Review essay: recent work on early Western Mexico and the revival of the Black Legend.

Ricardo Leon Alanis, Los origenes del clero y la iglesia en Michoacan, 1525-1640 (Morelia; Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolas de Hidalgo; Instituto de Investigaciones Historicas, 1997).

Alberto Carrillo Cazares, Vasco de Quiroga: La pasion por el derecho (Zamora; Morelia: El Colegio de Michoacan; Aquidiocesis de Morelia; Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolas de Hidalgo, 2003).

Bernardino Verastique, Michoacan and Eden: Vasco de Quiroga and the Evangelization of Western Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000).

James Krippner-Martinez, Rereading the Conquest: Power, Politics, and the History of Early Colonial Michoacan, 1521-1565 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001).

Social history of Mexico of the last decade has been characterized to a large extent by its shift, in essence, to cultural history. Indeed, the genres are difficult to distinguish given their similar aims and methodologies. Given the "cultural turn" witnessed both in the profession as a whole and the field of Mexico and Latin America, one might be hard pressed to say whether or not social history exists as a discrete field or whether it has been subsumed within its intellectual progeny, cultural history.

At the center of the sometimes vitriolic debate on the social/cultural history divide is the arrival of the influence of a French and European cultural history within the broader field of Mexican and Latin American social history. This turn is characterized by a move away from quantification and narrative and toward histories of mentalities, subalterns, and popular movements. In many ways there was a kind of bifurcation of social history in the field of Latin America. On the one hand those who claimed an inheritance from the "new cultural history" moved toward a discussion of power and ideology as multi-focal and contested (drawing on Foucault and Gramsci), on studies of non-elites and their reaction to state projects, and to a focus on marginalized groups within society, especially within the rubrics of gender/sexuality and "subaltern studies." On the other hand, social historians who cut their teeth on quantifiable data cried foul at this turn, claiming that the culturalists have turned the historical method into a bully pulpit for their own politics, for using data selectively to support their own claims, and for ignoring hard evidence in favor of theory.

The move to this cultural social history is marked in recent scholarship on early Mexico and in the case I present here, in Michoacan, in western Mexico. The sharp divide between theory and practice is also highlighted in a comparison between recent scholarship on Michoacan from Mexico and from North America. Indeed, one of the very central issues of the debate on the cultural turn has been on the direction of research itself. Mexican scholars, especially those of the colonial period, have tended to be much less influenced by or interested in theoretical models. Rather, as a group Mexican scholars have tended to focus heavily on their archival findings with relatively little use of anthropological, political, or critical theory. On the other hand, North American practitioners of colonial Mexican history have tended to draw on wide theoretical models to buttress their archival findings, which are occasionally less substantive than their Mexican counterparts. A second important issue comes into play in the overall historiography: there is very little scholarly interplay between Mexican and North American practitioners.

There are basic structural reasons for these divergences. Mexican historians experience a much more archivally-driven education as professional historians. The Mexican educational system introduces archival research to undergraduate students who complete a licenciate--a degree for which there exists no North American counterpart. To achieve a licentiate (something that typically lasts 6 years), a student must compose a thesis based on archival research and in length around 100-200 pages. Those who pursue history as a profession are expected to compose a master's thesis thereafter, again based on archival research, and to obtain a doctorate, a third thesis, again based on archival research. By comparison, most doctoral students in the U.S. have never seen the inside of a working archive before entering their postgraduate studies. Moreover, doctoral students from the U.S. must contend with the basic issue of travel to Mexico in order to conduct archival research, whereas most Mexican students are able to conduct archival research from home. This basic structural difference leads in turn to radically different emphases within the two scholarly worlds. Mexican scholars place a high premium on innovative archival findings and research.

The distinctions between these styles can be seen in recent production on the conquest and colonization of Michoacan from North American and Mexican scholars. Numerous recent offerings on early Michoacan have presented both synthetic treatments of the conquest and Purepecha culture as well as the important ecclesiastical debates about the nature of the Church, missionary project and conversion in Mexico and the Americas more generally. Michoacan as a cultural and political area was never fully subjugated by the vast Mexica empire and as a result maintained a separate and independent political, linguistic and religious identity prior to the Spanish conquest. In the early years of Spanish rule, a particularly ruthless Spanish conquistador, Nuno de Guzman, embarked on a dramatic and violent subjugation of the Tarascan empire centered near Lake Patzcuaro. In the aftermath of this conquest, Franciscan and Augustinian missionaries moved quickly into Michoacan to establish a Catholic presence. But soon after this mendicant missionary activity began, a former lawyer turned cleric, Vasco de Quiroga, was made the first bishop of Michoacan and entered into frequent jurisdictional disputes with the mendicants over the nature of religious authority, diocesan control and methods of Indian conversion. The recent work on early Michoacan has emphasized these themes in varying degrees and with varying results.

The study by Leon Alanis, an expanded version of the author's licenciatura thesis, offers an important contribution to the history of early Michoacan by tracing the development of the clergy and the diocese. While previous studies by scholars like Benedict Warren and Richard Greenleaf had focused on the conquest (spiritual or military) of Michoacan, Leon Alanis strikes out in new territory with a broad synthesis of the role the clergy played in Michoacan society and culture of the early viceregal period. Informed by a concern with the relationship between church and society, Leon Alanis provides a welcome addition to the large body of Mexican scholarship on Michoacan and the project of evangelization. But unlike previous scholars who sought to gauge the relative success or failure of a "spiritual conquest," Leon Alanis is motivated by issues germane principally to social and cultural historians. Indeed he argues that despite the attention given Michoacan as a center of missionary activity little scholarship had analyzed the socio-political role of the Church in the development of Michoacan. To wit:

  What difficulties did the missionaries encounter in this province?
  What was the importance of the diocesan clergy in Michoacan and how
  did it develop in this bishopric? What conflicts existed between the
  different sectors of the diocesan clergy in Michoacan and why? In what
  other political, economic and social activities did the clergy
  participate and what was its influence? In summary: how did the clergy
  develop and what role did the Church play in the economic, political
  and social formation of colonial Michoacan? (1) (p. 19)

Leon Alanis proceeds with these issues in both chronological and thematic chapters. He quickly outlines the early arrival and development of a Franciscan missionary endeavor in Michoacan, soon after the 1521 conquest of Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) by Cortes. The study offers an important summary and synthesis of the basic development of the Church and Christianity in Michoacan. This analysis thus offers readable and informatively rich surveys of the development of Augustinian, Franciscan and diocesan expansion in Michoacan. Additionally, Leon Alanis examines the thorny issue of Indian adoption of Spanish Catholicism. He demonstrates that this process was never as simplistic as "spiritual conquest" nor was it as one sided as a kind of oppressive superimposition of Spanish imperialism. Indeed, the author shows that many of the Tarascan (or Purepecha) nobles accepted and adopted Christianity and became themselves highly educated Christian humanists. By the same token many of the Tarascans experienced the cultural shock of having their pre-Hispanic idols, temples and religious regalia destroyed by Franciscan missionaries. Such destruction did not always correspond with the eradication of native religious practices, and Leon Alanis points out that decades after the conquest Indians continued in many instances to worship their ancient deities despite the efforts of Franciscan and Augustinian missionaries to eradicate them.

The study's greatest strength and contribution is its nuanced analysis of the internal tensions within the Church in Michoacan itself. Leon Alanis convincingly demonstrates that the Christianization process in Michoacan was not uniform but rather characterized by conflict, debate, jealousy and even outright violence from within. Accordingly, he demonstrates two important factors for a re-evaluation of the conquest in Michoacan from the point of view of religious development. First, the Franciscans were highly critical of the military conquest of the Indians and of the encomienda system in general. Indeed, the cruel and violent treatment of the Indians in Michoacan and Mexico in general by men like Nuno de Guzman led numerous Franciscans to become outspoken critics of the economic and physical subjugation of Indians. Second, Leon Alanis pays considerable attention to the internal conflicts in Michoacan between friars and the diocesan church.

In Leon Alanis' assessment three important issues led to this internal conflict between a diocesan and mendicant Church. First, there was substantial debate on the nature of the administration of sacraments to the Indians. Second, the mendicant and diocesan clergy squared off regularly over the building of churches and convents, with the result that the bishop Quiroga promoted a hospital building program that many mendicants criticized as a burden on the Indians who were expected to provide the labor. Third, a debate on the tithe and its applicability to Indians was a broad deliberation in Mexico, and one of the principal opponents of subjecting the Indians to the tithe was one of Michoacan's first missionaries, the Augustinian and founder of the college at Tiripetio, fray Alonso de la Veracruz. Leon Alanis correctly points out that tensions between diocesan and mendicant clergy formed one of the principal issues surrounding the early development not only of the church but of colonial society in Michoacan.

The heated and often violent encounters between the mendicant and diocesan clergy are highlighted in the spectacular new offering by Carrillo Cazares. This study is one of the most sophisticated legal histories of recent Mexican historiography and is clearly the most comprehensive recent treatment of the jurisdictional and philosophical debates on the nature of missionary activity, the Church in Mexico and the extent of the power of diocesan authorities in a colonial society in which the mendicants were granted wide privilege to engage in activities normally set aside for secular clergy. In two long and comprehensive volumes, the study is divided between analysis by the author and transcriptions of lengthy legal battles between bishop Quiroga and his mendicant opponents.

At the heart of the analysis is an impressive understanding of the nuances of early modern canon law as it relates to the "spiritual conquest" of Mexico. Specifically, the debate centered around the relative validity of a series of papal bulls known as the Omnimoda (1522) as they related to ordinary jurisdiction of a bishop. Quiroga had viewed the mendicants in Michoacan as overstepping their authority. Eventually, he placed a ban on the Augustinians, forbidding them from building any new convents or churches without express permission of the bishop. The Augustinians rejected his authority by claiming that the Omnimoda had empowered them to act in certain measures without diocesan approval. The result was both legal and violent.

Quiroga found himself caught between the viceroy of New Spain, who was sympathetic to the Augustinian missionary endeavor, and the Council of Indies, which appears to have been more sympathetic to Quiroga. Second, when Quiroga appears to have lost several rounds of the legal wrangling, primarily at the hands of the viceroy, the bishop appears to have literally ordered several of his loyal diocesan clergy to burn down the Augustinian church and convent at Tlazazalca. The Augustinians filed a lawsuit against Quiroga in response.

The result of these dramatic encounters forms the core of this impressive study's range. The author outlines the fairly complex and difficult legal history of diocesan authority and the ways that men like Quiroga understood it in terms of a colonial American context. Alone, this fine legal history would provide the most nuanced and most comprehensive discussion of the canon law issues surrounding mendicant missionary activity in Mexico to date. But in addition to this intricate jurisprudential history the author has offered the lengthy trial transcripts surrounding the two principal and extant cases involving Quiroga and his authority in Michoacan which were aired before and decided by the Council of the Indies. The result is that this two-volume study offers both excellent legal history as well as important documentary sources for historians interested in future research on issues as wide ranging as the nature of church jurisdiction, the relationship between the Council of the Indies and Mexico, as well as the broad social history of early Michoacan and Mexico.

Two recent studies on sixteenth century Michoacan by U.S. scholars demonstrate a much different focus on the early social history of Mexico as well as a distinct approach to research and scholarship. Michoacan and Eden is an offering on the conquest of western Mexico. It claims a broad synthesis in an effort to elucidate what the author states will be a "more accurate view" of that conquest (p. xv). In asserting this goal the author claims that his study will achieve that accuracy by offering a "variety of disciplinary perspectives" (p. xv). What precisely those perspectives are remains something of a mystery after reading the study. The thesis of the book itself is a rehearsal of debates of social history several decades old: the "inaccuracies" he aims to correct are the combined result of "continual transmission of misinformation concerning the 'New World' and to historical interpretations shaped by ... authors' own prejudices and world-views." (p. xiv). One would be hard pressed to find a more banal assertion of historiographic analysis.

According to Verastique the conquest of Michoacan has been misunderstood by historians because they have lumped together all of pre-Hispanic Mexican culture into one undifferentiated mass. Yet ethno- and social history of colonial Mexico of the last three decades has made considerable strides toward correcting the view that all Mesoamerican culture was similar, and Verastique seems unaware of this considerable body of scholarship on local culture, indigenous language and society.

Verastique's study is, at best, a broad text-book like survey of pre-Hispanic religion and culture and of the Christianization programs of mendicants and diocesan clergy. His syntheses read fairly well and offer a lucid summary of the primary events and contours of sixteenth century Michoacan, most of which are covered in considerably more detail in studies like those discussed above (in Spanish) and classics by Benedict Warren. Undergraduates may find this brief synthesis helpful in understanding the complex early encounters between Indian and Spaniard in western Mexico.

Yet despite its value as a general overview, the study is marred by amateurish scholarship, factual inaccuracies and stereotypical views of Spanish-Indian interaction. While the bibliography makes some broad claims, the text and footnotes reveal that the author has conducted minimal research in much used and antiquarian sources. For example, Verastique claims that the one primary source for the conquest of Michoacan is the Relacion de Michoacan, which is inaccurate. The study then appears to rely entirely on an English translation of this source. The author then ignores a wide array of other chronicles and contemporaneous printed and manuscript sources: the royally commissioned Relaciones geograficas, the vast collection called the Papeles de Nueva Espana, chronicles of Michoacan by friar-missionaries such as that by the Franciscan Diego de Munoz, the collection of documents titled Noticias para formar la historia y la estadistica del obispado de Michoacan as well as printed transcriptions of archival materials made available by Mariana de Jesus Torres and Juan Buitron.

Additionally, the author attempts on several occasions to make the research appear more thorough than it really is. He frequently quotes Mexican scholars but in reality has garnered such quotes from other, exclusively English language secondary works, without so noting. For example, on page 22, in arguing for a general view of Mesoamerican religion, he quotes the monumental study Mexico a traves de los siglos by Alfredo Chavero (itself a rather dated encyclopedic history of Mexico from the early twentieth century). The footnotes, however, reveal that Verastique gathered the quotes from an English translation of a work by Miguel Leon-Portilla, without acknowledging this double transference. Similar examples of scholarly lassitude are found in his gloss of early modern Spanish religious thought. In lieu of reading works by St. Teresa of Avila or fray Francisco de Osuna, he relies on secondary works of scholarship outlining the thought of these Spanish mystics. In place of reading the important late colonial chronicle of Michoacan by Pablo Beaumont, he relies on redactions of it by the prominent historian Benedict Warren.

Verastique also commits numerous factual errors throughout the study. For example, in sixteenth century Spain there was a lengthy debate on the legality and justification of the conquest of the Americas. Some of Spain's most formidable intellects engaged in these debates, led frequently by Dominican theologians at Salamanca. Because Verastique claims to be making an argument about the nature of conquest, any factual discrepancies on this score cripple his authority to speak of these issues. In 1550 the crown convoked a formal debate in Valladolid between the "defender of the Indians," Dominican Bartolome de las Casas, and the jurist Juan Gines de Sepulveda. Verastique incorrectly identifies Sepulveda as a Dominican and a theologian (pp. 111 and 114). At the very core of the Las Casas-Sepulveda debate was a lengthy Thomist tradition of explicitly Dominican theological scholarship that rejected the Aristotelian claims of Sepulveda as jurist that Indians were slaves by nature. In the introduction, Verastique reveals factual confusion when he claims that the principal actor of the study, Vasco de Quiroga, promoted a policy of missionary activity designed to benefit the Franciscans in their efforts to convert the Indians. Nothing could be further from the truth: Quiroga fought long and hard against the Franciscans in an explicit effort to scale back mendicant privileges and promote a diocesan church structure in Michoacan. This conflict is explained at considerable length by Carrillo Cazares and Leon Alanis in the above discussed works and has been long known to scholars of colonial Mexico.

In addition to these errors, Verastique engages in very old stereotypes about the Spanish enterprise in Mexico. Despite the author's own apparent awareness that there existed an internal debate about the nature and legality of conquest, Verastique repeats a Black Legend version of the story. His narrative is one of unmitigated Spanish rapaciousness and violence and Indian innocence and moral purity. At one point, for example, he makes the unsubstantiated claim that "[I]ndigenous noblewomen fared better in Purhepecha society than under Spanish rule" (p. 17). Two paragraphs later he relates that wives of Purepecha nobles were expected to commit ritual suicide on their husbands' deaths. Just how being expected to commit ritual suicide is evidence of a better lot in society the author does not explain.

Rereading the Conquest follows in similar theoretical lines as Michoacan and Eden. Both are informed by a general acceptance of the Black Legend and a willingness to cast the Spaniards as the villains and the Indians as the victims. Nevertheless, Rereading the Conquest is a lively and engaging overview of Quiroga and the historical memory of the conquest of Michoacan.

Krippner-Martinez offers episodic essays on various subjects germane to the conquest of western Mexico. These essays offer valuable summaries of the basic components of the power struggle between Spanish colonists and Indians. As such this book can be used effectively in undergraduate settings where students have little to no previous information on this relatively understudied region of early Mexico.

One of the best sections of the book is its treatment of the conquistador Nuno de Guzman, the man principally responsible for the military conquest of Michoacan and long excoriated by Mexicans and North Americans alike as the purest expression of vicious Spanish tendencies during the conquest. Guzman has been correctly analyzed as a man whose desire for conquest and riches pushed him to execute the Cazonci of the Purepecha empire for idolatry and engage in dramatically violent Indian slave raids in northeast Mexico thereafter. Kripper-Martinez, however, argues that Guzman should not be seen as an aberration but rather as following clearly in line with standard practices for conquest, subjugation and colonization in the Spanish legal world. But Kripper-Martinez exaggerates when he argues that the violent manner in which Guzman deposed the Purepecha emperor (known as the Cazonci) through a trial for idolatry and sodomy involving judicial torture was explicitly colonial. After all, judicial torture was not restricted to Indians or "colonial subjects" but was employed in Spain against Spanish citizens accused of similar offenses as that of the Cazonci, notably sodomy. There is nothing in the literature of early modern Spain to suggest that the legal treatment of the Cazonci differed at all given his ethnic status. Nevertheless, Kripper-Martinez does an excellent job in reshaping the discussion of Guzman not in terms of a rouge soldier and judge but as an out-growth of the Spanish conquest itself.

That said, Kripper-Martinez's work tends to repeat stereotypes about Spanish cruelty that, while offering a trenchant criticism of colonialism, does little to elucidate the self-stated purpose of the book, which is to understand Quiroga and the Spaniards on their own terms. Consider a basic issue. Krippner-Martinez argues that his evaluation and analysis of Quiroga will draw specifically on the canonist-turned-bishop's writings. Yet this analysis relies on only two very well known treatises that have been widely reproduced in the twentieth century. The author ignores entirely Quiroga's untranslated Latin treatises, such as De debellandis indis, as well as lengthy manuscript sources by Quiroga found in the Archive of the Indies in Seville. Such a lack of consultation might be over-looked except that Krippner-Martinez himself rehearses at considerable length the problems of translation and interpretation in colonial encounters, such as in the case of the trial of the Cazonci, in which the transcript was often a Spanish translation of Indian language depositions in Purepecha and Nahuatl.

Despite this, the work as a whole functions as an excellent primer and synthesis of broad issues of social history, colonialism and Indian-Spanish interaction. The book will be a useful source for teaching undergraduates about some of the principal issues involved in an emerging colonial Spanish society and the relationship between some of the more notorious conquistadors, like Guzman, and the lengthy legal tradition on which they drew for justification.

Taken as a whole the recent scholarship on the "conquest" and missionary activity in early Michoacan reflects a willingness to return to stereotypes of "rapacious Spaniards" by North American scholars. At the same time the work by Mexican scholars highlights an intense focus on archival research with minimal interest in theoretical models of social power by late twentieth-century postmodern. In contrast the offerings by North Americans tend to showcase the increasing reliance or use of Foucaultian models of power, of "post-colonialism" as a genre and to the willingness to relight the once sputtering embers of the Black Legend. Accordingly, this scholarship tends to reroute the conquest through the lens of tropes like "European oppression" of Indians and the "evils of colonialism." While one would be hard pressed to find any historians of the twenty-first century willing to defend the Iberian colonial enterprise on moral grounds, the pious tone of this recent work tends to elide more interesting issues of jurisprudence and its relationship to social history. On this latter score the material offered by Carrillo Cazares and Leon Alanis has provided a much more fruitful dialogue on the relationship between imperial legal and religious projects and their far-reaching social consequences for both Spaniard and Indian.

Department of History

Coral Gables, FL 33124

ENDNOTE

1. The original reads: "Que dificultades enfrentaron los misioneros en esta provincia? "Cual fue la importancia del clero secular en Michoacan y como se desarrollo este obispado? "Que conflictos se presentaron entre los diferentes sectores del clero en Michoacan y por que razon? "En que otras actividades politicas, economicas y sociales participo el clero y cual fue su influencia? En resumen: "Como se desarrollo el clero y que papel jugo la Iglesia en la formacion economica, politica y social del Michoacan colonial"

By Martin Nesvig

University of Miami