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At the heart of the heart of present-day Mexico City, near the center of its Zócalo, stand the remains of the Aztec Templo Mayor, excavated in the late 1980s. The Templo Mayor breaks the vast sweep of the second largest city plaza in the world and claims a powerful place for Aztec culture in the value system of contemporary Mexico. Viewing the Zócalo as a living cultural text, compare, if you will, the presentday plaza with Cristóbal de Villalpando’s pictorial rendition of it from 1695. In Villalpando’s spectacular masterpiece, on the very ground under which the Templo Mayor still lay buried, not one but two market installations monopolize the Zócalo. One bounded by walls, the other an array of stalls, both are symmetrical and glisten with goldtones. The enclosed marketplace, the new Parián for which Viceroy Galve (who commissioned the painting) wished to be remembered, bears on its golden entry arch the words, “Plaza mayor de México.” If the marketplace metonymizes the city’s main plaza and the plaza to some degree metonymizes colonial Mexico, then it becomes inescapably present to the viewer that the mercantilism for which Balbuena’s poem served as a passionate advocate had become a commanding force in seventeenthcentury New Spain. So much so, in fact, that as the twelve hundred miniature figures of the painting converge on the marketplace from all walks of life, they appear as mere cogs in the mercantile machine, magnetically drawn to it. Curiously enough, while Mexican creoles launched Balbuena’s Spectacular City into activism, they themselves played a quite vexed role both in the earliest activity of the omnivorous mercantile machine on Mexico City and in its early textual embodiment, “La grandeza mexicana .” Chapter Four probes this fraught situation. It reframes Balbuena’s poem, wresting it from the imperial project and situating it in the orbit of the creole program. In its new frame the resounding defense of Four BA L BU E NA’ S SPEC TAC U L A R CI T Y A N D T H E C R EOL E C AU S E Balbuena’s Spectacular City 129 mercantilism that allied “Grandeza” with the appetites of the empire proves to signal the text’s principal disjunction from the cause of the seignorial creoles. Yet a kind of poetic justice quickly prevails. Creole or creole-allied writers almost instantly recognize the splendid availability of Balbuena’s work for their purposes and extort from it an unexpected afterlife. In other words and crucially, the Spectacular City, whose three elements Grandeza fully incarnates for the first time, immediately demonstrates its volatility and “great” potential for the colonial subject who would exploit it in ever-different ways over the course of the entire seventeenth century. This chapter, a gateway to the full-blown work of the New World Baroque, will therefore afford a first glimpse of the implosive , political potency of the Spectacular City as it seduces satirical, programmatic, and festival writings alike. In something of a coda to the preceding chapter we will here enter the early wake of “Grandeza.” To lay out the tangled, deliciously ironic story of “Grandeza”’s surging aura, what follows tracks the poem’s relationship to the creole platform, the productive instability of “Grandeza ”’s hyperbolic esthetic, and the specific appropriations of the text by the creole colonial subjects to whom, on the face of it, Balbuena’s grand poem does no great service. Each of these arenas holds exceptional importance for the creoles and for Spectacular Cities to come. I. Creoles, Merchants, and “La grandeza mexicana” The creoles of colonial Mexico’s second life-project increasingly resented the crown’s forceful efforts to divest them of the encomiendas they considered to be both their birthright and the bedrock of their pretensions to aristocracy. This group, its livelihood and status based on agriculture, had a particular quarrel with merchants. As a center of international trade, Mexico had given rise to a wealthy merchant class that flaunted its affluence and, on the strength of that affluence, claimed membership in the aristocracy. In an ardent entreaty from 1599 that the crown retract the “two lives” encomienda policy and other practices that disenfranchise his brethren, the conqueror’s son Gonzalo Gómez de Cervantes writes, “it is clear that wealth lies in the power of merchants and traders, not in the hands of leading and noble citizens” (126), a state of affairs that leaves those worthy scions...

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