Another Cortes, brave, discreet, A new Columbus here. Following the spirit of Vil
lagra's text, t
he verse unabas
hedly pens a ho
pe that Don Juan de Onate will stand in the annals o
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Course Overview
f history among the "greatest" conquistadors and New World explorers. It traces a genealogy of conquest fame: Onate enters a "new" Mexico to redraw the boundaries of the Spanish empire, which were drawn by Cortes before him, in turn drawn by Columbus before him. He is last in a long line of conquistadors, and thus stands first on the expanding frontier of empire. The historian Gaspar de Villagra figures in this military genealogy, but only by corollary, having served as captain unde
- r Onate's command: "In ligh
- t of such a flame / Villagra has won his f
- Identify pre-Attack Indicators Associated with a Bombing Incident.
- Recognize Bombing Incident Related Injury Patterns and Treatment.
- ame." While Onate served the Crown as a "true sol
- dier" brandishing his "bloody sword," Villagra h
- as rendered an equally important service by ex
- changing his own sword for the "worthy pen": Tho
- ugh each passing day and year Ravage and-burn and cu
t and sear The
marks he left will perish not. (Villagra 39) The marks of the sword, like that of passing days, are so many cuts and ravages; the mark of the pen, in turn, can render those ravages immutable. In the historical text, the cuts and ravages take on the character of scars; discursively ordered into a text to be read and remembered by posterity. Thus the conqueror and the historian of New Mexico, wielding sword and pen on the far border of empire, assume complementary roles: through their combined efforts, the boundary and meaning of empire are remembered anew. But Onate and Villagra lost the wager with history. Who now remembers the deeds of this New Mexican conquest, as heroic or otherwise? Who reads the Historia, as they still do El
Araucana? In sp
ite or because of the twin efforts of the sword and the pen, the conqueror and the historian of New Mexico are little remarked in North or Central American cultural memory. To the contrary, rather than doubly seal and commemorate their future glory, the alliance between these acts of war and these acts of writing instead reveal and figure their own forgetting. A Trope The sword and the pen: a grand trope of medieval Europe, a particular trope of the Spanish Golden Age (think of Cervantes), from which emerges a remarkable nexus of interrelated acts of war and writing that make up the world of Spanish conqu
est. We know that the catacly
sms of Spanish "discovery" an
in the New World occasion furious circulation betwee
n the projects of war and the projects of writing: both mutually inform and advance New World carto-graphy. New W
Personnel
- orld ethno-graphy. New World historio-graphy. These projects, in turn, are marked not by their "newness," but rather by their consistent attempts to accoun
- A maximum of 30 course participants. Additional participants may be allowed with prior approval. Course minimum is 24.
t for the inc
ommensurability of the "New" with recourse to known formulations of the "Old"Ñhence through acts of both war and writing, "Anahuac" becomes "New Spain." For Miche
l de Certeau, the "disco
- very" and "conquest" are themselves a greater project of writing: "the conqueror will write the body of the other and trace there his own history.... This is writing that conquers. It will use the New World as if it were a blank, 'savage' pa
- ge on which Western desire will be written" (1988 xxv). Here th
- A dry-erase marker board or chalk-board.
- e sword is already a kind of pen, inscribing the narrative of Spanish empire onto t
he body of the land and its peoples; h
ere the pen is already a kind of sword, violently
- reinscribing the newly
- discovered land and peoples of America in
- to the book of empire. Between the sword and the pen o
- f Spanish conquest lies a complex range of performative acts and rhetorical postures, both warlike and wr
iterly, that advance, restage, and seal Castilian rule in new territory, thereby perpetuating and reinventing Spanish empire across time and space. Among them we find, for example, the reading of the (in)famous Req
uerimiento, the inscrip to arrange a class in your area or call 575-835-5054.
