Indigenous and Black Intellectuals in the Lettered City

Abstract

Indigenous and Black Intellectuals in the Lettered City Jason Dyck (bio) Saints and Citizens: Indigenous Histories of Colonial Missions and Mexican California. By Lisbeth Haas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Pp. xii + 256. $65.00 cloth. $34.95 paper. ISBN: 9780520280625. The Black Doctors of Colonial Lima: Science, Race, and Writing in Colonial and Early Republican Peru. By José R. Jouve Martín. Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014. Pp. xii + 209. $39.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780773543416. The Learned Ones: Nahua Intellectuals in Postconquest Mexico. By Kelly S. McDonough. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014. Pp. xiii + 280. $55.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780816511365. Missionary Scientists: Jesuit Science in Spanish South America, 1570–1810. By Andrés I. Prieto. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2011. Pp. x + 287. $59.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780826517449. Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes. Edited by Gabriela Ramos and Yanna Yannakakis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. xviii + 323. $89.95 Cloth. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 9780822356608. In the past, Spaniards, creoles, Indians, and blacks were all kept in neatly separate explanatory categories to analyze conquest, conversion, and cultural change from initial contact to the wars for independence. Spaniards, so the old colonial story was told, were the brave and self-sacrificing spiritual and military conquerors of Amerindian empires and African slaves. They were also the most talented artists in the principal viceregal cities and the only ones who wrote about historical themes and other scientific matters. Several new currents of research have significantly complicated these oversimplified dichotomies of colonial life. The more nuanced picture emerging is that of Indian and black conquistadors and missionaries who, alongside Europeans, subjugated indigenous polities and converted the masses, developing local Christianities in light of their own cultural assumptions. And now, instead of being mere slavish imitators of European art and illiterate neophytes in rural doctrinas (proto-parishes), Indians and blacks are increasingly seen as artists and authors whose works deserve to be treated together with those of Spaniards and creoles. The five books under review in these pages contribute to these larger trends in scholarship by opening up the elite and exclusively urban doors of The Lettered [End Page 256] City.1 In this classic work, Ángel Rama envisions the viceregal city as a visible and material symbol of colonial order, one in which another “lettered city” of religious men, administrators, educators, and authors controlled access to power through their mastery of the pen and access to books. His letrados (men of letters), however, are primarily of a lighter complexion, stemming from the noble ranks of Spaniards, creoles, and a few ascending mestizos. But as this cluster of new studies convincingly demonstrates, Indians and blacks—as informants to missionaries and anthropologists or as authors and artists—were also intellectuals who wrote histories and scientific treatises, made legal demands, and performed other unwritten forms of scholarly activity that contributed significantly to colonial societies and modern nations, both in the centers of viceregal power and on the frontier. As a group, these five books reinforce the idea that colonialism and modern nation building in Latin America were collaborative endeavors that included people from all socioracial backgrounds. Collaboration is central to Andrés I. Prieto’s Missionary Scientists, a detailed tour of Jesuit naturalists in South America during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In his work scientific exploration and evangelical activities go hand in glove because missions were sites of both intellectual pursuits and spiritual encounters. That scientific knowledge was acquired in the mission context is not a new discovery, especially considering the vast scholarship on José de Acosta and a recent translation of his commonly cited Natural and Moral History of the Indies.2 The originality of Prieto’s work lies in his concentration on the midcolonial period, because he compares Acosta to other well-known yet understudied Jesuits, namely Bernabé de Cobo, Nicolo Mascardi, Alonso de Ovalle, and Diego de Rosales. These men, according to Prieto, developed the larger intellectual “tradition of observation, reflection, and writing about America” (223) that exiled Jesuits in Italy—most famously Francisco Javier Clavijero and Juan de Velasco—drew upon to defend their patrias...

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.