In 1700, colonial authorities in the Sierra Alta, Oaxaca, faced a revolt that quickly spread across Indian communities. The origins of the uprising lay in the arrest of several Indian leaders following the killing of two indigenous church officers who had alerted authorities to the existence of a local network of native priests and followers intent on keeping alive old religious practices. As recent studies by scholars such as David Tavares have shown, the event laid bare the fragile foundations of Spanish control in the area as well as the existence of a deep fracture in the native elite over the limits of cultural and political accommodation. Although only one chapter of The Art of Being In-Between deals with the Cajonos rebellion, the episode looms large in the author's account of the changing political landscape in which native intermediaries from a Mexican peripheral region operated until the end of the eighteenth century.
Raising questions about autonomy, cooperation and resistance, native intermediaries have enjoyed a special place in the popular, literary and historiographic imagination and have often become, as in the Mexican case, ciphers of things to come or ambiguous allegories. The host of intermediaries who populate The Art of Being In-Between lack that larger-than-life dimension associated with their most famous counterparts of earlier colonial times; they comprise caciques, legal representatives of Indian pueblos, cabildo members, Church officers, and even a community whose original members moved into the area to keep a watchful eye over its inhabitants on behalf of the Spaniards.
The book opens in 1660 to follow the fortunes and misfortunes of two seasoned ladino caciques who, representing a coalition of pueblos, launched a lawsuit to defend local political autonomy from the encroachment of Spanish authorities. Bilingual, politically savvy and thoroughly familiar with Spanish mores and legal system, these caciques found ways to pursue their own economic interests by becoming the visible face of indigenous grievances. In choosing to do so, they exposed themselves to the scrutiny of authorities always ready to blame ladinos for social unrest and the contingency of local political alliances. The two ended up facing charges of idolatry and sedition.
The Cajonos rebellion brought to light the risks faced by those individuals who, due to a perpetual shortage of ecclesiastical ministers, had established themselves as de facto religious authorities in their communities. However, the fiscales de iglesia who chose to denounce the ongoing practices of native religion and paid dearly for their actions, soon fade into the background as Yannakakis turns her attention to the phases of the uprising and its aftermath. A similar shift becomes apparent throughout the study, the focus of which progressively moves away from individuals to the world of regional politics, where indigenous communities vied for economic power and influence. This change of perspective may point to the limitations of the author's original approach, since it is in the detailed reconstruction of communal conflicts that she succeeds in shedding light on the interplay of culture, religion and politics in a region that would come under tighter ecclesiastical and royal control after the Cajonos episode. Such interplay is expertly teased out from records that document the efforts by the community of Yae to secede from its cabecera in 1695 and the legal challenges mounted by competing pueblos opposed to such a move.
Throughout the book, the phrase ‘cultural broker’ often stands for native intermediary, but it is a term wide enough to accommodate an expansive variety of actors. Labels may not always carry too much weight, and under certain conditions one historian's cultural broker may very well pass for another's local politician. The author's fondness for the term is of a piece with her unchecked tendency to translate conflicts and actions quickly into high-stakes drama in which legal representatives ‘perform’ and face ‘rhetorical tasks’, and in which violence often turns ‘symbolic’. It seems that by force of repetition we have come to accept that cultural history – or at least some current versions of it – cannot do without such theatrical trappings, which obscure the difference between everyday and exceptional actions and events. The consequences of such an approach become apparent in the treatment of the native intermediaries at the centre of the study: on the one hand the author's exhaustive reconstruction of their milieu points to the existence of a well-established political and legal culture in Indian communities, yet at the same time they are also viewed somewhat as risk takers, a dimension seldom examined; the same applies to the analysis of the arguments brought forth in the courts.
The Art of Being In-Between is an ambitious book torn between satisfying the demands of a certain cultural history and capturing the interplay of personal, communal and royal interests that made up local politics, two domains that do not quite merge. It is also a welcome contribution to the growing and exciting historical scholarship on colonial Oaxaca.
