Textos, imágenes y símbolos: lengua y cultura en la América virreinal. En homenaje a Claudia Parodi ed. by Ángela Helmer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Textos, imágenes y símbolos: lengua y cultura en la América virreinal. En homenaje a Claudia Parodi ed. by Ángela Helmer Sam Krieg Helmer, Ángela, editor. Textos, imágenes y símbolos: lengua y cultura en la América virreinal. En homenaje a Claudia Parodi. Madrid: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2017. 323 pp. ISBN: 978-84-1690-056-7. This collection of essays was originally intended to present works from the Jornadas de Estudios Coloniales, organized by the Centro de Estudios Coloniales [End Page 150] Iberoamericanos (CECI) at UCLA in 2014. However, after the untimely passing in 2015 of Claudia Parodi, professor of linguistics and co-founder of the CECI, the collection is now presented in her honor. This volume celebrates her career and varied interests, and touching words about Parodi's impact on the authors' lives precede most of the essays. After a biographical sketch of Prof. Parodi, Angela Helmer presents the collection. Faced with the unenviable task of giving form to this diverse body of essays, Helmer tells us that the collection is ordered geographically, beginning with Mexico, "país natal y querido de Claudia," passing through South America, and concluding with a return north through the Caribbean and USA (14). This volume informs readers of both the quality of the current study of viceregal literature and the wide-reaching influence that Prof. Parodi has had on the fields of Hispanic literature and linguistics. In the opening essay "Los lectores de sor Juana: el Neptuno alegórico," Beatriz Mariscal Hay reminds us that, no matter which edition one studies, one must always keep in mind the original function and context of Sor Juana's Neptuno as a visual spectacle for New Spain's capital. Valeria Añón follows with a work in which she points out the irrepressible manifestations of Nahuatl influence throughout the final part of Bernardino de Sahagún's chronicle, Historia general de la cosas de la Nueva España. Alberto Ortiz provides a very informative overview of a genre as important in the viceregal period as it is overlooked in the present day: funerary literature, or writings detailing how Christians should face their final moments. While Ortiz examines how one's spirit could ascend to Heaven, José Francisco Robles' "El cielo en la Nueva España: astrología, astronomía y ficciones virreinales" analyzes the roles that the visible heavens played in New Spain. According to Robles sometimes the stars and skies served as celestial counterparts of the terrestrial world, whose mythology privileged the Spanish above all others, and at times were seen as evidence of divine communication (as with the comet of 1680 that inspired Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora's famous polemic). The final essay focused strictly on Mexico takes a linguistic turn with Catherine Fountain. Using various writings by missionaries, such as indigenous language grammar manuals, this chapter examines how the names people groups applied to themselves throughout present-day Mexico were affected by Spanish colonization and ultimately "highlights the prominence of Nahuatl in the colonial and missionary linguistic landscape" (120). The subsequent chapter is also a linguistic study: Michaela Carrera de la Red uses pragmatics to analyze how Colombian and Ecuadorian women construct positive and respectable images of themselves in correspondence from 1822–1849. Subsequently, Dexter Zavalza Hough-Snee goes even further south, to Peru. His analysis of the Sátira hecha por Mateo Rosas de Oquendo a las cosas que pasan en el Pirú, año de 1598 examines the high frequency of economic metaphors in the long poem, which he identifies as an early signal of the modernity seen more clearly in later, baroque poets like Luis de Góngora. The next essay remains in Lima as Lizy Moromisato compares how Lima and Quito play opposing roles in the Conde de la Granja's Vida de Santa Rosa, with the viceregal capital serving as the blessed birthplace of the saint and Quito serving as its infernal counterpoint. Angela Helmer keeps the focus on Lima, analyzing edits proposed to the Cádiz Constitution of [End Page 151] 1812 by members from one of the city's Black castes, the pardos. Although their ideas were ultimately...