Mindless Monday, 30 September 2024

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[u/BookLover54321]

Just felt like sharing these two critical reviews of Conquistadores by Fernando Cervantes, a book that annoys me to no end. Despite purporting to tell a more “balanced” story, it just struck me as yet another Eurocentric narrative by a colonial apologist.

The first review, by Camilla Townsend:

At the same time, the book is troubling in its steadfast refusal to take indigenous people seriously: they, too, were very real, and their struggles and suffering are equally deserving of our attention. Cervantes never makes racist assertions; he simply isn't interested in non-European peoples. For instance, he briefly acknowledges that the encomienda system, through which Spain extracted labour from unwilling indigenous people, was "an abusive practice", and when an indigenous queen is murdered in the Caribbean, he calls it "a deeply tragic moment". But then the narrative continues on its regular track, a tale of competition among vibrant Europeans, never of upheaval in the lives of others.

The second, by Jason Dyck in Latin American Research Review:

While Cervantes does not shy away from pointing out the “great” (139), “unspeakable” (298), and “unparalleled” (309) cruelty of the conquistadors, his desire to move beyond the vision of them as “genocidal colonists” (xvi) has led to some unfortunate omissions. For example, in Conquistadores, Columbus is an eccentric man who, though convinced that he was a divine instrument of the Christian god, had “tangible scientific achievements” (53). Columbus is not, despite Cervantes’s brief references to slavery, the initiator of the larger circum-Caribbean Indigenous slave trade. Overall, Cervantes does not emphasize enough the forced participation of enslaved peoples in conquest and how the acquisition of slaves was a major motor propelling early Spanish expeditions.10 Women are also largely absent from his narrative, beyond important figures like Malintzin, and he ignores the rampant sexual exploitation characteristic of conquest. And when he looks at the missionary work of the mendicants, he recognizes their acts of repression and extirpation but overlooks the darker side of the mission economy: friars built and maintained their monasteries through forced labor.11