As early as 1939, the Mexicans earned the credit of founding an Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, oriented to the world of the Indian before and after the conquest, and which closely allied anthropology and history at a time when these disciplines were still very much separate. In this interdisciplinary world of historical anthropology, commonly called ethnohistory, Charles Gibson is, without a doubt, the one who has achieved the most perfect work relating to Mexico in The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule, published in 1964 after ten years of research, but preceded by several others such as Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth Century (1952).
This innovative work has pointed and is still pointing the way to a number of young scholars who feel the need to go beyond strictly "economic and social” history, by reemphasizing alongside it the cultural factors that, in truth, had never lost their rightful place in North American anthropology. With a marked penchant for evoking the representations of the facts over and above the facts themselves, and for then looking at mental, psychic, sociopolitical, and religious attitudes, Charles Gibson had, at the very heart of his investigative agenda, the problems of the Indians’ acculturation or their resistance to its inroads, their deculturation, Hispanization, or Westernization, even if these phenomena are not explicitly treated. Thus, the author opened new and fruitful perspectives for research.
But it was also necessary to start from solid foundations. Charles Gibson was admirably familiar with the sources of Indian origin or inspiration or dealing with Indian themes, of which he assembled a remarkable critical catalog in volume 15 of the Handbook of Middle American Indians (1975). It is there that one must turn to find the specific qualities of the pictures, the sketches, and the pictorial or written texts of so many codices, annals, chronicles, works, and assorted testimonies of Indians and Spaniards. Thanks to Gibson, we learned the original characteristics, the mutual relationships, and, in the last analysis, the reliability and historical value of these sources. It is directly to them that this great scholar turned, and by preference they are what he cited in The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule, rather than the works of a bibliography that he dominated fully—such was his desire for precision and for meticulous exactness.
It is with the same care, and in the same spirit, that Gibson chose as a framework for his greatest work the Valley of Mexico. This allowed him to make a study in depth that was also, in a sense, a quasi-exhaustive study of the chosen theme. The region is exceptionally important, as it was situated first at the very apex of the former Indian empire and then of the colony, whose evolution the author follows through the longue durée (so dear to Fernand Braudel), from 1519 to 1810. But this focus on a relatively small space is linked to the author’s very broad conception of history. Apparently without theorizing, and as if instinctively, he worked out a total science of mankind, of the complete person, that integrates all the elements of human phenomena. Without giving in to any fashion, without favoring or neglecting any approach, Charles Gibson put to work all those that appeared capable of clarifying the numerous and complex problems that he posed for himself.
Besides the recreation of culture already noted, the essential phenomena of demography and of economics in all their forms are presented with the obligatory statistics, with significant graphs and charts—without the excess that one often notes elsewhere. Civil and religious institutions, and the men who give life to them, are carefully and brilliantly analyzed. Historical geography kept a special hold on his attention, with numerous plans and maps which made his always concise exposition remarkably clear, precise, and complete. Gibson again had recourse to linguistics and to semantics in order to verify the changing meaning of representative key words of society and institutions. . . . With a breadth of vision, a finesse, and a comparative spirit which were those of a great historian, Charles Gibson loved to go beyond the locally observed phenomenon to attain the general or the universal—as when, for example, he observed how in this old-regime colonial society a fortuitous “innovation, once established, became custom, hence inaccessible to law” (chapter 4, p. 96), thus illuminating the genesis and nature of custom of medieval origin.
Far from being a handicap, the limited geographic framework that he chose was an advantage, leading to a surer conceptualization of the topic treated. He there devised a potential “model” (in the modern and theoretical sense of the word), which it is reasonable to think will one day help us to understand, a contrario or not, some other colonial experiences of contact and shock, of domination and subjection or dependence, between people situated at different technical levels of development.
I have not had the honor, I believe, to know Charles Gibson personally, and perhaps partly for this reason I have not always cited his work as often as I should. But through reading and rereading I can well imagine him as a very eminent man, yet modest and discreet, somewhat nonconformist, the methodical and precise savant, endowed with a lively and penetrating intelligence that is remarkably balanced and nuanced. He is truly a “prince of history,” as was written of Braudel at his death. What Charles Gibson wrote on Mexico is, and will remain, one of the great works of the century on that country, but also, without a doubt, a point of departure and a constant incitement of future investigations.
