In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The way in which El Inca depicts the Spaniards and their misadventures in North America provides the reader with a view into the mestizo author’s European perspective. As he states in his prologue, one purpose in writing La Florida is to record the hazañas (heroic acts) of de Soto and his soldier-explorers and to recount the hardships they suffered for the honor and fame of the Spanish nation. El Inca’s purpose is not only to extol the virtues of Spain and its conquering heroes. He is attempting to create a model of behavior to which his countrymen can aspire, thereby creating a new, more humane colonization experience . El Inca’s approach to his treatment of his Spanish characters is not subtle. He comments continuously on the vices and virtues (primarily virtues) of the soldiers of what is at the time the most powerful military in western Europe as they set out to win fame and fortune (primarily fortune) and subjugate new peoples and territories for God and patria (homeland). El Inca extols the courage of de Soto’s men as freely and with as much pride as he extols the positive characteristics of the Native Americans. El Inca’s mestizaje (mestizo status) is evident when he proclaims, commenting upon the battle of Mauvilla, in which de Soto’s forces defeated the forces of the duplicitous Tascaluza, that they called upon God to give them courage in this desperate situation, following the example of their conquering ancestors (348). It is the “ánimo invincible” (407) (“invincible spirit”; 348) that El Inca seeks to emphasize in La Florida, ennobling the images of the Spanish soldiers and, indirectly, ennobling himself in public perception. El Inca is as acutely aware of his aristocratic Spanish heritage as he is of his aristocratic Amerindian heritage. Not only is he the hidalgo Captain Sebastian Garcilaso’s son, but he is the celebrated Andalucian ¤ghter Captain Alonso de Vargas’s nephew also. These relationships create within El Inca a keen aware4 La Florida’s Ideal Conquerors ness of his “noble” status within Spanish society. He knows that he has kin, however distant, who have excelled in both arms and letters. His soldier-poet namesake and distant cousin is the most outstanding example. Although he states repeatedly in La Florida that his status as an “Indian” makes him supremely quali¤ed to comment upon Native American society, he is con¤dent that his familiarity with things Spanish makes him equally quali-¤ed to comment upon the exploits of de Soto and his soldiers. Without diminishing the importance of his royal Native American ancestry, he brings to his writing a great sense of Spanish patria (patriotism); he emphasizes for the reader the glory of the Spanish Empire, however subjective this glory may be. Although a sense of Native American resentment toward the superimposed hispanicism of the New World is at times perceptible, El Inca’s medieval Spanish and classical in®uences lead him to exalt the heroic acts of the Spanish explorers . This is a characteristic that will be seen again in El Inca’s Historia general del Perú. The pre-Renaissance chivalric romances that entertained the young Garcilaso and suggested thoughts and attitudes that became prevalent in society in sixteenth-century Spain prompted El Inca to emphasize Spanish actions and abilities with arms with the same vehemence with which he encouraged Spanish settlements and European agriculture in Florida. The chivalric romantic medieval mentality af®icted Spanish society much longer than other European countries, and its eventual application to Spanish colonial life contributed to the gross mismanagement of the Spanish colonies. In comparison, other European countries that excluded the medieval mentality in their approach to their colonies escaped the consequential outcomes that Spain experienced. The encomienda system was nothing more than a New World version of the feudal system of medieval Europe (Leonard, Brave, 6). The Spanish aristocrats’ disdain for honest work ensured the social and economic decline of the colonies that followed the conquest: In the form of encomiendas, he (the conquistador) derived the bene¤ts of the toil of the conquered as a legitimate reward for bringing them into the Christian fold; his position as a feudal lord was a mark of divine gratitude for his military prowess while the manual labor of his serfs was proper punishment for their allegiance to a false faith. Toward the Jews, forced into the role of money changers and middlemen by the circumstances of their existence, the Spanish...

Share