Constructing the Criollo Archive

3. The Fragmentary Archive: The Catalogue of the Bibliotheca Mexicana

86 Chapter Three Chapter Three The Fragmentary Archive The Catalogue of the Bibliotheca Mexicana The Aprilis Dialogus and other prologues to the Bibliotheca Mexicana serve to ground the position of the criollo subject, and its knowledge. In both their formal organization and their thematics, they mobilize the contradictions that structure the thought of that subject. While they serve to posit the locus of its theoretical autonomy and organicity, they simultaneously demonstrate its investment in, and tension with, the semiotic matrices of indigenous, mestizo, and Spanish cultures. The catalogue itself constitutes an attempt to impose a totalizing order over such contradictions. Nevertheless, in its very logic and structure it tends to reproduce, and exacerbate, the very same contradictions in the body of knowledge it presents. The focus of the text now turns exclusively to the cultural and intellectual history of the regions comprising New Spain since the Conquest. While in the earlier, supplementary, parts of the work, a certain heterogeneity was maintained—particularly , in the separation of the discussions of indigenous and Hispanic cultural production into different prologues—there is now a concern to gather these conflicting elements together into a cohesive, organic whole. Organized in alphabetical order, the catalogue is an attempt to present information about all the most important educational institutions and individual missionaries , poets, and scholars in the history of the viceroyalty of New Spain.1 Taken as a whole, its main project is to depict the material and discursive workings of humanist and ecclesiastical culture, and the ordered, rational civilization they are held to have produced in the region over the course of more than two centuries. In the labor of synthesizing the often disparate aspects of this matrix, one can discern again the motion and mutations 87 The Fragmentary Archive of a subject moving between a series of contradictions and discontinuities in the face of which it seeks to establish an order, both in its corpus of knowledge and in its own position as gatherer and presenter of that knowledge.At the same time, the very unfinished state in which the catalogue was published serves to underline the incompleteness and flux that characterizes the structure and work of the criollo subject of knowledge. In keeping with the incomplete quality of the Bibliotheca Mexicana, I will not attempt an exhaustive analysis of the published parts of the catalogue—letters A through C—but will focus on certain lines of narrative that organize the project, and the problems they set in motion. The first recurrent feature of the Bibliotheca comprises the reconstructions of the histories of the viceroyalty’s institutions of higher education. As a result of the truncation of the project, only the University of Mexico is described in detail (Eguiara y Eguren, Bibliotheca 3: 1–11). The second principal component is composed of the descriptions of the lives and literary and scholarly works of individuals who have made significant contributions to the history of the viceroyalty. These individuals can, in turn, be grouped in a series of fields that have importance for the cultural history of the Conquest and post-Conquest. The first group is made up of explorers, such as Columbus, and the principal agents in the conquest of native peoples and foundation of Mexico City, most notably Cortés. A second criterion for the inclusion of certain individuals pertains to their achievements in a variety of areas of scholarship, most particularly theology, law, philosophy, the natural sciences, classical languages and literatures, and various native languages of the regions of the viceroyalty. The third rationale for inclusion stems from the production of eloquent works in Latin or Spanish, primarily poems and sermons, by canonized writers such as Bernardo de Balbuena. The fourth main group that merits inclusion in the Bibliotheca is composed of missionaries, of various orders, who played significant roles in the conversion of different native peoples to Catholicism, particularly in the most remote and inhospitable regions on the northernmost fringes of the viceroyalty, or on islands such as the Philippines. Although each of these groups is more or less conceptually discrete , the entries devoted to many of the individuals described 88 Chapter Three are not confined to a single category. Most particularly, in the entries that deal predominantly with the third and fourth areas of endeavor, there are frequently overlaps, with the information presented under the purview of descriptions of great labors and works in the...