New World, First Nations: Native Peoples of Mesoamerica and the Andes under Colonial Rule (review)

This multi-faceted volume on indigenous experience in the Americas is based on the presentations of a 2002 conference at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. It not only covers both Mesoamerica and the Andes as the sub-title indicates, but also stretches from the time before contact with Spain to the political break with that nation that occurred in the early nineteenth century. As all conference-based volumes must, the book struggles against the twin threats of dissonance and incoherence, but it does so successfully in large measure and ends by making a valuable contribution to the literature.

The first two contributions, taken together, offer an interesting parallel. Susan Schroeder presents "Writing Two Cultures: the Meaning of 'Amoxtli" (Book) in Nahua New Spain," and Susan E. Ramírez "The Cosmological Bases of Local Power in the Andes during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries." Although both pieces are based on colonial-era records, each looks back into the political patterns of the pre-colonial era as they demonstrate that even after the conquest, ruling indigenous noblemen could only retain power by consistently demonstrating their connections to their antecedents. Schroeder relies on the historical annals produced by Chimalpahin and Tezozomoc to uncover the traditional understandings of the amoxtli (book), and shows that high-ranking families had to have what we might call "history keepers." "Each royal family had a designated individual within the lineage who not only inherited the [family's] texts but was responsible for preserving them, keeping them current, and then making certain that they passed to the proper heir" (p. 18). Dynastic nobles, in short, had to be seen as "keepers of the trust." In the next chapter, Ramírez argues that although Andean paramount lords of course needed to be wealthy to retain loyalty, as has long been understood, "there was also a spiritual basis of legitimacy, which depended, in the last analysis, on the curaca being an acceptable bridge between his followers and their antecedents" (p. 36). Rather than using written records to demonstrate their connections to the past, as did the Nahuas, they used "legitimizing legends" and "elaborate genealogies" that were revivified in ceremonies of ancestor worship. This chapter on the Andean elite in general is followed by a detailed study of Inca Vilcabamba Kerstin Nowack. The piece is valuable in that it renders a particular Inca nobleman—Titu Cusi—more real and thus more important than is usually the case. To my mind, too much is perhaps attributed to his purported strategic errors, but that is perhaps a matter of interpretation. When one puts this contribution together with the 2007 article by Catherine Julien in Colonial Latin American Review, we at long last have a serious and comprehensive set of materials on the end of the Inca ruling dynasty.

Several chapters of the volume are interested in making a major theoretical contribution, and, taken as a group, they do so. Janine Gasco in "Beyond the Indian/Ladino Dichotomy: Shifting Identities in Colonial and Contemporary Chiapas" shows us that we would perhaps do well to move away from the literature's recent emphasis on elite attempts to write "Indians" out of existence and cultural retentions that continued nonetheless, and focus instead on the daily and personal complexity that individuals faced as they forged families that contained Indians, Hispanics, and everything in between. Nancy Van Deusen ably analyzes the historiography of "Recent Studies on Gender Relations in Colonial Native Andean history," demonstrating how effectively the recent literature has been moving us away from dichotomies in general (for example, the old debate that the Spanish state was good or bad for native women). David Cahill borrows Richard White's famous phrase in his "Liminal Nobility: The Incas in the Middle Ground of Late Colonial Peru." He argues that the social lives of Peru's wealthiest families...