Santiago Muñoz Arbeláez
Assistant Professor of History, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá
After the Conquest: Encomienda and the negotiation of tribute in the Valley of Mexico and the northern Andes
Abstract:
The new Conquest historiography has shown that careful attention to indigenous political structures, rivalries, and cultures dramatically changes the traditional narratives of the European expansion into Mesoamerica. Curiously, this examination of indigenous history has not always led to a re-examination of post-Conquest Spanish institutions. In fact, historians of early modern Spanish politics seem increasingly entrenched in monarchical discourses, rituals, and systems of meaning. As a result, the history of imperial institutions that provided the basis for interethnic exchange remains largely unmoved. Such is the case of the encomienda, which has fallen out of interest in recent historiography. In this presentation I will argue that the encomienda as an institution was inseparable from indigenous political structures and indigenous modes of authority in the Valley of Mexico and the Northern Andes. In order to understand the history of the encomienda, we need to carefully understand indigenous cultures and forms of political activity. This, in turn, can reveal the many ways in which indigenous people participated in the shaping and reshaping of imperial institutions.
Santiago Muñoz Arbeláez is Assistant Professor of History at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá and a founding member of Neogranadina, a nonprofit devoted to the digitization of endangered archives (www.neogranadina.org/en). He received a PhD in history from Yale University in 2018. His work focuses on Indians and empires in the early modern Atlantic world and is informed by scholarship on comparative borderlands, agrarian history, material culture, and the history of books, prints, and maps. His book Costumbres en disputa. Los muiscas y el imperio español en Ubaque, siglo XVI (Ediciones Uniandes), published in 2016, received an honorable mention for Colombia’s National History Award.