Colonialism

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Colonialism

The colonial period (1492–1820) has traditionally been studied from the perspective of the colonizer and colonialism understood as the conquest and control of other people's land and goods. Colonialism is also, however, a fundamentally unequal encounter between peoples and cultures, unsought by the colonized, in which the colonizer is incomparably more powerful. As such, it constitutes a complex multi-layered network of social and cultural actions and interactions. It was just such a relationship that began to develop when Christopher Columbus set foot in the Americas in 1492.

The Iberian colonization of the Americas entailed—aside from military conquest, direct economic exploitation, and political domination—centuries of trade and intercultural exchange with indigenous peoples, who were far from a homogenous population. In the New World, Europeans encountered, among others, Nahuatl-speaking peoples in central Mexico, Quechuas in the Andean Incan empire, and Mayas in southern Mexico and Central America, as well as Arawaks and Caribs in the Caribbean, Otomí, Zapotec, Mixtec, and Tarascan peoples in Mexico, Cunas in Central America, and Mapuches, Aymaras, and Guarani in South America. The cultural richness, political, economic, and social structures, and religious expression of these conquered peoples entered into dialogue with and became part of the Christian norms and practices that the Iberians attempted to impose.

Following the lead of Edward Said's analysis of Eurocentric prejudice toward the East in Orientalism (1978) and the work of the Subaltern Studies Group on the Third World, studies of Latin American colonialism have shifted from a focus on colonial "letters" toward the study of colonial "discourse." Thus, studies that traditionally focused on the writings of the conquerors and the "tyranny of the alphabet" (Mignolo) have been opened to many previously ignored voices and ways of thinking. In addition to the writings of the conquerors, colonizers, and missionaries (including Columbus, Bartolomé de las Casas, Hernán Cortés, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Bernardino de Sahagún, and others), the notion of colonial discourse includes pre-Hispanic oral traditions and written records (the Nahuatl huehuetlahtolli or Word of the Ancients, the fewer than twenty extant pre-Hispanic picto-ideographic codices, the Popol Vuh, the Chilam Balam, and the Quechua Quipus) as well as indigenous and mestizo expressions of the colonial period (the writings of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, and Fernando de Alva Cortés Ixtlilxóchitl; Diego de Castro Titu Cussi Yupanqui's Ynstrucción del Ynga). In the colonization of Latin America, Europeans systematically imposed their ways of thinking and being, suppressing and marginalizing indigenous ways and forms of knowledge (Restrepo 53). As Europe wrote colonial history it sought to control knowledge—a process central to colonialism (Mignolo 2000). As contemporary scholars have investigated the cultures that resulted from the colonial encounters of the New World, they have begun to hear the multilingual voices of the Americas' past expressed in a numerous forms: architecture, painting, theater, sculpture, pottery, textiles—the Paradise Garden Murals of Malinalco, Mexico, where indigenous tlacuilo or painters wove native flora and fauna into the Christian message of paradise in the sixteenth century; the baroque synthesis of indigenous symbolism and Christian theology in the Church of Santa María Tonantzintla in Cholula; the transformation of Spain's Apostle Santiago in the New World. Conceiving colonialism in Latin America as a series of cross-cultural encounters, not between the "self" and the "other" but between many "selves" and many "others," that take multiple and diverse forms—juxtaposition, acculturation, syncretism, transculturation, empowerment, mestizaje, hybridity, resistance—engenders better understanding of Latin American cultures of today.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Campos, Araceli and Louis Cardaillac. Indios y Cristianos: Cómo en México el Santiago Español se hizo indio. Mexico City: El Colegio de Jalisco, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Editorial Itaca, 2007.

Mallon, Florencia. "The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies: Perspectives from Latin American History." American Historical Review 99:5 (December 1994), 1491-1515.

Mignolo, Walter D. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Restrepo, Luis Fernando. "The Cultures of Colonialism." The Companion to Latin American Studies, edited by Philip Swanson. London: Arnold, 2003.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978.

Colleen Ebacher

Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture