From the Iberian colonization on, the American Indians were understood based on their skin color and the place where they were living. They were imputed a corporal condition and/or a complexio linked to the preponderance of the melancholic and phlegmatic ‘humor’ which expressed a kind of specific morality and behavior according to medical discourse of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. This chapter analyzes how these medical assessments were transferred to the American Indians with a high degree of generalizing essentialism in order to naturalize a condition of permanent servitude. This knowledge transfer used to describe them, implied a series of strategic analogies and correspondences among the generalized significations and representations of complex melancholy on the individuals in the Old World and the observed practices and behaviors of the Natives of the New World.

This chapter explores the historiographical project developed by the sixteenth-century mestizo chronicler Diego Muñoz Camargo, son of a Spaniard and a Native woman from Tlaxcala in New Spain. His project develops in three iterations and in each version tells the history of his mother’s ethnic group: Descripción de la ciudad y provincia de Tlaxcala (1584), Suma y epíloga de toda la Descripción de Tlaxcala (1588-1589) and Historia de Tlaxcala (1592). This essay looks at how Muñoz Camargo’s three-stage project responded to, in varying ways, the 1577 relación geográfica questionnaire that was devised by the imperial powers to learn about and better control the subjugated regions in the New World. Muñoz Camargo sought to insert the non-European history of Tlaxcala in a colonial Spanish narrative framework.