A Troubled Marriage: Indigenous elites of the colonial Americas by Sean F. McEnroe (review)

Ample in scope, highly accessible and compellingly written, A Troubled Marriage delineates in broad strokes a hemispheric tableau of interconnections and conflicts that bound Indigenous local and regional elites to European colonizers between the early sixteenth and the middle years of the nineteenth century. The ties that bound privileged individuals together provides a central metaphor, which the author characterizes as "a marriage of sorts, but an unequal one" (230). The book's eight chapters make a solid case for regarding these entanglements as both inescapable and perpetually open to strategic changes.

Chapter 1 sketches brief narratives of important early encounters, which range from Nahua noble visitors at the court of Charles V, to the well-known experiences of Gonzalo Guerrero, the Spanish soldier turned Maya warrior, Hernando Cortés' Yucatec Maya-Spanish translator Jerónimo de Aguilar, and the lengthy journey of the shipwrecked explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. This chapter also parses the travels of both Cherokee delegates and the Powhatan noblewoman better known as Pocahontas, and ends with the experiences of nineteenth-century Métis rebel Louis Riel.

Chapter 2 then turns to important cases of European marriage alliances with Andean elites, and explores their political and social rationale. These examples include the marriage of Juan de Betanzos to Angelina Yupanqui, and the failure and renewal of marriage alliances made for a niece of Inca lord Tupac Amaru, Beatriz Clara Coya, whose second attempt ends in a union with Ignatius of Loyola's grand-nephew, Martín García de Loyola—an important marriage celebrated in a painting that merited further discussion. The chapter then addresses the life and ambiguous inheritance dynamics of eighteenth-century female elite doña Juliana Tico Chipana, and the quietly successful life of María Antonia Montes, an untitled woman who resided in an Indigenous quarter just beyond central Lima.

Chapter 3 proposes an agile comparison of colonial educational institutions for Natives. This section deploys the experiences of Nahua statesman and Latinist don Antonio Valeriano—highly accomplished, but of commoner descent, as stressed by Nahua historian Chimalpahin—as an entry point into the mission of the first European school in the Americas, the Franciscan Colegio de Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco. A sketch of this vibrant milieu is complemented by a discussion of Diego Muñoz Camargo's activities as historian of Tlaxcala, and an appraisal of Lima's College of San Francisco de Borja, alma mater not only of Inca leaders, but also of José Gabriel Condorcanqui, who as Tupac Amaru II led the most multitudinous rebellion in colonial Spanish America. The chapter closes with a glance at Harvard Indian College and Sequoya's Cherokee syllabary project. Chapter 4, devoted to Indigenous artists, opens with a painter named, unironically, after the renowned theologian and author Jean Gerson, a Nahua, Juan Gerson, who achieved his renown after completing the celebrated church frescoes in Tecamachalco. McEnroe then inspects Guaman Poma's Nueva corónica, a monumental and lavishly illustrated Andean chronicle that, nevertheless, may not be exactly "a grim graphic novel" (92), before turning to corn-paste Crucifix images stuffed with decommissioned documents, and to a revered image of the Virgin of Copacabana made by Native hands—those of Francisco Tito Yupanqui.

Colonial religion is the focus of Chapter 5, which nimbly pivots from the Guadalupan visions of Juan Diego at Tepeyacac to the Nahua "child martyr" tales of sixteenth-century Tlaxcala, and then on to Diego Valadés' majestic 1579 rhetorical treatise and exaltation of Franciscan missionization, Rhetorica christiana, before landing further north with a précis about the life of Mohawk saint Kateri Tekakwitha and the elegant English prose of Cherokee Christian convert Catharine Brown. Chapter 6, a brief meditation on urban planning, Indigenous presence in the regal cities of Lima and Mexico City, and the public spectacle of Corpus Christi, leads to two final chapters about conquest and conflict. Chapter 7 examines Indigenous alliances and client relations with European colonial actors through...