La Guerra de Los Moriscos and Ginés Pérez de Hita’s (Ab)use of the Ballad

This article studies the text, form, and placement of ballads in Pérez de Hita’s La guerra de los moriscos: Segunda parte de las guerras civiles de Granada. It argues that the ballads’ limitations reflect the difficulties of Pérez de Hita’s task: the writing of a contemporary history that reveals the emergence of more complicated subjectivities in post-expulsion Spain. Many recognize that the crowning achievement of Pérez de Hita’s Historia de los bandos de los Zegríes y Abencerrajes lies in the author’s masterful use of Spain’s Moorish ballads, employed to add color, dramatic Bair, and, most important, as the actual source material for Pérez de Hita’s narrative. The ballads in his less familiar sequel, La guerra de los moriscos, however, do not show the same artistic innovation. In this article, I argue that an excavation of the symbolic uses (and abuses) of the ballad in La guerra de los moriscos raises fundamental questions about connections between genre, history, and narrative.