This book has two interwoven but distinct components. The first is a standard description of the Spanish conquest and early colonization of Mexico. Readers seeking new information from untapped archives will be disappointed, for the author relies almost exclusively on a handful of familiar secondary works and the usual repertoire of published primary sources, chiefly sixteenth-century chronicles and documentary collections (e.g., Paso y Troncoso’s Papeles de la Nueva España). Major recent historiographical contributions receive relatively little attention; for example, Woodrow Borah’s monumental work on the General Indian Court is cited only once, in a chapter entitled “The Pursuit of Justice.”
The book’s second component is a theoretical framework based on sociobiological studies of primate behavior. All humans share over 98 percent of their DNA code with chimpanzees, and on this premise Alves bases his “attempt to seek out the animal universal underlying the nuances of human culture and custom” (p. 11). Like their primate cousins, sixteenth-century Spaniards and Mexica alike were capable of extreme violence, but often tempered their aggression with acts of benevolence.
Wedded with Alves’s narrative, however, the theory tells us little that we did not already know. For example, scholars have long noted Cortés’s establishment of the Hospital de Jesús in Mexico City and the role that such charitable gestures played in solidifying Spanish domination. The fact that Cortés’s behavior bears a striking resemblance to that of food-sharing dominant male chimps at a Dutch zoo is interesting but does not advance our understanding of colonial Mexican society. Moreover, Alves promises that this exercise in comparative ethnology will yield new insights on the importance of gender in the creation of a new Mexican cultural synthesis. In fact, he delivers little more than conventional treatments of La Malinche and the Virgin of Guadalupe. His brief discussion of the role played by indigenous women in preserving traditional material culture will be familiar to readers of Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru’s work, while those interested in his observation that “the aspects of Amerindian cultural tradition that most readily survived . . . were not those associated with male games of dominance and display” (p. 96) will find a much more satisfying treatment of this phenomenon in Irene Silverblatt’s studies of colonial Peru.
These criticisms aside, historians would do well to consider Alves’s suggestion that sixteenth-century Spaniards and Mexica understood one another more fully than we might expect. Before going into battle both sides engaged in aggressive and far-from-subtle display not unlike that of male primates. Alves therefore argues that “contemporary cultural constructionists should be less than certain that culture and language serve as insurmountable barriers” (p. 74), and that we may have overestimated the incidence of “double mistaken identity” in sixteenth-century Mexico.
