Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (20 page)

Beverley's vision was a belated lament for a world that might have been. Among the Spaniards the same vision inspired a series of proposals for inter-ethnic union at a time when colonial society was still in its infancy. In their instructions of 1503 to Nicolas de Ovando as the new governor of Hispaniola, Ferdinand and Isabella ordered him to `try to get some Christian men to marry Indian women, and Christian women to marry Indian men, so that they can communicate with and teach each other, and the Indians can be indoctrinated in our Holy Catholic Faith, and learn how to work their lands and manage their property, and be turned into rational men and women."42 This policy seems to have met with mixed success. In 1514, 64 of the 171 married Spaniards living in Santo Domingo had Indian wives. Most of these Spaniards, however, were drawn from the lowest social stratum, and the marriages may primarily reflect the shortage of Spanish women on the island.141 While Spanish women, even of low birth, were preferred as wives, there was, however, no compunction about taking Indian women for concubines.

By formally sanctioning inter-ethnic marriage in 1514,1 the crown appears to have been reiterating its conviction that a union of Spaniards and Indians would help realize Spain's mission of bringing Christianity and civility to the peoples of the Indies. The idea was taken up again as large areas of mainland America fell under Spanish rule. In 1526 the Franciscans in Mexico wrote to the emperor Charles V urging that, to promote the process of conversion, `the two peoples, Christian and pagan, should unite, and join together in marriage, as is already beginning to happen. 14' Las Casas, advocating the foundation in America of colonies of Spanish peasants, envisaged the intermarriage of their families with those of the Indians as a means of creating `one of the best republics, and perhaps the most Christian and peaceful in the world'.146

The two peoples had certainly been uniting outside marriage. The conquerors, beginning with Cortes himself, took and discarded Indian women at will. Marriage, however, was by no means ruled out, with rank being rated more important than ethnicity. After taking her as his mistress, Cortes married off Montezuma's daughter, Dona Isabel, to a fellow Extremaduran, Pedro Gallego de Andrade, and, following his death, she married Juan Cano, who was clearly proud of his marriage to such a high-born wife.147 In arranging Isabel's marriage Cortes appears to have been pursuing a deliberate strategy for the pacification of Mexico, which led to a number of marriages between his companions and princesses of the ruling house or the daughters of Mexican caciques.141 Such marriages, which were seen as no disparagement where the indigenous women were of noble birth, may well have helped to create a climate of acceptance among later settlers. A merchant in Mexico wrote in 1571 to his nephew in Spain telling him that he was happily married to an Indian wife, adding: `Although back in Spain it may seem that I was rash to marry an Indian woman, here this involves no loss of honour, for the nation of the Indians is held in high esteem.' 149

While it is possible that the merchant was putting the best gloss on his behaviour for the benefit of his Spanish relatives, it is also possible that the obsession with purity of blood in metropolitan Spain, springing from the insistence on freedom from any taint of Moorish or Jewish ancestry, was diluted by the Atlantic crossing. Initially at least, conditions in the New World favoured this dilution. With Spanish women still in short supply, forced or consenting unions with Indian women were accepted as a matter of course. As the first generation of mestizo children of these unions appeared, their Spanish fathers were inclined to bring them up in their own households, especially if they were sons. In 1531 Charles V ordered the Audiencia of Mexico to collect all `the sons of Spaniards born of Indian women ... and living with the Indians', and to give them a Spanish education.' ° But the existence of a growing class of mestizos created difficult problems of categorization in societies that instinctively thought in terms of hierarchy. Where did the mestizos properly belong? If they were born in wedlock there was no problem, since they were automatically regarded as creoles (Spaniards of American origin). For those born out of marriage but accepted by one or other parental group, assimilation within that group was the normal destiny, although illegitimacy was a lasting stigma, and the lack of full assimilation could leave an abiding sense of bitterness, as the career of the most famous of all mestizos, the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, testifies. But there were also a rapidly growing number of mestizos rejected by both groups, and therefore unable to find a secure place in a hierarchically organized, corporate society.

No such problem apparently affected the English settler communities. While cohabitation between English men and Indian women inevitably occurred - and in 1639, to the horror of New England colonists, between an English woman and an Indian man"' - it was not on anything like the scale to be found in the Spanish colonies and it is significant that the mestizos born of these unions have largely disappeared from the historical record .112 Nor, apparently, was there any of the easy acceptance of the practice of cohabitation that was to be found in the Spanish colonies. Sir Walter Raleigh boasted of his Guiana expedition that, unlike the Spanish conquistadores, not one of his men ever laid hands on an Indian woman.153 If his boast is true, their behaviour was a world away from that of the band of some seventy Spaniards travelling up the river Paraguay in 1537, who, on being offered their daughters by the Indians, called it a day, and settled down to found what became the city of Asuncion.

Unique local circumstances made Paraguay an extreme example of the more general process that accompanied the colonization of Spanish America. The Guarani Indians needed the Spaniards as allies in their struggle to defend themselves against hostile neighbouring tribes. For their part, the Spaniards, moving inland from the newly founded port of Buenos Aires a thousand miles away, were too few in number to establish themselves without Guarani help. An alliance based on mutual necessity was sealed by the gift of Guarani women as wives, mistresses and servants. The continuing isolation of the settlement, and the almost total absence of Spanish women, led to the rapid creation of a unique mestizo society. Mestizo sons succeeded their fathers as encomenderos, and races and cultures mingled to a degree unparalleled elsewhere on the continent.'54

Everywhere in Spanish America, however, cohabitation took place, and the effect of it was to blur the lines of division which the Spanish authorities in church and state had originally planned to draw between the different communities. In Spanish eyes a properly ordered society was one that consisted of two parallel `republics', each with its own rights and privileges - a `republic of Spaniards' and a `republic of Indians'. But the plan to keep the two communities apart was in danger of foundering even before the emergence of a generation of mestizos which straddled the borderlines between them. The upheavals of conquest and colonization threw Spaniards and Indians into daily, and often intimate, contact. Indian women moved into Spanish households as servants and concubines, while Indians whose lives had been disrupted by the conquest gravitated naturally to the new cities founded by the Spaniards in search of new opportunities in the world of the conquerors.'55

The blending of races and cultures inherent in the process of mestizaje was therefore at work from the earliest stages of conquest and settlement, undermining the bipartite society which royal officials had fondly hoped that they could create and maintain. 116 The crown might legislate to keep encomenderos away from the Indian communities in their encomiendas; Indians might be herded into reducciones or compelled to live in special barrios or quarters of the cities reserved exclusively for them; their natural `inferiority' might be ceaselessly proclaimed by the colonists; but in a world where they heavily outnumbered settlers who could not live without their sexual and their labour services, there was no lasting possibility of closing off the two `republics' from each other by creating the equivalent of an Anglo-Irish `pale'.

Royal policy came to reflect the same tensions between segregation and integration as those to be found in colonial practice. To some extent the encomienda acted as a barrier against integration, except in matters of religion, where it was designed to foster it. In 1550, however, even as the crown legislated to prevent unmarried Spaniards from living in or near Indian communities, it also took the first steps towards breaking down the linguistic separation between the two republics, by decreeing that the friars, in defiance of their traditional practice, should teach the Indians Castilian, `so that they should acquire our civility and good customs, and in this way more easily understand and be indoctrinated into the Christian reli- gion'.157 Already the process of linguistic change was under way in New Spain, as Indians who moved into the cities picked up a working knowledge of Castilian, while Castilian words were simultaneously being incorporated into the Nahuatl vocabulary on a massive scale.15' Large numbers of the Indian vassals of the Spanish crown, however, either resisted the imposition of Castilian or remained to all intents and purposes outside its orbit, while many friars were inclined to ignore the crown's decree. At the same time, creoles with indigenous nurses learnt in childhood the language of the conquered, and in the Yucatan peninsula, which had a high degree of linguistic unity before the conquest, the Maya language, rather than Castilian, became the lingua franca in the post-conquest era."' The crown, for its part, was driven in particular by religious considerations to recognize realities. In 1578 Philip II decreed that no religious should be appointed to Indian benefices without some knowledge of the language, and two years later he set up chairs of indigenous languages in the universities of Lima and Mexico City, on the grounds that `knowledge of the general language of the Indians is essential for the explanation and teaching of Christian doctrine.""

The English, on finding themselves confronted by the linguistic barrier between themselves and the Indians, at first reacted much like the Spaniards. Indians showed little inclination to learn the language of the intruders, and initially it was the settlers who found themselves having to learn an alien tongue, both to communicate and to convert. Indians in areas of English settlement had less inducement than those in the more urbanized world of Spanish America to learn the language of the Europeans, although by degrees they found it convenient to have some of their number who could communicate in the language of the intruders. As the balance of forces tilted in favour of the settlers, however, so the pressures on the Indians to acquire some knowledge of English increased, until the colonists were securing promises from neighbouring tribes to learn the language as a requirement for submission to their rule.16' Here there was no question, as there was in Spanish America, of a policy of actively promoting, at least among a section of the colonial community, the learning of indigenous languages - a policy which had the concomitant, if unintended, effect of encouraging not only the survival but also the expansion of the major languages, especially Nahuatl, Maya and Quechua. The powerful impulse to Christianize that worked in favour of the toleration of linguistic diversity in Spain's American possessions simply did not exist in British America.

While their acquisition of pidgin English extended their access to the developing colonial society, Indians living within the confines of the British settlements tended to have the worst of every world. They remained unassimilated, but at the same time had difficulty in maintaining the degree of collective identity to be found in so many Indian communities in Spanish America. The reasons for this were partly numerical, since their numbers were relatively so much smaller than those of the indigenous population under Spanish rule. But the difference was also a reflection of the differing policies adopted in the British and Spanish colonial worlds. The Spaniards, having imposed their dominion over vast native populations, saw it as their duty to incorporate them into a society defined on the one hand by Christianity and on the other by the rights and obligations that accompanied the status of vassals of the Spanish crown. As converts and vassals the Indians were entitled to a guaranteed position within a social order that was to be modelled as closely as possible on the divine. 162 The hopes of achieving the incorporation of the Indians into an imagined ideal society by means of a strategy of separate development were constantly frustrated by colonial conditions - demographic pressures, the demands of the settler community for Indian services, the desire of many Indians themselves to take advantage of what the Europeans had to offer. But enough of the policy was retained to make it possible for Indian communities shattered by conquest and foreign domination to regroup themselves and begin adapting collectively to life in the emerging colonial societies, while striving with a measure of success to maintain that `republic of the Indians' which the crown itself was committed to preserving.

Where the Spaniards tended to think in terms of the incorporation of the Indians into an organic and hierarchically organized society which would enable them in time to attain the supreme benefits of Christianity and civility, the English, after an uncertain start, seem to have decided that there was no middle way between anglicization and exclusion. Missionary zeal was too thinly spread, the crown too remote and uninterested, to allow the development of a policy that would achieve by gradual stages the often asserted objective of bringing the Indians within the fold. In so far as a `republic of the Indians' was to be found in British America, it was to be found in the praying towns of New England. But the whole concept of such a `republic' was alien to settlers who expected the Indians either to learn to behave like English men and women, or else to move away. Tudor and Stuart England, unlike Habsburg Castile, had little tolerance for semiautonomous juridical and administrative enclaves, and no experience of dealing with substantial ethnic minorities in its midst.