how to say things with wars: performativity and discursive rupture in the ...

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How to Say Things with Wars:Performativity and Discursive

Rupture in the Requerimiento of theSpanish Conquest

Though linguistic anthropologists have long surpassed Austin’s initial formulation, theperformativity concept remains of enduring interest for its utility in exploring how languageconstitutes social action. I build on those conversations by considering the concept’s applica-bility to a key document used in the conquest of the Americas, an event involving one of thegreatest discursive divides in human history. After examining the text’s internal structureand what we know of its use, I suggest that the complex performative dynamics at work in thetext are tied to the ways it presupposes and simultaneously instantiates social hierarchies byestablishing participant roles. Competing interpretations of those participant roles are madepossible by the text’s strategic indeterminacy and the temporal dynamics of its circulation. Iconclude by considering parallels to other texts and speech acts likewise designed to grapplewith discursive difference. [performativity, indeterminacy, participant roles, ritualspeech, legal genres]

Introduction: On Performativity and the Felicity of Wars

The idea that speech can be a form of social action first gained widespreadrecognition through John Austin’s seminal treatise How to Do Things with Words(1975), an analysis of performativity in English. In its classic formulation, per-

formative utterances are those that by describing an act of speaking under appropri-ate conditions accomplish the act so named (Benveniste 1971). The “I do” at the centerof Western marriage vows is perhaps the most famous example, one Austin himselfdiscussed in elucidating the “felicity conditions” necessary for a speech act to beperformed successfully. However, Austin’s original framework was not designed totake into account the full gamut of complex, layered cultural contexts in whichutterances are produced, received, and recirculated. Thus linguistic anthropologistshave thoroughly reworked his framework while preserving the utility of his basicinsight that speech can accomplish social action. They have developed a rich array oftools for examining myriad ways language in use can be “worldmaking or world-transforming. As a result of [performative] utterances, new social relationships arecreated” (Urban 2001:144).

I draw on these tools, and the field’s ongoing conversations about performati-vity, by examining a case that poses interesting challenges for the concept. TheRequerimiento is a sixteenth-century Spanish text used to formalize conquests in the

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Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Vol. 22, Issue 3, pp. 182–200, ISSN 1055-1360, EISSN 1548-1395. © 2013by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1395.2012.01152.x.

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Americas. Its name comes from the text’s core section, turning crucially on the verbsof speaking requerir and rogar through which invading Spaniards explicitly beseechedindigenous peoples to submit to the Crown.1 Formally, the Requerimiento appears tobe an explicit performative: it literally describes the action it seeks to perform. Yetmost commentators, past and present alike, have regarded it as failing to accomplishits intended social act, to function performatively. The renowned legal scholar SilvioZavala wrote of the Requerimiento, “in practice, facing the tribes of America, it took ona character of the grotesque” (1988:78). Contemporaries found the text just as pre-posterous. A typical if especially scathing response was expressed by Fray Bartoloméde Las Casas, a former Conquistador and one of the era’s most famous missionaries,who wrote that the “unjust, impious, scandalous, irrational, and absurd” documentleft him at a loss over whether to “laugh, or, better, to cry” (1951:31). Other Europeansmocked and derided it, among them Sir Walter Raleigh and Michel de Montaigne(Hanke 1938, Seed 1995). As told by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, a royal chroniclerand staunch advocate of conquest, even the Requerimiento’s author seemed to share asense of its absurd character:

I asked Dr. Palacios Rubios (because he had written the Requerimiento), if the Christianconscience was appeased by the Requerimiento, and he told me yes, if I had given it as theRequerimiento instructs. But I saw that he laughed many times when I related what transpiredon this expedition and others. (Oviedo y Valdes 1959:297)

Such reactions reveal that contemporaries no less than modern scholars have reliedupon competing criteria for measuring the Requerimiento’s felicity or success. Thesecriteria diverge in part due to differing views of the text’s participant structure—turning on the crucial question, for example, of who constituted the text’s addressees:was the text addressed to native peoples of the Americas or not? Reactions on this andother issues inform us about the complex dynamics of performativity at issue in thiscase.2 These dynamics involve complicated interactions between form and context:how the text presupposes and simultaneously instantiates, through diagrammaticfiguration (Silverstein 2004), particular participant structures that are in turn linked toestablishing authority and domination. Also in play here is the role of indeterminacyin setting the text’s participant structure. The text’s indeterminacy of reference and itsparticipant structures are tied to the temporal dynamics of the document’s circulation,as it licensed the installation of the power relations the text was meant to formalize,recursively linking the text’s performativity to the temporal dynamics of conquestand colonial rule.

The conjunction of speech and action in cases of discursive difference is ofongoing relevance well beyond the conquest of the Americas, speaking to a broaderclass of speech interactions in contexts of domination. Granted, the discursiverupture in Old World-New World contact is a particularly extreme form of commu-nicative incommensurability. It begins from radical linguistic difference—the lan-guages in question (Spanish on the one hand, Amerindian languages on the other)were radically different from each other, had no previous histories of contact, andinitially lacked translators capable of bridging them. Furthermore, this linguisticdifference was tied to more comprehensive discursive divides between Europeansand Amerindians, differences that even centuries into the colonial project animatedthe production of hybrid expressive genres at communicative boundaries (Hanks2010, Durston 2007, Mannheim 2011). Scholars have found less severe forms ofmiscommunication a rich site of analysis: communicative failures illuminate mecha-nisms through which language in other circumstances successfully accomplishessocial work, and miscommunication is itself an important social phenomenon withpotentially momentous consequences (e.g., Jacquemet 2009). This paper adds to thatand related research into how texts function performatively in contexts where par-ticipants do not share the same metapragmatic assumptions (Bowen 1993; Cody2009). Because the Requerimiento emerged in response to a particularly radical

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rupture, its examination advances conversations in the field about the limits of per-formativity. How does speech constitute action in contexts of discursive disparity?How should we think about “felicity conditions”—or shared pragmaticframeworks—in such contexts? What is the relationship between form and contextwhere performatives fails to accomplish social action, or where they appear to workdespite their flaws?

Scholarship on the Requerimiento has focused almost entirely on its contexts of useor on the legal traditions and theological disagreements from which it emerged. Suchanalyses rarely consider the text’s internal nature beyond its referential content. Whileunderstanding the document’s context is critical, an analysis of its form is equallyrevealing. Examining the text’s form using linguistic anthropological tools illumi-nates dimensions of the text different from those elucidated by historiographicalanalyses. Yet at the same time such analysis broadens conversations in linguisticanthropology by examining an important historical text different from those thathave received such attention in the subdiscipline (e.g., Lee 1995 and Urban 2001 onthe Declaration of Independence).3 Examining the Requerimiento’s formal propertiesshows, at the grossest level, that the entire text was designed to be a performativeutterance: the Requerimiento is the “script” for serial speech acts, structured to be readaloud on a potentially infinite number of occasions. Analyzing the entire text as aperformative reveals that it has the interesting though not novel rhetorical strategy ofinstantiating a “super-performative” utterance, designed not only to accomplish anaction by explicitly describing it but also to establish those action’s felicity conditionsby explicitly describing them as well. The discursive disunity between the Spanishand indigenous peoples meant that the felicity conditions necessary for the text toperform “happily” could not be presupposed. Thus the text’s author was called uponto marshal the “bootstrapping” rhetorical strategy of attempting to accomplish anaction through speech while simultaneously establishing the communicative contexton which the speech act depended. As I discuss below, this strategy—while a depar-ture from classic Austinian cases and while perhaps deployed with unusual explic-itness in the Requerimiento—is present in many complex performatives discussed byothers (e.g., Derrida 1986; Fliegelman 1993; Lee 1995 and 1997; Silverstein 2004; Urban2001; Warner 1990).

What is unusual in this case is that this “super-performative” form of performa-tivity was harnessed to—and advanced by—the deliberate exploitation of deicticambiguity, particularly in the crucial matter of who constituted the text’s addressee.The fundamental indeterminacy of language, particularly as it relates to participationstructures, has been explored from many angles by linguistic anthropologists (e.g.,Duranti 1994; Falk-Moore 1978; Irvine 1996; Jaffe 2000, 2009). Here, the strategy isused as a response to the discursive disjuncture in the early conquest period. Thetext’s indeterminacy of reference made it possible for the text to be directed towardsmultiple addressees (and speakers) at once—or at least to be interpreted in multipleways by those taking stock of the text, both at the time it was used and in the centuriessince. This in turn rendered assessments about the text’s performativity multiple andcomplex. So while for some people the text was considered effective, for others it wasnot. Furthermore, different readings of the text’s efficacy hinged upon who wasconsidered the addressee—the Crown itself, other Europeans, or other indigenouspeoples. This multiplicity of interpretations—which depend crucially on the referen-tial ambiguity surrounding the addressee—is rooted in the text’s deictic structure,and fueled the intense debates about the document among both contemporaries andthe generations of scholars studying the text.

How one interprets the document centers as well on how the text is tied to contextsof use—and this, in turn, introduces temporal dimensions into the text’s performa-tivity. The relationship between performativity and temporality was underdevelopedin Austin’s original formulation, but work in linguistic anthropology has thoroughlyaddressed this issue (e.g., Briggs 2005; Cody 2009; Lee 1995, 1997; Urban 2001; Warner1990). My analysis builds on that work by considering how the unfolding of historical

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events over time conditions how people have interpreted the Requerimiento—particularly with respect to what different people have considered criteria for thetext’s efficacy and, in turn, competing understandings of the text’s performativitywere tied to divergent readings of the text’s participant structure. I take up a consid-eration of how both the indeterminacy of reference and the temporality of texts are atplay in the way the Requerimiento and like texts presuppose and at the same timeperformatively instantiate power relations.

I offer an overview of the Requerimiento followed by a discussion of what is knownabout its use and contemporary debates about its efficacy that arose in response topractices of the text’s deployment. I then examine the text’s performative qualities inlight of its internal nature, using three levels of analysis. First, I examine specificlinguistic forms anchoring the entire text as a performative while simultaneouslyestablishing the text’s participant framework. Next, I consider the document’s overallpoetic structure and the diagrammatic figurations it indexes. Finally, I view the entiretext as the token of a particular generic type. I close by considering how this caserelates to recent research on similar texts and how it might augment our understand-ing of performativity in contexts of discursive disjuncture.

Historical Background and Overview of the Text

Following Columbus’s initial “discovery” of America in 1492, the Spanish Crownmoved to ensure its legal right to rule the Indies. Officially, this right was based onthe papal bulls of 1493, “a clear instruction to the Crown of Castile to undertake theconversion of the American Indians to Christianity” (Parry and Keith 1984:287). Inthese famous documents, Pope Alexander VI drew an imaginary line dividing theIndies into two spheres of influence thereby “making donation” of the Indies jointlyto Spain and Portugal. Contrary to popular opinion, this was not a land grant perse; rather, “the Pope was allocating spheres of ecclesiastical responsibility . . . forconverting the infidels in the lands [the kingdoms] had discovered” (Muldoon1979:137). The bulls provided the legal basis for waging war justly in the NewWorld by stipulating the right of secular authorities to secure, by force if necessary,the entry of Catholic missionaries (Muldoon 1979:137–138; Parry and Keith1984:271, 287).

The Requerimiento was written by Juan López de Palacios Rubios, a distinguishedlawyer in the Council of Castile (Palacios Rubios 1927 [1513]). First used in 1514, theRequerimiento was designed to formalize and legitimate conquest, which at that timewas unfolding against partial awareness of the full reach and variability of Spain’sNew World possessions. The document was meant to license myriad acts of waragainst the Americas’ indigenous peoples by providing an incontestable legal basisfor military action in keeping with grounds for just conquest laid out in the papalbulls. The Requerimiento aimed to “prevent ecclesiastical criticism of [the Crown’s]American conquests and to justify these conquests in terms of the legal traditionabout the rights of infidels” (Muldoon 1979:140). It was created in direct response toharsh criticisms voiced in 1511 by the Dominican friar Antonio de Montesinos(Hemming 1970:129), whose fiery sermon forced “the crown itself to a criticalreevaluation of the procedures it had been following to guarantee legitimacy of itsown rule” (Seed 1995:72).

The result was the Requerimiento, one of the most striking texts written during theconquest of the Americas.4 Designed to be read aloud directly prior to launchingmilitary attacks, the text is a direct descendant of medieval European legal traditionsconcerning just war and the rights of non-Christians (Muldoon 1979; Zavala 1967).5

Viewed even at the time as anomalous by defenders and detractors alike, the Requer-imiento was at once the creative “invention” of its author and an exemplar of existinglegal and theological conventions.6

The Requerimiento is less than a thousand words in length; it would have takenminutes to read, even at a leisurely pace. It has four parts: 1) a brief history of the


world from its creation through the papacy’s establishment and the “donation” of theAmericas to Spain; 2) an explanation of Spain’s New World authority by virtue of thathistory; 3) the central speech act imploring natives to submit to the Crown; and 4) apromise of future Spanish actions if indigenous peoples fail to permit Christianevangelization. The document thus asserts Spanish intentions to take physical pos-session of the Indies, declaring that the Crown has prior legal and religious claim.This declaration hinges critically on the portion of the text where natives arebeseeched to recognize the sovereignty of the Catholic Church and the authority ofthe Spanish Crown, acting on the Pope’s behalf. An utterance of Spanish intentions topossess the Americas through formally requesting submission, the text outlines theserequests while simultaneously accomplishing the action of making them. The Requer-imiento therefore appears, formally, to be quintessentially performative: the very act ofuttering the text was intended to fundamentally alter the social relations betweenSpanish and natives.

However, once we consider what we know about the text’s use, the text’s perfor-mativity becomes more complex. There is no evidence the text was ever officiallytranslated into any indigenous languages (Muldoon 1979:140). Particularly in theinitial conquest period, native interpreters, when used at all, were often captivesseized from earlier skirmishes. Some had no knowledge of Spanish and little ofindigenous languages beyond their own (Brice Heath 1972:8–9). One famous linguis-tic circuit involving Cortés exemplifies such contingencies: Cortés spoke in Spanish;his words were translated into Yucatec Maya by Jerónimo de Aguilar, a Spanish priestwho learned Yucatac while a captive of the Maya; and the heralded translator andformer slave Malintzin (“La Malinche”) translated the Yucatec Maya into Nahuatl, thelanguage of the Aztecs and a lingua franca throughout Mesoamerica. Deployment ofthe Requerimiento and other initial acts of communication between the Spanish andindigenous peoples routinely relied on such highly contingent linguistic circuits.These spontaneous acts of translation involved multiple languages (indigenous andEuropean), visual aids (sign languages, gestures, and pictograms), and only some-times the efforts of experienced translators.

Research on the text’s specific contexts of use is scant. Existing sources outline avariety of scenarios where the “legal ritual” of reading the document aloud wasstrictly executed without attempting to communicate with indigenous peoplesbeyond deploying the form itself. Despite its age, Lewis Hanke’s work remains themost systematic on the specific events in which the document was read aloud (1938,1949; see also Muldoon 1979:140–142). His account illustrates their wildly disparatecharacter:

[T]he Requirement was read to trees and empty huts when no Indians were to be found.Captains muttered its theological phrases into their beards on the edge of sleeping Indiansettlements, or even a league away before starting the formal attack, and at times someleather-lunged Spanish notary hurled its sonorous phrases after the Indians as they fled intothe mountains. Once it was read in camp to the beat of the drum. Ship captains wouldsometimes have the document read from the deck as they approached an island. . . . On oneoccasion the proclamation was made according to the King’s instructions, but at the sametime the Spaniards judiciously plied the Indians with food, drink, bonnets, cloth, shirts,hoods, and “other little trifles from Castile” . . . The outcome was far different when CaptainJuan de Ayora captured a number of Indians, linked them together with ropes fastened totheir necks, and then read the Requirement. (1949:34)

As summarized by another colonial scholar, the Requerimiento was read “to emptyvillages, to natives already captive, or”—alluding to a famous event following Pizar-ro’s conquest of Cuzco—”during a victory celebration on the square of a conqueredcapital city” (Hemming 1970:130).7

There are different ways to interpret this failure to translate the text officially. Twoobvious yet opposing readings are at odds with by now well-developed linguisticanthropological critiques of conventional interpretations of communicative intent,


but I mention them briefly because such positions have been taken by various peoplewriting about the document. The first view holds the text to be motivated by broaderlanguage ideologies invested in linguistic transparency: conveying referential “facts”would provide the natives with sufficient information to make the informed—andrational—decision to submit (or, conversely, rebel). The second view reads the text asanimated by anxiety about linguistic opacity and hence the futility of communication.In this reading, the document was never meant to produce communication with thenatives and was instead a cynical exercise in legal ritual wherein those designing anddelivering it had minimal interest in making the text intelligible to its ostensibleaddressees.

Neither view, however, is tenable: research in the subfield has convincingly dem-onstrated the folly of such readings of authorial intent, and furthermore both histori-cal research and close examination of the text itself suggest other readings. What weknow of the context surrounding the text’s production and use suggests it wasmotivated neither out of a conviction that communication with the natives would bestraightforward nor out of a belief that the attempt to do so was a mere legal formality.Rather, the document was motivated by the effort to deal with discursive disunity ofthe most radical type—that between Spaniards and natives—but also disparity of lessextreme kinds. We know the Requerimiento was born out of disagreement beyond themost immediate dispute sparked by Montesinos’ sermon: “three centuries of debatein canonistic circles about the rights of infidels preceded its composition” (Muldoon1980:303). The Requerimiento was produced out of the anticipation of critiques ofSpain’s conquests by other powers in Europe as well as by factions within Spain itself.This history—and the fact that the document and the ideas it represented weredebated for years in the highest courts of the land—meant the document did not, inany straightforward sense, have a single author. Unlike some other forms of perfor-mative speech, the Requerimiento was in no way spontaneous or casual: it was carefullycrafted in response not only to the discursive challenges posed by the New World butalso to myriad, long-standing internal divisions at home.

These debates continued well after the text was put into circulation (and even afterit fell into disuse). The celebrated debate at Vallodolid in 1550 between the imminentcourt jurist Juán Ginés de Sepúlveda and the famed “Defender of the Indians” LasCasas gave “concrete incarnation” (Todorov 1984:151) to ongoing disputes over justwar and natives’ rights.8 While these contemporary debates were not always aboutthe Requerimiento per se, they dealt with the same underlying issues animatingdebates about the document: general concerns about the rights of the natives wereclosely linked to concerns about whether those rights had been satisfied by readingthe Requerimiento to them prior to attack. The debate over whether the Requerimientowas capable of licensing conquest even if the natives did not understand it was,essentially, a disagreement over whether the indigenous populations were the target,in Goffman’s terms (1981), or were instead “ratified observers” whose presence wasnecessary but whose comprehension was not. Disagreements among contemporariessuggest that whatever the author’s position, no consensus existed within Spain: evenif Palacios Rubios never saw the natives as the target of the text, Las Casas clearly andvehemently did, or at least refused to concede that the text could be performative forthe Pope, the Crown, and the rest of Europe unless it was performative for the nativesfirst.

I suggest the creation of the document was motivated by an attempt to grapplewith the vast discursive rupture between the Spanish and the natives and also withdiscursive and ideological divides within Spain. While the most skeptical assessmentwould read the document’s repeated hedges as an open acknowledgement of itscynical stance regarding communication with the natives, less skeptical interpreta-tions can also find evidence that the texts’ framers and users assumed not discursiveunity but rather discursive discord of both proximal and distant varieties, anddesigned the text in response. A look at the text’s formal structure is particularlyuseful at illuminating this strategy, especially analysis focused on the text’s peculiar


form as a performative. The text’s “super-performative” form—structured to performnot only the speech act in question but also the context on which the act depends—isa particular rhetorical strategy deployed to contend with discursive unity, to manageand contain it. As I discuss in conclusion, we find similar formal strategies in othercomplex performatives aiming to navigate discursive difference.

Internal Analysis of the Text9

Participant Structure and the Performative Core

Analysis of the text’s internal features reveals the various ways it simultaneouslypresupposes and performatively instantiates social hierarchies. The speech act’s par-ticipant framework is crucial, and is established most clearly in the text’s final half.The text’s four parts are as follows:

1 Recounting of [Western] history, from creation through Papal donation2 Explanation of Spanish authority to evangelize in the New World3 Plea for the natives to submit to the Crown and permit evangelization4 Promise of war if the natives do not submit

Though the third section is by far the shortest, it forms the text’s performative core.Moving from a discussion of indigenous peoples who have accepted the Requer-imiento and become Christian vassals of the King, the entire third section reads asfollows:

. . . and you too are held and obliged to do the same. Wherefore, as best we can, we askand require you that you consider what we have said to you, and that you take the timethat shall be necessary to understand and deliberate upon it, and that you acknowledge theChurch as the Ruler and Superior of the whole world, and the high priest called Pope, andin his name the King and Queen Doña Juana our lords, in his place, as superiors and lordsand kings of these islands and this Tierra-firme by virtue of the said donation, and thatyou consent and give place that these religious fathers should declare and preach to youthe aforesaid.

(Parry and Keith 1984:289–290; emphasis mine)

Not until this point in the text is submission explicitly requested. The segment’ssingle sentence is a series of embedded clauses whose independent clause, its gram-matical heart, is the phrase giving the document its name: vos ruego y requiero, “I askand implore you.”10 This construction is quintessentially performative: it “at oncedescribes and instantiates” (Silverstein 1981:9) the actions it performs. That singlephrase delivers on the entire document’s reason for existence: the key act the docu-ment was designed to accomplish was achieved by uttering it. Furthermore, thisholds regardless of who is considered to be the addressee. In even the most cynicalreading, for the text to be effective the Spanish must formally ask the natives tosubmit, even if it is a hollow ritual. This one phrase accomplishes that request forsubmission. Of course, this does not mean that uttering the text accomplished asuccessful communicative act for the target in question—that depends crucially onwho the addressee was, which I turn to below.

The fourth section also features strategically located performatives, particularly inthe final segment ending the text. Much like the third, this section consists primarilyof a single long sentence of embedded phrases whose independent clause is anexplicit performative:

But, if you do not [submit], and maliciously make delay in it, I certify to you that, with thehelp of God, we shall powerfully enter into your country, and shall make war against you inall ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of theChurch and of their Highnesses; we shall take you and your wives and your children, andshall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them as their Highnesses may


command; and we shall take away your goods, and shall do you all the mischief and damagethat we can, as to vassals who do not obey, and refuse to receive their lord, and resist andcontradict him; and we protest that the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this areyour fault, and not that of their Highnesses, or ours, nor of these cavaliers who come with us.And that we have said this to you and made this Requisition, we request the notary herepresent to give us his testimony in writing, and we ask the rest who are present that theyshould be witnesses of this Requisition.

(Parry and Keith 1984:290; emphasis mine)

Thus explicit performatives are strategically located in this text. They anchor keysections where they “describe and instantiate” the action towards which the entiredocument is aimed: the request for submission. But uttering the central performativedoes more than accomplish an action: it also establishes a participant framework—though people commenting on this text have strongly disagreed about the nature ofthat framework, particularly concerning speaker and addressee roles. Furthermore,the roles the text ostensibly establishes—Spaniards who have complied with rules ofjust war, natives who have chosen compliance or resistance—stand in particularrelations to each other, constituting the very social hierarchy towards which the textis directed. The entire narrative aims to create, through key speech acts, a specificconfiguration of socio-political relations by describing them: to instantiate them byestablishing participant structures. The text’s form is thus a key part of the process bywhich Spanish authority is simultaneously indexically presupposed and indexicallycreated.

This dual process of indexically creating and presupposing social hierarchy isrelated to the text’s abundance of metapragmatic commentary (see Silverstein 1993)on the legitimation of force. The basis for Spanish authority is not self-evident butrather is excluded from the discursive event. It resides in the decrees through whichthe Pope:

. . . made donation of these isles and Tierra-firme to the aforesaid King and Queen and totheir successors, our lords, with all that there are in these territories, as is contained incertain writings which passed on the subject as aforesaid, which you can see if you wish.So their Highnesses are kings and lords of these islands and land of Tierra-firme by virtue ofthis donation. . . .

(Parry and Keith 1984:289; emphasis mine)11

The legal basis for Spanish authority—the papal bulls and the broader Europeanpower structures on which they are predicated—is exterior to the speech event.Referencing that basis as the legal warrant for military action would have beenexpected and necessary for a wide range of possible addressees; in this, the Requer-imiento is like other “classic” performatives. What is unusual is the metapragmaticcommentary on the exclusion of this evidential basis from the speech event, suggest-ing anxiety about its omission. Yet only for the natives is that exclusion problematic:for the Pope, the Crown, and even the rest of Europe the papal bulls and the authoritythey license would have been assumed (or perhaps contested, in the case of Europeanpowers, but based on more fundamental critiques, not the documentary evidence).This aspect of the text’s structure, then, contributes to the attempt to establish thenecessary context for the text to function performatively, but in the process alsoreveals the complicated nature of the participant structure it must establish, involvingmultiple addressees who would have approached the speech event with widelyvarying discursive assumptions.

This complex participant framework is tied to the broader strategy of establishingthe necessary context for the document to be performative while acknowledgingsome of that strategy’s limits. Simultaneously, this strategy contributes to theinstantiation—if only in the “micromotion” (Urban 2001) of the text’s circulationthrough speech events—of the very political relations the text was designed toperform. Excluding such crucial evidence from the speech event would have posed


vast problems of immediate access for natives, involving linguistic, discursive, cul-tural, and physical barriers all at once. Of course, this problem is not unique to thistext; legal genres often depend on evidentiary chains where the recipient of a giventext, in the act of receiving it, is distanced from the licensing text by multiple layersof textual and institutional mediation. However, given the surrounding discursiverupture, this is a particularly severe case of mediation and distancing, placing theaddressees in an exaggerated relationship of dependence upon the speaker for veri-fication of Spanish authority. The natives must take that authority on faith or reject it,but either choice constitutes another means by which the participant structure isestablished and indigenous people are recruited to participate in a particular role—that of infidels who have heard the Requerimiento, responded to it (by welcomingevangelization or rejecting it), and hence licensed Spanish entry peacefully or byforce. While a response by indigenous people was required, the particular response—positive or negative, linguistic or nonlinguistic—was read performatively, as theinstantiation of submission or rejection.

Participant Frameworks: Ambiguity and the Limits of Historical Evidence

Only in the text’s second half is the participant framework fully established—and it isnot coincidental that explicit performatives figure so prominently here, for the deicticpronouns central to explicit performatives are the critical vehicles through which thetext-utterance is indexically linked to contexts of use. Direct address occurs at onlytwo earlier points in the text, both in passing (Parry and Keith quote on p. 189). Onlyin the third section—where there is also a dramatic increase in tokens of directaddress—is the particular role for which natives are being recruited clarified. Thespeaker’s role also comes into focus, emerging as an animator in Goffman’s (1981)terms who is explicitly absolved of responsibility for his words: he speaks for the king(who speaks for the Pope), who is the principal. The addressees, on the other hand, areresponsible for the words’ reception, for answering or rejecting the “summons toconvert and submit” (Seed 1995:89).

Before considering the speaker role, let me discuss some limitations on availablehistorical evidence. An important difference between the most widely used Spanishand English versions of the Requerimiento concerns the speaker’s first personpronoun, which is singular in the Spanish and plural in the English. Though clearlya significant difference, it appears the documentary record cannot tell us which formwas more common in practice: both pronouns appear in existing copies of the docu-ment as well as the numerous published versions, an inconsistency doubtless tied tohistorically contingent events involving the text’s reproduction and dissemination.Scholarship remains largely silent on who read the Requerimiento aloud. Fewsources identify the social role (let alone personal name) of the reader; those doing sodisagree, though candidates include notaries (Hanke 1938:26) and priests (Muldoon1979:viii, 140). While with few exceptions this issue appears unanswerable empiri-cally, at any rate the text’s participant structure is designed to “suppress” the inten-tions (Du Bois 1992) of particular speakers or speaker categories. Furthermore, theconquistador in charge was always responsible for the document’s recitation whetheror not he performed it himself: he could be prosecuted by the Council of the Indies forfailure to have it read and was legally protected from prosecution once its deploymenthad been documented (Hanke 1938:26, 1949:31–36).

For different reasons, the historical record is equally unable to address questionsabout the text’s addressees.12 Hanke’s account suggests the sheer variety of contextswhere the document was read, implying an equally wide range of addressees. But thehistorical question of who the addressees were in specific instances is of minorimportance. Contemporary debates about the text’s efficacy, and modern scholars’attempts to grapple with the document’s meaning, have crucially turned on thequestion of whether the natives were the ultimate target. At the explicit level, the


matter is straightforward: the text is addressed to the natives to whom it was osten-sibly read, using vosotros forms; in the sixteenth century such “nondeferential” forms,not marked for politeness, would have been expected when addressing those notconsidered superiors (Penny 2002:123–125). Yet the referential indeterminacy builtinto the text—allowing the pronouns of address to be hooked to natives who werefleeing or who could not possibly understand its meaning—calls into questionwhether indigenous peoples were ever meant to be the addressees.

The complexity and ambiguity of the participant framework is notable: for bothspeaker and hearer multiple overlapping roles are invoked, and a variety of actorsmight be recruited to participate in each role depending upon one’s reading of thetext. This calls to mind Judith Irvine’s work on the indeterminacy of participant roles,the “complex calculus of mapping roles onto persons present and absent” (1996:158).For example, the soldier, notary, priest, or even conquistador himself who physicallyread the text aloud is at one level its speaker or animator, the “I” to whom the role hasbeen assigned through the act of deploying the text and uttering the key performa-tives at its core. Yet given a more cynical or perhaps more legalistic reading of the text,he could be the addressee or “target” of the very text he animates, as he himself—orperhaps his “Christian conscience,” as Palacios Rubios suggests—witnesses the text’sdeployment. In other readings still the addressee might consist of other Spaniardswith him who can likewise serve as witnesses; or the Crown, who would ultimatelyrecognize successful performance of the text; or other Europeans or the Pope, forwhom proof of fidelity to legal form was being performed.

Or, once again, the addressee could have been considered the natives; Las Casasamong many others insisted they must minimally be a proximal target. “What couldsomeone say to excuse those that framed the Requerimiento, and those that went toexecute it, issuing it to those who understood not a word of it, anymore than if it hadbeen given in Latin or jargon?” Any “prudent man,” Las Casas claimed, would seethat to speak of texts like the Requerimiento functioning performatively in contexts ofsuch great linguistic difference “has no place” (Las Casas 1951:258). Furthermore, foreach of these cases the variable laminations of participant roles means the social actionperformed likewise varies. In one reading, the animator is performing a request; inanother, a threat; in another, a justification; in another still, a legal protection. All thewhile, adherence to the form and the emerging conventions surrounding its deploy-ment have their own perfornative effects, “disciplining” (in the Foucauldian sense)the various participants in the ways of the Spanish empire.

This complex participant framework is facilitated by the text’s formal elements, itspronouns above all. The indeterminacy of participant roles multiplied the potentialinterpretations about who was being recruited and according to what criteria. Refer-ential indeterminacy is strategically exploited in this text as useful in navigatingdiscursive diversity within Spain, across Europe, and in the fraught attempt to bridgethe discursive gap between the Old World and the New. This ambiguity then becamea resource available for further exploitation by the text’s specific animators whenreading it aloud—including those doing so on the purely cynical terms illustrated byHanke’s long list of events filled with Austian “misfires” and “abuses.” But referencefunctioned ambiguously not only for participants and potential participants but alsofor myriad observers and potential observers, both contemporary and modern. Thusthe referential indeterminacy built into the text has made possible competing inter-pretations of the text’s participant structure and, in turn, centuries of heated debateabout the Requerimiento.

The Text’s Poetic Architecture

The overall structure of the text likewise contributes to the strategy of simultaneouslypresuming and performatively instantiating social relations: it is a diagrammaticfiguration at once indexically presupposing and indexically creative (Silverstein 2004)of Spanish-native social relations. The text’s poetic architecture is an iconic index of


those relations—and a dynamic one at that, mapping those relations as they emergedover time through the numerous speech events of the text’s deployment.

The text’s overall architecture involves what Jakobson calls language’s “poeticfunction” (1964:356), wherein emphasis is placed on the message’s form, especiallythrough parallelism. The Requerimiento’s four parts exhibit structural parallelism: therelationship between these parts at a higher level is replicated at lower levels. The firsttwo sections are narratives of (Western) history and are collectively a representationof the past (A). This half is juxtaposed to the second (B), whose two sections representthe present projected onto the future. A is presupposed by B, a configuration repli-cated within each of these paired sections. Section one (giving the history of theworld) is juxtaposed to and presupposed by section two (where this history is thebasis of Spanish authority); section three (the request for submission) is similarlyjuxtaposed to and presupposed by section four (promising Spanish responses).

The A:B structure also appears within each of the four sections.13 The history of theworld culminating in the papacy’s founding is juxtaposed to the history of the specificpope who “made donation” of the Indies. The description of Spanish authority in theAmericas is juxtaposed to the history of exercising that power through the presentmoment of delivering the Requerimiento. The submission request is juxtaposed to itslegal justification. And the promise of leniency in response to compliance is juxta-posed to promises of violence if the natives resist. These layered oppositions give thetext a symmetrical parallelism where higher-level juxtapositions are structurallyequivalent to lower-level ones.

However, the text also exhibits asymmetrical parallelism, tied to the unidirectionallinearity of time as it passes through the text’s embedded temporal frames. Each ofthe text’s four sections occurs within a different time frame: originary or “God’stime,” recent European history, conquest history, and the present projected onto theimmediate future. Across these temporal frames the telos remains constant: the estab-lishment of Spanish authority and indigenous submission. But the sequence in whichthis telos is displayed moves ever closer to its actual realization, shifting throughnested time frames from the most distant (creation of the world) through layers ofincreasing proximity, arriving finally at the present moment when the Requerimientois read aloud. Only once we reach the passage where natives are expressly requestedto submit is the telos shared by all the sections explicitly stated. This juxtapositionbetween the symmetrical parallelism born of the uniformity of this telos and theasymmetrical parallelism of the movement of history towards the present moment ofspeaking gives the text momentum towards the realization of its goal.

These opposing forms of parallelism mirror features identified by Silverstein (1981)as common to poetic texts: the principle of symmetry and the principle of asymmetri-cal pragmatic transformation. The overall direction of the text’s metaphorical opera-tions, coupled with its linear sequencing as a speech event, effects a diagrammaticiconic representation of transformation. Transformations occur in this text at variouslevels. Within the parallel structure described above, certain mutually entailingopposites—we/you, Christian/infidel—play critical roles. They are posited as termsin a symmetrical equation, as parallel binary oppositions; yet, as has been observedfor other texts, this apparent parity is an illusion.14 In practice such oppositions areshot through with power imbalances: one term of the pair contains, encompasses,presupposes, prefigures, or asserts dominance over the other. Within the conquestera, the Spanish intended for the first terms in the above pairs to absorb the second:the underlying reason for deploying the Requerimiento is to create an asymmetry, asocial transformation in which “you” becomes (at least legally) part of “us,” in whichinfidels become Christians.

Asymmetrical transformation operates in the text’s poetic structure as well. Thenarration of world history in the first section provides grounds for the authorityasserted in the second. This discursive establishment of legitimate rule becomes thenecessary prerequisite for the two final sections where Spanish authority is per-formed, through the request of native submission and the promise of Spanish


response. This creation of authority takes place on three levels. First, the authoritydescribed discursively becomes part of the interactional text, (ostensibly) shared byspeaker and addressee alike. Second, the ideologies about language and authorityunderlying the creation of this text license its formation and use: Spanish authority tocreate certain speech acts is presupposed, which supports and reinforces the discur-sive, indexical creation of that authority. Finally, after the text is used, relationsbetween the indigenous peoples and the Spanish are discursively—and thenmaterially—reconstituted. Reading the text aloud legally sanctioned the use offorce, and the Spanish thereby granted themselves the right to wage war against thenatives. The Spanish thus accomplished what the text claims they will: force nativesubmission, now as both material and discursive fact. This also takes the text beyonda mere rationalization of force: by requiring a native response—by insisting that thejustification of military action be accomplished through a nominally interactivespeech event—the text forces indigenous people, at least discursively, to participate inthe process of licensing force against them.

Thus examining the text’s poetic architecture reveals another dimension of itsstrategy of simultaneously creating a performative utterance that accomplishes asocial action while establishing the necessary conditions for its success. Yet at thisscale of analysis—an entire text structured to be performative—the text’s “super-performative” dimensions, though a departure from classic Austinian notions, arepresent in many other “complex performatives”: rituals (legal, religious, and other-wise) anchored in extended, carefully structured texts whose intricacy surpasses thatof isolated utterances. As Silverstein put it, “Ritual as enacted traces a moving struc-ture of indexical gestures toward the knowledge presupposed to be necessary to itsown effectiveness in accomplishing something” (2004:636).

What is possibly unique, however, is how this “super-performative” structurefound in many rituals was here aimed at accomplishing a performative act within acontext of radical discursive disjuncture. One of the innovations of doing so was thestrategic—if not necessarily cynical—exploitation of referential ambiguity at keymoments in the text, especially in the explicit performatives at its core. The indeter-minacy of participant roles in these specific utterances—above all, the ambiguityconcerning the particular addressee to whom the text was addressed—allowed itto become “multiply performative”: to function—or potentially function—performatively for a variety of potential addresses at once. I suggest this inventive ifhardly unique approach to ritual form was called to the fore by the radical discursiverupture eliciting the text’s production. In turn this strategy produced, if perhapsunwittingly, heterodoxy of interpretation, at least on the issue of who the addresseeis—the very issue that has provoked centuries of debate.

The Text as a Whole: Genre and Ambiguity

A final dimension of this unusual discursive strategy is apparent when consideringthe entire text as a unit. Doing so is a recognition, in part, of the property many ritualtexts have “of seeming to self-entextualize, to stand as a formally autonomous total-ity” (Silverstein 2004:626). As is common with such texts, aspects of the Requerimien-to’s form contribute to its apparent autonomy. Essentially an extended block ofreported speech whose reader speaks for the king, the text exhibits traits of “authori-tarian dogmatism” in Voloshinov’s typology, a form typical in the Middle Ages(1986:123). Indeed, the text bears characteristics of various medieval legal genres withroots in Canon law where individuals speak on behalf of secular and religiousauthorities—monarchs and popes—to whom ultimate glory and responsibility wereattributed (Muldoon 1979:132–152). These formal conventions render the integrity,authenticity, and impenetrability of the principal’s words maximally insulated fromthe reporting speaker’s intentions. The Requerimiento’s form is designed to make theintentions of the animator irrelevant and those of the principal the only that “count.”As discussed earlier, the administrative structures surrounding the text’s use


stipulated how responsibility was ascribed to particular speakers (e.g., the conquis-tador in charge vs. the scribe reading the text aloud), explicitly isolating the Crown’sintent as primary. How, then, does this square with the referential ambiguity builtinto the text? The text itself is considered the definitive statement of the principal’sintent and yet ambiguity concerning the text’s addressee raises questions about thatintent. Who did the Crown intend, ultimately, to address? The Indians? The Crownitself? The Pope? The rest of Europe? The text cannot answer those questions—cannotinsist on “self-entextualizing” for all participants and observers—thus leaving thematter open to debate.

Examining the matter of genre from a different angle still, the text’s internalambiguity of reference was serially coupled, through the document’s specific acts ofdeployment, to another kind of ambiguity: indeterminacy concerning contexts of use.Judith Irvine makes a distinction between two kinds of discursive formality, onepertaining to aspects of linguistic code and another pertaining to “characteristics ofthe social situation,” including behavior and intentions (1979:774). For the Requer-imiento, only formality of code was stipulated—and with maximal rigidity, given thetext’s block-quote form. However, formality of practice remained at best underde-termined and at worst radically unspecified. This led to a wide range of interpreta-tions about what contextual formality was required for successful deployment of thetext; as we have seen, particular speech events ran the gamut from highly formalizedrenderings of the text before indigenous rulers and their amassed courts to the“absurd” incidents Hanke relays. Such variability was made possible by the veryconditions of conquest, in which the author and principal were located on one side ofthe globe and the text’s many animators were scattered across the other. Nor does thispragmatic indeterminacy—despite certain clearly cynical renderings of the text inparticular speech events—necessarily bespeak cynicism, as some authors have sug-gested (e.g., Greenblatt 1992), on the part of the text’s author, framers, or defenders.Rather it suggests a unified strategy of marshaling ambiguity to make the text mul-tiply performative in the discursively divided context of New World conquests. Readin this light, Palacios Rubios’ statement above is less cynical than evasive, his laughterindicating he acknowledged some of the costs entailed by the text’s ambiguity.

This pragmatic indeterminacy furthered the ambiguity built into the text andamplified it—giving further fuel to debates about the text’s meaning. Indeed, debatesabout the document and the conquest raging throughout the contemporary era wereanimated by disagreements over these various aspects of the text’s use, all of whichhinged on the principal’s intentions. Did the Crown ever intend—through thistext—to communicate with the natives? Or did the Crown hold the view that deploy-ing the form alone—enacting the legal ritual as an “autonomous totality”—was suf-ficient? The dispute escalated throughout the period the Requerimiento was in use,until finally in 1550 the Crown ordered the suspension of all conquests in the NewWorld until a panel of experts could devise a just method for waging them.15 This ledto the aforementioned Junta de Valladolid, in which Sepúlveda and Las Casas, two ofthe leading intellectuals in Spain, squared off over the justice of conquest. But thatdebate was not only (as Todorov would have it) the symbolic representation of a greatideological divide in Spain; it was also its very substance, born out of growing anxietyin Spain about the justice of the American wars. As Hanke summarized this remark-able event, “Probably never before or since has a mighty emperor—and in 1550Charles V was the strongest ruler in Europe with a great overseas empire besides—inthe full title of this power ordered his conquests to cease until it could be decidedwhether they were just” (1949:117).

Comparing the Requerimiento to Other Cases: The Performativity ofTemporal Inversion

Considering these debates and the Requerimiento’s surrounding context as itchanged over time brings us, finally, to the text’s temporality. The entire text is a


block quote designed to be “iterable” (Derrida 1982): repeated hundreds of timesand serially inserted into new contexts. This makes the Requerimiento like manyother ritual texts, such as that used in Christianity’s Eucharistic liturgy. Yet theRequerimiento is different from other iterable texts in that the ambiguity of referencebuilt into its participant structure is somewhat distinct from the endlessly reconfig-urable flexibility of reference in, say, the Eucharistic ritual (see Silverstein 2004).There, the text’s referential flexibility coupled with its recontextualizability allow itsdeictic pronouns to be eternally reattached to new participants—including, critically,new converts. But that is a different form of semiotic openness than the Requerimien-to’s referential indeterminacy, where insertion into new contexts does not defini-tively re-affix a given pronoun to a new referent whose role recruitment is sociallyagreed upon. Rather, upon recontextualization the Requerimiento’s critical semioticshifters are inserted into a new interactive field of floating possible referents andfixed to them differentially through the interpretive work of observers and partici-pants themselves. The meaning, then, of a given pronoun—the “you” to whom thetext is addressed—is subject to contextual definition differently than for many othertexts. The discursive strategy of exploiting the ambiguity of participant roles madethe text at once unusually adaptable to the novel discursive challenges of the con-quest and yet especially vulnerable to divergent interpretations of its meaning,based on the endlessly variable ways the text became tied, through practice, to dif-ferent contexts—and even, crucially, to different interpretations of the same context.

This vulnerability towards context also has temporal dimensions, related to theintertextual chains in which texts like the Requerimiento participate. Analyses of otherkey texts—such as Greg Urban’s work (2001) on the Declaration of Independence—are useful for the light they shed on the importance of temporality and intertextualityto considerations of textual practice. Urban argues that, in contradistinction to Derri-da’s performative reading of the Declaration as one where “the signature invents thesigner . . . in a sort of fabulous retroactivity” (1986:10), the Declaration’s performativ-ity is rooted in the “cultural motion” that produced the text and that the text itselfmoved forward through time. He argues that the text’s internal qualities—especiallyits pronominal structure—did not, a la Derrida, fabulously and retroactively create anAmerican “we” but rather diagrammed an imagined future in which a passive “us”could be transformed into an active, oppositional “we.” This “accelerated” the circu-lation of pre-existing discourses of collective complaint and stimulated furtherdiscourses—further texts, both written and oral—that collectively participated incomplex discursive processes unfolding in “historical time” that “pull[ed] people intoan incipient collectivity” (104). In Urban’s reading, the Declaration’s performativity isdependent upon temporal inversion—not the agentive retroactivity Derrida advo-cates but rather a more complex, intertextual discursive process in which the socialreality the text helps create (a new “we,” the “American people”) both pre-exists andsurvives its crucial performative instantiation in its key chartering text.

Urban’s argument is relevant in emphasizing the recursive process by whichmultiple texts and contexts interact over long historical periods—much as happenedwith the Requerimiento. Its decades of heavy use were preceded by, coincided with,and followed by discursive division on the part of leading figures in Spain andbeyond about the justice of conquest and hence the validity of the document’s use.These circulating discourses were not engaging in an ongoing process of increasingconsensus but rather were participating in a process of sharpening disagreement andthe magnification of ideological difference.16 Urban’s discussion of the Declarationprovides a mechanism for thinking about cultural motion in the Requerimiento caseand a vision of the social work key texts can accomplish in conjunction with othercirculating texts and discourses. Competing texts and discourses about the justice ofthe Requerimiento—over whether it was performative—were themselves in constantrecursive interaction with a host of nondiscursive events and circumstances. Many ofthese events were ones the text itself licensed: the vast tragedies of the conquest,including disease, death, torture, enslavement, destruction, and social upheaval on a


massive scale. In this narration of a single event, Oviedo offers a small but suggestiveglimpse of the accumulated horror and magnitude of the discursive and nondiscur-sive circulations in which the Requerimiento was involved:

After [the Indians] had been put in chains, someone read the Requerimiento without knowingtheir language and without any interpreters, and without either the reader or the Indiansunderstanding the language they had no opportunity to reply, being immediately carriedaway prisoners, the Spaniards not failing to use the stick on those who did not go fast enough(Oviedo 1959 [1535]:297).

This account is, furthermore, part of a complex intertextual chain in which differ-ent authors and actors worked through competing criteria for assessing the perfor-mativity and felicity conditions for the Requerimiento and for conquest more broadly.These and other conquest narratives formed crucial evidence, for example, in LasCasas’ famous Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, a hair-raising accountof Spaniards’ mistreatment of the natives Las Casas 1977 [1552]. The book and theongoing campaigns by its outspoken author are generally considered to have playeda central role in passing key legislation curbing abuse of indigenous peoples (the NewLaws of 1542 and then of 1552) as well as in bringing about the Valladolid debateitself, for which conquest itself was halted. But all the while, the Requerimiento con-tinued to be used and wars in the Americas went on. By the time the Vallodolid Juntahappened the Requerimiento was already falling into disuse (Muldoon 1979:152), notbecause it had been ruled problematic through popular consensus, far less by anylegal court—that was the very matter at hand when the Junta was convened. Rather,conquest was giving way to establishing colonial rule. This suggests a complex circuitinvolving not just circulating discourses and the ability of key texts to accelerate themas they interact over time through historically contingent events, but also the coerciveforces of institutions and regimes to enforce circulation of particular forms, afterwhich people act on the warrant such forms license, whether they were consideredsuccessful by all participants or not.

The radical discursive rupture at the heart of this case may have magnified thecomplexity of its performative nexus. But the radical absence of shared discursiveframeworks suggests how thoroughly the social efficacy of complex performatives istied to complicated interactions between formal properties of texts and shared—ordisputed—social metapragmatic framings, including intertextual discourses sur-rounding their meaning. While the Spanish-native discursive chasm makes theRequerimiento somewhat unique, the dynamics of performativity in this case wereintimately tied to internal discursive divides as well, suggesting it may find resonancein others where performativity is likewise differential and even inconclusive.

Notes

1. English translations (including the one used here) generally offer “The Requirement” asthe text’s title and “to require” as the key verb of speaking. As one reviewer helpfully pointedout this interpretation depends on a false cognate.

2. Arguably the most important reaction is conspicuously absent: there are apparently noexisting accounts of native reactions to the Requerimiento. This itself speaks to the case’s radicaldiscursive incommensurability.

3. My analysis also builds on a range of works considering the cross-cultural applicability ofperformativity (Duranti 1993; Hall 1999; McIntosh 2005; Rosaldo 1982; see also Tavárez 2002 onthe applicability of other concepts from analytic philosophy, including collective intentionality,to Mexican colonial contexts). Work on performativity, formal features, and ritual speech hasbeen another vital influence (Ahearn 2001; Du Bois 1992; Hill and Irvine 1992; Keane 1997a,1997b; Kroskrity 2009; Kuipers 1998; Luhrmann 2004; Robbins 2001; Shoaps 2009; Silverstein1981; Tomlinson 2004).

4. A similar document was introduced in the Philippines three decades after Spanish colo-nization (Rafael 1988); it thus sought to be performative not of physical possession but nativeconsent.


5. Some scholars have argued the Requerimiento stems from the ritual demand for submis-sion and religious conversion in the tradition of Islamic jihad (Seed 1995).

6. I thank Luis Castro Leiva for pointing out the text’s formal novelty.7. There are a few other occasions of this latter kind where the Requerimiento or

Requerimiento-like speech acts were performed before indigenous rulers through interpreters,e.g. the encounter between Cortés and the ruler of Cempoala as relayed by sixteenth centuryhistorian Francisco López de Gómara (1987).

8. Literature on the Junta de Valladolid is vast, as is that on broader discussions about humannature and forcible conquest elicited by the New World’s conquest and colonization (seePagden 1982).

9. Texts of the Requerimiento are widely available in print and online. The authoritativeEnglish version, used here, is from Helps ([1900] 1971), reprinted in Parry and Keith (1984:288–290). The Spanish version is printed in Colección de documentos . . . (1885–1932, Vol. XX: 311–314).

10. I discuss below the important difference between the speaker’s first person pronoun inthe Spanish and English versions.

11. Although my argument is drawn from analysis of the Spanish version I offer excerpts ofthe published English version, identifying places where it obscures features of the original text.All other translations from Spanish texts are my own.

12. The Requerimiento presumes that natives are eligible to serve as ostensible addressees: bythat point the natives were officially considered human—a position that itself stemmed fromyears of intense debate. This did not, however, preclude the widely held view that indigenouspeoples were inherently inferior; Sepúlveda and others considered the natives “natural slaves,”following the Aristotelean idea of a debased human state. This view had complicated impli-cations for the natives’ eligibility to serve as addressees, hence leaving open the question ofwhether they were the Requerimiento’s ultimate target.

13. At this lower level the A:B relationship shifts from purely temporal (before/after) tocausal; I take the latter to be a special subset of the former.

14. These include theorists focusing on linguistic phenomena (Waugh 1982, Silverstein 1985,Bucholtz 2001) and those working at a general level of sociocultural analysis (Derrida 1972,Bhabha 1994, Urciuoli 2009).

15. Hanke 1949:113–119; Muldoon 1979:143; Todorov 1984:151–152; Zavala 1988:49, 76, 274,294, 466–467.

16. Diversity within Spain during this era was considerable: 1492 marked not only the NewWorld’s “discovery” but also the moors’ Iberian expulsion. In addition, that year markedpublication of Antonio de Nebrija’s groundbreaking grammar of Castilian, the first of anymodern European language. That critical event was one in a complex circulatory process bywhich Castilian began rivaling Latin in status while semiotically detaching from Castile tobecome the language of the entire Spanish empire-in-the-making. It is fascinating to consider towhat extent the Requerimiento, written slightly later, might have participated incrementally inthis process. The text’s ambiguous yet oppositional pronominal usage is especially suggestive,for how it might have contributed to a doubly generative dynamic of ethnic categorization andalso for how it might have related to ongoing colonial tensions surrounding how boundariesbetween natives and Spaniards might be eroded as “you” differentially became part of “us.”

Acknowledgments

I dedicate this paper to the memory of Luis Castro Leiva. I thank him, Tom Cummins,Nancy Farriss, Susan Gal, Webb Keane, John Lucy, Peter Stallybrass, Michael Silver-stein, Rob Hamrick, Karin Zitzewitz, Jessa Leinaweaver, and Joshua Tucker for theirinput during the preparation of this article. I am also extremely grateful to the JLAeditors – first Paul Manning and Miyako Inoue, then Misty Jaffe and Paul Garrett – aswell as four anonymous reviewers, all of whom helped me improve the manuscriptsubstantially. Responsibility for residual infelicities is, of course, entirely my own.

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