Polemics, Literature, and Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Mexico

Since high intellectual history is something of a niche interest compared to ethnohistory and more recently Afro-Latin American history, it is rare for historians of colonial Latin America to place their work in the context of the “Republic of Letters.” This is a pity, since—as this book shows—scholars in the eighteenth-century Viceroyalty of New Spain were, both in practice and in terms of their self-professed identity, members of a distinguished local branch of a wider Republic of Letters. While much less well known than its French or even British North American counterparts, this Novohispanic corner of the learned world participated in wider neo-European scholarly trends from Scholasticism to satire as well as pursuing certain common themes in locally specific ways, such as pre-Columbian antiquarianism. From this, José Francisco Robles concludes that letrados (borrowing Ángel Rama's terminology) had triple citizenship in imperial Spain, the Republic of Letters, and the Catholic Church, to which he adds a polycentric sensibility and the criollo identity that was occasioned by the denigrating comments of contemporary European scholars like Manuel Martí and the comte de Buffon.The book's twin themes of scholarship and identity are explored in chapters that take the reader on a tour that begins in the erudition-obsessed world of the old Republic of Letters and ends in the enlightened second half of the eighteenth century, by which point new lighter-footed genres, new critical philosophical attitudes, and new scientific methods had supplanted their late Renaissance counterparts. The ebb and flow of ideas in this Mexican branch of the Republic of Letters unfolds through generally sound close analysis of well-known texts like the Gazeta de México (1722–1810), the Bibliotheca Mexicana (1755), and Tardes americanas (1778), and images such as the infamous casta paintings, as well as a host of less celebrated sources. In this way, the book contributes to the wider aims of the series in which it is published by showing the diversity and extent of the Enlightenment Republic of Letters.As an “intellectual history through the analysis of literary texts,” the book is not a work of archival history (p. 11). This is not a problem per se; after all, every discipline has its conventions. However, given the readership of this journal, it is important to note that this significantly hinders the book's ambition to integrate the insights of the last seven decades of Mexican scholarship with Robert Darnton's vision of Enlightenment sociability and book history. Indeed, the frequently vaunted connectivity of Mexico City–based scholars like Juan José de Eguiara y Eguren would have come to life much more vividly had the book made use of the extensive manuscript evidence now preserved in the Biblioteca Nacional de México, the Catedral de Puebla, and elsewhere. More careful attention to the original printed books (rather than modern editions) would have also helped fulfill this ambition, as would more frequent reference to the original Latin texts, rather than to Spanish-language translations.Moreover, those attuned to the historiography on Mexican intellectual history will find an unresolved tension between a criollista reading of the period that reflects something akin to a long-standing party line at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and El Colegio de México, and the consensus of the last few decades that the criollista framing has an exceedingly limited value for understanding the period's thought because it reflects rather the long shadow of German existentialism in postwar Mexican scholars' search for lo mexicano. As one reads, the book seems to oscillate between these two positions, at once emphasizing the criollo nature of Spanish American scholars (despite this not being the favored actor's category) and at others setting it aside and instead foregrounding the multiple identities of the scholars analyzed. This perhaps reflects the process of revising the manuscript. At the same time, the insights of some of the most innovative recent work, such as Peter Villella's Indigenous Elites and Creole Identity in Colonial Mexico, 1500–1800 (2016) and Gabriela Ramos and Yanna Yannakakis's Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes (2014), are conspicuous by their absence, mirroring again the criollo-centrism of older Mexican historiography that had little space in its nation-building project for non-Spanish intellectuals. Had the book taken an expansive view of Novohispanic society, a more fine-grain depiction of the Republic of Letters in the region would have emerged; it would also have rendered unnecessary the large sections of the book devoted to dismantling derivative Anglophone criollista scholarship, like Antony Higgins's Constructing the Criollo Archive: Subjects of Knowledge in the “Bibliotheca Mexicana” and the “Rusticatio Mexicana” (2000) (pp. 79–87).Overall, this is an impressive work of synthesis and literary analysis that does a good job of applying some of the insights of cultural historians of Europe to Mexico, thereby seamlessly integrating New Spain into a polycentric vision of the Enlightenment Republic of Letters. By offering close readings of texts in their social, literary, and philosophical contexts, it usefully supplements, rather than replaces, the work of David Brading, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, and Andrew Laird and provides an invitation to explore more deeply the multiethnic world of eighteenth-century Mexican scholarship that is still, I fear, being obscured by a reliance on a small number of sources and an interest in a relatively restricted number of actors

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