Carl Schmitt on pirates

Pirates have been in the news a lot lately.

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Here's what Carl Schmitt has to say about them in The Nomos of the Earth:

Originally, before the birth of great sea powers, the axiom "freedom of the sea" meant something very simple, that the sea was a zone free for booty. Here, the pirate could ply his wicked trade with a clear conscience. If he was lucky, he found in some rich booty a reward for the hazardous wager of having sailed the open sea. The word pirate comes from the Greek peiran, meaning to test, to try, to risk. None of Homer's heroes would have been ashamed to have been the son of such a daring adventurer, who tries his luck as a pirate. On the open sea, there were no limits, no boundaries, no consecrated sites, no sacred orientations, no law, and no property. Many peoples kept to the mounatins, far from the coasts, and never lost the old, pious fear of the sea. . . . Only when the great sea empires, maritime nations, or, to use a Greek expression, thalassocracies, arose was security and order established on the sea. The disturbers of the order created thereby sank to the level of common criminals. The pirate was declared to be an enemy of the human race (hostis generes humani). This meant htat he was ostracized and expelled, stripped of his rights, and made an outlaw by the rulers of the sea empires. Such extensions of law to the space of the free sea were world-historical events of revolutionary significance. We will call them "sea-appropriations." (43-44)

Towards an Archaeology of the Ciudad Letrada [introduction draft]

Hay un laberinto de las calles que sólo la aventura personal puede penetrar y un laberinto de los signos que sólo la inteligencia razonante puede descifrar, encontrando su orden.
--Ángel Rama (1984, 38)

This essay is a preliminary attempt to develop an archaeology of what Ángel Rama has called the ciudad letrada. By “archaeology,” I am not referring to Foucault’s project in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), although I too am interested in the conditions of possibility for authoritative discourse. Rather, I mean to evoke, in the first place, the complex, overlapping layers and textures of the political field of power relations that constituted New Spain’s ruling elite ; and, in the second, the academic field of archaeology, the search for the past in the materiality of the present, in the context of recent scholarship emphasizing the constructed nature of the “archaeological record.” In this essay, I trace the deployment of historical methodologies that engage with this material past -- Rama’s “aventura personal” as a form of excavation or inspection, an “archaeology lite” -- in order to transform the city into an object of study that privileges the mediating apparatus of a situated criollo knowledge. By mapping the “laberinto de los signos” onto the “laberinto de las calles,” I analyze the operations by which the urbs, the materiality of urban space, becomes legible to an “inteligencia razonante” that functions simultaneously as a political actor. Drawing on the works of the criollo intellectual Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, I trace the insertion of material history into the calculated -- though by no means secular -- politics of the field through which New Spain was governed and administrated at the end of the seventeenth century.

Genealogical Fictions

In Genealogical Fictions, María Elena Martínez traces the production of limpieza de sangre in Spain to the New World. One interesting piece of the argument is the transatlantic nature of the probanzas de limpieza de sangre, that is, the institutionalized process people had to go through in order to prove their purity of blood and receive an official document attesting to it (in order to apply for certain jobs, for example). Martínez argues, like Twinam, that the investigation procedures tended to rely on public images and behaviors, on the one hand, which made genealogies unstable. Also, the fact that people might have to apply for probanzas multiple times in their lifetimes, meant that they were constantly threatened by a potential destabilization. At the same time, Martínez argues that these investigations facilitated both the process of the production of archives (and thus bureaucracy... that goes with the rise of the modern state?) and at the same time reinforced local memory about genealogies because the tribunals had to investigate the places of origin of the candidate. These investigations were carried out over the Atlantic and thus could take years.

Another key point is that indigenous people were constructed as “pure” -- this goes along, for Martínez, with the production of the dual republics, an indigenous republic that had not only its own laws and courts and governors but also, and increasingly over the colonial period (though with some starts and stops), its own logic of limpieza de sangre. Indians, particularly elites, by the eighteenth century certainly, could emphasize their ancestors’ lack of idolatry and of black stains and still remain “pure”; indeed, because of the structure of the república de los indios, it was advantageous to be a “pure” Indian because it was necessary to occupy an official position (like a cacique). The production of Indians as “pure” was linked to religious assumptions and descended from the original formulation of limpieza de sangre, which was focused on the risks of Jews and Muslims (and conversos and moriscos), who tended to be linked with heresy. Indians, on the other hand, may have descended from the Hebrews, but they apparently had no original religion (yeah, right) and thus had nothing to return to -- they were “tabula rasa” and thus ideal for evangelization.

I wonder what how I could use this in my dissertation. If the doctrine of Indian “purity” was changing towards the end of the seventeenth century, how does Sigüenza’s intervention in the history of the 1692 uprising fit in? It seems, on one hand, that he’s trying to counter the purity argument -- as his emphasis on indigenous “idolatry” makes clear. But why would he do that in the context of criollo demands that, according to Martínez, is looking to push the argument of indigenous purity (at least to the extent that they’re marrying them or have married them and want to remain pure themselves)? I suppose the timing is a bit off; the criollo argument about purity comes in the eighteenth century, and Martínez links it with casta paintings. A reference in the book might come in useful in this regard. Martínez cites one Diego Jaymes Ricardo de Villavicencio, who published in 1692 a book called Luz y methodo de confesar idólatras, which tries to link Indians to Jews (and thus demonstrate their impurity), and even blames their idolatry for the June 8 uprising. The argument about purity, then, couched in an understanding of Catholic evangelization in Spain and deployed against Jews, continued to exercise significant authority. Indeed, Charles II published a real cédula in 1697 that consecrated Indian purity and their “clean” blood. What is at stake here?

Historiography as city planning [work in progress]

[I've made a decent amount of progress on this chapter since the last time I posted a section. In the interest of keeping this blog flowing and at least symbolically getting pieces of writing "out of my hands," I've decided to post another one here. As always, comments are welcome.]

One could argue that the viceroy’s July 1 request transformed Sigüenza, at least temporarily, from “official historian” into official city planner. But the letrado’s segregation proposal, far from an essentially different sort of knowledge production, depends on a series of claims to authority based on (access to) a particular history of Mexico City -- and, by extension, the conquest. Indeed, Sigüenza’s report constitutes a microhistory of the city, written from its geographical and ideological center. It is on this authority, and that of the historical figures he resuscitates from the chronicles of the conquest and the city’s foundation, that Sigüenza lays claim to knowledge of the dynamics of the cityscape and of the necessary theories of governance that reshape the architectonic contours of the city in order to facilitate its administration. Using a discourse common to the Spanish colonial project of the sixteenth century -- that of congregación and reducción -- the letrado opens by accepting the viceroy’s analysis of the root causes of the problematic arrangement of the status quo. But when Sigüenza frames his proposal as a return to the birth of the Spanish city by “reduciendo otra vez a práctica lo que en su fundación se hizo” (7), he is not merely recalling this overarching tenet of sixteenth-century Spanish colonialism. Rather, he is performing a historiographical operation that deploys a revisionist history to not only construct a policy of city planning to the government but also affirms his own perhaps surprising role as a critical actor in their production. City planning, here, is a historiographical operation.

In this case, Sigüenza’s history refers to a localized historical precedent rooted in the physical and historical texture of Mexico City -- the original traza ordered by the conquistador himself. Kathleen Ross has shown convincingly that the imagery of the sixteenth-century crónicas de conquista so permeated Sigüenza’s reading of the 1692 uprising that the Mexican criollo easily identified with the heroic Spaniard. It would seem natural, then, that Sigüenza opens by framing his segregation proposal as a direct descendent of the conquest:

Tengo por acertado se observe ahora y se reduzca a práctica lo que ejecutó el Marqués del Valle cuando después de su debelación y conquista reedificó esta ciudad . . . (6)

Here, the violence of the uprising, which destroyed the very materiality of Spanish colonial power in New Spain, recalls the devastation left by the army Cortés led into the city of Tenochtitlan in 1521. Although for Sigüenza the city perhaps did not have to be “conquered” this time around, it nevertheless had to be “rebuilt” -- and not only the buildings surrounding the zócalo, but the material and social textures of the city as a whole. At the same time, the use of the verb “reedificar” performs a second operation: it complicates the location of the city’s original foundation by inserting an indigenous past into its Spanish present. Even more here than in the “Alboroto y motín,” as Ross has argued, Sigüenza’s rhetorical insertion of Cortés into a historical trajectory that predates his arrival transforms the conquistador into a “figura del Nuevo Mundo y no de Europa.” This temporally extensive and geographically rooted Indian presence, as I show at length below, underlies the nature of the threat as imagined by Sigüenza. For the letrado, the history of Mexico City can be rewritten as one of continual indigenous aggression. But this reading does not indicate a uniquely indigenous problem; rather, the problem is located in the transgression of institutional structures that serve to maintain order through separation.

Sigüenza seeks to unearth a segregational urge in the city’s foundational moment. He thus cites a series of Spanish chroniclers, including Antonio de Herrera, Juan de Torquemada, Francisco López de Gómara, and Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who document the veracity of the precedent that is to be reestablished -- namely, that when Cortés decided to (re)build the new Spanish capital on top of the ruins of Tenochtitlan, he called for a division between the Spanish traza and the Indian barrios. Gómara, for example, wrote that Cortés “mandó que el barrio de españoles fuese apartado del barrio de los indios, y así los ataja el agua,” while Torquemada asserted that

esta ciudad está hora fundada y constituída en el riñón y medio de lo que antes era población de los indios de este primer barrio, llamado Tenochtitlán; no se mezcla esta ciudad con los indios, pero cércanla por sus cuatro partes, haciendo barrios por sí, que son los arrabales de dicha ciudad. (6)

The passages cited, then, coincide in their reaffirmation of an essentially divided urban space. Indeed, while Gómara depicts the components of the city as separate “barrios,” Torquemada’s terminology lays claim to possession of the city itself. While the Spanish capital and center of authority takes the form of “ciudad,” the Mexica city of Tenochtitlan -- the remains or ruins of the indigenous population -- is relegated to the status of a mere “barrio.” The ciudad/barrio distinction coincides with the transposition of the early modern definition of the city as a marker of civilization into a colonial context where civilization takes on the implications of an expansive project.

At the same time, what is most interesting here is that, despite the centrality of the figure of Cortés, Sigüenza leaves out the conquistador’s own description that we saw in the previous section, privileging instead the more rigid spatialization laid out by the other historiographers. In this way, he effects a historiographical division that mirrors the structural segregation of the cityscape he is actively engaged in promoting. In the interest of eliminating the ambiguity and tension implicit in the city’s foundations, he highlights only the security-minded side of the conquistador’s vision, that part which sought to ensure the Spaniards’s position as “muy fuertes y seguros y muy señores de los naturales.” In other words, Sigüenza, as Ross shows, certainly identifies with Cortés, incorporating him into his history of the uprising. In the role of city planner, however, his recuperation of the conquistador is not uncritical. Rather, it forms part of a strategic reading of the conquest that serves the interest of the city of the present, reconquered from the threatening Indian masses.

Sigüenza goes on to recall the original directives for segregation, which came from the upper echelons of colonial government, Antonio de Mendoza and Luis de Velasco, New Spain’s first viceroys, as well as Emperor Charles V himself, who ordered that “se amurallase y fortaleciese esta ciudad de México, no por otro motivo sino el de asegurarse de los indios” (7). Thus, while deploying the figure of the conquistador as a source of authority, Sigüenza at the same time diffuses his importance by juxtaposing him with a parade of illustrious colonial magistrates. Thus, it is not quite right to say that he depends solely on the figure of Cortés, but rather that he performs a historiographical operation that seeks to construct a new claim to authority in the form of a new historical subject, a constellation of colonial authorities.

In addition to the vision of these authorities, Sigüenza would have found another ally in his effort to constitute the authoritative history of Mexico City as based on the materiality of a defensive traza. Three decades after the foundation of Mexico City, Francisco Cervantes de Salazar published a series of Latin dialogues in which two locals, Zamora and Zuazo, lead a Spaniard, Alfaro, on a tour of the city’s most impressive sights. On the way to the central plaza, Zamora asks Alfaro what he thinks of the houses the line the street, “built so regularly and evenly that none varies a finger’s breadth from another.” The visitor responds:

Al[faro]. They are all magnificent and elaborate, and appropriate to the wealthiest and noblest citizens. Each is so well constructed that one would call it a fortress, not a house.
Zuazo. Because of the large, hostile population, they had to be built like this at first, since it was impossible to surround the city by walls and defend it by towers. (39)

Alfaro’s comment, which establishes a conceptual overlap between the “regular” and “even” construction of the houses and their fortress-like strength, recalls the Spanish obsession with “order” in the context of laying out the new cities of the Americas in particular, where the cities tended to lack more conventional defensive structures like city walls. We have seen how Rama traces the obsession with the orderly city and its temporal projection. A given city’s foundational moment becomes fundamental for ensuring its future. In the case of Mexico City, an urban palimpsest featuring a Spanish city superimposed over the remains of the Mexica capital, this characteristic should point to a principal weakness. Such paranoia takes on a more solid character, as it were, in the context of the increasingly concrete threat articulated by Cervantes de Salazar. Three decades after the foundation of Mexico City, the “large, hostile [and evidently native] population” now represents a clear threat against which the buildings of the traza served literally as a defensive bulwark.

More like Cervantes de Salazar than Cortés, according to this reading, Sigüenza too recognized the threat the indigenous population posed to the Spanish government -- especially in the wake of the 1692 uprising, which, as noted in chapter 1, was coded as a primarily “Indian” revolt. After establishing the historical precedent of urban segregation, Sigüenza moves on to the threat that makes this precedent necessary. This intervention remains in the realm of history -- though, as I will argue, it is revisionist in its approach. He brings life to this justification in an abridged history of the city rendered in the form of concrete moments in which the Indian threat had materialized. In this context, Sigüenza generates a list of subaltern uprisings in Mexico City that took place in 1537, 1549, 1624, and of course on June 8, “el estrago que tenemos hoy a la vista, para llorarlo siempre” (7), which had occurred less than a month before. Much like the historiographic operation Sigüenza performs on the 1692 uprising, which rendered the cross-race convergence as “Indian” by eliding the other castas who participated, this micro-history of the city’s political stability strategically erases non-Indian eruptions or actively inverts them, transforming them into the product of the Indians’ “innata malicia con que aborreciendo a los españoles (aun cuando más los benefician) proceden siempre” (7). A more succinct example of conventional colonial discourse (the civilizing mission, along the lines of the white man’s burden) would be hard to find.

This tendency to erase the city’s “other” others from the texture of history is particularly evident in the case of the 1537 uprising, the only site where a non-indigenous subaltern group appears. In general, Sigüenza frames the violence in terms of the danger represented by the city’s indigenous population. Although he locates the cause of these uprisings in the “indios avencindados en la ciudad” who “dio gigante cuerpo” to the violence, this first case is the only one where Sigüenza breaks out of the Spanish-Indian racial binary he has established in any specific terms. Because of the breakdown of Cortés’s segregation policy, Indians have gone “entrometiendo . . . en la población de los españoles,” upon which “se originó haber intentado aquéllos [los indios], auxiliándose de negros, sublevarse con la ciudad el año de 1537, y lo hubieran conseguido (por la multitud que había de ellos en aquel tiempo) si casi milagrosamente no se descubre” (7; my emphasis).

Compare Sigüenza’s brief account of the 1537 uprising to that of historian Edgar F. Love:

In 1537 a group of Negro slaves in Mexico City plotted to drive the Spaniards out of Mexico. The rebels elected a slave king and proceeded to make arrangements to revolt at midnight, September 24, 1537. The ambitious plans of the Negroes included provisions for using the Indians of Tenochtitlán and Tlatalulco in their uprising. Hours before the insurrection was to begin, a Negro slave reported the conspiracy to the Spanish authorities who swiftly suppressed the plot. Twenty-four of the Negro ringleaders were publicly hung and quartered. There is little evidence to indicate that the Indian succumbed to the entreaties of the Negroes . . . The viceroy, however, was so upset by the machinations of the slaves that he warned the king that “if so small a number of Negroes in this country have dreamed of such an enterprise, for the present the number of Negroes sent here should be curtailed, because a quantity of them under similar circumstances could place the country under grave danger of being lost.”

The two accounts concur as to the basic trajectory of the uprising, including the miraculous, last minute discovery of the plot. The principal actors, however, have been inverted. For Love, this is an unmistakably “Negro” plot. That these slaves considered “using the Indians... in their uprising” does not in any way mitigate the historian’s certainty about which group took the initiative -- nor did the colonial government mistake this for an Indian plot, as only blacks faced capital punishment at the hands of the state. On the other hand, for Sigüenza it is the Indians who try to “use” the blacks in their own plans. His potentially vague assertion about “la multitud que había de ellos en aquel tiempo,” in this case clearly refers to the indigenous population, for as Love observes the black population in Mexico City remained relatively small throughout the colonial period. Sigüenza has clearly rewritten the conventional history, substituting Indians for blacks in order to emphasize the unique threat they presented to colonial stability.

In addition to this active revisionism, Sigüenza also entirely skips over other common examples of what were generally understood by colonial elites as abortive conspiracies instigated and led by blacks. In chapter 3, I discuss the multiple violences of 1612, when the government brutally executed 35 blacks and mulattoes, hanging then decapitating or quartering their bodies, for their alleged plot to overthrow the Spanish government. Every historian, of course, necessarily makes choices about what to include (and exclude) in his or her narrative, and as such the final product represents not the “whole” story but just that -- a story. Sigüenza’s story focuses attention on the indigenous and smoothes over that posed by other castas, who only become dangerous when put to use by the Indians. He thus inverts the conventional fear, as seen in Mörner’s analysis of the Leyes de Indias, of the pernicious influence that the castas were thought to exercise on the indigenous, rendering the latter the primary target of state action.

But the threat presented by the Indians is more complex then merely some innate desire, for if that were the case the only possible response would be some sort of policy of mass genocide. Not only was the “sedición” of 1624 the fault of the Indians, but, he continues, “los mismos indios avecinados casi en todas las más casas de los españoles, y lo más ponderable, en la misma plaza, en ranchos estables que allí tenían, y en las pulquerías donde se contaban por centenares, los que de día y de noche las frecuentaban, fueron los que ejecutaron” the violence of 1692 as well (7; my italics). With this passage, Sigüenza attributes an essential continuity between the indigenous insurgents who formed the majority -- but far from the entirety -- of the multitude whose uprising forced the Viceroy Gelves out of office in 1624 and those who burned the palace of the Viceroy Conde de Galve in 1692 -- not to mention those who came before and, presumably, who would come after unless some effective measure were taken to eliminate their treacherous presence. For, while simple Indianness is partly to blame, the security threat arises from the positionality of these multitudes. Scattered throughout the city center, from permanent encampments in the central plaza to the houses of Spaniards to the mixed social space provided by the city’s underworld of pulquerías (see chapter 1) -- it is the breakdown of the boundary between Spanish traza and Indian barrios that concerns Sigüenza here. This brief historical trajectory brings the letrado back to the historical moment with which he began and returns him to the topic at hand -- (re)segregating the cityscape.

Notes on Spanish economic theory

Yes, this is a bit random. Economic theory? Why didn't I become an economist, for that matter?

Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson’s project in The School of Salamanca: Readings of Spanish Monetary Theory, 1544-1605 (1952) is, in macro terms, to extend the history of economic theory backwards into early modern Spain -- to reperiodize, or, I suppose more accurately, to resituate (geographically) the study of the history of economics. As she notes in the introduction, for some reason Spain does not conventionally fit into this history: “Perhaps because Spanish is less widely studied from French or Italian, or perhaps because economics and Spanish studies just do not seem to go together, Spain is usually omitted from our list” (ix; my emphasis). I would add the legacy of the Black Legend to this non-explanation, which devalued Spanish intellectual tradition as mired in Catholic authoritarianism. Even Grice-Hutchinson makes some similar assumptions, as in this quote: “Besides providing a mass of factual information, they [de Soto’s writings] conceal beneath their theological dress many general concepts that deserve a place in the history of economic doctrine” (45). In any case, although Grice-Hutchinson characterizes her project as a temporal or period-based one -- the “general conclusions” to be drawn from her study are “Only, perhaps, that some of the leading ideas of modern [economic] theory have a longer history than is often supposed” (78).

I’m interested in sixteenth-century understandings of inflation related to the influx of gold and silver from the Americas. Grice-Hutchinson says that by the mid sixteenth century it was well known. “If there was one economic lesson which the whole Spanish nation had learned by the middle of the sixteenth century, it was that the value of money is fickle and that gold and silver are not synonymous with wealth, a lesson made all the more bitter by the high hopes that had attended the discovery of the New World a few decades before. The dream of El Dorado had been followed by a harsh awakening” (1). By 1550, prices had “more than doubled” from the beginning of the century (1). This, for Grice-Hutchinson, is what she calls “quantity theory,” one of the School of Salamanca’s contributions to “modern” economic theory (51-52). The other two are a psychological theory of value, that is, the separation of value of an object from something inherent in its nature (48); and a theory of purchasing power parity, which could better be understood as foreign exchange or exchanges of foreign currency (58).

In terms of specific people, Grice-Hutchinson points out the following:

• Vitoria is identified as sort of the father of the School of Salamanca (xi).

• Tomás de Mercado was interested in the different rates of money at different places (Spain vs. Flanders). That is, a maravedí can be worth more in one (Flanders) than the other, because of relative scarcity (10). He also performed constantly the kind of space-jumping I talked about with Cellorigo, moving between Spain, Guatemala, Santo Domingo, in other words, covering the ground or even mapping out the Spanish empire but plugged into European markets as well. He talks about how Guatemala “dammed up their money” by raising the price of gold, and goes on to say that this is a much better strategy than banning the removal of money: “However many laws are passed, and however strictly we may try to enforce them, foreigners will continue to despoil the country of gold and silver, and stuff their own with them, finding a thousand frauds and deceits for the purpose. So much so that in Spain, the very source and fount of escudos and crowns, scarcely a handful can be scraped together, whereas if you go to Genoa, Rome, Antwerp, or Venice you will see in the street of the bankers and money-changers, without exaggeration, as many piles of coins minted in Seville as there are piles of melons in San Salvador or in the Arenal. If this manifest sack and robbery had been remedied at the time of the discovery of the Indies (millions having come since then), I’ll warrant there would now be as much gold and silver in Spain as in all Jerusalem in the reign of Solomon” (97-98). And, “[M]odern exchange transactions are founded on the diversity in the estimation of money. It is understood that this estimation is to be universal throughout the whole of a kingdom, not peculiar to two or three or five needy persons in a town. Thus we see that in all Flanders and in all Rome, money is more highly esteemed than in all Seville, and in Seville more than in the Indies, and in the Indies more than in New Spain, and in New Spain more than in Peru” (97).

• De Soto was interested in the poor (43-44).

• Azpilcueta Navarro produced the “First clear statement” linking inflation to American treasure in his Comentario resolutorio de usuras (Salamanca, 1556) (52; 95 is translation of actual quote). This means that he preceded by 12 years Jean Bodin, who claimed to be the first to make that argument (52). Here’s the quote: “Third, that (other things being equal) in countries where there is a great scarcity of money all other saleable goods, and even the hands and labour of men, are given for less money than where it is abundant. Thus we see by experience that in France, where money is scarcer than in Spain, bread, wine, cloth, and labour are worth much less. And even in Spain, in times when money was scarcer, saleable goods and labour were given for very much less than after the discovery of the Indies, which flooded the country with gold and silver. The reason for this is that money is worth more where and when it is scarce than where and when it is abundant. What some men say, that a scarcity of money brings down other things, arises from the fact that its excessive rise makes other things seem lower, just as a short man standing beside a very tall one looks shorter than when he is beside a man of his own height” (95).

• Luis de Molina, in his Disputationes de Contractibus (1601), wrote that in Spain significant inflation had happened in the last 80 years: “in Spain the purchasing-power of money is far lower, on account of its abundance, than it was eighty years ago. A thing that could be bought for two ducats at that time is nowadays worth 5, 6, or even more. Wages have risen in the same proportion, and so have dowries, the price of estates, the income from benefices, and other things” (113-14). He goes on to differentiate between countries as well as within countries: “We likewise see that money is far less valuable in the New World (especially in Peru, where it is most plentiful) than it is in Spain. But in places where it is scarcer than in Spain, there will it be more valuable. Nor will the value of money be the same in all other places, but will vary: and this will be because of variations in its quantity, other things being equal. Value in this sense is not indivisible, but enjoys a certain freedom, just as goods whose price is not legally controlled are priced according to the judgement of prudent merchants. Even in Spain itself, the value of money varies: it is usually lowest of all in Seville, where the ships come in from the New World and where for that reason money is most abundant” (114).

Food for thought.

Prologue: Cortés in Temixtitán [work in progress]

[This is a draft of a section of chapter 2 of my dissertation, which deals with the respatialization of Mexico City after the 1692 uprising. I'm not sure if it works, though, with the rest of the chapter. Which is not included here. But I'm wondering in general how much sense this makes... any comments are very welcome. --ed.]

The “gran ciudad de Temixtitán,” as Cortés called it, made a striking impression on the conquistadors. Recalling his initial glimpses of the Mexica capital from the shore of Lake Texcoco in 1519, the foot soldier Bernal Díaz del Castillo described the marvelous city as something straight out of the books of chivalry:

nos quedamos admirados, y decíamos que parecía a las cosas de encantamiento que cuentan en el libro de Amadís, por las grandes torres y cúes y edificios que tenían dentro en el agua, y todos de calicanto, y aun algunos de nuestros soldados decían que si aquello que veían si era entre sueños, y no es de maravillar que no escriba aquí de esta manera, porque hay mucho que ponderar en ello que no sé como lo cuente: ver cosas nunca oídas, ni aun soñadas, como veíamos.

Cortés too was awed. In his Segunda carta de relación to Carlos V, he prefaced his description with a baroque discourse on representation -- not, in this case, the postmodern critique of the failure of representation but simply that the city’s marvels were enough to overpower the representational abilities of the author. “Porque para dar cuenta,” he wrote, “de la grandeza, extrañas y maravillosas cosas desta gran ciudad de Temixtitán . . . sería menester mucho tiempo y ser muchos relatores y muy expertos, no podré yo decir de cien partes una de las que dellas se podrían decir.” Cortés concluded these prefatory remarks by echoing the wonder of Bernal Díaz’s “encantamiento”: “los que acá con nuestros propios ojos las vemos [algunas cosas de las que vi] no las podemos con el entendimiento comprender.”

But this rhetorical loss for words did not stop Cortés from launching into a detailed description of the city, a orderly, totalizing representation beginning with its natural setting before continuing on to demarcate its buildings, marketplaces, and inhabitants. Indeed, it is this textual representation that lays the foundation of the Spanish colonial capital. Its scriptural foundations can be traced through the map that accompanied the Nuremburg edition (1524) of Cortés’s second letter (figs. 1 and 2). Based loosely on Cortés’s description, the image adopts what has been called a “fisheye” perspective, which renders the city as a set of concentric circles that grow closer together as they move farther from the center. The image thus situates the viewer in the magnified central plaza -- the site of the barbaric and idolatrous practices represented by a skull rack (capita sacrificaru[m]) and sacrificial temple (templum ubi sacrificant) -- looking out toward the horizon, toward the shore of the lake, on which Cortés’s army stands under the Habsburg banner ready to take (back) the city. It “places its readers in the heart of Mexica darkness, but only so that they can appreciate what Cortés wants them to believe, that civilization has barbarism surrounded and is sure to conquer.”


Spanish conquest is thus imminent, inevitable -- indeed, it has already happened. José Rabasa has observed that the map “does not denote a real object” but rather “is an ideal reconstruction of a city by then in ruins. The pluperfect fuerat (had been) in the legend establishes the plan as an imaginary projection that fulfills a purpose other than cartographical accuracy.” The rest of the legend supports this claim: “This commonwealth had once been powerful and a realm of the greatest glory. [It] has been subjected to the rule of Caesar [Charles V]. He is truly outstanding. The Old World and the New [now] belong to him, and another (alter) is laid open to his auspices.” What can this “alter” refer to, if not the New World? Ricardo Padron reads it as an allusion to not only the city of Tenochtitlan but also to the future conquests that this one implies -- “that alter that lies beyond the horizon.” This suggests that the value of the historical past/present lies in its power to refer to, if not predict, the future. But the spatial relationship between past, present, and future, I think, is somewhat more complex. “Perspective vision and prospective vision,” de Certeau writes,

constitute the twofold projection of an opaque past and an uncertain future onto a surface that can be dealt with. They inaugurate (in the sixteenth century?) the transformation of the urban fact into the concept of a city. Long before the concept itself gives rise to a particular figure of history, it assumes that this fact can be dealt with as a unity determined by an urbanistic ratio. Linking the city to the concept never makes them identical, but it plays on their progressive symbiosis: to plan a city is both to think the very plurality of the real and to make that way of thinking the plural effective; it is to know how to articulate it and be able to do it.

To imagine Cortés as city planner, then, is to conceptualize the confrontation between an imaginary of structural (and thus social) order and a microcosm of urban ruins as the foundation on which to build; for de Certeau, the map is the material deployment of the surface on which this difference is neutralized, overcome, brought into line. The Nuremburg map, then, represents the overlapping of what has become an “opaque past” -- a calcified image of barbarism -- and an “uncertain future” of the projection of Spanish colonial power. Consider the map’s representation of the city center. As noted above, not only does the fisheye perspective magnify its scale, but as a place infused with meaning it connects symbolically with the ideological center, which, in the context of Spanish depictions of indigenous barbarism, coalesces in the visual matrix of skull rack-sacrificial temple. The headless stone idol (idol lapideu[m]) at the center of the walled enclave, however, captures the dual temporalities of the map. Certainly, it recalls Cortés’s righteous declaration in his second letter that he had the idols in the temple smashed and replaced with images of “Nuestra Señora y . . . otros santos” (94) -- before, that is, the city’s official defeat. But the statue as such also portends the inevitable (already occurred?) defeat of the Mexica temporal as well as spiritual authorities, the imposition of Spanish Christian rule.

The thick defensive wall, which carries the capitalized label “TEMIXTITAN,” locates the city at the center, designating that which falls outside as definitively something else (alter?). Here the map differs from Cortés’s description, which includes in “esta gran ciudad de Temixtitán” the canals, houses, streets, buildings, and markets that in the map are situated outside the wall. I point this out not as part of an argument about the map’s provenance, about which much has been written, but rather to highlight the convergence of multiple political strategies that can be isolated across the historical moments of writing the second letter (1520), planning the city (1521), and printing the image (1524). In his letter, Cortés described a similarly strong wall surrounding the temple -- “dentro del circuito della [la mezquita principal], que es todo cercado de muro muy alto, se podía muy bien hacer una villa de quinientos vecinos” (93-94). Superimposing image over text helps to reveal the urbanistic urge already present in Cortés’s presentation of the city in 1520, where already the structure of a city within a city is crystallizing. It is thus over the ruins of Temixtitán -- as opposed to Tenochtitlan -- that the new Spanish city is laid out in 1521. While eliminating the wall, Cortés retains its function, simply inserting the new authorities -- and their new “villa” -- into the same space.


Temixtitán contains its own past, present, and future. As historical imaginary it depicts the ideological representations of barbarism, while as urbanistic projection it smoothes over the difficulties of systematizing what de Certeau calls the “urban fact” with the “concept of a city.” This, I think, is why Margo Glantz has suggested that Cortés inaugurates, through its scriptural foundation, what Ángel Rama calls the “ciudad letrada” of the baroque. The recuperation of this “ciudad escriturada” at the end of the seventeenth century will thus be an ideal job for a letrado like Sigüenza.

Gonzalo Guerrero, religion, and mestizaje

In “The Narrative Invention of Gonzalo the Warrior,” Rolena Adorno proposes to use this figure to address sixteenth- and seventeenth-century understandings of the mestizo and mestizaje. Gonzalo Guerrero, as he is conventionally known, is the Spaniard who was captured by the Maya and incorporated into indigenous society -- to the point of manipulating his body with tattoos and piercings, marrying an indigenous woman, and having (the first) mestizo children. Even more striking, Gonzalo apparently refused “rescue,” choosing to stay with the Maya instead of returning to his countrymen. He proceeded, according to some versions of the story, to serve as the wartime leader and strategist for the Indians and through his abilities was able to keep the Spaniards from conquering the Yucatan peninsula until 1547 (232). (Though it’s unclear where Adorno pulls that date from, since according to Nancy Farriss’s Maya Society Under Colonial Rule [1984] the Yucatan was never really under Spanish control in its entirety.)

What Adorno does well here is clearly trace the development of this narrative, fictionalized character. While she frames it as an exploration into mestizaje, however, this part of her analysis (a bit of limpieza de sangre background) isn't very enlightening.

Gonzalo Guerrero’s foil is Jerónimo de Aguilar, also shipwrecked and captured by the Mayas, but who decided to join back with the Spaniards. Aguilar served as one link in Cortés’s chain of lenguas, translating from Spanish into Maya to Marina, who would consequently translate from Maya into Nahuatl. Gonzalo’s counterpart, then, serves a key role in the conquest.

Accounts begin with the 1534 investigation (interrogatorio) into Cortés’s rule of New Spain -- over two decades after the sailors were supposed to have been shipwrecked in 1511 (228). Though Cortés calls him “a certain Morales,” did not want to return because he “had his ears pierced and he was painted like an Indian and married to an Indian woman, and he had children by her” (228). The second reference to Gonzalo comes in 1536 from Andrés de Cereceda, who participated in Pedro de Alvarado’s attempt to conquer the Yucatan two years before. Cereceda writes of a “Christian Spaniard named Gonzalo Aroça” who was “the one who they say brought the military commander (adelantado) [Francisco de] Montejo to ruin” (229). For Adorno, these first two references represent the two main lines of thought on this traitorous Spaniard. In her words, “Cortés gives us the domestic Gonzalo, and Cereceda, the warrior” (229).

I am interested in the second part of the argument because it fits into contemporary debates about the nature of the Indians, both in the theoretical-theological-philosophical field of the Las Casas-Sepúlveda debates in 1550-1551 and in the more literary field of Ercilla’s La araucana, for example. (Though perhaps it would be better not to separate these fields at all.) This has to do with the Indians’s fighting abilities. If they’re naturally inferior to the Spanish, then it must be the case that they have a Spaniard giving them advice and helping them. Adorno agrees:

In the preceding years of 1527 and 1528, as well as during 1530-1534, Francisco de Montejo repeatedly had attempted and failed to conquer Yucatán. There was reluctance at the time to blame Montejo’s failure on the Mayas’ expertise in war or on Montejo’s inability to conduct jungle and guerrilla warfare. To explain the difficulty of achieving a conquest, another explanation was sought. (228)

Adorno also brings up the issue of religion and heresy in the context of reading Oviedo’s later account of “Gonzalo, el marinero” (229). Oviedo describes him in this way:

Y este Gonzalo, marinero, . . . estaba ya convertido en indio, e muy peor que en indio, y casado con una India, e sacrificadas las orejas e la lengua, e labrado la persona, pintado como indio, e con mujer e hijos. . . . Bien es de creer que los tales no podían ser sino de vil casta e viles heréticos. . . . él sería de ruin casta y sospechosa a la mesma religión cristiana. (230-31)

Unfortunately, Adorno doesn’t provide a close reading of these comments, which seem to me to contain a good deal to work with. She simply observes that Gonzalo’s ability to transform himself into an Indian must indicate that he was not an Old Christian -- his bill of limpieza de sangre was not clean enough (231). More interesting to me are a couple points. First, the use of the word “convertido” strikes me as particularly important for a discussion of religion in the context of conquest, which, after all, was consistently framed in terms of the evangelization project. Gonzalo’s “conversion” to Indian, of course, does not refer directly to a religious transformation but, at least linguistically, to one of material essence. Covarrubias (1611) includes a definition of “convertir” as “Convertir una cosa en otra, transformarla, como los embaydores alquimistas, que dizen convertir el estaño en plata y el cobre en oro” (354). The alchemical shift, then, might best be coded, perhaps anachronistically, as one from civilization to barbarism. It also strikes me that Oviedo’s use of the phrase “convertido en indio” creates a linguistic and conceptual bridge for the shift from the genealogical approach of limpieza de sangre, which traced religious essence through blood, to the genealogical approach of the sociedad de castas in the Americas, which would eventually trace racial essence through blood.

Oviedo’s description of Gonzalo’s bodily transformation -- “sacrificadas las orejas e la lengua, e labrada la persona” -- recalls another set of debates very present at the time about the Indians’ supposed crimes against humanity (primarily cannibalism and human sacrifice, often linked together). Gonzalo’s self-“sacrifice” indicts him not only as an idolater, who engages in indigenous religious practices, but also renders perhaps the most treasonous form of such a crime. But the “sacrifice” of the tongue plays a different role. Whereas Jerónimo de Aguilar’s “lengua” served a noble purpose by facilitating the conquest of Tenochtitlan, Gonzalo Guerrero’s sacrificed his true “lengua” not so much by piercing it as by taking on the cultural practices of the indigenous Maya. By rejecting the chance to rejoin the Spanish, he also rejected the Spanish language -- which, for Walter Mignolo (The Darker Side of the Renaissance), had significant implications for being considered civilized. His sacrifices, then, are truly what make him a vile heretic.

Gonzalo Guerrero’s children present another issue: varying responses to the first mestizos. The most interesting account seems to be that of Bernal Díaz, whose “portrayal of Gonzalo’s tenderness toward his mestizo family [says Adorno] bespeak Bernal’s appreciation and understanding of such social and familial phenomena, seeing the mixed society (in which he himself lived), as unthreatening” (235). After all, Bernal Díaz has Gonzalo say “Y ya veis estos mis hijitos quán bonitos son” (234). The beauty of mestizaje is apparent here. Adorno seems to imply that Bernal Díaz’s own mestizo children are enough to explain this sympathetic account (234). But there is a big difference between aesthetic appreciation and imaginaries of social difference or the possibilities of violence that mestizos could pose. Kathryn Burns argues that, in Peru at least, by the second half of the sixteenth century -- when Bernal Díaz is writing his manuscript -- the body of the (male) mestizo is becoming increasingly linked with the potential for political instability.