Letters to Felipe II: Native Epistolary and the Negotiation for Power

• In Event: Colonial Indigenous Intellectuals: Writing, Voices, and Networks

Abstract

Letter writing was among the strategies employed by native communities in the Indies to defend claims to status and autonomy. These transatlantic communications between subject and sovereign contain within them an outline of the range of skills and acumen deployed by native intellectuals. Far from offering a "vision of the vanquished," as scholars were once wont to call the native perspective on conquest and colonization, these letters demonstrate nuanced and dexterous negotiations between Indian intellectuals and the crown. This paper will focus on a selection of case studies from Mexico. For example, harnessing classical humanism for the cause of defending native claims, don Pablo Nazareo wrote three letters in Latin to the Phillip II pleading for the recovery of his family's property and privileges. His letters, laced with quotations form Ovid, Horace, and Justinian, demonstrate just how expertly some native intellectuals used the tools of the colonists to resist colonialism. Other texts to be addressed include a letter written in Nahuatl to King Phillip II in 1554, signed by native luminaries of Mexico City, that pleads for better treatment and the Spanish language Letter from the Council of Huejotzingo (1560), in which the authors protest a tax that had been levied on them. Written in Latin, Spanish, and Nahuatl all of these letters offer productive insights into how native intellectuals framed their authority in the sixteenth-century and negotiated with King Phillip II for greater autonomy and privilege.

Author

• Amber E Brian, University of Iowa