The Relación de Michoacán (1539-1541) and the Politics of Representation in Colonial Mexico

The Relación de Michoacán (1539-1541) and the Politics of Representation in Colonial Mexico
Author: Angélica Jimena Afanador-Pujol
Publisher:
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2015-07
Genre: Art
ISBN:

The "Relacion de Michoacan" (1539 1541) is one of the earliest surviving illustrated manuscripts from colonial Mexico. Commissioned by the Spanish viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, the "Relacion" was produced by a Franciscan friar together with indigenous noble informants and anonymous native artists who created its forty-four illustrations. To this day, the "Relacion" remains the primary source for studying the pre-Columbian practices and history of the people known as Tarascans or P'urhepecha. However, much remains to be said about how the "Relacion"'s colonial setting shaped its final form. By looking at the "Relacion" in its colonial context, this study reveals how it presented the indigenous collaborators a unique opportunity to shape European perceptions of them while settling conflicting agendas, outshining competing ethnic groups, and carving a place for themselves in the new colonial society. Through archival research and careful visual analysis, Angelica Afanador-Pujol provides a new and fascinating account that situates the manuscript's images within the colonial conflicts that engulfed the indigenous collaborators. These conflicts ranged from disputes over political posts among indigenous factions to labor and land disputes against Spanish newcomers. Afanador-Pujol explores how these tensions are physically expressed in the manuscript's production and in its many contradictions between text and images, as well as in numerous emendations to the images. By studying representations of justice, landscape, conquest narratives, and genealogy within the "Relacion," Afanador-Pujol clearly demonstrates the visual construction of identity, its malleability, and its political possibilities."

The Relación de Michoacán (1539-1541) and the Politics of Representation in Colonial Mexico

The Relación de Michoacán (1539-1541) and the Politics of Representation in Colonial Mexico
Author: Angélica Jimena Afanador-Pujol
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2015-07-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1477301070

Through close readings of the painted images in a major sixteenth-century illustrated manuscript, this book demonstrates the critical role that images played in ethnic identity formation and politics in colonial Mexico. The Relación de Michoacán (1539–1541) is one of the earliest surviving illustrated manuscripts from colonial Mexico. Commissioned by the Spanish viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, the Relación was produced by a Franciscan friar together with indigenous noble informants and anonymous native artists who created its forty-four illustrations. To this day, the Relación remains the primary source for studying the pre-Columbian practices and history of the people known as Tarascans or P’urhépecha. However, much remains to be said about how the Relación’s colonial setting shaped its final form. By looking at the Relación in its colonial context, this study reveals how it presented the indigenous collaborators a unique opportunity to shape European perceptions of them while settling conflicting agendas, outshining competing ethnic groups, and carving a place for themselves in the new colonial society. Through archival research and careful visual analysis, Angélica Afanador-Pujol provides a new and fascinating account that situates the manuscript’s images within the colonial conflicts that engulfed the indigenous collaborators. These conflicts ranged from disputes over political posts among indigenous factions to labor and land disputes against Spanish newcomers. Afanador-Pujol explores how these tensions are physically expressed in the manuscript’s production and in its many contradictions between text and images, as well as in numerous emendations to the images. By studying representations of justice, landscape, conquest narratives, and genealogy within the Relación, Afanador-Pujol clearly demonstrates the visual construction of identity, its malleability, and its political possibilities.

Rereading the Conquest

Rereading the Conquest
Author: James Krippner-Martínez
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2010-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780271039404

Combining social history with literary criticism, James Krippner-Martínez shows how a historiographically sensitive rereading of contemporaneous documents concerning the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest and evangelization of Michoacán, and of later writings using them, can challenge traditional celebratory interpretations of missionary activity in early colonial Mexico. The book offers a fresh look at religion, politics, and the writing of history by employing a poststructuralist method that engages the exclusions as well as the content of the historical record. The moments of doubt, contradiction, and ambiguity thereby uncovered lead to deconstructing a coherent conquest narrative that continues to resonate in our present age. Part I, "The Politics of Conquest," deals with primary sources compiled from 1521 to 1565. Krippner-Martínez here examines the execution of Cazonci, the indigenous ruler of Michoacán, as recounted in the trial record produced by his executioners; explores the missionary-Indian encounter as revealed in the Relación de Michoacán; and assesses the writings of Michoacán's first bishop, the legendary Vasco de Quiroga, and their complex interplay of authoritarian paternalism and reformist hope. Part II, "Reflections," looks at how the memory of these historical figures is represented in later eras. A key text for this discussion is the Crónica de Michoacán, written in the late eighteenth century by the Franciscan intellectual Pablo de Beaumont. Krippner-Martínez concludes with a critique of the debate that initiated his investigation--the controversy between Latin Americans and Europeans over the colonialist legacy, beginning with the Latin American Bishops Conference in 1992.

The Two Taríacuris and the Early Colonial and Prehispanic Past of Michoacán

The Two Taríacuris and the Early Colonial and Prehispanic Past of Michoacán
Author: David L. Haskell
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2018-10-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 160732749X

The Two Taríacuris and the Early Colonial and Prehispanic Past of Michoacán investigates how the elites of the Tarascan kingdom of Central Mexico sought to influence interactions with Spanish colonialism by reworking the past to suit their present circumstances. Author David L. Haskell examines the rhetorical power of the Relación de Michoacán—a chronicle written from 1539 to 1541 by Franciscan friar Jerónimo de Alcalá based on substantial indigenous testimony and widely considered to be an extremely important document to the study of early colonial relations and the prehispanic past. Haskell focuses on one such testimonial, the narrative of the kingdom’s Chief Priest relaying the history of the royal family. This analysis reveals that both the structure of that narrative and its content convey meaning about the nature of rulership and how conceptualizations of rulership shaped indigenous responses to colonialism in the region. Informed by theoretical approaches to narrative, historicity, structure, and agency developed by cultural and historical anthropologists, Haskell demonstrates that the author of the Relación de Michoacán shaped, and was shaped by, a culturally distinct conceptualization and experience of the time in which the past and the present are mutually informing. The book asks, How reliable are past accounts of events when these accounts are removed from the events they describe? How do the personal agendas of past chroniclers and their informants shape our present understanding of their cultural history? How do we interpret chronicles such as the Relación de Michoacán on multiple levels? It also demonstrates that answers to these questions are possible when attention is paid to the context of narrative production and the narratives themselves are read closely. The Two Taríacuris and the Early Colonial and Prehispanic Past of Michoacán makes a significant contribution to the scholarship on indigenous experience and its cultural manifestations in Early Colonial period Central Mexico and the anthropological literature on historicity and narrative. It will be of interest to Mesoamerican specialists of all disciplines, cultural and historical anthropologists, and theorists and critics of narrative.

Between Encyclopedia and Chorography

Between Encyclopedia and Chorography
Author: Anna Boroffka
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 444
Release: 2022-10-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 3110748134

During the early modern period, regional specified compendia – which combine information on local moral and natural history, towns and fortifications with historiography, antiquarianism, images series or maps – gain a new agency in the production of knowledge. Via literary and aesthetic practices, the compilations construct a display of regional specified knowledge. In some cases this display of regional knowledge is presented as a display of a local cultural identity and is linked to early modern practices of comparing and classifying civilizations. At the core of the publication are compendia on the Americas which research has described as chorographies, encyclopeadias or – more recently – 'cultural encyclopaedias'. Studies on Asian and European encyclopeadias, universal histories and chorographies help to contextualize the American examples in the broader field of an early modern and transcultural knowledge production, which inherits and modifies the ancient and medieval tradition.

Manuscript Cultures of Colonial Mexico and Peru

Manuscript Cultures of Colonial Mexico and Peru
Author: Thomas B. F. Cummins
Publisher: Getty Publications
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2015-01-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1606064355

This volume showcases dynamic developments in the field of manuscript research that go beyond traditional textual, iconographic, or codicological studies. Using state-of-the-art conservation technologies, scholars investigate how four manuscripts—the Galvin Murúa, the Getty Murúa, the Florentine Codex, and the Relación de Michoacán—were created and demonstrate why these objects must be studied in a comparative context. The forensic study of manuscripts provides art historians, anthropologists, curators, and conservators with effective methods for determining authorship, identifying technical innovations, and contextualizing illustrated histories. This information, in turn, allows for more nuanced arguments that transcend the information that the written texts and painted images themselves provide. The book encourages scholars to think broadly about the manuscripts of colonial Mexico and Peru in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and employ new techniques and methods of research.

Gathering Souls: Jesuit Missions and Missionaries in Oceania (1668–1945)

Gathering Souls: Jesuit Missions and Missionaries in Oceania (1668–1945)
Author: Alexandre Coello de la Rosa
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 121
Release: 2019-01-14
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004394877

This essay deals with the missionary work of the Society of Jesus in today’s Micronesia from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Although the Jesuit missionaries wanted to reach Japan and other Pacific islands, such as the Palau and Caroline archipelagos, the crown encouraged them to stay in the Marianas until 1769 (when the Society of Jesus was expelled from the Philippines) to evangelize the native Chamorros as well as to reinforce the Spanish presence on the fringes of the Pacific empire. In 1859, a group of Jesuit missionaries returned to the Philippines, but they never officially set foot on the Marianas during the nineteenth century. It was not until the twentieth century that they went back to Micronesia, taking charge of the mission on the Northern Marianas along with the Caroline and Marshall Islands, thus returning to one of the cradles of Jesuit martyrdom in Oceania.

Historical Dictionary of Mexico

Historical Dictionary of Mexico
Author: Ryan Alexander
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 519
Release: 2024-07-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1538111500

Tracing the historical development of Mexico from the pre-Hispanic period to the present, the Historical Dictionary of Mexico, Third Edition, is an excellent resource for students, teachers, researchers, and the general public. This reference work includes a detailed chronology, an introduction surveying the country’s history, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section includes cross-referenced entries on the historical actors who shaped Mexican history, as well as entries on politics, government, the economy, culture, and the arts.

Brill’s Companion to Classics in the Early Americas

Brill’s Companion to Classics in the Early Americas
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 449
Release: 2021-08-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 900446865X

Brill’s Companion to Classics in the Early Americas opens a window onto classical receptions across the Hispanophone, Lusophone, Francophone and Anglophone Americas during the early modern period, examining classical reception as a phenomenon in transhemispheric perspective for the first

Healing Like Our Ancestors

Healing Like Our Ancestors
Author: Edward Anthony Polanco
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2024-08-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 0816552894

Offering a provocative new perspective, Healing Like Our Ancestors examines sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Nahua healers in central Mexico and how their practices have been misconstrued and misunderstood in colonial records. Early colonial Spanish settlers defined, assessed, and admonished Nahua titiçih (healing specialists) and tiçiyotl (healing knowledge) in the process of building a society in Mexico that mirrored Iberia. Nevertheless, Nahua survivance (intergenerational knowledge transfer) has allowed communities to heal like their ancestors through changes and adaptations. Edward Anthony Polanco draws from diverse colonial primary sources, largely in Spanish and Nahuatl (the Nahua ancestral language), to explore how Spanish settlers framed titiçih, their knowledge, and their practices within a Western complex. Polanco argues for the usage of Indigenous terms when discussing Indigenous concepts and arms the reader with the Nahuatl words to discuss central Mexican Nahua healing. In particular, this book emphasizes the importance of women as titiçih and highlights their work as creators and keepers of knowledge. These vital Nahua perspectives of healing—and how they differed from the settler narrative—will guide community members as well as scholars and students of the history of science, Latin America, and Indigenous studies.