Colonial Baroque: Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora and the post -colonization of New Spain

My dissertation analyzes the work of the creole letrado Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora (1645--1700). I argue that Siguenza's heterogeneous writings were unified by an underlying project to create a patria from the social conditions of seventeenth-century New Spain. This moment was marked by "post-colonization" in which continued colonial expansion was coupled with changing demographics in urban areas. Thus even while the dichotomy of "Spanish" and "Indian" continued to be invoked, the racial and ethnic mixtures of urban New Spain exceeded the binary categories of Spanish colonialism. This mixed racial picture created the need for new figures through which to imagine social relations and governance.;I focus on three constellations of texts to argue that Siguenza used baroque forms as a mode for refiguring relations among colonial subjects in New Spain. The colonial baroque was a style primarily linked to the Spanish absolutist ideology of an organic community of estates, an ideology prevalent in texts produced for colonial institutions. Through their discrepancies with generic baroque models, Siguenza's writings reflect his ambivalent relationship to these institutions. Rather than dedicating his work to an institution, he proposes the alternative cause of patria. Siguenza's use of allegory, visual distortion and irony created a means to define and hierarchize the subjects of the expanding racial structure of late seventeenth-century New Spain in order to imagine this patria. His writings therefore define a second moment of the colonial baroque. They present the creole's intimate knowledge of the social landscape, particularly the ability to see and judge what the peninsular bureaucrat could not, as the best basis for colonial administration.;Siguenza y Gongora's writings show the extent to which creole nationalism developed out of and not against Spanish colonialism. In particular, his insistent use of the term patria betrays a utopian urge to reconcile the violent encounter of the conquest with a future society. For this reason, his writings inaugurate two powerful tropes in Latin American nationalism: the racial ordering of the sociedad de castas and the figure of the creole letrado as the culture broker between these social groups and the State.