Americans undergo an analogous textual transformation when the initial connection of the term “cannibal” with those under the rule of the Great Khan of Cathay turn into dog-faced monsters and eventually to a group of people, the Caribs, who purportedly practiced cannibalism and terrorized the “peaceful” Arawacs, who have subjected themselves willingly to the Spanish crown (Hulme, 1986). Columbus constitutes the Carib’s future within the new colonial order as slaves, in the best of scenarios, and as subject to extermination, in the worst: “The Admiral told him by signs that the sovereigns of Castile would order the Caribs destroyed, and they would order all of them to be brought with hands tied” (Columbus, 1989: 287). The history of the Americas will reiterate this bad vs. good Indian narrative for the next 500 years. On Columbus’s return to the Island of Hispaniola (the Dominican Republic and Haiti) during his second voyage, he learns that the 36 Europeans he had left behind had been killed — the initial mapping of friendly/unfriendly Indians turns murky. Columbus sent 500 enslaved Arawacs back to Spain, to the horror of Queen Isabel, who demanded that he abstain from enslaving her new subjects; nevertheless, he set the grounds for the systematic subjection of natives under encomiendas (a system of tribute in kind and labor) and the enslaving of resistant Indians. According to the consuetudinary laws governing the rights of victors in war, the defeated could be enslaved. The practice of enslaving resistant Indians remained within the colonial order until the wars of independence. But if Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla and Simón Bolívar eventually called for the dissolution of slavery, not only of Indians but also of blacks, debt peonage has remained a reality up to the present time.
Writing that Conquers
In 1511, Fray Antonio de Montesinos delivered a sermon in Santo Domingo in which he exposed the atrocities and condemned those responsible as living under mortal sin. This denunciation led to an ideological crisis that led to the drafting of the Laws of Burgos. In essence, these laws sought to establish criteria for determining when Indians could be subjected to war and, as a consequence, enslaved. The Laws of Burgos gained further solidity when the jurist Juan López Palacios Rubio wrote a legal instrument known as the Requerimiento. The Requerimiento, perhaps, constitutes the purest expression of writing that conquers (Rabasa, 2000: 67—72, 88—94, and passim). After narrating the history of the world from the creation of the earth to the universal rule granted to St. Peter, the first pope, the Requerimiento goes on to explain that a most recent pope had granted sovereignty of the New World to the Spanish crown, and that Indians had the choice of either recognizing Spanish sovereignty over their territories or being subjected to war and slavery. It also points out that those who have accepted Spanish rule live happy and prosperous lives. This document became a standard in the establishment of first contact after 1514 when Pedrarias Davila first read it in the Castilla del Oro. From the start the Requerimiento was cast as a cynical attempt to justify violence; the impossibility of conveying its meaning to a people whose language was unknown was one of the concerns, but also the absurd situation in which it was reputedly read several miles off the coast to people who, for practical purposes, could not have heard it, let alone understood its implications if they did not welcome the invading Spaniards.
The Requerimiento plays a fundamental role in Hernán Cortés’s Second Letter to Charles V. Having committed mutiny by refusing to follow the instructions of the Governor of Cuba Diego Velasquez, Cortés constantly draws from the Requerimiento to establish the legality of his conquering expedition into the hinterland of Mexico to subdue Motecuzoma in Tenochtitlan:
And, trusting in God’s greatness and in the might of your Highness’s Royal name, I decided to go and see him wherever he might be. Indeed, I remember that, with respect to the quest of this lord, I undertook more than I was able, for I assured Your Highness that I would take him alive in chains or make him subject to Your Majesty’s Royal Crown. (Cortés, 1986: 50)
Cortés prefaces every contact with people on the way to the basin of Mexico with variations of the Requerimiento. In some instances, he responds with acts of war to negative responses to the demand to recognize Spain’ claims to sovereignty; in other instances Cortés chooses to ignore the negative reply: “So as not to offend him and for fear that some calamity might befall my endeavor and my journey, I dissembled as best as I could and told him that very soon I would have Mutezuma order him to give the gold and all that he owned” (ibid.: 56). This astuteness in following the consequences of resistance already presages his manipulation of Motecuzoma’s response to Cortés in which the call to recognize the sovereignty of Spain plays into a narrative that identifies Charles V with the return of Quetzalcoatl, the god-man who, according to native narratives, had abandoned those who had settled in the basin of Mexico and had promised to return. Cortés offers one variation of this story in his representation of Motecuzoma’s welcoming speech. Observe his circumspection: “I replied to all he said as I thought most fitting, especially in making him believe that Your Majesty was he whom they were expecting” (Cortés, 1986: 86—7). Much has been written and debated over the supposed identification of Cortes and his cohorts as “gods.” I do not pretend to settle the disputes here but merely raise a few questions that should complicate whatever response you may want to give to this issue.
First, it is important to note that the term teutl or teotl used to speak of the Spaniards as gods carries an ambivalence in that, according to the Franciscan Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, one of the greatest scholars of Nahuatl in the sixteenth century, it meant “cosa estremada en bien o en mal” (thing consummate in good or in evil). Sahagún lists as examples “teuhpiltzintli, niño o muj lindo: teuhpiltontli, muchacho muy traujeso, o malo” (teopiltzintli, a very handsome boy; teopiltontli, a very mischievous or bad boy; Sahagún, 1950—82: 1, 87). While tzintli marks a reverential, the diminutive tontli denotes contempt; however, both share the term teo-tl.
Second, observe that Quetzalcoatl is a god-man and that, accordingly, he participated in both the natural and the supernatural from within a spiritual economy in which these two discrete realms lacked the separation commonly attributed to them in post-Enlightenment Western discourse. I stress the notion of after the Enlightenment, because for the Spaniards of the sixteenth century God, the Virgin, or St. James were agents of history. Cortés’s silence could only be temporary because from within the spiritual economy of Catholicism Quetzalcoatl must be reduced to the status of devil, hardly a pagan deity that Cortés and his cohorts could identify with for long. This does not mean, of course, that Cortés would deny the centrality of Quetzalcoatl in the indigenous conceptualization of the invaders. In fact, Cortés knows that as long as Quetzalcoatl exists independently of the Spaniard’s reduction to expressions of the devil, the Nahuas retain their own world and thereby remain epistemologically inaccessible.
Third, in Nahuatl history and cosmology, regions of the world have different temporalities. As much as the voice of Motecuzoma might be distorted in Cortés’s representation in the language of chivalry novels, one can trace the voice of a Nahua. That is, this Nahua story carries an ontology and epistemology that will remain inaccessible to the ethnographic reductions of the missionaries. Thus we find in Chapter XXVII of Diego Durán’s History of the Indies of New Spain [Historia de las Indias de la Nueva España a e islas de Tierra Firme] an account of when the first Motecuzoma sent wizards, witches, and enchanters to Aztlan to learn about the land of the ancestors and to find out if Coatlicue, the mother of Huitzilopochtli, the main Mexican deity, was still alive (Durán, 1994: 212—22). When the wizards and enchanters arrive at the seven caves from where the Nahua ancestors had first departed, they invoke the “devil” and rub their skin with ointments that enable them to assume the forms of birds, wild cats, and other fierce animals so that they can travel through the wilderness that leads to the place were their ancestors originated. Once they cross the lands filled with dangers, they transform back into humans at the foothills of the caves of Culhuacan. The people from Aztlan approach them and are surprised to learn that the ancestors who led the Nahuas in their migration have died. The narrative goes on to reproduce the conversations they had, but let this brief account suffice as an example of multiple temporalities in Nahua
