Festivals in the New World:
The Viceroyalties of Mexico and Peru
Peter Davidson
University of Aberdeen
The culture of the Spanish Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries is perhaps becoming better known to English-speaking readers,
but for a long time it has remained terra incognita to many. It still comes
as a surprise to these that the Spanish conquest, far from reducing the
Viceroyalties of Mexico and Peru to no more than impoverished and
exploited providers of raw materials, actually prepared the way for almost
two centuries of cultural achievement in all the arts. This was despite the
violence which had accompanied the conquest and subsequent but
intermittent rebellion and suppression, culminating in the much later wars
of independence from Spain. A crucial example: the Inca sovereign
Tupac Amaru I may well have been needlessly executed, but his judicial
murderer was disgraced for the action and his descendant Beatriz Ñusta
married to the Spanish aristocrat don Martín de Loyola.1
The cultures which arose in the Spanish Americas are a testimony
on the one hand to the universal energy and applicability of Baroque
cultural systems, and on the other to the principle of cultural
accommodation pioneered particularly by the missionaries of the Society
of Jesus. What arose in Spanish America was a culture based upon a
fusion between the international Baroque traditions of metropolitan Spain
and indigenous American traditions. The Spanish Empire began in
massacres, treated African slaves as badly as any colonial power, but was
not institutionally racist or culturally supremacist in any simple way. It is
noteworthy that in Peru the caciques (native aristocracy) and criollos
(Spanish élite) coexisted, intermarried and evolved together a distinctive
artistic tradition which, in some regards, persists to the present day. An
equally distinct American identity developed in Mexico, where again
native and colonial élites lived together for decades in such harmony that
1
This sixteenth-century marriage at Cuzco is noteworthy for two reasons:
the bridegroom was the nephew of S. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the
Society of Jesus. This wedding was commemorated in painting and was
held for a century to symbolize the closeness of relation between the
Jesuits and the indigenous peoples of Peru, as well as being re-enacted
annually as a symbol of the co-existence of élites of Spanish and Peruvian
origin (cf. Los Siglos de Oro en los Virreinatos de América 1550-1700
[Madrid, 1999], pp. 186-87.) This catalogue is cited as by far the most
convenient assemblage of American paintings of the golden age. Cf. also
David Brading, The First America (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 268-71.
the stereotyped perceptions of colonial experience are all but impossible
to apply.2
This rich heritage forms the backdrop to the ‘New World cluster’,
which examines festivals in the viceroyalties of Mexico and Peru. The
focal point of this Europa Triumphans cluster is the festivities which
marked the installation of the Marqués de Laguna as Viceroy of Mexico
in 1680. The texts describing these festivities, Carlos Sigüenza y
Góngora’s Teatro de las Virtudes Politicas and Sor Juana Inés de la
Cruz’s Neptuno Allegorico, are vital to the Europa Triumphans
collection as a whole for two reasons. First, the Teatro de las Virtudes
Politicas, which we summarize,3 manifests the clearest articulation of
cultural accommodation and fusion, as all the devices of Baroque rhetoric
and art are applied to the explicatory laudation of the Aztec sovereigns of
Mexico. The universal Baroque reaches out to embrace and affirm the
dignity of the Americas and the depth of their connection to Europe.
Secondly, the Neptuno Allegorico, which we print in full, is by any
standards one of the most significant festival texts in any language to
survive from the centuries of the Renaissance and the Baroque. Not only
is it one of the very few contributions to festival literature devised and
written by a woman, but its author is one of the most distinguished poets
of the Spanish language, of a status equal to any of the most eminent
contributors to the festival tradition in any European language. It is one
of the very few festival texts which develops in its own right from being a
description of an event in the direction of being an independent literary
artefact.
Considerations of length preclude any proper representation in this
cluster of the festivals of the Viceroyalty of Peru. However, a very brief
extract from the chronicle of the old capital of Cuzco, a Spanish city built
upon Inca foundations, shows the impossibility in the Americas of
applying the separation between secular and religious festivals which has
2
There was, however, a considerable decline in the access of the native
élite and the mestizo descendants of intermarriage between
conquistadores and indigenous nobility to real power from the middle of
the sixteenth century on, as administrators in Spain, and particularly
Viceroys, took the place of the conquistadores and their families at the
very top. See Brading, op. cit., pp. 255-72.
3
It is particularly unfortunate that constraints of length preclude the
inclusion of more than a summary of the first part of the festival.
Góngora’s text is still relatively hard to access and is available only in its
original Spanish. There is a fair discussion of it in Octavo Paz’s study of
Sor Juana Inés (see Sor Juana de la Cruz, her life and times [London,
1988], pp. 139-68).
been maintained elsewhere in the Europa Triumphans collection. It also
gives some indication of the religious accommodations whereby the
indigenous deities of the Andes are subsumed into the ‘Christ of the
Earthquakes’ (Taitachu temblores) and the brocade-clad, arquebusquier
angels of Cuzqueño painting.
Work on this cluster has been undertaken by Professor Peter
Davidson (University of Aberdeen), Professor D. A. Brading (University
of Cambridge), Professor Linda Curcio-Nagy (University of Nevada,
Reno), Dr Jean Andrews (University of Nottingham), and Dr Alejandro
Coroleu (University of Nottingham).