Journal Article

Chapter 6: The Violence of the letrados

Rojinsky, David

2010

Overview

[...]as a semi-literate conquistador, but certainly not a letrado, the use of written communication by a renegade like Lope de Aguirre allows us to problematize the notion that 'letterless' soldiers, like 'letterless Indians', were to be identified with a pre-literate state of nature where only a savage violence could possibly co-exist with the lack of writing, laws and orthodox Christianity. For if violence is the origin of the law, in the sense that the primordial foundation of any social taboo cannot be divorced from an inaugurating act of force (since it obviously depends on the threat of force for its authority), it stands to reason that \"where the highest violence, that over life and death, occurs in the legal system, the origins of law jut manifestly and fearsomely into existence\" (Benjamin 1986: 286). [...]rather than serving to simply punish an infringement of the law, the death penalty, as the most extreme form of legal violence against an individual life, serves to \"establish new law\" since each implementation of the death penalty enables the law to \"reaffirm itself as a transcendental institution (ibid.). [...]if, as González Echevarría (1990) has argued: \"Law and history are the two predominant modes of discourse in the colonial period\" (55), then it is in the sense that the law regulated the form and content of official historiography: \"In the sixteenth century writing was subservient to the law. On the contrary, according to Vázquez, Aguirre himself had predicted quite glibly that, should he be overthrown by forces loyal to the Crown, the public display of his severed head would serve merely to preserve his memory in the popular imaginary forever rather than serving as a deterrent to other acts of rebellion (Vázquez 1986: 145 -6). [...]Vázquez proceeds to describe how in fact Aguirre's prediction would not only be fulfilled, but exceeded: after his body had been quartered, his head was indeed severed and placed in an iron cage for public display while each one of his severed hands was sent to respective neighboring towns to complete the spectacular dissection.

• Publisher: Brill Academic Publishers, Inc
• Subject: Armed forces / Colonialism / Historiography / Illiteracy / Literacy / Violence / Writing