Honor and Personhood in Early Modern Mexico by Osvaldo F. Pardo (review)

This book is about the meaningful role the mendicant orders, Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians, and the Jesuits played in transmitting ecclesiastical and secular laws to the Nahuas of New Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Educating the Indigenous people of colonial Mexico in matters of morals, law, and social norms and attitudes toward ecclesiastical and civil authorities proved to be a challenging task due to the contradictory demands of the two realms, the religious and secular, upon the indigenous peoples and the missionaries’ conviction that the Indians needed to be protected from the abuses of the secular authorities. Mistrusting the influence of the Spanish corpus of laws upon the Nahuas, “The friars envisioned a community of Christian Indians governed by a notion of justice that was informed by moral ideas at odds with the moral and social notions underlying the Spanish legal system” (p. 162). Pardo examines the discussion among various secular authorities and clergy about how to educate the Indigenous communities in issues pertaining to the Spanish system of values. His study deals with topics of possessions, honor, oaths, and punishments, concepts that were at the core of the Spanish legislation and society. Pardo fleshes out the different, and often contradictory, interpretations of Spanish law in relation to these values, by high appointees, judges, encomenderos, letrados, and the religious communities. Basing his book on a vast array of archival documents, bilingual catechisms, ecclesiastical and secular treatises, legislative treatises, bilingual grammar treatises, historical accounts, letters, and a rich secondary literature, Pardo has produced a complex and intriguing cultural study of colonial Mexico. When dealing with issues of honor, the author provides good examples of the cacophony of voices among different authorities. While viceroys usually defended the rights of Indians to expose their grievances before the tribunals, encomenderos accused friars of misguiding Indians in matters of the Spanish law, empowering them in legal issues, and eroding their own credibility and reputation. Friars, on the one hand, found it difficult to reconcile Spanish legislation on honor with the indigenous concepts and practice of honor. As demonstrated by the missionaries’ extensive cultural ethnographic work in colonial Mexico, those societies had developed their own notions of worth and fame, and they considered it a mistake to apply to them norms that had been forged in different contexts and times. On the other hand, legal scholars such as Juan Solórzano de Pereira, exhibiting his trust in the Spanish law system, wrote that in the resolution of disputes between Spaniards and Indians, the latter’s condition of honor should be taken into consideration to decide the penalties to be applied. The same dissonance is visible in regard to the policies on oaths. Missionaries did not welcome the teaching of Spanish legislation on oaths in the colonies, because they served to judge and punish Indigenous people with alien parameters not clearly understood by them. But after they came to be embedded in everyday life in the colonies, the friars accepted them as valid judicial instruments.

Pardo’s book provides original interpretations of important cultural aspects of colonial Mexico. I highly recommend the book to scholars and graduate students in the fields of history, literature, anthropology, and cultural studies.