Notes
131 Notes Prologue 1. As Rosa Martínez notes, “Publishing in the early seventeenth century required a strenuous censorship process,and manuscripts that disseminated heretical and corrupt philosophies were burned or submitted to the Indexes of prohibited works.As for their creators, they, unfortunately, were persecuted.And so, the interrogation of the Historia manuscript lasted four months, and obviously as well as fortunately, the king approved its publication and America’s first epic poem was spared from the fires, and the poet from auto de fé.”“A Glimpse into the Production and Publication History of the Historia’s First Edition” (seminar paper, University of California, Berkeley, 2007), 1. 2. There are three censor approvals: Espinel’s quoted above; as well as that of fray Domingo de los Reyes, teacher of divinity and general custos of the Order of Santo Domingo (December 20, 1609), whose approval provides the clerical seal to those recorded a week earlier;and a certain Doctor Cetina,another censor who, it seems, represented the señores del consejo, members of the royal council. 3. LaAraucana was published in three parts,with part one published in 1569, part two in 1578,and part three in 1589.The entire poem then appeared in 1590. 4. Unless otherwise noted, translations are from Miguel Encinas, Alfred Rodríguez, and Joseph P. Sánchez, eds. and trans., Historia de la Nueva Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992). 5. The single best tracing of Villagrá’s literary allusions is M.Manuel MartínRodr íguez’s meticulously researched and elegantly argued essay,“‘Aquí fueTroia nobles caualleros’: Ecos de la tradición clásica y otros intertextos en la Historia de la Nueva Mexico, de Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá,” Silva: Estudios de Humanismo y Tradición Clásica 4 (2005): 139–208. 6. Encinas, Rodríguez, and Sánchez, Historia de la Nueva Mexico, 205. 7. Encinas, Rodríguez, and Sánchez, Historia de la Nueva Mexico, 257–58. 8. Part 1, 1569; part 2, 1578; part 3, 1589. 132 notes to pages 9–14 9. As Marc Simmons writes,“A dozen years before, Oñate had marched up this same trail gloriously optimistic and expansive . . . Now with a cartload of sobering experiences behind him, he was returning in a very different mood, not defeated perhaps, but certainly chastened, and also a good deal poorer for his efforts.After a brief stopover, we presume, at his home in Zacatecas, he reached Mexico City on April 30, 1610, just a few months short of the fifteen years from the date he had signed his New Mexico contract in the viceregal palace.” The Last Conquistador: Juan de Oñate and the Settling of the Far Southwest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 185. 10. “The plain truth was that the colony . . . was a shambles and so near to complete disintegration that he found himself compelled to condemn as a traitor anyone who spoke of giving up and returning to the southern provinces.That transformed him from a leader into an oppressor. . . . In a letter of denunciation addressed to the viceroy and smuggled out of New Mexico at great personal risk, [CaptainVelasco] declared that here,‘we are all depressed, cowed, and frightened, expecting death at any moment.’” Simmons, The Last Conquistador, 160. 11. Historia de la Nueva Mexico, ed. Luis González Obregón, 2 vols. (Mexico City: Imprenta del Museo Nacional, 1900); Historia de la Nueva Mexico, ed. Mercedes Junquera (Madrid: Historia 16, 1989); Historia de la Nueva Mexico, ed. Miguel Encinas, Alfred Rodríguez, and Joseph P. Sánchez (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992); Historia de la Nueva Mexico, ed. Felipe I. Echenique March (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Centro Regional de Baja California, 1993). Gilberto Espinosa offered an excellent prose translation as A History of New Mexico in 1933 (Los Angeles: Quivira Society). Chapter 1 1. See Gonzales’s lucid description of the controversy in “‘History Hits the Heart’:Albuquerque’s Great Cuartocentenario Controversy, 1997–2005,” in Expressing New Mexico:Nuevomexicano Creativity,Ritual,and Memory,ed.Phillip B. Gonzales, 207–32 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007). See also Kathy Freise’s excellent “Contesting Onate: Sculpting the Shape of Memory,” 233–54, in the same volume. 2. David Quint offers a different reading of Villagrá that ultimately, I believe, is overly formulaic.The Historia reproduces the epic topos of the curse the vanquished issued that Villagrá inherited from the Aeneid, the Pharsalia, and the Araucana; this...
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