The second event sponsored by the new Center for Latin American and Iberian Research was the book presentation on February 7th of Coming of the Kingdom: The Muisca, Catholic Reform, and Spanish Colonialism in the New Kingdom of Granada. Our own LAIS Director, Professor Juan Cobo Betancourt, authored this landmark work over a period of 9 years!
Coming of the Kingdom is an ambitious work in its scope and methods, as Professor Cobo aimed to create a nuanced view of the realities on the ground during early Spanish colonialism in the New Kingdom of Granada. Over 9 years of writing, he referenced what already existed in archives, as well as painstakingly building his own archive from sources he sought out in various locations across Europe and the Americas.
Professor Utathya Chattopadhyaya of the History Department introduced Professor Cobo and Professor Yanna Yannakakis of Emory University then interviewed him. Professor Cobo’s colleagues described his writing as utterly specific, crisp, and clear in its conclusions, and praised it as a landmark work in its methods. They highlighted his sensitivity to the heterogeneity of the indigenous peoples whom we know as the Muisca.
From the 1530s onward, Muisca peoples were subject to various imperial policies in efforts to create the cohesive legal fiction of a kingdom. Professor Cobo exposes this fiction for what it was, a hall of mirrors across the Atlantic, ultimately obscuring a multitude of linguistic communities who spoke languages too diverse to be systematized.
He took care to make his sources speak to one another to depict the everyday making of colonial (dis)order, and to reveal this is not the oft-told story of a smoothly operating colonial machine. Instead, the spread of Christianity and founding of Santa Fé de Bogotá—among other important historical events—were the result of complex reciprocal relationships between colonizer and indigenous, with the native leaders being crucial intermediaries to enforce any and all colonial policies. Any colonial history is incomplete if it only contains the perspectives of those in power.
Professor Cobo did not set out with the intention of writing Coming of the Kingdom in its full breadth; he was first interested in the Counter-Reformation in New Granada, before the scope of the work drastically expanded. The sources raised more questions than answers, leading to his unraveling the wishful thinking and outright fictions of the Spanish colonial empire, and exposing how the Muisca, over generations, turned Spanish practices and ideas (including Catholicism) into their own.