Constructing the Criollo Archive

1. Framing the Criollo Archive

23 Framing the Criollo Archive Chapter One Framing the Criollo Archive Knowledge and Legitimization: Juan José de Eguiara y Eguren and the Bibliotheca Mexicana The Bibliotheca Mexicana is the first attempt to organize systematically a heterogeneous range of authors and texts into the form of a Mexican intellectual tradition. It is both product and agent of the process through which a sense of shared identity and interests comes to be envisaged in New Spain. Written in Latin, it was compiled under the directorship of a cleric and high-ranking educator at the Real y Pontificia Universidad de México, Juan José de Eguiara y Eguren. Organized alphabetically ,1 the work was primarily intended to be a comprehensive biobibliography, detailing the individuals, texts, and institutions of importance within the history of the region, from the period of conquest to the moment when publication began in 1755. It is supplemented by a series of prologues, written by Eguiara y Eguren, which offer an archaeology of pre-Hispanic Mexican indigenous cultures. However, the death of Eguiara y Eguren in 1763 brought the project to an abrupt end, with only the sections comprising the entries under A through C completed.2 It is significant that this project of producing a totalizing, encyclopedic catalogue of Mexican literary and cultural production in the pre-Hispanic and colonial periods was never finished. In this sense, the Bibliotheca Mexicana stands as a cipher for criollo subjectivity and authority in an era of widening schisms within the colonial order. Within such a context, I perceive in the text an attempt to found an autonomous criollo subjectposition , one in which criollo subjectivity alternately coalesces and disperses in heterogeneous fashion. This criollo subjectposition is hypothesized as guarantor of, and as being predicated 24 Chapter One upon, a corpus of knowledge in which a dominant Spanish cultural regime is opened up to a supplementary semiosis comprising criollo and indigenous elements. The horizon of the collection of texts that constitutes the Bibliotheca Mexicana is the constitution of a body of knowledge and the subject who would appear to organize and support it. The work is a response to the European prejudice that there could be no criollo knowledge nor, by extension, subject, and the coetaneous tendency to representAmerica as a space of pure nature, a gap standing in an irreducible opposition to Europe, conceived as the locus of culture. Faced with such a framework, the criollo must open up the frontiers of the colonial discursive regime in order to articulate knowledge not only of its main Spanish sources of authority but also of that which lies beyond its threshold: the literary and scholarly production ofAmericanborn individuals and the peoples they represent. In the labor of the collation of these types of texts, I discern the movements of a criollo subject in gestation, coalescing and cohering as it catalogues the scholarly achievements ofAmericanborn Hispanics but at the same time has to distend and open itself up in the act of eulogizing native American artifice, and absorb it into a unified edifice of Mexican culture and identity. At the site of this very tension, and in the contradictions that the movement between different symbolic fields produces, I will locate and describe the coordinates and mutations of the criollo subject in the struggle for authority and power. The Bibliotheca Mexicana came into existence as a response to a particularly denigrating account of Americans’ physical and intellectual capabilities written by Manuel Martí, a Spanish cleric, which was first circulated in published form in 1735.3 In response to a request sent to him by a young Spanish student seeking advice regarding his plans to travel to America in order to further his education, Martí had written a letter in which he portrayed the New World as a cultural wasteland. His principal observations were that its inhabitants were by nature illdisposed toward learning and that the region did not possess educational institutions capable of offering those inhabitants a level of education commensurate with European norms. Martí’s provocative text is, however, but one among many disparaging representations of America’s nature and its inhabi- 25 Framing the Criollo Archive tants produced by a variety of Europeans over the course of the preceding two and a half centuries. It is important, therefore , for modern readers to situate the Bibliotheca within the context of these polemics4 and resist the temptation to see it...