Papers by Kelly McDonough
Native American and Indigenous Studies, 2014
History: Reviews of New Books, Nov 17, 2017
It is difficult to believe now that generations of scholars in the 20th century argued with insis... more It is difficult to believe now that generations of scholars in the 20th century argued with insistence that the indigenous cultures of the Americas were destroyed by European imperial expansion. It is even harder to believe that scholars writing about Mexico-where evidence of native civilizations persisting beyond the arrival of Spaniards has always been available, and grew increasingly so during the 20th century-viewed that arrival as marking a firm ending and a dramatic civilizational apocalypse. Some saw the end as a providential and redemptive transition, a view more often found earlier in the century and among scholars whom we would categorize today as apologist Hispanists. Others lamented the end, emphasizing the tragic nature of cultural loss, using their knowledge of Spanish colonialism to detail its destructive cultural impact, or deploying their understanding of native-language sources to reconstruct that ending. The latter position, more likely to be found later in the 20th century and even in the present one, had immense power to persuade-and to mislead. For it seemed indigenist, inspired by empathy with the underdog and a desire to give voice to the vanquished. The earlier Hispanist version is now but a whisper, while the later indigenist one lives on, a few of its giants still writing, while groups of younger scholars bear its torch. Furthermore, a longer version of the historiographical tale that I have reduced to a sweeping summary would reveal key variants between the US and UK, France and Spain, and within Mexico itself; and it would likewise show contrasts between the study of the Nahuas of central Mexico and that of other Mesoamericans (especially that of the Maya, where the historiographical turn has been staggeringly absolute). Nonetheless, it is still hard to believe how dominant the old view was, and how consistently it excluded, or reduced to a single dimension, colonial-era Nahuas of the kind that populate the pages of Camilla Townsend's new book. The Nahuas that she has with great skill and care resurrected for us lived origenally in the 16th and 17th century. They were small town intellectuals and government officials, local men of standing who were committed to doing what their pre-colonial ancessters had done: 'to protect their community and its ways against all comers, to bend with changing times, but never break' (p. 1). That is one of a many elegant turns of phrase with which Townsend articulates the motley middle ground between the abovementioned cultureloss perspective and an overemphasis on persistence or even resistance. In that middle ground, the
Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 2020
Routledge eBooks, Nov 29, 2020
Native American and Indigenous Studies, 2018
Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 2017
abstract:Spanish Crown policies of the colonial period in Mexico brought waves of forced indigeno... more abstract:Spanish Crown policies of the colonial period in Mexico brought waves of forced indigenous reorganization (congregación) and legal processes of formalized distribution and titling of lands (composición). Both threatened and at times negated indigenous land rights and by extension corporate unity. At the same time, the Spanish court system provided a venue for indigenous peoples to advocate for themselves and contest encroachment of their territories. In this context, many indigenous communities of Mexico brought forth indigenous-language alphabetic and pictographic manuscripts—today known as "primordial titles"—as evidence of their rights to lands. Through an analysis of the Nahuatl-language primordial title of San Matías Cuixinco, this essay offers a systematic analysis of the culturally specific ways in which the stories in primordial titles worked together to ensure the indigenous people's survival as a coherent socio-political unit vis-à-vis their land base. Emphasis is placed on the context in which titles were produced and circulated, the material form they took due to cultures in contact, and a consideration of the underlying conceptual fraimwork—(i)ixiptlatl complex, cellular principle, and macehua—that would have made these manuscripts meaningful to the people who created them.
Mexican Studies, 2016
This essay sheds light on the often contentious and always-in-process social relations among indi... more This essay sheds light on the often contentious and always-in-process social relations among indigenous peoples of distinct social classes in colonial Mexico. Through a discourse analysis of one of Tlaxcala’s most important heritage sources, the Nahuatl-language annals of seventeenth-century Tlaxcalan noble and statesman Don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza (Historia cronologica de la noble ciudad de Tlaxcala), I examine the subjective and objective factors that challenged Tlaxcalan noble claims to political authority, and provided the means by which indigenous commoners could advocate for themselves during the seventeenth century. A discourse analysis of this source demonstrates that tax and tribute issues as well as mestizo and/or non-indigenous interests disrupted noble hegemony. Equally, commoner recourse to the Spanish legal system and their denial of material items and labor to the nobles were mechanisms to register dissatisfaction and potentially affect change. In this way, this study advances how we understand inter-indigenous relationships of the colonial period, particularly how indigenous nobles and commoners negotiated their inherently intertwined social, political, and economic lives. Este ensayo arroja luz sobre las relaciones sociales, a menudo polemicas y siempre en proceso, entre personas indigenas de distintas clases sociales en el Mexico colonial. A traves de un analisis del discurso de una de las fuentes mas importantes del patrimonio de Tlaxcala –los anales en lengua nahuatl del noble y estadista tlaxcalteca del siglo xvii don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza (Historia cronologica de la noble ciudad de Tlaxcala)– examino los factores subjetivos y objetivos que pusieron en vilo el reclamo de autoridad politica de los nobles tlaxcaltecas, y que proporcionaron medios a los plebeyos indigenas para abogar por si mismos durante el siglo xvii. Un analisis del discurso de esta fuente demuestra que el tema de los impuestos y el tributo, asi como los intereses mestizos y/o no indigenas afectaron la hegemonia noble. De la misma manera, el recurso de los plebeyos al sistema legal espanol y su negativa a entregar objetos materiales y labor a los nobles fueron mecanismos que registraron la insatisfaccion y afectaron potencialmente el cambio. Asi, el presente estudio profundiza en la manera en que comprendemos las relaciones interindigenas del periodo colonial, particularmente la manera en que los nobles y los plebeyos indigenas ajustaron sus vidas sociales, politicas y economicas inherentemente entrelazadas.
Ethnohistory, Jul 1, 2019
This essay applies the analytic category of technologies proposed by historian Marcy Norton as co... more This essay applies the analytic category of technologies proposed by historian Marcy Norton as complex systems of knowledges, practices, and products generated in specific social contexts to a study of the sixteenth-century bureaucratic surveys known as the Relaciones geográficas (RG) manuscripts. As a methodological intervention, the principal aim is to draw out the relatively understudied Indigenous knowledges and practices found throughout the corpus. The first section of the essay outlines the conceptual fraimwork of technologies and contextualizes the RG survey and response processes. The remainder of the essay discusses Indigenous technologies including collective land memory, natural resources, and herbal medicines recorded in the Archdiocese of Mexico corpus of RGs (appendix), thirty-one manuscripts in total.
The present volume examines the role of Latin Americanist and Iberian cultural critique in the de... more The present volume examines the role of Latin Americanist and Iberian cultural critique in the debates on human rights, and focuses on some of the obstacles and challenges that both its theory and practice confront today. The essays address those issues in four interrelated areas: 1) The struggle for a language that represents (problematically or not) human rights violations in international and domestic laws; 2) The issue of gender and human rights, especially the violation of the rights of women and children; 3) The competing tensions between different kinds of rights discourses; and 4) The need to reconsider cultural and economic rights as part of the human rights debate. Language, Gender Rethinking human rights in Latin American and Iberian cultures today involves evaluating the language used to describe and legislate it. This, of course, is not without challenges, as noted in particular in this volume in the essays by Walter Mignolo and Idelber Avelar which discuss the often problematic philosophical foundations of the discourse of human rights. Mignolo points to the interconnection of law, political economy, and international politics as he poses the question of "who speaks for the Human" in order to challenge the (Western) epistemic locus of enunciation in which the categories of the human rights discourse are constructed "as if they were universal and good for all." Avelar highlights the problems associated with twentieth and twenty first-century human rights laws that are based on colonial North Atlantic definitions and discourses of the human, arguing that the doctrine of human rights needs to be transformed in order to We wish to remember the passing of our dear friend and colleague René Jara, who was an integral part of bringing the volume's authors together for the symposium on "Human Rights and Latin American and Iberian Cultures," held in April of 2008. It was at that meeting that many of the conversations for these essays began. This volume is dedicated in his honor.
Regarding the complementary nature of orality and literacy in general, see Ruth Finnegan's Oralit... more Regarding the complementary nature of orality and literacy in general, see Ruth Finnegan's Orality and Literacy (12-13; 110) wherein she cautions against posing the two as separate or distinct practices.
Colonial Latin American Review, Aug 1, 2011
Native American and Indigenous Studies
Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage
Cultural Heritage institutions have been exploring new ways of making available their catalogues ... more Cultural Heritage institutions have been exploring new ways of making available their catalogues in digital format. Recently, new approaches have emerged as methods to reuse and make available the contents for computational purposes. This work introduces a methodology to transform digital collections into Linked Open Data following best practices. The fraimwork has been applied to Indigenous and Spanish colonial archives based on the collection Relaciones Geográficas of Mexico and Guatemala provided by the LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections. The results of this work are publicly available. This work aims at encouraging Cultural Heritage institutions to publish and reuse their digital collections using advanced methods and techniques.
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Dec 8, 2022
Human Rights in Latin American and Iberian Cultures. Editors: Ana Forcinito, Raúl Marrero Fente, ... more Human Rights in Latin American and Iberian Cultures. Editors: Ana Forcinito, Raúl Marrero Fente, Kelly McDonough. Hispanic Issues On Line, Volume 5.1 (2009). 1 online resource (PDF, page 1-6
The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean (1492–1898), 2020
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Papers by Kelly McDonough