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Foreword
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xi B r i a n O w e n s b y Foreword What makes for domination? More concretely, what made for domination in a place without a standing army or an established constabulary in which the dominators were outnumbered, at times ten to one and never less than three-to-one, by the dominated during nearly three centuries of intimate interaction? The first of these questions is largely an abstract and theoretical one, born of contemporary political and scholarly discussions seeking to understand power relations against the backdrop of an idealized and often postponed Enlightenment egalitarianism. The second is a historical question regarding the centuries-long encounter between Europeans and indigenous peoples that began with the “discovery” of America in the late fifteenth century. Negotiation within Domination seeks to tack back and forth between these two questions, emphasizing the latter. This volume’s central point is to ask how we may understand domination not so much theoretically but as a tangible experience of human entanglement in a context of social, political,economic,andculturalinequality.Asvariouschaptersmakeclear, F o r e w o r d xii whatever domination consisted of in viceregal New Spain, it was never total. Coercion and the threat of coercion hung over all relations among people differentially situated in the colonial social order, but violence was never the mainspring of human interaction. And while there was a consensual aspect to dealings among Spaniards, Indians, Africans, and Castas (people of mixed race), there was never a static sense of unselfconscious ascendancy by Spaniards or of resigned acquiescence by others. Rather, as the essays in this volume insist, negotiation counterbalanced domination, reflecting the fact that social relations cannot be reduced to the mastery of overlords and the subjection and victimization of subalterns. From the perspective of our own ideological prejudices, an obvious question follows from this approach. Why would the foremost empire of its day, the world-girding Spanish dominions, permit its subjects to negotiate the terms of their submission? A partial answer lies in the fact that we have simply failed to understand the Spanish empire of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on its own terms and have refused to consider how imaginatively those who lived within it responded to their circumstances. Instead, we have supposed that the early-modern Spanish empire must have been like later European empires of the late eighteenth and, especially, the nineteenth centuries, in which the domination was more directly coercive, more naked and rawer.1 This is a distortion of historical vision, one this volume contributes to identifying and correcting by boring to the bedrock of social and political life to examine how negotiation was not only permitted but encouraged by Spanish officialdom and embraced by the king’s most vulnerable vassals— Indians and Indian pueblos. It does so by paying close attention to legal practice and culture. As an emerging literature has begun to show, the law represented a privileged space of interaction among various groups of actors in viceregal Mexico, a space of critical engagement that demanded that royal appointees, local power holders, and ordinary people recognize and respond to each others’ presence in the articulation of power.2 Put another way, and flirting with anachronism, the approach of this emerging literature, and of this volume, is one that sees in law a form of political engagement among people who stood in very different places in New Spain’s social order.3 Above all, this requires that we take legal processes seriously on their own terms. Anyone who has ever been to archives in Mexico City, Seville, and numerous Mexican towns and cities knows how much legal documentation there is. Anyone who has ever encountered the cedularios (legal compilations) read Solórzano Pereira’s Política Indiana, or perused the Recopilación of 1680 understands that law played a special role in the [18.207.163.25] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 11:16 GMT) Foreword xiii organization of Spain’s New World dominions. One of the great puzzlements of Latin America’s colonial historiography is that this embarrassment of riches has only recently begun to receive the attention it deserves. Negotiation within Domination represents a vital contribution to bringing this wealth to light. As with virtually all historical thinking, words and categories must allow for new perspectives and at the same time tether new ideas to recognized scholarly reflection. By counterposing negotiation to domination, these essays express a tension that establishes a nuanced middle ground of dialogue among disparate...