Emblems of Violence in Other Regions of the Americas

The four emblems we have analysed worked within the highly specific social and political contexts of Mesoamerica and the Andes, which were quite different from the rest of the Americas.

In other regions of the Americas, inhabited by societies that were less politically centralised and less hierarchical, Spanish rule was not so easily established and never achieved the same stability. As a result violence was more widespread and continuous, or at least intermittent. These different social realities produced other emblems, which deserve a study of their own, but we will briefly consider two in order to propose a few lines of comparison.

Around the Caribbean from the first explorations carried out by Cristopher Columbus in 1492 and onwards, the figure of the indigenous warrior that resisted Spanish domination came to be identified with anthropophagical practices under the name of ‘cannibalism'. This led to the creation of a long- lasting emblem of wild dangerous enemies that resisted every attempt of ‘pacification' (i.e. subjugation) and ‘conversion' (forced Christianisation). Such ‘cannibals' were later found and invented wherever indigenous non­state societies confronted Spanish colonists. In the frontier regions between the Andes and the Amazon and in northern Mesoamerica they merged with local ethnic classifications of non-state societies to create the intercultural emblems of the Chuncho and the Chichimeca, respectively.

In these emblems violence played a central role not as a past, finalised act, but as a constant threat, inherent to the frontier situation and to indigenous populations themselves. This violence was not presented as the foundation of the colonial order, but as a threat to it. In the first emblem it was embodied in ‘hostile' Indians and served to make them objects of brutal violence and subjugation, even extermination. In the second it embodied the complicated process of domestication and negotiation that allowed for a long-term inter­action with the powerful Mapuche.

We can conclude that the emblems of violence in the Andes and Mesoamerica, as well as in other regions, served as tools for interpreting the violence that was an inevitable part of colonial regimes. As such, they were central elements in the negotiation of the relations between native and European societies in the gradual construction of a shared order, or the exclusion of certain groups from it. To this day, they still play a central role in the historical memories of indigenous peoples in the New World, a proof of their cultural significance.