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Visions of Paradise: Primordial Titles and Mesoamerican History in Cuernavaca

2009; Duke University Press; Volume: 89; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2008-052

1527-1900

David Tavárez,

Historical Studies in Latin America

Mesoamerican títulos primordiales are an exceedingly local and dauntingly hetero geneous colonial historical genre written by and for an indigenous audience and filled with momentous origin narratives. Since these documents often feature actors or episodes not found in other historical narratives and make idiosyncratic use of the Gregorian calendar, interpreters must contend with two vexing issues: the relationship between these narratives and other accounts written by indigenous or European chroniclers, and the nature of these texts as exercises in collective remembrance. In an inspired, inventive, and sprawling volume, Robert Haskett provides a closely reasoned answer to these questions based on some 19 primordial titles, most of them in Nahuatl, that focus on the local history of Cuauhnahuac, now Cuernavaca, a Tlalhuica community whose political history was deeply impacted by two contrasting hegemonic processes: Mexica influence after the late 1430s and Spanish colonial rule less than a century later.As a microhistory of Cuernavaca, this work shoulders the same dual burden confronted by Luis González y González’s classic work on San José de Gracia: showing the multiple disjunctions between local historical narratives and grander national/global narratives, and contextualizing the former within the latter. Haskett approaches these tasks through a set of “nesting boxes.” While chapter 1 gathers the disparate threads woven into the received image of Cuernavaca as a “land of eternal spring,” chapter 2 summarizes Cuernavaca’s place within major narratives of colonial rule in central Mex-ico. These elements build a gateway to three core chapters: an exploration of historical narratives embedded in the landscape, an ambitious summary of major themes in Cuernavaca’s primordial titles, and a survey of local traditions regarding “the coming of the faith” and Christian miracles witnessed by natives. In fact, Haskett’s expository and methodological approach, characterized by a careful contextualization of local narratives and a constant cross-referencing of figures and events among them, allows these three chapters to stand on their own as a separate, coherent whole.Seemingly unreconstructed Carlisleans, the anonymous authors of Cuernavaca títulos focused on foundational acts performed by what Haskett terms “heroes of tradition”: local notables not always remembered outside their communities whose legitimacy — epitomized by the couplet in pillotl in tlatocayotl (nobility, rulership) — was confirmed by early encounters with Cortés and other representatives of colonial rule. Outsiders were often Nahuatized in speech and actions; in a revealing detail, the provincial governor inspects “the chili and salt,” a couplet conveying the notion of sustenance, in the local marketplace. The best example of such a hero, and of Haskett’s approach, is Don Toribio Cortés, a late sixteenth-century native governor of Cuernavaca. Rather than celebrating the first post-contact indigenous ruler, the títulos memorialized this ruthless ruler who augmented the community’s labor and tributary levies, according to litigation records. Furthermore, his wife Doña María Salomé was said to discover, providentially, a Holy Cross in a zapote tree. Haskett explains the motivation behind these choices by proposing a conflation with an earlier, more benevolent Don Toribio, and the association of his legacy with the political successes of the Hinojosas, a local ruling clan. Nevertheless, the heterogeneous composition of the títulos prevents individual biographies from serving as metonyms for local history, for these narratives’ structure is episodic, highly topical, and, unlike other native historical genres, loosely moored to chronology.While the author brackets his analysis within a discussion of “myth” versus “history” as unified categories, his analytical reach goes well beyond this binary. Haskett provides compelling illustrations of how the títulos uphold structures of local dominance, depict colonial rule, and narrate the birth of communal institutions — all examples of what anthropologist Terry Turner has called “ethno-ethnohistories” in Amazonian communities. Furthermore, by showing that some native borrowings — such as the emergence of indigenous coats of arms, or the insertion in títulos of exempla indebted to doctrinal authors like Bernardino de Sahagún or Pedro de Gante — follow an independent logic of appropriation that pursues novel social meanings, Haskett emphasizes the status of títulos as an autochthonous historical genre with its own autonomous intellectual history.Although more expert readers may wish for a few more details — such as footnote citations in the original Nahuatl or Spanish of ambiguous passages, or a discussion of the internal structure of certain títulos — Haskett’s exposition renders a dense and challenging topic accessible to an advanced undergraduate and graduate student audience. In the end, this volume shines as an eloquent exposition of local indigenous accounts that narrate the conquest and emergence of colonial hegemony as an ambivalent longue durée process and not as the punctual event memorialized in other colonial genres.