At the Crossroads: Introducing New Work in Early America and Colonial Latin America

The people of San Germán, Puerto Rico, had gone to sleep for the night. It was 1581, and they had recently relocated their fledgling town inland in an effort to protect it from seaborne attack. But the Kalinagos who broke the people's slumber with sudden violence were well informed, for one of their number had produced a map based on knowledge he acquired while he was living in the town as a slave. He had escaped not long ago and made his way home to the island of Dominica on a raft. Now he had returned with some well-armed brethren. This sixteenth-century version of special forces broke into the houses where they knew other Kalinagos were held, took the people they sought, and then melted away again into the darkness.1Such an archival drama as this is the stuff of legend, or of Hollywood; it is also the stuff of modern historians' dreams. No story could be more satisfying to most of us than this real-life drama featuring mobile, cosmopolitan, and feisty Indigenous people using the knowledge they had gained from their varied life experiences to empower themselves and their loved ones. Yet if we wish to end the movie that is playing in our mind's eye on a high note, we cannot allow the camera to pull back or waver; we must not let it pick up the dozens, possibly hundreds, of other Kalinagos still in bondage in Puerto Rico, or any of the other enslaved people lying wide-eyed in the darkness, awaiting the horrors that the morrow would bring. Thinking about this wider view may make us uncomfortable. Is it the case that our desire to find a trajectory that demonstrates empowerment may sometimes—just sometimes—interfere with what we call our scholarship? Has the moment perhaps come for us to acknowledge that wider reality more distinctly and consider how we may want to see our practices evolve to account for it? Most of the authors in this joint issue of the William and Mary Quarterly and the Hispanic American Historical Review, “Colonial Roots/Routes in North America and Latin America,” would vote yes.The editors of the Hispanic American Historical Review and the William and Mary Quarterly could not foresee what they would elicit when they released their call for contributions to a joint issue of the two journals. They fielded three panels at the 2019 meeting of the American Society for Ethnohistory (ASE) around the joint issue's theme. The editors simply sought scholars who wished to speak to both early Americanists and Latin Americanists, and given that the chosen venue was the ASE conference, they assumed the study of Indigenous peoples would play an important role. Beyond that, they had no expectations, as the theme was broad. A subset of the original presenters, as well as a few individuals who were solicited later, eventually met online in the spring of 2021 to discuss their fully elaborated papers and consider their collective significance. As the articles were workshopped, peer reviewed, and revised, it became clear that they shared certain common elements.For about 20 years now, scholars studying the early modern Americas have been partisans of the notion of mobility. We have been interested in the mobility of bodies (the movement of people, both individually and collectively) as well as of psyches (human beings' extraordinary ability to uproot and then successfully reembed themselves elsewhere). We have sought what we called cosmopolitanism among people previously assumed to be place-bound and culture-bound. We have explored the creation of new cultural frameworks and ethnic identities on the part of people whose circumstances pushed them into motion or who themselves chose new circumstances, referring to the process by various terms—most often creolization (if we studied the African diaspora) or ethnogenesis (if we studied the Indigenous). Whenever possible, we have focused on the power of mobile peoples to subvert the expectations of dominant groups. We have loved to envision the era we study as dynamic and exciting, its global currents generative rather than overpowering or ultimately victimizing. To some extent, we were following a well-known pattern: like other scholars who have first focused on recognizing victimization, we have welcomed reinterpretations underscoring empowerment. One need only think, for instance, of Oscar Handlin's The Uprooted (1951), a key work in immigration studies, giving way to John Bodnar's The Transplanted (1985) a generation later.2 But there was also something unique to our modern moment about the field's predilections, for with the world's relatively new emphasis on globalization, many historians—not just those who studied the Americas—began to seek it in the past.3Needless to say, not everyone has agreed: over the years, a number of historians emphasized quite different interpretations of mobility. Some Native Americanists used the term shatter zone to talk about the world created in the wake of colonial wars.4 Likewise, more than ten years ago, James H. Sweet wrote his memorable piece “The Quiet Violence of Ethnogenesis” for the William and Mary Quarterly. “A sharper focus on the violence of ethnogenesis,” he suggested, “offers us a chance to move even further beyond the normative narratives of Atlantic history toward ones that capture a broader poetics of resistance and loss in the lives of Africans and Amerindians.” His words came as a response to a now-classic article by James Sidbury and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “Mapping Ethnogenesis in the Early Modern Atlantic.”5 But it is their article, not Sweet's comment, that is far more often cited: Google Scholar tells us that the citation frequencies thus far have been three to one. Perhaps the field was not quite ready for Sweet's point when it came.The articles in this joint issue, taken as a whole, indicate that today's early Americanists—both those who study the North and those who study the Latin world—are increasingly tempering their enthusiasm for the idea that mobility is almost intrinsically tied to empowerment. The field as a whole seems more prepared to acknowledge that movement often involves the loss not only of cultural customs and familiar associates but also of their close relative, security. Mobility thus generally involves increased vulnerability to pain. More specifically, six of the eight articles included here exhibit two phenomena: first, a focus on the fact that the movement seen in the early modern Atlantic world translated to enslavement for vast numbers of people whom we have failed to acknowledge; and second, an awareness that the movement itself was often born not of increasing knowledge or improving vantage points but rather of a desperate desire to survive. Let us consider each of the two subjects in turn.Nancy E. van Deusen, in “In the Tethered Shadow: Native American Slavery, African Slavery, and the Disappearance of the Past,” considers the historiography of Indigenous enslavement, asking why it was only in the recent past that the phenomenon came to be understood as mammoth in scope and worthy of study. She demonstrates that certain dominant paradigms rendered it nearly impossible for most non-Indigenous people even to see such enslavement. Among these have been nationalistic narratives concerning American origin stories; the popular notion that the Indigenous demographic decline due to disease was so extreme that Europeans had no choice but to enslave Africans; and the perception that powerful economic enclaves (such as sugar mills or cotton plantations) are necessarily the most important forms of activity to study.6 Her piece in effect reminds us why almost no one until now has done what Casey Schmitt accomplishes in “‘Betwixt Ye Two Rivers’: Trafficking and Colonization in Early Seventeenth-Century Saint Christopher”: hers is a study of the Lesser Antilles that focuses on the ubiquity of slavery, including but not limited to the African trade, in a time and place where scholars have previously wanted to see only English adventurism. It turns out that Thomas Warner planted the first formalized Anglo-Caribbean colony on Saint Christopher, not because the island was unclaimed by other Europeans, but rather because he had already learned to make use of its flourishing trade in human captives. In the Lesser Antilles, the Kalinagos, English, French, Dutch, and others sold their prisoners to each other when and where it profited them to do so. The fluid, even borderless, nature of that world rendered it a dangerous one, permanently empowering only to those with numbers and weapons enough always to be the enslavers, never the enslaved.7Two articles in this collection consider a different phenomenon: what it signified when ordinary people chose to make use of the migratory routes opened by colonial ventures. Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez, in “The Unsteady Comanchería: A Reexamination of Power in the Indigenous Borderlands of the Eighteenth-Century Greater Southwest,” challenges the idea, long-standing in the US historiography, of the eighteenth-century Comanches as the superpower of their region. They have existed in our national imaginary as the quintessential empowered nomads: galloping over the prairies, striking terror into the hearts of white settlers, doing the bidding of no one else. Recently Pekka Hämäläinen famously gave them an “empire.” Consulting wide-ranging Spanish sources, Rivaya-Martínez demonstrates that the Comanches constituted one among several powerful Indigenous nations and, like all the others, were fighting a losing battle to retain their power. When they moved farther south beginning in the 1770s, occasionally even crossing into Mexico, what some have seen as a fearless program of expansion emerged out of their experience of losing control over some of their northern territories.8 In a comparable vein, Laura Matthew, in “Two Bigamists in Tehuantepec: Global(ized) Itineraries in Southern Mesoamerica, circa 1600,” brings together the contemporaneous biographies of two men to illuminate the contrast between what early modern mobility meant for a Spaniard with extensive cultural capital and what it meant for an Indigenous man with very little. An educated Spaniard could cross the Pacific twice and the Atlantic thrice, manipulating church and state bureaucracies as he went. But an ordinary Indigenous laborer was caught in a claustrophobic commercial circuit that his people traveled between Oaxaca and Guatemala—one, indeed, that they had traveled to some extent even before the Spanish conquest. All that had really changed for him was that now the Spaniards sat in judgment on his actions and could punish him violently when they chose. His mobility had hardly freed him.9One article treats both Indigenous enslavement and the question of Indigenous mobility. Margaret Ellen Newell argues in “‘The Rising of the Indians’; or, The Native American Revolution of (16)’76” that all over North America, within about 80 years of early European settlement, Native Americans chose to fight back. Their decisions are in keeping with what James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz long ago termed the reaction on the part of the Indigenous that usually occurred within about two generations of contact. We have been accustomed to thinking that the Indigenous ultimately lost these wars. Newell asks us to remain open to the possibility that to some extent they got what they hoped for—namely, some limitation to the predatory enslavement practiced by the settlers and to the constraints on Indigenous movement that forced them to migrate or hunt in patterns not of their choosing, as well as, in association with these gains, a moment of cultural revitalization that in some cases had a lasting legacy. The unplanned and unforeseen consistency between the findings of this piece and those of van Deusen, Schmitt, Rivaya-Martínez, and Matthew is indeed striking.10Some might argue that we are seeing not a disciplinary shift in philosophical or perspectival underpinnings, but rather the result of including North America and Latin America in one conversation. Such a conversation will, of necessity, focus more on the earlier period than the later, before nation-states' histories are siloed from each other. And the earlier period will, by definition, yield more studies of peripheral worlds, of still only lightly administered regions, which will in turn yield a picture of violent and uncontrolled terrain that leaves some people victimized. All this may be true, but we are nonetheless seeing the construction of a different vision of the same people—or the same kinds of people—we would once have characterized primarily as mobile, flexible, and cosmopolitan survivors.Moreover, although most of the work in this joint issue focuses on questions related to Indigenous history, a consideration of scholarship in an allied field shows a similar pattern, one that extends across time. Matt D. Childs's article, “The Roots and Routes of African Religious Beliefs in the Atlantic World,” brings us lessons from generations of scholars studying the African diaspora, particularly those focused on religion. He demonstrates that in recent decades, the field has unambiguously chosen routes over roots—that is, scholars have been far more interested in exploring patterns of Black Christian creolization than in plumbing the depths of African cultural roots of the belief systems of the Americas' peoples. In brief, researchers have here, as elsewhere, preferred to focus on mobility, not loss. But Childs asks that we pay more attention to what must in fact be lost as a result of repeated violent upheavals; he asks that we spend more time both seeking African perspectives and then acknowledging that there is much we cannot learn about all that disempowered people once knew. The sort of work he wishes to foreground often requires sustained attention to fragmentary sources sought over many years. Some of the most inspirational scholarship may come from outside the borders of the United States. Childs suggests, for instance, that more of us should read the work of Brazilian historians such as João José Reis.11 Certainly I myself can attest to the fact that historical studies involving the Indigenous are far more likely to dwell on their interactions with Europeans, and on their successes as literally and figuratively mobile actors, rather than on the deep roots of their varied and shifting cultures. Indeed, anthropologists remain much more likely than historians to study Indigenous languages, and even among this joint issue's fine roster of historians, only Laura Matthew offers a deep engagement with the linguistic and cultural elements of an Indigenous person's world. We may hope that in ten years such pieces will not be so lonely.In this context, I may surprise readers by arguing that it is just as necessary that we sound the depths of European cultural expectations and desires. It is far from true that we already know enough about them. Before his recent death, Sir John Elliott publicly called for us not to forget that the generations of scholarship available about Europeans in the early modern Atlantic do not reflect the sensitivities we would bring to such studies were we to forge ahead with them now.12 We should not feel self-conscious about studying Europeans. They mattered. We should study them eagerly—but differently than before. Two of the articles in this collection, one in each journal, offer examples of such work. Jack in and the in the studies the between these two island as it existed in that would have seen that modern historians or his of and the of and on more than the work of and their perspectives are in his article by those of ordinary whose important contributions to the about the Americas only in fragmentary archival In a very in “The of the of the studies the in which the Spaniards of the to the of the Indigenous of so as to their They on new elements such as church town and Christian to a new that would the and ultimately them. article is a piece about as it a most of cultural And I know that Indigenous sources would indicate that the is something a number of Indigenous to have their of changed more by church and town than by and we we eventually find to be among the few who still a from a past or who still the words of a who ago and whom we read when we were In some while these I was by the of our as that were produced in the and came to as I are in some and others have had when the world was in and power at the of the conversation. B. would to Jack that the early English much like the even earlier and he an of to them in their with one even for in and might read to the of one of his the that had the many of were the of the was and a like over the we were he might on with the of the of the of activity and of certain might Laura Matthew on on asking the most of in the Latin American world to yield the of would with Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez the to be by the the the the on or And the of from the them who is still among would be with the of Casey Schmitt and others in studying a phenomenon he long ago us to in such numbers within the then their numbers outside must have been and their as as generally No one in the was much about Indigenous as a phenomenon not one that past the of but certain historians from the past of the would offer to Margaret Ellen Newell and E. van what generation called historical and then the memorable an enslaved at the of about early in the it is not that I see in the joint issue's but movement Perhaps some lessons have had to be would argue I see an increasing ability to acknowledge at one and the same time both the by the relatively disempowered and their ability to and in some to that is no but more and more scholars are not to let themselves between the two have in the most of by our both of sources and of Rivaya-Martínez, and Schmitt all argue that even those of us who seek to study the world cannot fully what occurred if we have not read sources in Deusen, Matthew, and Childs each how much Atlantic world scholars to the historiography of Latin America and, in some to the of Latin American work as a of the of what the Indigenous had to and they They will us a about the nature of colonial in for instance, Indigenous people could feel to even as they to They a mobility even in the case of cultural One the and in Mexico, when the people were first forced to to that they could not could not speak he used to his at the and and then toward and But historians at two different of so this was by one who tells us that their of Europeans was He of by were He were was at this when the that everyone to for The articles in this joint issue us that we should not such even if they from where we both literally and very to

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