Leonardo Velloso-Lyons explores Miguel Cabello Valboa’s Miscelánea Antártica (c. 1586) as an archive of transatlantic reading. He closely examines Cabello Valvoa’s references to European historians (i.e. João de Barros and Luis del Mármol) and mapmakers (i.e. Abraham Ortelius and Guillaume Postel) to show that, even though the Miscelánea has a global outlook and reads like a world history not too dissimilar from its European counterparts, it is deeply embedded in local dynamics pertaining to the New Kingdom of Granada and the Viceroyalty of Peru. Velloso-Lyons presents an argument for focusing on the particularities of how each work engages with sources from the other side of the Atlantic, thinking the category of “Transatlantic” as an interaction that allows for responses to local contexts and inserting a particular locality in a global historical framework.
Drawing from the work of José Carlos de la Puente Luna (Andean Cosmopolitans: Seeking Justice and Reward at the Spanish Royal Court), Felipe Ruan identifies and contextualizes Indigenous and mestizo petitioners in Juan de Ledesma’s Libros de Peticiones (1572-1595) at the Council of the Indies. Ruan also considers petitions from Indigenous communities recorded in Ledesma’s Libros, paperwork which arrived at the Council on its own. Both people and paperwork crossed the Atlantic to present claims and concerns before the king through the Council of the Indies. Their presence in the Habsburg capital, where North and Sub-Saharan Africans (enslaved and free) also dwelled, encourages us to think about Madrid as a multiethnic city and not solely as an ‘European’ capital.
Caroline Egan offers an analysis of the “talking text,” a major motif that circulates widely in colonial Latin American narratives that portray encounters between Indigenous and European protagonists. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this motif manifested itself through direct citations, clear allusions, and suggestive resonances, connecting histories of the Caribbean, the Valley of Mexico, and the Andes. In episodes structured around this motif, the talking text is a book, letter, or other written document whose powers of speech (or failure to speak when expected) becomes a key narrative turning point. By examining the permutations and circulation of the talking text across an early modern intertextual network, Egan suggests that one important dimension of this motif is its metatextual nature—talking texts are figures written into larger works, from histories and letters to autobiographies and legal documents.
Beginning in the 16th century there was continuous movement between both Hispanic viceroyalties in the New World, the Viceroyalty of Peru, and the Viceroyalty of New Spain, with travelers reaching even the furthest regions of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, such as the southern part of what is today the United States. Catalina Andrango-Walker examines these connections in the specific case of Friar Marcos de Niza, who was part of the earliest group of Europeans to arrive in the Andean region, and in 1538 led a Spanish expedition to explore what is now the southwest of the United States. Andrango-Walker analyzes the traces that Niza left about his time in the Andean region, especially the testimonies about the mistreatment of indigenous populations that Friar Bartolomé de las Casas included in his writings, and the account he wrote detailing his experiences in North America while looking for the Seven Cities of Cibola.
This academic exchange seeks to illuminate the inter-American and trans-oceanic connections of the various regions of the Hispanic Atlantic world. Each panelist will read their paper for 12 minutes, leaving time for questions and exchange.