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MEXICO MAGICO
TRIUMPHS and TRAGEDY... A history of the Mexican people |
CHAPTER IV, The Forefathers - The Baroque Years (63th part continues...)
By Prof. German Estrada - September 2006 |
Mestizo intellectuals also made their appearance on the eve of the Baroque Age, specifically Diego Muñoz Camargo and Juan Bautista Pomar, like Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl authors of pre-Hispanic histories. Alva Ixtlilxóchitl’s Historia de la nación Chichimeca stamped him as the better known. Unfortunately, these mestizo authors, thoroughly malinchistas, thought in Spanish, wrote in Spanish and judge Indians by Spanish values. They were, in actuality, court historians, employing history to justify events.
Alva Ixtlilxóchitl even infused pre-Hispanic religious thought with Christian concepts of the Bible; Noah’s ark, to give one example. He described Cuauhtémoc as “white of skin and bearded,” a look-alike for the Spaniard.
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Juan Ruiz de Alarcón y Mendoza (1581-1639)
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By the end of the sixteenth century, the seeds of a criollo nationality, distinct from that of the Spaniard, had started to germinate. Before the mestizo saw himself as Mexican, the criollo sensed hat his New World birth blessed him with a culture of his own. He spoke Spanish with a softer accent, not the guttural sound of his parents, and employed a more delicate yet more bombastic vocabulary to voice unique sentiments. In 1590 or thereabouts, Juan de Cárdenas, ironically a young peninsular enamored of the New World, expressed this sentiment for the first time. In his Problemas y secretos maravillosos de las Indias, he spoke of “my land,” showing how New World inhabitants differed from those of the Old. Yet he was not referring to the Indian, whom he described as “filthy and obscene,” but to the criollo, whom Cárdenas believed superior to the peninsular.
On his heels appeared Juan de Torquemada, a Franciscan friar, whose Monarquía Indiana was a history of old Anahuac based mainly on sources collected by Motolinía, Bernardino de Sahagún, and Jerónimo de Mendieta. He believe that Francisco López de Gómara and Antonio de Herrera, the Spanish historians, had presented a distorted version of the ancient peoples. Unlike the official chroniclers, Torquemada wrote glowingly of pre-Hispanic Indians, insisting that they were on the verge of civilization and comparing Moctezuma with Alexander the Great. He pioneered the use of pre-Hispanic Indians to justify the criollo’s search for an authentic culture. But he was ambivalent, too, believing the ancient religions to be the work of the devil and seeing the Conquest as a means of redemption from paganism. The real founders of New Spain were the twelve apostles, the Franciscans who arrived in 1524, not Cortés. Because the inordinate religious bias, Torquemada’s views proved unacceptable to the broader criollo search for nationalist foundations.
More than the others, Don Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, a friend of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, helped plant the seeds of criollo nationality. A scientist, mathematician, historian, and church scholar, he embodied the transition from the orthodoxy of the seventeenth century to the more heterodox thinking. For his astronomy, one of his hobbies, he relied on Kepler, Galileo, and Copernicus and doubted the wisdom of Aristotle, the priest of the Baroque Age. A nephew of the poet Luis de Góngora, he was a Jesuit originally and, after his expulsion from the order in 1688, a secular priest with a penchant for writing history.
What fascinated him most was “Mexico”, a name more and more popular. He never tired of collecting “Mexican antiquities” and drew the first map of New Spain. In his studies, he endeavored to learn what he could about pre-Hispanic Mexico but, unlike Sahagún and the friars who explored the past in order to better convert, Sigüenza y Góngora simply thirsted for knowledge of what he titled mi patria, my motherland. He believed that “Mexico was no mere adjunct of Spain but a country with a rich heritage of its own,” anchoring his criollo identity in the Indian past, which he envisaged as a counter-weight to the European, comparing its accomplishments to Rome’s. Without negating the importance of Europe, Sigüenza y Güongora discovered the unity of New Spain in Spaniards, criollos, mestizos, Indians and castas. Cortés and Cuauhtémoc were two sides of identical coin: to accept one did not deny the other. Moreover, the Spanish conqueror, the truth required saying, dealt harshly with the Indian.
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Map of New Spain (1535-1828) that included the States of California, Texas, New Mexico,
Colorado, Arizona and Utah,All the way to Costa Rica in Central América
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In the next issue we’ll continue with Chapter V of this fascinating book, The Baroque Years.
Prof. Germán Estrada
E-mail: estradanav@yahoo.com
Source: From the book Triumphs and Tragedy, a History of the Mexican People by his author Ramon Eduardo Ruiz, and with his authorization. (W.W. Norton & Company. New York-London).
Prof. Germán Estrada is the author of the best selling book, México Mágico: Everything You Wanted To Know About... But Nobody Told You..." available in Puerto Vallarta at The Net House, Mail Boxes, Etc., Books, Books as well as directly from his website.
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