How to Write the History of the New World

This richly detailed and well-researched book curiously and cleverly combines “old-fashioned” intellectual history with a postcolonial thesis. According to historian Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, the eighteenth-century debates that crisscrossed the Atlantic about how to write the history of the New World constituted nothing less than a revolution in historiographical sensibilities that anticipated postmodern approaches. The author uses manuscript sources found in Spain, Mexico, France, England, and the United States to painstakingly reconstruct the arguments of more familiar and less-known Spanish and creole scholars concerning how to interpret Spanish America’s precolumbian and colonial pasts. These ideological reconstructions are reminiscent of Antonelli Gerbi’s La disputa del Nuovo Mondo: Storia di una polemica (1955), but they are undertaken in a radically different, postcolonial framework that emphasizes rhetorical analysis, hybridities, socially constructed identities, gendered power relations, and the decentering of the “North Atlantic paradigms of progress and modernization underlying all national historiographies” (p. 9).Cañizares-Esguerra wrests eighteenth-century Spanish scholarship from the derivative “Spanish Enlightenment” model to reposition it as epistemologically innovative and unique. He is primarily interested in demonstrating how the interpretations of the past advanced by Hispanic scholars revealed their views on the authority and reliability of sources. Through their responses to northern European characterizations of Spain and its empire as backward and degenerate, Spanish and Spanish American scholars developed patriotic epistemologies that eschewed the philosophical (based on travel accounts) or conjectural histories of progress, such as those of William Robertson and Cornelius de Pauw. The “new” northern European art of reading attacked the credibility of eyewitnesses and drew on evidence from natural history, geology, and other extraliterary sources to reconstruct the past. In addition to rejecting sixteenth-century Spanish accounts, the new histories discredited Amerindian sources because they were recorded in nonalphabetic scripts (e.g., quipus and codices) that signified inferior mental abilities.It is difficult to summarize the efforts of Spanish scholars to counter these trends, because they unfolded in the contentious and factionalized institutional and intellectual milieu of late-eighteenth-century Spain. All, however, aimed to contravene negative stereotypes of Spain’s colonial empire by writing histories that privileged primary (or public) sources. (According to Cañizares-Esguerra, these scholars prefigured Leopold von Ranke in this innovative methodology.) The Royal Academy of History turned its attention to creating authoritative histories of the New World based on primary sources, and in the 1780s the crown created the Archivo de Indias to assemble colonial documents. Cañizares-Esguerra casts these efforts as part of a patriotic movement, even as he unravels the political infighting and historiographical disputes (among factions led by the Count of Campomanes, Catalán Jesuits in exile, and Juan Bautista Muñoz) that ultimately thwarted the publication in Spain of new histories based on public documents.This failure in the peninsula was countered by the emergence of a prolific scholarship on the history of America produced by creole clerics using primary sources. Among the many scrutinized by Cañizares-Esguerra are Juan José de Eguiara y Eguren, Mariano Fernández de Echeverría y Veytia, and exiled Jesuits like Francisco Javier Clavijero and Juan de Velasco. These scholars rejected histories written by “outsiders” who lacked the necessary linguistic skills and knowledge of local specificities to produce anything other than uninformed travel literature and narratives contrived to support specific agendas or models of progress. Cañizares-Esguerra also traces the machinations of patriotic creoles in frustrating royal attempts to have Lorenzo Boturini’s collection of Mexican antiquities and documents sent to Spain. Intellectuals of the Spanish American Enlightenment, centered in Mexico, drew heavily on Amerindian sources, as well as sixteenth- and seventeenth-century histories that had been produced by elites, both native and Spanish. Such a melding of noble Amerindian and upper-class creole sources was based on a concept of hierarchy that transcended race; only the testimony of elites (and not of commoners) was deemed reliable. Some creoles incorporated the northern European–inspired “new art of reading” in their use of archaeology, natural history, and other nonliterary sources to explain the past.The creole patriotic epistemology was patrician and privileged the clergy, but Cañizares-Esguerra argues that it was original and creative, based in a baroque understanding that he sees as thoroughly modern in its search for renewal. He reconstructs several controversies in 1780s and 1790s Mexico involving Mexican antiquities, as well as the Virgin of Guadalupe, to show how creole clerics used etymology, philology, and allegory to read Mesoamerican traits into Christian icons. He characterizes the Spanish American baroque as “a world in which religious images were both read as hieroglyphs and interpreted as Neoplatonic seals with magical virtues” (p. 320). His argument—that the use of allegorical methods to question centuries of accumulated learning constitutes radical historiography and even reckless modernity—may raise eyebrows. But his erudite analysis of many unknown or long-forgotten documents and disputes is convincing in demonstrating how the decentering of the European Enlightenment created space for the emergence of original and innovative vistas on late colonial Spanish American elite cosmologies and epistemologies

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