The Spectacular City, Mexico, and Colonial Hispanic Literary Culture

2. ORDER AND CONCERT

So as not to tire Your Highness with the description of the things of this city . . . I will say only that these people live almost like those in Spain and in as much concert and order as there. Hernán Cortés, Segunda carta-relación [Second letter-account] (1520) I. Entering the Ordered City Before the Spectacular City, as its precondition and antagonist , there was the Ordered City. Decimating the concert and order that Hernán Cortés perceived in Tenochtitlán, the Hispanic Ordered City sought to subjugate the Indian world, razing and then rebirthing it in accord with the aims of the empire and in consonance with European paradigms. “Almost like those in Spain,” says Cortés: faced with the practical dilemma of conveying the New World to those who had no direct knowledge of it, basically every sixteenth-century Spanish writer took frequent recourse to comparisons with Spain and Europe in his writings. On a larger, far more devastating scale, the colonizers would batter away in deed and in word at the forbidding yet promising “almost” until it yielded the greater resemblance to home for which the conquerors , no less than their century, yearned. Hispanic New World city planners and city wordsmiths alike contributed to erasing the New World’s particularity in the name of empire, to erecting the Ordered City. A term familiar from Angel Rama’s La ciudad letrada, the Ordered City is both a real being, the planned city, and the bundle of powerful abstractions that underwrites it. Rama views the Ordered City as a colonialist entity that sprung fully formed, like Minerva from Jupiter’s Two OR DE R A N D CONC E RT 50 The Spectacular City, Mexico, and Colonial Hispanic Literary Culture forehead, from Renaissance classicizing and Neoplatonic thought into the New World, to the utter disregard and obliteration of extant realities . As he states of the planned city, “Before materializing in reality, cities had to be constructed as symbolic representations whose existence inevitably depended on signs,” such as words and charts (8). I will corroborate and work through his seminal assertion over the course of the chapter, examining its dramatic implications for city texts dependent on archetypes. At this entry point, though, it is crucial to observe that Rama folds the planned or Ordered City, which arose in the Renaissance, into the absolutist Baroque city of the seventeenth century. The first two chapters of his book mate and conflate the sixteenth century and the seventeenth. They synchronize the planned city, a closed entity overweeningly dependent on signs, with the community of intellectuals and bureaucrats immured in a self-contained world of papers and words that constitutes the seventeenth-century Baroque ciudad letrada, or lettered community.1 Certainly, the planned city and the absolutist agenda and Renaissance ideals that formed it greatly outlive their inception points. However, as this chapter and this book hope to bear out, I maintain quite forcefully that the Baroque city (and my construct, the Baroque Spectacular City) stands apart from the Ordered City, which has a special pertinence to the sixteenth century. One does well to bear in mind Mariano PicónSalas ’s observation that “Renaissance vitality, unlike the baroque, always sought a rule or archetype. . . . Renaissance pride, and consciousness of power, operated under an ordering intelligence. Everything had a rule, a special type” (89). In “Order and Concert,” we will experience the exigencies of the sixteenth century and of the Ordered City itself largely via the theory, praxis, and verbal representation of sixteenth-century Mexico City, the first full realization of the planned city in the New World. Paving the way for the Spectacular City, the chapter delves into the constellation of Western paradigms, city planning, and city writing that creates the early Ordered City of Mexico, rebuilt over the ruins of Tenochtitlán. We join walking and riding tours of Mexico City in a spectrum of genres at the beginning, midpoint, and last quarter of the sixteenth century that lay the foundations both for the New World city and for Mexican colonial literature. The authors of the tours are not creoles but Spaniards with varying degrees of rootedness in the New World, all of whose primary investment, generally pronounced enough to produce blatant propaganda , lies with empire. Accompanying the tours at a remove of five Order and Concert 51 centuries, we explore the writing of place rather than of action...