Tell Me the Story of How I Conquered You: Elsewheres and Ethnosuicide in the Colonial Mesoamerican World by José Rabasa (review)

José Rabasa’s Tell Me the Story of How I Conquered You: Elsewheres and Ethnosuicide in the Colonial Mesoamerican World is a theoretical approach, depicting the creation of the Codex Telleriano-Remensis¹ and how it contributed to the transformation of Indigenous Mesoamericans. Tell Me the Story of How I Conquered You highlights the ways that Indigenous worldviews persisted despite the Spanish colonial order’s active attempts to displace and erase indigenous understandings of the world. Rabasa thoroughly analyzes paintings from this Codex using a “theoretico-political experiment” to gain understanding on the colonial world from the perspective of Native painters. This philosophical text tacks between accessible and comprehensive analysis and theoretical jargon. When not diverging into philosophical debates that seem only vaguely relevant to the topic at hand, the text has a rich analysis that anthropologists and historians of Indigenous peoples will find innovative and insightful.

A novel feature of Rabasa’s book is that the analysis departs with an acknowledgement that the Native painters, tlacuilos,² were positioned within an alternative epistemology and ontology than that of the Spaniards. This is inherently a perspective we cannot know, but through the textual analysis, Rabasa illuminates an alternative worldview, an “elsewhere.” Rabasa is working within the postcolonial tradition and uses the term elsewhere to analyze how the Native painter interprets the world. The idea of “elsewheres” challenge Western thought as the only rational way of organizing and understanding the world. They are spatial and temporal locations conveying forms of affect, knowledge, and perception that exist within an unknowable world. While we cannot ever know the “elsewheres,” we are shown through the paintings in the Codex Telleriano-Remensis how the Native painters came to depict a world through the instructions of the Spanish missions using a pictorial vocabulary of the Mesoamerican elsewhere as it makes sense of the colonial world.

The unique position at the frontier between Spanish and Native America affords an opportunity for reinterpreting Indigenous history from the perspective of the conquered. What remains unclear in the text is whether the Codex Telleriano-Remensis is being commissioned to represent historical people, institutions, and practices of the Spanish colonial order or whether the tlacuilo was responsible for depicting Native life prior to the arrival of the Spanish, including its worldview and “religious” organization. Both narratives are covered at various points in the text, which is mentioned only briefly early in the book. The Indigenous painters of the Codex Telleriano-Remensis were to represent historical people, institutions, and practices of/during the Spanish colonial order, but were positioned from an alternative representational standpoint. The objective of the colonial clergy was to control the reality of native Nahuas by copying their “pictographic system of writing” by using Spanish understandings adapted to an Indigenous cultural form. The problem, at least from the perspective of the missionaries, was that in using the Indigenous cultural form, tlacuilos were reproducing indigenous worldviews. The tlacuilos could show the significance of an object or theme using indigenous pictographic cultural form while working with Spanish modes of representation, but without depicting the underlying Indigenous logic that makes it intelligible. This is the elsewhere from which the tlacuilo works.

The concept of elsewheres features prominently in understanding the creation of the Codex Telleriano-Remensis, and the unease which subsequently developed among the friars in response to the paintings. Rabasa deconstructs the pictures from the Codex to understand the depictions, the position from which the painter was painting, the agency of the tlacuilo in generating meaning, and how interpretations differed for scribes annotating representations presented by peoples positioned elsewhere. Positioning the analysis as one from “elsewheres” helps to understand the diversity of perspectives within the clergy for interpreting the Codex Telleriano-Remensis as well as the tlacuilo’s unique vantage point in identifying this, which emphasizes the different...