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Native Resistance and the Pax Colonial in New Spain
Colonial Period
Native Resistance and the Pax Colonial in New Spain. Edited by Susan Schroeder. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xxiii, 200 pp. Cloth, $45.00. Paper, $19.95. This volume brings together a distinguished group of colonial historians to examine revolts by indigenous people against the Spanish empire in New Spain. The chapters by Susan Deeds and Ronald Spores catalog dozens of rebellions and riots during the colonial period in Nueva Vizcaya and Oaxaca, respectively. For anyone interested in these areas and topics, these will be important bibliographic references. The other substantive chapters focus on specific revolts. Kevin Gosner discusses the well-known Tzeltal revolt of 1712 and Robert Patch the equally famous Canek Rebellion of 1761; Christopher Archer examines the Lake Chapala region during the Mexican War for Independence. The storytelling abilities of each of these authors are superb, so they make for good reads, in particular the piece by Archer on the remarkable resistance of a mostly indigenous force on the island of Mezcala from 1811 to 1816. While the substantive chapters differ from one another in temporal and geographic scale, there is a heavy emphasis on precipitating causes of revolts and their means of repression. The book concludes with an essay by Murdo MacLeod which spends some time exploring what rebellions and revolts can tell us more generally about colonial society.
A number of interesting points are raised in the individual chapters. Anyone familiar with the literature will undoubtedly have noted the chasm between archaeological explanations for the development of Mesoamerican societies--where the main historical dynamic lies in their adaptation to a complex and varied environment--and historical ones, where interaction with the colonial regime assumes a central place. Deeds mediates these positions in a refreshing way by discussing the role of ecological relations in the timing, patterns, and outcomes of armed rebellion against the Spanish. In his chapter on Oaxaca, Spores points out that revolts directed at the colonial regime paled by comparison to the scale and intensity of fighting among indigenous groups themselves, a situation which, while no doubt inflected by colonial arrangements, did not originate with them. Patch asks how the violation of long-standing informal agreements between elites and commoners regarding acceptable levels of exploitation and standards of behavior--Thompson's moral economy--can used to understand revolts in culturally heterogeneous societies like those of New Spain, where it is by no means clear that such agreements existed in the first place. In his essay he documents a suggestive case of a breakdown rooted not so much in tacit understandings between elites and commoners as in the contradictions inherent in what Paul Bohannon has called a "working misunderstanding" regarding the nature of kingship in the colonial regime. Gosner, operating with the Weberian dictum that religion can be a transformative force in collective life, most directly confronts the ethnic component in political mobilization by relating the Tzeltal revolt to tenets of Mesoamerican spirituality, in particular the role of revelation and covenants with sacred beings in the indigenous social order. While most of the final essay is taken up with a historiographic question of whether [End Page 181] or not violence is underreported in New Spain (it was, but given that all aspects of sixteenth- through nineteenth-century life are underreported in the literature, violence is certainly better reported than most), MacLeod shifts the focus from revolts to generalized violence, concluding that the high level he detects, especially with regard to the colonial response to indigenous resistance, is directly related to the weakness of the colonial regime, since it had neither the resources nor the organizational capabilities to respond in any other way.
Despite these insights, the topical basis of the book--indigenous peoples, revolts, and New Spain--is not matched by a systematic effort to address general debates. While this may be an advantage, one wishes that its organizing concept, resistance, received more critical scrutiny...
Native Resistance and the Pax Colonial in New Spain (review)
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