Performing Encounters: Lope's El Nuevo Mundo Descubierto Por Cristóbal Colon

This essay analyzes the performance of certain key historical events as the site where colonial difference is enacted, and where diverse local narratives struggle for supremacy. Lope de Vega, in his play El Nuevo Mundo descubierto por Cristóbal Colón, stages the encounter between Columbus and the indigenous peoples of the New World in order to explore themes such as linguistic and cultural incommensurability, the conflict between indigenous belief systems and imperial Catholicism, the role of communicative technologies such as writing in the Conquest of America, and the struggle between alternative visions of what the Conquest was ultimately supposed to achieve.