When I became interested in the colonial history of Honduras, I read a lot of colonial history. Among those who wrote about Honduras were people like the geographer William V. Davidson, and historians like Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle, Mario Argueta, Mario Ardon Mejia and for the more recent past, Dario Euraque. But no one impressed me more than the work of Mario Felipe Martinez Castillo.
He was a founder of the History program at UNAH, and easily the most knowledgeable person about 16th century Honduras. He wrote about colonial art, and the society that generated it. He was interested in the "family" of Hondurans who both formed the colony and whose descendents still wield power today.
From 1970 to 1980 he lived in Spain and worked daily in the Archivo
General de Indias researching the early history of Honduras. It was
there he found the 1558 declaration of the service and merits of Rodrigo
Ruiz (AGI Patronato 69 R.5) which for the first time confirmed in a contemporary document, the
existence of the national hero Lempira. His book on Lempira in 1987
both analyzes that document, and transcribes it, challenging everything
that Honduran school children still learn today about their national
hero.
He authored 14 books, and co-authored several others:
2011 Los forjadores de nuestra identidad
2009 Temas históricos inéditos de Honduras
2004 El paternalismo y la esclavidtud negra en el Real Minas de Tegucigalpa
2004 La Intendencia de Comayagua
2000 Por las rutas de la plata y el añil: desarrollo del arte colonial religioso hondureño
1993 Honduras en su historia y en su arte
1992 Cuatro centros de arte colonial provinciano hispano criollo en Honduras
1990 Honduras: cultura e identidad
1988 Catedral de la Inmaculada Concepción de Valladolid de Comayagua
1987 Los últimos dias de Lempira y otros documentos: el conquistador español que venció a Lempira
1982 Apuntamientos para una historia colonial de Honduras
1981 Presencia de grupos mexicanos antes y despues de la conquista de Honduras y pervivencia de la lengua Nahuatl en el área supuestamente Lenca.
1967 Capitulos sobre el Colegio Tridentino de Comayagua y la educación colonial en Honduras
1961 La escultura en Honduras
It's not often you get to meet one of your heroes. In 2008, my friend Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle arranged for me to meet his "mentor", Mario Felipe Martinez Castilllo, while we were attending a conference on minor Atlantic ports in the colonial period. He hosted a dinner at a beachfront restaurant in El Paraiso near Omoa where he introduced the two of us. Mario Felipe was gracious and listened to me talk about my own research on the 16th and 18th centuries in Honduras, but it was clear that his years of work had given him a greater knowledge of the 16th century events in Honduras than he had ever had the time to write about. I was both jealous and envious of the depth of that knowledge, and hope one day to be able to approach it. After the meal ended, we wanted to talk more, but he didn't do email, and I almost never go to Tegucigalpa, so it never happened.
Mario Felipe Martinez Castillo died Monday at the age of 80.
Showing posts with label Rodrigo Ruiz. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rodrigo Ruiz. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Dia de Lempira
Yesterday, July 20, was the Dia de Lempira in Honduras, when schoolchildren dress up as make-believe Lenca and elect an "India Bonita" in each town.
Like most such nationalist holidays incorporating imagery of an original people, there are many problematic aspects to this celebration. The image of Lempira on Honduran currency and in the statue that stands on a boulevard in San Pedro Sula draws more from ideas about generalized American Indians than any specifics of Lenca appearance or costume. But these aspects of cultural appropriation and their ironies are not the subject of this post.
In honor of this Lempira day I want to step back and remember the historical Lempira.
Lempira, or El Empira, was a Lenca war captain in the 1530s when the Spanish invaded western Honduras. We know he was a real person, one of those rarely named indigenous people who appear in Spanish Colonial documents of this time. When we began research in the country thirty years ago, the high school graduates we talked to were dubious about his historical existence, thinking he was legendary. But he was demonstrably real, and the recovery of his story is a tribute to the tenacity of Honduran scholars.
There are two contradictory stories about Lempira's death at the hands of the Spanish.
The most well known story is from the 17th century writings of Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas. In his multivolume work Historia General de los hechos de los castellanos en las islas y en tierra firme del mar océano.
This story, written long after the Spanish Conquest, was composed by interviewing the children of participants in the conquest and by examining documents in archives in Guatemala. In Herrera's story, Lempira agreed to meet with two representatives of the Spanish captain Alonso de Caceres to negotiate peace. While they were meeting under a flag of truce, a Spanish sharp-shooter shot and killed him. This is the story as it is taught in Honduran schools.
Due to the hard work of Honduran historian Mario Felipe Martinez Castillo, we actually know that earlier documentation of Lempira's campaign against the Spanish, dating to the 1560s, exists. Written less than a generation after the events, it contains first-hand witness testimony, and it tells a much different story.
The document, Patronato 69, R. 5 ("Meritos y Servicios Rodrigo Ruiz Nueva España") is in the Archivo General de Indias in Sevilla, Spain.
The document was sitting in the archives but was unknown to Honduran historians until the 1980s, when Mario Felipe Martinez Castillo, a noted Honduran historian, found and published it in Honduras in his book, Los Últimos Días de Lempira: Rodrigo Ruiz, El conquistador Español que lo venció en combate.
Rodrigo Ruiz gives us a fascinating story of infiltrating the Lenca forces during the battle with Lempira, until he arrived at the spot where Lempira was commanding his troops. He reports that Lempira was dressed in the clothing of two Spanish soldiers because Lempira felt it would make him impervious to bullets. He reports that he fought Lempira in hand to hand combat and killed him with his sword, later cutting off Lempira's head and presenting it to Montejo, the Spanish governor in 1537, as proof of Lempira's death. After Lempira was killed, Ruiz reports the Lenca withdrew for four days, then came to give obedience to the king.
The account of Rodrigo Ruiz contains elements which match the oral history preserved by the modern Lenca about Lempira, specifically that he thought he was impervious to the Spanish bullets, and that he was killed in combat, not in ambush as Herrera wrote.
The story of Lempira received from Herrera has been an important part of the creation of Honduran national identity, especially in the 1930s under the dictator Tiburcio Carias Andino. The new national currency, the Lempira, was named after him in 1931. The story of Lempira's betrayal by the Spanish, as told by Herrera, was incorporated into the new national school curriculum.
When Mario Felipe Martinez Castillo came forward with the account of Lempira based on earlier-- and therefore, likely more reliable-- documents, he was largely ignored. Lempira as an innocent victim of his nobility, doomed to defeat by the crafty (if morally flawed) Spanish, fits a standard storyline also seen in Mexico and Guatemala (where the stories are equally questionable historically). These stories underwrite ideologies of national integration, of assimilation and acculturation, of the inevitable loss of indigenous autonomy and identity.
Lempira as a successful leader who rallied a large-scale resistance to the Spanish is quite another kind of founding father. He is one of a group of alternative figures of indigenous history, who came to grips with the new historical circumstances in which they were living, and took active roles in advancing the persistence of their peoples.
It is a tribute to the work of Honduran historians that today the more complex story of Lempira is so well known that an editorial in Tiempo today by Edwin Wilfredo Rubí presented basically the same facts as we have in this post, about the rediscovery of the earlier story of Lempira and the contradictions it presents with the nationalist version. He ends his editorial
[Unfortunately, we cannot provide a link directly to the original document. But due to the policies of open access by the Spanish government, anyone with computer access can look up a scan of the original 16th century document. To do this,
1. Navigate to http://pares.mcu.es
2. Select the button for "Búsqueda Avanzada"
3. Under "Filtro por Archivo" select "Archivo General de Indias"
4. Under "Filtro por Signatura" enter "Patronato,69,R.5" and select the "Búsqueda por Signatura exacta" radio button.
5. Click on the "Buscar" button at the bottom of the page.
6. On the search results page click on "Patronato Real" underneath the "Archivo General de Indias" title.
7. Under "Titulo" click on "Meritos y Servicios Rodrigo Ruiz".
8. To view the page images, click on the "Ver Imagenes" button. ]
Like most such nationalist holidays incorporating imagery of an original people, there are many problematic aspects to this celebration. The image of Lempira on Honduran currency and in the statue that stands on a boulevard in San Pedro Sula draws more from ideas about generalized American Indians than any specifics of Lenca appearance or costume. But these aspects of cultural appropriation and their ironies are not the subject of this post.
In honor of this Lempira day I want to step back and remember the historical Lempira.
Lempira, or El Empira, was a Lenca war captain in the 1530s when the Spanish invaded western Honduras. We know he was a real person, one of those rarely named indigenous people who appear in Spanish Colonial documents of this time. When we began research in the country thirty years ago, the high school graduates we talked to were dubious about his historical existence, thinking he was legendary. But he was demonstrably real, and the recovery of his story is a tribute to the tenacity of Honduran scholars.
There are two contradictory stories about Lempira's death at the hands of the Spanish.
The most well known story is from the 17th century writings of Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas. In his multivolume work Historia General de los hechos de los castellanos en las islas y en tierra firme del mar océano.
This story, written long after the Spanish Conquest, was composed by interviewing the children of participants in the conquest and by examining documents in archives in Guatemala. In Herrera's story, Lempira agreed to meet with two representatives of the Spanish captain Alonso de Caceres to negotiate peace. While they were meeting under a flag of truce, a Spanish sharp-shooter shot and killed him. This is the story as it is taught in Honduran schools.
Due to the hard work of Honduran historian Mario Felipe Martinez Castillo, we actually know that earlier documentation of Lempira's campaign against the Spanish, dating to the 1560s, exists. Written less than a generation after the events, it contains first-hand witness testimony, and it tells a much different story.
The document, Patronato 69, R. 5 ("Meritos y Servicios Rodrigo Ruiz Nueva España") is in the Archivo General de Indias in Sevilla, Spain.
The document was sitting in the archives but was unknown to Honduran historians until the 1980s, when Mario Felipe Martinez Castillo, a noted Honduran historian, found and published it in Honduras in his book, Los Últimos Días de Lempira: Rodrigo Ruiz, El conquistador Español que lo venció en combate.
Rodrigo Ruiz gives us a fascinating story of infiltrating the Lenca forces during the battle with Lempira, until he arrived at the spot where Lempira was commanding his troops. He reports that Lempira was dressed in the clothing of two Spanish soldiers because Lempira felt it would make him impervious to bullets. He reports that he fought Lempira in hand to hand combat and killed him with his sword, later cutting off Lempira's head and presenting it to Montejo, the Spanish governor in 1537, as proof of Lempira's death. After Lempira was killed, Ruiz reports the Lenca withdrew for four days, then came to give obedience to the king.
The account of Rodrigo Ruiz contains elements which match the oral history preserved by the modern Lenca about Lempira, specifically that he thought he was impervious to the Spanish bullets, and that he was killed in combat, not in ambush as Herrera wrote.
The story of Lempira received from Herrera has been an important part of the creation of Honduran national identity, especially in the 1930s under the dictator Tiburcio Carias Andino. The new national currency, the Lempira, was named after him in 1931. The story of Lempira's betrayal by the Spanish, as told by Herrera, was incorporated into the new national school curriculum.
When Mario Felipe Martinez Castillo came forward with the account of Lempira based on earlier-- and therefore, likely more reliable-- documents, he was largely ignored. Lempira as an innocent victim of his nobility, doomed to defeat by the crafty (if morally flawed) Spanish, fits a standard storyline also seen in Mexico and Guatemala (where the stories are equally questionable historically). These stories underwrite ideologies of national integration, of assimilation and acculturation, of the inevitable loss of indigenous autonomy and identity.
Lempira as a successful leader who rallied a large-scale resistance to the Spanish is quite another kind of founding father. He is one of a group of alternative figures of indigenous history, who came to grips with the new historical circumstances in which they were living, and took active roles in advancing the persistence of their peoples.
It is a tribute to the work of Honduran historians that today the more complex story of Lempira is so well known that an editorial in Tiempo today by Edwin Wilfredo Rubí presented basically the same facts as we have in this post, about the rediscovery of the earlier story of Lempira and the contradictions it presents with the nationalist version. He ends his editorial
This extraordinary document...that has not been studied by any other historian [since Mario Felipe Martinez Castillo], merits a more careful analysis... It is also a stimulus for the present and future generation of Honduran historians that will give life to our colonial history, making use of documents like this...
From this text you can take two conclusions: first, that the rising of Cerquin was absolutely true, and second, that the indigenous leader who led the peoples of the province of Cerquin was named ELEMPIRA.
If this version is the truth, it also makes me feel proud, on knowing, that our Cacique Lempira died completely as a hero, preferring to die fighting, rather than on his knees
[Unfortunately, we cannot provide a link directly to the original document. But due to the policies of open access by the Spanish government, anyone with computer access can look up a scan of the original 16th century document. To do this,
1. Navigate to http://pares.mcu.es
2. Select the button for "Búsqueda Avanzada"
3. Under "Filtro por Archivo" select "Archivo General de Indias"
4. Under "Filtro por Signatura" enter "Patronato,69,R.5" and select the "Búsqueda por Signatura exacta" radio button.
5. Click on the "Buscar" button at the bottom of the page.
6. On the search results page click on "Patronato Real" underneath the "Archivo General de Indias" title.
7. Under "Titulo" click on "Meritos y Servicios Rodrigo Ruiz".
8. To view the page images, click on the "Ver Imagenes" button. ]
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