The Preservation of Indigenous Mexico

¶ … film La Otra Conquista captures the complexity of the process of colonialism, as even after he becomes known as Tomas, Topiltzin never loses his Aztec identity. The brutal use of force against the indigenous people of Mexico could not have alone erased the collective memories, dreams, and experiences of the people who survived. Historians have repeatedly pointed out the all-encompassing, major ways the colonial social systems and institutions transformed life for the indigenous people of Mesoamerica. Even the most "basic institutions" such as "family, marriage, and access to property," the issues that affect daily life as well as long-term survival of individual identity and community, would become "Europeanized."[footnoteRef:1] Yet it would be impossible for Indian memory to completely end with the conquests. Collective memory is not so easily erased. Moreover, the indigenous people's customs, values, worldviews, and beliefs sometimes permeate and permanently alter those of the conquistadores. As La Otra Conquista shows, colonization does impose formal systems of power and subordination over the conquered people but at the same time, the colonial powers depend on the conquered people at the very least as labor force and also for maintaining ongoing political legitimacy. Therefore, the indigenous people subtly merge their practices, values, beliefs, language, customs, and folklore into those of the newly dominant culture. [1: Ethelia Ruiz Medrano, "Indigenous Negotiation to Preserve Land, History, Titles, and Maps: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," in Mexico's Indigenous Communities (University Press of Colorado), 79.]

One of the ways indigenous people did not surrender, but rather clung and reaffirmed their cultures was through the "titulos," which help "protect them and help protect historical memory."[footnoteRef:2] The preservation of land boundaries, even when arbitrary, created an ongoing survival technique. Even when the land boundary itself was not linked directly to ancestral territory, the current body of indigenous people can determine for themselves how to define their relationship to the colonial (or nationalistic) powers that seek to dominate them. Instead of surrendering to whatever methods of dissipation, segregation, or dispersion the colonial or national governments present, the indigenous people can use original land titles and "entitlement" as a means of defending their pride, stories, and sacred spaces. The process of re-creating entitled spaces refers back to the "malleable nature of indigenous historical narrative."[footnoteRef:3] Its malleability does not in any way negate the fundamental truth of the overarching structure and semantics of the indigenous historical narrative. As narrative, indigenous histories preserve the integrity of the culture in ways that no other collective method can do. Indigenous histories have been preserved and passed on in the face of brutal opposition and oppression, as was seen in the film La Otra Conquista. [2: Ethelia Ruiz Medrano, "Indigenous Negotiation to Preserve Land, History, Titles, and Maps: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,," "112.] [3: Ethelia Ruiz Medrano, "Indigenous Negotiation to Preserve Land, History, Titles, and Maps: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,," "112.]

Even when it seems like he is ready to cede his identity to the Catholics, Topiltzin as Tomas realizes the importance of protecting his bloodline. The bloodline is a common characteristic to both the indigenous and the conquering colonialists, and indigenous people have used the concept of bloodline in a creative and unique way to manage their status and role in the colonial social and political landscape. By capitalizing on the Spanish notion that "pure" blood is preferable to impure blood even disregarding race, the indigenous people generated their own elite social class. Instead of "forgetting" that their Aztec social hierarchies were immutable, the sixteenth century native peoples of Mexico "remembered" how significant bloodlines always had been to ruling classes, priests, and monarchs. The sixteenth century Spaniards who conquered the Americas happened to also bring with them a belief that being "pure" of blood provided an elite status, and this "blood purity," or "limpieza de sangre" was also something that the Aztec elites could relate to because of similar sets of prejudices and beliefs.[footnoteRef:4] Even if the preservation of "blood purity" was not done consciously, the indigenous people somehow negotiated a higher social status than they might have without professing to believe that the Spanish were working with the same customs. [4: Peter B. Villella. "Pure and Noble Indians, Untainted by Inferior Idolatrous Races," Hispanic-American Historical Review 91, no. 4 (2011): 633]

Therefore, the limpieza de sangre concept was one that was held in common by the elites of both the conquistadores and the indigenous. The "blood purity" concept created important social, political, and economic class stratifications in colonial Mexico. To "remember" who they were, the Aztecs celebrated age-old social stratifications that did nothing to create an egalitarian society but at least helped to preserve the culture of the people. Class stratifications did enable the ongoing oppression of underclass individuals and communities deemed tainted by the bloods of other races. Especially when the broad economic goals of Spanish colonialism became apparent with the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the notion of race became extremely important to the forging of Mexican identities and one's position and role in the society. The elite "pure blooded" indigenous, as Topiltzin from La Otra Conquista would have been, could exempt themselves from slavery, whereas mestizo or African slaves would have been unable to remove themselves from the massive labor pool. Both the Spanish elite who deemed their blood free from taints such as Moorish or Jewish heritage, and the indigenous elite who deemed their blood free from taints of European, African, or other tribal heritages could therefore establish themselves as a ruling class with access to wealth and power.[footnoteRef:5] [5: Peter B. Villella. "Pure and Noble Indians, Untainted by Inferior Idolatrous Races," 634]

Rather than ending the collective memory of indigenous people, colonialism reinforced some of the oldest systems of social stratification in the Aztec universe. Catholicism provided a hypocritical self-contradictory schema, wherein the indigenous person who professed love of Christ could receive salvation and benediction and therefore increased respect among the colonialists. Yet even upon profession of conversion, an indigenous person would still not be considered socially mobile or elite unless the bloodline were to be proven "pure."[footnoteRef:6] Christianity set itself out to be morally superior than indigenous Aztec beliefs, but was not in any way as egalitarian as it might have claimed. Rural uprisings -- uprisings of the poor and underclass -- had long been a part of Aztec society.[footnoteRef:7] Therefore, rural uprisings against the Spaniards only served to extend the age-old class conflicts that defined existence in both Old World and New. Interestingly, the preponderance of rural uprisings that have occurred in Mexico throughout its history (pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial) is unique in the Americas.[footnoteRef:8] [6: Peter B. Villella. "Pure and Noble Indians, Untainted by Inferior Idolatrous Races," 5.] [7: Friedrich Katz, "Rural Uprisings in Preconquest and Colonial Mexico," in Riot, Rebellion, and Revolution, Princeton University Press, 1988, 65.] [8: Friedrich Katz, "Rural Uprisings in Preconquest and Colonial Mexico," in Riot, Rebellion, and Revolution, Princeton University Press, 1988]