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Introduction 1. Primarily chap. 2 of La ciudad letrada (1984). References to Angel Rama throughout this book, unless otherwise indicated, refer to La ciudad letrada. Translations are mine because the English version published by Duke University Press in 1994, The Lettered City, takes considerable license. 2. As the introduction explains later, my book focuses on writings by creoles and radicados and principally enacts the Spectacular City in Mexico. Much as chapters 1 and 7, the bookends of the study, extend the Spectacular City beyond Mexico, it lies outside the scope of this (already lengthy) book to locate the Spectacular City fully within other viceregal territories. Hence, the qualification of my claim for its ability to generate a comparative intra-Hispanic literary history. 3. The Mexican scholar José Pascual Buxó, for example, questions the tendency to enthrone “the great Amerindian works as the only and true paradigm for our present culture” (4). J. H. Elliott calls for an ecumenical perspective: “What has happened . . . is that our contemporary discovery of the presumed ‘otherness’ of others has embraced the non-European world to the exclusion of the conquerors, colonists, and chroniclers of the sixteenth century; the observed have been accorded a privileged status that has been denied their observers , whose individual voices, reduced to an unattractive unison, are dismissed as ‘the hegemonic voices of the West.’ But in reality there are many voices, among the conquerors and the conquered alike. We may not like what some of those voices are saying, but, as historians, we have an obligation to give a hearing to each and every one” (“Final Reflections” 398). 4. Mazzotti’s introduction to Agencias criollas also provides helpful bibliography on the much-discussed overlap of creoles and mestizos. Israel, chap. 3, offers an influential treatment of mestizos, and Elizabeth Anne Kuznes a more recent one in “Ethnic and Gender Influences on ‘Spanish’ Creole Society in Colonial Spanish America,” Colonial Latin American Review 4.1 (1995): 153–176. 5. I refer to scholars (to name but a few) like Solange Alberro, Rolena NOT E S 298 The Spectacular City, Mexico, and Colonial Hispanic Literary Culture Adorno, Ralph Bauer, José Joaquín Blanco, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Leonardo García Pabón, Anthony Higgins, Bernard Lavallé, Yolanda MartínezSan Miguel, José Antonio Mazzotti, Mabel Moraña, Edmundo O’Gorman, Kathleen Ross, and Hernán Vidal. 6. As Blanco notes, other facets of creole life, like art, architecture, food, clothing, festivals, and language were even more mixed than their writings (Esplendores 17). 7. Kubler, for example, notes that in Peru “an entire generation elapsed before the campaign of systematic urbanization began under Viceroy Toledo” and that the “Christianization of the Quechua Indians was not achieved until the mid-seventeenth century.” Whereas the initial colonization of Peru “lacked a dominant urban policy,” in Mexico “urbanization was concomitant with initial colonization” (69). 8. Ross’s more recent work discerns the same intertextuality at work in sixteenth-century creole texts. For instance, her “Sigüenza y Góngora y Suárez de Peralta: Dos lecturas de Cortés” (Mayer 2:139–149) discusses the intersection of Juan Suárez de Peralta’s Tratado (1589) with the writings of Cortés, Sahagún, Las Casas, and Motolinía. According to Ross, what distinguishes Suárez’s work from that of later creoles who take recourse to the archive of the conquest is his privileging of oral sources and orality over written works. Orality, she says, represents “the creole voice of the author” (144). 9. As I detail in chapter 6, Catalá’s Para una lectura americana del barroco mexicano presents a notable, valuable exception to disregard of the creole Mexican Archive found in literary histories of Mexico. 10. In Peru, the Franciscan Buenaventura de Salinas y Córdova’s Memorial de las historias del Nuevo Mundo, Pirú (1630), a text that offers hyperbolic praise of Lima and the creoles, had a similarly catalytic effect on creole writing. My last chapter discusses the neglected Memorial (and its possible connections to Balbuena’s poem) at some length. Chapter 1 1. In Spanish, the lines from Los heraldos negros quoted in the first two paragraphs read as follows: “eje ultranervioso” (“Líneas,” page 68 of the Las Américas edition); “la doncella plenitud del 1,” “unidad excelsa . . . que es uno / por todos” (“Absoluta” 65); “lábrase la raza en mi palabra” (“Nostalgias imperiales” 41); “Mas ¿no puedes, Señor, . . . contra lo que acaba?” (“Absoluta” 65). The translations of the lines that...