MOM 2006 journal for pdf.pmd - University of Michigan-Flint

With a sense of his mastery of strategy, the embedded religious devices within his Segunda
carta de relacion become much more apparent. Cortes uses inconspicuous statements to degrade
the Aztecs into an unchristian enemy of the crown. He begins his religious commentary through a
supposedly sympathetic description of those conquered by Moctezuma, a man who “rules them
by force and tyranny, and takes their children in order to kill and sacrifice them to their idols * .”
He later mentions the “monstrous” paintings within their temples, and then refers to Moctezuma
as being “unfaithful.” Collectively, these simple interjections imply a pagan denial of Christianity
among the Aztecs and therefore mark them as believers in false gods. Cortes illuminates a clash
of ideologies which Todorov attributes to the fact that, “Christianity is, fundamentally,
universalist and egalitarian. “God” is not a proper noun: this word can be translated into any
language, for it designates not a god – like Huitzilopochtli or Tezcatlipoca, though these are
already abstractions – but the god. This religion seeks to be universal and is thereby intolerant”
(105). It is through the negation of the indigenous ideologies that Cortes and the Spaniards find
justification for their lapse in decency and morality. As Glen Carman explains in “The Means and
Ends of Empire in Cortes’s Cartas de Relación”: the conquistadores see the war against the
infidel as a war against false beliefs. The ideological justification for Spanish imperialism, not
surprisingly, is based on the stable opposition between truth and falsehood” (118). Thus, the task
of conquering an innocent society is readily transformed into a war on the nonbeliever. Cortes
uses religious belief to degrade the indigenous people to an inhuman status so that the brutality of
their subjugation may be carried out shamelessly.
Yet, during this era, not only are the Indians persecuted by subversive religious rhetoric, but
they are also defended by it. One of the Indians’ greatest champions, Fray Bartolome de Las
Casas, a Spanish priest who rallied for their rights and protection, used religious references
within his works to trigger strategic moral associations. Las Casas applies biblical comparisons,
most predominantly the wolf and the lamb, in order to force his reader to make biblically implied
judgments about the Spaniards’ and the Indians’ moral standing. Such language appears often
subtly, but has a strong influence on the devout reader of the time. In Las Casas’s, Historia de las
Indias, the horrific events of the massacre at Caonao in Cuba are relayed with care to portray
through metaphor the Indians as lambs and the Spaniards as wolves. Las Casas writes, “Then the
whole hundred drew [their swords] and began to rip open the bellies, to cut and kill those lambs –
men, women, children, and old folk, all of whom were seated off guard and frightened” (536).
The Indian is directly identified as the lamb by which the Spaniard’s role is implied. Frequently,
Las Casas is even more direct in his judgment of the Spaniards, describing their acts as Satanic or
guided by the Devil. Statements like, “A Spaniard, in whom the devil is thought to have clothed
himself,” or, “since the devil, who inspired the Spaniards, furnished them with the whetstones
with which they sharpened their swords” initiate a pattern of thought within Las Casas’s work
where the judgment of the Spaniards is continually reiterated and reinforced by bold comparison
(536).
After the Europeans had solidified their hold on the colonies, religion appeared less as the crux
of a crusade and more as a reflection of a society’s daily struggles. Thus, religion as a
psychological device gains a wider spectrum of use. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the seventeenth-
* This is my translation.
Meeting of Minds 2006 111