Poetry in Motion: A Mexican Vicereine's Verse Travel Diary (1757)

Abstract

On August 4, 1755, the soon to be forty-second viceroy of New Spain, Agustin de Ahumada y Villalon, Marques de las Amarillas, set sail from Cadiz on the transatlantic voyage that would take him to the New World to assume his post.1 Travelling with him was his wife dona Maria Luisa del Rosario de Ahumada y Vera, their young son, and a retinue of some sixty-six persons.2 They were conveyed by the Spanish ship America, escorted by the Dragon and the Infante, in a journey lasting 56 days. The party landed safely in Veracruz at the end of September and, after two weeks of rest and an elaborate welcome in that port city, began the laborious journey westward (and upward) to the viceregal capital, Mexico City. Their five-week overland journey followed the same ceremonial itinerary that had been traced by entering viceroys since the sixteenth century. It included stops, each with days of festivities, in the symbolically significant cities of Tlaxcala and Puebla. In Otumba, outside the capital, incoming and outgoing viceroy met. After the obligatory visit to Guadalupe and the shrine of Mexico’s patroness, the viceroy entered Mexico City, where he and his wife were treated to weeks more of sumptuous festivities. Among the events were the ceremonies surrounding the two triumphal arches erected in the city, whose elaborate iconographic programs compared the Marques to Aeneas and other classical heroes, in effusions of praise that included, as was customary, recommendations in the art of good government. The story of this journey by sea and land is told in a lengthy poem3 composed by the Mexican Creole Antonio Joaquin de Rivadeneyra Barrientos, and published in Mexico City two years later (1757) with the title Diario notable de la excelentissima senora marquesa de las Amarillas, virreyna de Mexico, desde el puerto de Cadiz hasta la referida Corte...4