Abstract

In the winter of 1622–23, Manila publicly mourned the passing of Philip III and then celebrated the ascension to the throne of his son Philip IV. A series of urban festivals brought together the many different social and ethnic groups of the colony and culminated in the carnival of 1623. As had been the case in colonial cities in the Americas, don Quijote and Sancho joined the party and participated in the jousts and parades of Manila. All this was recorded by soldier Diego de Rueda y Mendoza in his manuscript Relación verdadera de las exequias funerales que la insigne ciudad de Manila celebró a la muerte de la majestad del rey Felipe III y reales fiestas que se hicieron a la felice sucesión de . . . Felipe IV. Through the examination of this and other unpublished sources, this article studies the popular uses of Cervantes’s novel in relation to the complex linguistic, ethnic, and social makeup of the Philippine capital. It also analyzes the different forms of collective affect and urban sociability prompted by the recontextualization of the Cervantine characters in this peculiar colonial carnival.

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