Kathleen Ross, New York University
Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, Alboroto y motín de los indios de México del 7 de junio de 1692
This letter, or carta de relación written by Sigüenza y Góngora to Admiral Andrés de Pez, was first published in Spanish by Irving Leonard in 1932 in Mexico. Leonard also translated the text into English and included it in his 1929 biography of the author, Don Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora: A Mexican Savant of the Seventeenth Century. It runs to about 40 pages in length and is one of the better-known of Sigüenza's works, along with Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez, published in 1690.
Alboroto y motín narrates, in a first-person voice, the uprising of Indians, accompanied by blacks, mulattoes and lower-class Spaniards, that took place in Mexico City in June of 1692. Sigüenza sets the stage for the rebellion by describing to Admiral Pez all the calamities that had befallen the viceregal capital beginning one year earlier: floods that wiped out whole parts of the city, a total solar eclipse that left it dark for seven minutes, plagues of insects that destroyed the wheat crop, corn that would not grow because of wet conditions. On June 7, 1692, popular discontent, frustration and hunger exploded and continued through the night into the next day, with much of the central plaza or Zócalo burned and sacked until the rebels were pacified with emergency rations of wheat and corn. In subsequent weeks many participants were hung, shot, burned or whipped to death, and eventually order was restored.
An important feature of the letter is Sigüenza's recounting of his own participation in the events, as he first learns of trouble while sitting in the quiet of his study and then runs outside to witness the violence. Later, as the city's archives burn, Sigüenza will do his part to save what records he can from the flames, axe in hand. In this letter, then, the Creole university professor and intellectual becomes an active fighter on the side of the viceregal government, salvaging history for future Spanish generations.
As he narrates the events and his own place within them, Sigüenza y Góngora spews a virulently racist diatribe against the Indians and their collaborators in the rebellion. Since he himself was one of the authorities of his day on matters pertaining to pre-conquest indigenous Mexican culture, and on other occasions had held up Mexica kings as examples of virtue for the viceroy to emulate (in the work Teatro de virtudes políticas que constituyen un príncipe, 1680), Sigüenza's anti-Indian attitudes are notable for their absolute rejection of contemporary Indians as worthy subjects of the Spanish crown, or indeed, as morally decent people. The examination of this apparent contradiction has been the chief focus of literary criticism on the text since it was published, with Mexican critics in particular taking strong positions regarding Sigüenza's motives for such negativity. More recently, over the last fifteen years, articles on this text have focused on different ways the narrative represents, masks or erases the polyphony of voices present in late-seventeenth century Mexican society, and in so doing reveals the positioning of Creole intellectuals within the empire. I will devote the rest of my remarks to three such articles: one by myself from 1988, the second by José Rabasa, published in 2002 but written some years earlier, and the third by Mabel Moraña, published in 2000.
My own study concentrates on the presence of the sixteenth-century chronicles of conquest, especially Cortés's Segunda Carta de Relación, as a textual substrate in Sigüenza's baroque narration of the rebellion. Drawing on theories of the baroque in its relation to the classic, I develop a reading of Alboroto y motín as a Creole rewriting of the chronicles that, through an excess of detail and adornment, claims Cortés's noche triste, the night of his 1520 retreat from Tenochtitlan, as the model it will appropriate and surpass. Sigüenza's position as both narrator and participant in the events reveals his identification with Spanish power and his closeness to the viceregal court. Nonetheless, as he writes his own history of this violent challenge to imperial domination, the Creole intellectual also makes that narration American through a baroque discourse of excess. Details such as the voices of Indian women cursing Spanish power, translated by Sigüenza from their native language, weave a Creole text that takes over Mexico's history as its own.
José Rabasa reads Alboroto as an example of counterinsurgent discourse, and as a work from which subaltern studies can recuperate "the strategies of mobilization, the interracial allegiances, the role of women, the anticolonial positionings, and the tactics of rumor that remain sedimented in Sigüenza's text" (65). Writing in 1994, soon after the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Rabasa connects the late twentieth-century peasant movement with other earlier insurgencies, and indeed with a "memory continuum" in Indian historical consciousness (71). Reading against Sigüenza's racist account of the events, Rabasa pieces together the story of the peasant rebels not as an unruly, irrational mob, but as an example of people acting from "other rationalities to those dominant in the 'West'" (73). As for Sigüenza himself, he is an antiquarian member of a "fully consolidated intellectual elite that takes as a given the subalternity of the Indian population" (73), fascinated by New Spain's indigenous antiquity while scorning its Indian present. A Creole space is not present here, where the sides are drawn in a struggle that continues into the colonialized present of the Zapatistas.
Mabel Moraña does look for that possible Creole space as she reads Alboroto in light of Douglas Cope's 1994 book The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660-1720. Cope's study makes use of documents pertaining to the 1692 uprising that record the voices of its participants as they were persecuted and afterwards punished, thus supplying a text we can contrast to Sigüenza's official story. Coming to some of the same conclusions as Rabasa regarding alternative rationalities, and Sigüenza's imposition of a legal, European discourse upon them in the narrative, Moraña nevertheless also searches for an indication of a complex Creole consciousness at work. That consciousness operates within the sphere of the baroque, a multi-layered culture whose many components and contradictions play out in the "multiple faces" (163) hidden by the apparent splendor of a monumental, consolidated power. By studying that multiplicity of subjectivity and agency, in the various ways it is represented by both testimony and Sigüenza's historiographic narration, we can tease out the voices of the colonized, and of the Creole colonizer, who is not always one and the same with Spanish power.
In conclusion, I would say that Alboroto y motín stands as a key text for the study of criollo intellectuals as subjects writing and living within a complex colonial world. It offers a unique look into the response of a lettered Mexican, loyal to his patria and also to his king, at a moment of violent threat to his privileged way of life. In my view the baroque defines that colonial culture and the writing it produced, and endures as a tool for understanding this text.
Works cited
Leonard, Irving A. 1929. Don Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora: A Mexican Savant of the Seventeenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Moraña, Mabel. 2000. "El 'tumulto de indios' de 1692 en los pliegues de la fiesta barroca. Historiografía, subversión popular y agencia criolla en el México colonial." In José Antonio Mazzotti, ed., Agencias criollas: La ambigüedad "colonial" en las letras hispanoamericanas. Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana. 161-175.
Rabasa, José. 2002. "Pre-Columbian Pasts and Indian Presents in Mexican History." In Gustavo Verdesio and Alvaro Félix Bolaños, eds., Colonialism Past and Present: Reading and Writing about Colonial Latin America Today. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. 51-78.
Ross, Kathleen. 1988. "Alboroto y motín de México: una noche triste criolla." Hispanic Review 55: 181-90.
Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos de. 1932. Alboroto y motín de los indios de México del 7 de junio de 1692. Ed. Irving A. Leonard. Mexico City: Talleres Gráficos del Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Historia y Etnografía.