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Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

Volume 18 Number 2, August 2017

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The Florentine Codex: Culture and the Mestizaje

 by

Jane Duran

University of California at Santa Barbara

 

Abstract

The work of Pohl and Lyons on parallels between Spanish understandings of the ancients and their conquest of the New World is cited in an effort to clarify the origins of the cultures of the mestizaje.  In addition, allusion is made to the writings of Miller, Krauze and Poniatowska, and the general mythography of the Spanish conquest.

           Throughout the history of México, an effort has been been made by cultural commentators, art historians and others to work on the formation of the mestizaje, its overall importance to the establishment of a sense of nationhood, and its relationship to that all-important moment in Mexican history, the Conquest.1  But until recently, comparatively little effort had been expended on the precise response of the Spaniards to what they began to witness as they encountered the indigenous cultures of México, particularly with regard to their own interpretations, through the lenses of their cultural backgrounds, of what they saw. 

          A number of scholars and art historians have recently begun to emphasize the fact that, as they stayed in the area now comprising México for extended periods of time, the Spaniards used the tools of the education they had received in Europe to begin to interpret the religious orientations and belief systems of the indigenous groups.  Writing in a work published as the catalog to a recent Getty Villa exhibit, John Pohl and Claire Lyons have tried to establish a link between the writings of Bernardo de Sahagún, commonly known as the Florentine Codex, and the pantheons of the Greco-Roman writers and scholars who preceded him.  The thesis that this linkage—between the indigenous and the ancients—is more important than has been realized is a crucial one, and it will be the argument of this paper that more work needs to be done on this underdeveloped topic.  An additional argument will be that, despite some shortcomings, the thesis developed by the authors does indeed hold up.2

 

I

          It has long been the case that the government of México has tried to emphasize the indigenous roots of the people, and a number of commentators, from Octavio Paz to Elena Poniatowska, have been involved in demarcating what those roots might be, and how important they are to the history of México.3  Although there is also a long tradition of criticism that faults the government for much discourse and little action on these ideas, there is also no question that the formation of México as a nation-state in the nineteenth century is directly related to these issues.4  But among the bones of contention that mark any discussion of the importance and growth of the mestizaje in México, and consequently of the importance of the original indigenous cultures, is the overall debate about the centrality of religious worship in those cultures and its points of origin.  Many want to claim that the prevalence of the Guadalupana reverence—that is respect for and worship of the Virgin of Guadalupe, who is supposed to have been related to the corn goddess—has a great deal to do with the matters in question, and the popularity of Mixtec and Toltec icons is also supposed to be not unrelated.

          What Pohl and Lyons do, however, is to push this burgeoning interest in syncretism considerably further back in time.  Juan Diego and the various other stories surrounding the Virgin come chronologically later; it is of interest, according to some of the new commentators, to examine some of the original work of the Spaniards.

           One of the reasons that those from the Peninsula felt justified in engaging in hostile and aggressive acts against the persons of what is today México has comparatively little to do with religion, and a great deal to do with both ancient and Renaissance jurisprudence.  Nevertheless, in their quest to establish authority in this region—and this will later translate into an interest in the pantheon of those living around what is today México City—the Spaniards and some Portuguese felt called upon to refer to a notion best characterized as de jure belli.  As Pohl and Lyons write:

 

Nowhere were classical sources more pertinent than in the conquistadors’ assertion of the Roman legal principle of de jure belli, or right of conquest by just war.  The philosophical basis of de jure belli was promulgated by Dominican friar Francisco de Vitoria ….  Vitoria marshaled the model of Roman imperialism….5

 

          Here the notion is that, just as Rome might have been thought to have been in service of some states against others, so the Spaniards were able to see themselves as in service of those to the South who were at war with the Aztecs.  However far-fetched this doctrine might seem, there is no question that it began to take hold, and the model for the conquered peoples in turn became those various groups that had been at war with Rome.

          When we begin to conceptualize the Roman attitude toward the conquered in their time—those whom they would regard as barbarians—we can get a sense of how the Spaniards may have felt that they were providing a service to the native peoples of the Americas, and one that went above and beyond merely bringing the Christian religion to the unconverted.  The point is that the Romans stated, and clearly felt, that their culture was superior, and at least partly because of the strength of their written language, their legal code, and so forth.

          In contrast, it is important to remember that, although many major groups in México and the areas immediately to the South had developed cultures with a form of writing, these cultures were simply not believed, by the Spanish and those from the Peninsula, to be on a par with the European cultures. Nor were they, in general, on a par with that of the Aztecs themselves.  Thus it is clear that the Spaniards felt that they were aiding groups in terms of de jure belli, and that, on the whole, the cultures that were the recipients of their aid were inferior cultures.

          Robert Ryan Miller, in his México:  A History, gives us a sense of what the cyclical notions involved in the indigenous view of the Spanish conquest amounted to:

 

In 1515, rumors that Quetzalcoatl had returnedcirculated throughout Anahuác.  Reports filtered up to the highland plateau about large watercraft,"temples in the sea," that had been sighted along México's eastern littoral...  After much discussion, the majority of the leaders, concluding that the intrusion was the return of the Feathered Serpent god-king or his disciples, appointed a welcoming committee....6

 

          Needless to say, the Spaniards did not see themselves as in need of a welcoming committee, and, in any case, the variety of groups with which they were involved militated against the notion that (as Pohl and Lyons argue) any one group could have been seen by them as ultimately crucial.

          While a good deal of the discussion involving the Spanish response to the indigenous cultures has revolved around religion, the legal justification mentioned by the authors has seldom been alluded to, and, in any case, there is reason to believe that an insufficiently thorough overview of the Conquest, from the standpoint of cultural clash, has been made.  In other words, although it has long been a point of interest for those writing about the Conquest that some syncretistic Catholic belief is derived from worship of a goddess local to the Tenochtitlán area, or that Juan Diego’s status as an indigenous person has a great deal to do with the conversion efforts and the controversy surrounding them, the full panoply of beliefs with respect to the Conquest has not been set out.

          To take but one example, the Aztec pantheon was a recondite and complex one, and in a certain sense would bear comparison with the mythology of the Greco-Roman period, a mythology with which the Spaniards and other inhabitants of the peninsula would have been well familiar.  Even before advertence to matters Christian, there might have been a sense on the part of the Spaniards that they were encountering a tradition with which they were already familiar, even if that familiarity was not one that they would have been particularly eager to claim as their own.  Thus the work that the visitors from the Iberian peninsula did to try to make the indigenous cultures more recognizable to them was work that was deeply rooted in their own educational systems, and not all of the intellectual labor involved necessarily had a Christian origin. 

          In trying to tie a thread between the Greco-Roman systems of worship and those of the indigenous peoples, it is important to remember what it was that the Spaniards were intending to accomplish.  It is to these areas that we now turn.

 

II

          In a sense, we could make the argument that the Iberian peoples were attempting to make the constructs of the indigenous in the Mexican region familiar to them, so that the task of attempting to convert individuals could be accomplished more easily.  We know that some parallels were made almost immediately:  reports from some of the first persons involved with the Conquest, such as Diego Durán, indicate that analogies were being made between indigenous religions and those known to the Spaniards.

          But Pohl and Lyons argue that a more complex and intricate set of parallels presents itself, and that it is important to try to be specific about those particular constructs.  The authors point out that it is not only the gods and goddesses themselves that are paralleled—and this despite the fact that some concepts simply were not analogous (there was, for instance, no consistent story or record of the families or lineages of the deities, unlike in the Greco-Roman cultures).  Another concept that was pushed into a parallelism had to do with the notion of a deity or demiurge, as opposed to a general notion of spirit.  As the authors indicate:

 

Spirits or animating forces in the environment were perceived by the Aztecs as teotl.  Spanish sources often translate teotl as “god,” but its actual meaning corresponds more closely with the Polynesian concept of mana, a numinous impersonal power diffused throughout the universe.7

 

          Strong matriarchal constructs persisted throughout the Americas, and the notions of various goddess-figures are essentially female forces, divorced to some extent from any of the personification that would be attendant upon the deities of the ancient Mediterranean.  For instance, with respect to the Maya, W. George Lovell has argued that throughout the entire period of the Hispanic conquest, and up to and including contemporary times, important instantiations of the Mayan belief system remain in place:  the fundamentality of the agricultural cycle and natural worlds, and the traditional beliefs that the "first father" and "first mother" were of cornmeal dough, along with the general emphasis on fertility/germination.8  In a sense, similar lines of argument could be made about almost any of the original cultures of México.

          Taken in that vein, the assessment could be made that the Iberians were moving in the wrong direction when they tried to create analogies between various groups of deities from the Mediterranean and those from the Americas, but it is, in any case, incontestable that this took place.  It is, in fact, the existence of this set of constructions that would do damage to the counterargument that it is not important to investigate this area. Trying to create a space for such parallelism significantly increased the Spaniards’ understanding of what they saw around them—at least by their lights—and meant that they had a way of conceptualizing what took place in the New World.  Although what was believed in the Americas appears in many instances to have been more closely approximate to a belief in forces, it was not altogether wrong-headed to invoke the Greco-Roman deities, since it is clear that some of the same concepts of animation (fertility, fecundity, certain crops, and so forth) drove the two conceptualization patterns.

          The set of beliefs surrounding the Virgin of Guadalupe is but one instance of this sort of concept construction.  The reason that the Guadalupana beliefs, as they are called in México today, have such a force for the country is that it is widely held that the local corn goddess was turned into an image of the Virgin, so to speak, and that this happened at least in part because Juan Diego, the visionary, was himself an indigenous person.   But if we cannot at least minimally attribute some of the characteristics of a “goddess”—of whatever Mediterranean variety—to that of the indigenous peoples near Tenochtitlán, how then does it make sense to give as much importance to the cult of the Virgin in this locale as is often done?   Every contemporary Mexican from the President of the nation to Elena Poniatowska professes to have an interest in this phenomenon, and it is clear that what drives the interest is not religion per se, but cultural attachment.9  Even Pohl and Lyons admit that the fact that the site of Juan Diego’s vision was also the previous site of veneration of Tonantzín probably has a great deal to do with the salience of the story.10

          In a sense, then, it is not so crucial whether much parallelism can be drawn between the various sets of deities, although it is obvious that the Spaniards were to some extent driven to make a great deal of the apparatus.  What is important is the work that this parallelism created, and that work survives today and is part of the set of notions that pushes forward the historical notion of the creation of the mestizaje and its criticality for México.  Personification or no personification, there is very little that has been more helpful to the congruence of the belief systems than the Iberian notion that analogies between legal systems and forms of religious worship could be created, and that to do so might enable them to more quickly and efficiently conquer México.

          Finally, there is one last parallel that is of historical interest, and that intersects with the classical civilizations in an intriguing way.  As Pohl and Lyons note, the development of an awareness in the mestizo people of their cultural heritage as “Mexicans” took place in the capital during the nineteenth century around the time that the Greeks were becoming increasingly self-conscious about their heritage, coinciding with their independence.11

This last, and perhaps most unusual parallel, is characterized by the authors in this way:

 

Monoliths continued to be uncovered throughout the remaining years of the eighteenth century…. Recognizing the importance of antiquities as fundamental symbols of national identity, Cabinet minister Lucas Alamán enacted a decree issued by Congress that pro-vided for the establishment of the first Mexican National Museum in 1825, an event that closely coincided with Greece’s independence and formation of an antiquities museum in Athens.12

 

          The point here, of course, is that however dubious the analogies between the personified, family-tree possessing deities of the Greeks and the force-like demiurges of the indigenous were, both emerging cultures saw themselves as the possessors of a system of “religious” worship, and both wanted to make the most of it.  The newly-emerging concept of the Greeks as a self-aware  people in contact with their past could not have been lost on the Mexicans, and this spirit, in a sense, overrode remaining qualms about the time of the Conquest.  It is indeed ironic that much of what the Spaniards brought with them as cultural baggage turned out to be useful, after all.

 

III

 

          One of the areas alluded to both in the Codex material and in general commentary on the period of the Conquest is the notion that “empire” drove the Spaniards, and that at least some of the conceptual apparatus having to do with empire possessed by them came, again, from the ancients.  This notion is reflected in the work of Pohl and Lyons, but is also important for an overall understanding, as it comes up in other contexts as well.13

          Empire, as a construction, will go on to prove of even greater importance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when it will be used to justify excursions of Europeans into corners of Asia and Africa, as well as further regions of South America.  But before this expanded concept of the imperial can move forward, the Iberians borrowed from what they knew of the Roman rule, and tried to apply various precepts to New Spain.  Just as the de jure belli argument seemed to carry weight when extended to the obvious discontent with their rule of those living south of the Mexica, the large line of argument that empire brings culture and civilization to those whom it colonizes was one that the Spaniards and Portuguese found useful in the New World, and it was well-documented in Latin and Roman thought.

          Ironically, it was in some of the very areas of Europe near to or even comprising the realms of origin of the Iberians that the Romans gained enough power to be able to codify their thinking.  When dealing with the “barbarians” of Western and Northern Europe, the Romans had to instigate certain practices.  We are aware of what took place because of the lengthy published writings, including the classic commentaries on Gaul that used to be taught to secondary-school Latin students, and we area also aware of the movements in these regions because of the later growth of Christianity, and the fact that that growth often replicated the original classical push.

          Indeed, it is clear that, just as the concept of de jure belli motivated a great deal of the Spanish conquest, the understanding that the “barbaric” cultures could benefit from contact with both Spain and Christianity was part and parcel of the aggression, and is again related to the notion of empire among the ancients.  Indeed, one could go further and try to relate all of these concepts to the general religious movements in Europe that began to occur around the time of the Conquest:  the Reformation, the Counterreformation, and so on.  We frequently are guilty of failing to recall the importance of these notions in sixteenth-century Europe itself, until we remember that empire, religion, and culture had a great deal to do with even such seemingly disparate matters as the rule of Henry VIII and English relations with Spain.14

          Another point that needs to be made with respect to the notion of empire, the attempt to link that notion to concepts taken from classical antiquity, and the various cultures of indigenous México has to do with the sheer psychological survival mechanisms of the Iberians.  Just as they had come from a Europe in disarray, they also found themselves bereft of supporting devices in the New World, and cut off from all that they had known.  Although some made this adaptation more easily than others—indeed Robert Ryan Miller writes of shipwrecked Spaniards in the Caribbean who refused to return home, even when found—others must have found the experience jarring in the extreme.15  Thus there were not only intellectual, religious and other sorts of theoretical motivations for the writings that Sahagún and others created, but strong psychotropic motivations as well.  It is for these reasons that, in many cases (particularly, as we have seen, with respect to the notion of a pantheon) the analogies were moved beyond what a properly parallel construction would bear, but the push to do so was strong.  As Pohl and Lyons remark:

 

On the eve of its destruction, Tenochtitlán rivaled and in many ways surpassed the Rome of the Caesars.  Hernán Cortés and his soldiers were likely not cognizant of Roman architecture and public sculpture as powerful political weapons in the service of the theater-state.  Although some of the men had served in Italy in the previous decade during Spain’s wars against the French, their imagination of classical antiquity was fired instead by the sagas of Alexander the Great….16

 

          One may assume that, in general, many of the individuals serving had only a barebones conception of these sagas, and probably a scantier notion of ancient Rome.  But although the lettered among them may have been in a position to discuss and write about these matters, what drove a great deal of the parallelism here is obviously need—the need to make the strange familiar, and to be able to cope and navigate in new surroundings.  Vague notions that the ancients had themselves encountered barbarity, conquered it, and made themselves at least more comfortable than they had been, moved the Iberians to try to assimilate their experiences in México into this pattern.

          In general, the Spaniards and Portuguese who explored and conquered vast areas of the New World, including what is today México, were driven by a complex variety of motives, some of which had to do with wealth, but many of which had other orientations.  Although the contemporary movements against “Discoverers’ Day,” as the most recent incarnation of Columbus Day is often called, are many and vocal, there is no question that at least some of the Spanish movement in México had to do, as has been set out here, with notions such as de jure belli and bringing both Western education and Catholicism—seen, of course, as the true religion—to the unconverted.  As remarked at an earlier point, when we remember how brutal the religious wars on the Continent were at this time, it is unsurprising that this should be the case.17

          In general, Pohl and Lyons provide an important overview of the topic when they write that the Iberians were “not entirely misguided” in believing that they could make the parallel between the Aztec society that they saw and the cultures of the ancients.  Indeed, as they go on to say, there were specific sorts of reasons why this was the case:

 

After all, everywhere they looked they would have envisioned in the exuberant colors and textures of daily life what in their homeland could only be dimly gleaned from the writings of Roman historiansand the remains of Roman Hispania.18

 

          If climate, topography and other features of this part of the New World are taken into account, it is fair to say that, to some extent, the Spaniards were correct in making their parallel.  The real difficulty is, as many have now contended, that the force of the analogy has until recently been only little appreciated.

 

IV

 

          I have been arguing that the general tale told about the formation of the mestizaje and its importance for Mexican culture, despite the force of work done by such authors as Miller, Krauze and Poniatowska, omits or elides crucial information that is important to the story in general.  As Octavio Paz has argued, if one wants to characterize the life of the mestizo as the “labyrinth of solitude,” one need look no further than the bastardized origins of the population, the forced sex of the mixings between Iberians and the indigenous, and the general destruction of the indigenous cultures.  Indeed, it is for these reasons that Malinche, for example, has the place that she does in traditional Mexican history, despite the fact that common sense would indicate to us that a young girl had no more say in her life then than she would in the middle of a number of Latin American nations now.

          But the new work that is being done on the meticulous documentation of several of the European voyagers—work that has come to our attention through the exhibit referred to here, and its accompanying publications—indicates to us that the situation was rather more complex than has generally been portrayed.  However misguided the Spaniards may have been in some of their assumptions, both the legalistic arguments about the nature of war and “assistance,” and the cultural parallels between the groups of ancients in the Mediterranean with whose lives they would have been familiar and the clusters of indigenous persons they encountered, it is clear that Sahagún, for example, is motivated in part by genuine intellectual curiosity, and at least to some small extent by some notion of charity.

          To try to portray all of the European motivations as having to do with greed, rapine and a failure to acknowledge the others as human beings is to make the same sort of mistake that some have accused the Europeans themselves as having made.  Even a casual examination of the work on de jure belli indicates that the Spaniards may well have felt that they were genuinely providing assistance to Southern groups against the Aztecs—and indeed, at least initially, those groups may have concurred. Whether this sort of thinking holds up over the long haul in a more longitudinal examination of Spanish and Portuguese motives in the New World is subject to dispute, but there is no question that evidence exists that shows similar motives to have guided at least their initial efforts.

          In the end, whether there is a parallel or not between the Greco-Roman pantheon and the “pantheons” of the indigenous cultures is somewhat beside the point.  More important is that we begin to examine the thinking that moves in this direction, and that we cease to simplistically place all of the Iberian conceptualization patterns under one rubric.  Simple respect for all of the cultures of that time, regardless of their point of origin, demands that we examine the works produced by them carefully, and that we ask ourselves the difficult and necessary questions about their origins and their aims.  When we cease to oversimplify about the Iberian conquest of the New World, we will have made great strides in understanding that conquest, and, perhaps in understanding ourselves.  We cannot honestly require of ourselves that we do any less.