The Conquest of Mexico E-Book

Serge Gruzinski

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 781

Beschreibung

The Conquest of Mexico is a brilliant account of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, written from a new and unfamiliar angle.

Gruzinski analyses the process of colonization that took place in native Indian societies over three centuries, focusing on disruptions to the Indian's memory, changes in their perception of reality, the spread of the European idea of the supernatural and the Spanish colonists' introduction of alphabetical script which the Indians had to combine with their own traditional - oral and pictorial - forms of communication.

Gruzinski discusses the Indians' often awkward initiation into writing, their assimilation of Spanish culture, and their subsequent reinterpretation of their own past and recovers the changing Indian perceptions of the sacred and their 'absorption' of elements from the Christian tradition.

The Conquest of Mexico is a major work of cultural history which reconstructs a crucial episode in the European colonization of the New World. It is also an important contribution to the study of the relationship between memory, orality, images and writing in history.

Leseprobe

The Conquest of Mexico

The Incorporation of Indian Societies into the Western World, 16th – 18th Centuries

Serge Gruzinski

Translated by Eileen Corrigan

Polity Press

English translation © Polity Press 1993

First published in France as La colonisation de l’imaginaire

© Editions Gallimard 1988.

This translation first published 1993 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Reprinted 1996, 2005

Published with the assistance of the French Ministry of Culture.

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Contents

Abbreviations

Map of Mexico

Introduction

1 Painting and Writing

The torn net

A new look

The transformations of pictographic expression

The last Renaissance

2 Memories to Order

3 The Primordial Titles or the Passion for Writing

4 Colonial Idolatry

Idolatry at issue

5 The Christianization of the Imaginaire

6 Capturing the Christian Supernatural

7 A Last Reprieve for Composite Native Cultures

Composite cultures

Enforced interlocutors

The first onslaughts of modernity

Conclusion

Notes

Glossary

Sources

Sources and methodology

Sources: printed and painted

1 Collections of documents

2 Ecclesiastical sources

3 Civil sources

4 Judicial sources

5Linguistic sources

6 Indigenous sources and mestizo manuscripts

7Indigenous painted sources

Bibliography

Index

Abbreviations

AGIArchivo General de Indias (Sevilla)AGNArchivo General de la Nación (Mexico City)AHPMArchivo Histórico de la Provincia Mexicana de la Compañía de JesúsAMNAHArchivo del Museo Nacional de Antropología e Historia (Mexico City)ARSIArchivum Romanum Societatis Jesu (Rome)BNBiblioteca Nacional (Mexico City)exp.expediente: fileFCEFondo de Cultura Económica (Mexico City) HMAIHandbook of Middle American IndiansINAHInstituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (Mexico City)leg.legajo: bundlePNEPapeles de Nueva EspañaRGMRelaciones geográficas de Michoacán (José Corona Nuñez ed., 1958)SEPSecretaría de Educación Pública (Mexico City)UNAMUniversidad Nacional Autónoma de México (Mexico City)

Introduction

How does a culture come to life, change and decline? How is a credible environment generated and reproduced in the midst of apparently unparalleled political and social upheavals, disparities in modes of living and thinking and demographic crises? How, in more general terms, do individuals and groups contrive and experience their relations with the real1 in a society disrupted by an absolutely unprecedented external domination? Travelling through the prodigiously interesting territory that made up the Mexico conquered and ruled by the Spanish from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, one inevitably asks questions such as these, not to satisfy a craving for the exotic and the archaic – which has nothing in common with history and anthropology – but to understand better what the impact of sixteenth-century western Europe might have meant for America. It was a completely new experience, all the more remarkable since America was the only continent to have had just fleeting contacts with the rest of the world for tens of thousands of years. It was an experience notable also for the wealth of accounts that can shed light on it, and the many questions it still raises about the Indians, and even more about ourselves.

Elsewhere, I have tried to follow the history of the body, of marriage and the introduction of western European sexuality as well as the fate of the representations and practices of power in the indigenous world (Gruzinski, 1982; 1989a). These first steps helped me to discover and to reexamine the instruments of the conversion of Mexico to Christianity and what was at stake; to highlight the multiplicity of cultural levels among the Indian peoples; to analyse the forms of a practically uninterrupted creativity.2 In this study, I have preferred to investigate other fields and to work on other subjects, seeking as much to discover the modification in forms and in what was at issue as to describe the substance. The revolution in the modes of expression and communication, the disruption of memories, the transformations of the imaginaire, the role of the individual and of social groups in the genesis of syncretic expressions, are inescapable for the historian of colonial Mexico. Following these lines has made it possible to exploit the already considerable knowledge of demographic, economic and social history, while reaching beyond the flat, reductive and distant vision often established by apparently exhaustive statistics and the rigidity of superimposed patterns.

Actually, many of these topics were still to be explored. With certain brilliant exceptions,3 anthropologists have systematically missed out the period of the Spanish domination that transformed Mexico, dismissing in a few pages processes of the greatest complexity. In the same way, prehispanic archaeology and history have often forgotten that most accounts of the period before Cortés were conceived and written in the drastically changed context of the nascent New Spain, and that they offer above all a reflection of this period.

Most historians and anthropologists have disregarded the revolution in modes of expression – the passage from pictograph to alphabetic writing in sixteenth-century Mexico – although it was probably one of the major side-effects of the Spanish domination: in a few decades the Indian nobility not only discovered writing but also often combined it with the traditional forms of expression, based on the image, that they continued to cultivate. The twofold nature of the indigenous sources of the sixteenth century (painted and manuscript) leads one to study what writing implied in restructuring and altering the Indian view of things, and prompts an assessment of the control that Indian circles continued (or not) to exercise on communication, or at least some of its forms. The use of writing changed the manner of fixing the past. How, then, could one fail to inquire into the evolution of the organization of the indigenous memory and the transformations undergone by its contents, or the distances assumed in relation to ancient societies and the degree of assimilation of new ways of life? The more so since until now this question too has had little attention. But the modifications in the Indian relationship to time and space suggest a further line of inquiry, more global and more difficult to undertake: to what extent could the Indian peoples’ perception of the real and the imaginary have changed, in what way, and under what influence? It is true that the relative scarcity of sources hardly permits a reconstruction of an ‘ethnic’ or ‘cultural unconscious’, still less an understanding of its metamorphoses. One must settle for a few modest reports, pointing the way, and follow a handful of personalities in their attempts to construct syntheses and fashion compromises between these worlds – which recalls that cultural creation is as much the task of individuals as of groups. Styles and techniques of expression, memory, perceptions of time and space, the imaginaire, thus provide material for exploring the confusion of borrowings, the assimilation of European characteristics and their distortion, the dialectics of misunderstanding, appropriation and alienation. At the same time, one must not lose sight of the political and social stakes involved, which meant that a reinterpreted feature, a concept, a practice, could strengthen a threatened identity while in the long term it was likely to bring about a slow dissolution or a complete reorganization of the group that welcomed it. That is how I envisage coming to grips with the dynamics of the cultural entities that the Indians of New Spain ceaselessly reworked.

Of course all these fields of research come together in a quest, not so much to penetrate indigenous worlds in order to unearth an ‘authenticity’ miraculously preserved or irrevocably lost, as to take stock over three centuries of a process of westernization, in the sense of Europeanization, in its least spectacular but perhaps most insidious manifestations: a last resort that admittedly responds as much to constraints inherent in the sources as to the deliberate orientation of our inquiry.

A good deal of documentation, scattered in Mexico, Spain, Italy, France and the United States, makes it possible to study the Indians of New Spain, or more precisely to apprehend what they represented for the Spanish authorities: a population of tributaries, of pagans to convert to Christianity, of neophytes to watch and catch out, of pueblos to set up, shift, concentrate, and set apart from those of the Spanish. The colonial view was a measuring up of bodies, goods and souls, in which one reads constantly of the encounter, the collision between an unlimited will to ascendancy and groups that willingly or not accepted submission to it. Moreover, this material has inspired an institutional, demographic, economic and social history of the Indians of the colony, successfully illustrated by the works of Charles Gibson, Sherburne F. Cook, Woodrow Borah or Delfina López Sarrelangue.4 To reinforce this colonial view, we have the exceptional work of the ecclesiastical chroniclers of the sixteenth century, Toribio de Benavente, known as Motolinía, Bernardino de Sahagún, Diego Durán, Gerónimo de Mendieta and many others concerned to put an end to idolatry, to describe the indigenous societies before their contact with western Europe, but preoccupied also with safeguarding what they perceived to be best in them. This was a remarkable approach for its time, prefiguring the ethnographic process, but its richness and apparent comprehensiveness might well often conceal subtle or obvious preconceptions imprinted on the indigenous reality. It is hardly surprising that these authors explored the Amerindian world using European grids and vocabularies.5 In fact, it often happens that the exotic quality that we experience in reading their accounts actually emanates more from sixteenth-century Spain than from the indigenous cultures. It is none the less true that these sources sketch in the incomparable outlines of an overall grasp of the indigenous worlds at the time of the conquest and, we would add, throughout the sixteenth century. It is regrettable that these texts – copiously exploited by archaeologists and historians to describe religions, societies and ancient economies – have less often served to shed light on their own world, which was already converted to Christianity and acculturated when they took shape.

There remain the indigenous sources. However paradoxical or surprising it might be, the Indians of colonial Mexico have left an impressive quantity of written testimony. They expressed a passion for writing often tied to the will to survive, to keep safe the memory of the lineage or the community, to preserve goods and identities. That is the case of the Indian historians and priests whom the works of Angel M. Garibay have helped to make better known but about whom much remains to be said. It is also true of a rich literature from the Indian communities – the Annals, the ‘Primordial Titles’ – which is less known, usually anonymous, and reveals in many regions the precocious existence of the practice of writing and an altogether original concern with expression. To which one must add the vast collection made up by the Indian escribanos and towns, wills, deeds of sale and purchase, gifts, proceedings, accounts – all more stereotyped and more subject to the constraints of Spanish law – written in the indigenous language and which James Lockhart and others have drawn to the attention of scholars. It is true that only the nobles and notables wrote. It is no less true that one must part with the cliché of ‘peoples without writing’. In many pueblos of Mexico the quill was handled as often as and perhaps better than in the villages of Castile or Europe in the same period. Finally, not a few Indians had to give an oral account of behaviour or beliefs that the Church condemned. Every trial, each interrogatory yields its share of data, provided that one knows how to evaluate what the filter of writing, the aims of the investigator, the questioning of the judge, the intervention of the notary and the escribano or the chances of preservation have been able to add to (or subtract from) the original account.

This cluster of sources cannot then be dissociated from European modes of expression or colonial situations. Only archaeology and an analysis of the pictographs afford the theoretical possibility of breaking through the western European filter – theoretical, since the absence of the filter paradoxically does not resolve very much. The Indians who painted the codices, aligning their multicoloured pictographs on amate, have hardly left a guide to reading them (Plate 1). The key, the meaning of this mode of expression – without equivalent in our world – still largely escapes us, however innovative the work carried out in recent years, the more so since many of the ‘prehispanic’ pieces were in fact painted after the conquest and might lead us to take for an indigenous feature a subtle assimilation, a first, hardly discernible reinterpretation. Once more we face the close or distant spectre of the Europeanization that shadows every step of the historian.

The unavoidable filter of writing, whatever the source, and the resulting impossibility of getting in touch with the original oral culture, the inevitable relations with western Europe in the form of the parish priest, the judge, the tribunals, the administrators, the tax collector, indicate and clarify the limits of this exploration of indigenous worlds. But let us not conclude that we are condemned, for want of a better possibility, to decode the discourse on the Indians. Let us simply admit that we apprehend only reflections of the indigenous world mixed unmistakably and with greater or lesser confusion with our own. To claim to pass through the looking glass, to grasp the Indians apart from the western European influence, is a perilous and often impracticable and illusory exercise; unless one accepts losing oneself in a maze of hypotheses that must ceaselessly be challenged. There remains, however, a still considerable field: indigenous reactions to models of behaviour and thought introduced by the Europeans; analysis of their perception of the new world established by the colonial domination in violence and often chaos. Let us now pick up and interpret these reflections, which by their very survival provide exceptional accounts, with scarcely an equivalent on the European side of the Atlantic.

This book was written between 1982–1985 and is a considerably abridged version of my doctoral thesis presented in January 1986.

1

Painting and Writing

It is difficult to imagine the extraordinary complexity, the population density and the cultural diversity of Mexico on the eve of the Spanish conquest. Before beginning to explore the more noteworthy characteristics of this universe, it is vital to make a detour by way of certain essential landmarks; otherwise there is too great a risk of getting lost. Central Mexico – from Michoacán and the Bajío, from the Chichimec border in the north to the region of Oaxaca in the south – is known to have accommodated a sizeable population at that time, dispersed among numerous communities and several large agglomerations. It is calculated that between 10 and 25 million souls inhabited these lands in 1519 (Cook and Borah, 1971–9), together making up a singularly dense linguistic and cultural political map. Nahuatl-speaking peoples dominated in the centre, in the valleys of Mexico, Toluca and Puebla, in the semi-tropical Morelos and part of Guerrero. The Purepecha occupied Michoacán, while in the southeast, Zapotec and Mixtec shared the mountains of Oaxaca. So much for the most powerful groups. Less numerous or less influential, other peoples had a personality, a history, that set them apart from the foregoing. Consider the Mazahua and especially the Otomí of the north of the valley of Mexico, from Sierra de Puebla and Tlaxcala; the Chontal of Guerrero; the Mixe, Trique, Chatino, and many others, of the region of Oaxaca. It is impossible to do justice to each of these groups and cultures. At the very most, one can keep in mind their diversity, their interweaving, their belonging to quite different linguistic families: Uto-Aztec for Nahuatl; Maya for Mixe, Zoque, Totonac; Macro-Otomanguean for Mazahua, Otomí and Matlaltzinca, Mixtec, Zapotec, while the Tarasc (or Purepecha) of Michoacán made up still another group. Certain languages dominated in this mosaic: Mixtec, Zapotec, Tarascan, and above all the Nahuatl of the central valleys, which served as lingua franca in the other regions.

South of the Bajío, inhabited by the nomad Chichimec hunters and gatherers, peasant societies were generally to be found, maintaining by their tribute the artisans, priests, warriors and shopkeepers in the framework of political units that the Nahua called tlatocayotl, the Spaniards translated as dominios and the Anglo-Saxons city states – although they were in fact neither cities in the Greek sense nor states in the modern sense of the term. A so-called city state was rather a vague entity made up of a political, administrative, urban centre (more or less developed, according to the ethnic group), and of a series of villages and hamlets, and even scattered farms. Among the Nahua peoples, these villages and hamlets corresponded to calpulli; in other words, to territorial units based on kinship, a relative hierarchy of lineages, a tendency to endogamy, communal ownership of land, material and military solidarity, and the cult of a tutelary god, the calpulteotl, whose force resided in an image or a sacred bundle. At least that is what one can deduce from sources that are at the same time copious, contradictory and incomplete (López Austin, 1980, I, pp. 75–80).

Embedded among the domains and the free or enforced alliances, the confederations made up more or less extensive, more or less ephemeral, more or less centralized political units after the fashion of those constructed by the Mixtec of Tilantongo, the Nahua of Tlaxcala and particularly those of México-Tenochtitlán, Texcoco and Tlacopan in the valley of Mexico. Alliances were made and unmade in tandem with the invasions and movements of people. So it was that during the three centuries that preceded the Spanish conquest, the Nahuatl-speaking tribes of the north penetrated into the valley of Mexico and mixed with local populations in successive waves. ‘Cities’ such as Culhuacán, Azcapotzalco and Coatlinchan prospered, then declined. In the fifteenth century, about 1428, Texcoco and Tlacopan, under the leadersip of the Mexica of Tenochtitlán, set up a confederation or league, the Triple Alliance, which drained tribute from the valley and from far more distant lands. Built in the middle of the lake of Texcoco, Tenochtitlán, with its network of canals, became the largest agglomeration of the American world at that time, with more than 150,000, and possibly more than 200,000 residents. However, we must be wary of seeing it as the head of a modern empire or a centralized bureaucracy, or the heart of an irresistible dominion. The ascendancy of the Triple Alliance basically took the form of the levying of tribute, the possible installation of garrisons, the imposition – or rather the superimposition – of its gods on the local pantheons, and above all the setting-up of extremely dense networks of marriages and bonds of kinship. The Triple Alliance was new and as politically fragile as earlier hegemonies, possibly because of the lack of a system of writing that measured up to its ambitions. It covered basically the centre of Mexico, that is, a territory of about 200,000 km sq. (Calnek, 1982). It did not however include Tarascan Michoacán, the domain of Tlaxcala (likewise Nahua), which alongside its allies of Huejotzingo and Cholula stood up to the Mexica and the Triple Alliance.

Finally, in the course of their migrations or their periods of settling down, all these peoples underwent a continual process of acculturation. This was recalled by some when they compared the Olmec and Toltec of old, bearers of the refinements of civilization, to the Chichimec hunters and gatherers, and even when they mentioned the Toltec-Chichimec groups that resulted from their encounter. Ancient and autochthonous peoples coexisted with the new arrivals, who assimilated the local traditions at the same time as they lent their services. We must bear in mind that these historical acculturations, these progressive passages from a nomadic to a sedentary life, formed the background of indigenous memories. We must equally beware of considering these cultures and societies as homogeneous wholes: it is established in the case of Tenochtitlán (and is doubtless true of other cities as well) that deep differences separated the urban communities, devoted to business and arts and crafts, from rural settlements. If the variables introduced by the diversity of social groups, if not of social classes, are added to these many economic, ethnic and historical levels, one gets a kaleidoscopic picture that rules out categorizing the Indian worlds as stable entities, monolithic and immobile societies, totaritarian before the term had been invented, or miraculously anchored outside history. It is equally untenable to confuse them with the farming communities or exploited marginals that they have become in our time (Calnek, 1974).

Let us stay for a while with the indigenous nobility, for it was in their midst that appeared one of the most remarkable features of these societies. Of all the groups that dominated the peoples of central Mexico – Tarasc achaecha, Mixtec tay toho, Otomí or Zapotec lords – it is the pipiltin, the Nahua nobles, who are probably best known to us (Carrasco, Broda, et al., 1976; López Sarrelangue, 1965; Spores, 1967; Olivera, 1978; Monjarás-Ruiz, 1980). The pipiltin legitimized their powers and conceived the world in which they lived by relying on the learning that they held dear. This learning recorded ways of life, traditions to be preserved, inheritance to be transmitted, all that can be designated in a general way by the Nahuatl term tlapializtli (Léon-Portilla, 1980, pp. 15–35). To the cosmos, this learning was supposed to impart a rule, a moderation, a stability. To society it provided an order, a direction, a meaning. At least so claimed the four elders who invented ‘the account of fates, annals and the account of years, the book of dreams’. An ancient patrimony, meticulously preserved, implemented and transmitted from people to people, this learning was the origin of a singularly developed system of education. Temple-schools reserved for sons of the pipiltin prepared the future rulers. Within these calmecac, wise men – ‘those called the owners of the books of paintings’, ‘the knowers of hidden things’, ‘the keepers of tradition’ – dispensed to the young nobles an education as austere as it was sophisticated, which associated knowledge with modes of speaking and ways of being. Among other things, they learned ‘verses of songs so as to be able to sing what they called divine hymns that were written in characters on painted books’ (ibid., pp. 190–204). It was this education that from birth set the nobles apart from the plebeians, the macehuales, by making them intellectually and morally superior beings, these ‘sons of the people’, these ‘hairs’ and these ‘nails of the people’, who were all dedicated to the functions of ruling (López Austin, 1980, I, pp. 443–67).

But what is undoubtedly the main thing is that all the learning that expressed and synthesized the image that these cultures – or more precisely these ruling circles – cherished of the world, flowed into two modes of expression that seem predominant and at home in the Mesoamerican world: oral transmission and pictography. So it was for the ancient Nahua, the Mixtec and the Zapotec of the Oaxaca region and also, perhaps to a lesser degree, for the Otomí. The Tarasc of Michoacán, on the other hand, seem not to have known pictographic expression, since they have left us nothing comparable to the annals or the calendars.

The cultures of central Mexico were in the first place oral cultures. They took great pains to cultivate oral traditions and to codify, verify and transmit them. In their highly variegated expressions, the Nahua sources of the colonial period have preserved a sense of this creativity. I shall give just a brief survey the better to suggest the range that it covered. The Nahua distinguished at least two major bodies of work composed of numerous and contrasting genres: cuicatl and tlahtolli. Cuicatl designated warriors’ songs and songs of ‘friendship, love and death’, hymns to gods, and poems combining intellectual and metaphysical speculation. Tlahtolli, on the other hand, were concerned with relations, narration, discourse and oratory. Also classed as tlahtolli were ‘the divine words’ (teotlahtolli), which told of deeds of the gods, the origins, cosmogony, cults and rituals; ‘stories about ancient things’ with a historical flavour; fables, zazanilli, and the famous huehuehtlahtolli or ‘ancient words’, those elegant speeches about the most varied subjects: power, the domestic circle, education or the gods.

Taught in the schools of the nobility, the calmecac, some of these pieces were recited or sung at the great festivals where the pipiltin gathered. If the huehuehtlahtolli tended to be the prerogative of the nobles and the lords, the hymns and songs of a ritual character were disseminated among the whole of the population and especially in their schools. The priest who undertook to transmit them saw to it that they were reproduced faithfully – he was given the title of tlapizcatzin, ‘he who preserves’ – while another priest was engaged in examining the newly composed songs, demonstrating that a society without writing can be quite familiar with both the true copy and censorship. It is possible that the narrator of tlahtolli was able to speak more freely if he was a pleasing and skilled reciter; but we have every reason to believe that the ‘tales of ancient things’, or the ‘divine’ narrative were also supposed to be subject to checking and censorship. Strictly controlled by institutions, tied to circumstances and contexts, oral productions were also subservient to a complex and subtle interplay of internal constraints. The transmission, learning and memorizing of this patrimony put the most varied resources to work. So it is, for example, that the cuicatl have their own rhythm, metre, style and structure. They were composed of a sequence more or less studded with expressive units – the equivalent of our verses and strophes – which were linked in groups of two. Parallelism (constructions of symmetrical phrases) and diphrasism (the juxtaposition of two metaphors to call to mind a concept, such as water and fire to designate war) were used constantly. Inserted syllables probably marked the metre, while others, of the type tiqui, toco, toco, tiquiti, perhaps indicated the rhythm and the pitch of the musical accompaniment. In general, the cuicatl cannot be dissociated from its accompanying means of expression, even if we have lost almost every trace of it. That is true of the music and dancing that occupied a significant place in public celebrations. Doubtless less varied but just as established, analogous stylistic processes structured the tlahtolli, among them parallelism, diphrasism, the piling up of predicates about the same subject, conceived to organize a temporal sequence or to make something explicit by convergent and complementary terms. Compositional techniques such as these often give these texts a disconcerting, repetitive and cumulative pace. They also undoubtedly made learning and memorizing the texts simpler, in the absence of written versions, while providing guidelines for improvisation and creation.1

The sophistication of the compositions entrusted to oral transmission, the range of genres, the considerable significance given to teaching, eloquence and the word, must not induce us to forget that these societies also had a graphic mode of expression. If they knew no form of alphabetical writing before the Spanish conquest, they none the less expressed themselves in various media – paper of amate and agave, deerskin – which could take the form of either elongated and narrow leaves that were rolled or folded in accordion pleats, or else large surfaces that were spread out on walls to be viewed. On these surfaces the Indians painted glyphs. Pictographic expression has a long and complicated, not to say obscure, history in Mesoamerica, which cannot be summarized here (Plate 1) (Robertson, 1959; Dibble, 1971; Glass, 1975a; Glass and Robertson, 1975; Galarza, 1972). It will suffice to sketch what we know of the practices in effect in central Mexico among the Nahua peoples. They had three types of signs of unequal importance, which we cover by the term ‘glyphs’. Pictograms proper are stylized representations of objects and actions: animals, plants, birds, buildings, mountains, scenes of dance or procession, sacrifice, battle, gods and priests, etc. Ideograms call to mind qualities, attributes or concepts associated with the object depicted: an eye signifies vision; footprints designate a trip, dance, or movement in space; the headband of a noble indicates the chief (tecuhtli); shields and arrows stand for war, etc. Let us say that in general the pictogram denotes, the ideogram connotes. Finally phonetic signs, few in number, are close to the glyphic expression of western alphabets. Exclusively for transcribing syllables, these signs relate to toponymy, anthroponymy and chronology. Examples are the Nahua locative suffixes (-tlan, -tzin, -pan) that in various forms come into the composition of toponymic glyphs. This embryonic phoneticism, which the Maya and the Mixtec also knew, is like a rebus to the extent that it uses easily deciphered and identified homonyms that give a sound close to or reminiscent of the one to be indicated.

Nahua pictography on the eve of the Spanish conquest was a mixed system, whose nascent phonetization was possibly tied to the military and economic expansion of the Triple Alliance dominated by the Mexica. Repeated contacts with other ethnic groups, enemies or subjects, may have made it increasingly necessary to paint place names and the names of exotic characters, and this practice would have posed the problem of the phonetic transcription of isolated words. It cannot be excluded either that the morphological characteristics of Nahuatl lent themselves to this evolution to the extent that it was an agglutinative language, which could easily be broken into syllables. It is none the less true that there was no large-scale coupling of the written form with the word, as in our alphabets.

The pictographic, ideographic and phonetic signs were scattered no more haphazardly on the leaves of amate or agave than words are strung along the lines that are so familiar to us. The glyphs were organized and articulated according to criteria that are still not well understood. The page make-up, the scale of the signs, their relative position, their orientation, their association and grouping, the graphic links between them, are all elements constituting the meaning of the ‘painting’ and, more simply, the meaning of the reading. The colour that fills the spaces defined by the thick, regular line drawn by the painter, the tlacuilo, adds the significance of chromatic modulations, even if the Spanish saw it as a decorative element, leading them to refer to the glyphic productions by the misleading term, usual in the sixteenth century, of ‘paintings’.

Moreover, pictographic expression compressed in the same space planes that the European eye usually distinguishes for purposes of analysis, but that were probably without relevance for the Indian ‘reader’. So it was that reports that we would characterize as economic, religious or political could be grafted on a framework composed of topographical elements. Routes for the collection of tribute, prehispanic sanctuaries, a group’s signs of hegemony, were merged, composing a work imprinted with a strong thematic and stylistic unity. Even though it permits us to grasp the contents by having recourse to modern grids, our exegetical reading of the ‘paintings’ often condemns us to miss the specificity of a grasp of reality and its representation. One might add that this formal specificity is quite unlike an artifice of presentation.

Whatever its apparent depths, the pictographic field of expression is astonishingly vast. It covers fields as varied as chronicles of war, catalogues of wonders and climatic accidents, the gods, cartography, business, finance, the transfer of goods. It appears, however, that divinatory works were the most numerous: ‘books of years and times’, ‘of days and feasts’, ‘of dreams and omens’, ‘of baptism and the names of children’, ‘of rites of ceremonies and of omens to observe in weddings’.2 The predominance of divinatory works can be read in the pictographic representation of a tlacuilo, where the painter is represented in the guise of an Indian holding a brush ‘above the glyph of the day’. It is true that consulting divinatory books regularly punctuated the existence of individuals and the group. One might believe that the apparently rudimentary character of the technique of expression implies an undeveloped organization of information, like that which prevailed in the ancient near east before the conquest of alphabets. And it is true that lists or inventories order the data contained in the ‘paintings’, such as lists of conquered provinces, borders, merchandise delivered as tribute, lists of years or rulers. But it would unduly restrict the significance of these documents to reduce them to inventories, primarily because the combination of things signified in the design of an ideogram enabled the Indians to express highly complex concepts and to handle the most abstract notions and the most imaginary constructions. That is true for example of the joined pictograms of water and fire used to designate the Nahua notion of sacred war; the sign ollin, to render the movement of the cosmos; the compositions arranged to depict the different ‘avatars’ of the gods. But if the ‘paintings’ are more than lists, it is because they also have a visual dimension that has sometimes been underestimated. The ‘paintings’ are images as much as texts, and demand to be treated as images. That is to say, they should be seen as perceptual as much as conceptual, which poses a problem: while we perceive this dimension intuitively, it is difficult to verbalize and thus to transcribe. Let us say that this dimension corresponds to the combinations of forms and colours, to the organization of space, the relations between figures and ground, contrasts of light and shade, geometrical laws received and employed, the activity of reading, the varying complexity of the representations.

Nevertheless, the mechanisms of ‘reading’ and, a fortiori, of the preparation of pictographic documents, remain barely understood. The accounts are usually those of European observers, complete strangers to these practices. It is known that the glyphs were ‘read’ by being checked off with a rod, that mnemonic texts guided the deciphering of the ‘paintings’, bringing to bear enlightenment, complementary information, or even both at the same time. The Indian ‘reader’, taught in one of the calmecac, had the habit of saying: ‘Like the parrot in bloom, I make the leaves in the house of paintings speak (León-Portilla, 1983a, p. 64). ‘To make speak’ consisted in drawing from carefully memorized sources the elements of a verbalization that incorporated explanation and interpretation in the standardized form of a parallel and complementary discourse. It is tempting to confuse this exercise with the medieval gloss, but this would probably represent the sin of ethnocentrism. The ‘painting’ was linked to discourse by a two-way street: if it is true that one ‘made the books speak’, the ‘paintings’ also served to support oral expression: ‘the students in the calmecac were taught hymns, the ones called divine hymns, by following the paintings’. It would no doubt be just as wrong to make the ‘paintings’ simple auxiliary mnemonic devices, as the missionaries of the sixteenth century were inclined to do. It seems more likely that the transmission of information implied a simultaneous and not redundant recourse to verbal memory and to painted ground, in accordance with an inextricable combination of the image and the word.

Only a minority of individuals was able to reconcile this learning, these techniques and these sophisticated imperatives: the nobles who attended the calmecac and sometimes dedicated themselves to the service of the gods – without it being necessary to distinguish too precisely between the laity and the ‘clergy’ – or the tlacuilo, who painted the glyphs, also products of the same circles. But if it is true that, as tradition held, ‘those who mastered black and red ink and what is painted lead us, guide us, tell us the way’ (Léon-Portilla, 1959, p. 76), pictography and discourse were far more than the expression of a class or an instrument of power. As with the laws of discourse and song, the canons of painting were not just the reflection of a superior world or an invisible order. Beyond the contents of the teachings dispensed, they participated systematically in the organization of a reality that intimately associated human experience and the world of the gods. They extracted from it the most salient characteristics, designated the most significant elements, setting aside the accidental, the arbitrary and the individual. In this way they stressed re-presentation, revelation, more than communication. They contributed actively to forming a perception of things, a relation to reality and to existence, that the Spanish conquest must have challenged fundamentally.

The torn net

The campaigns of evangelization that the Franciscans conducted after their arrival in 1523, by provoking disturbances for many years, contributed to scattering and sometimes destroying a large part of this oral or painted patrimony. We know, for example, that in 1521 the Indian allies of Cortés set fire to the archives of Texcoco, one of the three capitals of the Triple Alliance. But it was in 1525 that the systematic demolition of the temples in the valley of Mexico and at Tlaxcala began, after the Franciscans had forbidden any form of public cult. The incessant persecutions to which the Indian clergy were subjected from then on enable us to date to these years the dismantling of educational institutions and the definitive closing of the calmecac. At the same time the first missionaries decided to take in hand the education of the children of the nobility. If the destruction of the temples and the idols was the primary objective of the 1520s and 1530s, the Franciscans, followed by the other mendicant orders, also confiscated all the ‘paintings’ that appeared to them to go against the faith, ‘burning all that related to the ceremonies and that was suspicious’. It is true that they tried in principle to separate the wheat from the chaff, tolerating the works that seemed to them to be of a historical nature, but without displaying excessive naivety. The difficulty of determining where the ‘error and deception of the devil’ began, the distrust that overshadowed all of these products, weighed heavily in the fate of the ‘paintings’. They were often destroyed without any distinction, as the chroniclers deplored in not a few sources: ‘the ignorant had them burned, believing that they were idols, although they were chronicles worthy of being saved’.3

The years 1525 to 1540 were the age of violent and spectacular persecutions: 15 years, in the course of which whole aspects of indigenous culture sank into clandestinity, to acquire in the light of the Christianity of the conquerors the cursed and demonic status of ‘idolatry’. In a few years Indian lords had to proceed to a complete reordering of their ancestral practices. They had to abandon the sanctuaries in the cities, to choose remote spots, the secrecy of caves and mountains, the deserted banks of lakes, the protection of night. They had drastically to restrict the practice of human sacrifice, to form a network of informers and hiding places capable of thwarting the vigilance of the Spanish and the spying of the neophytes, obtained by blackmail and the threat of collaboration or at least the silence of the populace.4

Progressively cut off from their material and social base, isolated by the missionaries and the conquerors from the groups to which they belonged to become ‘religions’ and ‘idolatry’, whole or partial manifestations of Indian culture underwent a redefinition incomparably more shattering than the passage to clandestinity. At the very moment when the conquest forced them into a space entirely invented by western Europe, imposed by the Spanish and labelled with superimposed terms and concepts – ‘superstitions, beliefs, cults, sacrifices, adoration, gods, idols, ceremonies,’ etc. – these cultural manifestations were indicted as errors and false. All at once the Indians learned that they ‘adored gods’ and that these ‘gods were false’. What had been the meaning and interpretation of the world became a ‘rite’, a ‘ceremony’, pursued, marginalized, discredited, a false ‘belief, an ‘error’ to be rejected, to renounce, a ‘sin’ to confess before ecclesiastical judges. What had corresponded to an indisputable and tacit apprehension of reality, what had been the subject of an implicit, immemorial consensus and had rendered an account of a totality had from then on to confront an exotic system obeying other principles, based on other premises, fabricated from quite different categories and, let us not forget, completely rejecting any compromise. And yet, whatever we might think of it, ‘book censorship’ was not an innovation introduced by the conquerors. Already in the fifteenth century, under the Mexica ruler Itzcóatl, ‘paintings’ had been destroyed to eradicate memories or to throttle particularism; but now it was a question of annihilating a whole and not of expurgating parts. We understand that Indians then experienced a loss of coherence, an erosion of meaning, the ancestral patrimony being nothing more, in their words, than ‘una red de agujeros’, a ‘net full of holes’.5 Another option was to reject the non-sense of the Other, as did the Indians of Tlaxcala, who in 1523 decided that the first missionaries were ‘madmen’. Or they could make the friars monstrous creatures come to destroy mankind, or the living-dead, baleful sorcerers. Others took refuge in traditional learning, the ‘prophecies of their parents’, confident of finding nothing there that announced the ‘Christian doctrine’. Following the example of the cacique of Texcoco don Carlos Ometochtzin, they deduced the hollowness of Christianity: ‘Christian doctrine? It is nothing at all, and there is nothing sound in what the Brothers say’.6

Many Indians in these first years more or less openly, more or less deliberately, preferred to Christianity the world expressed in the songs, the ‘ancient texts’ and the ‘paintings’. For the painted ‘books’, like the idols, were hidden. The stakes were just as high, since the celebration of feasts or the reading of fates was dependent on the decipherment of ancient computations. The specialists – the ‘counters of the sun and the feasts of the demons’ – were secretly asked to seek the dates of the feasts in the paintings, to ‘look at’ the particulars of the rites and the names of the divinities to be honoured. It is doubtless worth while to focus on the learning laid down in the ancient calendars, to evaluate better what their loss or destruction could have meant. The divinatory calendar, the tonalpohualli, was based on a conception of time, the cosmos and the person that cannot be restricted to the narrow sphere of ritual, or even to the more ample but more problematic sphere of religion. For the ancient Nahua mythical time – the time of the successive creations that had seen the appearance of the precursors of men and then men themselves – exercised a determining influence on human time to the extent that the encounter, the coincidence of a moment of human time with one of the ever-present moments of mythical time, determined the substance of the experienced moment. These meetings, these correspondences, obeyed complex cycles of variable scale, whose combination and articulation structured the human moment. The conjunction of these cycles in effect governed the order of route and the arrival on the terrestrial plane of good or harmful forces that acted on the individual, caught up from birth in chains of events whose movement hung over him, without for all that completely crushing him. The same combinations of forces regulated in a more general way the dynamics of the cosmos: they produced change and movement at the same time as they shaped time. In these conditions we can imagine how the knowledge of cycles, the calculations to which they gave rise and the physical medium that alone made these operations possible took on crucial importance for the individual and society. To master the divine forces, to take advantage of or counteract them, it was necessary to see through their appearance and to know how to put to work an arsenal of practices intended to ensure the survival of all. That was the role of the ‘counters of the sun’, the tonalpouhque, whose learning and ‘paintings’ oriented all human activity, war, business, crafts, work in the fields, the rites of passage and marriage: ‘everything had its computation, its reason, and the day that corresponded to it’. Knowledge was also power. People could influence their destiny with the help, obviously, of the tonalpouhque. Thanks to them it was possible, when a child was born under an unlucky sign, to choose a more favourable day to give him a name. It was also they who examined the compatibility of the signs of future spouses and, if necessary, advised against marriage (López Austin, 1980, I, pp. 68–75).

Several indications suggest that the calendars, as well as many other works, often escaped destruction: near Mexico, the cacique of Texcoco don Carlos Ometochtzin hid at his house a tonalamatl, the ‘painting or account of feasts of the demon that the Indians had the custom of celebrating, following their law’; in the far more distant land of the Totonac, the cacique of Matlatlán had at least two ‘pieces of cloth bearing attributes of idols and ancient paintings’ that he appears to have had from Indians from Azcapotzalco, northwest of Mexico. Some Indians even managed to paint on the gate of the Franciscan convent of Cuauhtinchan a calendar ‘with these characters or these signs, full of superstitions’.7 Even though we have little information about it, there is reason to believe that the circulation – we saw an example above – and the production of ‘paintings’ were not interrupted by the Spanish conquest, despite the risks and persecutions. Painters from the valley of Mexico, from the region of Tlaxcala, from the region of Oaxaca, continued to handle the ‘red ink, black ink’. In those troubled times, they painted most of the pieces preserved today, which figure among the most beautiful expressions that the native cultures have left us. Under the Spanish rule were produced the Codex Borbonicus (Mexico) and the Tonalamatl Aubin (Tlaxcala), which contain the computation of the cycles and the feasts. If we turn to the Mixtec of Oaxaca, the terminus ad quern of the Codex Selden, uncontested masterpiece of the traditional style, can be dated 1556. The existence of these ‘paintings’ demonstrates the continuation over a good 50 years of a pictographic production in the genres forbidden by the Church. Their form is sometimes so ‘classic’ that we might hesitate over the prehispanic or colonial date of certain works. These documents confirm, as other sources also indicate, that ancient learning and techniques continued to be transmitted.

It was far simpler to preserve the oral traditions, since learning and reciting the songs or texts left hardly any compromising traces, unless the ‘ears’ acquired by the friars took it upon themselves to inform against what was going on. In the 1570s the Dominican chronicler Diego Durán noted not without dread that the old men continued to teach the young lords ‘the life and customs of their fathers, their grandfathers and their ancestors’. In the same period, the songs that commemorated the past grandeur of the princes still accompanied the public dances in which the indigenous nobility took part. At the same time the calendars and the oral teachings that went with them survived: ‘Few are the places where they are not preserved, where they are not much read, and where they are not taught to those born today so that they shall always be remembered’.8 The custom that was kept up of choosing the indigenous name as a function of the day of birth, the skill with which the Indians put forward or postponed the celebrations of the new patron saints so that they would coincide with the forbidden feasts, the observance of the agrarian calendars secretly set by the elders corroborate the preservation in the last decades of the sixteenth century of an oral and pictographic transmission condemned by the Church. In 1585, the Third Mexican Council once again had to forbid the Indians to sing ‘the songs of their ancient history or their false religion’. That of course did not exclude the considerable evolution of the genre under the influence of European canons.

These scattered signs suggest the diffusion of an attitude impervious – or very nearly – to the upheavals that were rocking indigenous societies. Some sectors of the Indian population appear to have succeeded, not without risk, in preserving the traditional core. However, what we can infer about this period presents a far from static and reductive vision. It would undoubtedly be useful to distinguish an initial stage covering the first 20 years after the conquest, from about 1520 to 1540. Despite the material and intellectual implications of a clandestinity that had become the norm and of a constant and inevitable confrontation with Christianity, it was still possible to keep up many practices. During this period, everywhere but where the Spanish were established in force – essentially at México-Tenochtitlán, Tlaxcala and their environs – the temples still standing continued to be attended by Indian priests, who discreetly saw to the service of the gods and collected the revenues of the lands attached to the shrines. Among the Otomí Indians, children spared baptism were initiated to the priesthood. Among the Nahua, 15-or 16-year-old adolescents were set apart from the others to become achcautin – that is, high priests – or to carry out other functions such as the preservation of sacred objects or propitiatory fasts.

Things changed quite a bit after 1540. Under the direction of the bishop of Mexico, the episcopal Inquisition achieved spectacular successes in getting rid of certain active and dangerous opponents: it arrested a priest of the god Camaxtli, Martín Ocelotl, who was plotting with the aristocracy and predicting the end of the world; it seized an Indian who travelled through the Sierra de Puebla to stir it up by claiming to be a god. Already in 1539, it had struck a decisive blow by condemning don Carlos Ometochtzin, the cacique of Texcoco, whom it turned over to the secular arm. The death on the pyre of this important figure of the aristocracy of the valley of Mexico seems to have had a profound impact. Many panic-stricken Indians decided at that point to destroy their ‘paintings’, or to give up these compromising objects (Gruzinski, 1989a, pp. 33–5). It was also in 1539 that the Junta eclesiástica met and reinforced the Church’s control over the subject populations. More priests, deeper penetration, helped by a better knowledge of the land, the repression practised by the monastic, then episcopal Inquisition under the leadership of the bishop of Mexico, Juan de Zumárraga, irreversibly altered the relations of power. But other perhaps more decisive factors influenced the attitude of the Indian nobles. These circles had lost their political and cultural cohesion since many had chosen to join the conquerors and Christianity.

To these divisions, in which opportunism and calculation were probably more important than conversion, were added other divisions that the friars themselves had instigated in setting Christianized children against their ‘idolatrous’ parents. From 1540 on, the new generations, who had participated with a sometimes murderous zeal in the campaigns of incrimination and eradication, came to power in ever greater numbers. The recruitment of pagan priests suffered from this, while the stones of the old sanctuaries served regularly to construct churches and convents. More decisive still, the ravages of the first waves of epidemics weakened and frayed the fabric of indigenous societies. Confronted with these difficulties and not without clearsightedness, the nobles resigned themselves to accept Christianity and the colonial domination. More or less sincerely converted, they chose the way of accommodation, and were at pains to preserve the signs of their origins, the ‘paintings’ of history and genealogy that legitimized their power. It was undoubtedly in these circumstances that the Mapa de Sigüenza and the Tira de la Peregrinación (c. 1540) were composed, which illustrate the origin and migrations of the Aztec on their departure from Aztlán, and, between 1542 and 1548, the Mapa Quinatzin, which recorded Chichimec history, and the Codex Xolotl were painted. Before 1550 genealogy inspired the Mapa Tlotzin of Texcoco and in the region of Oaxaca the Lienzo de Guevea (1540) or the Codex Selden (1556).9 Among the Nahua, the Mixtec or the Zapotec, the line that separated clandestine production from history painting was obviously as thin and arbitrary as the Christian and European criteria that distinguished the memory of Indian ‘false religions’ from a strictly historical tradition. When in 1539 a painter from Culhuacán, near Mexico, painted the genealogy of his family, he represented ‘a kind of cave where his forefathers and also certain gods were born’.10 The painter don Andrés belonged to a family of priests close to the old Mexica king. Openly Christian in 1539, he nevertheless had an extensive and puzzling learning: puzzling because it was ambiguous, since his genealogy intermingled allusions that were far from being mythological embellishments. He was nevertheless devoid of that European insistence on opposing idolatry to history or myth to authenticity.

However it was done, whether by the secret byways of clandestinity or the authorized roads of history, some of the ancient techniques and learning survived the disaster. It was the same with manifestations of the oral inheritance, whose ethical scope attracted the friars, who sought to take advantage of it in their best interests. It was also true of the enthronement speeches, which were probably kept up as long as the old allegiances survived. In other words, despite persecutions, epidemics and turmoil, the defeated nobilities confronted the colonial reality that progressively took shape before their eyes with a baggage that was no doubt censored and reduced but was still considerable.

A new look

Nevertheless, it is difficult to follow the paths that led from resistance to accommodation, that expressed a progressive separation from the old cultures – albeit a separation that would never become irreversible abandonment. Although analysing the colonial ‘paintings’, and to a lesser degree the evolution of oral traditions during the sixteenth century, does not resolve this question, it provides valuable and often unforeseen indications. For instance, the precocity with which the Indians painted the society in formation around and among them cannot be other than disconcerting because, on the one hand, it rules out considering colonial pictographic expression as a fixed art, an inert survival, a cumbersome archaism; and, on the other hand, it bears witness to the unflagging curiosity shown towards an unusual and hostile world. As early as 1545, Indian nobles at a secret meeting prided themselves on having learned all that they wanted to know from the Spanish, ‘all the technique of the Spanish, their way of fighting, their strengths, their horsemanship and all the rest that we were ignorant of and did not know’.11 This will to know and to discover, even at the price of a trip to Spain, likewise incited the Indians to reconstruct or rather to construct new relations to beings and things, thus gradually filling the voids, the ‘holes in the net’, left by the Spanish conquest.

From the first contacts, the indigenous painters contrived to render the irruption of these beings, who were at first taken for gods. By this means Moctezuma learned, well before Cortés, of the arrival of the fleet of Narváez, and the Indians of Chalco and Tlalmanalco transmitted strategic information to Cortés by painting on henequén canvases the Mexica troops threatening them.12 Thus from the beginning the ‘paintings’ recorded recent history, while a few years later, among both the defeated Indians and the indigenous allies of the invaders, songs told of the extent of the Mexica disaster and the desolation of the ruins.

After the first two decades the political landscape changed. New generations arose and left important productions, for example that which, more than 30 years after the conquest, illustrated and exalted the Tlaxcaltec collaboration in the Spanish invasion. The Lienzo of Tlaxcala (Plate 2) was probably painted to order for the viceroy don Luis de Velasco between 1550 and 1564. It is thus a commissioned work, 7 by 2.5 metres, which reconstructs the Tlaxcaltec version of events in 87 pictures. For these Indians it was also a political manifesto that did not hesitate to disguise events when they might refute the indestructible attachment of the Indians of Tlaxcala to the cause of the conquistadores.13 Until the arrival of the Spanish, the Nahua of Tlaxcala had been able to withstand the advances of the Mexica and the Triple Alliance. Tlaxcala was a powerful State, located between the warm lands of the gulf of Mexico and the valley of Mexico, and, after having fought it, resolved in the end to support Cortés’s expedition. It was beyond a doubt thanks to this ally that the Spanish overcame the Mexica hegemony, and they showed their gratitude by giving the Tlaxcaltec relative autonomy within New Spain. In the course of the three centuries that the Spanish rule endured, the Tlaxcaltec did not fail to take pride in the support they had provided or to attribute their privileges to it. It was most certainly in this spirit that the prudent authors of the Lienzo already preferred to keep quiet about the clashes at the very beginning, when they had opposed the Spaniards (Gibson, 1952, pp. 247–53, 229–34).

Although colonial in content, the Lienzo still in many respects belongs to the native tradition. Names of places and protagonists and dates were indicated according to custom by glyphs. The Indians were represented in profile with the attributes of their functions, the signs of their power – the icpalli seat – the clothes of their rank, the hairdos of their tribe. Many objects – baskets full of tortillas, turkeys, birds in cages, canoes, shields and standards – were inspired by the native figurative tradition. The presentation of bouquets to Cortés as a sign of welcome also belongs to the indigenous repertory of gestures. The representation of water, fire and rivers likewise remains in keeping with traditional canons, as does the architecture of palaces, pyramids and temple patios: no perspective, no ‘realistic’ proportion but, on the contrary, an advanced stylization which integrates the toponymic glyph with the building it is supposed to designate. Still, western European features are visually present in the Lienzo when, for example, the old style interpreted the universe that the Indians were discovering, as in the caravans and war machines constructed by Cortés, stylized by the painters and reduced to two wooden uprights covered by a roof. The show of novelty even led to enriching the pictographic repertory when marks of horseshoes, after the fashion of the traditional footprints, signal the movements of the Spanish horsemen, or when a sun in the European manner serves as a glyph designating the conquistador Alvarado whom the Indians assimilated to the sun, Tonatiuh. But sometimes the western European tradition invaded the space of the Lienzo