Latin%20America

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Latin Americas Colonial Foundations

• Maxwell A. Cameron

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Conquest as Clash of Cultures

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The Encounter

• The conquest, discovery, encounter brought
  cultures together that had never been previously
  exposed to one another.
• In 1492 100 million people lived in the New
  World, 1/5th of the human race.
• Catastrophic population collapse through disease
  was one immediate result - 95 percent of Central
  Mexico wiped out.

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The Capture of Atahualpa

• The requerimiento (1512-1542) The document
  exhorted the Indians to acknowledge the Church,
  the Pope, and the King and Queen of Spain, and
  warned them that failure to do so would bring
  harm and damage, and spilt blood.

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The Capture of Atahualpa

• Friar Valverde read from the Requerimiento to
  Atahualpa Atahualpa attempted to listen to the
  book, and then threw it aside saying What, why
  doesnt this book talk to me?
• Pizzaro attacks, takes Atahualpa hostage.
  Demands ransom, then kills Atahualpa.

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What do we Know about Spain?

• Advanced technology
• WMD small pox, flu, measles, yellow fever,
  plague, cholera, malaria
• Technical skill and weapons navigation, gun
  power, cavalry.

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Economic Base

• 2. Spain was mercantilist, seeking new
  opportunities for trade, not very
  entrepreneurial. Great apparent material wealth
  ie. had the resources to colonize yet moribund
  institutions

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Mission

• 3. Possessed a sense of mission and desire for
  conquest (little social mobility for non-nobles).
  Religious intolerance. Also, a warrior culture
  expelled Moors Spain (Isabellas Castilia and
  Ferdinands Aragon) unified under a powerful
  crown. Nobility weak. Absolutist state.

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Scripturalism

• A highly legalistic culture
• Three types of law
• Divine law Gods will
• Natural law Divine law embodied in nature
• Human law Fallible approximation of divine law
• E.g. The requerimiento

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What do we Know about the Indigenous Peoples?

• Three important civilizations Mayan, Aztec,
  Incan
• Diverse forms of political organization

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Bartolome de las Casas

• they had properly organized states, wisely
  ordered by excellent laws, religion, and custom.
  They cultivated friendship and, bound together in
  common fellowship, lived in populous cities in
  which they wisely administered the affairs of
  both peace and war justly and equitably truly
  governed by laws that at very many points surpass
  ours, and could have won the admiration of the
  sages of Athens.

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The Mayans(Classic Period 200-900 AD)

• A diverse cluster of small monarchic or
  oligarchic polities.
• Brilliant architects, advanced art, astronomy,
  mathematics.
• Had a more accurate solar year than Europe until
  the late 16th century. Calculated the lunar month
  to within seconds.

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Mayan Literacy

• Literate Fully developed writing system
  combining phonetics and ideographs. Used stone
  and parchment.
• Compared sometimes with Egypt in terms of (glyphs
  and hieroglyphic script) but not the centralized
  political organization. The Mayan civilization
  was a loose system of querulous states, not
  unlike the Hellenic world, or Renaissance Italy.

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The Incas

• Incas were masters of political organization.
  They created an empire that covered territory
  from contemporary Chile and Argentina to Ecuador.
• At time of conquest, they had just undergone a
  civil war over succession.
• Their leader The Inca. Political system
  hierarchical and personalist. Last Inca,
  Atahualpa.
• Basic unit of society Ayllu, or local village
  and kinship groups.
• Inca empire (3 million by conservative estimates)
  was organized by means of oral communication.

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Inca Proto-Literacy

• Means of accounting Quipu.
• Quipu officials called quipucamayoc

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Conquest and Culture

• The Spaniards deliberately destroyed the cultural
  products of the Amerindians.
• The recognized that their products embodied the
  principles of their social organization, which
  they sought to disrupt.
• This was a more radical kind of conflict that
  anything to which the Indians have previously
  been exposed. It was, in a word, genocidal.

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Colonial Vandalism

• The destruction of artifacts fulfilled two
  functions
• - undermined resistance social organization
• - created the conditions for Christianization.
• Mayan glyphs, codices, Inca quipus, were
  destroyed with ruthless thoroughness, as well as
  efforts to transcribe Mayan hieroglyphics into
  alphabetic text.

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Denial of Access to Text and Literacy

• The early debate over literacy among Indians
• Why did Indians learn to write? Indian nobility
  sought to retain status and power.
• The counter-reformation (late 16th Century).
• Absence of tradition of customary law.
• Destruction of indigenous culture the cultural
  effects of colonialism.

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No Legislation

• 1542 New Laws 1681 Recopilacion de Leyes de
  las Indias.
• No legislature
• No checks and balances
• Close links between church and state

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Challenges for the Colonial System

• Crown (peninsulares)/colonizers (creoles) split
• Encomienda Entrusting of a community to the
  Spanish colonist for tribute, protection, and
  civilization.
• I obey but do not comply (obedezco pero no
  cumplo).

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Upward Accountability

• King or queen, in alliance with the Pope.
• Council of the Indies
• The council of Indies appointed the Viceroys
• Answered to audiencias
• corregidores and alcaldes
• caciques, clerical authorities, Indian communities

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Residencia

• At the end of all terms of office, each
  administrator could expect a residencia, a
  judicial inquiry into his public behavior. All
  those checks required an immense amount of
  paperwork, a characteristic abundantly evident in
  all Iberian bureaucracy. A multitude of lawyers,
  scribes, and notaries in all the major cities
  testified to the fascination with and importance
  of legal and bureaucratic matters. Thanks to that
  legal obsession elaborate law codes were drawn up
  in the Old World to govern the New. (Burns 1972
  43).

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The Scriptural City

• A gap developed between the prescriptive minutia
  of the laws and codes and the anarchic
  confusion of the societies over which they
  legislated, a gap filled by lawyers and
  scribes, clerks, and bureaucrats.

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Ciudad Escrituraria

• The language of colonizers, impregnated with the
  courtly norms of the peninsula, was ceremonial,
  ritualistic, baroque, and diplomatic and it stood
  in sharp contrast with the everyday, popular
  language of private and social relations with its
  variegation, informality, clumsiness, and
  incessant invention.
• In the diatribes of the literate elite, the
  latter was vilified as corrupt, ignorant, and
  barbarous Angel Rama.

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Conclusions What did Latin America Inherit from
Spain?

• Gap between pais real and pais oficial
• A tradition of non-compliance with formal rules
• Social exclusion, especially of indigenous
  peoples

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Further Reading

• Rama, Angel. The Lettered City. Durham, NC Duke
  University Press, 1996.
• Wright, Ronald. Stolen Continents. Toronto
  Penguin, 2003.
• Restall, Matthew. Seven Myths of the Spanish
  Conquest. New York Oxford, 2003.
• Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations.
  New York Touchstone 1996.
• Stein, Stanley J. and Barbara H. The Colonial
  Heritage of Latin America. New York Oxford
  University Press, 1970.
• Burns, E. Bradford. Latin America A Concise
  Interpretive History. New Jersey Prentice Hall,
  1972.

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Key Concepts

• Scripturalism or scriptural city
• Encomienda
• Requerimiento
• Types of medieval law