their meaning often remains inaccessible, especially whenno effort was made to translate the spoken text to Western cate-gories. The Historia de Tlatelolco is an instance where the interpreta-tion of verbal language recorded by means of the alphabet presents

more difficulties for a twentieth-century Western reader than theidentication of units of meaning in the kinds of pictographic textsalphabetically literate Nahuas followed in writing an oral perfor-mance.

In the case of acts of war, the machinery of terror—the inscrip-tional power of whipping, hanging, mutilation, torture, or mas-sacre—entails a series of legal instruments that found as well as

conserve colonial rule. The best known is the Requerimiento, thatinfamous interpellation whereby conquistadores and missionariesvia their makeshift interpreters—that is, in the best of scenarios—explained to Indians that (to paraphrase) God created the world,that all men were descendants of Adam and Eve, that God hadchosen Saint Peter to represent him on earth and rule over all men,and nally that Saint Peter’s authority had been passed down a lin

of popes until a recent one who granted the kings of Spain sov-ereignty over their lands. The Requerimiento goes on to give Indi-ans the choice of recognizing the Spanish Crown as their legitimateruler or facing war and slavery. The voice of the conquistador sig-nals a chain of sovereign subjects from which he derives his power—a regress that goes back to king to pope to Saint Peter to God. Asin Las Casas’s ‘‘letter,’’ the convincing element of this voice resides

in the display of the military force integral to the speech act—thebodily act—that performs the interpellation.Whether read in earn-est or not, the logic of the Requerimiento exerts symbolic violenceon Indians by giving them no option but to surrender or be cast ashostile in Spain’s imperial historical telos. The Requerimiento men-



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tions documents, the papal bulls, that the conquistador utteringthe speech act would be willing to share with the addressed Indi-ans, but we would be hard pressed to argue that the illocutionaryforce of the Requerimiento, its violence as a performative speech act,resides in its alphabetical nature rather than in the theatricality ofits reading, in its oralization. Once Indians gave their obedienceto the Crown, they were distributed among the conquistadores inencomiendas, a system of tribute in which Christian benefactors hadthe responsibility of looking after the Indians’ spiritual health. Al-though the force of arms is inseparable from the founding as wellas the conservation of Spanish sovereignty, the ideal subject would

understand the truth of the Requerimiento and the benets of the en-comienda out of his or her own volition.Under domination, subaltern subjects are bound—in their com-

munications and exchanges with colonial authorities—to the in-struments of colonial law without being forced to abandon socialspaces informed by non-Spanish legal institutions encapsulated, ifnot reied, under the concept of usos y costumbres (uses andcustoms).

The Spanish Crown recognized this form of plural-world dwell-ing when it prescribed that lay officers and missionaries investigate Indian usos y costumbres and apply them in cases involving dis-putes among Indians. Usos y costumbres also provided informationon precontact indigenous patterns of tribute, systems of slavery,delineations of boundaries, sexual alliances, and so on that estab-lished antecedents thatwould naturalize andlegitimize, if not legal-

ize, colonial institutions replicating these structures of power. Upto the present, for instance in the context of the debates betweenthe Zapatistas and the Mexican government, the denition of usos y costumbres remains a source of dispute (both within the indige-nous communities and in negotiations with the state) because it re-tains the traces of its colonial origins.There is, nevertheless, a radical difference between discussing the validity of usos y costumbres in

terms of Western legal and anthropological apparatuses, and dis-cussing that validity within the indigenous communities in Indianlanguages and conceptual frameworks. By necessity, subaltern subjectsdwell inat least twoworlds; that is, they live theusos ycostumbres,they do not just discuss them.

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Savage Literacy, Domesticated Glyphs

Alphabetical writing does not belong to the rulers; it also circulatesinthemodeofasavage literacy.Bearing no trace of Spanish interven-tion in its production, the Historia de Tlatelolco exemplies a form of grassroots literacy in which indigenous writers operated outside thecircuits controlled by missionaries, encomenderos, Indian judges andgovernors, or lay officers of the Crown.9 Byall appearances, theHis-toria de Tlatelolco was written to perpetuate the history and identity of the Tlatelolcans. It depicts the Spanish conquest as motivated ex-clusively by greed, and makes no reference to the importation of

Christianity—pure violence, as it were, without ideology. On theother hand, it represents the Tenochcas, who had subjected the Tla-telolcans in the previous century, murdering each other in a totalstate of social anomie. In the best of the pre-Columbian traditions,it is local history.10 Asforthosegroupsofpaintersandwritersoper-ating under the supervision of missionaries or lay Spaniards, theirinterests were more often than not in conict. Within these power

struggles, glyphs could both lend legitimacy to colonial institu-tions as well as rhetorically enhance the information glyphs con-tained regarding patterns of tribute and forms of slavery and otherusos y costumbres purportedly dating back to the pre-Columbian past. What could more powerfully constitute a link between the enco-mienda and tribute patterns before the conquest than an indigenouspictographic record (see Rabasa b)? If it is true that glyph

were glossed, I must insist again that writing records speech abouthe image, not the image itself; it does not substitute for the forceof paintings, especially in those cases where the use of glyphs fullled the rhetorical function of certifying the validity of the infor-mation. At any rate, the end product of glyph and alphabet is theiroralization in reading and interpretation; otherwise, both systemsremain mute.The oralization ofwriting cannotbe isolated fromthe

cultures of reading specic to historical moments, social groups,professions, and elds.11 The story of the Mexica founding moment can be read as a meta-

phor of how alphabetical writing reies history by reducing to oneoral performance the endless possible stories that could be told fol-lowing glyph-scripted narratives. But the Historia de Tlatelolco also



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mimics the making of the statue as it produces a new whole by aggregating stories representative of different genres of Nahua his-torical writing, which most likely were derived from independentamoxtli: an itineraryhistory that traced Nahuas’ origins to the north-ern region of Chicomostoc or Aztlan, a dynastic account of Tla-telolco, an annal of the rise of Mexica hegemony under the TripleAlliance of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan (which includedthe subjection of Tlatelolco), and the new historical genre designedto tell of the destruction brought about by the Spanish invasion (seeBoone ; Quiñones Keber ). As the record of an oral perfomance, theHistoria deTlatelolco included songs and dialogues as well

as the historical narration ofevents.We may assumethat the Nahuasread the Historia de Tlatelolco as they did their pinturas, that is, as anoral performance of a narrative that could lead to further interpre-tation and production of texts both oral and written. This wouldentail the kind of collective author as well as reader that BruceMannheim andKristaVanVleet ( ) have identied in contemporary Southern Quechua narrative.We can further trace this mode of

collectively authored and read Nahua histories in other Nahua textssuch as Leyenda de los soles (a cosmogony) and Fernando Alvarado Tezozómoc’s Crónica mexicáyotl. By contrast, dialogical productionplays no part in the work of other authors, such as Fernando deAlva’s Historia de la nación Chichimeca or Fray Diego de Duran’s Histo-ria de la Nueva España e Islas deTierra Firme, which, although they fol-low pictorial histories, incorporate the information into a historical

narrative in the guise of Western Romance both in their plot struc-ture and their representations ofspeech; furthermore, theyare writ-ten from the point of view of an individual author. As we will see inchapter , Garcilaso deconstructs his rendition of an Indian mono-logue by indicating that Indians speak collectively, not individu-ally, thereby exposing the violence the conventions of Romanceexert on indigenous narrative styles. Because Garcilaso was neve

in Florida, we can surmise that in thus prefacing Indian speech he was invoking the Quechua speeches he had listened to as a youngman in Cuzco. In acknowledging the dialogical nature of indige-nous oral performances in Garcilaso’s hybrid Quechua-like Appalachian Indians or in the Nahua tradition, we should not ignore thepower dynamics involved in the production of narratives such as

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the founding story of Mexico-Tenochtitlan in the Historia de Tlate-lolco. After all, the song is a war cry that marks the beginning of the Mexica military ascendancy in the Valley of Mexico. We musalso keep in mind that sixteenth-century Nahuas wrote glyphs topromote and express Spanish ideology.This is because the Nahuasin the colonial period, just as before the Spanish conquest, under-stood all too well the power of glyph-scripted narratives. Thus, thepictographic history known as the Codex of Tlatelolco (ca. ) ex-alts the participation of the Tlatelolcans in the suppression of a re-bellion on the northern frontier, during the Mixton War in by representing Tlatelolcan warriors in proportions that dwarf the

Spaniards riding horses.12

Scriptural Economy These twoTlatelolcan texts testify to theviolence of writing in gen-eral but also to the subaltern subjects’ heterogeneity that all formsof colonial rule must foment, create, indeed depend on, to impose

and perpetuate dominance. Writing entails power structures: writ-ing as the memory of subordination, as the record of theft, as theerasure of culture, as the process of territorialization, and as the im-position of regimes of law, regardless of the type of script or formof representation. In writing we are circumscribed by these powerstructures though not ineluctably co-opted or blocked from doingother things than those intended by discourses of domination. I

would not be writing what I am writing now if I considered theexercise futile.Although the two Tlatelolcan texts manifest instances of how

writing performs violence, we need to differentiate between thedifferent regimes of violence under which these writing perfor-mances operate. Whereas the Historia de Tlatelolco uses alphabet toelude colonial authorities, the Codex of Tlatelolco uses glyphs to se-

cure a privileged position for Tlatelolco within the colonial order. The Historia de Tlatelolco exemplies the centrality of local history in Mesoamerica, the assumption that even under the subordinationof Tenochtitlan, theTlatelolcans retain their identity and particularmodalities of dwelling in theworld.Tenochtitlan could not have itsownidentity,asitwere,withoutaparticularhistorythatsingledout



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Mexico-Tenochtitlan from other ethnic groups.The same principleinforms the prominence of theCodex of Tlatelolco gives to the Tlate-lolcan warriors. In this regard we can note the anomaly betweenalphabetically written history for the internal consumption of the Tlatelolcan community in the years immediately after the conquesand a pictographic record of the participation of the Tlatelolcansin the conquest of the northern frontier primarily intended for theconsumption of the colonial authorities. Likewise, the class of le-trados cannot be limited to those using letras (letters), but must beexpanded to include disciplined individuals embodying as well aimplementing regimes of law and knowledge regardless of whether

they can write letters on a page, that is, regardless of the writ-ing tools and systems of representation or the traditions on whichtheyclaim expertise. Spanish sources often speakof Indians knowl-edgeable of their traditions as letrados, a term that we should, per-haps, simply translate as literate rather than putting too much weight on the use of letters. Take, for instance, the following pas-sage from the Dominican friar Diego de Durán’sHistoria de la Nueva

España e Islas de Tierra Firme (ca. ): ‘‘Queriéndome conrmar ensi esto era verdad, pregunté a un indio viejo que me le vendieronpor letrado en su ley natural . . . que me dijese si aquello era asíque allí tenía escrito y pintado’’ [Seeking to verify if this was true,asked an old Indian who was presented to me as literate in his natural law . . . to tell me if things were thus, as I had there in writ-ten and painted text] ( [ca. ], : ). Note that in one b

Durán refers to glyphs as both pintados (painted) and escritos (writ-ten). Indian, mestizo, andSpanishletrados participated in the powerstructure by drawing maps, painting glyphs, writing history, andinterpreting Indian languages (see Leibsohn ).

Spanish colonialists knew that the colonized hardly constituteda homogeneous group. Indeed, they were very successful in usingone group against the other and, perhaps even more important, in

working with a native elite that looked after its own interests andsought to perpetuate its privileges within the colonial order. Thesesubaltern elites facilitated the administration of the empire by ful-lling the role of judges and governors of Indians. Consequently,the Franciscan college of Santa Cruz of Tlatelolco and the Augus-tinian college of Tiripetio were established to form elite cadres of

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native scholars (see Gruzinski : – ; Kobayashi ; Sahagún – , : – ). By the end of the sixteent

tury this intellectual elite thought in terms of an epistemology thatno longer bore a connection to the magicoreligious world of theeveryday life of the common Nahuas.Thus, the fact that dominatedNahua elites were aware of their domination did not rule out ‘‘con-sent,’’ thewilling adoption of instruments, rationalities, narratives,and aesthetics imported by the rulers. On the other hand, membersof this same elite might have known themselves to be dominatedbut were ignorant of how domination ‘‘worked’’ and in what waythey contributed to domination while ‘‘resisting’’ (cf. Scott

Joseph and Nugent a; Roseberry ; Sayer ). One also argue that these questions could not have been formulated be-fore the dissolutionof the colonialworld afterWorld War II and thepostcolonial condition of thought we associate with Frantz Fanon( , ) and, in general, with the emergence of a native intelletual elite that contests the historical and epistemological privilegesof the metropolis.

If in this study I draw from and build on postcolonial theory andsubaltern studies, it is not merely to apply this scholarship to theSpanish colonization of the Americas in the sixteenth and seven-

teenth centuries. We must keep in mind that the theoretical work inthese elds has been conceived for the most part with otherareas of the world and historical moments in mind. In reading the work of postcolonial scholars such as Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Spivak, HomBhabha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Johannes Fabian, and Edward Said,I have come to realize that in the colonization of the Americas,Spain rehearsed, three centuries earlier, the imperialist categories

that Britain and other Northern European powers came to deploy in India, Africa, and the Middle East at the end of the eighteenthcentury.13 The after in the subheading for this section is intendedto highlight that by postcolonialism I understand a series of intellec-tual projects in literary studies, cultural studies, and critiques of anthropology, history, and sociology that have common structures of



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feeling and ethicopolitical positions enabling us to draw not onlya critique of the colonialisms that once were, but also of neocolo-nial forms of exerting dominance and internal colonialisms thatemerge in the wake of the dissolution of formal political ties to ametropolis. Moreover, the after points to the condition of thoughtthat enables us to read in a new light collaboration, complicity,and resistance as well as opacity in the cultural artifacts that different sectors, groups, and representatives of subalterns and eliteshave produced under colonial rule. To dialogue with postcolonialscholars, we must elicit the categories and concepts from sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Spanish texts that articulate tutelage, civi-

lizing mission, native collaboration, and colonial law and that arestill inuential today. Hence, postcolonialism, understood as a newcondition of thought, cannot be equated with the end of a colo-nial period, nor should the questions postcolonial scholars raise belimited to the specic experiences of nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonialisms. For now, let me point out that this geneal-ogy has had two detrimental consequences for the study of earlier

periods in the Americas. At best, Enlightenment forms of produc-ing otherness—for example, the opposition between peoples withand without history, or between peoples in a state of nature andthose living under a state—assume a transhistorical applicabilitythat erases historical specicity. At worst, postcolonial theorists re-duce the colonial enterprises before the Enlightenment to crudemodes of raping the land—for example, Portuguese trading posts

and Spanish conquest—with no coherent civilizing mission worthmentioning. This book argues the exception of the Spanish im-perial project, but a similar argumentcould bemadefor Portuguesemodes of colonization in the early modern period.

But even more detrimental than the erasure of the Spanish colo-nial past is the loss of a possible history of the present that could re-sult from an uncritical adoption of postcolonial theories that better

apply to the Asian and African histories that gave rise to them. His-torical differences between the Americas and Asia and Africa distinguish the relationship between elite and subaltern cultures in theAmericas from the relationship between these two groups in Asiaor Africa.14 It is therefore as urgent to underscore the differencesbetween the colonial pasts as between the presents—the histori-

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cal nows—of subalterns and elites in India, Africa, and the Ameri-cas. I will return to this question in the epilogue, where I elabo-rate a critique of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s understanding of the ‘‘timeof history’’ and the ‘‘times of the gods’’ as mutually excluding thpossibility of dwelling in both worlds. One crucial historical dif-ference between these regions of the world is the long history ofindependence in the Americas. Another, as we have seen, is the de-velopment of the term usos y costumbres, which underlines the dis-tinct trajectory colonial categories have had in the Americas (seeStavenhagen ; Zavala , ; cf. Schwarz ). TfromTlatelolco that I examined above exemplify how, from the be-

ginning of the conquest of Mexico, Nahuas dwelled in at least thetwo worlds of the usos y costumbres and the juridic and religious eldsof the Spanish authorities.To the extent that Spanish authorities so-licited and collected verbal and pictorial expressions of Nahua culture, they too were committing themselves to dwell in both worlds,at least from a hermeneutic necessity, though not necessarily froman affective affinity.The importance of the imposition of categories

such as usos y costumbres may be seen in the fact that the meaningsof usos y costumbres, cultural and linguistic rights, and the autonomy of Indian peoples have been central issues in recent debates be-tween the Zapatistas and the representatives of the Mexican gov-ernment. Whereas the government has displayed an incapacity tounderstand the demands of the Zapatistas and other indigenousgroups, Indian leaders have once more shown their ability to dwell

in modern and nonmodern worlds without incurring a contradic-tion (see Rabasa ; see also Gossen ; Le Bot ; Rojascf. Chakrabarty ). Even if usos y costumbres is a colonial inven-tion, there are ontological as well as epistemological differences inindigenous and modern discourses that articulate understandingsof native laws. Unfortunately, the Mexican government today ap-pears unwilling to listen to the Indians, regardless of whether they

articulate their discourses in terms of indigenous languages andunderstandings of the world or in anthropological Western cate-gories.

Given these concerns about the uncritical adoption of postcolo-nial theories, I welcome J. Jorge Klor de Alva’s reminder of the dif



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ferent meanings the term colonialism has had in Western historyand the fact that we should avoid projecting nineteenth-century British understandings of colonialism and its specic economicstructures onto the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanishpossession in the New World (see Klor de Alva ; see alR. Adorno ). My proposed method of drawing what is particlar to Spain in the sixteenth century would not only avoid a me-chanical application of a ‘‘paradigm,’’ but indeed would identify the ways in which sixteenth-century colonial enterprises, which clearlencompass nations other than Spain, constitute prototypes and in-augurate structures of power relations that remain in force dur-

ing the so-called second wave of European expansionism. As forthe issue of the applicability of the term colonial to the sixteenth-century Spanish enterprise, we face similar constraints in usingother recent terms such as race and racism. Yet, because race didnot exist before the eighteenth centurydoes not mean that the cate-gories and arguments that justied establishing hierarchies, sub-jugation, and the extermination of people based on physical (and

not exclusively cultural) traits did not constitute forms of racism(see Delacampagne ). In parallel, our denition of the termcolonial was not part of the Spanish lexicon of conquest and em-pire. Nevertheless, Spain articulated theories of empire and just war against the Indians, elaborated discourses on the inferiorityof Amerindians, and demanded their subordination to the Span-ish Crown. Rather than denying the existence of racism and colo-

nialism in the sixteenth century, we ought to benet from under-standingthespecicformsracismandcolonialismassumedinearly modern colonial discourses.15 For instance, Spanish theories andcolonial programs that use terms such as poblar (to settle) and pacicar (to pacify) cannot be equated with the establishment of Ro-man garrisons, even if this was the meaning given to the term colony by early modern Spanish authors (see Klor de Alva : ).

though garrisons were indeed a component of the Spanish inva-sion, they served to create an infrastructure for the religious con-version and political subjection of native populations. Indeed, thegarrison was an important part of the ‘‘frontier’’ conquest in Cali-fornia, New Mexico, and Texas, and, unlike garrisons on the U.S.

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frontier, there was a church centrally located in each. Colonial-ism, at least in the version practiced by Spaniards in the Ameri-cas, was not just about dominating people by the force of arms butabout transforming Indians into able bodies and obedient subjects.Furthermore, as Patricia Seed ( ) has shown, the fact that Eglish, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spaniards already in the six-teenth century had different imperial styles of claiming possessionshould warn us against making categorical statements that deny theexistence of colonialism in the sixteenth century (see chapter ).

Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier consists of six essays on six-teenth-century texts pertaining to the colonization of NuevoMéxico (a territory ranging from the Pacic Coast to the present-day U.S. state of Kansas) and La Florida (which ranged from thePeninsula to the states of Tennessee andArkansas).These essays ex-

amine visual and verbal representations, colonialist programs, andthe theories of colonization that informed the writing of the terri-tories on the northern frontier of New Spain. The frontier is a dis-cursive category that ultimately refers back to the borderlands ofthe reconquista of Moslem territories in Spain and to heathen landsin general. In the Americas, the frontier held promises of wealthand, after Tenochtitlan and Cuzco, the specic expectation of nd-

ing rich kingdoms—hence the pursuit of Cibola, Quivira, Toton-teac, Chicora, Appalachee, and so on in the texts we will examine Thus, the frontier implies not solely the end of civilization, as in wilderness or terra incognita, but also the beginning of other civi-lized cultures, though qualied as barbarian for not being Chris-tian. It must be underscored that the North and the frontier arecolonial constructs that erase Indian organizations and experiences

of space. From the Indians’ perspective, the encroachment of thefrontier is an invasion of their territories. In the course of history,the northern frontier emerges as a space populated by a pluralityof ethnic groups often in conict with each other and having dif-ferent experiences and perspectives on the evolving structures ofpower through which the colonizers eventually become the colo-



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nized, in the transitions from the Spanish empire to the Mexicanrepublic and to the American annexation. Writing in the present as Indians, Hispanics, Mexicans, or An-

glos, we ought to keep in mind the violence one exerts in privileg-ing one’s point of view. The northern frontier was and is a highlycontested space that is best understood as the result of material,cultural, and ideological exchanges among evolving groups, ratherthan as an embodiment of a uniquely American culture, as Fred-erick Jackson Turner argued in his seminal address, ‘‘The Snicance of the Frontier in American History’’ ( ). Semioticathe frontier is an empty signier that I use here for lack of a better

term (cf. Laclau : – ). Though Mary Louise Pratt’s (concept of a contact zone provides a conceptual framework tounderstand the culture of colonialism, it strikes me as a euphemism when speaking of slavery or wars of extermination. The term fron-tier in sixteenth-century usage refers to regions not yet under Span-ish control and certainly lacked the meanings associated with thespirit of the Anglo-American frontier or the particular nature of

the Mexican Norte.16

This frontier is a geographic space that hasbeen dened and culturally contested as ‘‘the West,’’ ‘‘el Norte,’‘‘the Spanish borderlands,’’ and, since , ‘‘the U.S.-Mexico bder.’’ Like all these other terms,the northern frontierof New Spain exertsconceptual violence on the Indian peoples who inhabited and in-habit these lands. My use here seeks to foreground a geographicarea that was written about, imagined, and mapped from a colo-

nizing perspective, rather than a natural entity that was discoveredknown, and charted. It would be erroneous, however, to think thatthe people involved in colonial enterprises lacked the resolve toverify what a philosophical realist would call the brute physical facts andwere content with ideological, willful claims to the territories.17In reading colonial documents, we must learn to distinguish verbaland visual statements intended to accurately record factual infor-

mation from those designed to symbolically lay claim to territories,and still others that develop theories of colonialism and violence. This methodological observation obviously does not exclude thepossibility that statements of fact may also entail gurative meanings or establish symbols.

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The concept of writing violence comprises both the representa-tion of massacres, tortures, rapes, and other forms of material ter-ror, as well as categories and concepts informing the representa-tion of territories for conquest, the denition of Indian cultures asinferior, and the constitution of colonized subjectivities. Whereasthe rst meaning of writing violence is self-evident, the secondmight provoke readers to resist seeing the force of writing itself asviolence. But the two meanings are also related, for writing codi-es legal categories such as criminals, insurgents, deviants, and in

subordinates, and legitimizes violence against these groups. Letus not forget the even more insidious forms of symbolic violencethat underlie shared assumptions and self-evident concepts suchas the frontier, savagery, cannibalism, social evolution, develop-ment, progress, and others that structure our relation to the objec-tive world up to the present. The difference, then, does not reside in literal versus metaphorical

uses of the term violence, nor in the semantic difference in writing as violence versus writing is violence. Violence can be both literal andmetaphorical, with no qualications as towhether it is exercised ona material or a conceptual plane. Take, for instance, the quotationfrom Las Casas at the beginning of this introduction. His descrip-tion of mutilation points at once to a literal act of violence and to ametaphorical functionofsending the hands as letters. Here we have

an instance where violence is a form of writing. What the message was that the mutilated Indians would convey remains unsaid in LaCasas. Furthermore, other descriptions of torture and terror in the Brevíssima convey arbitrary forms of violence lacking any reason be-yond the pleasure Spaniards derived from inicting pain; they thusmanifest a pragmatic use of violence for subordination.

Descriptions of torture and terror lend themselves to a clarica-

tion of the materiality of writing violence. I can anticipate some-one observing that there is an ontological difference between ter-rorizing someone and describing the torture in writing. But de-scription can fulll at least two functions: to instruct in techniquesand to set an example. These modes of writing pertain to a cul-ture of violence, but they also exercise material violence inasmuch



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as they have psychological impacts; the rst forms the subjectivityof torturers (I assume a numbing of sensibilities), and the secondaims to terrorize a population (as in the mutilated hands in LasCasas). In addition to the numbness of future torturers, descrip-tions of terror committed against an enemy may also generate im-pulsions of violence on the readers and thereby solidify a war community. Description ensures the continuity of violence by shapingthe sensibilities of those who will either endorse or commit futureacts of terror. As I pointed out at the beginning of this introduc-tion, the mutilated hands as ‘‘letter’’ metaphor exemplies the forceembedded in the act of interpellating Indians into subordinating

themselves to the Spanish Crown. The performance of the Requeri-miento replicates the mutilation-as-letter inasmuch as it is a threatof war and slavery that can only be effective, that is, terrorize theaddressee into submission, if the bodily act of reading the inter-pellation displays the military power that will enforce it. Thus, the Requerimiento constitutes an instance of love speech, conveying thebenets to be derived from the gift of Christianity and Spanish

forms of life, that in fact exerts violence in describing the con-sequences of not recognizing Spanish sovereignty as self-eviden‘‘news.’’ This distinction denes writing in terms ofproduction (de-scription as a means to torture) and action (description as torture). To understand these terms, we may turn to Aristotle. In the Ethics

(bk. , chaps. and ) and the Politics (bk. , chap. ), Aristotle sug-gests an identication of art and violence inasmuch as art belongs

to production ( poiesis ) in contradistinction to action ( praxis ): ‘‘For while making [production] has an end other than itself, action can-not; for the good action itself is its end’’ ( Ethics b – ).18 In thePolitics (bk. , chap. ), Aristotle speaks of the weapons man is born with (language would be one) and places the legitimacy of language as violence in terms of means to achieve a just end: ‘‘For man, when per-fected, is the bestof animals, but, when separated from law and jus-

tice, he is the worst of all; since armed injustice is the more dangerous, and he is equiped at birth with arms [e.g., language], meant tobe used by intelligence and virtue, which he may use for the worsends’’ (Politics a – ). Torture as a form of writing implies thlanguage can be viewed both as a means to achieve an end as well asconstituting an end in itself. On the one hand, the terror and tor-

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ture described by Las Casas could very well be inscribed in termthat validate any means necessary to a justied end—that is, thepublic display of mutilation as message that warns potential rebelsof the consequences of insurrection. On the other hand, the law would derive its symbolic force from the categories and logical argu-ments that establish the truth and justness of demanding that Indi-ans surrender their sovereignty to the Crown. Language, then, nolonger functions as a weapon to achieve just or unjust ends, but assymbolic violence. The critical force of Las Casas, in turn, requiresthat we disassociate mutilation as letter from a discussion of justied means and view the regime of terror as an end in itself. Other

missionaries and lay historians, however, interpreted this same violence as divinely ordained punishment of Indians. Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘‘Critique of Violence’’ identies thre

forms of violence that correspond to those outlined above: ‘‘meansto just end,’’ ‘‘means as end in itself,’’ and ‘‘pure violence with nconsideration of ends or means.’’ Benjamin shows that means andends are inextricably bound to each other: ‘‘Natural law attempts,

by the justness of the ends, to ‘justify’ the means, positive law to‘guarantee’ the justness of the ends through the justication of themeans’’ (Benjamin : ). Benjamin adds to his discussioviolence as means and ends what he calls unalloyed, pure violence The emphasis on ends and means apparently sets up an opposi-tion between violence as law making (establishing an end) and lawpreserving (conserving an order). Benjamin has in mind the man-

ner in which the modern police’s violence arbitrarily elides the distinction between founding and preserving the law. I wonder, how-ever, if this arbitrary elision—thescandal ofpoliceviolence—is notcharacteristic of the exercise of dominance without hegemony incolonial power relations. Las Casas’s argument in part hinges ondemonstrating that the conquistadores abrogated the right to makelaws in making war against Indians. I say ‘‘in part’’ because eithe

the conquistadores act illegally by making the unjust laws or theyembody the king’s unjust laws. At any rate, Benjamin also indi-cates that the founding of law is inseparable from the conservingof order, and there is no conservation of law that does not partakeof a founding moment. Paraphrasing Derrida, we can say that inthe founding of colonial law, the Spanish Crown carried the power



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to determine as outlaw anyone who did not recognize its right todemand obedience (obediencia ) (Derrida : ). In this light, wecan read Las Casas’s example as a founding moment inasmuch asending mutilated Indians to convey the news corresponds to theestablishment of a regime of law. In exposing this display of muti-lated bodies as an arbitrary exercise of violence, Las Casas invokea sense of justice that destroys the grounds on which wars of con-quest could legitimize themselves. Even if Las Casas seeks to founda new law to ensure nonviolent evangelization, his call for justicegoes beyond the calculability of the law (establishing an equivalencebetween injury and restitution) to the extent that the Indians’ losses

and suffering could never be adequately compensated.This call fojustice, which goes beyond the calculable, leaves his critics with noption other than to accuse Las Casas of propagating the leyenda negra (black legend). These examples of the force of law suggest that the culture of vio-

lence ultimately circumscribes the critic’s practice of writing. To what extent can one write about violence without perpetuating it?

What are the dangers of speaking and thereby generalizing writ-ing as a form of violence? Would this equation necessarily implylosing perspective on material forms of violence? Should (writ-ing) violence be a means to end violence? The essays in this booaddress these questions, which obviously lack straightforward answers. They examine issues pertaining to the culture of conquest,the mediation of the law, the aesthetics of colonial violence, the

moralization of terror, the politics of authorship, and the symboli-zation of hatred. To the extent that the elucidation of the ‘‘cultureof conquest’’ maps out conceptual complicities that haunt today’s writing on colonial discourses, we begin to understand that lawsdetermine texts that organize the world for colonization. The ‘‘me-diation of the law’’ enables us to avoid assessing degrees of justic(or, for that matter, comparing nations in terms of more or less be-

nevolent colonial models) and attend to how the evolving bodiesof law dene styles of recording information, enable aesthetic rep-resentations of violence, and delimit the moralization of gratuitousacts of terror. In viewing colonialism from within the ‘‘culture ofconquest,’’ we also begin to understand the limits Las Casas andGarcilaso de laVega faced as they were forced to elaborate their cri-

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tiques of colonialism from within the universal parameters of Ro-man Catholicism.

In the case of Garcilaso’s La Florida del Inca, we nd a brilliantinstance of a subject who, in embodying the language of univer-sality, exposed the contradictions of Roman Catholicism, at leastin the Spanish version, inherent in the category of the converso (therecent convert) and the Estatutos de Limpieza de Sangre (Statutesof Blood Purity). The universal call of all peoples into the Churchentails a hierarchization that institutes inequality by means of thecategoryoftheconverso, which dened newconverts as less Christianthan the cristianos viejos (Old Christians), and the statutes of limpieza de sangre, which limited the social and intellectual world of all those who could not trace a line of cleanVisigoth blood for seven genera-tions (cf. Balibar : – ). Even such a subject as Garci who mastered Spanish forms of life and personally overcame thedeprecatory effects of interiorized stereotypes about Amerindianscould not carve out a cultural space unconstrained by the doublebind of Spanish Catholicism. In La Florida, Garcilaso explores the

force of law in its most insidious form of exerting symbolic violence:the constitution of subjectivities at fault (see chapter ).In developing theories of violence, writing, and colonialism that

emphasize stable oppositions between the colonizers and the colo-nized, one runs the risk of undermining the theoretical sophis-tication of the programs and policies as well as the aesthetics ofviolence that articulate and mediate imperialistic enterprises. Texts

such as Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda’s Democrates Alter, known in Span-ish as theTratado de las justas causas de la guerra contra los Indios, the lawsthe Spanish Crown designed to regulate exploration, or the Hugue-not corpus on Florida elaborate complex theories of violence andstrategies of colonization, not just ideological or moral justica-tions of conquest. Take, for instance, the statement of possessionthatJuandeOñatereadtothePuebloIndiansinwhichheoutlinesa

colonizing program that envisions Indians trading with Spaniards,learning trades and technologies, adopting new cattle, seeds, andvegetables, learning forms of ordering the economic affairs of theirfamilies, houses, and persons, in short, the designs for develop-ing a mestizo culture: ‘‘vistiéndose los desnudos y los ia bestidomejorándose’’ [the naked clothed and the now-clothed bettering



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themselves]. This version of the statement Oñate read comes fromGaspar de Villagrá’s Historia de la Nueva México ( [ ]: ).19Chapter traces a twofold purpose in Villagrá’s Historia. The mostobvious was to legitimize the war against Acoma. But on a secondplane, a colonization of the body and subjectivity of the Acomansin the representation of their ‘‘barbarism’’ further complementedthe ideological validation of the massacre. By means of an aesthetiof colonial violence, an epic treatment ‘‘civilizes’’ the ‘‘barbarityof the Spaniards, that is, of the massacre of Acoma. Clearly, Villa-grá’s account of the ceremony of possession in terms of peacefulcolonization in the Historia, which reects the Crown’s regulations

on poblar (to settle) and pacicar (to pacify), is intended to justify the massacre, but we should not write off Acoma’s refusal to accept Spanish ‘‘development.’’ Inasmuch as the Acomans, and Indians in general, had their own ideas about the kinds of relations they wanted to have with the Spaniards, they should be seen as contesting Spanish rule,not as the passive subjects manipulated in Spanishaccounts.

We must recall that the invasion of the northern frontier wascarried out mainly by criollos (Spaniards born in America), mestizos, and such friendly Indians as the Tlaxcaltecas, who were takento the North not only as a labor force, but also as examples of ac-culturation for Indians on the frontier (see chapter ). Earlier inthis introduction we saw that as early as the s theCodex of Tlate-lolco highlighted the protagonism of the Tlatelolcans in the Mixton

War.20

Furthermore, the culture ofconquest that informed the pushnorth beginning in the s was as much the invention of Indians and mestizos from central Mexico as of Spaniards. ‘‘Inventionhere refers to developing strategies and concepts of colonization as well as to the mental maps that fabricated the fabulous kingdoms of Cibola, Quivira, Totonteac, Chicora, and Apalache. We must alsoadd to the mix the informants and interpreters who were forced or

willingly offered themselves to lead the way and to interpret for theinvading armies.In explaining how empire works, we must keep in mind that

colonialist texts speak colonialism in explicit, unambiguous terms.Colonial programs, representations, and theories do things: they for-mulate speech acts that structure (among other things) patterns of

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settlement and modes of subjecting Indians. In unmasking or de-mystifying ‘‘representations,’’ one runs the risk of developing tautological descriptions of colonizing processes that reproduce thesame categories that enable domination. To what extent does anassumed privileged perspective entail a historical hubris that uni-versalizes a particular version of Western culture? Do tautologicareproductions of colonialism contribute to a regime of power by signaling what makes it effective? Do present-day truths perpetuatecategories that further exercise colonial violence, paradoxically, bybeing blind to how these forms of thought were key to earlier theo-ries of colonization? My end is to move beyond these impasses tha

burden critiques of colonialism by foregroundingwriting violence as aslippery terrain that inevitably haunts the project of writing about vio-lence. Therefore, this book not only seeks to explain what colonial-ist texts do but, in reecting on what they do, to change our waysof thinking about colonial discourse. In denouncing colonialism we should also explore new ways of feeling that will make readersensitive to how colonialisms past and present affect not only our

intellectual work but also our daily lives.

Leyenda Negra

Outlining a critique of Spanish colonialism may contribute to theleyenda negra (black legend). It should be evident from the above

that my concerns with the leyenda negra have nothing to do with arehabilitation of the Spanish imperial enterprise—that is, of cre-ating a leyenda blanca (white legend) to correct the distortions of the Spanish characters by Protestant Northern Europeans. Indeed,there runs an equally pernicious Anglo-American version of theleyenda blanca, which became part of Nuevomexicana culture, per-haps nowhere better captured than in Nina Otero de Warren’s evo-

cation of an ideal Hispanic legacy in the title of her book Old Spain in Our Southwest (see Calderón and Saldívar : ; Padilla : One must underscore that the destruction of cultures, the enslave-ment and exploitation and, in some cases, wholesale exterminationof peoples pertain to colonialism in general, whether of the Span-ish, French, English, Dutch, Portuguese, or U.S. variety. Leyenda



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negra ideologies are not content with mere denunciations ofSpanishatrocities in the New World but constitute platforms for projectingand legitimating new colonial enterprises with a rhetoric of anti-conquest (see Pratt ). In one breath, sixteenth-century Protetant French or English anticonquest ideologues condemn Spanishcolonialism, delegitimate Spain’s exclusive rights to America, andestablish territorial claims (see chapter ). Indeed, the exponents of the leyenda negra, from Las Casas’s reformist policies (which corre-sponds to one moment in the life of this great anticolonial writer)to the English and French anti-Spanish pamphleteers, simply pro-pose better forms of colonization.

There always remains, however, the uncertainty that the moderncritic of colonialism—in disbelieving Spanish ‘‘representations,’’ informulating more credible ethical stances, and in developing morepowerful epistemologies—is not repeating the same pattern, thelet-me-do-it-instead position.One need not be an apologist ofcon-quest nor condone colonial atrocities to recognize the vitality andsophistication of Hernán Cortés’s letters to Charles V, the debates

between Las Casas and Sepúlveda, the complexity of Indian andmestizo historians such as Alva Ixtlilxóchitl, AlvaradoTezozómocand Garcilaso de la Vega, the statistical (in the sense of collectinginformation for the state) quality of the Relaciones geográcas, and,in general, the body of texts pertaining to sixteenth-century NewMexico and Florida.

It is particularly pertinent to the history of the northern fron-

tier of New Spain that we complicate the writing and reading of colonial texts by showing their complexities and complicities, as well as recognize the repercussions reductive readings may havin the present, regardless of our good intentions. This early Span-ish period of U.S. history is quickly glossed over in survey courseand textbooks even though, at least in that northern Mexican ter-ritory that became the Southwest, the descendants of the original

settlers as well as recent immigrants constitute a signicantly largHispanic population, in some areas a majority. As for the South-east, and in general for the United States, Hernando de Soto g-ures as the favorite son of the Conquistadores (note the caps and theSpanish), perhaps because there are no descendants of sixteenth-century settlers in the Southeast to lay strong cultural claims for a

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Hispanic past. Coronado is also a darling Conquistador, but mainly due to the wacky, romantic legend that surrounded his pursuit of the legendary Seven Cities of Cibola. In the case of Cabeza deVaca,he is taught in all standard Texashistorycourses, whichare requiredto cover everything having to do with the state of Texas.

21

Other- wise, the tendency has been to cast the conquistadores as pure evilobjects of hatred that get transposed to an amorphous populationof Latinos living in the United States and Latin America. And hereis where the colonialist impulse of the leyenda negra gets tricky. Forthe leyenda negra ’s denition of a corrupt, lazy, evil Spanish char-acter fullls the function, to paraphrase Frantz Fanon, of distort-

ing, disguring, and destroying the past of an oppressed people(Fanon : ). In addressing issues concerning the leyenda negra,the essays in this book explore the implications of critiquing Spanish colonialism rather than elaborate a systematic study of anti-Spanish prejudice.



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Reading Cabeza de Vaca, or How We

Perpetuate the Culture of Conquest

Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios (literally, the Shipwrecks)is among those chronicles of the Indies that literary critics have tra-

ditionally singled out for their literary value. Insufficient attentionhowever, has been paid to the ideological implication of readingcolonial texts for their artistic worth. Recent trends in scholarshipin literary studies have critiqued the concept of the literary as anelitist category that serves to undermine the cultural contributionsof non-Western cultures and thus perpetuate a closed canon.1 Butthe preference for anthropological or historical readings that ac-

centuate the uniqueness of the Naufragios as a founding text of LatinAmerican heterogeneityorof Cabeza deVaca as an exception to thecolonial ethos of the conquistadores, paradoxically, would seem toconrm the seductive power of the literary at work in the Naufragios. We have come to understand the literary as a construct, but we haveleft it at that, rather than taking this insight further to analyze theforce of the aesthetic—its violence.

It seems to me that the seductive powers of the Naufragios, that is, what makes it a brilliant literary piece, have led historians and critics alike (including recent literary and cinematic renditions) to argue that Cabeza de Vaca underwent a personal transformation thatenabled him to formulate and exemplify a ‘‘peaceful conquest’’ (seR. Adorno , , ; Sheridan ; Echevarría loy ; Pastor [ ]).Take, for instance, Rolena Adorno

sessment of the differences between Nuño de Guzman and Cabezade Vaca: ‘‘In contrast [to Guzmán], Cabeza de Vaca provided what was, to date, the most successful and the most peaceful of con-quests. It was the prototype of expeditions that were to be called,according to Phillip II’s laws, not conquests but ‘acts of pacation’ ’’ ( : ). By reading the Naufragios in the legal context


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of the Ordenanzas regulating exploration and conquest, wcome to question the purported originality of Cabeza de Vaca’s advocacy of peaceful colonization. We need, moreover, to attend tothe ways in which the oxymoron ‘‘peaceful conquest’’ manages tnegotiate colonial dominance with hegemonic consent: the rightkind of treatment will ensure that potentially ‘‘hostile’’ Indians wilturn out ‘‘servile.’’ The oxymoron also remains blind to, hence com-plicitous with, the rhetorical slippages in Cabeza de Vaca’s texts where ideology (hegemonic will) gives way to violence (dominanc(cf. Guha ). Although toward the end of the Naufragios Cabezade Vaca outlines an ideal form of imperialism and casts himself a

an equally ideal servant of the Crown, it is the Comentarios, an ac-count of Cabeza deVaca’s political asco in the Río de la Plata writ-ten by his amanuensis Pero Hernández, that dwells at length on hisefforts to enforce colonial law in a colonial outpost ruled by ter-ror. The power of the Naufragios, on the other hand, resides in thestory of shipwreck, of complete loss of material civilization, of be-coming a shaman, and of immersion in an Indian world. Colonial

laws, nevertheless, constitute a subtext of the Naufragios. Why privilege the Naufragios over theComentarios, which, in spiteof Cabeza de Vaca’s pathetic return to Spain in chains, presents hisaccount of the Río de la Plata as an exemplary history with moraand political lessons? What cultural forms and reading patternsinform literary appraisals of colonial texts, in particular the Nau- fragios, to the point of ignoring their colonialist impulse and their

reduction of Native Americans to either servile or hostile charac-ters in the Spanish imperial plot in the Americas? What deeplyembedded historiographical prejudices keep these readings todayfrom making allowances for indigenous rights to violently opposeSpanish invasions? Obviously, historians and anthropologists alsotend to partake of these ethnocentric constructs in their use of colonial documents. I highlight literary criticism because this disci-

pline purports to do the kind of tex

Rabasa Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier

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