TY - JOUR
AU - Townsend,, Camilla
AB - Martin Austin Nesvig’s book Promiscuous Power: An Unorthodox History of New Spain is a welcome addition to the scholarship on colonial Mexico. It is set in Michoacán, in western Mexico, in the first century after the Spanish conquest. Numerous indigenous groups lived in the region, most prominently the Tarascans, or Purépecha, who had always remained independent of the Aztecs but fell relatively quickly to the Spaniards. This work, however, does not focus on the indigenous population, but rather on the few hundred Spaniards who ruled over them from the 1520s onward. Lest anyone get the wrong idea, Nesvig is far from intending to demonstrate the Spaniards’ power over those they had vanquished. Rather, Nesvig portrays the colonial instability inherent in a world of “Spanish agents of a global order relentlessly pursuing their own interests” rather than those of the Spanish Crown or the Catholic Church (3). The author’s careful and detailed research reveals a debilitating rivalry between secular clerics and the religious orders, an Inquisition that fails to frighten most residents in the region, rural towns that sheltered convicted felons, and even priests who behaved more like caudillos than pious community leaders. One possible critique of the book might be that in a certain sense, the argument is not new. That is, although it is true that we are accustomed to thinking of sixteenth-century Spain and the Holy Office of the Inquisition as great powers, it is also true that we have heard before that in far-flung corners of empire, the power of the center did not always hold sway. Many years ago, for instance, John Leddy Phelan taught us the refrain “Obedezco pero no cumplo” (“I obey but do not comply”) in his classic article “Authority and Flexibility in the Spanish Imperial Bureaucracy” (Administrative Science Quarterly 5, no. 1 [1960]: 47–65), and more recently, several scholars have demonstrated that the Inquisition in Mexico was not nearly as interested in extracting blood as was its counterpart in Spain. However, I personally would reject this critique. Given the current interest in indigenous history and culture, we actually find ourselves in need of more works taking the Spanish perspective, and thus we have had until now no book bringing together multitudinous examples of Spanish dysfunction and making the overall point in a memorable way that New Spain often illustrates the “entropy of decentralization” (3). There is, however, one element of the work that I do find disconcerting. Nesvig seems to assume that the Spaniards’ “promiscuous power,” by which he means their overlapping, often contradictory, and ever shifting sources of power bred enough chaos that the conquered indigenous people were better off. In the concluding paragraph of the book, he specifically ties his findings to the evidence of the persistence of indigenous cultures, uncovered by ethnohistorians in recent decades (181). It seems to me, however, that the author’s own evidence actually underscores the point that the further the indigenous were from centralized control in New Spain, the worse off they were in some regards. Nesvig himself says early on: “Paradise is relative, and the paradise for Spanish settlers in Michoacán came at the rather obvious hell of indigenous peoples” (46). He is, however, only talking about the initial conquest at this point. Later, the idea seems to get lost. He certainly acknowledges that “geographical and juridical isolation . . . enabled a regional elite to wield tremendous power” (132). He notes that when a Spanish Crown inspector arrived and tried to support an indigenous leader who had complained and been whipped for it, the government representative found himself without the wherewithal to punish the Indian’s local tormentors (140). There are numerous such examples. Nesvig argues that in New Spain “empire was in effect parceled out to private operators” (178), thus weakening the hold of the Spanish state. But almost all of these “private operators” were Spaniards, and although it is true that they often fought among themselves or with their government when they felt they could afford to, these Spaniards apparently sided together when their entire group’s material best interest was at stake—if not, the indigenous groups would not have had to continue to pay tribute, and runaway slaves would have been left to live peacefully in the forest forever. If anything, it seems, the indigenous and the enslaved populations in decentralized areas were more vulnerable to rampaging Spaniards than they were in the city; in rural Michoacán, for instance, Spanish leaders roamed about with their private militias, which other Spaniards seemed powerless to deprive them of. The indigenous people were without the powerful allies that they could count on in more central regions. Yet I do not mean to indicate that the book is ultimately without value because I believe the material should be interpreted quite differently. That is far from the case. Any work that gets us all talking about important issues is a very welcome contribution, and Promiscuous Power is definitely just such a book. © The Author 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Martin Austin Nesvig. Promiscuous Power: An Unorthodox History of New Spain.
JO - The American Historical Review
DO - 10.1093/ahr/rhz1214
DA - 2019-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/martin-austin-nesvig-promiscuous-power-an-unorthodox-history-of-new-29jVCUGZKq
SP - 1923
VL - 124
IS - 5
DP - DeepDyve
ER -