Defying the Inquisition in Colonial New Mexico

In 1732 the Franciscan ministers of the Villa Nueva de Santa Cruz del Reino de la Nueva Mexico felt compelled to initiate legal action against a local scribe (escribano), Miguel de Quintana, after getting acquainted with his personal writings. In the friars’ view, Quin-tana’s ideas might amount to transgressions against Catholic Church principles. Quin-tana was denounced to the Inquisition’s New Mexican representative, a fellow Francis-can, who forwarded the file to the Santo Oficio authorities in Mexico City.As the case proceeded, the poetry and prose writings of Quintana came to light. Francisco Lomelí and Clark Colahan have recovered Quintana’s case from archival research in Mexico City and New Mexico, providing the reader with a unique opportunity to look at the religious horizons of a secular man in northern New Mexico. After being notified by the zealous Franciscans, the authorities in charge of protecting the Catholic faith in New Spain found enough evidence to prosecute Quintana with the charge of writing “proposiciones temerarias y escandalosas [scandalous and imprudent assertions],” a certainly minor offense, which nevertheless generated enough information to look inside the life and times of this New Mexican writer.Lomelí and Colahan present a fully bilingual edition of the writings of Quintana, along with the full transcript of his interactions with the Holy Inquisition Tribunal representatives in New Mexico and Mexico City. While the case against Quintana certainly lacks the splash of other more prominent inquisitorial files in New Spain (in the best tradition of the colonial, repressive Tribunal del Santo Oficio, he was ordered to stop writing and be silent), the legal process illustrates in detail the life and times of one of the founders of Santa Cruz de la Canada in the aftermath of the 1680 Pueblo Indian revolt against Spanish colonial rule. Born a Spanish criollo in Mexico City, Quintana ventured north along the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro and participated as one of the espanoles mexicanos in the process of Spanish resettlement in northern New Mexico orchestrated by colonial authorities in Mexico City. Once a vecino of the new settlement of Santa Cruz, this New Mexican writer lived in a rather discreet manner as clerk for both civil and religious authorities. Lomelí and Colahan provide a meticulous study of Quintana’s life and times based on archival and secondary sources.The authors contextualize Quintana’s writings in the literary traditions of Spanish mysticism, New Mexican religious culture and devotions, and other possible sources of inspiration and learning. While the section linking Quintana with the local religious devotions in northern New Mexico is particularly insightful and contributes greatly to the understanding of Quintana’s literary horizons, the connections between Quintana’s religious thoughts and the writings of Spanish mystics seem to be less convincing. A deeper analysis of the history of reading and book circulation in the Spanish borderlands is certainly missing from the study, as is a historical perspective on Quintana’s assertions in the context of similar cases tried by the colonial Inquisition in New Spain.Notwithstanding these limitations, the writings of Miguel de Quintana, along with the preliminary study of his life, writings, and times, make a significant contribution to the literary traditions of colonial New Mexico and colonial New Spain. We are in debt to Francisco Lomelí and Clark Colahan for rediscovering an author who certainly deserves a place in the history of literature in New Mexico, the Spanish borderlands, and Chicano/Latino culture in general

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