The Latino Body by LÁZARO LIMA

Author:LÁZARO LIMA
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 2007-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

In the “Service of Your Majesty”: Castaways and the Amerindian Body in the Colonial Imaginary of Villagrá

Cabeza de Vaca’s knowledge of the Amerindian peoples’ “customs and stratagems” during his travails through New Mexico, offered to the king, was in fact valuable in the conquest and colonization of the American Southwest and the literature that charts this process. His text inspired the legend of “the seven cities of Cibola” and served as the historical basis for Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá’s 1610 Historia de la Nueva México (History of New Mexico), which chronicles the conquest of New Mexico by Juan de Oñate (c. 1550–1625). Oñate’s exploits began approximately fifty-six years after the first publication of Castaways and were hyperbolically celebrated by Villagrá, his procurador general and an eyewitness to the expedition.

Villagrá’s History of New Mexico, dedicated to King Philip III,35 is one of the earliest epic poems written in New Spain and “may claim the distinction of being the first published history of any American commonwealth.”36 The text covers the actual establishment of New Mexico by Juan de Oñate from 1598 to 1601, and chronicles the Oñate expedition’s incursions through the New Mexican landscape and the attendant clashes with the Amerindians, specifically the Acoma tribe.37 From the prologue, Villagrá establishes the need to secure the practices of empire through writing, since “[n]o greater misfortune could possibly befall a people than to lack a historian properly to set down their annals” (Espinosa, 35). Writing will entail for Villagrá the preservation of Spanish “cultural memory” as antidote to cultural oblivion, “for history not only brings before us those who are absent, but it resurrects and breathes life itself into those long dead. … I take my pen, the first to set down these annals, more in response to that sense of duty I feel than in confidence in my ability” (ibid.).

Villagrá’s History of New Mexico has been accorded the status of a historical document with the truth claims the designation carries: “it is a literary recreation that not only holds strictly to the historical events and their chronology, but introduces a very bare minimum of fictional material” (Encinias et al., introduction, xx). The assertion, aside from literalizing Villagrá’s stated intentions, obviates a series of facts that ignore the historical conditions around the text and the text’s supporting suppositions about the Amerindian and Spanish characters that infuse the poem with historical meaning. Texts like Cabeza de Vaca’s Castaways are accorded a truth-bearing quality that is purportedly distinguishable from those rare moments where “fictional material” is said to be inserted. Indeed, in the editors’ introduction to Villagrá’s History of New Mexico, Encinias, Rodríguez, and Sánchez state that “[i]f one discounts the almost necessary fictionalization of the Acoma world, to which the narrator had little access, Historia de la Nueva México interpolates no fictional passages” (xx).

If this is the case, then Villagrá relates a truncated world indeed. Relegating the Acoma to the status of fictional, while purporting to tell the “real” events lived by the Spanish, makes

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