Vasco de Quiroga: Utopia y derecho en la conquista de America, and: La construccion de la utopia: El proyecto de Felipe II (1556-1598) para Hispanoamerica (review)

The two books under review reflect a resurgence of interest in the concept of "utopia" in the early modern Spanish empire. Serrano Gassent's Vasco de Quiroga is an intellectual study of the first bishop of Michoacan (1538-65), whose political thought was utopian in the strict sense: it was directly influenced by a reading of Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516), which Quiroga sought to put into effect in America. (The current book is a companion volume to Serrano's earlier edited collection of Quiroga's writings, La Utopía en América [1992].) Morales Folguera's La construcción de la utopía focuses on the later sixteenth century and addresses Philip II's goal of controlling social space throughout Spanish America—a more ambiguous utopia.

Quiroga's career, which Serrano describes in the introduction, is a fascinating case study in the first generation of imperial rule. A lawyer and royal bureaucrat, he went to New Spain as a member of the royal Audiencia less than a decade after the Spanish conquest. He was ordained a priest in order to become bishop of the frontier province of Michoacán, where the Tarascan Indians had governed a large and complex state independent of the Aztec empire. Refusing to live in a Spanish settlement, Quiroga began building an immense cathedral in the principal Tarascan city. He was a prototype of European priests who sought to protect Indians' alleged simplicity and innocence from European influence through their own paternalistic rule. Quiroga founded model Indian towns, called pueblos-hospitales, whose organization was based on More's Utopia. Believing that More had been inspired by Native American societies, Quiroga apparently saw himself as restoring the Tarascans' own lost heritage.

The first hundred pages of Vasco de Quiroga are a general survey of utopian and millenarian thought in Quiroga's world. Following a brief look at Christian and classical roots, Serrano examines such ideas in the lives and writings of Thomas More, Thomas Munzer, Christopher Columbus, Hernán Cortés, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Mexican Franciscans, and the later Jesuits of Paraguay. The last two hundred pages proceed topically through Quiroga's writings, examining, in turn, his ideas about native Americans as political subjects, about Indian communities and education, and about the legality of the Spanish conquest and continuing warfare in the New World. At each point, she shows how his ideas and the demands of his career interacted with one another and with the major debates of the time: struggles among Franciscans, officials, and Spanish settlers over control of the Indian population in Mexico, speculations on natural law by Spanish professors, and debates at the Spanish court over the human rights of Indians. (Quiroga was present for some of these debates.) The book is a well-constructed study, one that is systematic, lucid, built up from details but not bogged down in them. It provides a good intellectual portrait of an ecclesiastical jurist-statesman in colonial Spanish America, and of Renaissance political thought at work on the ground.

Morales Folguera's La construcción de la utopía does not focus on a particular political figure, but on a set of laws passed by Philip II in July of 1573. The first laid out a scheme for the uniform founding of new towns in America: straight streets laid out in a grid surrounding a plaza, church, and cabildo. The second law set out a plan...