week 8: la otra conquista

Our first film of the semester. La otra conquista (The Other Conquest) tells the story of a Mexica scribe who struggles with the transformation of Tonantzin into La Virgen. As you watch the film, pay close attention to how its narration performs double mistaken identity. James Lockhart defines Double Mistaken Identity as a process, “in which each side of a cultural exchange presumes that a given form or concept is functioning in teh way familiar within its own tradition and is unaware of or unimpressed by the other’s side’s inerpretation.” Of Things of the Indies (Standford University Press, 1999): 99. Also pay attention the nature of the differing cataclysms of the period.

October 8 (Tuesday)

• Martin Nesvig, Promiscuous Power, “Burning Down the House, in Which the spiritual Conquistadors Go to War with Each Other.”

October 10 (Thursday)

• J. Michael Francis. “In the Service of God, I Order these Temples of Idolatrous Worship Razed to the Ground”: Extirpation of Idolatry and the Search for the Santuario Grande of Iguaque (Columbia, 1595)” in Colonial Lives, pp. 39-53.