Poetry in Motion: A Mexican Vicereine’s Verse Travel Diary (1757)

POETRY IN MOTION: AMEXICAN VICEREINE’S VERSE TRAVELDIARY (1757) Frederick Luciani ColgateUniversity O n August 4, 1755, the soon to be forty-second viceroy of New Spain, Agustín de Ahumada y Villalón, Marqués de las Amarillas, set sail from Cádiz on the transatlantic voyage that would take him to the New World to assume his post.1 Travelling with him was his wife doña María Luisa del Rosario de Ahumada y Vera, their young son, and a retinue of some sixty-six persons.2 They were conveyed by the Spanish ship América, escorted by the Dragón and the Infante, in a journey lasting 56 days. The party landed safely in Veracruz at the end of September and, after two weeks of rest and an elaborate welcome in that port city, began the laborious journey westward (and upward) to the viceregal capital, Mexico City. Their five-week overland journey followed the same ceremonial itinerary that had been traced by entering viceroys since the sixteenth century. It included stops, each with days of festivities, in the symbolically significant cities of Tlaxcala and Puebla. In Otumba, outside the capital, incoming and outgoing viceroy met. After the obligatory visit to Guadalupe and the shrine of Mexico’s patroness, the viceroy entered Mexico City, where he and his wife were treated to weeks more of sumptuous festivities. Among the events were the ceremonies surrounding the two triumphal arches erected in the city, whose elaborate iconographic programs compared the Marqués to Aeneas and other classical heroes, in effusions of praise that included, as was customary, recommendations in the art of good government. The story of this journey by sea and land is told in a lengthy poem3 composed by the Mexican Creole Antonio Joaquín de Rivadeneyra Barrientos, and published in Mexico City two years later (1757) with the title Diario notable de la excelentíssima señora marquesa de las Amarillas,virreynadeMéxico,desdeelpuertodeCádizhastalareferidaCorte…4 CALÍOPE Vol.16, No. 1, 2010: pages 179-196 Frederick Luciani 180 As the title indicates, the poem pretends to be a diary written by the vicereine herself, in the form of a letter in verse addressed to an unnamed female friend.5 The Diario notable represents an unusual amalgam of genres: on the one hand, it has much in common with the numerous relaciones of viceregal entries that Creole authors composed in the colonial centuries. As they paid elaborate homage to the newly arrived Peninsular dignitaries, these relaciones articulated their Creole authors’ concerns, prerogatives and aspirations through an elaborate Baroque poetics. On the other hand, the Diario notable seems to assume the exterior form of the varieties of intimate, first-person travel diaries and letters that flourished in the eighteenth century—genres grounded in the personal experience, powers of observation, and curiosity of the traveling subject. The Diario notable, then, seems to be characterized by a series of shifts, which this essay will explore in greater detail: from Baroque to Enlightenment sensibilities, from the third-person relación to the first-person letter or travel journal, from prose to poetry, and from Creole to Peninsular (and back to Creole) subjectivity. A Creole Ghostwriter Antonio Joaquín de Rivadeneyra Barrientos (ca. 1710-?) was born in Puebla de los Ángeles of aristocratic parentage. He graduated from the colegio mayor of Santa María de Todos Santos of the University of Mexico in 1731, and served as an abogado for the Mexican Audiencia and the Inquisition. His ambitions brought him to Spain where he earned the favor of Fernando VI and the king’s powerful foreign minister José de Carvajal y Lancaster. The Spanish monarch promoted Rivadeneyra to fiscal for the Audiencia of Mexico, and in that new capacity he returned to Mexico as part of the retinue of the Marqués de las Amarillas. He would eventually be appointed oidor of the Audiencia. His major published works, in addition to the Diario notable, were the long didactic poem El pasatiempo (1752), dedicated to Carvajal y Lancaster and written for the edification of the latter’s nephew, a poem which recounts—no less—“the most notable sacred and profane events from...