9.4 A POWER CONVERGENCE FOR THE POOR IN EUROPE AND THE AMERINDIANS IN AMERICA

In the late Middle Ages and Early Modernity, hospitals were not only concerned with caring for the sick, but also the poor. In Western Christendom they were an offshoot of the hospitable function of the monasteries.

Following the recommendations of treatises such as Forma subventionis pauperum, De subventione pauperum, charity was increasingly channelled through hospitals. Hospitals were sites of control as well as care. In the sixteenth century the institutions of hospitals evolved and proliferated, and the poor were increasingly confined to hospitals that were specifically for the poor. Poor bodies were increasingly associated with malaise, and the poor person entering the hospital was seen to need curing, physically, spiritually and morally. Chapels were part of the infrastructure of early modern Spanish hospitals, and inhabitants were expected to receive confession and religious instruction during their stay. This use of hospitals as sites of indoctrination as well as care had a long precedent as Spanish monarchs had established hospitals in newly conquered cities during the reconquista to facilitate the conversion of Muslims.^{^[650]} As the sixteenth century unfolded, religious instruction was not enough and labour was seen to be necessary for curing the poor of their tendency towards idleness.

While religion remained central to the hospitals, during the transformations of the sixteenth century ecclesiastic authorities lost their monopoly of these institutions. Vives had advocated that the state control the poor through hospitals.^{^[651]} For Vives, the ideal society could be developed through the centralisation of control; he wrote that ‘liberty is found in yielding obedience to the magistrates of the community rather than in that encouragement to violence or in the opportunity for widespread license in whatever direction caprice may lead'.^{^[652]} Vives advocated reform and increased control of the hospitals: ‘when all the leeches have been eliminated from the hospitals, the resources of each institution should be examined'.^{^[653]} Here we see the power dynamics of the conditionality of hospitality, identified by Derrida as the desire to distinguish between guests and parasites.^{^[654]} These sixteenth-century hospitals were also spaces where humanistic visions of ideal societies could be realised, which meant purification from cultures of greed.

Vives had written that in the hospital there should be enough but ‘there should be no luxury by which they might easily fall into bad practices'.^{^[655]} Hospitality would be provided, but with austere conditions. Despite the austerity of the hospital regimes, wealth was on display in the architecture and art commissioned by the founders and benefactors of the hospitals, emphasising the power and importance of the hosts. This is illustrated in the building of the hospital of Las Cinco Llagas in Seville which opened in 1558, a building so grand it became the seat of the Andalusian parliament.

Across the Atlantic, hospitals continued to play an important role in power formations. The ways in which the extractive labour regimes of encomienda and mita played a role in the reorganisation of the lives and resources of the Amerindians is well known, but the role played by institutions of hospitality is less well known yet equally important. On the site where Cortes first met Moctezuma, a hospital was built, the hospital of La Purisima Concepcion y Jesus Nazareno, founded by Cortes. Hospitals were also power statements, and they helped to structure the Spanish empire.

Around 1531 one of the oidors (judges) of the second Audiencias of New Spain, Vasco de Quiroga, founded the hospital town of Santa Fe, in the northwest periphery of Mexico City. This experiment to create an ideal community using the institution of hospitals was inspired by Thomas More's Utopia, a book he had borrowed from the library of the Franciscan Juan de Zumarraga. Quiroga's hospital town of Santa Fe is another important example of the role that the humanistic recovery of classical models of hospitality played in the construction of visions of global order in the sixteenth century. The hospital town of Santa Fe provided basic resources for the Amerindians but was aimed at facilitating conversion.^{^[656]} Quiroga's hospital towns were concerned with saving and controlling the lives of the Amerindians at the same time: Amerindians living in the hospital town were subject to a comprehensive regime of religious instruction.

The regulations of the lives of the Amerindians were laid on in the Doctrina Christiana, which even stipulated the clothes that Amerindians could wear. As with the poor hospitals being developed in sixteenth-century Spain, inhabitants were not only required to receive communion and participate in a regime of religious instruction but also to work.

Quiroga continued to emphasise the importance of hospital towns for controlling rebellious Amerindians. In 1535 he wrote Information en Derecho explaining the importance of creating communities of patrilinear families with indigenous and Spanish overseers. His policies were put to the test when he was sent to Michoacan following the Chichimec rebellion in 1533. He developed a new hospital town of Santa Fe de la Laguna in Michoacan, the plans of which are mapped out in his Ordenanzas. Quiroga wanted to use hospitals for the total reorganisation of Amerindian society and behaviour,^{^[657]} but as with other sites of mission there were also opportunities for resistance and adaptation. For example, despite Quiroga's plan for patrilinear communities, the Purhepecha social structure of guatapera, a form of women's community, survived in the hospital towns and formed the basis of hospitals especially for women.^{^[658]}

The colonial project to use hospitals to reorganise Amerindian society in sixteenth-century Mexico highlighted the way in which the Spanish had transformed themselves into hosts and the indigenous populations into guests. Yet the game of hospitality cannot be controlled so easily. As a system of intersecting rights and customary practices aimed at negotiating the power relationship between hosts and guests, hospitality tends towards a more fluid formation in which the ambiguity of the power relationship between guest and host can be manipulated but cannot be overcome.

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Source: Brett Annabel, Donaldson Megan. History, Politics, Law: Thinking through the International Cambridge University Press,2021. — 450 p.. 2021

9.4 A POWER CONVERGENCE FOR THE POOR IN EUROPE AND THE AMERINDIANS IN AMERICA

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