ABSTRACT
In his Historia de Indias (History of the Indies), the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas included a transcription of the document popularly known as the requerimiento (or requirement). 1 The requerimiento was an official policy formalized by the Crown to govern colonization practices. Principal among the document’s concerns was the treatment of Indigenous peoples, particularly those activities that undermined colonization and acculturation processes. The colonizers were encouraged to establish alliances through peace accords and gift-giving practices in order to foster a climate capable of hosting a successful colony. But the document also recognizes that force was at times considered necessary to bring about Indigenous compliance and submission. The requerimiento allowed the colonizers to “subject you [Indigenous peoples] to the yoke and authority of the Church and of Their Highness” if the Indigenous populations refused to comply with its tenets. 2 In Yucatán, this latter caveat of the requirement was used by the conquistadors to justify their actions during the decades-long war between the Spanish and the Maya. Their justification for violence is connected to Spanish perceptions of the Maya peoples. As the adelantado writes, the Maya are “the most abandoned and treacherous in all the lands discovered to this time, being a people who never yet killed a Christian [or Spaniard] except by foul means and who have never made war except by artifice.” 3 Thus, the conquistador paints the Maya as the most bellicose peoples in the Americas. There is little question that Montejo’s descriptor served multiple purposes, including justifying to the Crown his continued failures while also establishing a clear binary between the benevolent Christians and the violent infidels. Such ethnic and racial binaries were well rooted in Spain following the Reconquista. During the conquest of the Americas, some Spanish intellectuals construed reconquest militaristic, religious, and political tactics of the American colonization as a continuation of the Christian war against the infidels. 4 Such ideas allowed Spanish peoples to justify their subjugation and annihilation of Indigenous peoples.
