Baroque Sovereignty: Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and the Creole Archive of Colonial Mexico

3. Mexican Hieroglyphics: Creole Antiquarianism and the Politics of Empire

110 c h a p t e r 3 Mexican Hieroglyphics Creole Antiquarianism and the Politics of Empire Throughout the seventeenth-century Habsburg world, highly orchestrated urban spectacles provided one of the most public faces of political and ecclesiastical power. Combining parades, theater, music, and ephemeral visual art, including elaborate allegorical floats and firework displays, Baroque festivals broke the routine of daily life by providing mass entertainment in a carnivalesque atmosphere.1 In the urban centers in Spanish America, as in Madrid, public festivals commemorated religious and state celebrations throughout the year. The extent to which these spectacles dominated urban life is nothing less than astounding: it has been estimated that at the height of spectacle culture in Mexico there were ninety processions or celebrations of some kind a year.2 Printed accounts (relaciones) recounting the details of festivities held for religious and state celebrations such as Corpus Christi, autosda -fe, and the entrance of church and state officials give a clear picture of the organizational intent behind these events. Replete with tropes of excess intended to add grandeur to the celebration, the accounts also provide details about the ephemeral art, processions, and social circumstances of each festival. Central to many descriptions were the representations of the urban populace. Coordinated around confraternities defined by ethnic and pre-Columbian political divisions, the procession itself provided a visualization of the groups that made up urban society. Meanwhile, the crowds that thronged the streets added support to the idea that the city as a whole was unified around the motive at hand. But although the participation of confraternities in official festivities was enforced through penalties for no-shows,3 the highly encomiastic Mexican Hieroglyphics 111 nature of the relaciones has made it difficult to generalize from the descriptions about the actual effect of processions on popular culture. According to José Antonio Maravall’s well-known thesis, Baroque festivals in Spain created a state of awe (asombro) among spectators.4 In this passive state, he argued, the crowd was particularly susceptible to associations between festive artifice and divine power.5 Maravall concludes that the Spanish absolutist state used this visual staging to direct the passions of the crowd toward affective adherence to figures of power.6 Although it continues to dominate much of the scholarly literature on festivals, Maravall’s theory has been critiqued for assigning too much power and unity to the early modern Spanish state and too little agency to spectators.7 In the case of Spanish American festivities, the additional factor of the geographical distance between viceregal subjects and the Spanish Crown must be posited. Not only was the viceregal polity itself divided juridically and socially, but the presence of the Creole elite, who identified racially with peninsular subjects but was formally excluded from holding the higher viceregal offices, created an additional layer of mediation between the local populace and metropolitan governance. In this context, part of the task of the accounts was to distinguish among these different social categories while also giving the appearance of a unified polity homologous to its transatlantic counterpart. Nowhere was this complex political relationship addressed more publicly than in the entrance of church and state officials into viceregal cities. The viceregal entrance was a highly ritualized affair that drew from the Roman tradition of the triumph, in which the emperor crossed the threshold of the welcoming city. The Renaissance version of this ritual increasingly emphasized the symbolic unity of the early modern state through a web of visual signs and theatrical performances.8 In Spanish America, the ritual of the viceroy’s entrance into the city thus provided an ideal platform for the local elite to pay homage before the official representative of the Crown.9 As in European counterparts , some of the most impressive structures marking the entrance of the viceroy into Spanish American cities were triumphal arches. As opposed to the stone monuments of the Roman triumph, the early modern adaptations were ephemeral structures built of wood, carton, and paper and ornately painted with emblems, decorative motifs, and poetry. Placed at pivotal points along the viceroy’s route through the city, they were meant to symbolize the meaning accorded to the viceroy ’s entrance. City councils (cabildos), responsible for receiving the chapter 3 112 viceroys, bestowed the task of creating the arches on members of the Creole elite who were charged with finding adequate allegories to symbolize and honor arriving officials...