american-holocaust

212 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTduring which verbal depictions of the region's native people drasticallydeteriorated. An even more vivid example of this transformation involvedthe fabled Tupinamba people of Brazil.When first contacted by Europeans in the early years of explorationthe Tupinamba were described as the most handsome and best-proportionedpeople in the world, virtually creatures of perfection. They were, said PedroVaz de Caminha in 1500, people of "fine bodies and good faces as to goodmen," and a kind and generous people of "innocence" and "pure simplicity"to boot. An imaginative Portuguese painting of the Adoration of theMagi from this time even replaced one of the traditional wise men with ayoung and handsome representative of these Brazilian natives, replete withdistinctive feather headdress and gold earrings, bracelets, and anklets. Atalmost this same time, however, woodcut illustrations began appearing inother parts of Europe depicting the Brazilians as cannibals and sexual libertines.And by the 1550s, when Brazil was in the process of being denudedof its native people by European slavery, violence, and importeddiseases, those very same gold and feather Tupinamba decorations couldbe found adorning the head and body of Satan in another Portuguesepainting, a grotesque and horrific portrait of the Devil's Inferno. Meanwhile,in concert with the change in visual representation, European writershad now taken to calling these lately dubbed Brazilian paragons ofpure virtue and simplicity "beasts in human form," to quote Nicolas Durandde Villegagnon. 47Such ideological transformation did not occur, of course, without asocial context or without serving a larger political function. The same wastrue of the earlier intellectual innovations we have noted. The Priors ofFlorence had declared as acceptable the traffic in Christian slaves who were"of infidel origin" because to fail to do so might have undermined theslave trade, with which the Church was so profitably involved. And thelimpieza de sangre, although initially inspired by religious hatred, soonbecame a valuable weapon of class struggle with which low-born SpanishCatholics could push their way into positions of authority that might otherwisebe held by high-born persons of Jewish ancestry. As Elliott demonstratesin his discussion of the limpieza, the doctrine functioned as a"compensating code" for commoners "which might effectively challengethe code of the aristocracy." After all, they would argue, "was it not preferableto be born of humble, but pure Christian parentage, than to be acaballero of suspicious racial antecedents?" 48In neither of these cases, certainly, was the social or political or economicfunction of the race discrimination in question the sole and sufficientmotivation for its being institutionalized. Each one drew for its authorizationon a deep well of centuries-old and symbolically embeddedantipathy for its targeted victims. Once in operation, however, the raciallyoppressive institution justified, reinforced, and thus exacerbated the nega-