Mexican Intellectuals Research Articles

The Estridentistas and Contemporáneos Reimagined: Debating the Legacy of the Mexican Literary Avant-Garde

The article discusses how prominent Latin American authors have reimagined the two Mexican avant-garde groups—the Contemporáneos and Estridentistas—in novels published between 1992-2011. It is obvious that the authors pay tribute to the Mexican avant-garde by casting members of the Contemporáneos and Estridentistas as lead characters in their novels. What is less obvious is the way in which the later authors stylistically borrow from the earlier avant-garde authors. Although critical tradition has tended to separate the Estridentistas from the Contemporáneos, a side-by-side reading of their 1920s prose both argues against this division and lays claim for a more prominent position for the Mexican avant-garde in Latin American letters. Between 1921 and 1929, both Estridentistas and Contemporáneos obsessively produced experimental literary self-portraits. These fragmented, pseudo-autobiographical texts serve as models for the later works from the 1990s to early 2000s, all of which paint portraits of Mexican intellectuals amidst turmoil while using literary devices that simultaneously undermine questions of authorship and the possibility of telling a coherent story. Both sets of experimental autobiographies (those from the 1920s and more recent versions) deeply question the meaning of being an intellectual in Mexico, both then and now. Considering the Estridentistas and Contemporáneos in tandem not only reveals a fuller picture of the 1920s literary scene in Mexico, but allows us to see an organic style that emerged in Mexico and influenced authors and artists throughout the Americas from the 1920s until the current day.

Bonanza o Falsas Riquezas: Cambiantes Imaginarios Mexicanos del Trópico y el Impulso Civilizatorio

Existing scholarship on “tropicality” emphasizes how Europeans and US-Americans constructed the tropics discursively and visually in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Scientists, investors, and travelers denigrated tropical spaces to legitimize imperialism, labeling them backwards, racially degenerative, disease-ridden, and unconducive to civilization without white European intervention These works unwittingly reproduce a central assumption of the very imperialists they critique: namely, that North Atlantic elites controlled knowledge production. They thus marginalize the important theorizing and conceptualizing that transpired in tropical spaces. Following independence, Latin American national elites agonized over how to integrate their tropical territories, many of which remained isolated, and make them legible for economic modernization. This article uses Mexico as a case study for Latin American representations about the tropics given its diverse temperate and tropical geography, its key role in the global commercial economy, and its robust intellectual production. I argue that the ways in which Mexican intellectuals—public officials, geographers, philosophers, and others—thought about their low-lying tropical lands molded nation-building projects and contributed to the global production of environmental knowledge at a time when notions of tropical peril and degeneracy were giving way to the promise of tropical bonanza. By tracing the changes and continuities of Mexicans’ tropical discourses in a global context, I underscore the underappreciated environmental and geographic thought of influential Mexicans—from Matías Romero and Francisco Bulnes to José Vasconcelos—who rarely appear in environmental historiography. A focus on these different imaginaries regarding the significance, purpose, and place of Mexico’s tropical lands also reveals the extent to which material interventions in the tropics and discursive representations of the tropics have co-constituted each other.

“[...] EL BRASILEÑO TAN CONOCIDO ENTRE NOSOTROS”: A CIRCULAÇÃO DAS OBRAS DE LOURENÇO FILHO NAS BIBLIOTECAS DO MÉXICO (1933 - 1963)

Abstract The text aims to analyze the circulation of the works of Lourenço Filho in Mexican libraries, in the period between 1933 and 1963. It is possible to affirm that the presence of these works in Mexico is indicative that they were part of the collections destined for the formation of normal schoolteachers, Primary Education leaders and school administrators, especially for offering readers principles of educational psychology, rural teacher training, experiences in Brazil and an overview of educational systems on a global scale. It can be concluded that the circulation of Lourenço Filho works in Mexican libraries is due to a network of relationships that he established with Mexican intellectuals, mediated by UNESCO and Crefal.

Finding Afro-Mexico: Race and Nation after the Revolution

Finding Afro-Mexico: Race and Nation after the Revolution

Intelectuais e a transição democrática no México: globalização e modernização como discursos (1988-2000)

O presente artigo tem por objetivo analisar debates e discussões intelectuais no contexto das reformas neoliberais entre os anos 1980 e 1990 no México. O argumento central é que a globalização atuou também na esfera cultural e simbólica através de discursos que se efetivaram na imprensa, onde intelectuais mexicanos discutiram as transformações de seu presente. A análise de revistas culturais publicadas no período revela uma ampla diversidade de posições tomadas pela intelectualidade para interpretar e significar estes processos, utilizando argumentos e ideias para debater e construir explicações para aquela conjuntura. Temas como globalização, democracia e “modernização” são aqui analisados com maior atenção, revelando como intelectuais mobilizaram conceitos para justificar e fundamentar seus argumentos. Inspirado pela história política e intelectual, busco compreender como estas operações discursivas estão conectadas com o contexto político do processo de transição democrática no México.

Lazos del exilio en México a través de la revista Humanismo

El fenómeno del exilio en América Latina entre los años cuarenta y cincuenta del siglo XX reflejó los primeros efectos de la Guerra Fría en la región, al mismo tiempo que promovió la conformación de redes intelectuales que materializaron nuevos proyectos culturales. Este artículo aborda la historia de la revista Humanismo (1952-1961), editada primero en la ciudad de México y posteriormente en La Habana, Cuba, a partir de las relaciones entre intelectuales y políticos que permitieron su realización, procedentes tanto del medio cultural y político mexicano, como de los exilios latinoamericanos y español que residían principalmente en México. Dicho proyecto cultural propició la formación de redes de intelectuales que, por una parte, tuvieron que adaptarse al país que los acogía y, por otra, idearon distintos métodos de intervención social, a veces contrapuestos, que se reflejaron en la historia de la revista.

Oscar Wilde in Mexico: Keeping the Scandal Alive

Oscar Wilde came to be known in Mexico during his lifetime not as a talented writer but rather as an outrageous figure who was disgraced and imprisoned for his “depraved habits”. Soon after the initial scandal of his 1895 trials, a handful of Mexican intellectuals launched modest endeavours to reshape Wilde’s image by turning attention to his literary works, some of which they translated and made available in Spanish to Mexican readers for the first time. Despite this new appreciation of his talents, Mexicans continued invoking the scandalous image of Wilde to stir up attention and startle audiences. Among the first generation of Mexican artists who identified readily with Wilde’s sexual dissidence, there was a marked preference for the writings – literary works that were notably more sexually explicit and themselves more scandalous than those of Wilde – of the more universally respected André Gide, although Wilde’s wit did serve them as a model for shocking their readers. Even Carlos Monsiváis, Mexico’s greatest cultural critic of the last half century, whose own writings sought to subdue the symbolic importance of the Wilde trials in Mexico’s queer cultural history, could not resist invoking Wilde’s name as a provocation against the homophobia of certain interlocutors.

Adela Pineda Franco's Steinbeck and Mexico: A Cinematographic Gaze in the Era of United States Hegemony

Adela Pineda Franco's Steinbeck and Mexico: A Cinematographic Gaze in the Era of United States Hegemony

Currents of Progress, Toy Store for Tourists: Nineteenth-Century Mexican Liberals View the Niagara Falls

The essay addresses the depiction of the Niagara Falls as an ambivalent symbol of progress in nineteenth-century Mexican travel accounts of the United States. At that time, various Mexican intellectuals spent some time in the USA. In diaries and travelogues, some of them articulated their views of their host country but also reflected on their own society through the contrast with their northern neighbor. The Mexican visitors expressed a particular fascination with signs of modernity in the United States. Interestingly, such signifiers included not only political and social institutions and economic and industrial advancements, but also the Niagara Falls as a site of both natural and technological wonders. Examining the depiction of the Falls in major nineteenth-century Mexican travelogues of the United States, the essay illuminates some of the metaphorical “uses of nature” for articulating socio-political ideas as well as experiences of mobility.

Cervantes, Lizardi, and the Literary Construction of The Mexican Rogue in Don Catrín de la fachenda

Abstract This study explores the socio-economic legacies and critique of nation-building found in the work of Jose Joaquin Fernandez de Lizardi (1776-1827). In the nineteenth century, the Latin American elite struggled to disassociate itself from a suffocating colonial machine; they sought their own identity, and writing became a way to express their frustration. As in other parts of Latin America, Mexican intellectuals protested fossilisation via Cervantes’s Don Quijote. Using the Spanish author’s text as a blueprint, Lizardi’s Don Catrín de la fachenda depicted a turbulent society that was in the process of abandoning a decaying colonial order. Don Quijote’s characters engaged in power struggles and were involved in a variety of forms of social antagonism. Lizardi juxtaposed and superimposed these on an American geographical and socio-economic space where there was much dissension around the nation’s direction. The social and economic rules of Mexico (and Latin America) today can be said to be already present in the social exchanges in Don Catrín. It was in this context that Don Quijote was “Mexicanised” by Lizardi and thereby made to participate in local reflections on liberty, patriotism, capitalism, and citizenship. Cervantes’s text thus took on a socio-political meaning in the narrative of Latin America’s past and present.

El “adversario desleal a España”: el debate de Francisco Bulnes y Carlos de Olaguíbel sobre la segunda guerra de independencia de Cuba

Artículo sección Escritorio

Stuart Levine (1932–2016)

Stuart Levine (1932–2016)

Contested Empire: Rethinking the Texas Revolution ed. by Sam W. Haynes and Gerald D. Saxon

Reviewed by: Contested Empire: Rethinking the Texas Revolution ed. by Sam W. Haynes and Gerald D. Saxon Graham B. Cox Contested Empire: Rethinking the Texas Revolution. Edited by Sam W. Haynes and Gerald D. Saxon. Introduction by Gregg Cantrel. College Station: Texas a&m University Press, 2015. vii + 169 pp. Illustrations, maps, index. $30.00 cloth. For students of Texas history, Contested Empire offers a look into some of the newest scholarship on the revolutionary period. Edited by Sam Haynes and Gerald Saxon, accomplished Texas historians in their own right, this book contains five unique assessments of the revolution. Greg Cantrell’s introduction deserves special mention as well for its excellent discussion on the ways in which historians have treated Texas history and the revolution in particular. Eric Schlereth, in his “Voluntary Mexicans: Allegiance and the Origins of the Texas Revolution,” examines the apparent ease with which Mexicans and Anglo-Americans changed allegiances in leaving their country of origin, joining Mexico and shifting their support to the rebellion and the new republic. Using this concept of “voluntary allegiance,” Schlereth reveals that “patriotism was transferrable” and, therefore, the revolution and its outcome was a “deeply contingent” event. These ideas, of course, are quite resonant today. In his “‘Imitating the Example of our Forefathers’: The Texas Revolution as Historical Reenactment,” Sam W. Haynes focuses on the revolutionary motives of Anglo-Texans and reveals the degree to which collective memory of the American revolutionary experience guided actions. Particularly helpful in understanding the intellectual connectivity of the Texas experience with that of American history, Haynes delivers an excellent (if all too brief by necessity) recitation of America’s “creation narrative.” Haynes succeeds in not only demonstrating how Texans connected to the American experience but also how rapidly they disassociated themselves almost immediately by fashioning a unique “Texas creation narrative,” which has tended to obscure, as Haynes put it, the degree to which Anglo-Texans “had once been, in a very real sense, re-enactors of the American Revolution.” Miguel Soto reveals the importance of land speculation, particularly that of Mexican speculators, in bringing about the Texas Revolution in his “Politics and Profits: Mexican Officials and Land Speculation in Texas, 1824–1835.” The course and character of land grants after the Mexican Revolution from Spain had produced a minority of Spanish and Mexicans in Texas; according to Soto, this was “a decisive factor in the outcome,” suggesting that “Mexican sovereignty over Texas” may have “already been compromised long before” what happened at San Jacinto. Will Fowler in his “The Texan Revolution of 1835–1836 and Early Mexican Nationalism,” like Soto, evaluates the revolution from a Mexican perspective. By examining period writings, Fowler argues that the Mexican national consciousness that grew in the post-1848 period owed its underpinnings to the earlier revolutionary period. This “early vision of Mexicanidad,” according to Fowler, emphasized a collective Hispanic heritage, Catholicism, abolitionism, spiritualism over materialism, and distrust of the United States (and land-grabbing Americans). As Fowler shows, although Mexican national identity took time to grow, it did not appear out of whole cloth during the Mexican-American War era; it was already present, at least among Mexican intellectuals in the Texas revolutionary period. While acknowledging the importance of slavery in the debate over American annexation [End Page 70] of Texas, Amy Greenburg in her “‘Time’s Noblest Empires Is the Last’: Texas Annexation in the Presumed Course of American Empire” takes a broader view and submits that some Americans were concerned “that annexation of Texas would lead to the internal collapse of the United States.” Using Thomas Cole’s series of 1836 allegorical paintings of the five stages of empire, Greenburg certainly succeeds in what she proposed for her essay, letting Cole’s The Course of Empire “weave the web of the story.” By doing so, Greenburg reminds us that the debate over annexation of Texas was part of a larger discourse on American empire. This book represents the printed version of the forty-eighth annual Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures held at the University of Texas at Arlington in 2013. Each chapter examines Texas history from more modern perspectives, which reflect recent trends in history—transnational, cultural, and...

Retos y alcances de la vecindad de México con Estados Unidos. Mirada desde el escritor mexicano José Revueltas

Objetivo: analizar el artículo “Los intelectuales mexicanos frente a Norteamérica” y el subtítulo “Con los Estados Unidos de mañana”, publicado en 1943 por el mexicano José Revueltas, sobre los retos y alcances de la vecindad de México con Estados Unidos. Con esto se explican –en estrecha relación con el contexto de la Segunda Guerra Mundial– las razones geopolíticas e históricas de la relación entre ambas naciones.Metodología: se analizó, semánticamente, el contenido del artículo. El método de análisis del discurso, permitió ampliar y profundizar el significado del artículo. Se siguió la línea metodológica que subraya que las expresiones discursivas no se separan de la situación en que han sido emitidas. Cada evento comunicativo cumple la función de expresar algún pensamiento o sentimiento efectivo en ese momento y en esa situación.Resultados: la mirada del escritor José Revueltas sobre las relaciones México-Estados Unidos, en el contexto de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, se caracteriza por destacar los elementos civilizatorios que hacen ver la posibilidad de establecer una convivencia pacífica y respetuosa en ambos países. Se evidencia la habilidad del escritor para usar la polifonía y algunas categorías del análisis estilístico. El análisis refleja las aristas conflictivas de las relaciones entre México y Estados Unidos.Conclusiones: El contexto de la Segunda Guerra Mundial influye en el escritor, porque su discurso se encuentra inmerso en una situación social en la cual México forma parte de los Aliados, junto a Estados unidos, en la contienda internacional.

The Inevitable Bandstand: The State Band of Oaxaca and the Politics of Sound

The “inevitable bandstand” refers to the music building placed in the central plaza of main towns in Mexico between the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Along with statues of national heroes, it is an emblem of order, civic life, and modernity. Charles Heath revives the concept of civil religion as interpreted by Robert Bellah to argue that the Oaxaca state band played a central ideological role in the political and social plans and programs of the state.Bellah's discussion of a civil religion in the United States called attention to the presence of a religious discourse in the political speeches of the country's founding fathers and more recent politicians. This discourse involved the power of God as the guiding force to rule and govern the country. Is it viable to interpret nineteenth-century Mexican liberal patriotic sentiments as the expression of a civil religion? Mexico is well known for being a Catholic country; however, the construction of the nation and the power of the state were only consolidated with the Reform Laws (1867–1869) and the state's secularization. The suppression of the Te Deum in government enthronement ceremonies during the Benito Juárez government illustrates not only the separation of the state from the church but also the separation of government politics from religious ritual. The wording and appearance of fervent nineteenth-century statements about the nation chosen by Heath may sound religious—and indeed religious expressions still are part of our language—but their moral ideology was not to link state policies and programs with a supernatural authority but instead to generate an awareness of the country's struggles to create a sovereign nation and to instill nationalism, forging an identity based upon the diversity of regional cultures. What the author calls the “eclectic repertoires” of the Banda de Música del Estado de Oaxaca's (BME) musical renditions throughout one and a half centuries exemplify this combination of European romantic militarism, heroic values, and Oaxacan or regional Mexican musical compositions (p. 42).The strength and contribution of this book is the author's detailed historiographical work. Heath uses primary sources, periodicals, annual government reports, and texts from politicians and intellectuals of the time (often musicians themselves) such as Justo Sierra, Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, José Vasconcelos, Genaro Vázquez, and Guillermo Rosas Solaegui to account for the state's struggle to modernize government and society and the introduction of social and economic policies and programs, particularly in education and tourism. The BME is made the avatar of that history. Introducing music festivals and popular and regional music as part of a socialist education curriculum was central to the civic calendar of the BME. Under the ideology of mestizaje, Mexican intellectuals imagined social and cultural integration for Latin American societies. Rural education became a priority, and cultural missions trained teachers to encourage regional music and dance in education. The author also discusses the importance of regional music and dances for promoting tourism and economic development. Descriptions of the BME's participation in the Guelaguetza festival are testimonies to the important role that this musical institution plays in the main economic industry of Oaxaca today.The book gives minute detail of government dispositions toward and investments in the growth and improvement of the BME, the band members' labor contracts, and the obligatory and key role that they have played in political and social celebrations, commemorations, and other symbolic events of the official civic calendar. The strong influence of musical directors such as Germán Canseco, Diego Innes, and Amador Pérez Torres is narrated with ethnographic detail. Several descriptions of the music programs are offered, but the reader misses an inventory of the music archive of the BME, which the author had the opportunity to study.The writing is slightly dry but full of information, and it is thus interesting and useful from that point of view. The Inevitable Bandstand is an important book, as it contributes to filling a gap in the modern history of music in Oaxaca City.

Juan Rejano en México: Los criterios del crítico literario

Making use of the articles published by Juan Rejano in El Nacional, this paper defines Rejano’s criteria in order to make known the critical perspective of Spanish exiles about Mexican literature and to insist in the importance of a dialogue between Mexican and Exile intellectuals. Despite the registry of his column is wide, Rejano’s critique about Mexican narrative explains his tastes, his ideas of tradition and literary quality. Moreover, the specific case of Rejano demonstrates how Spanish exiles participated and exerted influence in Mexico’s cultural space.

Alcohol and nationhood in nineteenth-century Mexico

This lively and engaging interdisciplinary study explores socio-cultural nation-building processes in Mexico between 1810 and 1910, through an analysis of issues surrounding the consumption of alcohol in a diverse range of source materials, including novels, newspapers, medical texts, and archival records. Examining the historical importance of drinking, as both an important feature of Mexican social life and a persistent source of concern for Mexican intellectuals and politicians, offers important insights into how the nation was discursively constructed and deconstructed in the nineteenth century. As well as condemning the physically and morally debilitating aspects of excessive alcohol consumption, and worrying that particularly Mexican drinks and drinking places were preventing Mexico’s progress as a nation, some Mexican intellectuals identified more culturally valuable aspects of Mexican drinking cultures that ought to be celebrated as part of an “authentic” Mexican national culture. The intertwined literary and historical analysis illustrates how wide-ranging the connections were between ideas about drinking, poverty, crime, insanity, citizenship, patriotism, gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity in the nineteenth century, and the book makes timely and important contributions to the fields of Latin American literature, alcohol studies, and the social and cultural history of nation-building.

The Avant-Garde Detective Fiction of Antonio Helú

The Avant-Garde Detective Fiction of Antonio Helú Mike Strayer The “delgado, inteligente, nervioso y . . . explosivo” Antonio Helú Atta lived as a newspaper and magazine editor, filmmaker, dramatist, and fiction writer known for his unabashed championing of the detective genre in Mexico (Villaurrutia 17). This largely-ignored father of Mexican detective fiction, however, also maintained deep, yet hitherto forgotten, ties with the Mexican avant-gardes. Helú’s involvement with both the Stridentists and the Contemporáneos not only informed his literary output but his radical, working-class politics, bridging the gap between literary avant-gardism and popular fiction. In his most famous novella La obligación de asesinar (1947), Helú develops an anarchistic hermeneutic for solving crime in which avant-garde free play out-deduces bourgeois reason. Through ad hoc investigations Helú’s detective – a lumpen thief named Carlos Miranda – brings into relief the failures of the Mexican Revolution and hints at alternative futures antagonistic towards private property regimes. Understanding Helú’s avant-garde affinities thus salvages his work from the dustbin of literary history by opening up certain radical possibilities for a literary mode, detective fiction, widely known for its hegemonic underpinnings. The Detective Mode South of the Border Most literary critics only consider Helú’s work important in relation to the broader genealogy of Mexican detective fiction. Speaking, for instance, of La obligación de asesinar, one literary scholar laments that “la importancia del libro es más documental que estética” (Negrín 40). For many critics, Helú’s work is only valuable in so far as it occupies what Ilan Stavans has called “the cornerstone of detective letters in Mexico” (75). Consequently, Stavans and other critics typically employ Helú’s literary biography in order [End Page 273] to contextualize the “literary explosion of this ‘subgenre’” during the nineteen seventies and eighties in Latin America (74). This is perhaps due in part to Mexican detective fiction’s perceived debt to foreign fonts of creative output, resulting in its misrecognition as, what Donald Yates calls, “a type of imported literature” practiced by so-called “native authors” (xi-xii). Notwithstanding the ivory-tower anthropology of Yates’s assessment, the empirical outcome is not all that surprising: a shallow pool of Helú scholarship. Over the past sixty years only a handful of academic books have treated either Helú or La obligación de asesinar in passing. Such is certainly the case with Persephone Braham’s Crimes against the State, Crimes against Persons (2004) and Glen S. Close’s Contemporary Hispanic Crime Fiction (2008). The most recent academic book to reference Helú – Artful Assassins (2010) by Fernando Fabio Sánchez – continues in the mold of previous literary histories by situating Helú as the noble precursor to bigger and better things yet to come (61). Couple this with a Queen’s Quorum reference to La obligación de asesinar from 1948 where Helú is credited with “founding a south-of-the-border school of detection” and two or three websites, along with a few anthologies, and therein lies the extent of criticism devoted to Helú (125). This critical neglect is especially strange, however, considering the influence that Helú has exercised on generations of Mexican writers like Carlos Monsiváis – who authored the prologue to the latest compilation of Helú’s stories and novellas published by Porrúa in 1997. Monsiváis, in fact, praises Helú as “un autor que creyó radicalmente en la literatura policiaca y a ella consagró lo mejor de su activa, generosa vida profesional” (19). Fifty years earlier, in another prologue to Helú’s work, the avant-garde poet Xavier Villaurrutia enthusiastically commented “para la sed de los lectores de novelas policíacas, existe ya el pequeño oasis de los cuentos policíacas de Antonio Helú” (16).1 In other words, two of the most prominent Mexican intellectuals of the twentieth century have put their stamp of approval on Helú’s work, and yet no serious academic scholarship has paid him any due attention. Much critical ink, however, has been spilled on Latin American detective narratives that channel hard-boiled detective fiction, which “appears to be a [End Page 274] much more...

Mestizaje and the Creation of Mexican National Literature: Ángel María Garibay Kintana's Nahuatl Project

From the beginning of the twentieth century, numerous Mexican intellectuals attempted to construct a national identity through mestizaje, a mixture of indigenous and European races and cultures. In both historical research and artistic production, they focused on Prehispanic indigenous traditions as an essential part of Mexican national history. In this mestizo nationalism, however, Mexican intellectuals did not pay much attention to the original Prehispanic indigenous forms, and in many cases they recycled post-conquest indigenous traditions that had already been transformed. Thus, the indigenous traditions which appear in the discourses of mestizaje are reworked yet again by Westernized intellectuals in the name of Mexican nationalism. Ángel María Garibay's study of Nahuatl literature is perhaps the best example of this phenomenon. This article examines how Garibay constructs a Prehispanic Nahuatl literary tradition based on the colonial chronicles of the sixteenth-century Catholic missionaries and informed by the European concept of literature.

Astronomía espectacular y extravíos de la gula en un festejo novohispano del siglo XVIII

No sólo las cambiantes peripecias de la Guerra de Sucesión fueron causa de las manifestaciones de lealtad de los súbditos americanos, sino que con más razón eran celebrados con oficial alborozo los faustos acontecimientos de la casa real. Al igual que en la metrópoli, tales acontecimiento dieron origen a festejos de diversa índole, cuya ideación y descripción fueron encomendadas a conspicuos letrados de la Nueva España. Hoy, a pesar de la trágica dispersión de los impresos coloniales, todavía conservamos noticias de muchos de aquellos que daban cuenta, por una parte, de las victorias obtenidas por el monarca hispano sobre sus enemigos y, por el otro, se congratulaban del alumbramiento de los infantes. Para los «festivos alborozos y comunes alegrías» de la corte mexicana por el nacimiento del infante Felipe Pedro, el erudito Gil Ramírez, en colaboración con otros ingenios de la corte mexicana, imaginó un deslumbrante dispositivo simbólico, según el cual serían cada una de las divisiones de la esfera mundana, titulado Esfera mexicana… (1714), una de las principales composiciones emblemáticas del siglo.