The Daring Flight of My Pen: Cultural Politics and Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá's "Historia de la Nueva Mexico," 1610 (review)

The epic poem written by the Mexican creole Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá about the Spanish conquest (or rather massacre) of the Acoma pueblo people in January of 1599 has long been considered a foundational literary text of what once was the north of New Spain and today is the US American Southwest. Villagrá published his epic poem in 1610, ten years after he himself had participated in the violence he describes as a soldier in the army of Juan de Oñate. For that reason, his poem has been of interest for such historians of the Spanish borderlands as the late David Weber, as well as for such literary critics as David Quint and José Rabasa. However, whereas Quint had considered Historia de la Nueva México, in his book Epic and Empire (1993), to be a minor text in the history of the epic genre, marred by formal flaws, Rabasa had, in his book Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier (2000), seen it primarily as an obscurantist rationalization of colonial violence. In his own book, Genaro Padilla takes issue with both of these major recent critical statements. As a Chicano who grew up in New Mexico, Padilla takes a more personal approach to Villagrá's poem, self-consciously juxtaposing literary analyses and reflections on his youth as well as on the cultural and social history of his own family and ethnic group in relation to the events of 1599. While the reading is critical of Villagrá the soldier, its result is sympathetic to Villagrá the author—an author who, like his descendant Padilla himself, attempted to come to terms with the colonial violence perpetrated against the Acoma and other Native American peoples throughout the New World.

Padilla's short book consists of a prologue, an epilogue, and three chapters that follow the division of Villagrá's epic into three parts. The prologue offers the author's autobiographical account of reading Villagrá's poem in the Bancroft Library in order to explain his dual approach to the text that "situates it both in the cultural landscape of its genesis four hundred years ago and today" (10). Chapter 1, "Fables de la nueva México," reads Villagrá's subtle critique of Oñate in the Historia against twentieth-century celebrations of the Spanish conquerors by the guardians of a Hispanic cultural heritage in the Southwest who erected a statue of him in the sculpture garden of the Albuquerque Museum. Padilla argues that Villagrá, like Ercilla in his earlier epic poem La Araucana (1569), "found a way to confront his own murderous rage in the imaginative structure of verse, poetry making lucid and stark the violence he had committed" (22). For example, Padilla shows, Villagrá thoroughly Europeanizes Amerindians in his cultural descriptions. It is, however, unclear why Padilla believes that Villagrá would have derived the story of the Aztecs' mythic southward migration toward Mexico with which he begins his epic from firsthand oral sources, when the story had in fact circulated widely in print, most notably in José de Acosta's Historia natural y moral (1590), from which Villagrá could incidentally have also borrowed the thesis of the Asian origin of Native Americans.

Similarly, chapter 2, "La Colonia," focuses on Villagrá's account of the establishment of a camp at the present site of Española, New Mexico, in order to show that the poem "exposes the foundation of deceit and fracture within the Spanish camp that troubles any facile reading of the epic as panegyric" (46). This chapter also offers the author's family history in the area and its cultural memory of the conquest.

The third chapter, "Acoma: El Peñol Ensangrado," finally turns to the last cantos of Villagrá's poem, which deal with Oñate's assault on the rebellious Acomas' "Sky City...