Foreword

Abstract

This first issue of CLAR for 2021 begins with an article by David Horacio Colmenares. In ‘“Su herencia fue el llanto.” Pathos, memoria y condensación temporal en los Cantares mexicanos,’ Colmenares asks how these foundational, sung texts might be re-read (or hummed) in light of new interpretations of the original Nahuatl. What might the Cantares tell us about Nahua representations of time, memory, and pathos? Why have these songs been misunderstood? Speaking of misunderstandings, Elise Bartosik-Vélez, in ‘Fray Francisco de la Cruz and translatio imperii,’ revisits controversial arguments made by an ill-fated Dominican priest in late sixteenth-century Peru. Was Fray Francisco de la Cruz an egomaniacal madman, as some have claimed, or was he executed on orders of Lima’s Inquisition in part for proposing an unpopular but not inherently heretical concept that separated nation from native soil? Was it wrong to imagine the Spanish Empire as a moveable feast? On the lighter side, and also in Lima, is Laura Paz Rescala’s ‘Zurciendo teatro, confeccionando un oficio: el caso de Juan Meléndez, sastre y autor de comedias.’ Paz Rescala treats the notable case of a Spanish tailor turned playwright. Was Juan Meléndez, active in the 1590s, unusual in juggling these two professions? Was he simply a costume designer moonlighting as a bard, or were his two oficios a better fit than we might think? The comedy continues in ‘De Lazarillo a Qispillu: de la casa de un escudero a las encrucijadas de un Fausto andino.’ Here, Jorge García-Granados examines Usca Páucar, a piece of Quechua catechetical theater from mid-eighteenth-century Peru. In focusing on the picaresque character of Qispillu, García Granados asks if Indigenous elites were in dialogue with players and playwright. Did class play a role? And most importantly, would the Virgin Mary save the day? Next is ‘Enemies of the enlightened state: Francisco Clavijero on exiled Jesuits, sovereign power and the contested futures of Spanish America,’ by Luis Ramos. Ramos exploits newly discovered documents composed by this storied Mexican Jesuit during his first years of exile in Bologna in the 1770s to show how Clavijero responded to Spain’s ambitious Bourbon agenda and to the Enlightenment project more generally. He was not impressed. We return to Mexico, and to one of those Bourbon endeavors, in ‘Botanizing in the borderlands: the limits of scientific indigeneity in late colonial New Spain.’ Here, Lance C. Thurner tracks indigenous plant-hunter Ignacio de León y Pérez as he toiled for Spain’s Royal Botanical Expedition in northern Mexico in the last decade of the eighteenth century. León y Pérez’s ‘indigeneity’ was deemed an asset from the perspective of cosmopolitan scientists, but it proved a liability on the imperial frontier. Why? Imperial botany strikes again in ‘The Chinese cotton contest: the Royal Economic Society of Guatemala, Maya farmers, and the struggle over Enlightenment-era agricultural science, 1796–1798,’ by Scott Doebler. As Doebler shows, it seems that the Spanish Bourbons could not stop trying to revitalize and exploit what they regarded as a moribund, backward, benighted American storehouse of untapped riches and tropical soils. If only Indigenous