Visions of Paradise: Primordial Titles and Mesoamerican History in Cuernavaca (review)

Robert Haskett's new book lies at the intersection of history and literary criticism. It is a study of Mesoamerican primordial titles (títulos), a form of literature produced by native communities in the late colonial period. These records were written as titles of possession, documenting the local community's lands and boundaries. For some scholars, Mesoamerican titles represent a form of community history, since they typically contain a story of the town's origins in the early colonial era, or of its entrance into the colonial era. Yet the titles were produced much later, as part of widespread efforts by native communities to assert land rights and to confirm their corporate legitimacy at a time when Hispanic presence was increasingly encroaching on native lands and on the integrity of native communities.

The challenges of understanding these narratives as history, as Haskett explains, are sizable. Dates given in the titles for key events, such as the first arrival of Spaniards in the locality, do not always correspond even remotely to what we consider to be historical facts. Names of conquest-era indigenous persons who appear as protagonists in the titles "turn out with distressing frequency to be pure fiction or to have been the names of real people anachronistically placed out of their true historical context" (p. 17). The titles make little mention of the Conquest; local indigenous heroes are depicted welcoming the Spaniards as allies from the beginning. Haskett's project is to discern what the titles can tell us about indigenous understandings—about the ways that the titles' authors (whose names are not known) understood their communities' past. Focusing on a region with a particular wealth of these documents, Haskett draws on the nineteen known titles from the Cuernavaca area, all apparently written in the eighteenth century.

The first three chapters provide an overview of history and popular memory in Cuernavaca. This first half of the book is based primarily on non-indigenous sources, including travel writing and administrative records. The heart of the study is Chapters 4-6, which examine the titles themselves. Clearly, the research in this second half of the book was especially difficult, not only because the documentary sources—the titles—are in Nahuatl, but also because they are often factually inconsistent. And here is the feat of Haskett's analysis. He shows us what the seemingly inaccurate elements of the titles meant to the writers (and by extension, to their communities). In effect, Haskett is explaining their construction of history. Ultimately, this analysis reveals in the Cuernavaca titles a late colonial campaign-in-letters for the legitimacy and sovereignty of the individual native communities that produced them.

This revelation emerges starting in a discussion of native towns' coats of arms, which were often said in the titles to have been granted by the Spanish crown. Haskett demonstrates that coats of arms were signs of legitimization and invigoration for indigenous communities, not signs of European authority. He makes a similar argument about the titles' early colonial-era protagonists, who all seem to be either composites of various real persons, or fabrications. These heroes, Haskett suggests, served to affirm the community's corporate integrity and the legitimacy of its nobility. A chapter on religious narratives offers a parallel interpretation of the titles' accounts of indigenous elites who voluntarily joined in Christian religious practices, including evangelization efforts. Through these stories, the authors of the titles were demonstrating an alliance between the native nobility and the sources of sacred power in the colonial age. Miracle stories, often involving the apparition of holy images to native people, also strengthened the legitimacy of the native community; the miracle was evidence that Christian power protected the community. In the Cuernavaca titles, Spanish and Christian power was cast as sources of protection and legitimacy for the indigenous community.

These findings have important implications about the complicity (often observed by...