This book is an anthology (in Spanish or translated into Spanish) of source readings on Amerindian culture. The compiler clearly puts his purpose in the selection of these first-view chronicles: it is to give “una idea completa del panorama cultural americana tal como lo veían y juzgaban los cronistas.” It is successful in this aim. This, therefore, is not an anthology of geographic, but of cultural, discovery.
All the areas first ransacked by the Iberian peoples are represented. Some of the early French, such as Laudonnière and Jean de Léry, are thrown in because the tribes they first observed were within the general areas of Spanish and Portuguese discoveries. The following headings (with a few of the chroniclers under each heading selected as examples) show how the book is structured. In all some 55 different chroniclers are excerpted.
Las Avanzadas del Nuevo Mundo (Caribbean) Columbus, Pane
Los Pueblos del nordeste Cabeza de Vaca, Fray Andrés de San Miguel
Grandes culturas de mesoamérica y sus anexas Sahagún, Zorita, Fray Antonio Tello
Tierra Firme, de mar a mar Andagoya, Ximénez de Quesada
El Mundo incaico Betanzos, Huaman Poma
El Laberinto fluvial (Brazil, Amazonia and Paraguay basin) Vaz de Caminha, Pero Fernández, Manoel da Nóbrega
Chile y el extremo sur Aréizaga, Ladrillero
El Norte lejano (California) Crespí, Moziño Suárez de Figueroa
The selections are of varying lengths and, where necessary, are broken down into sections with such subtitles as Cannibalism, Weapons of war, Coastal navigation, Mourning rituals, Method of bread-making, Physical appearance, etc., etc. Each chronicler is briefly introduced and a bibliography (sometimes abbreviated) of the chronicler’s works added.
The whole is introduced with a commonsense prologue presenting general cautions to him who would read all cultural chronicles of the New World as gospel. The deformations and deficiencies in the cultural pictures presented by the chroniclers are clearly pointed out, thus providing material to the historian of the Conquest as well as to the historical ethnologist. The inclusion of men like Juan Bautista Pomar (Mexico) and Huaman Poma (Peru) can hardly be justified in this anthology, however, for being sons of native nobility, their view of the natives was an internal view and thus inconsistent with the purposes of this collection. There are the usual errors in the spelling of Indian names and bibliographical data that one would expect in an anthology of this scope.
Six maps from the 17th and 18th centuries are of little use in identifying home areas of the tribes named in the selections.
In sum, this book is not based on great learning, but it is a useful reserve tool on college library shelves for students in Latin American history courses or American anthropology. For the layman who can read Spanish, it is, like a handful of Montaigne’s essays, fascinating and episodic.
