Memories of Conquest: Becoming Mexicano in Colonial Guatemala by Laura E. Matthew (review)

Between 1524 and 1528, thousands of native peoples from central Mexico and Oaxaca joined a small group of Spaniards in the invasion of Guatemala. The native conquerors and their descendants who established their own exclusive colony, Ciudad Vieja (originally known as Almolonga), near the Spanish-held city of Santiago de Guatemala, are the main subjects of Laura Matthew's welcome book. Matthew draws on an impressive collection of Spanish-language documents and native pictorials to examine issues of migration, conquest, colonization, and identity formation from the preconquest period to just before independence.

Matthew's important monograph joins a series of exemplary works on early Latin America that places native peoples at the center of historical narratives. While many of these works focus on indigenous communities that existed before the conquest period, Matthew considers the fate of natives who left (in greater numbers than we can ever be sure of) their local ethnic states and resettled elsewhere. The field is not without studies of diasporic indigenous groups, yet most to date have centered on relocated groups with a shared group identity and with long-term privileges, such as the Tlaxcalans of northern Mexico. Matthew's indigenous settlers were made up of many ethnic groups, including Mexicas, Tlaxcalans, and Zapotecs, each challenged with developing and maintaining a separate identity that distinguished them from their Maya neighbors and Santiago's urban casta population.

As in other areas, the crown initially exempted its indigenous allies from tribute and draft labor as a reward for service during the invasion. But by the 1560s, the conquerors of Ciudad Vieja found themselves fighting once again, this time against Spanish officials eager to revoke their royal exemptions. In subsequent legal battles native peoples generated their version of the conquest in a probanza, or account of their services, spanning over 800 pages. In her book's strongest methodological innovation, Matthew complements this source with an analysis of an indigenous, pictorial map (to date, the earliest version of the conquest by central Mexicans), the Lienzo de Quauhquechollan. Both images and texts, Matthew argues, point to an indigenous perspective of the invasion as a joint endeavor among equals, with indigenous allies wielding Spanish technology, leading military operations, and protecting Spaniards. Matthew's study, building on her own pioneering work in the field of New Conquest history and those of other scholars, such as Restall, Asselbergs, and Oudijk, reiterates the importance of indigenous peoples as allies (not simply auxiliaries) and offers compelling evidence that they did not view the Central American campaigns as particularly Spanish or "extraordinary" (p. 34).

In the second part of the book, Matthew shows how this conquest heritage cast a long shadow over the colonists and the settlements they developed. While Ciudad Vieja's neighborhoods reflected the ethnic diversity of the native invaders, its indigenous residents over time came to be known as "Mexicanos," a process of ethnic ethnogenesis that conflated Nahua and Oaxacan micro-ethnicities in favor of a collective identity based on their Guatemalan conquest heritage. The Mexicanos developed shared memories and practices, including parades and ritual reenactments, that anchored their identity as conquerors. Their semi-autonomy, tribute and labor exemptions, and conqueror status explain the survival of a central Mexican identity and town only a few miles from a Spanish city and a densely populated Maya hinterland.

Matthew's fine work is a welcome addition to the classroom and to the field. It significantly advances our understanding of New Conquest history, while adding another valuable piece of scholarship on both colonial Guatemala and the history of indigenous migrants. By highlighting the ambiguities of such terms, as "conquest," "colonizers," and "Indians," Matthew reminds us of the diverse indigenous responses, experiences, and hierarchies that developed in the wake of Spanish rule. The Nahua and Oaxacan colonists of Guatemala never achieved equality with Spaniards, but their status as conquerors facilitated their...