ABSTRACT

As we have observed in the preceding chapters, one of the most fascinating features of performance and performative writing of the colonial Americas is the multiplicity of ways in which the perceived tension between competing world-views and ideologies is staged. In his Historia de las Indias, the sixteenth-century Dominican priest-ethnographer Diego Durán provides us not only with remarkably detailed information about the indigenous peoples of Mexico, but also with extensive documentation of the upheaval that occurred when Spanish and indigenous world-views collided in the aftermath of the Conquest. In this vein, Durán describes an incident that took place shortly after the Conquest, in which he admonished a native leader for celebrating a wedding with lavish festivities and traditional ceremonies, which the Spanish missionaries viewed as diabolical heathen rites. To this, the man in question is said to have responded, ‘Father, this should not surprise you, for we are still nepantla.’ Durán continues,

As I knew what he meant by this word and metaphor, which means ‘to be in the middle’, I insisted that he tell me what middle they were in. He answered that, as they were not yet strong in the Faith, and that they were still neutral, that they did not follow one law or 1

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formed. In the years following conquest and settlement, Creole identities were forged in this terrain of nepantla, in which the peoples of the Americas, suspended between two vastly divergent world-views, negotiated between competing European and American narratives in order tactically to appropriate the features that were most relevant or useful to their own situation.