La distancia y la modestia: las "dos" caras del Atlántico en los versos de Sor Juana a la duquesa de Aveyro

Abstract

This essay examines an under explored side of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's "Romance 37": her Creole subjectivity in the representation of space in the transatlantic literature of New Spain. I argue that this seventeenth-century nun uses her praise of Duchess of Aveyro, another intellectual and virtuous woman from Portugal, to advance a protest. By using admiration as the apparent motive of the endeavor, she elaborates a strong criticism of colonialism and the role the Atlantic plays in its consolidation. As she denounces how Europe bleeds dry the mines of Mexico, she presents the Atlantic as a space of economic exchange and historical exploitation, i.e., a gateway to inequity. However, as a baroque poet, her depiction of the Atlantic invites another consideration, that of "cultural" exchanges and tolerance, which she fashions through equality, the antithesis of subordination that this space epitomizes after 1492. As she modestly appears to praise virtue in a transatlantic figure who presents what she recognizes in herself, Sor Juana aligns America and her poetry with Neo-Thomism in order to pair center with periphery and re-locate reason in America. I demonstrate that this strategy accommodates a Creole subjectivity that fights difference and oppression. In the latter symbolism, another "facet" of the Atlantic reveals itself. By taking the poetic form of the "romance" in an original direction, as it crosses the Atlantic to and from the periphery of the Old World, she advances a Creole sentiment via the symbolic re-evaluation of the Atlantic as instrument of empire.