Dual identities: Colonial subjectivities in seventeenth-century New Spain, Don Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora and Don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl

This dissertation addresses the work of Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora and Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, two writers from seventeenth-century Mexico who are often seen as seminal figures in the development of a specifically Mexican national history. The works of Siguenza y Gongora and Alva Ixtlilxochitl represent different moments and social positions within the colonial society of New Spain. Alva Ixtlilxochitl's writings from the first half of the seventeenth century offer one of the last examples of a mestizo historian. His combined Spanish and indigenous ancestry determined both his social identity and space of discursive intervention. Siguenza y Gongora's work exemplifies that of a later seventeenth-century creole intellectual whose social status as the American-born son of Spanish parents equally impacted his life and interests.;Traditionally, the creole intellectual class has been seen as occupying a superior social position vis-a-vis mestizo writers such as Alva Ixtlilxochitl. However, more recent research has specified the ambiguities of both within the changing structure of colonial Spanish America. Building off this recent scholarship, I address how Alva Ixtlilxochitl's status within a noble indigenous family can be compared to Siguenza y Gongora's struggles to establish himself as an intellectual. This reassessment of social status requires locating the work of each within the discursive structures of their time. To highlight their commonalities and differences, I examine the writings of each within period-specific literary and cultural discourses, including legal structures, political debates, public spectacle, regional history, and patronage networks. In the end, my research questions a progressive history that locates the roots of nineteenth and twentiethcentury Mexican nationalism in seventeenth-century colonial historians like Alva Ixtlilxochitl and Siguenza y Gongora. I suggest instead that each of these complex writers is best understood in the web of relations and possibilities which defined intellectual work and social status in their own historical moment.