Baroque Sovereignty: Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and the Creole Archive of Colonial Mexico by Anna More (review)

In Baroque Sovereignty, Anna More traces the formation of a new “creole political imaginary” in seventeenth-century New Spain as a reaction to contradictions within Spanish imperialism. Scholars have previously considered the creole in terms of conflicted or hybrid colonial identities, expressed in the labyrinthine literary forms of the Spanish American Baroque. More revises this scholarship to argue that seventeenth-century creole political discourse was both logical and instrumental in its application of baroque rhetoric, and should be assessed in its historical context independent from nineteenth century creole claims of autonomous sovereignty. Through the varied works of a native of Mexico City, Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora (1645–1700), More dissects the baroque rhetorical forms that defined the creole in terms of an archive and a patria, and were central to a seventeenth-century Novo-Hispanic “invention of tradition.” According to More, the application of baroque rhetorical forms arose out of a conceptual and ideological “need” to maintain social order during a breakdown of providential, religious justifications for the violence of Spanish conquest. The fiction of voluntary submission to the Spanish monarchy was confounded by continuing resistance to evangelization, population mixtures that defied the legal categories of español and indio, and the infiltration of indigenous cultural and religious practices into Hispanicized communities. Conquest therefore represented a major “historical disruption” for claiming legitimate sovereignty. Providing evidence for awareness of such a discursive crisis at a social level (a rising racial discourse, financial crisis, and absence of the king’s body in New Spain), More proposes that recourse to baroque aesthetic and rhetoric could overcome this particular conceptual bind at an individual level (chap. 1). Drawing on the aesthetic theory of Walter Benjamin, More explains how baroque allegory re-established transcendent ideals of authority through the artifice of an archive. The spatial re-ordering of historical artifacts in an archive, transforming profane or popular objects in a type of secular redemption, could bypass religious justifications for the Spanish monarchy. Such “allegorical hermeneutics” in response to the historical disruption of conquest created a new “creole archive.”

A seventeenth-century turn to archival politics did not serve as a radical break with authority, but an attempt to maintain existing social order. Nevertheless, objects of post-contact colonization, re-ordered as the “ruins” of a pure indigenous past, invested those able to “read” these ruins allegorically for their hidden, historical truth, with patrimonial claims to “local authority.” In support of this point, More analyzes Sigüenza’s interest in the collection of texts testifying to St. Thomas the Apostle’s evangelization of the Americas and the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe (chap. 2). Sigüenza and other authors (Manuel Duarte, Miguel Sanchez among others) championed the authenticity of artifacts of Mesoamerican antiquity, oral traditions and indio testimonies in order to then authoritatively explicate their hermetic sympathies with Christianity. Because most of the objects in question were produced post-conquest, they required allegorical re-positioning in order to represent these truths of a pure indigenous past.

The impulse to collect artifacts and interpret the hidden meaning of an indigenous antiquity, thus, served in the ideological project of a social elite to appropriate indigenous history in print. The creole archive existed primarily at a discursive level, More notes, as a process of inscription and interpretation rather than as an institutional reality. Such allegorisis invested patrimonial authority in the one able to interpret the hermetic nature of this archive. More demonstrates this personal claim by Sigüenza in a close reading of his viceregal entry arch (chap. 3). Explaining the Mexica glyph for the reviled god of war Huitzilopochtli, Sigüenza incorporated Nauhatl word play and oral traditions of the Mexica migration story into his emblematic reading of the god’s glyph. Creating an extended allegory of a wandering people returning to their homeland, Sigüenza represented the viceroy’s arrival as the...