The discrepancies about what happened in the Spanish conquest and the viceroyalty in the Americas are beginning to be as recurrent as the discussion about potato omelette: with onion or without onion, a national or, rather, political issue. One of the two versions, this time through the mouth of the Culture delegate of the Madrid City Council, Marta Rivera de la Cruz, has once again stirred up the hornet's nest by pointing out that in the New World there was no plundering nor was colonialism detected in the museums Spaniards, now that half the planet is reviewing those cultural and extractivist yesterdays. Mrs. Rivera De la Cruz, from the conservative Popular Party and subscriber to a revisionist discourse in vogue in recent years, believes that Spain should not feel concerned in this debate. She disagrees with the Spanish Government and historians everywhere.
The “play on words” with which the Madrid councilor “has tried to minimize colonialism” does not seem appropriate to the Peruvian historian Rafael Escudero, a doctoral candidate at the National University of Florida. Because, although it is true that a colony is not the same as a viceroyalty or a composite monarchy, “there was a vertical relationship between the royal and administrative authorities in Spain with the territories of America. The latter were dependent on the will or interests of the former,” he explains. Why doubt it, if even the lack of taste for wine in Mexico has its origin in the prohibition on planting vines that the kingdom imposed thousands of waves away.
The looting thing is even simpler. That there was no looting, says Rivera de la Cruz. "If the pieces that were taken at that time did not arrive or are not shown in Spanish museums, it is not because the pillage did not exist, but because at that time, back in the 16th century, the idea of a museum piece or even the idea Even as a museum there were no curiosities or rarities that reached the Spanish court. Museums will appear in Europe later,” explains Gabriela Ramos, also Peruvian, specialized in Colonial History and senior professor at the University of Cambridge.
Rivera de la Cruz is right that the Americas were not the Belgian Congo, that nineteenth-century European colonialism or something earlier that filled British, French, and Dutch museums with pieces of all kinds stolen from here and there. No, the Spaniards proceeded differently, the way their century dictated, but the word is the same. “Looting? Of course, there is multiple evidence in the archives and in published books,” says María Castañeda de la Paz, doctor in American History from the University of Seville and researcher at the Anthropology Institute of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). “If everything stayed in the viceroyalty, how to explain the existence of the Spanish fleets that were loaded to Spain. In the archives we have many testimonies of precious stones whose trace has been lost, it is difficult to detect what they were used for, but probably in jewelry; and the feather art, which there did not have the enormous value that was given to it in Mesoamerica, with which fans, shields - which were sent to the churches -, war suits, capes were made... all those precious feathers were very perishable, little can remain of them,” he says.
The famous plume that Montezuma supposedly gave to Hernán Cortés ended up in Vienna, part of the empire. “And not everything was gifts,” says Castañeda, an expert in Mesoamerican codices. “Gold and silver jewelry was melted in Mexico and arrived there as ingots, therefore, there are no vestiges in the museums, a good part of that wealth was used to pay for wars,” or to make emperors. Castañeda suggests that these days of Holy Week take a look at the sacred monstrances that process through the Spanish streets. “That silver came from America and before it had been spectacular jewels that have been recorded in codices: frogs, birds, butterflies, they were all melted.” Juan David Montoya, professor at the National University in Colombia and expert in the conquest processes of the New Kingdom of Granada, also comments that the gold from the mines was melted into coins that circulated throughout the Empire. “It wasn't kept in a piggy bank.”
They also know about gold and silver in Peru and Colombia, of course. Ask Atahualpa, victim of Pizarro from Extremadura, how the indigenous lords were forced to reveal the location of the treasures. The great obsession of the Spanish was the precious metal, abundant in these lands, reported the late Colombian historian Germán Colmenares in
The Emergence of a Political Economy of the Indies
. “Gold announced the imminence of death and torture.” The Spaniards, their investigations indicate with documents from 1535, “hanged, cut off hands and roasted the Indians because they were wandering as guides” in search of gold. The word plunder, then, fell short, and the responsibility of the Spanish cannot be wrapped in discursive tinsel to distinguish it from that of the rest of the colonizers, experts say.
In the controversial statements of the Spanish Rivera de la Cruz, the treasure of the Quimbayas is barely mentioned, which is exhibited in the Museum of America in Madrid, a gift from the government of the Colombian Carlos Holguín in 1893, two years after its discovery, says the councilor that “in payment for services provided”, against the criteria of the Constitutional Court of Colombia. Isabel Arroyo, doctor in History from the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, also criticizes that “the republican elites instrumentalized the pre-Hispanic past and did not recognize the legitimate heirs.” “Spain has the responsibility of establishing the plundering of the indigenous people, but we [Colombians] maintained it and we are also responsible,” she says. “What right did that president have to take ownership of something that is part of the pre-Hispanic past?” Everyone has their fault in secular intrahistory.
From Colombia, Montoya and Arroyo agree that the archaeological pieces, however, are another matter. They argue that the Spaniards of the 16th or 17th century had no interest in those pre-Hispanic treasures, which they saw as diabolical or pagan figures that had to be melted down to extract the metal. The love for antiquities came later, when the new nation claimed itself as such, and there the guaqueros played their role, looting the tombs to sell to private collections.
Therefore, there is a historical responsibility in the plundering and a current one to amend that, as many countries are recognizing, including Spain, at least part of the political spectrum. And the matter is not simple. Dr. Laura Van Broekhoven, director of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, distinguishes two concepts that are used these days: repatriation and rematriation. The first refers to returning the pieces “taken without the permission of the indigenous peoples” to the homeland that was colonized, worth the word, although it has nuances. “For some of these peoples, especially when it comes to sacred or secret objects, or human remains, this transit from one country to another only represents a change of context, from one museum to another museum, but not to their original destination. or philosophical,” he explains. Without this “due cultural care” the wishes of the native communities are not satisfied. For this reason, Van Broekhoven, professor of Ethics and Museum Studies, explains that some indigenous peoples prefer to refer to rematriation, meaning that the object or ancestor can return to mother earth.
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