The Spectacular City, Mexico, and Colonial Hispanic Literary Culture

Abstract

Although you can’t tell a book by its cover, Stephanie Merrim’s study seeking to understand the complexity of Colonial Spanish American urban culture is remarkably illustrated by Cristóbal de Villalpando’s seventeenth-century bird-eye’s view of Mexico City’s main plaza, depicting in minute detail nearly 1,200 people of all walks of life, its busy market place, and a riot-destroyed skyline. It is a spectacular vision, with a rich literary pedigree rigorously documented in Merrim’s book and epitomized in Bernardo de Balbuena’s well-known urban pastoral Grandeza mexicana. How can one tell the multiple stories that unravel in this vibrant, awe-inspiring but contradictory and heterogeneous urban maze? Merrim approaches this question from the vantage point of Spanish Ameri-can literary culture, examining a broad selection of iconic sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts that depict the New World city, its festivals, and its wonders. From Hernán Cortés and Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo to Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, as well as a number of lesser-studied writers such as Francisco Cer-vantes de Salazar, Agustín de Vetancurt, and Buenaventura de Salinas, Merrim analyzes how Spanish residents (radicados) and creoles write the city, coding its spaces morally, racially, and sexually. As Merrim clearly shows in each text approached, the depiction is not a straight rendition of the city but a thick and coiled discursive thread, rhetorically crafted with and drawing from a burgeoning colonial archive as well as classical, biblical, European, and Amerindian sources. These writers are nonetheless confronted with a rich and heterogeneous reality that resists discursive enclosure.The argument is developed contrasting the Renaissance and the Baroque visions of the city, rightly pointing out that one of the key studies of the colonial Spanish American city conflated both, Angel Rama’s Ciudad letrada (1984). The imperial dream of a transparent, orderly space is present from Cortés’s letters to Philip II’s 1573 Ordenanzas. The colonial city’s heterogeneous society is problematically inscribed and objectified in descriptions of the marketplace, where autochthonous natural produce like guavas, mameys, and sapotes stand in for the Indians (p. 76). The market is also a high point of Balbuena’s poem celebrating Mexico’s greatness as a wonder cabinet offered as a gift to the empire (p. 127). The creole writers will take these renditions and rework them to affirm their place in colonial society and inscribe themselves in the Hispanic world, in what represents a creole cultural nationalism. Carving a space of their own, the key point in the cultural politics of the New World Baroque literary production is how deeply these writers engage the plurality of their own societies on this side of the Atlantic. Merrim recognizes that the colonial writers selected — mostly Spaniards and creoles — ultimately seek to contain the heterogeneous urban space. Another perspective could be presented by looking at the ample archive of postconquest Nahuatl texts, such as the Annals of Tlatelolco, Nahuatl dramas, and local histories written by don Fernando Alva Ixtlilxochitl, Hernando de Alvarado Tezozomoc and don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin. From another point of view, Merrim’s study shows that an epistemological aperture within Western-based texts is also possible. One of the quintessential preoccupations of the Baroque is precisely the limits of knowledge. Merrim demonstrates this splendidly in her examination of the creoles’ appropriations of Athanasius Kircher’s works, Sor Juana’s in particular, who uses the well-reputed Jesuit’s thought to defend against his embittered confessor and to assert her unlimited desire for knowledge in the Answer. Still, Merrim convincingly argues that Sor Juana distances herself critically from Kircher in Primero sueño by highlighting the impossible quest for truth.As stated above, Merrim looks primarily at sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexican literary culture. The thick of the argument concentrates on the Baroque, highlighting nuances brought forth by the New World Baroque. Six of seven chapters are dedicated to Mexico with the last one examining texts from New Granada, Potosí, and Lima, which gives breath to the study without losing coherence. This is high-caliber scholarship that draws from postcolonial and transatlantic studies to underscore the predicament of Latin America’s colonial legacy. In this view, it is not gratuitous that creoles imagined Babel when faced with colonial violence. But, as Merrim optimistically points out, the creole imagination also holds hope for a better world. With no doubt, this conceptually well-defined and rigorously developed project allows us to understand better the intricate discursive web and the cultural politics of colonial writers. In sum, The Spectacular City is excellent reading for colonial Latin American literary and cultural scholars as well as advanced and graduate students.