Raise Castilian maize [wheat] so that you may eat Castilian tortillas [wheat bread]. Raise sheep, pigs, cattle, for their flesh is good. May you not eat the flesh of dogs, mice, skunks, etc. For it is not edible. You will not eat what the Castilian people do not eat, for they know well what is edible.
Similar assertions were made by another sixteenth-century writer, who commented that as a result of eating a specifically European diet and sheltering from the elements, the indigenous inhabitants of the Mexican village of Citlaltepec had begun to acquire a European constitution.
This seemingly logical suggestion, however, contradicted basic elements of the same humoral theory that underpinned it.
Indians were advised to adopt a European diet so as to acquire or restore a European complexion, yet medical thinking insisted that a change of diet could have devastating consequences for an individual's constitution. After all, changes in diet were blamed for illness among European settlers in the New World. If it was so dangerous for Europeans to eat Indian food, what would happen to Indians who ate European food? Would they, too, not fall ill? In fact, many writers believed that it was precisely the adoption of European food that explained the extraordinarily high mortality rates that afflicted Amerindians after the advent of colonization.
In Hispaniola, the wave of epidemics that nearly exterminated the Taino people was blamed at least in part on their adoption of European dietary habits, just as the ill health afflicting Spanish settlers on the same island was attributed to the consumption of New World foods. T his paradox reveals something of the contradiction at the heart of Spain's colonial enterprise.
The centrality of evangelization to the colonial endeavor had of course been laid forth from the earliest days of the conquest, but Spanish ambitions extended far wider. This, he insisted, would bring multiple benefits: Wearing Spanish clothing not only is not bad, but indeed is good for many reasons. Firstly, because they will thereby grow to love us and our clothes; secondly, because they will thereby begin to be more like men … ; thirdly, being dressed as Spaniards they will be ashamed to sit together in the plaza to eat and drink and get drunk; and fourthly, because the more they spend, the more silver they will extract from the earth, and that much more Spanish merchandise will be sold, which will all be to the benefit of the treasury.
Here, then, is a clear program for Hispanicization. Nonetheless, scholars such as Homi Bhabha have reminded us of the discomfort caused to colonizers by too close an imitation of their ways by wily colonized people. Such discomfort was made all the more acute by the fact that colonists themselves quickly adopted many aspects of indigenous culture, including, as we have seen, some of its typical foods.
Hybridity perhaps characterized colonial space, in Spanish America as elsewhere, but this was frequently a source of anxiety, rather than satisfaction, for administrators and settlers alike. Spanish demands for Amerindians to adopt European customs were in fact regularly undercut by legislation intended precisely to preserve the distance between colonizers and colonized.
For example, following a riot in Mexico City in , when the city's indigenous population had risen up in protest against maize shortages, European and creole observers attributed the unrest in part to the injudicious blurring of caste divisions. The uncertainties that characterized European opinions about whether Amerindians should adopt the European diet, and conversely whether Europeans could thrive in the New World, reflect precisely these contradictions.
To survive, Europeans needed to be able to eat the foods of the New World, or at least to succeed in cultivating their own crops in the colonial environment, but they did not wish to turn into Indians.
Indians needed to learn to eat wholesome European foods, but if they thereby acquired a European complexion, what possible justification remained for their subordination to Spanish rule? Ambivalence about whether Europeans could or could not eat maize, and whether maize was or was not like wheat, reflects deeper European doubts about whether they could live in the Indies, and whether Amerindians could become part of the Hispanic world.
Colonists in other parts of the world harbored similar doubts about the consequences of culinary hybridity, for similar reasons. Food is both a daily necessity and a potent symbol, and it is therefore particularly effective at capturing anxieties about status in virtually any social context. But in the early modern world, food was uniquely adapted to this role because of its importance in shaping the human body itself. Food, more than any other factor, was responsible for the constitutional differences that separated Europeans from Amerindians.
Food helped create the indigenous and Spanish bodies, and food could turn one into the other. Spanish concerns about whether Old World crops could be cultivated in the Indies thus reflected far more than mere nostalgia for Iberia, and colonial stipulations that Amerindians should or should not eat European foods went beyond a simple yearning for cultural homogeneity.
These concerns spoke directly to Europeans' worries about the physical integrity of their bodies, and about the maintenance or dissolution of the most fundamental of colonial divisions: that between the bodies of the colonizers and the colonized.
Food thus provides a surprisingly effective vehicle for examining the unstable foundations of colonial ideology, which aimed simultaneously to homogenize and to differentiate.
This is because diet lay at the heart of early modern European ideas about identity, the body, and civilization itself. Taking seriously early modern beliefs about food's profoundly transformative power also helps us understand why settlers in the Americas did not need to invent an embodied racism avant la lettre to account for the differences between themselves and Amerindians, or to explain why Europeans might thrive in the New World while Amerindians sickened.
The existing humoral models for understanding the human body provided a satisfying explanation for both these phenomena.
Despite the claims of recent scholarship, the idea of racial fixity did not emerge in early America as a result of European encounters with new peoples and places.
Colonists' understanding of the human body did not allow for fixed, permanent, physical differences. Instead, Spaniards viewed both Indian and European bodies as mutable and porous, open to the influences of many external forces, including, critically, food, which therefore occupied a central place in the maintenance of colonial society.
It is for this reason that chroniclers and officials devoted so much attention to documenting the cultivation of Old World crops in the Americas, and the sons of conquistadors proudly recited the names of the European plants their fathers had introduced, for these foods were the bulwark that separated colonizers from colonized. Food was not simply the cultural icing on the colonial cake. Indeed, early modern actors did not view culture and bodies as fundamentally different.
The physical body was generated in part through the ambient culture, and in particular through diet. Bodies were built out of food, and they differed one from another because of diet and other cultural practices, which were therefore understood to have a physical impact on the corporeality of the body. These were the ideas that Europeans brought with them to the New World, and which exercised a profound effect on their conceptualizations of the differences between themselves and the new peoples they encountered there.
Colonial societies have perhaps always been structured around concepts of physical difference, but the ways in which those differences have been understood are both diverse and historically specific. As Joyce Chaplin has argued, we must pay close attention to European ideas about bodies and nature if we hope to understand the broader process of European colonization in the early modern era.
My focus here is the attitudes of Spanish settlers, but there is every reason to believe that colonists from other parts of Europe held similar opinions. Guillermo Lohmann Villena ; repr. Angel Garibay, 2 vols. Mexico, , 1: 5 prologue to vol. Franklin Pease ; repr. Seville, , 2: —, — book 14, chaps.
Francisco Mateos, 2 vols. Madrid, , 2: 10—14 book 11, chaps. Note: I have included the book, chapter, and part numbers for many of the primary sources in parentheses, to make it easier for others to locate this material. Fisch, ed. Madrid, , 3: chap. Early modern understandings of climate derived fundamentally from the writings of ancient scholars. Hett London, Modesto Santos Madrid, , Indigenous people, too, seem to have viewed the beard as a distinctive Spanish trait.
Catherine Julien Indianapolis, , 10, 18 chap. Vetancurt, Teatro mexicano , 11 tratado 1, chap. For the influence of humoralism in Spain and its colonies, see J. The only example I have found in which the different humoral makeup of Indians and Spaniards is not ascribed at least in part to the consumption of different foodstuffs is Cobo. Some writers stated that it was impossible for mortals to understand why color varied so much among people, concluding that it was a mysterious act of God.
Cuneo thus provides an early example of the view that Indians were either phlegmatic or melancholic, the complexions associated with cold. Conversely, because creoles ate virtually the same diet as Spaniards, they had identical humoral makeups, in the view of the Spanish doctor Diego Cisneros; Cisneros, Sitio, naturaleza y propriedades , v—r chap. Benjamin Keen New Brunswick, N.
Francis Augustus MacNutt, 2 vols. Pedro Gasca ca. Madrid, , 1: book 2, chap. See also Martyr, De Orbe Novo , 1: decade 1, book 10; decade 2, book 4.
Abril, C. Baciero, A. Ramos, J. Barrientos, and F. Maseda, 2 vols. Juan Friede ; repr. Caracas, , 1: chap. Paris, , 6: vol. Que vivan los tamales! Food and the Making of Mexican Identity Albuquerque, Kathleen Deagan, Spanish St.
Reitz and C. Donna J. Seifert Glassboro, N. Deagan, ed. Caracas, , 2: , Such concerns were not prompted by anxieties about the poisonous juice contained in bitter cassava, for Europeans were familiar with the process whereby this substance was extracted.
Writers often stressed that once bitter cassava had been processed, it was perfectly safe, at least for Amerindians. Chaplin, Subject Matter , , —, , —, Thanks to Deborah Toner for this reference. Oakley, and P. Odbur de Baubeta, eds. For Spain, see David E. Thomas Nicholas ; repr. Manuel Ballesteros Madrid, , book 3, chap. Individuals who admitted that wheat and grapes did not prosper in a particular region often went to some effort to explain that this was simply because they had not been cultivated correctly.
Martyr, De Orbe Novo , 1: decade 1, book 9. Vetancurt, Teatro mexicano , 17, 42, 44 tratado 2, introduction, chap. Europeans' ecstatic response to the perceived fertility of the New World surely reflects in part concerns about the declining fertility of western Europe.
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The word for million in Spanish is a cognate, so it looks and sounds like the English word. For two million, three million, and so on, be sure to pluralize it and say millones as in cinco millones. The word for billion is actually mil millones in Spanish — a thousand millions. You may not have realized before that numbers can act as adjectives. Think about it — you are describing how many of something there is, and an adjective describes a noun. In Spanish, adjectives have to match the gender and plurality as in singular vs plural of the noun they are describing.
A few numbers change in gender depending on the noun they are describing. Numbers ending in one , as in 21, 31, change to un if it is a masculine word. Three hundred tables would be trescientas mesas. How old are you? In Spanish, age is expressed with the verb tener — to have.
The number is in adjective form here because you are describing how many years, so the adjective form rule for numbers ending with one applies. Here is a short and simple way to tell the time in Spanish. There are other terms not included for the sake of time pun intended so take this as an introduction and practice and learn more with apps like Lingodeer! For times that are right on the hour, use the following formulas:.
Pretty straight forward so far. To add minutes, tell the time like shown above then add y followed by the number of minutes.
What is the date today? Expressing the date can be used for more than just this simple question, but learning how to answer it will help you talk about other dates like your date of birth, the date of your flight to Puerto Rico, your anniversary, and so on. In English, we use ordinal numbers like first, second, third, and so on when saying the date. Luckily, Spanish only uses one — first! All the other dates are simply numbers. Take a look at these formulas and examples. Hoy es el primero de julio de dos mil veinte.
In Spanish the year is said like any other number, versus English which breaks the year into two parts. Today is the seventeenth of February, Hoy es el diez y siete de febrero de mil novecientos ochenta y tres.
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