Participants

Alfredo Chavero’s Historia de Tlaxcala (1892): An Ideological and Methodological Inquiry

Jannette Amaral-Rodríguez, University of Richmond 

This presentation discusses Alfredo Chavero’s ideological and methodological approaches to colonial codices and his production of modern editions of Mexican codices in the nineteenth century. Although Chavero is not the first editor of Historia de Tlaxcala, his legacy and impact on colonial studies and history is significant. Indeed, generations of scholars have been introduced to the history and literature of colonial Mexico through his mediations of colonial texts. It is urgent then for contemporary scholars of both colonial and modern canons to have greater clarity of Chavero’s processes. The presentation will focus on two discussion points: First, the ideological and historical context of nineteenth-century Mexico with emphasis on Chavero’s archeological vision and treatment of indigenous artifacts and codices. In other words, this section will answer what was the role of these artifacts and codices in achieving progress and modernity in Mexico. And second, an analysis of Chavero’s editing and scholarly choices in his edition of Historia de Tlaxcala, published in 1892 for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. This examination will reveal for colonial scholars how the international marketing of colonial Mexican history, with its nationalist logic of transcription and reproduction, distorted both the original textual content and our ways of reading it. 

Postcolonial (Printed) Lives that Remain: Palimpsestic Temporalities in 19th-Century Editions of Martín del Barco Centenera’s Argentina… 

Mayra Bottaro, University of Oregon

During the nineteenth century, a number of scattered colonial texts, both in manuscript and print format, that had been circulating in private libraries found new audiences through renovated editions, whose organization was often tied to narratives of empire and state formation that decontextualized the texts’ original use to fulfill political agendas. Through the study of the nineteenth-century printed afterlives of Arcediano Martín del Barco Centenera’s La Argentina y Conquista del Río de la Plata: con otros acaecimientos de los reynos del Perú, Tucumán, y estado del Brasil (originally published by the Lisbon Press of Pedro Crasbeeck in 1602), this presentation argues against the claim of a single unifying narrative encompassing the new republics’ understanding of the colonial past as a void. My analysis will focus on the text’s material transformations in two new editions produced under the umbrella of historiographical projects and in its intertextual reemergence in fictional literature. First, I will consider Neapolitan Pedro De Angelis’ inclusion of the text as part of his massive undertaking, the Colección de Obras y Documentos relativos a la historia antigua y moderna de las provincias del Río de la Plata (1836-1837). Plagued by difficulties that range from complications to include illustrations and maps, to economic problems derived from paper and ink costs, this collection represented a historiographical landmark, mired in controversy nonetheless. Then, I will look to Juan María Gutiérrez’s 1854 edition by the Imprenta de la “Revista” in tandem with his critical analysis of the text published in La Revista del Río de la Plata in 1873. Finally, I will turn to the fragments of the text published in El Plata Científico y Literario (1854) in the body of Vicente Fidel López’s serialized novel La novia del hereje ó la Inquisición de Lima. Interpreted through the metonymic logic of the “bar sinister,” the multiple traces of elisions, deviations, corrections, emendations, rearrangements, and addenda, reveal a complex narrative, one that evinces inherent tensions in the way in which the colonial archive manifests and is shaped at different junctures, and that rewrites the all-encompassing tale of historicism, with its emphasis on the arrow of progress, into a celebratory tale of unstable origins, mutable perceptions, and oblique filiations.

Tlatoltequitiliztli: Nahua Scribal Practices in Nineteenth-century Mexico

David Horacio Colmenares, Boston University

This presentation focuses on the legacy of Don Faustino Galicia Chimalpopoca (1805-1882), the Nahua lawyer and scholar whose tireless work secured the survival of a whole range of colonial Nahua works and documents, only a small fraction of which was published by José Fernando Ramírez. His role as the foremost cultural mediator between indigenous central Mexico and its urban elites in the nineteenth century was tarnished by his close collaboration with the Second Empire, but recent studies have begun to shed light on Chimalpopoca’s intellectual work. In this presentation, I strive to reconstruct and reframe don Faustino’s unique textual scholarship and scribal practices. When he undertook the transcription and translation of sixteenth-century Nahuatl texts in the 1830s, there was neither an academic community nor modern philological criteria at his disposal. He approached the matter by tapping into an intellectual genealogy, or rather, a trade know-how, that was simply indiscernible to the Republic of Letters and did not sit well with the positivism and historicism of leading Mexican intellectuals such as Ramírez. I will argue that Don Faustino saw himself as belonging to an ancient lineage of Nahua legal experts that, within the context of the petitional viceregal government, had regarded the transcription and reproduction of Nahuatl documents as an integral part of governance. A remarkable aspect of this scribal tradition is manifested in Chimalpopoca’s Nachlass: he not only produced fair copies of old texts, but also copied painted documents in the Mesoamerican tradition. At the cusp of the scribal tradition of the tlacuilo (Nahua painter) and the nahuatlato (translator and legal expert), don Faustino’s scholarship can perhaps be regarded as the last flickering moment of a metaphysics of embodied gesture, consubstantial to Mesoamerican amoxtli.

Editar la Edad Media en el siglo XIX. El caso de Escritores en prosa anteriores al siglo XV de Pascual de Gayangos

Mario Cossío Olavide, Universidad de Alcalá de Henares

In this presentation I offer an overview of the chaotic and often serendipitous process of edition of one of the first anthologies of medieval Castilian prose by Pascual de Gayangos (1809–1897), a founding figure of Iberian medievalism. Through the analysis of surviving printers’ copies, Gayangos’s correspondence, and the volume titled Escritores en prosa anteriores al siglo XV, I will review how Gayangos collaborated with scores of copyists, typographers, and editors to transform his privileged access to early Castilian manuscripts into a relatively democratic and popular edition not surpassed until the mid 20th century.

(Presentation in Spanish)

Editing Mexican National History. Bustamante and Early Hispanic Books and Manuscripts

Gabriela Goldin Marcovich, Duke University / EHESS

Alongside his political and literary activities as a lawyer and a writer, Carlos María de Bustamante (1774, Oaxaca – 1848, Mexico) was the prolific editor of colonial books and manuscripts by Indigenous and Creole writers. Bustamante edited Bernardo de Sahagún’s history, the chronicles of Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl, the history of the Society of Jesus in New Spain by Francisco Javier Alegre, the history of the city of Mexico by Jesuit Andrés Cavo and the treatise on the archaeological stones discovered in 1790 by Antonio de León y Gama, among many others. Bustamante completed some of the works, as he did with Cavo’s history, originally ending with the expulsion of the Jesuits and finishing with the entry of the Trigarant army in Bustamante’s edition. Bustamante also printed unknown manuscripts as in the case of León y Gama’s book, to which he added a second part that the author left unpublished. Based on the introductions to the different editions, the presentation will analyze the historiographical and editorial gestures of Bustamante during the 1820 and 1830s that inscribed them in a national timeframe by establishing continuities and ruptures with previous eras, laying the foundations of the national historiography that will dominate the interpretations of these texts. Through a brief overview of this editorial operations, this presentation asks how through editions of works by Creole and indigenous chroniclers of the colonial period, Bustamante created a corpus of precursors of the Mexican nation, replacing the colonial texts, written in a colonial and imperial framework, in a national one.

Making History Al Vivo: José Fernando Ramírez and the Publication of Diego Durán’s Historia de las Indias de Nueva España (1867-1880)

Miguel Ibañez Aristondo, Villanova University

This presentation examines José Fernando Ramírez’s archival approaches to colonial codices by focusing on the publication of Diego Durán’s Historia de las Indias de Nueva España (1867-1880). Familiar with scholarship abroad, Ramírez criticized in his writing representations of the Mexican past and questioned “violent interpretations” seen in the great majority of works devoted to the study of American antiquities. For Ramirez, Mexican history had to generate a singularity by avoiding “imaginary analogies” and presenting the past from life through the codices and archeological artifacts of the Mexican archive. In other words, Ramírez looked at codices as portraits that captured the authentic nature of the past. It is through this particular lens of history that the Mexican historian saw his publishing project of Diego Durán’s Historia de las Indias de Nueva España. By exploring Ramírez’s publication project, this presentation will interrogate how and through which operations the publication of colonial artifacts in the nineteenth century emphasized the necessity of eliminating or obscuring the mediated forms and entangled voices that intervened in the production of the colonial archive.

(Presentation in Spanish)

The Origin of an Hypothesis: the “Crónica X” and its Nineteenth-Century Heritage 

José Luis Nogales Baena, Boston University 

An important group of sixteenth-century related texts about the pre-Hispanic past of the Mexica people was printed between 1847 and 1880: the Historia de las Indias de Nueva España e islas de tierra firme (1579, 1581) by Diego Durán; the so-called Tovar Codex (c. 1586); the Ramírez Codex (c. 1586) by Juan de Tovar; and Crónica mexicana (c. 1598) by Hernando de Alvarado Tezozomoc. The “discovery” of these manuscripts, their first printed editions, and their circulation through the Atlantic in such a short period of time were due not to a coincidence, but to a group of men who—with or without knowing each other—shared a similar devotion for old codices, a bibliomania, a passion for pre-Columbian history, and, in most cases, a will for editing and forging a Mexican national history. They formed, in Robert Barlow’s phrase, a “generation of discoverers”: Kingsborough, Icazbalceta, Phillipps, Ramírez, Chavero, Orozco y Berra, Bandelier and Chávez. Their work laid the foundations for twentieth-century Mexican historiography, but also for some of its more persistent flaws. This talk will review the editorial and social practices, the characters, and the main motivations that led to the rescue and edition of the aforementioned texts. In particular, I will show how these editions and the multiple hypotheses around its affiliation gave origin to the theory of a common source—the later called and still debated “Crónica X”—as well as how this theory was shaped by the desires and the motivations that drove its discoverers.

(Presentation in Spanish)

Medieval Authorship in the Nineteenth Century: A Case Study of the Conde Lucanor

Anita Savo, Boston University

The nineteenth century saw a proliferation of editions and translations of Juan Manuel’s best-known work, the Conde Lucanor. They fall into one of two categories: some editors relied on the text prepared by sixteenth-century humanist Gonzalo Argote de Molina (Seville, 1575; Madrid, 1642), while others consulted the extant manuscripts in an attempt to edit a more complete, “ancient,” or authoritative text. Both types use paratexts—including introductions, prologues, notes, and appendices—to portray Juan Manuel as the work’s creator in ways that appear to echo Romantic notions of the poet’s artistic creativity. However, they also draw from a medieval and early modern concept of authorship, expressed in the rhetoric of medieval prologues and in a mise-en-page that calls attention to the author’s role in book production. In this presentation, I trace the transmission and adaptation of this premodern concept of authorship from manuscripts of the Conde Lucanor, to Argote de Molina’s humanist edition, to nineteenth-century editions and translations by Adelbert von Keller (1839; 1840), Manuel Milá y Fontanals (1853), M. Adolphe de Puibusque (1854), Pascual de Gayangos (1860), and James York (1868). In doing so, I show how these modern editors reshaped the premodern discourse of authorship to adapt to nineteenth-century narratives of literary history and the tastes of cosmopolitan European readers. 

Re-writing race in the nineteenth-century afterlives of Los siete infantes de Lara

Rebecca de Souza, Oxford University

In its earliest medieval versions, the epic legend of Los siete infantes de Lara depicts intercultural interaction not predicated upon conflict but on personal relationships across porous frontiers. Los siete infantes formed an indelible part of cultural-historical memory in the burgeoning Spanish nation state when it was retold in nineteenth-century afterlives that respond to contemporaneous socio-political circumstances. This paper explores how Los siete infantes is transformed in new, creative editions by nineteenth century scholars, authors and playwrights, and how these afterlives differ from prominent rewritings in the early modern period, from Lope de Vega to Juan de Matos Fragoso. It then focuses specifically on how the Duque de Rivas and José Somoza recast the legend in El moro expósito (1834) and El bautismo de Mudarra (1842) respectively. Both authors rework the depiction of Andalusi characters found in prior versions of the legend. The notion that the Infantes’ biracial half-brother Mudarra can solve internal Castilian conflict is no longer possible in a nation state plagued by internal divisions and exclusive narratives of national identity. Rivas and Somoza instead efface a multicultural medieval Iberia through acculturation by ‘Castilianizing’ Mudarra long before he crosses the border. Both reject prominent early nineteenth-century constructions of medieval Iberia as anachronistically Christian and of an exceptional al-Andalus divorced from the wider Arab world. Rivas and Somoza parody both of these historiographical fallacies in works that end pessimistically, raising the question of whether medievalism has a role to play in nineteenth-century society.

❦