Forbidden Passages. Karoline P. Cook

peoples inhabiting Nueva Galicia dragged on for decades. These events took place during the term of Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, a member of the influential Mendoza noble family from Granada. He traced his lineage to ancestors who fought in battles of the so-called Reconquista, and his father, Iñigo López de Mendoza, Count of Tendilla, acted as captain-general of the Christian forces conquering Granada. Historical memory of these earlier battles continued to hold meaning for elite Spanish families and continued to be mentioned in histories and genealogies composed on both sides of the Atlantic. Viceroy Mendoza’s brother, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, composed the Guerra de Granada, one of the more detailed and well-known accounts of the Alpujarras uprising.³⁶ As can be seen through the Mendoza family, Christian-Muslim interactions on the Iberian Peninsula and in the Mediterranean influenced many Spaniards who made their way to the Americas and guided their responses to the “new” lands. Imperial and local policies, perceptions of others, and strategies for self-fashioning were all bound up in peninsular interactions that were transformed during the course of new encounters and experiences in the Americas.

      Antonio Tello’s Libro segundo de la cronica miscelanea en que se trata de la conquista espiritual y temporal de la Santa Provincia de Xalisco recounts the history of Jalisco to 1653. Tello’s depiction of the conquests of New Spain and Nueva Galicia develops gendered parallels between Spanish interactions with North African Muslims and Turks in the Mediterranean and with indigenous peoples in the Americas. Describing Cortés’s participation in a Spanish campaign to Algiers in 1541, Tello emphasized Cortés’s masculinity and the authority he gained from direct experience in the conquest of Mexico, in light of peninsular Spaniards’ skepticism: In Algiers, Cortés “served his majesty, and had some disagreements when he gave counsel concerning the winning of that city, because they told him that he thought that that war was with the naked Indians of New Spain. To this he replied, ‘It only takes one of those Indians to fight with six clothed Spaniards’.”³⁷ Through Tello’s eyes we can envision how his readers might have imagined these parallels that were already being inscribed onto early accounts of conquest. Describing Spaniards battling indigenous groups in northern New Spain, Tello notes, “When they fight, they yelp and cry out like Muslims.”³⁸ Nuño de Guzmán’s forces engaged peoples in feathered dress in Chiametla, whose bows were “so big they appeared Turkish.”³⁹

      As in Spain, St. James or Santiago reputedly assisted the conquerors during his “first apparition” in New Galicia. A shrine was built in his honor on the mountain ridge (cerro), and the adjacent settlement added Santiago to its name, becoming Santiago de Tonalán, thereby transforming the landscape to reflect Spanish devotions to Reconquest saints.⁴⁰ After the fall of Granada, St. James, or Santiago Matamoros, had gained currency as the patron saint of Spain, as myths depicted his early arrival on the Peninsula, making it the first European nation to learn about Christ, thus bestowing preeminent status on Spain. Santiago had been invoked during Christian battles against Muslims in medieval Iberia, and he continued to be called upon during conquests in the Americas. Depictions of Santiago had become more prevalent in the changing political climate in Spain, especially as the Catholic monarchs’ personal devotions to him seeped into their political decisions.⁴¹ These images inhabited the mental worlds of the Spaniards as Estevanico was making his way with Cabeza de Vaca and Friar Marcos de Niza as interpreter and as later generations reinterpreted these events in their written histories of the early conquests.

      In 1535 Viceroy Mendoza sailed to New Spain to assume his fifteen-year post, which involved establishing Spanish control and jurisdiction over the recently explored and conquered territories of the viceroyalty, extending from La Florida and the Caribbean, to the area that is now the southwestern United States and Baja California. In Nueva Galicia, Spanish settlers were met with strong indigenous resistance in 1540, when native leaders formed alliances to oust the early settlements established under Nuño de Guzmán. Viceroy Mendoza quickly sent Spanish forces to suppress the mostly Cazcan-speaking “rebels” in the Juchipila Valley, in a two-year struggle that became known as the Mixton War.⁴² However, conflicts between Spaniards and indigenous groups in Nueva Galicia never completely died down after the Mixton War, setting the stage for the Guerra Chichimeca that broke out nearly ten years later in 1550.⁴³ The Spaniards had left a profoundly transformed society in their wake, in both the emerging towns of Guadalajara, Purificación, San Miguel de Culiacán, and Compostela, and in settlements such as Jalisco, Etzatlan, and Juchipila, which had previously belonged to indigenous communities. In Nueva Galicia, the demographic balance shifted after the Mixton War to comprise a multiethnic society of Spaniards, Africans, and mixed-race peoples, as well as the native peoples whose population was dwindling due to the ravages of war and disease.⁴⁴

      By the 1541 Spanish campaigns against the peoples whom they labeled “Chichimeca,” Viceroy Mendoza had working for him a group of interpreters who were reputed to be Moriscos.⁴⁵ The 1546–47 tour of inspection or visita that Francisco Tello de Sandoval carried out against Viceroy Mendoza and the Audiencia of Mexico provides ample information about the activities of these Morisco naguatatos.⁴⁶ Through denunciations and complaints tying these men to Mendoza, it is also possible to glimpse attitudes toward Moriscos that would surface in later disputes over offices and encomiendas. It is hard to gain a sense of who these men were from the visita records, but read alongside other documents, it reveals the importance in early expeditions of Morisco interpreters, the need for them to fill certain niches in the emerging viceroyalties, and the opportunities for gaining status available to those who participated in the first generations of conquest.

      Francisco de Triana, Marcos Romero, and Alonso Ortiz de Zúñiga were all described during the visita as sons of Moriscos. Their cases were bound to an investigation of Antonio Ortiz, interpreter for Viceroy Mendoza in the Guerra de Jalisco, and they were all affected by the charges against him for extortion, illegally selling “indios jaliscos” as slaves, and cheating the people for whom he was interpreting. Licenciado Lorenzo de Tejada, judge of the Audiencia of Mexico, presented charges against these men as part of his ongoing enmity with Antonio Ortiz, whom he accused of bribing them to ruin his credibility as visitador. Tejada’s accusations reveal insights into the lives the interpreters forged for themselves in New Spain, as well as Spanish conceptions of honor and anxieties about intermixture between Amerindians and Muslims. They cast Ortiz de Zúñiga, Triana, and his cousin Romero as men who “live more like Muslims than like Christians.”⁴⁷ They had achieved some degree of authority in colonial society due to their role as interpreters, which may have made other Spaniards uncomfortable or envious, given their reputedly lower status. Tejada described Triana as a Morisco slave whose parents were also “newly converted” Muslim slaves in the household of the Marqués de Tarifa in Seville. In New Spain, Triana had found work as a gardener (hortelano) for the Marqués del Valle Hernán Cortés before being removed from his post for unseemly behavior. Triana’s cousin Marcos Romero was also portrayed as a “Morisco, son of newly converted Moriscos.”⁴⁸ Finally, Alonso Ortiz de Zúñiga, who acted as tutor and guardian to a young woman from a prominent family, was labeled a “bad Christian … the bastard son of the Morisca slave of Doña María, wife of the señor de Ginés.”⁴⁹

      A recurrent concern in the accusations against the interpreters was their contact with indigenous women. Triana lived “among Indians” and had in his house a tavern where he sold pulque to Indians and Africans. Spanish authorities remained anxious about indigenous drinking throughout the colonial period, as consumption of fermented beverages like pulque in New Spain or chicha in the Andes had enduring religious and ceremonial significance that ecclesiastical authorities deemed contrary to Christian baptism.⁵⁰ Triana’s “conversation and dwelling has always been with Indians and among Indians, eating with them on the floor and doing their dances and ceremonies (mitotes).”⁵¹ Furthermore, although married to a Spanish woman in Castile, Triana was “cohabiting (amancebado) with many Indian women, living more according to the law of Muhammad than as a Christian.”⁵² In Cuernavaca, Triana also allegedly stole from Alonso Pérez Tamayo a female slave and a free indigenous woman, both of whom he held “captive and hidden for many days, being a drunk, a thief, and an amancebado, and having other dirty and low vices.”⁵³ Similarly, Marcos Romero had resided “among Indians and outside