A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture - Группа авторов

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power, whether the emperor was lord of the world, whether the indigenous leaders were their own master, and whether Spaniards had the right to deprive them of their dominion. But Vera Cruz also raises questions pertaining to the payment of tribute, when to make restitution when abuse has been committed, and the examination of whether the recognition of Spanish sovereignty and the appropriation of lands were attained without extortion and violence. These are just a few questions and doubts the treatise examines. Now, these lectures were delivered with the intent of training future confessors of Spaniards. Confessors would be charged with leading Spaniards into a thorough examination of motives, practices, and awareness of ways in which they might have abused Indians. It is in the context of these questions that Vera Cruz addresses the need to consider the possibility of excusing Spaniards from restitution or from being evicted from lands in their possession. It is a treatise clearly more concerned with the effects of colonization and the pursuit of remedies than with the legality of the Spanish invasion. With regard to this point he is clearly on the side of those who condemn the conquest:

      I beg you, good reader, to put aside prejudice and reflect on what law, by what right did the Spaniard who came to these regions, and armed to the teeth, attack these people subduing them as though they were enemies and occupying lands not their own, seeking arbitrarily with force and violence all their valuable possessions and robbing the people? I do not see by what law or right; perhaps I am just beating the air. (Vera Cruz, 1968: 2, 163)

      The last lines read in the Latin as “Ego non video; fortassis in medio sole decutio!” (I cannot see; perhaps I am melting in the midst of the sun!).

      The humility of Vera Cruz leads him to question his own certainty. Moreover, the question of “ignoratiam invincibilem” would retain the possibility that some Spaniards, or, for that matter, Indian rulers and caciques, might have broken a law or, even more precisely, acted in bad faith. Vera Cruz demands that the will of the people be taken into account in assessing the justice of transactions, even if it is in the nature of government for those who rule to interpret the will of the people. There remains the semblance of caciques who “are not lords but rather like wretched slaves do they help in exacting tribute for the Spaniards themselves”; however, note that he is not blaming the caciques here but underscoring the abuse by the Spaniards that leads them to act on their behalf: “they are insulted, they are flung into prison, they ‘bear the day’s burden and heat’, a condition proper not to lords but rather to servants” (ibid.: 2, 201). Vera Cruz also mentions caciques that have been bought with wine, European clothing, a horse, and what not. The examination of conscience would find its limit in “ignoratiam invincibilem”; this state, however, would in some instances absolve Spaniards from the obligation to restitute goods illegally obtained or the losses incurred owing to violence. But there are other occasions in which ignorance does not exclude fault and restitution demanded. We would only wish that our leaders today who have made war on Afghanistan and Iraq would be subjected to the thorough examination of conscience that Vera Cruz recommended for his contemporaries. But also consider the blind spots we carry, the “ignoratiam invincibilem” of the violence we inflict, when exposing the writing violence of yesterday but also of today.

      NOTES

      1 1 This chapter builds on the concept of “epistemic violence” as developed by Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak in her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988). I have developed these ideas on writing violence in Inventing America (Rabasa, 1993) and Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier (Rabasa, 2000).

      2 2 I derive the concept of “echography” from Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television (2002). This book is the full and literal transcript of a recorded conversation filmed by Jean Joseph Rosé under the auspices of the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, on December 22, 1993. This conversation reflects on the nature of television as a medium that captures and transmits live events. The transmission of the live event is never as direct nor as unmediated as the concept would suggest, but the effect, the capacity to reproduce the immediacy of an event suggests a most accomplished technology for producing mimetic artifacts. The reproduction of reality, however, is implicit to the inscription and reception of images. As Roland Barthes has argued, it is particular to the analog image of photography to have first made possible the preservation of reality as “this was” (1981), but as Derrida and Stiegler argue, the pursuit of the effect of the real antedates the invention of photography. Within the West, written letters have a privileged place in the history of recording the real, which would be followed by analog and, more recently, by digital reproducibility. I further elaborate the concept of echography in “Eco- grafía de la voz en la historiografía nahua” (Rabasa, forthcoming).

      3 3 The title of Vera Cruz’s lectures was Relectio edit a per Reverendum Patrem Alfonsum a Vera Cruce, Sacrae theologiae magistratum, Augustinianae familiae priorem, et cathedra primariae eiusdem facultatis in Academia Mexicam regentem (A discussion by the Reverend Father Alonso de la Vera Cruz, master of Sacred theology, prior of the Augustinian order, and head professor of the same subject in the University of Mexico). He referred to this treatise as Relectio de dominio infidelium & justo bello (A discussion on the dominion of unbelievers and just war) in the first edition of his Speculum coniugiorum (Mirror of the married, 1556) (Vera Cruz, 1968: 53).

      References and Further Reading

      References

      1 Anderson, Arthur J. O., and Schroeder, Susan (1997). Codex Chimalpahin. Society and Politics in Mexico Tenochtitlan, Tlatelolco, Texcoco, Culhua- can, and Other Nahua Altepetl in Central Mexico. The Nahuatl and Spanish annals and accounts collected and recorded by don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin. 2 vols. Trans. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Susan Schroeder. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. (Original manuscripts ca. 1593—mid- 1620s.) (This book contains transcriptions of a selection of Chimalpahin’s Nahuatl and Spanish texts with an English translation; it also includes a transcription and translation of Fernando Alvarado Tezozómoc’s Crónica Mexicayotl).

      2 Barthes, Roland (1981). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill & Wang. (This text offers a theory for understanding the experience of photography).

      3 Berdan, Francis F., and Anawalt, Patricia Rieff (1992). The Codex Mendoza. 4 vols. Facsimile edition. Berkeley: University of California Press. (This facsimile of the Codex Mendoza is accompanied by studies of the pictorial forms, contents, and materiality of the manuscript).

      4 Columbus, Christopher (1989). The Diario of Christopher Columbus’s First Voyage to America 1492—1493. Abstracted by Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas. Trans. Oliver Dunn and James E. Kelley, Jr. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. (Original manuscript ca. 1530.) (This edition offers a rigorous transcription and translation of Columbus’s journal of his first voyage to America).

      5 Cortés, Hernán (1986). Letters from Mexico. Trans. Anthony Pagden. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (Original manuscripts 1519—26.) (Pagden’s is arguably the best translation of Cortés five letters to Charles V).

      6 Derrida, Jacques, and Stiegler, Bernard (2002). Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews. Trans. Jennifer Bajorek. Cambridge: Polity Press. (In their conversation, Derrida and Stiegler reflect on television as a most accomplished form of reproducing the real).

      7 Durán, Diego (1994). The History of the Indies of New Spain. Trans. Doris Hayden. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. (Original manuscript ca. 1580). (This offers a complete translation of Diego Durán’s historical section of the Historia de las Indias de Nueva España e islas de Tierra Firme).

      8 Gruzinski, Serge (1993). The Conquest of Mexico: The Incorporation of Indian Societies into the Western World, I6th—18th Centuries. Trans. Eileen Corrigan. Cambridge: Polity Press. (This book, which was first published in French in 1988 with the title La Colonisation de l’imaginaire, traces in indigenous pictorial texts colonizing processes in which Indians were, to borrow Gruzinski’s term, “occidentalized.”)

      9 Hulme, Peter (1986). “Columbus and the cannibals.” In Colonial Encounters, pp. 14—43. London: Methuen. (This chapter examines the ideological determinants in the discursive production

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