The Unsettlement of America: Translation, Interpretation, and Story of Don Luis de Velasco, 1560-1945 ANNA BRICKHOUSE Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015 366 pp. The achievements of Anna Brickhouse's The Unsettlement of America: Translation, Interpretation, and Story of Don Luis de Velasco, 1560-1945 are many. Her study excavates little-known archives that span Iberian-Anglo worlds from Columbus's putative discovery to mid-twentieth century; it enacts a reading practice that radically rewrites our narratives of canonical texts; it shifts focus from imperial knowledge production to indigenous knowledge production with self-consciousness and regard for materials; and it intervenes in ongoing, if somewhat embarrassingly Anglo-American, centrism that continues to organize US literary history, embarrassingly because of field's well-meaning, if woefully unrealized, intentions to move beyond such limitations. In a frequently hyperbolic genre, I realize that such praise labors under suspicious eyes of readers, but as her analyses of diverse archive makes clear throughout, we simply lack vocabulary and methodology with which her own book might be recognizable. What stands as The Unsettlement of America's greatest achievement is not this new critical vocabulary, however, but how utterly compelling her story is--I could not put it down. At center of this compelling story is Algonquian-speaking Indian Paquiquineo, later christened Don Luis de Velasco by Spanish agent Antonio Velazquez, who takes Ajacan Indian back to King Philip's court in Madrid after his ship, Santa Catalina, is hit by a storm while attempting to settle Florida in 1561. The European record of Don Luis de Velasco reveals that he was esteemed by King Philip II, was educated at court, and received clothing, allowance, and communion upon his confession. Brickhouse details his subsequent transatlantic travels between Spain, Mexico, Peru, and Cuba, during which time he came into contact with other Ajacan Indians and indigenous Mexicans, contact that enabled not only transmission of information and understanding between itinerant natives but also solidarity--a sensibility of unsettlement--that Brickhouse suggests determined unexpected failure of both 1562 and 1566 voyages to and 1570 destroyed settlement of Don Luis's native Ajacan (50, 93). The details of Don Luis's invisible, authorial hand in unsettling his homeland are remarkable and complex and, as Brickhouse admits, necessarily speculative. Don Luis's role in failed 1562 voyage to Ajacan was as a guide to Dominicans while they looked for a way to embark on coast of La Florida, and then as a translator between Spanish and Ajacan natives, throughout Spain's establishment of a new settlement. But during their stop in Mexico City, Don Luis and his Algonquian-speaking companion became very ill, which indefinitely postponed their voyage. Brickhouse reads their simultaneous illness--and miraculous recovery--as a strategic obstruction to settlement of Ajacan. The cosmopolitan translators, who begged to be baptized on their deathbeds in New World after likely repeated rejections of same in Spain, may have understood legal consequences of conversion, that is, protection and full liberty to either remain in Mexico or return to Spain. Under Spanish colonial and religious law, conversion to Christianity meant that Don Luis de Velasco could not return to his homeland without religious supervision for fear that he might apostatize; but it also provided him with a means of apprehending the culture of conquest and a site of relative refuge within which to do so (52-53). Moreover, Brickhouse conjectures, Don Luis and his companion may have understood that by converting to Christianity they could impede, or defer, military occupation of Ajacan. That Fray Pedro de Feria, head of Dominican Order in Mexico City, understood their conversion as a religious triumph rather than a military obstacle reinforces an interpretation of Don Luis de Velasco's intentional unsettlement of his native land. …