Transcending Conquest: Nahua Views of Spanish Colonial Mexico (review)

Transcending Conquest presents a set of essays meant to give impetus to debates surrounding the reevaluation of the conquest. Wood wants to reevaluate indigenous sources in order to understand how indigenous people saw invading Europeans and reflected on the conquest, as well as how they saw themselves and their role in history. The author follows a tradition founded by Miguel León-Portilla and Charles Gibson some 40 years ago, continued by James Lockhart, which has led to today's broadly accepted view of indigenous people as subjects of their history, having their own historical identity, potentiality, and limitations within colonial society.

Nevertheless, there still are some romantics following the eurocentric tradition of Las Casas, who insisted on viewing indios as human beings of childlike innocence and immaturity and against whom Wood arrays these clearly written and vivid essays. Wood employs various sources in her analysis, covering the entire colonial period and produced for different purposes and audiences: pictorial images of Spaniards and related symbols drawn from codices, narratives, a manuscript from the colonial period, and finally sources from the late colonial period. Her essays, some of which were originally prepared as lectures, are framed by an introduction and a concluding chapter.

I should like to consider two types of sources in more detail: pictorial sources, which represented Spaniards and symbols of their way of life, and written sources, which reflect on the conquest and its significance. The centerpiece of Wood's essay on written documents is a sensational, but problematic, narration: the account of the Ajusco conquest. A village near Mexico City celebrates, today, an annual ceremony in which the alleged proclamation of an Indian noble to his people in the sixteenth century is read. Neither the original proclamation nor a contemporary copy exists, which led Miguel León-Portilla to assume it to be an eighteenth century invention. Wood, in contrast, tends to take the account as authentic. This may or may not be the case. It would have been interesting to know why Wood believes modern people, living in close contact with a global metropolis, have elaborated ceremonies centered on a proclamation presumably dating back half a millennium. Why do modern Mexicans publicly recite a manuscript that reinforces an image of Indians as identical to Rousseau's noble savage?

Choosing such an example seems to reveal the classic eurocentric view of the "other" as childlike in his ability to understand the world. This is surprising, because the author otherwise vehemently critiques eurocentric perceptions that allegedly still dominate Western historiography and historical understandings. Wood bases her arguments almost entirely on British and North American authors, while continental historians' works are scarcely mentioned. Although her critique on Foucault is valid, Foucault is not Europe. His writings are no more than a fashion, and like all fashions, temporary. Her neglect of the work of Mexican colleagues, and their perception of their own history, is more regrettable. Although she thanks the excellent Xavier Noguez for his role as interlocutor during her research in Mexico, his works are not considered in the bibliography.

In an earlier article dealing with the Códice Techialoyan García Granados, a famous eighteenth-century fake, Wood commented that indigenous orderers and authors of these codices consciously created a historically embodied identity. Now Wood traces this idea of (re)creating one's "self" and the "other" in different manuscripts from central Mexico. Here she underlines anew how very differential and self-confident the indigenous authors looked at the Spaniards, despite the far-reaching changes in their lives. Is it possible that the Spaniards were far more stunned by the conquest than the inhabitants of central Mexico? "The paradigm of central Mexican histories," Wood believes, "was to think of the society's origins as involving successive waves of immigrants, each bringing a new god and settling in with the existing population without much initial conflict" (p. 142 ).

In conclusion one might say that, although...