The Long Road from Guadalupe to Televisa

Verdesio, Gustavo.
CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 2, Number 1, Spring
2002, pp. 277-286 (Review)
Published by Michigan State University Press
DOI: 10.1353/ncr.2002.0014
For additional information about this article
Access Provided by University of Michigan @ Ann Arbor at 11/03/11 7:30PM GMT
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ncr/summary/v002/2.1verdesio.html
q 277
B O O K R E V I E W
The Long Road from
Guadalupe to Televisa
G U S T A V O V E R D E S I O
University of Michigan
Images at War: Mexico from Columbus to Blade Runner (14922019). By
Serge Gruzinski, trans. Heather MacLean. Durham: Duke University Press,
2001
1uis ioxc ovinnui 1nnxsin1iox oi sinci cnuzixsiis :o nooi is n
welcome addition to the authors corpus in English. It is, besides, an impor-
tant companion to The Conquest of Mexico in that it supplements some of
the aspects of the process of Westernization that took place during colonial
times to which the aforementioned book did not pay special attention. One
of those neglected aspects is the role played by the image throughout the
colonial period.
One of the objectives of this book is to show that images were very
important for the Europeans and that they constituted an extremely valu-
able tool for colonization. There are different kinds of reasons for the
relevance of the image in colonial times: spiritual (the imperative of evan-
gelization), linguistic (as a tool to overcome the obstacle posed by the indige-
nous languages to the missionaries message), and technical (the availability
and popularization of engravings and of the printing press [z]). Yet the
Amerindians did not remain passive before the European aggression. On the
contrary, they responded to the images that were imposed on them with
images of their own creation. That is why Gruzinski asserts that, in good
part, the enterprise of colonization was a war of images that lasted several
centuries (z).
The book begins with a chapter on the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, because
in Gruzinskis opinion the importance of the image can be traced as far back
as his arrival in American lands. Christopher Columbuss gaze is what the
chapter focuses on in its rst section. There, Gruzinski analyzes the ways in
which Columbus deals with indigenous objects that seem to be representa-
tional. Yet it is Fray Ramn Pan (a Catalonian friar) who, in :(6, studies
the indigenous objects today known as Cemes, which have many meanings,
origins, and forms (:o). In spite of the polysemous nature of those objects
and the lack of referent points for the task of interpreting them from a com-
pletely different culture, Fray Ramn Pan does not describe them as idols
that represented false gods or the devil (::). They are, instead, things
endowed or not with a life (::). Columbus, for his part, does not call the
Amerindians idolaters either (::).
Although Gruzinkis attribution of ethnographic sensitivity to Fray
Ramn Pan is arguable (because it sounds like a forced attribution of mod-
ern values to an early modern subject whoI hasten to declare in order to
avoid falling into an anachronism that would eventually be noticedhad no
knowledge of anything remotely similar to ethnography), it is clear that the
friar tries, most of the time, to describe the indigenous rituals in their own
specicity. That is, he does not try to understand them from an exclusively
European standpoint but tries, instead, to understand the local context in
which they take place. Nevertheless, it can be said that the discourses of
Pan and Columbus share one trait with modern ethnography: they are uni-
lateral discourses that do not give the Amerindian the chance to produce, in
turn, a discourse about the European subject.
The following section studies Peter Martyr of Anghieras (humanist and
advisor to the Spanish Crown, the rst to ever publish an encyclopedic vol-
ume on the New World) interpretation of the Cemes as ghosts (::8) and
Gonzalo Fernndez de Oviedos (the rst royally appointed chronicler of the
Indies) characterization of them as gures of the devil (:8zz). In both cases,
Bo ok Re vi e w 278 q
the indigenous object is reduced to something familiar, to something easily
understood in the European episteme. Yet, it is with the arrival of Hernn
Corts (the conqueror of Mexico-Tenochtitlan) in the discursive scene that
the word Cem disappears and gives way to the most familiar one, at least
for a European audience: idol (zz).
According to Gruzinski, with Corts disappears any interest or concern
for the elucidation of the questions about what the idols meant or what they
were used for; that is, what replaces Pans curiosity is a total indifference for
the identity and function of the indigenous objects (z). This attitude was
the product of a decision and not of an impossibility (zz6).
From then on, the idol becomes, if it is made of a precious metal, a valu-
able curio (z6). The object is now appreciated for its value and, not less
importantly, for its beauty: many of them will end up in one of the growing
European collections. In that new home (the collection), indigenous objects
are separated from their original contexts and are, in that manner, deprived
of their usual meaning (z;). The rst idols seen by Europeans, the Cemes,
were not as valuable as the, say, Aztec ones, because they were made of less
interesting materials such as stone or wood.
According to Gruzinski, the encounter with more complex civilizations
such as the Aztecs, rst, and the Incas, later, forced Europeans to come up
with more elaborate strategies for both domination and conversion (z8).
Although this characterization may owe a lot to European evolutionary and
diffusionist models, it is true that a new strategy developed: that which con-
sisted in the persecution of objects that did not exist in the indigenous
world; that is, the persecution of the idolsa European construct without a
counterpart in any of the indigenous cultures encountered by the invaders
(z8). Europeans started, then, watching for signs of a complex religious life,
for indicators of an easily taken wealth (z).
In the second chapter (entitled War), Gruzinski tells us that the adver-
sarys images are unacceptable if they are meant to be worshipped (o). This
notion starts to become dominant with, again, Corts, who started the afore-
mentioned practice: the systematic destruction of the images of the
Amerindians (o). It is with Corts, then, that the persecution of idolatry
takes the form of a two-step operation: rst, the destruction of the native
Gu s t av o Ve r de s i o q 279
idols, second, the substitution of them by Christian images (:). It was he
and not the priests who came with him who both preached against the local
idols and replaced them with Catholic images (z). In contrast, some of
those priests showed a remarkably pragmatic attitude towards indigenous
images: Why bother taking away their idols from a temple or an oratory
now, if they then transfer them elsewhere? (().
The European invasion, then, unleashed a ood of Western images onto
the American continents ((). In Gruzinskis opinion, Corts did not take,
from those Western images, their didactic, emotional, or mnemonic capac-
itiesand thus their qualities of representationas much as their material
efficacy (;). That is, he tried to persuade the Amerindians that his images
were more useful and powerful than theirs and, therefore, that they would
be able to satisfy indigenous needs and secular expectations better than
their old idols (;).
The operation of substitution was not that difficult because, in general,
the Amerindians realized that it did not entail a major change in the ways
in which things worked: the sanctuaries, the local clergy were imper-
turbably recycled around the new images and the profanation remained
apparently without consequence on the order of things and the world (8).
However, this process of replacement had not always worked so smoothly. It
sometimes encountered unexpected difficulties, such as the deviational
interpretations the aborigines performed vis--vis the Christian images, for
example the widespread belief among indigenous communities that all
European religious images represented dioses (gods) and that, therefore,
the virgin Marys images were the images of god ().
In any case, the Spaniards did not abandon their double policy of bar-
tering (gold and silver) and the imposition of images. These two operations
were always together, according to Gruzinski, and, in the Western worldview,
the exchange favored the Europeans in the economic realm and the
Amerindians in the domain of the image: the ones they were acquiring were
the true ones ((:).
The idol, a Western creation, was the heir of a Judeo-Christian world-
view, and it only existed in the gaze of the conquistadors ((z). In this world-
view, the idol is a false image to which a true (that is, Western) one must be
Bo ok Re vi e w 280 q
opposed ((). In this respect, colonization appears, in the realm of images,
as a decontamination ((;).
The Spaniards had difficulty understanding how the indigenous images
worked. They had trouble realizing that the Amerindians images were not
gurative and that they were not intended as realistic representations but as
a means of communication (o). There is also another form of indigenous
representation that was difficult for the Spaniards to grasp: the ixiptla.
Gruzinski denes it as follows:
The ixiptla could be the statue of a god . . . a divinity that appeared in a
vision, a priest representing a deity by covering himself in adornments, or
even a victim who turns into a god destined to be sacriced. These various
semblances . . . could be juxtaposed during the rituals: the priest symbol-
izing the god placed himself next to the statue he represented and there
was no need for their appearances to be identical. (o:)
The ixiptla is, besides, the container of a power and the actualization of a
power; it does not point to a beyond but incarnates the immanence of the
forces that surround us as human beings (:). In opposition to this concep-
tion we find the Christian image, that is a copy of an original to which,
guided by resemblance, it points (:).
In this context of mutual misunderstanding, the Amerindians tried to
hide their extant idols as well as to produce new ones. This was not a very
difficult operation for them because, traditionally, the worshipping of gods
was done in private. Only on special occasions were the rituals made public,
and most of the time they took place beyond the gaze of the populacecon-
tact with the gods was reserved for the members of the nobility (). Yet it
was not always necessary for the Amerindians to hide their religious objects
from the invaders, because many of them were not even visible to Western
eyes. Trained only to perceive idols, the Spaniards were not able to see the
religious nature of some objects such as stones, mirrors, clothes, maguey
horns, owers, and cocoa, to give just a few examples (6). These non-
gurative forms of religious representation were, then, virtually invisible to
Western subjects.
Gu s t av o Ve r de s i o q 281
Indigenous religious practices became, therefore, even more private than
they had been and, of course, completely clandestine (;). Their beliefs sur-
vived mainly in three media: the man-gods (human beings dressed like gods),
their visions, and their cult objects (). Another form in which Amerindian
religion survived was a wide variety of syncretisms that consisted in the jux-
tapositionnot the substitutionof elements from both cultures ().
Yet, in the rst stages of the conquest of Mexico, the destruction of tem-
ples and idols somewhat paralyzed, or at least shocked temporarily, the
Amerindians in a way that stopped them from giving an organized response
to the aggression (6). The rst Franciscan friars who predicated the gospel
in Mexico chose to be equipped with very few images to replace the
destroyed idols, though: they were afraid that the locals would misinterpret
some of the Christian images, such as the representation of Jesus body on
the cross, as referring to something similar to human sacrices (6).
The Franciscan images were the semblance of another thing; they were
in lieu of the original (66). They were also more inuenced by Flemish paint-
ings than by the Italian or Spanish traditions (6;o) and Peter of Ghent, a
Fleming, was one of the most renowned masters who taught the
Amerindians how to reproduce the Christian art. Frescoes, walls saturated
with images, also characterized the Franciscan enterprise and brought to
the fore a new organization of space (;;). They popularized, also, a very
Western pictorial trend: an anthropomorphic kind of painting (;8). This
trait and many others posed a challenge to the perceptive habits of
Amerindians, for whom the Western stylized representation of nature (caves,
clouds, and trees, for example) was not by any means obvious (;). The space
that organized those represented objects was not, either, self-evident to
indigenous eyes, and the actions portrayed belonged to a repertoire
unknown to them (8o).
There were, however, some possible bridges between indigenous and
Western forms of representation, as Gruzinski points out: the absence of a
background and the proliferation of emblems in some Christian representa-
tions; plus the graphic representation of hierarchies allowed some room for
at least a partial reception of the Occidental image by the Amerindians (8().
What was probably less obvious to the Amerindian consumers of Western
Bo ok Re vi e w 282 q
images was the imaginary of which they were a part (8). The Franciscans
used images in yet another form: theatrical representations that had plenty
of special effects and trompe loeil (o:).
In chapter (, the most extensive and heavily documented chapter,
Gruzinski studies the baroque image in general and the myth of the virgin
of Guadalupe in particular. This latter is reconstructed from its origins, the
astute concoction masterminded by the head of the Mexican church, Alonso
de Montufar (6 and passim). The framework for the appearance of the cult
is the :;os, a decade that had marked the departure of Peter of Ghent and
the arrival of the Jesuits and the Inquisition, which changed the religious sit-
uation in Mexico completely (::z).
The increasing complexity of the baroque imagethat included texts as
an important part of the visual messagewhere the elements were the prod-
uct of an intellectual construction and the deciphering of it required a cer-
tain degree of education, lost a good part of the didactic strength of the
Franciscan images (::6). During the whole baroque period there is, besides,
a proliferation of sacred images, not only in public places such as churches,
but also in private homes (:;). And those images, far from being simple or
modest, were opulent: the materials they were made of cost a lot of money
(:(). Those images were also very public and massively consumed. They
were an instrument used to achieve a goal: the unication of a very hetero-
geneous society under a single imaginary (:(6). Finally, during the baroque
era the Inquisition was in charge of the vigilance of the quality of images,
which means that the tribunal watched over the respect of aesthetic canons
(:;).
Chapter studies the consumption of the baroque image, not only by
European but also by mestizo and Amerindian subjects. The reader is pre-
sented with a society in which the image is omnipresent to the point that
something like a colonization of everyday life starts to take place (:6:). All
kinds of objects were decorated with religious motifs: fans and watches
depicting scenes from the Passion of Christ, stockings with saints images,
buttons featuring the Virgin, and so on (:6:). Confronted with this prolif-
eration of images, the church had to defend the monopoly it claimed
against all these forms of appropriation of the religious images (:6). Those
Gu s t av o Ve r de s i o q 283
appropriations could take the form of monstrous clandestine figures,
unorthodox commentaries, free interpretations, and so forth (:66().
Yet another form in which the masses appropriated sacred images was
tattooing and body painting (:6). Other ways in which consumers related
to images was by coercing images to fulfill their wishes by attacking and
sometimes destroying them (:66;o), and by having visions (usually
prompted more by hallucinogenic drugs than by religious fervor) or fan-
tasies (:;o;(). However, for the church, the most worrying kind of appro-
priation was the insincere use of the images by indigenous subjects who still
believed in their ancient gods. Notwithstanding the undeniable existence of
these practices, it is reasonable to assume that not all Amerindians con-
sciously manipulated Christian images (:;;). Many of them simply looked at
the images in a different waya way that we should admit escapes us (:;;).
According to Gruzinski, though, there is one thing we can say about
indigenous reactions to Western religious images: they seem to have been
very receptive to them (:;;). This receptivity can be explained, in part, by an
old Nahua tradition that consisted of bringing back home the conquered gods
from their military raids (:;;). Another reason can be found in the indigenous
belief in the effectiveness of the Western image (:;8). Yet another reason: the
missionaries often used the word ixiptla to refer to the images of the saints
(:;8). This may have taken on a tactical role for the Indians and been used
to mask the recourse to ancient divinities, but it also fullled a function that
was analogous to that of the traditional ixiptla. It was considered a living
thing, to which one offered food and drink. From the very moment of contact
the Western image thus received a native interpretation (:;).
The appropriations that the Spaniards viewed as indigenous misunder-
standings of the Christian image can be better explained, Gruzinski tells us,
by accepting that indigenous interpretations were based less on error than
on habits, practices, and notions that could help them understand, and deal
with, colonial domination (:8o). There were, of course, misunderstandings,
but they were occasionally mutual, like the equation of saints and idols that
took place on both sides of the cultural clash (:8o).
In any case, the indigenous imaginary showed a much more open
attitude toward the new than the Spaniards imaginary, as is shown, for
Bo ok Re vi e w 284 q
example, in the rapid incorporation of indigenous subjects to the ranks of
those producing Christian images (:8). Amerindians played, then, from the
time of Peter of Ghent on, an important role in the diffusion of Western
images (:z). Yet their role in the reproduction of the enemys images
changed over time. For example, in the eighteenth century the production
of images became an expression of native resistance that occasionally
turned into rebellion. They even became concrete representations of the
political, social and religious refusal of colonial order (zoz).
Little by little, Amerindians began to oppose their own Christian images
to the ones produced by Europeans by claiming the monopoly and the
authenticity of Christian worship for themselves. The fake, the impostor, the
devil, was the Spaniard (zo). But not all indigenous groups responded in
the same way to the challenge posed by the iconography brought by the con-
quistadors: the receptivity depended on the different imaginaries that pre-
dominated in the different regions of Mesoamerica (zo). This is why
Gruzinski prefers to talk about indigenous imaginaries in the plural.
The conclusion of this book is a very hurried overview of the most recent
history of Mexico, from the eighteenth century to the date of publication (end
of the twentieth century). In the end, he proposes a nexus between the baroque
and postindustrial imaginaries: the baroque proliferation of images somewhat
opened the way for the politics, machinery and effects of the image today. It
did so not only through its homogenizing function and its universalizing
obsession, but also by creating a singular rapport with the image, making it
the basis of a surreality into which the gaze could sink, that abolished the dis-
tance from prototype to reection, erasing the conditions of its production
(zz). The whole chapter provides valuable insights, as is customary in
Gruzinski, but it lacks sometimes the depth of analysis that one would have
desired to see in the conclusion of such a dense and richly documented book.
The conclusion is perhaps too short to account for both the long period that
it intends to cover and the not-so-clear links between the baroque image and
the ones produced by the modern-day Mexican network Televisa.
Throughout this volume one gets the impression that Gruzinski could
have gone further in the analysis of the cornucopia of documents he pres-
ents to the reader. He usually stops analyzing once he has more or less
Gu s t av o Ve r de s i o q 285
squeezed the sources of the information thats relevant to proving his point,
which is usually the Westernization of indigenous lives and imaginaires. One
could safely say that the pages dedicated to the Westernization of the indige-
nous peoples of Mexico by European subjects outnumber, by a wide margin,
the ones dedicated to registering indigenous forms of resistance to it.
His claim that the study of colonial Latin America is important for the
understanding of the present is welcome in an academic world that consis-
tently forgets about that region (zz;), as is the case in postcolonial studies
and other progressive scholarly practices. However, there should be better
ways to make this connection between an unjust present and an ignomin-
ious past than to quickly propose a nexus between the future world pro-
posed by the film Blade Runner (or the present world that some, like
Gruzinski, identify as postmodern) and the colonial Latin American one.
This is how he sees those links: The blurring of references, the confusion of
ethnic and cultural registers, the overlap of life and ction, the diffusion of
drugs, the multiplication of the images bases also turned the New Spain
baroque imaginaires into a preguration of the neobaroque or postmodern
imaginaires that we experience today (zz6). It seems to me that this kind
of parallelism entails some risks, such as falling into the trap of believing in
a transhistoric zeitgeist shared by the baroque era and postmodernity. It also
seems to me that if one intends to make such a risky and difficult-to-prove
statement, more documentation and discussion should be dedicated to
make the argument more persuasive or at least more plausible.
Having said that, it is evident that we are before an important work that
contributes to the understanding of the effects of colonization on the peo-
ples of Mexico. It is not, perhaps, as illuminating as other contributions by
Gruzinski, like, say, The Conquest of Mexico or his most recent El pen-
samiento mestizo, but it is relevant nonetheless. It offers the reader a mag-
nificent documentation, a series of insightful readings performed by an
acute observer, and a focus on the hitherto neglected role of the image in the
colonization of that important region.

Bo ok Re vi e w 286 q