Hierarchy, Commerce, and Fraud in Bourbon Spanish America: A Postal Inspector's Expose

Notes

   311 Notes Introduction 1. Note that although the title page of the exposé gives the publication date as 1773, the actual date was 1775 (see Chapter 1). Note too that in previous monographs on Carrió, and in the manuals of Latin American literature, Carrió’s paternal surname is divided as follows: Carrió de la Vandera. I follow the spelling used by José Gómez-Tabanera (1984), who consulted the legal documents to which I refer subsequently. 2. I am greatly indebted to Bryan Palmer (1990) for his Descent into Discourse, a critique of cultural historians who ignore material reality, or history, in their discourse-analysis approach to social history. 3. Víctor Uribe-Urán’s study is representative of this tendency. For a brief history of the middle period model, see his “Introduction—Beating a Dead Horse?” (2001, xi–xxi). For a succinct counterpoint, see Bertrand 1999b, 315 and n. 78. More recently, Voss 2000 has greatly extended the middle period to include part of the twentieth century. 4. The textbook on hybridity in Carrió is Meléndez 1999. Her approach is rooted in Young 1995 and McClintock 1995. 5. Rather than argue that Carrió’s exposé has a “style and sensibility partially baroque” (O’Connor 1996, 342) or that it “entails basic coordinates of the literature of the Enlightenment ” (Mathieu 1994–1995, 42), I let the terms enlightened and baroque emerge where they may, without focusing on them to the exclusion of other periods. 6. All references to El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes follow Carilla’s 1973 edition unless otherwise indicated. 7. Peter Bakewell asks the right rhetorical question, “Eighteenth-Century Spanish America : Reformed or Deformed?” (2004, 271), but he is considerably more optimistic than Carrió and many of his contemporaries were. Assessments of the Bourbon reforms in New Spain tend to emphasize the economic gains of the second half of the eighteenth century, as in Vázquez 1992, Román Gutiérrez 1998, and Silva Riquer and López Martínez 1998. 8. The reluctance of Spanish American politicians to enfranchise, economically and culturally , peoples who did not identify themselves as the descendants of criollos—peoples who, in many instances, were on the front lines during the wars of independence —and the failure to distribute resources fairly even among peoples who did identify themselves as the descendants of criollos were commonly explained by the construction of Spanish rule and all its attendant circumstances as the Middle Ages (Edad Media) or childhood (infancia) of Spanish America. The development model at work there was European to the exclusion of Spain. See Vayssiere 1994, 204–5; Hill, “Inventing the Spanish-American Middle Ages,” in Sceptres (2000, 251–57). Elites coopted the indigenous and the African elements of Spanish American culture when these could be used as a wedge to differentiate themselves from “tyrannical” Spaniards (their ancestors). On this, see Pagden 1992. 9. Tamar Herzog’s finely crafted study of citizenship in the early modern Hispanic world was published in 2003 after I had completed this book. 10. After noting that “the most extensive period of imperial development was from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries,” James Muldoon claims that only Charles V was labeled an emperor. He goes on to note, however, that empire and emperor, while not used “in the legal and constitutional sense . . . , nevertheless . . . were employed in discussions of governance from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries” (1999, 114). In the middle ages, emperor “clearly meant rule over a wide expanse of territory, a wide variety of peoples, and, above all, rule over other monarchs” (141). As I show in this study, Spaniards born in New Spain or Peru commonly referred to those viceroyalties as empires (imperios), and books published in Spain, Italy, and Portugual commonly referred to one Spanish Bourbon monarch or another as emperor of the Indies (emperador de las Indias). What is today commonly called the Spanish empire was in the eighteenth century called Monarquía, meaning Spain and the lands outside of Spain that were under the control of the Spanish Crown. 11. I wholeheartedly embrace J. Jorge Klor de Alva’s (1992) objections to the use of colonial and postcolonial constructs developed from Anglo and French situations to analyze Spanish America. (On this question, see also Adorno 1993.) However, his objections concern the period from 1500 to 1750 or 1760, whereas I doubt that the modernity in which such constructs are imbricated can be found in Spanish America before 1830. 12. See Benita...