es to the reconquista of Muslim territor

y in the Iberian Peninsula. The Castilian Crown does not treat conquered territories as either colonies or trading outposts,but as the prolongation of the kingdom itself. Thus the founding, the (re)making, of a new Spain requires a grammar of performative gestures: the Requerimiento is perhaps its most famous inst

ance. Read on the

• horizon of New Mexican land (otherwise Pueblo territory), this speech act, in which Don Juan de Onate claims possession of the lands
• in the name of the king, is performative: for the Spanish, it enacts what it enunciates. While we can read this practice cynically, it
• is nonetheless compelling (and strange indeed) that this single act of reading aloud not only establishes the "legal" and "moral" grounds for any and all future Spanish contact, warfare, settlement, missionary activity, and commerce among the Pueblos and in New Mexican land, but alsoÑwithin the Spanish conquest imaginaryÑfundamentally reconstitutes the status and meaning of that land and its peoples in relation to the Spanish Crown. An act such as the Requerimiento is, to bor
• row Derrida's language on the sacred source of law, a "founding and justifying moment" that institutes law as performative force, "not in the sense of law in the service of force ... servile and thus exterior to