Fray Angélico Chávez: Poet, Priest, and Artist

3: La Conquistadora as History and Fictitious Autobiography

37 chapter three LA CONQUISTADORA AS HISTORY AND FICTITIOUS AUTOBIOGRAPHY p luis leal University of California, Santa Barbara Fray Angélico Chávez’s earliest interest as a writer was poetry. However, in the 1940s he began to publish history and historical fiction. In his documented study ‘‘La Conquistadora Is a Paisana,’’ he wrote, ‘‘Three years ago, led by an irresistible fascination, I began to piece together a few known facts about La Conquistadora in an e√ort to separate fact from fiction.’’∞ Twenty years later (1970) he stated that he ‘‘took up history because it’s there and makes my writing readable. There was a drama to the colonial life, and I have found its records.’’≤ His first historical monograph, ‘‘Nuestra Señora del Rosario, La Conquistadora,’’ appeared in 1948 in the New Mexico Historical Review, and that same year it was revised and reprinted in book form by the Historical Society of New Mexico as Our Lady of the Conquest.≥ Six years later, under the title La Conquistadora: The Autobiography of an Ancient Statue, he transformed that documented history into a fictionalized autobiography of this most famous New Mexican statue of the Virgin Mary. In that book, instead of the author as a historian writing a biography, he lets the statue itself relate its life and adventures as if she were a real person. Here, Chávez’s focus has changed. Instead of separating fact from fiction, which was his original aim when he took up history, he reverses the process and combines both discourses to produce a very original fictitious autobiography. That La Conquistadora is the same statue brought to New Mexico by Fray Alonso de Benavides in 1625 is the thesis of Fray Angélico’s 1948 monograph. Two years later he said, ‘‘I discovered seventeenth-century documents about La Conquistadora which supported the conclusions I had previously drawn.’’∂ During Fray Alonso’s time the statue represented the Virgin of the Assump- 38 Historical Recovery tion, as stated by the author in his Memorial of 1630; it was much later that she became La Conquistadora. In Chávez’s book of 1954, the statue says, ‘‘I have been in this country [the United States] for more than three hundred and twenty-five years.’’∑ In the chapter ‘‘Apaches, vaqueros del ganado de Síbola’’ of the Memorial, Benavides says, ‘‘y habiendo sus Capitanes mayores oído decir que los españoles en la villa de Santa Fe tenían a la Madre de Dios, que era una imagen de bulto del Tránsito de la Virgen nuestra Señora que yo allí había llevado y estaba bien adornada en una capilla, vinieron a verla y le quedaron muy aficionados y le prometieron ser cristianos’’ (. . . and their principal captains having heard that the Spaniards in the village of Santa Fe had the Mother of God, which was a statue of Our Lady the Virgin of the Assumption, which I had brought there and was very well dressed, in a niche, they came to see her and remained very devoted and promised to become Christians).∏ The statue says she has been in New Mexico for 325 years. This number is apparently derived from Fray Alonso’s Memorial of 1630, in which he states, ‘‘Y el año pasado de 29 fue Dios servido que los redujésemos de paz’’)(And last year, [16]29, God was served, for we were able to make peace with them [the Pueblo Indians]).π If 1629 is subtracted from 1954, the year the autobiography of the statue was published, the result is 325 years. Fray Angélico’s sources for the writing of his fictionalized autobiography, as listed in the book’s ‘‘Bibliography and Historical Comment,’’ are historical in nature.∫ And although all the historical references mentioned by the statue can be documented, the book is often classified as fiction. Alejandro Morales, in his doctoral dissertation, speaks of La Conquistadora as a novel.Ω This is true only in the context of the picaresque novel, which is essentially a fictitious autobiography narrated by the protagonist, a pícaro. There are novels in which the narrator is a pícara, as in Francisco López Ubeda’s La pícara Justina (1605), Alonso Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo’s La hija de Celestina (1612), and Alonso de Castillo Solórzano’s La niña de los embustes, Teresa de Manzanares (1632). In Mexico, José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi published La Quijotita...