Conquering Creoles: Power, Transculturation, and the Limits of Empire in New Spain, 1521-1625

This dissertation examines conquering creole consciousness through the voluminous pastoral and ethnographic writings of Mota y Escobar (1546-1625), a first-generation elite criollo of Hispanic descent, who served as Bishop of Guadalajara-Nueva Galicia (1598-1607) and Tlaxcala-Puebla (1608-1625). His generation, the first of the conquistador descendants, believed themselves entitled to extend and naturalize conqueror power as a form of perpetually inheritable privilege, in order to continue the construction of empire and cement their own place within it. Mota y Escobar’s cohort enjoyed the returns of their parents’ and grandparents’ institutionalization of Hispanic domination but experienced the Crown’s efforts to claw back the mercedes (rewards) that undergirded this naturalization. Mota y Escobar’s writings exemplify the ways in which creole power was made through transcultural agents who used Iberian epistemological constructs alongside distinctly novohispano goals, desires, and affect to assert their natural right to rule the colony. As mobile and strategic cultural agents, these creoles banded together around a sense of entitlement as the legitimate inheritors of New World wealth and power, and as the most effective conquerors, creators, and interpreters of New World order. Bearing out Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortíz’s vision of New World cultural transformations as processes of exchange, loss, and creation (transculturation), this dissertation shows criollo power as articulated and negotiated through colonial bureaucracy, reproduced through the rhetoric of whiteness, and managed through the practices of slavery, patronage, and wealth accumulation. It highlights Mota y Escobar’s efforts as a transcultural agent to communicate his sense of his place in the imperial structure using a language that moved flexibly between what was European and what was novohispano. To naturalize Hispanic control, power had to be made and remade constantly in the colony of New Spain, and conquering creoles like Mota y Escobar laboured to transform and translate European cultural codes into novohispanoorder. Conquering creoles revelled in their domination and marginalization of other racialized groups in New Spain, all the while romanticizing the criollo relationship to colonial space. A detailed examination of a member of this generation helps illustrate the logic of violence upon which criollismo was built.

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