A Troubled Marriage: Indigenous Elites of the Colonial Americas

In A Troubled Marriage, Sean F. McEnroe highlights a consequential yet often overlooked undercurrent of early modern American history: the profoundly transcultural lives of some Indigenous leaders, mestizos, and Europeans who, by chance or design, found it necessary to straddle colonial cultural divisions, form alliances, and learn from one another. This included Native intermediaries who pursued the interests of their home communities within the diplomatic and commercial structures of European empires, Indigenous Christians who transformed the aesthetics and theological emphases of the colonizers' religion, and individual Europeans who found themselves beyond the reach of colonial hegemony and compelled to engage Indigenous peoples on equal, or even disadvantageous, terms. In a vivid and well-curated series of minibiographies, McEnroe highlights and juxtaposes dozens of individuals whose lives exemplified such cross-cultural “marriages.” In doing so, he illuminates a dimension of the fraught, centuries-long Columbian encounter that contemporary disciplinary tools sometimes struggle to...