Agencias criollas: La ambiguedad "colonial" en las letras hispanoamericanas

Abstract

Agendas criollas: La ambiguedad en las letras hispano-americanas. Ed. Jose Antonio Mazzotti. Pittsburgh: Institute International de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2000. 265 pages.This book is a collection of essays based on papers presented at a conference of the same title at Harvard University's David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. The goal of the conference was to explore the issue of criollismo before the Bourbon reforms in the context of new approaches and conceptualizations that have emerged in the field of Latin American colonial studies. The emphasis on in the title of the volume is a conscious opposition to the notion of subject. This post-structuralist emphasis sees criollismo not as a coherently articulated, specific kind of subjectivity but rather as a murky field of activity that constitutes the conditions for its very existence.One of the common threads that appears repeatedly in the volume is an understanding of criollismo as a social space through which an identity is enacted. Bernard Lavalle argues that although criollismo is normally seen as emerging in the seventeenth and developing fully in the latter part of the eighteenth century, it really began in the first decades of Spanish presence in America when the interests of the settlers came into conflict with the crown, and the doctrine of acato pero no cumplo represents both the symptom and the postponement of a crisis that only worsens throughout the colonial period. In her article on the epic Cortes valeroso (1594), Mary Malcolm Gaylord identifies a creole agency in the figure of the castaway and later interpreter for Cortes, Jeronimo de Aguilar. Solange Alberro also locates the roots of Mexican criollismo at the beginning of the colonial period in an inevitable-and often unconscious-process of acculturation based on adaptation to the local environment and intimate contact with indigenous culture. And Yolanda Martinez-San Miguel argues that Hernen Cortes's Segunda carta initiates a discourse characteristic of a colonial Latin American subjectivity-which would later become known as criollo-that is always negotiating between its objects of desire and the circuits of local and metropolitan power.The new political, economic, and social spaces that Spaniards, Creoles, mestizos, and even indigenous Americans create in the colonial period are accompanied by discourses that reflect the tensions, ambivalences, and ambiguities inherent in those spaces. Pedro Lasarte demonstrates that in the poetry of Mateo Rosas de Oquendo and Juan del Valle y Caviedes, the symbolic difference between criollo and Spaniard was not always clear cut. …