The Mestizo Mind by Serge Gruzinski

Author:Serge Gruzinski [Gruzinski, Serge]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Latin America, Americas (North; Central; South; West Indies)
ISBN: 9781136697333
Google: jRaOAQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-10-18T03:36:29+00:00

10 CROSSING THE SEA

I stumbled on the Floridas.

Incredible, the eyes of panthers,

Cats with human skin, stare out at you

From flowers, and rainbows stretch

Like reins attached to some green beast

Beneath the surface of the sea.

—Rimbaud, The Drunken Boat

Wind arises, roaring, hissing.

The ocean seethes,

and the boat goes creaking along.…

—Cantar mexicano LXVIII

MEXICO CITY, SUNDAY JUNE 4, 1564

More than forty years had passed since the Spanish arrived. For the wedding of Don Luis de Santa María Cipac, the last successor to Moctezuma and governor of Tenochtitlán, magnificently dressed Indians performed the atequilizcuicatl, the “Water-Pouring” song. Groups danced, singing louder and louder as their movements became faster, accompanied by the swirling of multicolored feathers and the rhythms of indigenous drums (teponaztli and ahuehuetl).

Did the old nobility of Mexico-Tenochtitlán realize it was experiencing its final glory? Eighteen months later, in December 1565, Don Luis, grandson of the monarch Ahuitzotl, would die, leaving the throne vacant and discredited—Luis was called Nanacacipatzin, “he who sold out the homeland,” because he allowed the Spanish authorities to gain control over the administration of the tribute paid by the indigenous population,1 triggering riots among the people of Mexico City and Tlatelolco.2

It was also the 1560s that saw the deaths at an advanced age of the last nobles raised before the Conquest in a world that knew neither the presence of foreigners nor the throes of defeat. Although the Indian nobility buttressed its situation by stressing its ancient legitimacy and its new loyalties to Spanish king and Christian God, it knew it was under threat.3 The steady loss of its privileges and its political base, the end of the dynasties in the neighboring cities of Tacuba and Texcoco, and the rise of many commoners to leading positions had weakened its hand. In a letter dated March 25, 1566, Don Pedro de Moctezuma, scion of a famous family, complained bitterly of living in grandísima miseria (great wretchedness).4 Everywhere, indigenous chiefs suffered “a loss of income, power, and prestige.”5

The living conditions of the indigenous masses, reduced to silence, were even worse. Subjected to increasing taxation, they endured the ravages of constant epidemics, while in the countryside entire groups were uprooted to form “congregations,” forced assemblies of populations.6 Within Spanish society, the leadership was also experiencing troubled times. The powerful encomenderos feared that they would be unable to pass on to their heirs the encomiendas they had been granted, and envisaged the bankruptcy of their families. Young Creoles who were involved from near or afar in the conspiracy led by Cortés’s son, the marquis del Valle, trembled at the thought of the repression unleashed by the representatives of Philip II; opinion was terrorized by the executions of 1566, designed to stifle all inklings of conspiracy. This urban context must be kept in mind when studying the texts that follow, with attention to the uniqueness of a period when, after a half century of colonial domination, memory of pre-Hispanic days had not yet been lost.

Although the text of the cantar, or song, performed for the wedding

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