Polemics, Literature, and Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: A New World for the Republic of Letters by José Francisco Robles

Abstract

Reviewed by: Polemics, Literature, and Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: A New World for the Republic of Letters by José Francisco Robles Miruna Achim KEYWORDS Colonial Mexican Intellectual History, Creole Science, Creole Archive, Eighteenth-Century Mexican Literature josé francisco robles, Polemics, Literature, and Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: A New World for the Republic of Letters. Oxford UP, 2021, 387 pp. Polemics, Literature, and Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: A New World for the Republic of Letters is built on a premise that has been a point of departure for much writing in the history of science and cultural history of Spanish America since Antonello Gerbi's The Dispute of the New World (1960). Said proposition contends that the eighteenth century saw an escalation of the transatlantic polemics whereby Spanish American scholars sought to disprove their European counterparts' allegations that American climates had a pernicious effect on human and non-human lives, producing mentally and physically deficient individuals. In time, even the offspring of those born elsewhere—Spanish-American Creoles—would gradually soften and deteriorate under these influences. Assumptions about natural and racial inferiority—such as those José Francisco Robles pointedly documents in his discussion of the "Ordenanzas del Baratillo de México," a mid-eighteenth-century text that described Creoles as lazy, dishonest, licentious, and generally immoral, traits they inherited through the milk they suckled at the breast of their Indigenous wet nurses—translated, with the implementation of Bourbonic reforms by the middle of the eighteenth century, into the political marginalization of Creoles from influential positions they had previously held. To counter prejudices and their very real effects, Creole writers produced, to use a term coined by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, "patriotic epistemologies," that is, strategies for knowing the New World built on situated and locally-sensitive descriptions and observations. They argued that only an intimate knowledge of the Americas, which came either with being born or having dedicated oneself to them through study, would result in more balanced accounts of American natural and human histories and the profitable management of American riches. Cañizares-Esguerra's historiographic proposals have shaped how eighteenth-century intellectual and scientific productions in the Americas have been studied in the past two decades. And while some of the best works in this tradition have given nuance to the concept of "patriotic epistemologies" to make significant contributions to the field, others have limited themselves to applying the concept flatly and rigidly, as a kind of mold, to different sets of colonial materials. One of the merits of Robles's book consists in his efforts to expand the colonial archive. Most cultural histories of Spanish America have engaged the last decades of the eighteenth century—for which both the archival and printed materials are significantly more abundant—in the context of a restructuring of the sciences that produced expeditions, institutions, and periodicals. Robles studies an earlier generation of writers, including such powerful figures as Juan José Eguiara y [End Page 107] Eguren, Díaz de Gamarra, and Granados y Gálvez, who came of age before the mid-century and have received comparatively scant attention. Drawing mostly on eighteenth-century printed sources and a readily available apparatus of secondary literature in both Spanish and English, Polemics, Literature, and Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Mexico is both a historiographic overview and a reference for the earlier manifestations of Creole definitions and defenses of Mexican intellectual traditions. The book reconstructs the intellectual and political spaces which made it possible for the later generation of scholars to write about the human and natural histories of New Spain. It would have been useful, in this sense, if Robles had pursued the discussion of how, if at all, these early writings were taken up by the generations of scholars writing at the end of the eighteenth century. Otherwise, one gets the impression, despite repeated claims that these towering intellects were members of a "global" Republic of Letters, that they labored away mostly in isolation, both because their contemporaries outside Mexico and later generations of scholars seem to have had little concern for their work. In this sense, it is not always obvious what the "polemics" in the title refer to because...