Indigenous Agency in Colonial Spanish America

Conquest narratives lend themselves to easy dichotomies. The conquistadores made a fundamental distinction between us and them, Europeans and Indians, and took their own superiority for granted. After their remarkable military triumphs in Mexico and Peru, they perpetuated this division and used it to forge a durable system of domination: conquerors and conquered became rulers and ruled. This unequal power dynamic pervades most sources and has shaped the stories that historians tell. As Susan Schroeder notes in the introduction to Indian Conquistadors, the epic Spanish conquest and the spiritual conquest, two paradigms that emphasized the Spaniards' ability to impose their will on native peoples, dominated scholarship until the mid-twentieth century. Then, Miguel León-Portilla and Nathan Wachtel published their works on the "vision of the vanquished."¹ But while these studies turned scholarly attention to indigenous perspectives, they also reinscribed the concept of a successful Spanish conquest, now viewed as a tragic event with destructive consequences. Subsequent research, largely based on indigenous language sources, has far more radically challenged traditional assumptions. The famous elegies presented by León-Portilla, which put such a striking human face on the Mexica's defeat, may also be profoundly misleading—or just specific to Tenochtitlán. Elsewhere, the "coming of the white people" may not have represented a sharp, immediate, and fundamental break with the past,² but something closer to a nonevent, in Schroeder's terminology. Local government and social structures proved surprisingly resilient, and in central Mexico, many community histories "contain no record of the conquest, or at best, the Spaniards are mentioned but only as if they were any other indigenous group. . . . It is noteworthy that conquista as a loanword has yet to appear in Nahuatl annals" (13).

Earlier images of the Indians as traumatized victims turning to mass alcoholism to ease their pain and anomie have faded; instead, indigenous peoples now appear as pragmatic, flexible actors, creatively adjusting to the new conditions brought forth by the Europeans' arrival, and even manipulating their supposed superiors. Consider, for example, Louise Burkhart's argument that Franciscan missionaries themselves became "missionized."³ Even military conquest has been recast as a struggle among different indigenous polities, something beyond the Spaniards' ability to understand and direct.⁴ The four works under review, in their attempt to demonstrate Indian (and African) agency and resistance, are thus entries in what is now a well-established field. What then do they have to offer? First, they extend the agency argument in fresh directions. Second, and perhaps more important, they give it new depth and specificity by focusing on particular regions of Mesoamerica and the Andes. How did local (geographic and human) environments affect colonial social relations? What empowered or limited indigenous actions? Was native resistance merely an annoyance to colonial power holders, or did it actually alter socioeconomic structures?

Indian Conquistadors, as the title suggests, sets out to counter the victor-vanquished narrative. Here, the famous alliance between the Spanish and Tlaxcala is not treated as an anomaly or special case but rather takes its place in the mainstream of indigenous responses to invasion. In their overview chapter, Michel R. Oudijk and Matthew Restall (whose volume Maya Conquistador is an important precursor to this book⁵) point out that tens of thousands of Indians joined in the wars of conquest as fighters...