Rereading the Conquest: Power, Politics, and the History of Early Colonial Michoacan, Mexico, 1521-1565 (review)

This book is one of several recent studies of colonial Michoacán focusing on the process of evangelization, and the historiography of that process, using a form of postmodern or poststructuralist critical analysis. It has appeared at a time when a flourishing of more traditional historical studies is taking place at regional institutes of history in Michoacán, especially the Colegio de Michoacán (Zamora) and the Universidad Michoacana (Morelia). While these institutes have promoted archival research in Spain and Mexico to enlarge the corpus of relevant texts and have published new editions of major colonial works, the use of postmodern critical analysis to reanalyze the documents has largely been undertaken by non-Mexican scholars, including the author of this book, James Krippner-Martínez.

In Rereading the Conquest, the author examines the way four texts from colonial Michoacán were constructed and later used by historians to create the myths of early and complete evangelization of the Tarascan people (the Puréhpecha) and the benevolence and significance of Vasco de Quiroga in that process. The texts used include the Relación de Michoacán (1539-41), a native oral text recorded by a Franciscan friar; the Proceso contra Tzintzincha Tangaxoan (1530) by Nuño de Guzmán, produced to defend his execution of the last Tarascan king; the writings of Vasco de Quiroga (1530-65); and the Crónica de Michoacán (1788), by Franciscan Fray Pablo Beaumont. These documents were produced by some of the major players in the construction of colonial society, representing the missionaries (here the Franciscans), the conquistadors (Nuño de Guzmán and Cortés), and the civil and religious institutions (at one point dually represented by Vasco de Quiroga). The other major players—the native nobility and commoners—are only indirectly included, as the analysis of the Relación de Michoacán focuses on the account of the treatment of the last Tarascan king by Nuño de Guzmán and the relationship of the nobles dictating the Relación to the Franciscan missionaries. The book concludes with a study of the creation of the legend of Vasco de Quiroga in the last two centuries. In the author's words, "[T]hese essays demonstrate the inevitable influence of power and politics on the history and historiography of early colonial Michoacán" (p. 6).

In the spirit of postmodern analysis, I need to make clear that I am an anthropologist, specifically an archaeologist, who has used these and other colonial documents, in concert with primary archaeological data, to understand the prehispanic societies of this region; thus I am not in a position to mount a detailed critique of the specifics of this analysis. There is a tone, however, that occasionally verges on the polemic in criticisms of contemporary historians or the politics of colonial documents. For example, it is stated that the first section of the Relación de Michoacán, dealing with native religion, was destroyed, probably because it offended colonial authorities (p. 54). The section is certainly missing, but the circumstances of its loss are unknown; this portion may well have been used by later authors or by officials arguing cases before the Inquisition and then misfiled or destroyed inadvertently. Assigning agency—and malevolent agency in this case—may be valued in poststructuralist analysis, but in this case it's misleading, unless the author has evidence he has not yet presented. In a similar vein, I am not at all surprised that the author disagrees with some interpretations of other contemporary historians, but I do disagree that this is uniformly the result of unreflexive, noncontextual analysis. This book reminds me of the early literature in processual archaeology of the 1960s, which dismissed anything produced earlier...