The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization (review)

Anthropologists and historians have long tried to describe and analyze the mixing of cultures that occurred throughout the Americas after the arrival of Europeans. Historian Serge Gruzinski, continuing his fascination with Mesoamerican conquest—and colonial-era imagery—offers an analysis of what is termed in the English translation of his book La Pensée Métisse the mestizo mind. He focuses on the intellectual and cultural processes underlying the development of mestizo (mixed indigenous and European origin) cultural production primarily in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century central Mexico, though he also briefly discusses Amazonian societies and patterns of change. Divided into three parts, the book first covers the immediate cultural impact of conquest. Next, it treats the development of a complex visual imagery rooted in sophisticated knowledge of ancient and Renaissance European texts, combining them in new ways with indigenous imagery, tales, and beliefs. Finally, the third section considers the emergence of a true mestizo culture, evident in written texts and in particular the Cantares Mexicanos, a collection of some ninety-one song-poems, most dating from the mid-sixteenth century in a codex housed today in the Biblioteca Nacional de México. The author argues that the conquest of Mexico set off a kind of cultural explosion that resulted in a variety of kinds of hybridization, the reverberations of which we still feel today.

Part 1, "Mélange, Chaos, Westernization," contains four chapters that offer examples of surprising mixes of old and new, reviews relevant literature briefly, defines three terms that Gruzinski repeatedly employs (mestizo, mélange, and hybridization), and traces the emergence of these broadly defined mestizo processes out of the chaos and losses of people and power in the post-1521 Mexico City region.¹ Noting that Amerindian societies as well as enslaved Africans experienced "physical and psychic distanciation" (45), Gruzinski points out that Iberians also experienced distance and painful losses, with all peoples thus compelled to adapt in order to survive. For indigenous people, on whom the book concentrates, material, political, and cultural forces, or Westernization, in the book's terms, wrought transformation. As many others have also argued, however, the process of change entailed not just cultural replacement but creativity, and individuals as well as indigenous groups responded to a rapidly changing world.

The chapters of Part 2, "Mestizo Imagery," treat a variety of visual images but concentrate on the intricately painted friezes of the Casa del De�n (house of a late sixteenth-century Puebla priest) and the Ixmiquilpan murals located in an Augustinian church in the town of that name. After describing a series of intriguing images—monkeys, flowers, warriors, centaurs—Gruzinski argues that indigenous artisans drew on both native and European traditions. More important, he speculates that these artisans drew on Roman mythology such as that portrayed in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Such literature and images spread to the Americans through Renaissance popularizations of earlier Greek and Roman writings. If Gruzinski cannot show that Ovid's writing was the source for some of the images in both places, he certainly shows that it was possible for educated native elites to be quite familiar with Renaissance and earlier writings and images and to pass along such knowledge to craftsmen associated with them.

Such hybrid images appropriated other European influences as well, however. Here Gruzinski displays his familiarity with European art and art history, discussing the rise and spread of grotesque imagery and mannerist ornamentation. These styles played with conventional rules of form and composition and opened up imagery to exotic hybrid figures. From such hybridity arose a mestizo imagery on both sides of the Atlantic, acting through "attractors." These conjunctions of mythology and ornamentation brought images together in a convergence of signs whose numerous meanings became deeply intertwined. Sorting out what comes from which tradition or what a sign or image...