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Introduction
- Vanderbilt University Press
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Introduction Overview E l lazarillo de ciegos caminantes (Guide for Blind Rovers or Guide for Blind Traders) (1775), published under pseudonym, is the best-known work of the Spanish American eighteenth century. Its author, Alonso Carrió de Lavandera (1715–1783), was a Spaniard who spent nearly fifty years in the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru, trading, serving the Crown in a variety of capacities, and building a family and lifelong friendships.1 In 1767 the Crown commissioned Carrió de Lavandera to escort the exiled Jesuits out of Peru. A few years later, between 1771 and 1773, he was commissioned to conduct a review and personal inspection of the postal system in the Viceroyalty of Peru. This was the motivation for El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes. The relationship between Concolorcorvo (the alleged Inca scribe to whom Carrió attributed his exposé) and Calixto Bustamante (the man who accompanied Carrió on part of his inspection) and the historical relationship between Bustamante and Carrió are issues that I explore later. Here I wish to point out that Carrió, like the inspector of the posts with whom Concolorcorvo dialogues in the account, possessed more than a passing interest in law and economics, and his writings and experiences confirm that he was versed in not only imaginative literature but also philosophy, geography, and history. His experience with a variety of peoples and places compels us to remember that he was directing much of the information in his account to business travelers and that he was speaking to them in a manner designed to make their load seem lighter and their trip shorter. The image of Carrió as bluff and hearty inspector of the posts is largely one of his own account’s making, but much of what the Spaniard wrote in jest about Bourbon Spanish America was no laughing matter. In the jocose anecdote that closes El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes, the riddle of the 4Ps from Lima (which appears over and over in Carrió’s narration) is posed to Spanish residents of Lima by a Spanish resident of Guatemala and then solved in two different ways at the archbishop of Guatemala’s palace in 1746. It was around 1990 that I began to ask myself, “Why Santiago de Guatemala? It was not even part of Carrió’s inspection route. And why 1746, nearly twenty-five years before his inspection of the posts?” Little attention had been paid to the setting of this mock trial, or to its participants, but I became convinced that asking some obvi- Hierarchy, Commerce, and Fraud in Bourbon Spanish America ous questions would answer many mysteries about Carrió that remained even after the publication of so many critical studies. I did not realize then that answering my own questions would take more than a decade or that the answers would also speak to key issues in the fields of Hispanic, colonial, and imperial studies. The riddle and its solutions together undercut current theoretical notions about colonial identity in general, but there is far more to it than that. My research into the riddle and its solutions prompted me to confront a discursive reality particular to viceregal Spanish America that is not supported by history, or what I loosely call here material reality: the rivalry between criollos (Spaniards born in the New World) and peninsulars (Spaniards born in the Old World).2 The riddle of the 4Ps from Lima laughingly conveys the existence of reform-resistant, mixed (i.e., criollo and peninsular) oligarchical clans (or roscas) who understood hierarchy, commerce, and fraud only too well. This fact in turn holds important implications for Latin Americanists who employ the middle period model. The middle period is a category devised some two decades ago to replace the colonial, late colonial, and independence periods by setting the second half of the eighteenth century against the first.3 It assumes that Bourbon reforms in the second half of the eighteenth century set Spanish America on a course that it would traverse during the nineteenth century. Carrió’s witty anecdote suggests otherwise. It further suggests that scholars have sold Carrió and his century short by approaching El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes as a baroque echo that was deaf to the material reality and discursive options of eighteenth-century Spanish America, which were no less contradictory and polyphonic than those of seventeenth-century Spanish America and were probably more cosmopolitan than those of eighteenth-century France or England. In sum, the mock trial that supposedly took place...