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Mesoamerican Memory: Enduring Systems of Remembrance

2013; Duke University Press; Volume: 93; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2351798

1527-1900

Yanna Yannakakis,

Latin American history and culture

Two generations of ethnohistorical scholarship have successfully challenged the notion that the Spanish conquest was a cultural cataclysm for Mesoamerica’s indigenous peoples. The proof is in the provincial, municipal, and village archives of Mexico as well as repositories in Europe and North America, which contain a treasure trove of colonial-era codices, lienzos, maps, and native-language written records. The question of how native people modified their methods for recording the past in response to pressures imposed by conquest, colonialism, and evangelization, and to what end, has occupied center stage in this vein of scholarship. Amos Megged and Stephanie Wood’s rich collection of essays, organized around the theme of social memory, provides an overview of the state of the field through an interdisciplinary methodology and a longue durée approach.Wood acknowledges in the introduction that the volume owes its primary intellectual debts to James Lockhart’s New Philology and the Leiden School of ethnohistory pioneered by Maarten Jansen. In keeping with the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of ethnohistory, the volume puts historical, art historical, archaeological, and anthropological approaches into conversation with one another. The essays stretch across a broad swath of Mesoamerican geography and over 500 years of history from the pre-Hispanic period to the present, with considerable emphasis on the colonial period. Although many chapters use an array of sources, the volume is loosely organized according to the preponderance of a specific source type in any given essay. The volume honors its emphasis on visual sources with beautiful reproductions, line drawings, and photographs, while it also offers rich excerpts from written sources within appendixes.In the introduction, Wood advocates for a conceptualization of memory that emphasizes social process. The essays are uneven on this score. Some of the contributors privilege exegesis of sources, as does Daniel Graña-Behrens, who interprets the changing role of the “wise man” in pre- and postconquest Maya and Nahua societies, and does Megged, who decodes the significance of binding and entwining in Nahua thought. Others place greater emphasis on how the construction of memory made and remade social and political relations in and among indigenous communities. Florine Asselbergs, Justyna Olko, Bas van Doesburg, María de los Angeles Romero Frizzi, Ethelia Ruiz Medrano, Hans Roskamp, and Jerome Offner all demonstrate how native claims on the past, as expressed in representations of conquest, genealogy, and territory, served as a tool for negotiating status, privileges, and rights in the colonial period, often at the expense of rival ethnic groups or elites. The Spanish legal system provided a crucial institutional context for these negotiations. The demand for documentary evidence to support claims to land and status in Spanish courts encouraged the production of native documentation and facilitated a confluence of Spanish and native discursive forms.At other moments in the volume, the paradigm of domination and resistance, as manifested in the dichotomies of indigenous versus Spanish and community versus state, comes to the fore. State-sponsored assaults on indigenous autonomy, whether through colonial extirpation (as discussed by León García Garagarza), the repeal of Article 27 of the Mexican constitution (as argued by Ruiz Medrano), or the folklorization of native history in the service of nationalism (as treated by van Doesburg) worked to galvanize distinctions among rival native elites, strengthen communal solidarity in defense of collectively held territory, or pit mestizo urban dwellers against the rural indigenous population.In this regard, the volume points to a tension that has long plagued Mesoamerican historiography: To what extent were interindigenous power struggles reconcilable with communal solidarity and collective goals? When did factional and class interests prevail, and under what circumstances did the categories of community and indigenous become more inclusive and salient? The essays that take a longue durée view go some distance toward answering these questions. Ruiz Medrano, van Doesburg, and Judith M. Max-well each analyze the changing value and meaning of indigenous memory in the face of transformations in indigenous sociopolitical relations as well as state and legal regimes over the course of 500 years. Ruiz Medrano and Maxwell provide rich ethnographic evidence for the resignification of collective memory in the context of communal land defense and ethnic revitalization, which points to the flexibility of indigenous legal strategies and identities.Many of the themes touched on thus far contribute to long-standing scholarly discussions. Two essays engage with more recent methodological innovations by analyzing the theme of place-making through the interface between community and landscape. Ángel Julián García Zambrano and Carlos Rincón Mautner analyze colonial-era lienzos alongside the landforms of the communities they depict in order to demonstrate how cosmological understandings of landscape made certain sites particularly attractive for settlement and how Mesoamerican notions of community hinged upon the relationship between the sacred and the physical terrain.Wood and Megged have assembled an impressive array of interdisciplinary essays on Mesoamerican historical expression. At times, description of the documents themselves overshadows analysis, and community and social memory are sometimes assumed rather than demonstrated. But overall, the volume contributes insightfully to our knowledge of how Mesoamericans deployed the past in the service of a colonial or national present.