Apertures of the Archive: Criollos and Viceregal Societies

The Latin American Library has continuously built on its founding collections, broadening the early focus on the study of Indigenous Mesoamerica to the complex social structures and dynamics during the period of Spanish colonial rule. In recent decades, exciting discoveries within the library’s existing holdings shed new light on criollos—those of Spanish descent born in the Americas—in 17th and 18th century Viceregal societies.

In particular, new readings of existing documents evidence the fluid nature of historical collections. Archives, whether broadly conceived or as physical entities, are not fixed or stable repositories but are constantly subject to reinterpretation and reevaluation. New information, scholarly approaches, and emerging technologies continuously reshape our understanding of the past. 

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• Title: Fama y obras pósthumas del Fénix de México
• Caption:
  Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695)
  Madrid: Manuel Ruiz de Murga, 1700
  The third volume of Sor Juana's works, published posthumously.
• Source: Rare Books Collection
• Date: 1700

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• Title: Fama y obras pósthumas del Fénix de México
• Caption:
  Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695)
  Madrid: Manuel Ruiz de Murga, 1700
  The third volume of Sor Juana's works, published posthumously. Displayed is Carta en respuesta (1691), in which she forcefully defends women's rights to education and access to knowledge. Sor Juana was subsequently forced to renounce her intellectual pursuits by Church authorities and died a few years later.
• Source: Rare Books Collection
• Date: 1700

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• Title: Letter to María de Guadalupe de Lencastre, Duchess of Aveiro
• Caption:
  María Luisa Manrique de Lara y Gonzaga (1649–1729)
  Holograph letter by the Vicereine of New Spain (Mexico), part of an extraordinary recent discovery at the Latin American Library. It provides a rare eyewitness account of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a towering literary figure of Spanish letters. The finding underscores how archives and texts are transformed through time by shifting scholarly approaches and broader social change. The Vicereine's letters were acquired in the 1930s at a time when scholars did not focus on women's history. Today we appreciate the rarity and documentary value of personal correspondence of women from any social class in early modern Spain or its colonies and even more so one that also contains a first-hand account of an elusive literary giant like Sor Juana.
• Source: Manuscripts Collection
• Date: 1682-12-30

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• Title: Reales exequias [a la muerte del Rey Carlos III]
• Caption:
  Juan Rico
  Lima: Imprenta Real de los Niños Expósitos, 1789
  On the death of King Carlos III of Spain, funeral ceremonies were held in cities across the Spanish empire. This lavishly printed work gives an account of the elaborate ceremonies carried out in a prominent Viceregal capital like Lima.
  
  Included is a foldout of the ornately designed funeral tableau erected for the occasion. By contrast, less ostentatious proceedings in a peripheral city like New Orleans appear as an item in the records of the city's Cabildo. Despite these differences, the two ceremonies were performative displays of the unifying power of the Spanish monarchy in far-flung regions intended as enactments of colonial allegiance to the Crown.
• Source: Rare Books Collection
• Date: 1789

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• Title: Record of Funeral Ceremony and Procession on the Death of King Carlos III
• Caption:
  Registro del Cabildo de la Ciudad de la Nueva Orleans
  Facsimile
  On the death of King Carlos III of Spain, funeral ceremonies were held in cities across the Spanish empire. This lavishly printed work gives an account of the elaborate ceremonies carried out in a prominent Viceregal capital like Lima.
  
  Included is a foldout of the ornately designed funeral tableau erected for the occasion. By contrast, less ostentatious proceedings in a peripheral city like New Orleans appear as an item in the records of the city's Cabildo. Despite these differences, the two ceremonies were performative displays of the unifying power of the Spanish monarchy in far-flung regions intended as enactments of colonial allegiance to the Crown.
• Source: Image Courtesy of the New Orleans Public Library Archives
• Date: 04-1789

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• Title: Mercurio Peruano
• Caption:
  Sociedad Académica de Amantes de Lima
  Lima: Imprenta de los Niños Huérfanos, 1791–1795
  This influential Lima newspaper is a prime example of the early Spanish-American Enlightenment. Mercurio was intellectually progressive in that it embraced a forward-looking scientific outlook. However, recent research has observed that it remained politically conservative. For instance, its elite readership included the Spanish viceroy, the representative of the Spanish monarchy in Peru. It was hardly a forum for expressing politically subversive views. Mercurio also exemplifies the instrumental role of print newspaper in forging a strong criollo patriotism in the colonies, in this case by exalting all things Peruvian, that would develop in later decades into one of the causes of independence from Spain.
• Source: Rare Books Collection
• Date: 1791–1795