La Indianidad: The Indigenous World before Latin Americans (review)

This book attempts to synthesize the history of the indigenous peoples of what is now Latin America. Although the author carried out some research in primary sources, his goal was not to produce original research but to present an overview suitable for the reading public.

Unfortunately, Horna does not succeed in accomplishing his goal. He has not kept up with the research in Spanish and English, and, as a result, the book is based largely on outdated material. For example, he cites Sherburne Cook and Woodrow Borah, Aboriginal Population of Central Mexico on the Eve of the Spanish Conquest (Berkeley, 1963), although more recent research—including an article by Zambardino published in this journal as long ago as 1980—has scaled down the huge estimates made by the Berkeley scholars. ¹ His estimates of the highland Andeans population are also outdated. He attributes Mexico's seventeenth-century mining depression to Indian demographic decline, which is also said to have caused the emergence of feudal haciendas in northern Mexico; both of these interpretations were advanced in the 1950s (by Borah and Chevalier) and have been shown to be inaccurate. ² Many, many other examples of the passé could be cited.

Horna's historiographical and archaeological disputations are likewise anachronistic. He argues that "Western historiography has not yet overcome its original paternalistic perception of the Conquista (conquest) as a confrontation between two peoples in which the victorious Europeans have been presented as a Christian—and superior—race, and therefore more civilized" (4). Criticism like this might have been fair fifty years ago, but no longer. It would be difficult to find one serious current scholar of Latin American Indians who publishes anything remotely insinuating that the indigenous people were barbarous savages or racially inferior.

The book is also not recommended as a general introduction for the reading public; Horna is inclined toward some farfetched (or even "crackpot") interpretations. He agrees with the thesis from the 1950s (and not supported since) that migration to pre-Columbian America may have come from Asia via Antarctica. He suggests that Chinese fleets visited America on their fourteenth-century voyages to south Asia and Africa. His evidence consists of a conversation held with Chinese historians (whose work, if published, is unavailable in any European language). Recent research supports Horna's argument that ancient Peru and Mexico had some contact (although it was one-way) but not that Africa or Asia had any significant contact with what is now Latin America (although one or more one-way voyages may have occurred).

Horna also attempts to do too much, discussing both the pre- conquest and colonial eras in a short book. His approach for the study of colonial Latin America, however, is anachronic. Topics are hopelessly confused (discussion of the encomienda follows that of independence, for example). It also includes many themes related to the American and European Spaniards—topics best left out of a book about Indians.