Spiritual and Earthly Conquests: New works on colonial Mexico

In its sparest retelling, the “conquest of Mexico” is a narrow story that begins with Cortés’ reckless landings of 1519 and ends with a Castilian flag flying over the ruins of Tenochtitlan in 1521. Even this well-trodden narrative involves an astounding range of Spanish and Indigenous actors, and presents complex puzzles of documentation and transcultural interpretation. It is no small wonder that the tale of these few years has consumed entire academic careers. How much more daunting, then, is the longer and more complete story of Spanish military, religious and cultural dominion? The broadest definition of the Conquest of Mexico extends over several centuries to embrace the history of evangelization, acculturation and state formation among peoples throughout Mesoamerica and North America. It includes traditions of inquiry based on Robert Ricard’s “Spiritual Conquest,” Charles Gibson’s notion of “Aztecs under Spanish Rule” and Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán’s and Silvo Zavala’s explorations of African Slavery and Indian encomienda (tribute labor).¹ The most recent wave of works on New Spain continues to address political conquest, spiritual conquest and servitude. However, these publications do so in ways that take stock of the limits of colonial power, and of the widespread cultural improvisations that took place within colonial systems. They also bring a remarkable combination of newer research methods to bear on older historical questions.

This review is occasioned, in part, by the publication of The Conquest All Over, a collection of articles on post-conquest Indigenous experience. Edited scholarly volumes have a way of indexing the current state of historiography on a given subject, and this is certainly the case with this book. Among ethnohistorians of Mexico, several similar projects of recent years have expressed the relationship between the New Conquest History² and a broader colonial social history: Jane Landers and Barry Robinson’s Slaves, Subjects, and Subversives (2006), Michel Oudijk and Matthew Restall’s Indian Conquistadors (2007), Andrew Fisher and Mathew O’Hara’s Imperial Subjects (2009), and Ben Vinson and Matthew Restall’s Black Mexico (2009).³ Susan Schroder, herself a foundational figure in the New Conquest History, now presents us with The Conquest All Over, a collection of works by leading scholars from a variety of disciplines and subspecialties that captures current deliberations on the sources, methods and themes best suited to extend our understanding of the Conquest. Michel Oudijk points out in a recent review that this volume is not entirely a work on Conquest history—at least, if we take the narrow definition of “the Conquest”—but it is, I would suggest, an excellent expression of where the broader definition of Conquest history has taken the profession.⁴ Schroeder’s introduction to the volume places the project squarely in the Aztecs-under-Spanish-rule tradition. That is, it presents the articles that follow as contributions to our understanding of Indigenous resistance, adaptation and historical memory within the general political and cultural context of Christianity and Spanish empire. If this book fits within the long Gibsonian tradition, it also fits within the younger, but now firmly rooted New Philology tradition associated with James Lockhart, as well as with contributors Susan Schroeder and Kevin Terraciano.⁵ Scholars in this tradition...