The Art of Being In-Between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca (review)

In the last several decades, scholars of the history of colonial Latin America have progressed from characterizing native peoples as mostly passive and exploited peasants and subalterns, struggling against a dominant and often violent imperial state and its officials, to showing them as active agents who quickly learned to defend themselves in the local, viceregal, and imperial courts and, when stymied in these efforts, organized rebellions to defend what they believed to be their rights. Publications often highlight the native leaders, the caciques and curacas, who mediated between the state and the local community and otherwise led their followers in both nonviolent and violent efforts/struggles. Here, Yannakakis broadens the category of intermediaries to include males from prominent native families who served as notaries, scribes, interpreters, missionaries, traders, fiscales, and the like. Her nuanced analysis of a wide spectrum of sources from the Villa Alta area of northern Oaxaca between 1660 and 1810 shows how such brokers negotiated the boundaries between community autonomy and ever more centralized colonial power. These intermediaries, placed in their proper context of local and overlapping social networks, used alphabetic literacy and biculturalism to help frame and interpret forms of local rule and native identity. In short, this work caps long historiographical efforts that increasingly depict cross-cultural encounters not as a sequence of ongoing but often disjointed actions and reactions as much as a continuing process of sometimes delicate negotiations. Herein lies the major contribution of this book.

Often, these intermediaries had to toe a fine line between the pressures from above and below. Caciques, for example, had to maintain reciprocal relations between their followers and their gods, yet guarantee that these same people attended Catholic mass. If they revealed hidden practices to the Spanish, they could “disappear” as a result. If they failed to satisfy their followers by keeping the Spanish from meddling in local political affairs, they could become inadvertent leaders of violent reactions against such encroachment, which could lead, sooner or later, to sanctions by the colonial state, including imprisonment, torture, and execution.

Her story begins in the second half of the seventeenth century with an uprising against Spanish interference in local community affairs. This forced colonial administrators to rethink strategy, which in the long run resulted in a later interpenetration of colonial institutions that she calls a “shadow system” (pp. 29, 44, 56–62, 223–24). Part 2 focuses on parish reform, which caused a shift in the relationship between native nobility and commoners and shaped the outcome of inter-pueblo rivalries. Part 3 deals with how the intermediaries shaped the impact of the Bourbon reforms and their centralizing tendencies and how the reforms affected their intermediary roles. Especially enlightening is the author’s discussion of how “law” replaced “custom,” and how “Indian conquerors” resisted the Bourbons’ efforts to eliminate their privileges—an effort that recalls parallel processes in the Andes in the aftermath of the Tupac Amaru rebellion.

My only objections are as follows: first, some definitions of terms (e.g., cacicazgo and parcialidad) appear at odds with more familiar usage, perhaps because of specific idiosyncrasies of the time and space under consideration; second, in occasional references to other “historians,” Yannakakis does not indicate specifically to whom she refers (p. 121); and third, there is a need for more information or a clearer distinction between a cacique’s personal lands and those lands that came with the office. But these are merely minor points to an otherwise important study, which caps a long list of individual efforts by other scholars that has brought us from conquest, subordination, resistance, and agency to negotiation. In fact, this book shows how dialectic and interaction renegotiated native forms of social and political organization, as local mediators tried to defend custom, native ritual, and electoral autonomy, and co-constructed a new symbolic order...