Francisco A. Lomelí

Cantas a Marte y das batalla a Apolo: cinco estudios sobre Gaspar de Villagrá

time (http://www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/digital/collections/items/show/93), a full transcription and translation is only now available thanks to the efforts of George Brian Souza and Jeffrey Scott Turley. This paleographical and philological tour de force is likely to become the authoritative edition, as the other transcription and translation published the same year by Isaac Jiménez Donoso, María Luisa García, Carlos Quirino, and Mauro García (Quezon City: Vibal Foundation, 2016) is exceedingly difficult to obtain. To the transcription and translation, Souza and Turley have appended a lengthy introduction, which provides an excellent overview of the physical characteristics, provenance, context and content of the Boxer Codex. The introduction also gives an account of previous haphazard attempts to publish short extracts from the codex which, while providing useful context for understanding the contribution of this volume, perhaps should have remained in the original book proposal. The transcription is semi-normalized (i.e. features the addition of sentence breaks but not changes to the manuscript’s orthography), and so remains faithful while facilitating reading. Having sampled several extended passages of the transcription at random, it appears the editors and copyeditors have done an excellent job. The translation too reads well, while closely following the original. The translation also has detailed footnotes that elucidate certain philological issues, and gloss some of the more unusual terminology relating to local flora, fauna and the like. This is all prefaced by a helpful glossary of the codex’s Tagalog, Visayan, Malay, Nahuatl, Arabic, Spanish and Chinese vocabulary, which alone gives the reader a sense of the overlapping cultural and linguistic spheres that characterized Southeast Asia in this period. Finally, the volume also contains high-resolution reproductions of the images, which are all eminently satisfactory. In short there is little to fault in this transcription and translation of the Boxer Codex which is likely to become an important point of reference for scholarship on the early modern Iberian Pacific. It is a clear and accurate presentation of an invaluable source for the ethnohistory of Southeast Asia and the broader history of the region, in particular as it relates to late Ming China. For historians of colonial Latin America who wish to include a Pacific dimension in their research and teaching, this is essential reading.

Moving towards Latinotopia

La utopia no es lo imposible, sino lo que aun no existe. Ariane Mnouchkine, Director of the Theâtre du Soleil “The most global of global cities holds a new manifest destiny: New York is now ‘Latinotopia,’” so claimed Antoni Bernat an architect and cultural critic based in Barcelona, Writing in ReVista: The Harvard Review of Latino America in 2010. New York City, Los Angeles and Miam...