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[Page 3: Black Indians
and Savage Christians: Unmaking the “Other” in the Performance
of the Conquest, by Sarah Jo Townsend]
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The best proof of the conquest scenario's power,
it seems, is its ability to limit even critics who recognize it
as such to either illustrating its omnipresence or celebrating what
they see as its reversal while leaving intact its underlying structure.
This suggests that in order for criticism of the Conquest to avoid
getting trapped in the story it tells, it is necessary to unthink
the Self/Other dichotomy and to reexamine these same scenes with
a different optic.
To begin, if we look beyond its own rhetoric,
is it really true that the dynamic of conquest rests upon no finer
distinctions than that of the European and his "insert-any-ethnicity-here"
Other? The scenes in the Tratado curioso involving indigenous actors
dressed as black men are particularly suggestive in this respect,
if only because the color line makes it more difficult for both
the conquistadors and modern-day observers to merge the mask with
the face beneath. Twice the author mentions having seen danzas de
negros contrahechos (dances of imitation blacks); in one case, he
reports only that they "danced very elegantly to the sound
of a tambourine and a flute" and led the prelate to the church,
while in the other they seemed to have appeared alongside the "chichimecas"
and a group of Iindians playing the traditional game of palo. But
it is another "Black indian" that makes one of the most
unusual and enigmatic appearances on the ethnographic stage set
by Ciudad Real. He tells us that Ponce was received in the village
of San Hierónimo Purenchécuaro by musicians playing
trumpets and chirimías, as well as three or four dances.
In one of these "an indian came out dressed as Death, and with
him another dressed as a black man saying thank you, to the friars
as well as the indians and even to Death himself." This "black
man" played cards with Death and strummed the guitar, "saying
witty things and speaking like a newly arrived black slave."
(17)
What might this inscrutable performance mean?
Trexler does not mention the negros in his essay at all, and Harris's
only comment on their "public transcript" is that it is
obviously demeaning to blacks. Neither asks what function such masquerading
might serve, both for the indigenous participants and their Spanish
audience, or what it has to do with the real black slaves who are
curiously invisible in the text.
Although Ciudad Real does not comment upon the relationship between
the two, it is notable that the skit involving the beguiling black
slave is described as having occurred at the same time as another
scene that has an "old indian" playing St. Peter, who
holds a ring of keys in one hand and a net full of fish in the other.
While the schematic nature of Ciudad Real's descriptions means that
any analysis must be conjectural, viewing the two scenes in conjunction
with one another suggests that what is at stake when the slave sits
down to deal with Death may be nothing less than the salvation of
souls. This idea gains plausibility when we look at one of the commonly
performed evangelical plays of the period, fittingly called The
Final Judgment. In this play, the allegorical figure of Death introduces
himself to the audience as "the officer of the law, the appointed
one, the messenger empowered by heaven"; his mission is to
remind people that they should clean up their act, "for the
time and hour of judgment is at hand." Calling upon common
Christian tropes, Death castigates the people of the earth, saying
that they "have blackened themselves with great sins…Let
them wash themselves. Let them bathe themselves in the divine light
of goodness." (18)
As the scene described by Ciudad Real indicates,
this association between blackness and sin cannot be separated from
the representation of New Spain's black slaves. The historian Herman
L. Bennett argues that far from forming part of an undifferentiated
"Other," the black population – which at many points
during the 16th century outnumbered the Spanish – had a distinct
place in the cultural imaginary of the early Spanish colonizers
along with a unique legal status. Whereas the indigenous did not
fall under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition, a decision justified
by their recent introduction to Christianity, blacks were perceived
in a certain sense as "Old World" inhabitants and constituted
nearly fifty percent of the cases brought before the inquisitorial
tribunal. "By adjudicating over Africans and their descendants
and not the indigenous population," Bennett states, "the
tribunal magnified the ways in which the dichotomy between New and
Old World informed the divergent experiences of the colonized."
(19)
Spanish mastery of blacks, displayed in the public spectacles of
the Inquisition as well as daily interactions, had a particular
significance as "symbolic capital" that granted Old World
residents authority in their quest to conquer the New. Referring
to blacks as objects of "conspicuous consumption," Bennett
claims that "(l)ike writing, walled cities, wheat, olives,
and wine, Spaniards relied on the servile African population to
signify their cultural identity as the civilized."(20)
It is interesting to note, then, that in Ciudad
Real's "curious and learned treatise," the black character
who expresses gratitude to the audience is identified as a bozal,
a newly arrived slave and therefore a liminal figure who marks one
of the conceptual boundaries of colonial society. His exaggerated
display of subservience may have appeared to the Spanish to be a
tribute to their own authority and a recognition of their civilization's
superiority. But these cultural and social distinctions are represented
in the skit as an existential border between the sinners and the
saved that is patrolled by Death, just as the black bodies tortured
in the Inquisition were the terrain upon which were drawn the lines
separating both Good from Evil and Civilization from Barbarity.
Assuming in this case that Death won the game of cards (Ciudad Real
does not say, but perhaps it is taken for granted), the performance
would seem to indicate that the indigenous participants were aligning
themselves with the Spanish on the good side of St. Peter's gate,
against the black slaves who constituted one of the colonizers'
own Old World Others.
The Spanish conquistadors' manipulation of distinctions
among the various non-Spanish populations can also be seen in the
appearances of "Chichimecas" that trace the political
and cultural divide that lay just to the north of these villages.
It does not suffice to say, as does Trexler, that these performances
are a metaphor for the indigenous actors' own historic defeat. While
this is undoubtedly one aspect of the conquest scenario, the conquistadors'
move to symbolically equate the actor with his role coexists with
their need to view these performances as representations of difference.
Ciudad Real has nothing but praise for the Iindians he encounters,
and unlike some of the clergy he does not seem to find any contradiction
between their professions of faith and their use of traditional
instruments such as the chirimía and the teponastle drum.
These people seem to have been so successfully subdued and converted,
in fact, that one wonders why the prelate and his secretary need
be there at all. It is the make-believe "Chichimecas"
that provide them with a pretext for their presence, standing in
for the real savages that they never manage to see because crossing
the real border into the lands of the Other might mean their own
annihilation. These performances in which a slightly-civilized,
recognizable but distinct Other plays the part of another, unknown
Other create a frontier between the European Self and its inverted
image, a place that marks a division but also a means of approach
that is necessary for the Conquest to take place.
This underlines the importance of seeing the
Conquest not as a scene, a freeze-frame view, but as an ongoing
scenario that is played out over time. Considered in this way it
becomes evident that despite the Self/Other dichotomy that is constructed
to legitimate the conqueror's singular power, the presence of a
third term is the essential factor that allows the scenario to reproduce
itself. There is no doubt that the impulse behind the Conquest is
for "the Same" to "violently reduce the Other to
itself," as Dussel says. But it is equally clear from the account
of Alonso Ponce's travels through Michoacán that the final
success of such an endeavor must constantly be postponed. What purpose
does the conquistador serve if the Other has already been tamed?
In order to avoid working himself out of a job, the conqueror must
constantly recreate new frontiers between his own Self and his object,
relying on the mediation of intermediary figures such as the "Black
Indians" and the "Savage Christians" of Michoacán
as well as the bodies of real black slaves whose public torture
taught the indigenous the lessons of Christianity and the unmasked
Purépecha Iindians that were enlisted to fight the real barbarians.
This leads me to suggest that rather than founding our critique
(and perhaps our own authority?) on the epistemological ground of
the reassembled "Other," modern-day critics would do better
to reveal the ways in which the conquest scenario is predicated
upon and constructs multiple differences that at other times it
must erase in order to authorize its own reenactment.
Attempting to see the same events from the vantage
point of the indigenous participants, of course, is another possible
way of throwing a wrench in the works. This involves treading on
even shakier ground, since the account of these performances includes
only what the Spanish observer was able or willing to see. But even
a quick glance at the history of the Purépecha actors' relationship
to the groups they were impersonating is enough to indicate that
whatever may have been happening, it was most likely more complex
than either the Spanish story of indigenous submission or Harris's
"hidden transcript."
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