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MEXICAN HISTORY - PERSPECTIVES
By Ronald A. Barnett. ©2005 R. A. Barnett
His Bio -
What is History?History is generally written from the standpoint of the victors or the dominant society. Consequently the other side of the story is hardly ever told in full. This is especially true of Mexico, although the balance is now being redressed to some extent through improved translation and interpretation of native sources. Advances in the decipherment of the Maya hieroglyphs and the interpretation of the Maya, Aztec, and Mixtec codices reveal a different concept of time and history from our own.
What is history anyway? Sounds like a naive question, until you stop to think about it. It's like the concept of time. Everybody knows what it is, until one is asked to define it. In our society we are obsessed with the idea of keeping time. Nevertheless, your time and my time may be quite different, depending on our individual perceptions of time and space. Time in Mexico, as many visitors and even long-time foreign residents have observed, often does not mean the same as it does in the time-oriented society north of the border.
Our concept of history also depends to a large extent on our concept of time. The precise definition of time is a complicated philosophical problem. Does time exist independently of our thinking about it? Would the past, present, and future even exist if no one were alive to think about it? We do not have time to ponder theories of time when we are pressed for time. In one sense, every remembered event is "historical," whether it is a recent personal experience or something you read in a history book. The experience of reading history takes place in a kind of eternal present in which past events become the present, insofar as you reconstruct them in your mind.
In ancient Mexico, the Maya, Aztecs, and other high cultures observed both cyclical and linear time. Consequently their concept of history was far different from our own. Therefore, in dealing with theories about the origins of Mesoamerican civilizations and the meaning of history in ancient Mexico certain basic questions arise concerning the purpose and method of recording historical events. For convenience we may break the subject down into categories: traditional history, alternative history, oral history, and pseudo-history.
First, traditional or academic history. Historians in the western academic tradition generally follow one of two main approaches: speculative or critical. In the first approach, history is seen as a process with a purpose or master plan. In religious terms this presupposes a divine purpose or forward linear development of human history. In secular terms this implies an attempt to apply "scientific" method to the study of history, while at the same time maintaining the idea that history has some overall significance. The second is the critical approach, which represents a trend away from speculative theories. In this concept of history the emphasis is on specific persons and events as unrepeatable "happenings." On this view there is no universal pattern or linear progression in the course of human history. For lack of space and time the historians following these different approaches cannot be dealt with here. But it is important to remember that much of our current historical knowledge of ancient Mexico is based on these premises.
The method of writing history poses even greater problems. We therefore have to consider the nature of the historical explanation itself. Some historians advocate, as far as possible, the application of scientific methodology to the study of history. Others object that the subject matter, the quirks of human nature, and the sometimes bizarre events which go to make up history are simply not susceptible to scientific analysis and therefore require a radically different approach. We can conduct controlled laboratory experiments on white rats, but what does this really tell us about human behaviour?
With a few notable exceptions, historians do not generally participate directly in the events they write about. Julius Caesar, who wrote the war commentaries about the battles in which he himself led the Roman legions, was a notable exception. During the Conquest of Mexico, Cortés wrote letters to the emperor to describe and justify his actions against the native population. Years later Bernal Diaz del Castillo, one of the Conquistadors, wrote his "true" version of the same events. However, this raises the problem of objective observation versus subjective participation. If one is completely objective, it is difficult to understand another person's view of the same historical events. On the other hand, if one is completely immersed in an experience, it is equally difficult to avoid a biased interpretation of these same events.
The historian must of necessity be selective in the choice of events and persons to be entered into the historical record. The alternative, as in Alice in Wonderland, is to produce a map the same size as the terrain to be described. Regardless of the way in which the historical narrative is divided into time sequences, the historian cannot cover all the details, even in a minor event. Some events and personages will stand out above the others and demand special attention, but not everyone will agree on who or what is most important. Moreover, in order to make the historical account intelligible to the reader, the historian has to arrange his series of historical "facts" into some kind of coherent story line. We must then ask how much of the historical narrative is to be attributed solely to the imagination of the historian. Depending upon the skill or the bias of the writer, the reader is presented with a running narrative somewhere between historical fact and literary fiction. Prescott's popular Conquest of Mexico is a prime example of a historical account that reads like a novel and is extremely biased in favour of the conquerors.
These are just a few of the problems involved in writing history. The history of pre-Hispanic Mexico poses an even greater challenge, for the Spanish soldiers and the missionaries who followed them had no real respect for or interest in the cultural or spiritual values of the people with whom they came in contact. While certain Spanish chroniclers, such as Fray Bernardino de Sahagun and Bishop Landa, have left us invaluable historical accounts of the Aztecs and the Maya. . .
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