Conquest and the ‘Stranger Effect’

All indigenous peoples had traditional hatreds and conflicts of their own with neighbours. They made use of the Spaniards for their own purposes in the service of their internecine [civil] wars. That does not, however, explain why in so many cases they deferred [bowed] to the newcomers and assigned them places of command in war, or authority (pic 1) afterwards.
The solution to the problem lies in what I call the stranger-effect - the propensity [tendency] some cultures have to receive the stranger with exceptional honour. In our modern Western societies, the propensity is hard to understand. ... We mistrust strangers. We reject them. We call them “illegals.” We impose on them bureaucratic or fiscal [monetary] burdens. If we admit them, we make them unwelcome and typically assign them low status and demeaning work. In other times, however, and in other parts of the world, people have not, in these respects, behaved like us.

Pic 1: A ‘cacique’ from Tepetlaoztoc complains to ‘encomendero’ Miguel Díaz de Aux in the late 1520s about the latter’s brutal treatment of the local community; Kingsborough Codex, fol. 11b (detail)

Though the notion is remote from modern Western sensibilities, I think the most hardened, secular-minded Westerner can understand it, if he or she thinks of how we add value to goods according to the distance they traverse. In my local grocer’s shop - allowing for relatively modest differences in production and delivery costs - domestic Parmesan commands a much lower price than the kind imported from Italy, not because it is worse, but because it is familiar. The exoticism of the foreign product imparts prestige. So it is, in many cultures, with people. In Christendom in the past, pilgrims profited from a similar effect, acquiring prestige with their neighbours, on returning home, in rough proportion to the remoteness of the shrines they visited.

Pic 3: Pilgrim path waymarker, Ireland

The stranger is often physically attractive, perhaps for evolutionary reasons or perhaps for sheer novelty. In the Caribbean, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo thought native women “were very chaste with their own men, but gave themselves freely to Spaniards,” in what sounds like an act of physical hospitality instanced in many other cultures. In any case, the stranger typically represents an excellent choice of marriage partner for powerful or ruling families by virtue of arriving untainted by any previous associations with local rivalries. To this day, all over the world, where monarchies still exist, heirs typically marry foreigners or, increasingly nowadays, social outsiders, for this very reason.

Pic 5: Painting depicting a Mexican ‘mestizo’ in a ‘Pintura de Castas’ from the Spanish colonial period. The caption states “Spanish and Indian produce Mestizo”