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175 Conclusion Unfinished Projects, Recuperated Remains Forget the Alamo. John Sayles, Lone Star The relationship between the Spanish American Enlightenment, the Enlightenment more generally, and modernity as it has come to be understood today represents a genealogy that is often contested, when it is remembered or acknowledged at all. The closing line of John Sayles’s film Lone Star (1996)—a provocative and generous exploration of how families and communities tell their stories in a Texas border town—suggests that forgetting history can sometimes be a way of moving forward. And this may help to explain what happens to the eighteenth century in subsequent formulations of Spanish American cultural history: it is forgotten in order to open up a space for new cultural narratives. Carlos Alonso argues that a “narrative of novelty” with roots in the sixteenth century was replaced by a “narrative of futurity” that “created the conditions for a permanent exoticization of the New World—the sort that cannot be undermined or dissolved by actual experience or objective analysis.”1 But I would argue that experience and analysis are precisely where eighteenth-century authors ground themselves; they inhabit a discursive space that is no longer that of novelty but not yet that of futurity, an in-between that must later be actively forgotten. Thus, the domesticating turn that I have argued marks eighteenthcentury writing in Spanish America is erased (or, at the very least, subsumed) in nineteenth-century national foundational fictions. Are these eighteenth-century texts, as is commonly thought, too resistant to modernity to be considered relevant ? Or do they fall victim to the confusion of an earlier American spirit and an emerging national sentiment, as José Carlos Chiaramonte has suggested?2 Whatever the answer, it is essential that we rethink the traditional chronology that imposes a seamless continuity on the discontinuities between the colonial period and the formation of Latin American nation-states. We can only do this by remembering the eighteenth century. The authors I have studied here—Oviedo y Baños, Molina, Azara, Herrera, and Arrate—rewrite the central issues of the colonial period—conquest, Amerindians , nature, God, and gold—on eighteenth-century terms. All reflect a specifically eighteenth-century strain of empire that I have characterized as a project of enlightened domestication; all contribute in some way to the articulation 176 Domesticating Empire of a new Spanish American epistemology that prioritizes place, presence, and pragmatism, and brings with it new perspectives and new practices. Their project of domesticating empire is built on a foundation of discursive migrations and paradigm shifts that I have traced in each of these chapters. José de Oviedo y Baños’s move from conquest to settlement in Historia de la conquista y población de la provincia de Venezuela is reflected both in his title and in his evaluation of the enterprise of conquest itself. Individual conquistadors are portrayed as vain, foolhardy, or greedy, and Oviedo y Baños’s portrayal of Lope de Aguirre as the inevitable and disastrous end point of the Spanish fascination with conquest is embedded in the central chapters of the book as a sobering, cautionary tale. Conquest is replaced by the important task of settlement —that is, building and maintaining a viable colonial order—which falls to Oviedo y Baños and his contemporaries. Juan Ignacio Molina uses earlier accounts of the ferocious and liberty-loving Araucanians (most notably, Ercilla’s La Araucana) as a point of departure in order to write a domesticated version of Araucanian agency in which the language of diplomacy is substituted for the arts of war. Molina continues his Compendio de la historia civil del reyno de Chile up to a present moment in which treaty negotiations with Spanish viceregal authorities demonstrate a new deployment of the Aruacanian tradition of parlamentos and a new role for the Araucanians, one that has been prefigured by their portrayal in Molina’s history as eloquent and savvy orators. The Aragonese military engineer Félix de Azara, whose voluminous writings on the flora and fauna of the Río de la Plata provided Darwin with many firsthand observations on New World species, uses the failure of Bourbon Spain’s imperial commission to map a new boundary between Spanish and Portuguese territories in the Río de la Plata region, opening a space for a different kind of measuring and measured activity—that of the accidental naturalist. In the process , wonder as a response to natural phenomena is replaced by the imperative...

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