Constructing the Criollo Archive: Subjects of Knowledge in the Bibliotheca Mexicana and the Rusticatio Mexicana Antony Higgins

Purdue University Purdue e-Pubs Purdue University Press e-books Purdue University Press 10-1-2000 Constructing the Criollo Archive: Subjects of Knowledge in the Bibliotheca Mexicana and the Rusticatio Mexicana Antony Higgins Follow this and additional works at: http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/purduepress_ebooks Recommended Citation Higgins, Antony, "Constructing the Criollo Archive: Subjects of Knowledge in the Bibliotheca Mexicana and the Rusticatio Mexicana" (2000). Purdue University Press e-books. Book 8. http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/purduepress_ebooks/8 This document has been made available through Purdue e-Pubs, a service of the Purdue University Libraries. Please contact epubs@purdue.edu for additional information. CONSTRUCTING THE CRIOLLO ARCHIVE Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures Editorial Board Floyd F. Merrell, Series Editor Howard Mancing Jeanette Beer Anthony Julian Tamburri Paul B. Dixon Allen G. Wood Associate Editors French Marta Peixoto Paul Benhamou Ricardo da Silveira Willard Bohn Lobo Sternberg Gerard J. Brault Germaine Brée Spanish and Spanish American Mary Ann Caws Maryellen Bieder Gérard Defaux Catherine Connor (Swietlicki) Floyd F. Gray Ivy A. Corfis Michael Issacharoff Frederick A. de Armas Milorad R. Margitic; Edward Friedman Glyn P. Norton Charles Ganelin Allan H. Pasco David T. Gies Gerald Prince Roberto González Echevarría David Lee Rubin Patricia Hart English Showalter David K. Herzberger Emily Hicks Italian Djelal Kadir Fiora A. Bassanese Lucille Kerr Peter Carravetta Alberto Moreiras Benjamin Lawton Randolph D. Pope Franco Masciandaro Francisco Ruiz Ramón Luso-Brazilian Elzæbieta Sk¬odowska Fred M. Clark Mario Valdés Mary L. Daniel Howard Young PSRL volume 21 CONSTRUCTING THE CRIOLLO ARCHIVE Subjects of Knowledge in the Bibliotheca Mexicana and the Rusticatio Mexicana Antony Higgins Purdue University Press West Lafayette, Indiana Copyright ©2000 by Purdue Research Foundation. All rights reserved. 04 03 02 01 00 5 4 3 2 1 ∞ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America Design by Anita Noble Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Higgins, Antony, 1964– Constructing the criollo archive : subjects of knowledge in the Bibliotheca mexicana and the Rusticatio mexicana / Antony Higgins. p. cm. — (Purdue studies in Romance literatures ; v. 21) Includes bibliographical references (p. - ) and index. ISBN 1-55753-198-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Mexico—History—Spanish colony, 1540-1810. 2. Creoles— Mexico—Politics and government—18th century. 3. Creoles—Mexico— Intellectual life—18th century. 4. Subjectivity. 5. Eguiara y Eguren, Juan José de, 1696-1763. Biblioteca mexicana. 6. Landívar, Rafael, 1731-1793. Rusticatio mexicana. I. Title. II. Series. F1231 .H54 2000 972'.02—dc21 99-057971 For Winifred Contents ix Preface xvii Acknowledgments 1 Introduction 21 Part 1 Juan José de Eguiara y Eguren and the Bibliotheca Mexicana 23 Chapter One Framing the Criollo Archive 45 Chapter Two Supplementing Authority: The Prologues to the Bibliotheca Mexicana 86 Chapter Three The Fragmentary Archive: The Catalogue of the Bibliotheca Mexicana 107 Part 2 Rafael Landívar’s Rusticatio Mexicana: Expanding the Criollo Archive 109 Chapter Four Subject, Archive, Landscape 167 Chapter Five After the Sublime: The Rationalization of Colonial Space 211 Chapter Six Framing American Heterogeneity 233 Conclusion 241 Notes 263 Bibliography 277 Index Preface Preface The central project of this book is to carry out an investigation into the emergence of theoretical discourses of criollo subjectivity in the viceroyalty of New Spain and the kingdom of Guate- mala during the eighteenth century. I track this process in terms of two interrelated problematics. First, I have sought to test the hypothesis that shifts in criollo thought are tied up with a complex negotiation of a conjunctural intellectual moment in which moves between traditional structures and a form of modernity are in the process of being conceptualized and realized, a process that is rendered all the more complex by the particular dynamics of a colonial cultural and historical situation. Second, my reflections on the trajectory of criollo subjectivity constitute an attempt to address the question of how to discuss the development of forms of selfhood and association within and against the system of norms established by a colonial regime. Within this framework, I am concerned, first, to track the contradictory movements of criollo subjectivity as it weaves between identifications with Western paradigms of culture and subjectivity, on the one hand, and with the available models of indigenous civilizations, on the other. In particular, I am interested in how such a subjectivity becomes bound up with the assumption of an ambivalent stance toward indigenous peoples. At one level, it manifests itself in the unfolding of a discourse of interested knowledge about the cultures of those societies, a process that I regard to be similar to that which Edward Said traces in his study of European and North American knowledge about the Near and Far East (1–28). At another level, it shows up in the form of a tension that underpins the articulation of criollo selfhood even as it assumes a façade of homo- geneity, to the extent that within the complex racial matrix of colonial society, the act of identifying oneself as criollo was often predicated on the suppression of one’s mixed racial back- ground. The second focus of my study is a dynamic through which criollos deploy the new modes of scientific investigation of nature and natural phenomena that emerge in the eighteenth century with a view to developing a body of knowledge about the specificities of the natural environment of their home- land. Most importantly, I posit that criollo intellectuals seek ix Preface to constitute such a body of knowledge as a theoretical ground for criollo claims to authority and power. Over the course of my study I analyze how these two problematics unfold in two eighteenth-century neo-Latin texts. These texts are the Bibliotheca Mexicana (1755), by Juan José de Eguiara y Eguren (1696–1763), and the Rusticatio Mexicana (1781; 1782), by Rafael Landívar (1731–93). I bring these two works together, in spite of their apparent differences, out of a desire to investigate how they both play a part in the construction of visions of criollo subjectivity and association. Specifically, their involvement in such a practice is endlessly marked by contradiction, largely as a function of their positioning within some of the very institutions where Spanish rule was simulta- neously maintained and contested. In addition to being criollos and educators, both were clerics with serious involvements in religious institutions. While Eguiara y Eguren served in various capacities in the Cathedral of Mexico City, Landívar was edu- cated and came to work within the colleges of the Society of Jesus in Guatemala and New Spain, eventually writing his poem from a position of exile and estrangement, in the aftermath of the expulsion of the Jesuits from America in 1767. Landívar’s positioning is further complicated by his having been born and raised in the region of Guatemala, which maintained a substan- tial degree of autonomy with respect to the northern viceroyalty from the moment of its earliest settlement by the Spanish in the sixteenth century (Jones xii–xiii; 36–41). At first sight, it might appear that the fact of having been written in Latin is the only thing the Bibliotheca Mexicana and the Rusticatio Mexicana have in common. It would have been as natural for Eguiara y Eguren and Landívar, as clerics and educators, to write in Latin as in Spanish. Moreover, the pres- tige that Latin enjoyed as the appropriate medium for the representation of the most exalted topics made it the logical choice as the language in which to compose their works. In this respect, it serves to lend authority to the American topics Eguiara y Eguren and Landívar treat in their works, helping to consolidate the discourses of criollo association and subjectivity they seek to articulate. At the same time, nevertheless, Eguiara y Eguren and Landívar’s positioning within this regime of writing underlines the contradictions embedded in those x Preface discourses. The very fact that they wrote in Latin serves to il- lustrate the specifics of a sociocultural formation that does not conform to the model of a nation-state whose hegemony is predicated, in part, on the emergence of a literature written in vernacular language (Anderson). It is my contention that Eguiara y Eguren and Landívar are key figures in a genealogy that comprises a significant portion of the literary production of the so-called period of colonial stabilization, the phrase used by Hernán Vidal and others to designate the stage of Latin American history during which the viceregal system was established and consolidated (Vidal 89; González Stephan, “Narrativa” 7–8). Specifically, I choose to focus on these texts in order to critique the conventional schol- arly wisdom that regards them as successive steps in the history of period concepts established by Latin American literary historiography. While the Bibliotheca Mexicana is usually read as the product and synthesis of a scholastic regime of textual authority and highly stylized poetics, the Rusticatio Mexicana is represented as an articulation of an Enlightenment episte- mology and aesthetics. In accordance with the precepts of an inherited European historical narrative, scholars tend to place these texts within a story of ruptures and paradigm shifts, mark- ing the transition from Baroque (Eguiara y Eguren) to Enlight- enment (Landívar). In place of that superimposed model, this study attempts to re-create a narrative that pays closer attention to the particular, heterogeneous dynamics of intellectual culture in the Spanish colonies. An important feature of these dynamics is the man- ner in which colonial history is not composed of a series of clean breaks from one discrete historical moment to another.

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