Memories of Conquest: Becoming Mexicano in Colonial Guatemala

By Laura E. Matthew

Indigenous allies helped the Spanish gain a foothold in the Americas. What did these Indian conquistadors expect from the partnership, and what were the implications of their involvement in Spain's New World empire? Laura Matthew's study of Ciudad Vieja, Guatemala--the first study to focus on a single allied colony over the entire colonial period--places the Nahua, Zapotec, and Mixtec conquistadors of Guatemala and their descendants within a deeply Mesoamerican historical context. Drawing on archives, ethnography, and colonial Mesoamerican maps, Matthew argues that the conquest cannot be fully understood without considering how these Indian conquistadors first invaded and then, of their own accord and largely by their own rules, settled in Central America.
Shaped by pre-Columbian patterns of empire, alliance, warfare, and migration, the members of this diverse indigenous community became unified as the Mexicanos--descendants of Indian conquistadors in their adopted homeland. Their identity and higher status in Guatemalan society derived from their continued pride in their heritage, says Matthew, but also depended on Spanish colonialism's willingness to honor them. Throughout Memories of Conquest, Matthew charts the power of colonialism to reshape and restrict Mesoamerican society--even for those most favored by colonial policy and despite powerful continuities in Mesoamerican culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Apr 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9780807882580

Laura E. Matthew

Laura E. Matthew is associate professor of history at Marquette University.

Book preview

Memories of Conquest

Memories of Conquest

Becoming Mexicano in Colonial Guatemala

Laura E. Matthew

FIRST PEOPLES

New Directions in Indigenous Studies

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

Publication of this book was made possible, in part, by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

© 2012 THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Designed by Sally Fry and set in Arno Pro by

Rebecca Evans.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress

Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Matthew, Laura E.

Memories of conquest : becoming Mexicano

in colonial Guatemala / Laura E. Matthew.

p. cm.—(First peoples: new directions in

indigenous studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8078-3537-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4696-2197-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Indians of Central America—Colonization—Guatemala—Ciudad Vieja. 2. Indians of Central America—Guatemala—Ciudad Vieja—History— Sources. 3. Indians of Central America—Guatemala—Ciudad Vieja—Government relations. 4. Spain—Colonies—America—Administration. 5. Ciudad Vieja (Guatemala)—History—Sources. 6. Ciudad Vieja (Guatemala)—Colonization. 7. Guatemala— Foreign relations—Spain. 8. Spain—Foreign relations—Guatemala. I. Title.

F1465.1.C57M37 2012

972.81′62—dc23 2011037428

cloth 16 15 14 13 12 5 4 3 2 1

paper 18 17 16 15 14 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Acknowledgments

Note on Terminology

Introduction

1. Indigenous Invasions

Mexicans & Maya from Teotihuacan to Tollan

2. Templates of Conquest

Warfare & Alliance in the Shadow of Tenochtitlan

3. Indian Conquistadors

Conquest & Settlement in Central America

4. The Primacy of Place

Ciudad Vieja as Indian Town & Colonial Altepetl

5. Creating Memories

Militias, Cofradías, Cabildos, & Compadres

6. Particularly Ladinos

Language, Ladinization, & Mexicano Identity

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations, Maps, and Table

ILLUSTRATIONS

Sihyaj K’ahk’ on Uaxactun Stela 5 in Teotihuacano warrior costume, ca. 378 A.D., and Yaax Nu’n Ahyiin on Tikal Stela 31 in the same costume, ca. 379 A.D. / 24

Warrior costumes provided as tribute to the Aztec empire from the altepetl and dependencies of Tzicoac / 47

Lienzo de Tlaxcala, scene 80, Ytzcuintepec (Escuintla, Guatemala) / 65

Mapa de Cuauhtlantzinco or Codice Campos, scene 5 / 67

Lienzo de Quauhquechollan / 74

Title page of Justicia 291, R.1, N.1, Los yndios mexicanos . . . / 76

A Quauhquecholteca woman grinding corn / 91

The alliance between Hernando Cortés and the Quauhquecholteca lords / 94

Jorge de Alvarado leads a Spaniard dressed in Quauhquecholteca warrior costume and four Quauhquecholteca warriors on the road toward Guatemala / 99

Jorge de Alvarado receives information from Quauhquecholteca pochteca / 100

The glyphs for Zapotitlán and Quetzaltenango / 101

Chimaltenango, whose glyph is a round shield topped by a wall / 103

Spanish dogs attacking Kaqchikel at Pochutla while a Spaniard watches / 104

Center portion of the Lienzo de Quauhquechollan / 105

The Cuchumatanes at Tecolotlán, with scenes of fighting / 106

The Pacific coast and the torn border of the lienzo / 107

Figures of the Spaniards Quirijol and Portocarrero from the Baile de la Conquista de Guatemala, as performed in Ciudad Vieja in 2005 / 193

Francisco Cisneros, Indios de Ciudad Vieja, Guatemala, ca. 1835 / 246

Eagle warrior from the battle of Tecolotlán / 272

Francisco Cisneros, Indios de Ciudad Vieja en paseo o fiesta de Sta. Cecilia, ca. 1835 / 273

Float during the convite (parade) of the festival of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, Ciudad Vieja, Sacatepéquez, 2010 / 277

MAPS

1. Classic and Postclassic Mesoamerica / 18

2. The Tenochca Empire / 43

3. Conquest Routes of the Alvarados in Central America / 82

4. Santiago en Almolonga/Ciudad Vieja / 149

TABLE

Tributary Counts (1752) vs. Militia Membership (1777) in Ciudad Vieja / 203

Acknowledgments

After more years than I am willing to count, it is time to say thank you.

To the institutions and people who safeguard the historical records that are the foundation of this book and make it possible for me to use them: Anna Carla Ericastilla Samayoa and the staff at the Archivo General de Centroamérica in Guatemala City, who greet me warmly no matter how long since my last visit or how short my current one; the staff at the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, Spain, especially Socorro Prous Zaragoza, Teresa de Sande, and María Pía Senent Diez; the Archivo Histórico Arquidiocesano in Guatemala City, which was briefly open to scholars in 1997, especially Hector Concohá Chet and José Chaclán; the Family Archives of the Church of Latter Day Saints in Guatemala City; the American Philosophical Society, especially Joseph-James Ahern; the University Museum Library and Van Pelt Library of the University of Pennsylvania, especially Joe Holub and John Weeks; the Latin American Library at Tulane University, especially David Dressing and Hortensia Calvo; and the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin, especially Margo Gutierrez and Michael Hironymous.

To the public and private granting agencies that have seen value in my work: the Pan American Round Table of Texas; the U.S. Department of Education Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Grant for Research Abroad; the Research Institute for the Study of Man in New York City; the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; the Newberry Library in Chicago; the Office of Research and Development at Marquette University; and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee funded by the U.S. Department of Education.

To my mentors: Howard Miller, Virginia Garrard-Burnett, and Susan Deans-Smith at the University of Texas at Austin; Michael Zuckerman and Ann Farnsworth-Alvear at the University of Pennsylvania; Mary Lindemann, Michael Miller, Guido Ruggiero, and Richard Godbeer at the University of Miami; James Grossman, James Epstein, Leon Fink, and Bruce Calder at the Newberry Library; and James Marten, John Krugler, and Michael Fleet at Marquette University. Special thanks are due to Nancy Farriss at the University of Pennsylvania for her scholarship that inspired me in the first place, her guidance through graduate school, and her support of my efforts since. I hope you like the book! I also owe a great deal to Christopher Lutz, dean of Guatemalan colonial studies in the United States and constant guide, critic, and friend. Chris read multiple drafts, recommended the project to others, could be counted on to catch every stray fact, and pointed me toward my cover art. Susan Schroeder encouraged me at an early stage, read several drafts, and continued to open doors for me over the years. Her steady interest mattered almost as much as the precision she demanded of anything I wrote.

To those who provided support, advice, knowledge, and friendship along the way, in no particular order: Yanna Yannakakis, Joan Bristol, Anne Pushkal, Daniel Greene, Traci Ardren, María Casteñeda de la Paz, Robinson Herrera, Hugh Thomas, Stephen Webre, William Fowler, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, Franz Binder, Marcie Mersky, Alfonso Arrivillago Cortés, Oscar Peláez Almengor, Joel Hernández Sánchez, Edgar Chutan Alvarado, Lucky Ramírez, Shannon and Rodolfo Hernández, Timothy Hawkins, Margaret Hurdlik, George Lovell, Pablo Picatto, Xochitl Medina, Jordana Dym, Christophe Belaubre, Catherine Komisaruk, Gabriela Ramos, Gene Ogle, Mike Hesson, Deborah Augsberger, Conard Hamilton, Nancy Midthun, Todd Little-Siebold, Christa Little-Siebold, Sophie White, Karen Dakin, Barbara Knoke de Arathoon, Juan Pedro Viqueira, Rodolfo Pastor H., Antonio Feros, María de los Ángeles Romero Frizzi, Ruben Reina, Martha Few, Ellen Baird, Sara Austin, Frank Valadez, Dana Velasco Murillo, Jovita Baber, Karen Graubart, Lisa Voigt, Yarí Pérez Marín, Aims McGuiness, Jasmine Alinder, Ellen Amster, Tony Pasinski, Matthew Restall, John Chuchiak, Sherwin Bryant, Nestor Quiroa, Coralia Gutiérrez Álvarez, Kittya Lee, and my phenomenal colleagues in Marquette University’s History Department.

Special thanks are owed to a few without whose specific contributions this book would be far poorer. Oralia de León read and transcribed hundreds of pages of documents in Guatemala for this project. Chapter 6 could not have been written without her assistance. Quite beyond her identification and analysis of the Lienzo de Quauhquechollan that is highlighted in Chapter 3, Florine Asselbergs has been an ideal partner in our parallel search for things Mexicano or Quauhquecholteca. Florine also put me in contact with Michel Oudijk, a model of scholarly energy, generosity, and hospitality (along with María and Yago), whose meticulous transcription of Justicia 291 made word searches a million times easier. Hector Concohá Chet passed along documents from his own work that turned out to be critical, kept me connected to Guatemala when I was unable to travel, and has been a constant friend and colleague. Wendy Kramer shared documents and ideas as well as some very pleasant days working together in Philadelphia’s Old City. Sergio Romero provided Nahuatl translations and his own keen thoughts on the relationship between language and history; I also thank his family for their warm welcome into their home, often on very short notice. John Sullivan lent his practiced eye to several Nahuatl translations. Luis Enrique Sam Colop (may he rest in peace), Ruud van Akkeren, and Luis Pedro Taracena commented on various aspects of my argument with marvelous frankness; I am especially grateful for Luis Pedro’s efforts late in the project. They may not agree with all my final conclusions, but I hope they will see some of their good influence. Ricardo Castillo graciously allowed me to reproduce the Universidad Francisco Marroquín’s marvelous digital restoration of the Lienzo de Quauhquechollan, with particular and tireless assistance from Ana Lucía Ortíz Moscoso. Dan Johnson of Marquette University spent hours helping me select the images I wanted. Joel Brown’s photographs of the Festival of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception in Ciudad Vieja surpass anything I could have done. Michel Dagnaud, secretary-general of the Société de Géographie, went out of his way to help me locate the Juan Galindo prints on a very short schedule one June day in Paris. To all I send my heartfelt thanks, with the caveat that I alone am responsible for any errors.

In Ciudad Vieja, Walter Ortíz spent several years fielding my email queries, sharing his knowledge, arranging interviews, guiding me through Ciudad Vieja’s local prehispanic ruins on private lands whenever I visited in 2005–9, and in 2010 keeping me updated after tropical storm Agatha. He also provided photographs of the 2010 convite I was unable to attend; a shot of one float commemorating the disastrous mudslide that followed Agatha appears in the Conclusion. I also thank Hugo Leonel Vásquez Sánchez, Benjamín Parada Morales (Don Mincho), José Juventino Paredes Galindo, and Viviana Paredes for their hospitality and interest in my work, and Doña Graciela Castellanos Miranda for her good care whenever I dropped in. In 1997, Monseñor Gustavo Paredes allowed me to work in the parish archives (a special kindness since he temporarily gave up his desk), and sacristans Jorge Gonzales Minas and Felix Reyes Parada took time from their work to answer questions about old baptismal registers.

I am very grateful to the anonymous reviewers at University of North Carolina Press, who read the full manuscript not once but twice and improved it, I hope to their satisfaction. Mark Simpson-Vos, Zachary Read, Tema Larter, Paula Wald, John Wilson, and Heidi Perov at University of North Carolina Press were always available with good advice and patient help.

My parents, Deanna D. Matthew and Earl B. and Lonnie Matthew, held my hand via telephone along the way and never openly questioned what I was doing from the moment I got on that bus from Austin to Guatemala City in 1989. They also acted as private granting agencies, as did my in-laws Roberta Bannister and Wes and Victoria Bannister. (Special thanks to Wes and Victoria for putting me in proximity to the Bibliothèque nationale de France.) Thank you all for your support and love.

Writing this book has become part of my personal history. Simon—thank you for the memories of parenthood in Guatemala and Spain, and I promise not to measure the time elapsed since beginning any future books by your birthday. David—thank you for making me stop staring at the computer even when I pouted, and for planting flowers with me in Philadelphia and Milwaukee. Michael—I’m proud to have finished but more proud of our boys and our life together. I couldn’t have done it without you; may the next adventures be happy ones.

Note on Terminology

In Guatemala today the term indígena is preferred to indio, which historically has been used in derogatory ways against the Maya and other indigenous peoples of the region. Because indigenous translates awkwardly and the term Indian has fewer negative connotations in English, I use the latter but limit its use as best I can to colonial and national-era classifications—for instance, the satellite towns around the Spanish city of Santiago, Guatemala, are referred to as Indian towns because they were created and classified as such in the colonial period. Whenever possible, I identify people labeled Indians in colonial-era documents based on their linguistic and/or ethnic affiliation (i.e., Tlaxcalteca, Mexica, Zapotecs, Guatemalan Maya, K’iche’ Maya, etc.). I also avoid using the term Indian in the first two chapters that deal exclusively with the pre-Columbian and conquest periods—because, of course, before Columbus and Cortés labeled them as such, the peoples of the Americas were not Indians at all.

The Mexicanos themselves present even more formidable problems of terminology, for they were not all Mexica from the cities of Tenochtitlan or Tlatelolco, nor even Nahuas from central Mexico. Nor, obviously, were they from the nation-state of Mexico; what became Mexico after independence was called New Spain during the colonial period. In Chapter 1, following common usage among archaeologists, I use the modern terms Mexican and Maya to contrast two of many broad culture areas within Mesoamerica. In Chapter 2, I use generally accepted terms for different groups associated with certain language groups or city-states, such as Mexica Tenochca, Zapotecs, Mixtecs, Cholulteca, Acolhua, Quauhquecholteca, and so on. As the colonial period and the history of Ciudad Vieja proper get under way in Chapters 3 and 4, these heterogeneous groups whose descendants lived in Guatemala begin to be grouped under ever more general monikers, the primary one being Mexicano. The process by which this happens is the central concern of the book. The associated shifts in terminology, from more to less complex but never becoming completely homogeneous, should be clear as the reader follows the Mexicanos’ emergence as a unique group in colonial Guatemala.

Memories of Conquest

Introduction

The conquest of largely Maya territory by foreign invaders in the years 1524–28 is perhaps the most important story of their history for the people of contemporary Guatemala. The invasion followed on the heels of viruses that would kill millions of native K’iche’, Mam, Pipil, and other southern Mesoamericans over the following century. It destroyed the K’iche’ and Kaqchikel Maya cities of Utatlán and Iximché, and laid the foundations of Spanish American cities in their stead. It precipitated half a millennia so far of colonial and neocolonial rule over Central America by people of largely European descent. Over time, it created a new people out of the resulting mix of Native Americans, Africans, Europeans, and Asians: the Ladinos who make up roughly half of Guatemala’s population today.

The Guatemalan experience resonates, too, as a chapter in a much larger tale. With local variations, it repeats the story of European conquest throughout the Americas—in Cuba, Mexico, Massachusetts, Virginia, Chile. Individually and collectively, these conquests symbolize one of the most dramatic moments in world history: the meeting of the old and new worlds, the demographic collapse of indigenous American populations, the birth of the world economy, the beginning of modernity. Such grand phrases are commonplace in tales of the conquest of the Americas told in classrooms, history books, cartoons, rock music, opera, political manifestos, and novels. Different characters are cast as heroes or villains, scenes start at different points, and the moral of the story may shift. The basic outline, however, remains the same.

But there are other ways of telling the story, which can make European conquest look like something else altogether. Such are the memories of conquest presented in this book. Many thousands of indigenous allies from central Mexico and Oaxaca invaded Central America alongside a few hundred Spaniards in 1524–28. Hundreds remained behind as colonists. In a small town called Ciudad Vieja in central Guatemala, the descendants of these warriors and colonists gradually became Mexicanos: a local group of Mesoamericans subjugated as Indians by the colonial system, but who enjoyed privileges not available to their Maya neighbors based on their identity as conquistadors. The extent of these Nahuas’ and Oaxacans’ participation in the invasions of 1524–28 undermines the very notion of a Spanish conquest. Their lives as Indian conquistadors in Guatemala suggest that we still have a long way to go to understand the lived experience of colonialism by the American continents’ indigenous peoples.

To understand the Mexicanos’ memories of conquest requires a reimagining of the conquest itself. Historians have traditionally asked, sometimes with a heavy dose of amazement, how so few Europeans conquered tens of millions of people. Implicitly, the earliest military confrontations between Europeans, their indigenous allies, and various foes (who subsequently themselves often became allies) are taken to represent European colonization as it was accomplished over hundreds of years, with varying degrees of control and success and with the terrible aid of epidemic disease. Attempting to see things from the Mexicanos’ point of view, however, suggests that how the Europeans did it may be the wrong question to ask of these initial diplomatic encounters and military clashes. The Mexicanos of Ciudad Vieja did not remember their role in the conquest as auxiliary, nor the Spaniards as being in total control of military campaigns. Instead, they remembered the invasion of Guatemala as a joint affair and their own role in it with pride. The Mexicanos’ mostly triumphant recollections of the period are not hegemonic. Like all memories they are selective, woven and rewoven into stories of the past that, in this case, explained and justified the Mexicanos’ superior position in colonial Guatemala. They cannot represent the experiences of the Tz’utujil Maya who surrendered in 1524 (and today often emphasize their peaceful reception of the invaders), or the Kaqchikel who fought a bitter guerrilla war between 1524 and 1530 (and today celebrate their resistance), or the Central American Nicarao taken as slaves and forced to participate in the invasions of Yucatan in the following decade. They do not even represent a unified Mexicano viewpoint; archives, by their nature, winnow out much of what is unofficial, individual, difficult to classify, or merely undocumented. Nevertheless, the Mexicanos’ surviving memories of conquest remind us of a fact that many Europeans at the time and subsequent historians recognized: that without native allies, Spanish expansion throughout Mesoamerica would not have been possible. Indeed, when the leadership roles and overwhelming numbers of the allies are taken seriously, it becomes difficult to think of this as Spanish expansion at all. The historian’s question then becomes, why did so many Mesoamericans work willingly with the Europeans? Is this a story of treason and collaboration? Of profound misunderstanding and miscalculation? Or of something else altogether, that forces us to dismantle and reassemble traditional narratives of European conquest?

It is impossible to answer these questions from the vantage point of European history alone, without taking indigenous America’s history into full account. This requires displacing Europeans from the center of the narrative—a more difficult task, perhaps, than merely acknowledging indigenous allies’ participation in the military campaigns. In the United States, writing Native American-centered history has often meant a geographical reorientation that destabilizes the still-powerful idea of the western frontier in the Anglo-American imagination. Daniel Richter contemplates the meeting of Europe and America facing east from Indian country rather than from the shores of the Atlantic looking west. Pekka Hämäläinen reenvisions central Texas not as a far-off borderland where Europeans found it difficult to impose their will, but as the center of the Comanche empire whose power and aggressive expansion prevented others from gaining a foothold in the region. In Mesoamerican history the reorientation is more temporal: a rejection of rigid divisions between archaeological or ancient history and the colonial period, and an insistence that Mesoamerica’s pre-Columbian past is not simply background or worse, prehistory, but essential for understanding what happened after contact with Europe, Africa, and Asia.¹ This is possible, in part, because of the richness and comparative abundance of Mesoamerican sources—not only historical texts, but also information from archaeology, anthropology, art history, epigraphy, and linguistics. In particular, the historical reimaginings of Nahuatl-speaking people in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, while products of their own unsettled times, provide a complex picture of central Mexican politics and society in the two hundred years or so prior to European colonialism. Situating the conquest period within this broader, indigenous American timeline reveals that Mesoamerican patterns of alliance, warfare, and colonization helped shape the invasion of Guatemala just as surely as Iberian ones. Going one step further, it is worth asking whether the sixteenth-century invasion of the Maya highlands by largely northern, Nahua forces was simply the latest example of many such intrusions, albeit carried out this time with particular violence and a fateful new ally in the Spanish.

Mesoamerican history writ long and large also helps us understand the Mexicanos’ experience as both colonists and colonial subjects in Guatemala. At its inception, Ciudad Vieja existed to protect the fledgling Spanish city of Santiago. In form and function, however, it paralleled the garrison colonies that secured frontier regions under Aztec imperialism. As they had in prior wars of conquest, Mesoamerican conquistadors-turned-colonists divided their settlement into ethnic wards. They welcomed new immigrants from their homelands and forged lasting relationships with locals. Ciudad Vieja’s spatial and social arrangements in Guatemala echoed those of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century native settlements in central Mexico. Religious and civic rituals followed Mesoamerican as well as European formulas. A common language, Nahuatl, marked the Mexicanos’ difference from the Maya whose territory they had invaded (even as it masked ethnic differences among themselves, most notably between Nahuas and Oaxacans). Long after the colonial system was formally dismantled in the early nineteenth century, the Mexicanos of Ciudad Vieja still remembered their descent from Nahua and Oaxacan conquistadors. Historians of Mesoamerica looking for threads of continuity with the precolonial past, newly rewoven into the fabric of colonial society, will find them easily in Ciudad Vieja. In myriad ways, the Mexicanos of Ciudad Vieja maintained a persistent, dynamic memory of their particular Mesoamerican history.

But it is important not to overstate the case for continuity. Europeans fundamentally shaped the process of becoming Mexicano in colonial Guatemala, in all the usual ways: through foreign institutions like town councils, confraternities, and Catholic marriage rites, and new spiritual concepts like sin and angels. All these were imposed upon and transformed by the people the Spanish labeled Indians. Historians have quite rightfully pointed out that the Europeans, too, were transformed in this cultural exchange. But to what extent did Europeans have the upper hand, despite being a minority of the population? The Mexicanos seem to have clearly recognized that the emerging colonial system was eroding their options and limiting their status within a few decades of the invasion of Guatemala. To defend their position, they chose not only to conform to colonialism but also, perhaps incidentally, to bolster it. Being Mexicano in Ciudad Vieja meant claiming a conquistador heritage that was increasingly defined by Europeans and their descendants in America, not by Mesoamericans. To act outside or challenge the colonial order meant risking the original alliance that had made the Mexicanos conquistadors in the first place and all the privileges that came with it. For the entirety of the colonial period, the Mexicanos of Ciudad Vieja maneuvered within a system that both safeguarded and restricted their position in colonial society. Self-consciously and purposefully or not, they and their counterparts throughout Mesoamerica helped create a colonial order that all Mesoamericans had to manage, often from a disadvantaged position. In the process, at least to some extent, the Mexicanos themselves were created by Spanish colonialism.

This book thus attempts a delicate balance between change versus continuity of indigenous culture under colonial rule, and between the power of colonial institutions versus the sometimes surprising potency of everyday life to shape a collective consciousness. Over the course of three hundred years of living in colonial Guatemala, the Mexicanos of Ciudad Vieja acquired overlapping and often counterintuitive identities. They were both indigenous and foreign, Indians and conquistadors. They were ladinos in the early colonial sense of the Spanish term of being Europeanized Indians, but not in later, racialized definitions of Ladinos as anyone who did not fall under an idealized European-Indian rubric. They did not, and do not, fit easily into seductive oppositions between victor and vanquished or oppressor and victim. And yet, the Mexicanos’ experience reveals the longevity, evolution, and practical applicability of all these categories of colonial rule. Straddling so many of them at once and sitting significantly outside the standard narratives, the Mexicanos of Ciudad Vieja are well-positioned to help us reexamine our own memories of European conquest and colonialism in the Americas. At stake is not only the possibility of finer understandings of the Mesoamerican colonial experience, but the building of alternative narratives that can compete with stories whose raison d’etre is to explain European dominance over the Americas. This is not to deny that millions of Mesoamericans were victims of contact and conflict with Europeans—for who could possibly do so? Nor is it to throw out European-centered narratives and replace them with indigenous ones. Rather, my goal is to reiterate the old maxim that there are many sides to every story and to assert that this one contributes something important and previously overlooked: the perspective of Mesoamericans who embraced the colonial project and found themselves both protected and limited by it.

At the heart of this book is something that sociologist Maurice Halbwachs in the 1930s termed social memory. Halbwachs suggested that the individual recalls his or her past, and defines his or her present, as part of a larger social group. Put together, these individual yet social memories can potentially create something larger: a group consciousness passed down and refashioned from generation to generation. In Ciudad Vieja, the most salient social memory was that of being Indian conquistadors. But how was this passed down and refashioned over time? What did being Mexicano mean, if anything, in any particular situation?

Most accessibly and obviously, people transmit social memory by telling stories about their shared past. Such stories may crystallize in and around what Pierre Nora famously called sites of memory—subway maps, paintings, textbooks, monuments, anything that provides an opportunity to reimagine the past. They may emerge out of social gatherings (family reunions, veterans’ groups, religious communities, ethnic clubs) or become part of consumer culture (antique shops, Disney films, published memoirs).² Sometimes a story of the past becomes both iconic and contentious. The famous Bayeux tapestry created in the twelfth century, whose embroidered panels pictorially recount the Norman invasion of England in 1066, inspires competing English and French interpretations. Colonial Mesoamericans also created visual narratives of the past, on painted sheets of paper or leather that sometimes stretched across entire walls. Painted lienzos (cloth sheets), tiras (rolls), codices, and maps, such as the Mapas de Cuauhtinchan, employed traditional techniques to narrate local histories reaching far into the Mesoamerican past, rarely mentioning Europeans. Often used as mnemonic devices, they invited ceremonial retellings of the epic journeys of ancestors or the genealogies of royal families. Mesoamericans also transcribed their narratives of the past into the Europeans’ alphabetic script, as in the Guatemalan K’iche’ Maya’s Popol Wuj, the Yucatec Maya’s Books of Chilam Balam, and the annals-style histories of the Nahua historian Chimalpahin. They adopted European forms of history-telling wholesale, as in the works of the seventeenth-century mestizo chronicler from the city-state of Texcoco in central Mexico, Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, or created histories that fit uneasily between indigenous and foreign genres, as in the alphabetic-pictorial Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca. In the Mexicanos’ case, a painted map known today as the Lienzo de Quauhquechollan and an 846-page Spanish-style petition for tribute exemption—both discussed in detail in Chapter 3—offer two versions of the same conquest-era events that, despite their considerable technical differences, are remarkably alike in tone and message.

These histories of mythic journeys, ethnic consolidation, imperial might, and royal lineage offer the most direct evidence of how Mesoamericans remembered their collective pasts during the colonial period. But like most written documents, they reflect the viewpoints of those with the means, either financial or technical, to create them. The same can be said of what historian James Lockhart has called mundane native-language documentation—bills of sale, minutes of local council meetings, wills, and so on—but these have the advantages of being more widely produced over the course of the colonial period and of reflecting a broader range of Mesoamerican experiences and viewpoints in their own languages.³ Far fewer native-language colonial documents have survived in Guatemala than in Mexico; for this study, I found only five from Ciudad Vieja in the Guatemalan Mexicanos’ predominant native language of Nahuatl. In their relative absence one is left with mostly secondhand, filtered representations of the Mexicanos’ words and lives in colonial Guatemala. A court-appointed notary records the recollections of a Nahua who journeyed to Guatemala with the Spanish conquistadors. An eighteenth-century Spanish American bishop notes Ciudad Vieja’s bilingualism. A family dispute between a Mexicano father and his daughter yields a detailed list of household goods submitted to a colonial judge, while a conflict between neighborhoods instigates an inspection of boundaries still recognizable in the hills around Ciudad Vieja today. Such details tucked away in bundles of legal documents or the narratives of colonial-era chronicles allow a sideways glimpse at the continuing activity of collective memory as new inputs occur, and as material is remembered, transmitted, and remembered again.⁴ In colonial New Spain, the Franciscan friar and scholar Bernardino de Sahagún worked with Nahua student-scholars to produce an entire volume of specifically Tlatelolca memories of conquest and many other volumes more generally detailing Nahua history, religion, and ritual practice. Historians of ancient Mexico approach Sahagún’s work with caution but also with gratitude for the chance to interrogate it. Historians of Central America are even more suspicious of the writings of the hyperpatriotic seventeenth-century Guatemalan creole chronicler, Francisco Fuentes y Guzmán.⁵ Nevertheless, Fuentes y Guzmán is the best source available for descriptions of occasional reenactments of the conquest of Guatemala, in which the Mexicanos of Ciudad Vieja played a central role.

Finally, social memory is traceable through the actions that such documents suggest rather than the words they reveal. This takes us beyond narrative and toward what Paul Connerton has argued are the most powerful conduits of social memory: rituals, gestures, and habits.⁶ Commemorative ceremonies like that of the conquest of Guatemala do not just recall the past, writes Connerton—they reenact it, with familiar actions and at regular intervals. An obvious example of this kind of bodily memory is found in the Catholic church’s celebration of Easter, whose rituals remind participants and observers of their connection not only to God but to one another and past generations of Christians. But Connerton argues that collective memory is just as powerfully located in learned, repeated, everyday gestures such as posture, table manners, gesticulations, or habits of dress. Both commemorative ceremonies and bodily practices . . . contain a measure of insurance against the process of cumulative questioning entailed in all discursive practices, he writes. This is the source of their importance and persistence as mnemonic systems. Every group . . . know(s) how well the past can be kept in mind by a habitual memory sedimented in the body.⁷

Present-day examples suggest how embodied social memory might function in practice. The West River Apache of central Arizona transmit and refashion their ancestral past by traveling and narrating the landscape in which they live. Place-names recall particular events; changes in the landscape record the passage of time. Telling stories along familiar routes recalls the past for future generations, and physical, routine knowledge of particular places is essential for remembering. The municipal archive in the small Nasa community of Cumbal, Colombia, where anthropologist Joanne Rappaport worked in the 1980s, serves a similar mnemonic purpose. The content of the documents matter less than the physical, material connection they provide to real experiences of past generations. In the Mexican town of Santo Tomás Ajusco, local authorities preserve, recite, and ritually transfer a copy of a colonial-era speech detailing the European conquest of the area on a regular basis. In the Aymara town of Santa Bárbara de Culta in modern-day highland Bolivia, residents travel what anthropologist Thomas Abercrombie calls memory paths as they perform the particular rituals of maintaining hamlet boundaries, libation ceremonies, and saints’ festivals, as well as more everyday rituals. All these examples come from contemporary Native America, but there is nothing peculiarly modern, indigenous, or American about the phenomena.⁸

This book traces the echoes of social memory in colonial Ciudad Vieja, Guatemala, discernable in direct narratives, secondhand accounts, and recorded actions. Commemorations of the conquest re-enacted the Mexicanos’ claim to territory in foreign lands. Mexicano militias and confraternities assigned particular tasks and rituals to the town’s ethnic subgroups, the routine fulfillment of which recalled and reinforced their ancestors’ heterogeneous origins. The ancestral past was embedded and thereby remembered in the very place-names of Ciudad Vieja’s colonial-era neighborhoods. Some memory paths were purposefully trod—when the conquest was invoked to claim community lands, for instance, or when a defendant in court proclaimed his ethnic identity in self-protection. Others were part of a habitual memory recalled when a campesino walked daily across another neighborhood’s land boundaries to his own fields, or identified himself as a Mexicano or Tlaxcalteca to the census-taker or priest, or supplied the candles for Holy Week ceremonies as part of his confraternity duties. Some habits, like dress and food, are even more difficult to access but were surely as profound and enduring in their familiar, reflexive routines.

My aim in tracing these social memories is to understand what being Mexicano meant in colonial Ciudad Vieja over time. Being and also becoming, because the Mexicanos of Ciudad Vieja did not exist as such when thousands of Nahuas, Mixtecs, and Zapotecs invaded the Maya highlands in 1524. To be Mexicano in colonial Ciudad Vieja did not imply an essentialist, static identity, nor even a single, overarching ethnicity. It did not mean the same thing in the sixteenth century as it did in the nineteenth. I would also not claim that being Mexicano was the most important aspect of any resident of Ciudad Vieja’s existence. Indeed, the underlying assumption of this book is that on a day-to-day and individual level it mostly did not matter. Even the Mexicanos’ most explicit renderings of their collective identity, such as their annual participation in conquest commemorations, surely meant many things beyond identification with a particular, cohesive group. Marching into the cathedral in Spanish military costume as the Mexicanos did every November provided a chance not only to reenact a story of a shared past, but also to celebrate, get drunk, dress up. And this is the very essence of what I wish to explain: how the idea of being Mexicano—a fundamentally Mesoamerican yet also evolving and colonial identity—was sustained and reinvigorated over time, despite being in the background rather than the forefront of most people’s everyday lives.

NOTES

1. Recent exemplars of this approach in the Anglo-American academy include Zeitlin, Cultural Politics; Leibsohn, Script and Glyph; and Megged, Social Memory. Also noteworthy is Robert Carmack’s body of work on Guatemala, which pioneered the interdisciplinary methodology known as ethnohistory and consistently treats the history of Guatemala’s indigenous people as an uninterrupted progression from ancient times to the present day. The attempt to bridge the precolonial-colonial divide is also predicated on a long tradition of Mexican scholarship centered mostly on the Nahua region, most recently represented by scholars such as Enrique Florescano, Hildeberto Martínez, Andrea Martínez Baracs, Miguel León Portilla, Alfredo López Austín, Leonardo López Luján, and Luis Reyes García.

2. See the varied essays collected under Nora, Realms of Memory; Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country; Mires, Independence Hall in American Memory; Horowitz, Confederates in the Attic; Brear, Inherit the Alamo.

3. James Lockhart encouraged a generation of students in the 1980s and 1990s to focus on these sorts of native language documents. Their approach emphasizes historical rather than poetic analysis and insists that native voices be made as central to modern history-writing about the indigenous past as possible; see Restall, History of the New Philology. The disinterest that some of these texts exhibited toward the Spanish, perhaps most surprisingly when recalling the fall of Tenochtitlan and its aftermath, led some to question to what extent Mesoamericans at the time viewed the Spanish as the principal enemy, or the conquest as the most pivotal event in their histories. Others using Spanish texts and/or Mesoamerican pictorial sources have come to similar conclusions. See Lockhart, We People Here; Hassig, Mexico and the Spanish Conquest; various works of Schroeder, the most recent being Chimalpahin’s Conquest (with Roa-de-la-Carrera and Tavarez); Restall, Seven Myths; Wood, Transcending Conquest; Asselbergs, Conquered Conquistadors; Matthew and Oudijk, Indian Conquistadors; and Oudijk and Restall, La conquista de Mesoamérica. For a slightly different approach that emphasizes the unpredictable yet transformative and often punitive power of colonialism (in this case, the translation