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Call for papers #37

Cañeque, Alejandro. The King's Living Image: The Culture and Politics of Viceregal Power in Colonial Mexico. New World in the Atlantic World. New York: Routledge, 2004. pp. I-XII, 403.

Alejandro Cañeque is interested in the language the Spanish used to justify colonial exploitation, and so he analyzes strategic discourses that constituted viceregal power for over two hundred years. His main purpose is to understand power as early modern contemporaries experienced it and to describe the ways in which ruling elites fashioned discourses of control, which, he argues, were effective mechanisms of wealth extraction. He relies on a large amount of printed sources and archival material: correspondence, chronicles, treatises, royal orders, prescriptive literature, legal papers, and architectural design. In his extensive coverage of historical scholarship and structuralist disciplines, he rejects teleological models and reification theories about nation states. "The logic of the Spanish monarchy," he writes, "was not one of centralization and uniformity but of a loose association of all its territories, a logic very different from that of the centralizing sovereign nation-state" (11).
Cañeque describes colonial political culture on the basis of seven discourses articulated by social elites: the ideological foundations of viceregal authority, the judicial culture, the competition between civil and spiritual power, the ritualistic performance of power, patronage politics supported by royal favors, the civilizing process of colonialism, and a transformative politics that incorporated Indians into the court system. The reflected language of the period consisted in concepts including religion, justice, prudence, liberality, and clemency.
The first discourse was medieval and scholastic. The king was the head of a mystical body and the viceroy represented this organic unity. Printed descriptions of triumphal arches, erected by municipal councils and ecclesiastical chapters, positioned the king and viceroy and their virtues of piety, prudence, fortitude, and liberality.
The second discourse allows the author to engage with the current state of scholarship. Refuting theories about the seventeenth-century crisis and Spain's decline, he argues that "no clear evidence exists that economic or fiscal matters played any important or decisive role in the disturbances of New Spain" (52). The disturbances were political and internal. Ruling elites competed for power, and they operated within and fashioned a discourse of royal power which had two balancing components: the royal duty of justice and the constitutional constraints upon royal absolutism (i.e., autonomous and representative institutions).
The third discourse revolves around the contest between church and civil power. The king was the effective patron of the Spanish church and state. The Inquisition was a compromise, an institution representing the interests of the pope and the king. It served the two powers, as tribunals sought to eradicate heresy because of the dangers of religious subversion and political disorder.
The fourth discourse is about the "symbolics of power," or rituals which were "not mere incidental ephemera, but central to the structure and working of colonial society" (120). Examples include viceregal entries, funeral processions, and public appearances.
Patronage, kinship groups, factions, clientelism, nepotism, and other networks of personal loyalties were the central principles of the fifth discourse symptomatic of the patrimonial state. The distribution of offices facilitated judicial procedure, the primary duty of the crown. During the early modern period corruption was characteristic of all monarchical governments, and it must be seen within the operation of royal liberality.
If corruption was not an ingrained Spanish trait, the colonial project produced a rhetoric of wretchedness that presented Spanish exploitation as a civilizing mission. The Indians produced the wealth that "allowed the functioning of the economy of favor," so the Castilianization of colonial Mexico consisted in objectifying Indians as children in need of civil society, religion, and employment.
As the Spanish prospered in Mexico, rhetoric changed as a way to facilitate control over Indians who had gained Spanish privileges. The timid rural Indian became a demonized urban Indian, primarily because he had acquired an aptitude for litigation. The Mexican Indian court increasingly handled cases filed by Indians against Indians, and by Spaniards against Indians (but not those filed by Indians against Spaniards).
Cañeque provides us with a well-researched study of how elites articulated power, the vicissitudes of colonial politics, and the continuity of social discipline. He also illustrates the great danger of Spanish colonization: that it encouraged people to learn and use the hardware of Castilian civic culture.

Aurelio Espinosa
Arizona State University