| This dissertation contributes to an early modern cultural history of print through an investigation of the symbolic dimensions of literacy within New Spain conquest historiography. The cultural history of print, a term coined by historian Adrian Johns, encompasses the materiality and sociological impact of textual creation, production, and circulation in different communities around the world. The communities of Spain and its colonies, however, have long been overlooked by book historians, who concentrate primarily on continental Europe and England. Further, the little research on Spanish colonial book history does not always take into account indigenous perspectives and forms of record-keeping. Indeed, this bias is clear in the very vocabulary---print- and book-centered, according to European concepts of textual production and reading---used to describe the discipline. Nonetheless, a cultural history of print that incorporates indigenous perspectives is essential to an understanding of Latin America's generative processes, because, as Walter Mignolo and others have shown, the interaction between different cultural concepts of literacy played a central role in the Spanish colonization of the continent and was integral in the formation of new societies and eventually new political states.;In order to elucidate this interaction between Spanish and Amerindian literacies, I focus on the symbolic meaning of literacy within three crucial historical events in the Spanish conquest of Mexico, each with a European text or an indigenous record-keeping artefact at its center. These events are: the rescue of Jeronimo de Aguilar and the book of hours he kept during his eight years of captivity among the Maya of the Yucatan peninsula, as well as his role as cultural and linguistic translator between Hernan Cortes and the Amerindians, as told by Spanish priest Francisco Lopez de Gomara, conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo, official chronicler of Mexico City Francisco Cervantes de Salazar, mestizo historian Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, and indigenous chronicler Chimalpahin (chapter 1); the portrayal of Moctezuma via his use of pictorial manuscripts and Amerindian received wisdom in handling the Spaniards' initial appearance as reported by Spanish priest Diego Duran and Amerindian historiographer Hernando Alvarado Tezozomoc (chapter 2); and Ixtlilxochitl's and conquistador Hernan Cortes's versions of Cortes's infamous execution of the Amerindian tlahtoani Cuauhtemoc during the disastrous journey to Hibueras (Honduras), an assassination he dubiously legitimates using an Amerindian pictorial manuscript (chapter 3).;By juxtaposing conflicting versions of these episodes, I explore how and why the authors assign varying levels of cultural, political, and religious authority to different types of literacy. I interrogate how much they are able to control the meaning of record-keeping artefacts and corresponding practices of another tradition by applying their own notions of literacy; and whether the power struggles in the histories themselves reflect the power struggles in a historiographical process that often pits textual authorities and authoritative sources against one another. Through this juxtaposition, I challenge the critical commonplace that Europeans believed the Amerindians had no writing and thus no history or civilization, showing instead that historians from Spanish as well as indigenous and mestizo backgrounds depended on sources from so-called alphabetical cultures and those considered to lack true writing in order to construct their own textual authority; and furthermore, that the construction of authority using resources from both cultures perhaps occurred earlier than previously thought. |
