Understanding the Transatlantic Hispanic Enlightenment

Two recent contributions to the renewed interest in the transatlantic Hispanic Enlightenment are David J. Weber’s Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of the Enlightenment and Andrew Laird’s The Epic of America: An Introduction to Rafael Landívar and the “Rusticatio Mexicana.” Both have great merit and are completely accessible to any non-Spanish-speaking scholar or student seeking a more inclusive conception of the Enlightenment. The first offers up a historical wealth of primary and secondary sources that help illuminate the successes, challenges, and contradictions of Spanish Bourbon era policies and methods for dealing with bárbaros (“savage” or wild Indians) in the Spanish-American “edges of empire.” The second offers English translations and a close reading of the georgic celebration of New Spain penned in Latin by the exiled Jesuit Rafael Landívar (“the American Virgil”). Both books steer a productive middle path within postcolonial approaches to eighteenth-century studies by addressing aesthetic and political repercussions.

Recent explorations of the transatlantic Hispanic Enlightenment have been recuperating both pre- and post-exile Jesuit contributions to the socially, politically, scientifically progressive Spanish and Spanish-American Catholic culture in the eighteenth century. Coexistent with the Bourbon reforms, Catholic intellectuals both religious (Jesuit) and laymen (Jesuit-educated) combined secular reason with spiritual passion. Before the Kings Charles III and IV’s age of Enlightenment (1759–1808) came to be regarded as anti-Spanish in the nineteenth century, when the prejudicial misperceptions that continue today about the very existence of a Hispanic Enlightenment took root, Spain and Spanish America benefited from eclectic philosophies that supported progress and reforms simultaneously intellectual and spiritual. While neither Weber nor Laird focuses exclusively on the Catholic nature of the Hispanic Enlightenment, both argue for reevaluating the Bourbon-era 1700s as central for studying Latin American colonialism, and both explore interactions between Catholic Spaniards, Creoles, and Amerindians. In the process, both address decolonization, alterity, and the subjugation of indigenous knowledge, languages, and cultures. In his introduction, Weber announces an ambitious plan to examine “a variety of people and places, from Araucanians in southern Chile to Tlingits in the Pacific Northwest, and from Chiriguanos on the western edge of the Gran Chaco to Comanches on North America’s southern plains” (13). If such a “panoramic view” promises an almost impossibly wide treatment of Spain’s final frontiers in North America, New Spain, and South America during the Age of Enlightenment, Weber proves cautious about making global statements that would simplify local distinctions between “savage” Indians (the bárbaros of the book’s title) and “civilized” Spaniards and Spanish Americans.

Well known for his contributions to borderland theory, throughout Bárbaros Weber continues to mine the borderlands for knowledge. ¹ Weber’s wide-ranging chapters may seem at times confusing, yet when read in order, their compelling narratives cement his argument. Weber cites both original and modern editions of colonial sources and moves from Enlightenment-era “discoveries” (chapter 1) about “wild Indians” (chapter 2), to Bourbon-era efforts to evangelize them (chapter 3), to make war or peace with them (chapter 4), and, to civilize them through enlightened trade and commerce, perhaps succeeding where evangelization and war do not (chapter 5). The final chapter (6) addresses reciprocal cultural border crossings and the diplomatic roles of Hispanic and Amerindian mediators. At first glance, this series of chapters reads like a chronological progression supporting a “capstone discourse” of an Enlightenment that culminated in the wars for independence (epilogue). In reality, however, Weber is discussing mostly simultaneous events, arranged by theme. The author concedes an at times incoherent narrative with a closing epigraph by Inga Clendinnen that warns against the dangerous temptations of metahistorical emplotment: “Making coherent stories out of the fragments we find lying about is a natural human inclination, and socially...