When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Work
Review: Commentary on Ramón Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sex, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846, by Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, Professor in Ethnic Studies, California State University, Hayward, and author of Roots of Resistance: Land Tenure in New Mexico, 1680-1980. The Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, including officials, traditional leaders, and the many intellectuals among them, are protesting this book. It garnered ten prestigious scholarly awards in 1992, including the Herbert E. Bolton Prize in Latin American History, the Haring Prize in Latin American Studies, the John Hope Franklin Prize in American Studies, the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize and the James A. Raleigh Prize on race relations from the Organization of American Historians, the prize for the best book of 1991 from the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association, and, significantly, the Quincentenary of the Discovery Prize from the Embassy of Spain. Why is the History establishment so impressed with this text? I find nothing new in the book. There an overlay of crackpot theory muting the same old tired colonialist 3facts,2 gleaned from Spanish church and state documents, and psuedo-scientific ethnographic 3data2 from the 1920s-40s, with the same pro-colonial conclusions. The book is riddled through with blatant racism and sexism, and is, I believe, a set back for Native American history, Chicano history and for women1s history. Because the footnotes are gathered at the end of the book and most of the notes reference key abbreviations, the reader is likely not to consult the notes and get discouraged if she does so. A typical instance: After feeding, the activity of greatest cultural import to Pueblo women was sexual intercourse. Women were empowered through their sexuality... When women gave the gift of their body to men with whom no obligational ties existed, they expected something in return, such as blankets, meat, salt, and hides. For a man to enjoy a woman1s body without giving her a gift in return was for him to become indebted to her in a bond of obligation. (17) The footnote to this passage: "The gifts women demanded for sex are mentioned numerous places. See NCE, p. 248; RNM, p. 206; RBM, pp. 43-44; HD vol. 3, pp. 149, 184; AGN-INQ 587-I: 19, 60, 64, 140." The sources are simply colonial documents--of the Coronado expedition, the Spanish reconquest, a Franciscan memoir, eighteenth century Spanish records, and the Spanish Inquisition. Making use of colonial documents is not the problem, but using them unexamined to 3prove2 such radical claims is fraudulent. Gutiérrez does not rely only on unexamined colonial documents: Through the gifting of food and the offering of hospitality in the form of intercourse women assured communal peace...And through the issue of women1s bodies--children--foreigners and natives became one and were incorporated into households. (19) Gutiérrez1s sources here are Sahlins, "Stone Age Economics," and Whitehead, 3Fertility and Exchange in New Guinea.2 Gutiérrez does not explain the legitimacy of these sources to support such a conjectural assertion, but rather poses it as unquestioned canon. Some amazing statements have no citations at all: "We focus here on deer hunting because deer meat was the most abundant and highly prized, and because men thought of women as two-legged deer."[!] (30) Gutiérrez even interprets, without attribution, the role of the berdaches (male-woman) as reducing the female role: "On the basis of the berdaches1 role in Pueblo ritual we see again the male assertion that they controlled all aspects of human life. Women had power only over half of creation; through ritual men controlled its entirety--male and female--and were thus equal if not superior to women."(35) Although Gutiérrez lists in the bibliography historian Walter L. Williams1, "The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture" (1986), he neither cites nor argues with Williams1 opposite view: "Many cultures that recognize berdaches, the Keres Pueblos, for example, believe that masculine qualities are only half of ordinary humanness. But feminine qualities are seen as automatically encompassing the masculine as well as many other characteristics that go beyond the limits of masculinity. Consequently, there is a recognized enhanced status for those males who have the ability to transcend the limits of masculinity...If a male wants to incorporate feminine aspects, he has to move beyond masculinity." (Williams,86) Nor does Gutiérrez cite Paula Gunn Allen1s, "The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions" (1986). Indeed, Gutiérrez does not even list Allen, herself a Laguna Pueblo with a doctorate in American Studies, in his bibliography. Since he bases his entire narrative of precolonial Pueblo sexuality on their origin myth, Allen1s observations must be addressed: "In Keres theology the creation does not take place through copulation. In the beginning existed Thought Woman and her dormant sisters, and Thought Woman thinks creation...into life." (Allen, 16) The problem of unexamined sources plague the entire book, but especially the first chapter, 3The Pueblo Indian World.2 Then Gutiérrez1s wild conclusions pop up throughout the rest of the book as established facts: "The Spanish narratives of the conquest are silent on the hospitality the Indian women offered the `Children of the Sun.1 Because sanctity and sex were so closely related in the Pueblo world, it was common for men and women to give their bodies to persons they deemed holy, in order to partake of their supernatural power...The Pueblo women cooled the passion of the fierce fire-brandishing Spanish katsina through intercourse, and by so doing, tried to transform and domesticate the malevolence of these foreign gods." (50-51) The proof of this, Gutiérrez finds, is that when Spanish soldiers were investigated in 1601 for abusing Pueblo women: "...the soldiers recounted no exploits admitted no faults. Rather, they spoke of the licentious Pueblo women who had `no vices other than lust.1 Normally, Spanish soldiers might have bragged about their sexual triumphs in words evocative of the terror of their victims,such as rape, vanquishment, violation. But in 1601 the conquistadores seemed to scratch their heads in collective befuddlement, wondering what had transpired between them and their Pueblo subjects." (50-51) Gutiérrez pretends to present a balanced view in equally blaming the colonizer and the colonized: "...49 of the hundred or so friars who served in New Mexico during the seventeenth century died as martyrs, suffering pains not unlike those they meted out to the Indians." (128-29) Gutiérrez seeks symmetry, rather than analyzing colonialism and how it works. A pox on both houses. The colonial victims, the Pueblos, turn out to be as fundamentalist and oppressive as the colonizers with Gutierrez's analysis. This guise of objectivity--a cultural conflict with good and bad on both sides--is a favorite approach of US historians in order to evade a systematic analysis of colonialism. Gutiérrez1s thesis is found on the book jacket: 3...the conquest of America was a dialogue between cultures.2 Gutiérrez laments that the Franciscan friars fell into sins of the flesh, but he blames the Pueblo women: "It would have been amazing if lapses of chastity had not occurred among the Franciscans, given their ministry to a culture that glorified sexuality, given that Pueblo women offered their bodies to men they deemed holy, and given that the mystical marriage and union with God the friars so desired were likened to human intercourse.(123) The book is filled with unsubstantiated and fabricated 3facts,2 as well as outright errors, for instance placing the Comanches originally in Illinois: 3Already the French had armed the Comanches and driven them south

Rating:
Summary: Glimpse of past encounters.
Review: This book in not of the divulgative kind. It is more of a scholarly work. Sometimes too heavy, insistent and lenghty. But it provides a very intersting glimpse in the past of the SouthWest and the conflicts that the encounters between the indians and the spaniards caused. The inability of the spaniards to deal with ancient indian customs in one hand and the church and morals they brought with themselves, remnants of a dying world, in the other, the deception the indians suffered as they applied their own beliefs to the spaniards, the codes and whims that regulated the sexuality of these two vastly different worlds...it all makes for an exciting subject and a great diary of the life in the U.S a long time ago. The author doesn't portray the indians as free of prejudice like they would want us to believe these days, neither are the spaniards just mere enslavers and ill-guided colonists. The views are more balanced and make better sense. Even centering the thesis aroun! d sexual matters was very illustrative and rich.

Rating:
Summary: Valuable, but approach with caution
Review: This book is valuable if for no other reason than its presumption that sexuality has a history, and its tracing of the emergence of modern forms of sexuality thorugh the colonial documents of the Spanish conquest of New Mexico. One should not be seduced by Gutierrez's title into thinking that his text is riddled with pithy and complicated observations about the intersection of race, power and sexuality. Rather, the text itself manifests and speaks quietly of new questions and possible answers to be gleaned from considering colonial conquest as a two-way event; one in which the conqueror is affected as much as the conquered. It is, I think, a radical idea to examine how the symbol/belief system of Pueblo indians interfaced and ultimately facilitated their conquest. Similar, it is interesting to observe the colonialist system of self-other become undermined by conquest, hopelessly buttressed by extreme racist measures, and ultimately falls, playing out an Hegelian dialect- the seeds of destruction are immanent to creation. At the root of the author's project is the notion that people are conquered, subjected, not so much by the sword but by the imposition of discourse, which as Foucault reminds us is always negotiated between power and resistance.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Work
Review: This is an excellent book. While the book has received some criticism, anyone who has read them will realize that they have little value. The passionate nature of the attacks on this book make it obvious that the attitude they are written in is anything but scholarly. It's true that there are assumptions and subtleties that could trouble some people, but they should be no problem for the intelligent and alert reader. Note that most of the things that were questioned about the book were very clearly explained in the introduction of the text.