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Black Indians and
Savage Christians: Unmaking the “Other” in the Performance
of the Conquest
by Sarah Jo Townsend
Abstract en español
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 Few
of the Spanish conquistadors, either spiritual or secular, could
have hoped for a welcome like the one that greeted Alonso Ponce
in each of the villages he passed through during his travels in
the province of Michoacán from October 1586 to February of
the following year. In his Tratado curioso y docto de las grandezas
de la Nueva España (Curious and Learned Treatise on the Marvels
of New Spain), Ponce's secretary Antonio Ciudad Real describes the
elaborate festivities featuring dances, mock battles, and occasional
plays that invariably culminated in offerings to the Franciscan
prelate and requests for his blessing. Using nothing more than the
force of his mere presence, Ponce is shown conquering the hearts
of his indigenous subjects in a series of scenes that have all the
sense of wonder and newness of Columbus's initial encounter with
the people of the Caribbean: "there was not a single iindian,
big or small, in the village who did not come to see him, and they
were all dumbfounded looking at him," Ciudad Real tells us
of his employer's reception in one village. (1).
Strangely enough, however, when the Europeans look back, what they
see are not their native subjects but black men and Chichimecas,
the nomadic Iindians to the north against whom the Spanish were
waging an ongoing war of conquest. Why, one wonders, would these
good Christians who were key allies of the Spanish – "very
devout and sincere people," according to Ciudad Real –
choose to dress up as black slaves and wild men? Furthermore, why
would their Spanish visitors take as signs of devotion these performances
in which their compliant Other appears, not as himself, but as Another
Other?
 Beginning
with the early conquistadors' letters to the Spanish kings and continuing
up to the present day, most attempts to describe the Conquest and
its legacy have relied, either implicitly or explicitly, on a distinction
that is often framed in terms of a European "Self" and
its "Other" whose subjugation the Conquest enacts. In
addition to physical violence and genocide, the partial destruction
of native ways of life and the imposition of another have resulted
in a preoccupation with cultural mimesis evident even to this day
in the discourse of intellectuals who struggle to define a distinctive
Latin American identity. The Brazilian novelist and cultural theorist
Silviano Santiago, for example, states that "[t]he archaeology
of America leads us back to the violence of the conquest…to
the violence that imposed on the Other his inexorable condition
as a copy." (2)
Similarly, Enrique Dussel, an Argentine philosopher whose ideas
are in many respects at odds with Santiago's poststructuralist bent,
claims that the European ego did not "dis-cover" the New
World but rather "covered over" its true alterity, leading
Dussel to conclude that "[t]he Same violently reduces the Other
to itself through the violent process of conquest."(3)
While such analyses have been essential in revealing
the logic that authorizes the act of conquest, the language they
employ also points to the risk of mimetism that is inherent in the
act of criticism itself; that is, it is possible that in engaging
one's object of study on its own terms the critic may end up reinforcing
the very dynamic that she or he is attempting to undermine. What,
then, might be an alternative to this constricting binary and the
constant mirroring that it sets up between the European Self and
the Latin American Other?
One possibility, I suggest, is to rethink the
meaning of the Conquest by drawing attention to the multiplicity
of identities being constructed in performances such as those witnessed
by Alonso Ponce and his secretary. In what follows, I use a strategic
reading of the representations of blacks and Chichimecas described
in Ciudad Real's Tratado curioso y docto to argue that despite the
constant discursive move to subsume all subordinate or adversarial
groups into a monolithic "Other," the relationship between
the colonizer and specific colonized groups is often mediated through
the performance of other "Others." In some cases, as in
the missionary plays involving battles between Christians and Moors
restaged by indigenous actors, these alternative Others are the
ghosts of historic enemies that accompanied the conquerors across
the Atlantic. Often, however, they reflect the daily realities of
colonial society itself. In the case at hand, the indigenous groups
of Michoacán and the Spanish defined themselves not only
in relation to each other but also through their interactions with
black slaves and the Chichimecas, their common adversary. Keeping
in sight not only the spiritual conquistadors and their indigenous
suppliants but also the negros and Chichimecas invoked by the latter's
performance not only disrupts the facile Self/Other opposition that
condemns the New World to being an imperfect copy of the Old but
also suggests the need to rethink the way in which power and resistance
function through the act of representation (4).
It is precisely this ability to foreground the
juxtaposition of different identities that makes both the study
of embodied performances and the methodology of performance studies
particularly useful in approaching these questions. In her book
The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the
Americas, Diana Taylor points out that performances hold the potential
of confronting spectators with bodies, gestures or facial expressions
that can reveal new facets of a scripted narrative or even undermine
or parody its original intention. Invoking the example of the mock
battles between Christians and Moors, she states that whereas the
original plays are clearly meant to polarize racial and cultural
groups, the visual discrepancy between the roles and the indigenous
actors who performed them forces us to realize that for the participants,
the battle scenes may have served as an opportunity for "cultural
masquerading" and "strategic positioning" in which
they could "act out their own versions of the us/them."
Taylor proposes the idea of the "scenario" as a useful
paradigm for understanding the transmission of social behaviors
and structures. A theatrical concept that foregrounds the issues
of embodiment and physical location, "the scenario more fully
allows us to keep both the social actor and the role in view simultaneously,
and thus recognize areas of resistance and tension." (5)
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