Genocidal Massacres in the Spanish Conquest of the Americas

Rare indigenous perspectives on the Spanish Conquest and Christianization of Mexico are gleaned from late-colonial Nahuatl manuscripts known as primordial titles, or titulos, from central New Spain. Although the coming of the sword and cross had become cosmic events by I65o or later, when titulos were recorded, there is mounting concern in them about the growing penetration of Spaniards and mestizos into outlying Indian towns and their encroachment on increasingly scarce resources. Otechmotlayocolili Totlatocatzin Rey [i]nic oticchiuhque inin armas ca tonechicahualiz ca totlapalihuiliz mochihuaz inic titomaquixtizque in ihuicopa in Caxtiltin inic amo techmahuizpolozque anoze tlein techcuilizque anoze Toteopixcahuan techtolinizque. [The King, our lord, granted us (the right) to make this (coat of) arms; it is our strength and our assistance. It will be made so we can free ourselves of the Spaniards, so they will not dishonor us or take something from us, nor will our priests afflict us.] -Municipal of Cuernavaca (BNP, MM, 29I/z92) An outward reverence for the Spanish king juxtaposed against a profound distrust of local Spanish colonists and priests-these are but two of the many recurring themes running through the growing body of indigenouslanguage documents known as titulos primordiales (primordial titles). Recorded in various central Mexican Indian communities during the latter half of the colonial period, these informal municipal histories are among the best sources for examining the popular consciousness of New Spain's Ethnohistory 38:2 (Spring I991). Copyright ? by the American Society for Ethnohistory. ccc ooI4-1801/9I/$I.5o. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.134 on Sun, 25 Sep 2016 04:28:10 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Sword and Cross in Central Mexican Titulos conquered peoples.1 As such, they contain examples of indigenous popular lore that can be elusive in so many other types of ethnohistorical sources. Titulos form a unique genre. They do not conform to more traditional conventions found in Nahuatl-language annals, for example, and the majority were not written in the polished language of professional Indian notaries. It is highly unlikely that their production was ever supervised by Spanish officials or priests. Free in form and idiosyncratic, they were composed primarily for a local Indian audience by literate individuals who were at least temporarily outside local power structures. Deciphering these cryptic documents, which deviate so from Western historical traditions, contain a very different sense of chronology, and have many orthographic and linguistic rarities, is a major challenge. Exact dates of composition, precise authorship, and the original context of most of the known titulos have been lost, weakening the modern historian's ability to assess their full thrust and to grasp completely their spectacular indigenous voice. What messages and attitudes do they convey? What traditions and cultural expressions? To what extent do they speak for the average citizen? Is their emphasis on the community exaggerated? Are self-interested individuals or factions really behind their composition? These and other questions are still being explored, as the study of primordial titles is in its infancy.2 One way of advancing our exploration of such questions is to scrutinize a number of the recurring themes in titulos. Among the more obvious themes are the ways in which they depict the Spanish invasion, the coming of Christianity, and the Indians' opinion of the intruders who had come to live in their midst. Do we find the same vivid Conquest-era descriptions of Spaniards lusting after gold as in such works as the Florentine Codex (Sahaguin I950-82, book iz: chap. iz) or Miguel Le6n-Portilla's (I962, 1985) edition of these and other indigenous accounts? Do we find the same emphasis on the heroic assistance given Cortes by communities like Tlaxcala and Huejotzinco, which in the sixteenth century curried favor with the Crown for their deeds?3 Or, many generations after Cortes's triumph, had the collective Indian consciousness reframed the Conquest and the changes it set in motion? How had the foreign invasion come to figure in the indigenous peoples' sense of their own history? Was it viewed with some degree of acceptance, tolerance, or perhaps indignation? If so, what might account for these changing perspectives? Before beginning the analysis of these specific themes and questions, it is necessary to sketch out the genre's major characteristics. I77 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.134 on Sun, 25 Sep 2016 04:28:10 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Journal Article Race, Caste, and Status: Indians in Colonial Spanish America. By Robert H. Jackson. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. x, 151 pp. Cloth, $40.00, ISBN 0-8263-2108-9. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 0-8263-1894-0.) John K. Chance John K. Chance Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 87, Issue 2, September 2000, Pages 638–639, https://doi.org/10.2307/2568787 Published: 01 September 2000

Much of the scholarship on difference in colonial Spanish America has been based on the categorizations of indigeneity, Africanness, and the eighteenth-century Mexican castas system. Adopting an alternative approach to the question of difference, Joanne Rappaport examines what it meant to be mestizo (of parentage) in the early colonial era. She draws on lively vignettes culled from the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century archives of the New Kingdom of Granada (modern-day Colombia) to show that individuals classified as mixed were not members of coherent sociological groups. Rather, they slipped in and out of the mestizo category. Sometimes they were identified as mestizos, sometimes as Indians or Spaniards. In other instances, they identified themselves by attributes such as their status, the language that they spoke, or the place where they lived. The Disappearing Mestizo suggests that processes of identification in early colonial Spanish America were fluid and rooted in an epistemology entirely distinct from modern racial discourses.

The first Jews to permanently settle in the Caribbean arrived in the mid-seventeenth century and traced their origins to the Iberian peninsula, where many had lived for centuries as New Christians before reverting to Judaism in centers such as Amsterdam, Bayonne, and London. The place of Jews in colonial Caribbean societies is of particular interest since they were often among the first white settlers. Perhaps nowhere in the region has their impact been more pronounced than in Suriname and Curaçao, the longest-lived and historically largest Jewish communities in the early modern Caribbean.1 KeywordsEighteenth CenturyJewish CommunityJewish PopulationAfrican DescentLate Eighteenth CenturyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Set along both the physical and social margins of the British Empire in the second half of the seventeenth century, Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean explores the construction of difference through the everyday life of colonial subjects. Jenny Shaw examines how marginalised colonial subjects - Irish and Africans - contributed to these processes. By emphasising their everyday experiences Shaw makes clear that each group persisted in its own cultural practises; Irish and Africans also worked within - and challenged - the limits of the colonial regime. Shaw's research demonstrates the extent to which hierarchies were in flux in the early modern Caribbean, allowing even an outcast servant to rise to the position of island planter and underscores the fallacy that racial categories of black and white were the sole arbiters of difference in the early English Caribbean. The everyday lives of Irish and Africans are obscured by sources constructed by elites. Through her research, Jenny Shaw overcomes the constraints such sources impose by pushing methodological boundaries to fill in the gaps, silences and absences that dominate the historical record. By examining legal statutes, census material, plantation records, travel narratives, depositions, interrogations and official colonial correspondence, as much for what they omit as for what they include, Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean uncovers perspectives that would otherwise remain obscured. This book encourages readers to rethink the boundaries of historical research and writing and to think more expansively about questions of race and difference in English slave societies.

Modern Mexico derives many of its richest symbols of national heritage and identity from the Aztec legacy, even as it remains a predominantly Spanish-speaking, Christian society. This volume argues that the composite, neo-Aztec flavor of Mexican identity was, in part, a consequence of active efforts by indigenous elites after the Spanish conquest to grandfather ancestral rights into the colonial era. By emphasizing the antiquity of their claims before Spanish officials, native leaders extended the historical awareness of the colonial regime into the pre-Hispanic past, and therefore also the themes, emotional contours, and beginning points of what we today understand as 'Mexican history'. This emphasis on ancient roots, moreover, resonated with the patriotic longings of many creoles, descendants of Spaniards born in Mexico. Alienated by Spanish scorn, creoles associated with indigenous elites and studied their histories, thereby reinventing themselves as Mexico's new 'native' leadership and the heirs to its prestigious antiquity.

This paper investigates the role of civil society in EU development policy. The two key findings are that over the years European civil society has been increasingly marginalised in the planning and implementation of EU external assistance and that the practice of ensuring effective participation by Southern civil society in the programming process is far from optimal. The first part of the paper shows that the marginalisation of European civil society actors is due to the new emphasis on ownership of development by developing countries and is also a consequence of the process of devolution of management authority from Brussels to the external delegations. Moreover, while the interaction between European civil society actors and the European Commission has progressively become more difficult, their relations with European Parliament and a majority of the member states in the Council continue to be optimal. The second part of this paper concentrates on the involvement of Southern non-state actors in the programming process. While in theory the Cotonou Agreement provides a comprehensive framework for integrating civil society in the development process, the practice has been very different. Efforts have been made to involve as many actors as possible; nonetheless the overall quality of participation is not yet satisfying. An even more serious concern is that little progress has been achieved between the first (2002–2007) and the second (2008–2013) programming exercises.

In the archaeological excavations carried out at the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan, the Aztecs’ main ceremonial building, archaeologists have recovered hundreds of objects representing rich offerings corresponding to the foundation of the pre-Hispanic city until the Spanish conquest (1325–1521 AD). Among the recovered objects, a significant number of green stone artefacts, which were particularly appreciated by pre-Hispanic cultures, were found. They were produced using raw materials from the Mexico Basin and other Mesoamerican areas. Various green minerals (jadeites, antigorite, lizardite, diopside) and rocks (serpentinites and even green marble) may have been used in the production of these artefacts. Jadeite sources are located far away, in the Motagua river basin in Guatemala, and, as a result, we may expect that a limited number of jadeite objects arrived to Central Mexico through trade (Taube et al.

The stereotypical image of the drunken Amerindian in Mexico dates back to the decades following the Spanish conquest of the Aztec state in 1521, and is present in New-Spanish (colonial Mexican) visual culture that was jointly produced by native artists and Spanish friars of the sixteenth century. Along with Spanish religious and historical chronicles of the period, and official colonial documents, these early pictorial works comprise a larger body of historical works that construct the colonial image of the drunken Amerindian. This essay examines the earliest textual and visual evidence that documents drunkenness among New Spain’s native population, and situates these sources in a colonial context in which culturally distinct methods of recording knowledge — native-produced, pictographic images and Spanish alphabetic inscriptions — were combined for Spanish friars and colonial officials to understand the customs and histories of New Spain’s indigenous groups. In particular, this essay critically analyzes the unions and disjunctions between early colonial native manuscript images of intoxication and the Spanish inscriptions that commented on them. It argues that the stereotypical image of the drunken native in New Spain’s early visual record was due not only to the evangelical goals of Spanish friars and the propensity of colonialism to render its subjects as unruly, but also to the complex relationship between European alphabetic text and native-made images, and partial correlations between elite indigenous and Euro-Christian ideologies.

One of the most thought-provoking works to march onto the field of Guatemalan history, this recent publication by José Daniel Contreras Reinoso and Jorge Luján Muñoz will provoke intense debate amongst Mayanists and historians of the early colonial period. This slim book contains six essays by the two well-known and respected historians. Each essay is meant to be self-sufficient, with some minor overlap in their content, but they have been arranged thematically to address recent research into the famous Kaqchikel chronicle of the Xajilá clan of Sololá. Based on this original document, thought to have been written by a series of separate authors and copied by a single scribe, the Memorial provides a unique window into the mythical past of the Kaqchikel peoples and their migration to Guatemala. It also offers an alternative view of the subsequent Spanish contact and conquest by those normally voiceless in the later chronicles and histories.Luján Muñoz and Contreras R. build on their experience assisting with the 1999 publication of Simón Otzoy’s facsimile edition, and there is overlap between the essays here and the introduction to the earlier volume. In two areas, however, Luján Muñoz greatly expanded on his original introduction to create two separate essays. One increases the historiographical information related to earlier analyses of the Memorial, creating a complete listing of all published and unpublished works to date. The list also includes an evaluation of the translations to Spanish, discussions of portions intentionally omitted, and other valuable information for comparison. Contreras R. draws on his role in the 1999 Otzoy publication in various essays dealing primarily with the dating of historical events utilizing both Spanish and indigenous chroniclers. He directly questions the use of the Kaqchikel word Iximché for the capital of the Kaqchikel kingdom from prior to Spanish contact until its ultimate destruction.Luján Muñoz’s essays are useful for the background information they contain on previous attempts at transcribing and translating the documents. He openly states that Otzoy’s work is the best of the lot in terms of clarity in the translations. Contreras R., however, openly challenges scholars to rethink some commonly held notions about the conquest period, specifically the timeline of the “Kaqchikel Rebellion,” the dates involving Spanish settlement and the creation of Santiago, as well as the actual place-name of the capital of the Kaqchikel kingdom. He skillfully juxtaposes various Spanish chronicles against the Memorial, comparing accounts, dates, and names. Without sufficient elaboration on his reasoning, Contreras R. states that the Kaqchikel document is much more reliable than any of the Spanish chronicles or the letters of Pedro de Alvarado to Hernán Cortés. While it would behoove those interested in the conquest period to study both Spanish and indigenous accounts of the history of Guatemala, it is no less dangerous to rely more exclusively on the documents of those that became the silent majority than it is to rely on those of the colonists.Worthy of further discussion is Contreras’s view that Iximché, as the archaeological site of the Kaqchikel kingdom is commonly known, should be instead called Tinamit or Patinamit as in the Memorial. He believes that Iximché is merely the region in which the capital city, called Tinamit or Patinamit, was to be found. Since “tinamit” is also simply the Kaqchikel word for “town” or “population,” it more likely that the authors of the Memorial simply did not feel the need to keep addressing Iximché by its proper name because it seemed obvious, and, instead, substituted the generic term for town/city. Also perplexing is Contreras’s preference for the label Tecpán-Guatemala, a word of the Nahuatl soldiers brought by Alvarado from Mexico and used by the Spanish chroniclers, over Iximché, the Kaqchikel word. Even the preference for calling the Kaqchikel “the people of Guatemala” (again, a Nahuatl word) over the Kaqchikel word for their land, Iximulew, is problematic.Regardless of the potential problems listed above, these essays will most certainly provoke intense debate and spur much-needed further investigation into the early colonial history of Guatemala. The authors’ well-written and concise style makes it a very accessible book and a pleasure to read and discuss.

Residential patterns of Mexica human sacrifices at Mexico-Tenochtitlan and Mexico-Tlatelolco: Evidence from phosphate oxygen isotopes

The Spanish conquest of Mexico marks the true beginning of the Spanish Empire in America. Like many other early Spanish colonial projects in the Americas, it was initially less an effort of the Spanish state than of an independent military entrepreneur, or “conquistador,” Hernán Cortés, who from his base in the Spanish colony of Cuba gathered a small army of adventurers to establish contact with the mainland.

The chapter examines the fundamental transformations to ways of knowing the natural world effected by black ritual practitioners in the seventeenth-century Caribbean. During this pivotal period, black Mohanes led an epistemological revolution in which the experiential replaced first principles as the basis for Caribbean ways of knowing truths about the natural world. Experientially based forms of producing and consuming medical knowledge proved essential to the creation of Atlantic nodes of knowledge production in spaces like Cartagena. Black Caribbean epistemological spaces in which the experiential overcame old dogma, even if experientially-based, were conspicuously located outside the boundaries that natural philosophers defined.In the early modern Caribbean a heterogeneous group of ritual practitioners of African descent arriving from Europe, Africa, and the New World experimented with new materials they found in the Americas and formulated material, conceptual, and social practices based on Caribbean experiential findings that they designed to interpret and establish authority over a natural world that encompassed the moral and the spiritual. As the chapter shows here, black ritual practitioners’ ways of knowing the natural world and bodies were intrinsically related to the development of novel Caribbean experientially based ways of articulating the nature of truth.

The society of states, whether through the United Nations (UN) or alternative arrangements, did not send troops to halt the slaughter in Rwanda. But within the Security Council, a clear dynamic evolved toward international judicial intervention—the establishment of an international war crimes tribunal to hold individuals accountable for the genocide and other violations of international humanitarian law. The road to the international tribunal began in April 1994—the first month of the mass killings. Although, as we have seen, the United States and Britain were reluctant to put the label “genocide” on the killings in Rwanda at that time, the statement issued by the president of the Security Council on April 30, 1994 condemned all breaches of international humanitarian law in Rwanda and noted that the persons who instigated or participated in such acts where individually responsible. The statement referred to the killing of members of an ethnic group with the intention of destroying the group, wholly or partially, as a crime according to international law.

(1969). STYLISTIC AFFINITIES BETWEEN THE QUIMBAYA GOLD STYLE AND A LITTLE-KNOWN CERAMIC STYLE OF THE MIDDLE CAUCA VALLEY, COLOMBIA. Nawpa Pacha: Vol. 7, Combined Volume 7 & 8 (1969-1970), pp. 65-83.