Prompt Week 12

If one goes by the way the question is phrased. It would seem no, they weren’t trying to get the same message across given the titling of both. The Other Conquest, as a title, seems to imply that they are focusing on some single conquest. Ambivalent Conquests, on the other hand, seems to imply there are multiple conquests, perhaps simultaneously. So it would seem that one focuses on both the conqueror (Spaniard), and the conquered (Maya). The other focuses more so on one side, by The Other in the title one can assume it is the side of the Maya. Given the entire content of both pieces, however, it is clear that; overall, their messages are more or less the same.

It’s more about the ambivalence than anything. On pg. 91 there is a most telling quote that shows how unsuccessful a seemingly well to do conversion process had gone “…the practice of crucifixion had originated in Sotuta village, and had been introduced five years before. They identified its originator as Landa’s old intimate, Juan Nachi Cocom.” The Spaniards must have felt betrayed given that the Maya were unrepentant heathens.

However, in the movie, there is a subtlety in the priest’s relation to Topiltzin. Topiltzin is always wearing a sky blue habit with white rope belt, and he is the only one to do so throughout the movie. If memory serves me well, only the woman who serves him his last meal, the woman who tends the hearth (hence the word heathen, not to be confused for hedon), wears solely sky blue and white as well. After Topiltzin dies however, the priest who was his mentor is also seen wearing the sky blue habit with white rope belt. The color blue was a sacred color for the Maya, according to Clendinnen (pg.180), and there was a Maya portrait of the sacred which was, in essence, food (pg.158-159).

The movie itself is saturated with these same parallelisms, between conqueror and conquered. Topiltzin’s last meal and carrying the virgin until he drops dead from exhaustion is reminiscent of a Christ-like figure. The friar (symbolic of Christian thought and European culture), by his wearing of the blue habit when going to see Topiltzin, is implied to be “converted”. This is not entirely unfounded, the colors blue and white are the colors in the flags of: Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua; the areas in which Maya speakers were known to have dominated.

In the book about Malintzin, I remember very distinctly the author pointing out that the scribes wrote in both black and red. I’ve met a Native American from the Quiche people of Southern Arizona once, apparently red and black are their sacred colors. This is also the area from which the Mexica originally migrated. In the Andes, it is said that man was born into a harsh, cold, dark, colorless world, but then, The Creator gave them the original gift of color and light, and from this sprang the genius of man, that he might elevate himself from squalor (Hence the wiphala and the rainbow flag of cuzco). In European religion this is obviously the opposite, we were born into a paradise and lost connection to God through original sin (consumption of a material food item), and only through repentance can one see the genius of God. Clendinnen, too, notes that even seemingly normal or European things might mask Indigenous overtones (Pg. 159).

Additionally, in the movie you see the people naked a lot, sometimes a woman gyrating on a man, this is connected to the food. Food is the literal lifeblood of man as a corporeal being; sex is the act by which people come into being. Food is a metaphor for the body, mankind, and being. Light and color is a metaphor for the mind, God, and action. Food is atomistic, material, and linear in concept. Light is relativistic, ethereal, and sinusoidal in concept (circular). Specific colors perhaps then are assigned to different entities of thought. Bodily images (such as crosses, or gender) then might represent other bodily objects through some perceived shared characteristic. Combined, one might encode all sorts of figurative meanings.

Think of the Catholic mass, the body of Christ, food, is concrete and has atomistic qualities similar to mass; the blood of Christ, liquid, is fluid and has wave-like qualities similar to light-energy.Roman Catholicism came to power through collective conversions which were made easier by mixing heathenistic imagery with Christian ideals. At the time of the Spanish conquest, the Bible was only in Latin, a dead language. So very few people actually had access to what it said, and even fewer to what it actually means. This utmost control of belief was part of the reason for the protestant revolution and its emphasis on, interpretation of the written word, as well as, translation of the Bible into vernacular. This revolution itself took place in an area that scarcely 500 years before was almost entirely heathen.

And if one wants to get really carried away, look at pg. 50 "That dyad of one who orders and one who obeys was the essential unit of the Franciscan structure: where it was, so was the order." Talk about linear chain of command, no wonder it was the most popular order (pg. 45-46); it made sense to people of the time. A notion closer to Indigenous thought would be one where at some times one obeys and the other follows, and at other times it is the other way around. That is a circular command structure, somebody is in fact in command, but who specifically it is depends on the occasion. It is a reciprocal relationship. But, in sum, the overall message of the two works is the same.