Sunday, January 5, 2020: 9:10 AM
Central Park West (Sheraton New York)
Kevin Terraciano, University of California, Los Angeles
Mexican rebels and writers of the early 19th century revisited the history of the conquest of Mexico during and after the violent wars of independence from Spain. Both Miguel Hidalgo and José María Morelos invoked the idea of an indigenous reconquista. Carlos María de Bustamante wrote the speech that Morelos delivered to the Congress of Chilpancingo, when the rebel priest declared that the insurgents would free the Mexican people from the bondage imposed on them in 1521. After 1821, Bustamante published numerous valuable manuscripts for the history of Mexico, including the first version of the Florentine Codex (the Spanish-language translation of the Nahuatl), and Ixtlilxochitl's narrative of the conquest (Décima tercia relación), under the sensational title Horribles crueldades de los conquistadores de México. Free from the constraints of the crown's monopoly on printing in the viceregal period, Bustamante set out to recover indigenous voices from the past while challenging imperial narratives of events that led to the foundation of Spanish rule.
This presentation focuses on Bustamante's extensive comments on fray Bernardino de Sahagún's second version of Book 12 of the Florentine Codex, which treats the conquest. Sahagún wrote a second version in 1585 in Spanish, less than a decade after the Nahuatl-Spanish bilingual version was completed. Here I focus on the substance and tone of Bustamante's notes on each chapter, which reveal an informed reading of Sahagún's text in relation to other colonial sources, and a critical assessment of the Spanish imperial narrative. Bustamante's re-assessment of the conquest, printed in 1840, resembles the treatment of this topic a century later, after the revolution, and resonates with many characteristics of the "new conquest history" of the 21st century.
