The Memoirs of fray Servando Teresa de Mier, a Mexican friar persecuted by the Inquisition and a direct witness of Napoleonic Europe, extend to the reader an invitation hard to resist: to look at history upside down and, therefore, to look at it from the proper perspective. With fray Servando, Europeans cease to read the America invented by their own colonizing culture, and Americans in turn cease once and for all to compare their reality with a model that they imagine to be superior and begin to think of themselves as they really are.
The adventures of a priest who spends thirty years escaping, time and time again, from the prisons of the Holy Office by means of wondrously clever tricks and who turns out to be one of the founding fathers of Mexico are extravagant enough in and of themselves. But the impression the Memoirs leave of a world upside down results not from the exoticism of Miers biography but from his hilarious, clear-sighted accounts of his years spent as a fugitive in Europe, which subvert the image of the world recorded in the travel literature of the era. People who are products of the Age of Enlightenment are still heatedly arguing about the “good savage” of the American continent when this supposed “savage” (a Creole born in the New World) presents, in his encounter with the Spanish Empire, a portrait of manners and morals that is a far cry from the “civilized” esprit des nations that Empire is endeavoring to impose in its colonies.
In the Memoirs, for example, the ones who are Others, observed from the more or less anthropological angle that the accounts of imperial travelers are inclined to adopt, are the Europeans. A completely marginal figure, born in New Spain, a fugitive and in the bargain a friar—a status held in little esteem at the time of the French Revolution— adopts, in Europe, the attitude of the traveler with an amateur scientists’s bent who is seeking to explain local peculiarities to his Mexican compatriots. The strange creatures whose rites are described are not aborigines but Frenchmen, with their ventriloquists, galvanizers and re-suscitators of the dead (43–4);1 Italy is “the country of treachery and chicanery, of poison; the country of murder and robbery,” where the women wander about bare naked at home because of the heat (50, 51). According to Mier’s testimony, the Napoleonic wars have spread death and poverty throughout Europe: by comparison, imperial splendors are irrelevant.
In this era of ocean voyages, of rediscovery of the world, fray Servando takes the reverse route: he looks upon Europe as though it were the Other; he is (if the metaphor were possible) the Humboldt who draws up the inventory of an arrogant, and in many senses decadent, continent. Fray Servando is not the dazzled American who comes to know the marvels of an imperial civilization whose codes he will hasten to imitate the moment he returns home; he is the first learned Creole to acquire a familiarity with the Iberian Peninsula, and he is the first colonized observer to reveal the weaknesses and shortcomings of the colonizer.
Despite his situation as a person enjoying no prestige or advantage, his tone is never that of a subordinate. Thus, if a film were to be made today about the departure of this Mexican for Europe contemporaneous with that of Humboldt for America, the result would be pathetically comic by virtue of the disproportion between the two men. The dates coincide: the German traveler Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt—Baron von Humboldt, to be precise—secures the backing of the government of Spain for a visit to its colonies in America, which will result in his century’s great naturalist testimonial, Voyage de Humboldt et Bonpland auxrégions équinoxiales du nouveau continent, fait en 1799–1804 (Voyage of Humboldt and Bonpland to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, 1799–1804), in twenty-three volumes, so influential an example of how to study the nature of the New World that it will be the Rosetta stone even for the key works subsequently written by Charles Darwin. The Mexican friar, on the other hand, will bring with him no large inheritance received from a noble mother nor illustrious scientists of the stature of the Frenchman Aimé Bonpland: his epic is that of a runaway prisoner without a penny in his pocket, far from the scientific sphere, detested by the Spanish colonial authorities, abandoned by one and all (“even those who appeared to be my kinfolk were ashamed of being seen as such,” he says, “even though in all America there was no one whose nobility outranked mine” [M 114])2 and whose only company in prison was ordinarily that of rats. Proud and fond of exaggeration as was his habit, he describes his plight in Las Caldas:3 “[The rats] were so numerous and so big, that they ate my hat, and I had to sleep armed with a stick so that they wouldn’t eat me alive.” (M 229).
Fray Servando Teresa de Mier is not in Europe in the position of the savant who pontificates, classifies and orders with the discerning eye of the discoverer: he is there almost as an erudite adventurer in a cassock whom chance has brought to the heart of the Empire in the Napoleonic era. Dazzled, clear-sighted and sarcastic, he tells his compatriots of New Spain the truth “to open their eyes.” (M 243)
Toward Spain, the heart of the Empire, he is particularly implacable. Which model should be the one that the Mexican colony ought to imitate, which one ought to be respected as the cradle of power? He says, for example, that the soil is extraordinarily barren in the Iberian Peninsula, and “when it produces a crop it is because of the use of manure; in Madrid the human variety is sold in sacks that are worth their weight in gold.” To cap it all, he adds that “in Catalonia they go about making manure inside their very own houses, keeping the inner courtyard flooded almost all the time, and throwing out into it all the slops and excrement, which keep the house permanently perfumed.” (115) He then speaks of the poverty: “There are no factories or industrial enterprises in Spain, or any workers for them. Almost everyone, men and women alike, wear garments of coarse wool and rough-woven cloth; their footwear is hemp sandals, and their blouses are made of cloth woven from flax.”(115)4
Is this the scatological image of an empire to which they must bow down and pay tribute and which they must allow to occupy all government posts? What is above (culture) and what is below (the humiliated manifestations of the body) are inverted in the imagery of the dominant culture, since the central power is in the habit of representing the social periphery in scatological terms and not the reverse.5 It is the logic of the grotesque, but applied to a geography that ordinarily does not embody it. Fray Servando Teresa de Mier is not writing from the submissive status of the colonial subject: he speaks with the voice of a nation that at the time is very rich, and with that voice he denounces the ignorance of the mother country with regard to its colonies. Hence he writes:
In Madrid, when I said that I was from Mexico [they answered]: “How rich that king of yours must be, seeing as how such a lot of silver comes from there!” In a royal office in Madrid that I happened to go into, when I stated that I was an American they were amazed. “But you aren’t black,” they said to me. “A countryman of yours came by just now,” the friars at the monastery of San Francisco in Madrid said to me, and when I asked how they knew that, they answered that he was black. In the Cortes the deputy from Cádiz, a Philippine priest, asked whether we Americans were white and professed the Catholic religion. In certain hamlets, hearing that I was from America, they asked after Señor X or Y; you must know him, they said to me, because in such-and-such a year he went to the Indies. As though the Indies were the size of a small village. When I arrived in Las Caldas, the mountain folk “came to see the Indian....”(60)
His main objective is to explain “the practice of our government” (he is referring to Spain) and open the eyes of his “countrymen, so that they place no trust whatsoever in their being able to attain justice.” (M 243)6The account shows in detail the corruption of the system, “because the power there is more absolute, the court and the tribunals more venal, the number of people in dire need, of wicked men and of schemers greater.” The ignorance of what is really happening in the New World is such that utterly nonsensical orders are issued. Fray Servando cites the ridiculous case of an edict to take all termites on the island of Santo Domingo prisoner for “having destroyed the records of court proceedings that His Majesty was requesting.”
The inhabitants of the New World have no idea of the degree to which the Empire lacks knowledge of them and disregards them. Because, as he says in the Memoirs: “Since the Conquest there has been an apothegm on the lips of the mandarins of America: ‘God is far above, the king in Madrid and I here’” (M 208), a saying, to be sure, very much like the lament of contemporary Mexico: “So far from God and so close to the United States.” Unlike his compatriots, Mier has had the opportunity (though forced upon him) to come to know the heart of the Empire: “I did not know that the real kings of Spain are the covachuelos, and the ministers know nothing except what the latter tell them and want them to know.” The covachuelos, minor bureaucrats of the Council of the Indies, are the ones who really manipulate and bring about, in their own interest, decisions that affect the New World. Any and all complaints are addressed to them and live or die in their hands. “I then learned that the covachuelos bring up whatever petitions they please, the minister signs as if they were of no interest to him, and they are the real kings of Spain and of the Indies.” Concerning these functionaries, he explains: “One gains access to these posts, as to all those of the Monarchy, through money, women, ties of kinship, recommendations or intrigues; merit is an accessory, useful only if accompanied by these aids. Some are ignorant, others very clever; some honest Christian men; others, scoundrels and even atheists. In general they are vice-ridden, corrupt, well supplied with concubines, and burdened with debts, because the salaries are very meager.” The covachuelo drafts and submits, if he so pleases, reports to the ministers, who, with the same scant interest, submits them to the king:
The minister reads to the king the covachuelo’s little marginal annotation on each memorandum. The king asks each of them how the matter should be resolved; the minister answers by reading the resolution noted down by the covachuelo, and the king scribbles a little signature. After five minutes Charles IV used to say: “Enough,” and with this word whatever is in the diplomatic pouch is taken care of, in accordance with the opinion of the covachuelos, to whom power over all things is handed over from the Royal Country Estate so that they may dispatch orders. They then put whatever words they please in the king’s mouth, without the king knowing what is happening in his own palace, nor the minister in the kingdom. (M 245)
The description naturally does not fall on deaf ears when it is read in the colonies. The sovereigns indifference toward the New World is a grave matter: “When, then, we rack our brains pondering the terms of a royal order in order to discern His Majesty’s intention, it is that of a covachuelo who is a rascal or a madman.” If there is anyone who is still laboring under any illusion to the contrary, to the Empire New Spain is nothing more than a means to continue to enrich itself, but, in accordance with this image, not even important enough for the king or his ministers to take the trouble to devote their time to it.
In point of fact, even though Spain from the first conferred the status of provinces on its new dominions (a political status that incorporated them as extensions of the territory of the mother country and not merely a commercial formula), neither the king nor the most illustrious names in the Empire were capable of evaluating the consequences of the Conquest. Hence, while America saw itself as an active part of the Empire from the very beginning, Spain continued to elaborate epic poems to the glory of its soldiers in Italy and Africa, and the extraordinary material offered by the adventure of its own men in the Indies was long looked upon with scorn or ignored. It is understandable that, at the dawn of the nineteenth century, Servando Teresa de Mier should want to share with his compatriots his indignation at the bureaucracy of which he had been a witness and a victim: the Creoles should feel the weight of that disdain.7
Another of the extraordinary contributions of these Memoirs lies in the fact that Mier is the one who best expresses the tension inherent in the formation of the center/periphery dichotomy, that is to say Europe/Latin America in this era. In the rhetoric of accounts of journeys abroad, “barbarian” or “savage” is the basic word applied to the peoples encountered. The Memoirs attribute this barbarism to the conquistador, a conclusion that, seen from our contemporary point of view, is almost comic. An example: “Everyone journeys like a barbarian through a land of barbarians, trembling at the highwaymen who sally forth to rob travelers, and a carriage is escorted only by troupes of beggars and children, clamoring for alms at the top of their lungs.” (46) And also: “Spaniards perpetually ape the dress and the customs of other Europeans.” (41–2)
In all likelihood the debates of the period did not allow people of that time—immersed as they were in the epistemological system of the end of the eighteenth century—to appreciate the true import of that gaze that totally reverses colonial values, at least in the terms center/periphery employed at that time.8 It must be remembered that this was the era of the denigration of the American continent. The attacks by Buffon, de Pauw, Raynal and Robertson as well as the idealization of the good savage in the manner of Rousseau were in fashion. According to the theories in vogue, the inhabitants of America were weak, inferior and degraded; in fact, similar arguments were used by the Legislative Assembly of Cádiz to enact a law that would limit the parliamentary representation of Mexicans, on the grounds that “of its six million inhabitants, ten [million] were Indians, two halfbreeds, and a half of themillion whites incapable of exercising their political rights.”9
It is worth recalling that as Jean-Jacques Rousseau was dreaming of the lost happiness of aborigines, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Count of Buffon, was maintaining in his Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (A Natural History, General and Particular, 1748–1804) that American degradation had gone so far that the New World man suffered from sexual frigidity, and his passivity in the face of nature put him on the same level as animals. In his “Of National Characters” (1748, revised in 1754), David Hume assured his readers, for instance, that “[t]here never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation.”10 Another abbot, Corneille de Pauw—whom fray Servando cites several times as “Paw”— claimed in his Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains, ou Mémoires in-téressants pour servir à I’histoire de I’espèce humaine (Philosophical Research on Americans, or Memoirs of Interest for a History of the Human Species, 1768), at the very height of the Encyclopedist movement, that an American is not an immature animal or a child, but a degenerate.
Of all the great European thinkers of the era, Johann Gottfried von Herder was one of the few pluralists for whom no culture was inferior to another; each one, rather ought to be considered from the perspective of its own particular value and its own particular truth, and in his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Ideas on the History of Mankind, 1784–91) proposed a revision of the theory of history. Another, whom Mier cites in his Memoirs, was Gian Rinaldo Carli, the author of Lettere americane (1776), a panegyric to the Incas, who places no credence in the accusations of American inferiority, even though in his case there was already evident a tendency to rehabilitate indigenous societies of the distant past and forget the situation of the contemporary Indian (a forget-fulness that has been traditional among Latin American governments themselves down to the present). Other readings that would have enabled the Mexican friar to think of the New World in a more positive light were Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia (1782)—the first printed defense of North America—and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791).
The intense and influential debate regarding the New World followed Aristotle’s old idea that in the tropics conditions were less favorable to life;11 the thinkers of the Enlightenment exaggerated their arguments on the grounds that rational law is universal, and it went without saying that what they meant by “universal” was “in their own image and likeness.” This battle to determine who is more rational, or rather, who is truly civilized, reflects a fight for geopolitical power between the European metropolises. Abbot Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, in his Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes (Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and of the Commerce of Europeans in the Two Indies, 1770)is a direct attack on Spain: his book contains a condemnation of the cruelty of the colonizers and a denunciation of the immense sufferings of the indigenous peoples. Diderot takes up this line of argument by accusing the Spanish conquest of America of engendering ignorance, fanatical missionary zeal, abuses. It is not only the colonized world, then, that is deemed inferior, but also very obdurate colonizers (Spain): the battle is for the possession of the world. Voltaire, Jean-François Marmontel and William Robertson, a Scot, with his History of America, contribute to these attacks.12
The attacks on Spain are linked to the “black legend” of the Conquest, spread by another Dominican, fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, through his Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (A Very Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies). Fray Servando is regarded as the direct heir of the tradition of Las Casas, by virtue of his attack on Spanish abuses.13
The cultural framework of Miers Memoirs is complex. One factor is the self-interested inferiorization of the New World, another the attacks against Spain (also inferiorized, and furthermore, accused of excessive cruelty), and yet another the official (and positive) versions that the Empire itself offered with regard to the Conquest of America. Among these versions, wherein the Creoles found it hard to recognize themselves completely, is the classic summa of the Conquest composed by fray Juan de Torquemada, De los veintiún libros espirituales de la Monar-quía Indiana (Concerning the Twenty-one Spiritual Books of the Monarchy of the Indies, 1615)—which Mier cites several times—and Antonio de Solis’s Historia de la Conquista de México (History of the Conquest of Mexico, 1684), which went through some twenty editions during the eighteenth century. “[A]longside this official, traditional, propagandistic vision, as reassuring to the general public as a fairy tale, written for the most part by members of religious orders, there existed another vision of America, that of the lay bureaucrats of the State” (Ross, 221): that of José Campillo in Lo que hay de más en España para que sea lo que debe ser y no lo que es o Nuevo sistema de gobierno económico para la América (What There Is an Excess of and a Lack of in Spain for It to Be What It Ought to Be and Not What It Is or New System of Economic Government for America), thatof Bernardo Ward in his Proyecto económico (Economic Plan) or that of the Count of Campomanes in Reflexiones sobre el comercio español a Indias (Reflections on Spanish Commerce in the Indies), all works that had been recently published, in Servando Teresa de Mier’s early years. These books present a vision of “America as a problem.” To counter the attacks of Enlightenment writers against the abuses of Spanish rule in America, Abbot Nuix’s Reflexiones imparciales and Juan de Escóiquiz’s México conquistado—pious defenses based on the pretext of evangelization, a pretext that Mier was to try to discredit—were published. Also toward the end of the eighteenth century, José Cadalso, in his Cartas marruecas (Moroccan Letters), accuses those European countries that traffic in slaves “and with the profits from this trade print books full of elegant invective, high-flown insults and eloquent slander against Hernán Cortés for what he did.” (cited in Tietz, 230)14
A campaign of disinformation is pursued on both sides, as is ambition. In the name of reason the Encyclopedists flaunted ridiculous prejudices concerning realities that they really knew nothing about; the Spanish answered with arguments about a world that they too knew nothing about, as is noted again and again in Mier’s Memoirs. Affairs in the New World were in such chaos that when the king ordered that a refutation of Robertson and Raynal be drafted, it was discovered that “the documentation required to do so was not accessible, but rather was scattered more or less throughout the whole of Spain. By direct order of the king, Juan Bautista Muñoz was assigned the difficult task of gathering these documents together and of writing in accordance with modern criteria his history of the New World (Historia del Nuevo Mundo)— which goes only as far as 1500 and went to press in 1793.” (Tietz, 233) Moreover, the founding of the famous Archives of the Indies in Seville does not date, as anyone who does not know otherwise might believe, to the period of the Discovery or the beginning of the Conquest, but only to the time at the end of the eighteenth century when Muñoz began the search for documents in order to write the history that the king had commissioned.
The writings of the period cannot be readily understood without taking these debates into account. They are the background that Antonello Gerbi called “the New World dispute” in an extraordinary book on the subject.15 The Americans knew (and absorbed) the inferiorization of which they were the object since they read the Encyclopedists, despite the censorship of books imposed by the Inquisition and the authorities of the viceroyalties. Hence it is almost a cliché (and also a simplification) to attribute the intellectual bases of the movement for independence in America in large part to these readings concerning the repositioning of secular power and the weakening of that of the Church, social contracts and magna cartas, equal rights and the free self-determination of man.16
Fray Servando read the work of Benito Jerónimo Feijoo y Montenegro, a member of the Benedictine order and no doubt the intellectual pillar that supported the Spanish version of the Enlightenment (its bases: recovering the sense of usefulness to society, fostering knowledge of the natural sciences, education, law, medicine and philology, while at the same time preserving the Catholic faith); he was also familiar with the texts of Buffon, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marmontel, Raynal, and Robertson. Once he reached Europe, Mier kept company with Jesuits in exile, Francisco Javier Clavijero, the Abbot Grégoire and Alexander von Humboldt, whom he cites several times in his Memoirs and tries to persuade of the truth of his own ideas about the evangelization of America. Mier assures his reader that “Baron von Humboldt also told me in Paris: ‘I believed that it [the evangelization of America before the arrival of the Spaniards] was an invention of the friars, and said as much in my statistics, but after I saw your curious essay I see that this is not so.” (35)
Concerning De Pauw, Mier wrote jokingly that “he said that America is a continent that has just emerged from the waters; consequently, all full of swamps and foul-smelling and deadly lakes,” and that “from its rank ponds there has leapt forth a caste of frogs called Indians who managed to speak some sort of crude mumbo-jumbo and consequently they should be classified as members of a species halfway between men and orangutans.” (cited by Gerbi, 396-8) In answer to these delirious ravings, “deserving of a cage,” Mier writes: “it is impossible to describe the portrait painted of them with a pen dipped in the blood of cannibals, heaping upon America and its aborigines all the absurdities and insults that the Spaniards themselves passed on to Pauw.” (cited by Gerbi, 396)Hence it is “also necessary to take a broom to all these many annoying beetles, squashing them on top of their own dung, and providing my countrymen with a little manual of exorcisms against such antuerpias.”17
The stereotypes of Aztec barbarism and Creole ineptitude were already matters of argument between Spain and Mexico as early as two centuries before the Enlightenment. The first written response from Latin America was that of the Mexican Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavijero in his Historia antigua de México (History of Ancient Mexico, 1780–1), a refutation of the postulates of De Pauw, Robertson and Raynal. Clavijero says, for example: “Mexicans, in particular, are handsome, healthy,robust, and unaffected by many afflictions and sicknesses. No Mexicans breath ever smells bad” (Gerbi 255, quoted in his Storia antica, vol. 1, 118–23). More important still, in it he flaunts the argument that the Creoles will increasingly vaunt the fact that the Aztec Empire cannot be accused of barbarism but was, rather, a very advanced civilization. Mier, naturally, takes up the detail concerning a Mexican’s sweet-smelling breath and accuses Europeans of having introduced into America such plants as garlic and onions “which make the breath reek.”18
Analyzed in retrospect and in light of the complete change of direction that was to be taken by Latin American history toward the end of the nineteenth century, the defense of Jesuits such as Clavijero and even that of fray Mier were in all likelihood accorded a more or less ambiguous reception by Creole society. Such a defense meant that that society was being given the possibility of creating a thought that was autonomous and proud of itself, of emerging from its supposed inferiority, but at the same time, there is no gainsaying the fact that at bottom this Creole thought continued to have very strong ties to the imperial gaze, even long after the wars of independence.19 In point of fact, the “gaze” that the power of the metropolitan center had trained on these countries in order to draw their portrait was eventually assimilated: even after their countries had become independent republics, Americans looked at themselves with borrowed eyes, with the same gaze to which the metropolitan centers of power had subjected them.20 At a time when the nineteenth century was well under way, the rivers and the mountains ceased to be a part of what constituted nature and were transformed into trade routes or obstacles to trade; the value of human beings came to be determined by the measuring rod of European knowledge. Figures as central as Domingo F. Sarmiento or Andrés Bello spoke of Latin America in almost the same idiom as Chateaubriand or Hegel; that is to say, in the idiom of amazement or of usefulness. The nations of Latin America tried to model their identity on parameters of progress that owed less to their own realities than to the ideas of London, Paris and later on New York as well. They believed that they were putting distance between themselves and the Spanish Empire, that they were leaving behind their colonial or neocolonial status; but quite to the contrary, they were confirming it.21 This is part and parcel of the dynamics of former colonies.
Although Mier’s writings did not always have the effect he had hoped, Mier’s texts are expert at turning arguments upside down, ripping traditions apart, discovering points of view that others had not thought of before or that had failed to be put to good use even a centurylater. There are any number of examples. As though to refute the accusations of cannibalism leveled against Spanish-American Indians, although he does not expressly refer to these charges, he says of the Italians at the time of the Republic:
The hoi polloi, called lazzaronis [sic], are very talkative, a filthy rabble and so barbaric that… they took the decapitated corpse of each noble and carried it in front of his house, shouting for bread to be thrown to them to eat with it, and devoured the body. Human flesh was sold in the public square at a price of four granos (cuartos) for a strip four fingers wide. The only one they didn’t eat was the bishop: they were greatly offended, rather, that the the king had hanged him, when secular nobles simply had their heads cut off. (M 68)
With this passage, the inversion of the question of who is the true savage is complete. Fray Servando’s discursive maneuvers are a model of the strategies employed by the colonized to oppose imperial power (and, above all, the oppressive molds into which it forced knowledge), invaluable material for the development of a postcolonial theory for Latin America.22 His humor is well-nigh prophetic: word games such as the one just cited, which dismantle the logic of Empire, give the impression of having been written two centuries later. There is another marvelous example, a jewel that demolishes, with humor and clear-sightedness, the logic of colonization:
Discoverers! [used as a title signifying the right to rule over America that was put forward by the Spaniards], that is to say, you did not know that the greater part of the world existed: therefore on learning this, you are its masters. Hence, if the Indians had known sooner that Europe existed, were they ipso facto its masters? (Historia, vol. 14, 277)
Servando Teresa de Mier is a witness not only to two worlds but also to two eras. Hence it is difficult to pigeonhole him: he is neither a learned colonial scholar nor a Romantic writer; as a Dominican he is not an out-and-out product of the Enlightenment, nor does his life end with the Inquisition, but rather he lives on to see the coronation of the first Creole emperor. He is a transitional figure (as perhaps we contemporary readers are, trapped in the vacuum of the change of episteme created by a new millennium), a witness and a committed participant. The conflicts engendered by this transition are also part of the fascination that his work creates: like a boiling cauldron where no idea is yet a certainty, not even those that seem indispensable for the foundation of nations, so obvious and so interwoven with the image of the nation that they give the impression of having been present since the beginning of time. As seldom before or since in history, fray Servando’s era looks intently backward, forward and sideways in time: searching in our origins, in our present and in our dreams for what we are as peoples, in our own eyes and in those of others. Though Servando was born at a time of great repression (at once cultural, political and religious), he was to live part of his adult life amid the effervescence of the insurgent and of the politician who, blotting out the past and beginning all over, can sit down to imagine (and negotiate) the Mexico that for the first time is independent, the country to come.
There have been a number of studies of the colonial era in Latin America and also of what happened after independence, but Mier’s period, the period that throughout the continent is the mother and father of plans for founding a country, continues to attract the attention of scholars. We know, of course, that it is in those final years of the eighteenth century that the die was cast for the destiny of America, but there are figures in this period as gigantic as Francisco de Miranda, Simón Rodríguez, or Mier himself, who are remembered as protagonists of an exceptional history, but whose thought has not yet been exhausted or explored as deeply as it deserves.23 In fact, we speak today of the supposed romance between Empress Catherine of Russia and the Venezuelan general Miranda or of how his name came to figure on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris; we speak today of the eccentricities of Rodríguez, Simón Bolívar’s teacher, to whom the future liberator personally promises to bring about the independence of all America (the Oath of the Sacred Mountain), because of Rodriguez’s faith in the ideas of Rousseau, because he wrote under other names, such as Samuel Robinson, or because he went so far as to strip naked in class to provide an anatomical demonstration. Their images in glowing colors as founding fathers endure on the one hand, as do the anecdotes about them on the other, but the core of their meaning escapes us.
In the same way, the Account of What Happened in Europe to Dr. don Servando Teresa de Mier, After He Was Transferred There as a Result of the Proceedings against Him in Mexico from July 1795 to October 1805 was long read as the adventures of one of the most outlandish characters of the Latin American scene. The only remaining traces of fray Servando are the name of an avenue in Mexico, the fact that he was the coauthor with Simón Rodríguez of the first translation into Spanish of Chateaubriand’s Atala, or that he and Rodríguez, both fugitives, penniless and with no regular means of livelihood, founded a school in France to teach spoken Spanish.24 The echo of his adventures, above all that of his hilarious prison breaks, may also linger on, in large part thanks to the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, who takes up, and invents, the life of Mier in his novel El mundo alucinante (Hallucinations, 1969), in which he describes him as “a man of a thousand dimensions, an innocent, a rogue, an adventurer, a hothead,” an impudent fellow. In quick strokes, Arenas limns the image of the friar: “The man who traveled on foot all across Europe, experiencing unbelievable adventures, the one who suffered every sort of persecution, the tireless victim, on several occasions on the point of being burned at the stake, the habitual guest of the most dreaded prisons of America and of Europe (San Juan de Ulúa, La Cabana, Los Toribios, etc.), the patriot and political rebel, the fighter....”25 The distinguished Mexican historian and essayist Alfonso Reyes also contributes to the construction of the myth of fray Servando: “He is as light and frail as a bird, and possesses that force of levitation that the historians of miracles believe they find in saints. He makes use of the trick of disappearance with ghostlike mastery. His adventures are so extraordinary that at times they appear to be products of his imagination.” But he is quick to add: “Father Mier might have been no more than an eccentric, had his sufferings and his faith in the fate of his nation not caused him to grow in stature.”26
That reading of Mier was prompted in part by the latter’s own Memoirs, which portray him as “the picturesque victim of persecution.” (Escritos, ɛ) Like all autobiographical accounts, the Memoirs tell the story of a fictitious I, created by the author himself.27 Emir Rodríguez Monegal points out the influence on Mier of the picaresque tradition and of the model of Rousseau. “In the various autobiographical accounts he left, he was mainly concerned with setting the record of his life straight. But, like Rousseau or Casanova, he also wrote to fulfill a deeply narcissistic need: to leave behind a record of his dashing, brilliant, beautiful self,” and there is no doubt that on occasion he goes to megalomaniacal extremes.28
Be that as it may, and to return to the problem of how to read Mier’s life, it must be kept in mind that not only his writing but also all his movements as the first-person narrator tend to become myth, as do even certain events that supposedly occurred after his death in 1827. Antonio Castro Leal recounts that the Monastery of Santo Domingo exhumed fray Servando’s mummified corpse in 1842 and sold the mummy in 1861 to a certain don Bernabé de la Barra, who intended to exhibit it in Europe or America. According to this account, Mier’s mummy, as great a wanderer as Mier was in life, ended up being exhibited at a fair in Brussels as a victim of the Inquisition. (M xii)
From a heretic to a father of his country, from a mummy in a sideshow to a character in a novel, the I that narrates, and either charms or exasperates, is of interest not so much because of the biographical facts in and of themselves (regardless of their fascination), but rather as evidence of the way in which the author conceived of his specific place and role in the societies in which he was active. As Kathleen Ross notes, there are two discourses in the Memoirs: one focuses on the self as subject, the other looks outward and describes the world, reflecting the revolutionary era. As Tulio Halperín Donghi also explains, the relevance of this sort of text is “the effort to pour a life-experience into a certain [social] mold, to make it fit a certain model whose characteristics are to be individualized.”29 Mier’s account is also a sign of the “metamorphoses” that learned men undergo in this era of transition between colony and independence, hemmed in “by ideological limits and rigidly defined behavior.” Halperín adds:
The drama of the person who feels hemmed in within suffocating limits was lived out, with an intensity that took him to the verge of madness, by fray Servando Teresa de Mier. . .. The resounding failure of this attempt [to redefine a regeneration within the colonial framework], in all truth stillborn, and fray Servando’s inability to come to terms with it, give rise to texts whose richness is owed at times to an extreme, exasperated lucidity, at times to the ravings of an obsessive imagination; in the sway of this twofold inspiration fray Servando records for us the march of a quarter of a century of reflections on the experience of the dissident learned man in an Ancien Régime in the throes of death. (55–6)
Mier himself expresses it differently: “Faced with a bishop whose habit it was to preach a sermon only once every twelve years at most, a brilliant American was unable to preach anything that did not entirely accord with the bishop’s ideas without immediately provoking an attempt [on the latter’s part] to trip him up in order to destroy him, as he did in my case....” (M 181) It was not easy to be a learned man in this period of transition between the eighteenth century and the nineteenth, between the colony and independence, between being a Spaniard born in America or an American by right of birth, between that sort of Catholic Enlightenment kept under close surveillance by the Inquisition that was typical of intellectual life in Mexico and the fervor of Romanticism and palingenesis. Edmundo O’Gorman, one of the great Mier specialists, describes him as a “champion of Independence” and furthermore as “punctilious with regard to his aristocratic lineage,” ever loyal to his Catholic faith despite persecutions, so jealous of proper recognition of his academic degrees and of his prerogatives as the popes domestic prelate that it pleased him to wear the dress of a bishop (which he was not). “Possessed of a way with words, mordant, erudite, intelligent and insolent, he unfailingly captured the attention of his listeners.” O’Gorman criticizes the lack of unity of his works, the repetitions and inaccuracies, the exaggerated use of the first person; but he then immediately explains:
Let them not be disdained for that reason. His body of work is admirable; the style is original and vigorous, and all his writings, enlivened by the impassioned personality of their author, are full of unerring flashes of insight and felicitous trouvailles. Father Mier is indispensable reading for anyone who aspires to acquire a profound knowledge of the origin, the antecedents and the solutions of that great historical turning point, the political Independence of the Spanish possessions in America; and even more indispensable for anyone who is interested in learning of the tidal wave of problems that greeted those incipient republics, as incipient as they were hallucinated.30
The levels of possible interpretation, the accretions of the imaginary are a product of the strategies of the text itself: Miers heterological vocation and his comic irreverence are such that they corrupt the field of legibility. An illustrative case is that of Antonelli Gerbi, the extraordinary researcher, who loses his perspective and ends up labeling Mier a “poor and incoherent” spirit. Bold, peripatetic and megalomaniacal perhaps, and contradictory as well, but never poor in spirit. Jacques Lafaye recognizes the contradictions inherent in the I of the narrator, but at the same time he shows that, within the European millenarian atmosphere and the messianic cycle in which the war of independence in Mexico was fought, Mier’s religious and political thought was coherent.
Perhaps the worst “accusation” that could be leveled against this complex figure, the one portrayed in the Memoirs and the one in real life, would be that he was so often in the wrong place, acting at the wrong time. Two events in his life will suffice as examples. The first: he was just beginning to be famous in Mexico when he delivered the public sermon that was to cause him so many problems with the Inquisition; the sermon was intended to strengthen Creole pride in the face of Spanish colonial power, but instead of holding fast to local traditions, Mier criticized them, thereby antagonizing both the imperial authorities and many Creoles. Another example: when the Inquisition was abolished and Mexican independence was declared, Mier could have ceased at last to be a marginal figure and a fugitive and instead enjoy the privileges of power and the recognition brought him by his appointment as a deputy to the Congress; he was nearly sixty years old (the reader must keep in mind what it meant to reach that age in that era and in view of the precarious conditions in which he had lived), but he had not learned, or else refused to learn, his lesson. On the day that Agustín de Iturbide was proclaimed emperor of Mexico, fray Servando was let out of the prison of San Juan de Ulúa (where he was incarcerated at the time, not on account of his enmity toward the Inquisition, which had now disappeared, but on account of his sympathies with the cause of independence) and the emperor received him personally in Tlalpan. Before three months were out, Iturbide himself issued orders to have him imprisoned for his anti-Iturbide activities: fray Servando was once again put under lock and key in the Monastery of Santo Domingo. This friar had a certain rather odd quirk of personality: he repeatedly went about things in such a way that he found himself a man persecuted, each time for a different reason. Only the last four years of his adult life were spent without a warrant out for his capture.
In the margin of the margin, while a prisoner, he writes this text from out of the space of memory, fifteen years after the events he recounts. The value of these memories (of this gaze), centered on his escape and his wanderings through Spain, England, Italy, France and Portugal, is exceptional: “Even though in my twenty-four years of persecution I have acquired the gift of painting monsters, my discourse will make it evident that I am merely copying the originals here,” he writes implacably. (M 4)
In the Memoirs, past and present are conjoined in a single time and on a single map, where the “there” is not the primitive space of Africa or America, nor yet the touristic exotic place of travels to Jerusalem or the Mediterranean à la Chateaubriand. Past, present and the motion of otherness are represented through the gaze of a Creole American that has nothing to do with the inferiority supposedly suffered by the inhabitants of the New World. Quite the opposite is the case:
Furthermore [fray Servando repeatedly states with great pride], I am a nobleman and a gentleman, not only by virtue of my Mexican doctorate in accordance with the Law of the Indies, not only by virtue of my lineage, well-known to the most exalted nobility of Spain, inasmuch as the dukes of Granada and Altamira belong to the same house as I, and that of Mioño, to whom it is now related, its grandeur evident, but also because in America I am a descendant of the first conquistadors of the New Kingdom of León, as is recorded in the examining magistrates’ reports presented to the Tribunal, already verified within the Order, and, consequently, in accordance with the terms of the Laws of the Indies, I am a knight and gentleman of known noble ancestry with all the privileges and rights appertaining to this title in the kingdoms of Spain. (M 101)
Proud of his supposed Creole-style nobility, he also assured his readers that he was a descendant of Cuauhtémoc and Montezuma on his mother’s side, “so that on various occasions he expressed the opinion that if the Mexican empire were to be restored, he could claim the right to occupy the throne.”31 How to read assertions of this sort at a time when Europeans whiled away their time debating the question of the inferiority of the zoological species and the races of the New World, or waxing enthusiastic about the possibilities of that American space that, they believed, was about to take shape ex novo? History would have been quite different had Europe been willing to listen, instead of looking through self-interested spectacles at the map of the colonies.
This is the change of point of view, of literary genre, of cultural framework. The reader is subjected to personal anecdotes only to be obliged to go on almost without transition to social panoramas or theological reflections, attempting to weigh this information within the context of the era continually brought to mind by the text itself—it is practically impossible to dissociate in this book the autobiographical element, social biography and political analysis. It is quite possible, rather, to see the birth of the nineteenth century in the textual overlapping of all these traditions of writing, as Halperín Donghi suggests. “Here the intellectual is born—in a painful birth rife with conflict—of the colonial learned man.”32
José Servando de Santa Teresa de Mier Noriega y Guerra is born on October 18,1763, in the capital of what was then the Kingdom of New León, into a family that had counted among its members a provincial governor and a president of the Inquisition Tribunal.33 At the age of sixteen he enters the Dominican order, a decision that later on he regards as imprudent since he made it at too early an age and with insufficient knowledge. He earns a doctorate in theology and in 1792 receives his license to preach. He is an immediate success, and more and more frequently he is asked to give public sermons on important occasions. His success is as sudden as his fall will be resounding: “I shone so brilliantly in Mexico thanks to my talent, [knowledge of] literature and eloquence that, as with every outstanding American, I brought upon myself the envy and the hatred of Archbishop Haro.” (Manifiesto) The year of his disgrace is 1794: on November 8 he preaches on the anniversary of the funeral honors paid the conquistador Hernán Cortés; his talent is greeted with such enthusiasm that he is requested to give the sermon on the day of the Virgin of Guadalupe. As Mier wrote: “some seventeen days before that of [the appearance of Our Lady of] Guadalupe, councilman Rodríguez asked me to deliver the sermon for the fiesta of the Sanctuary, and as a trained orator, and one who had already preached three times on that very image and been applauded, I soon found my subject. I was rehearsing my sermon, when Father Mateos, a Dominican, told me that an attorney had recounted to him such curious things about Our Lady of Guadalupe that he had held his attention the entire afternoon.” (M 5)
The die is cast: it falls to him to give the main sermon in the Collegiate Church of Guadalupe on December 12, the feast day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, patron saint of Mexico. The viceroy, Archbishop Alonso Núñez de Haro y Peralta, the authorities and all important Creoles will be present; the young friar decides to surpass himself and deliver an unforgettable sermon, a Creole sermon. He goes to the house of the lawyer in question, a certain Licenciado Borunda, and there receives the idea that will serve as inspiration for his sermon. As he recalls it: “He told me: ‘I think that the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe dates from the time of the preaching in this kingdom of Saint Thomas, whom the Indians called Quetzacohatl [sic].” (M 5)The theory is a new version of the Guadalupan tradition according to which the Virgin appeared to the Indian Juan Diego, choosing colonial Mexico to receive her message and leaving her image imprinted on the Indians cape as proof; declaring that the image is prior to the arrival of the Spaniards in America is tantamount to a denial of the justification for the Conquest: the evangelization of the New World. It creates an immediate scandal. “The clergymen attached to the diocese deliberately misled the Mexicans as to the glory that I had attained for them with my sermon; but it was they themselves [the clergymen] who were misled. And they said that it was a Creole conspiracy meant to rob the Spaniards of the glory of having brought us the Gospel.” (M 96)Fray Servando Teresa de Mier is locked away in the monastery of Santo Domingo, and the retraction he makes is of no avail, nor is his later attempt to secure secularization. The Canons Uribe and Omaña condemn him; Archbishop Haro issues an edict decreeing that Mier be imprisoned in the monastery of Las Caldas (Santander, Spain) for ten years and deprives him in perpetuity of the right to deliver lectures and sermons or to hear confession. In disgrace and ill from fever, he is sent by ship to Cádiz, a journey that begins his odyssey of prison breaks and attempts to flee unceasing persecution by the Inquisition: nearly thirty years of defending himself against the injustice that has been done him.
To understand the dimensions of the scandal, it is necessary, first, to understand the situation in Mexico at the time, what the Virgin of Guadalupe represented, and within this framework, precisely what it was that Mier was proposing.
For part of the colonial era the Spaniards enforced the prohibition against bringing a wife to the New World, a policy that produced a burgeoning racial mixture and great social inequalities. A persons social position was measured according to a multilevel scale that went from the humblest Indian to the Spanish noble, producing a degree of hostility between human groups that the wars of independence did not succeed in mitigating completely.34 The gachupines (Spaniards born in the Peninsula) even discriminated against their own legitimate offspring, despite the fact that this progeny was 100 percent white: it sufficed to have been born in America to be looked upon as inferior, as though the climate and the atmosphere of the continent made these scions incapable of occupying public posts (this is one aspect of the inferiorization of the New World).35 This constantly gave rise to obvious resentment between one group and another.
The royal preference for appointing peninsular Spaniards to fill public posts became even more deep-rooted in New Spain after 1763, when José Moñino y Redondo, count of Floridabianca, Charles Ill’s prime minister in an effort to strengthen Spanish commerce against its competitors in Latin America broadened the colonial bureaucracy, and in an attempt to reduce corruption took steps to reduce the number of Creoles who held posts in it. As Raymond Carr has noted, the relative success of Charles Ill’s reforms began to undermine the foundations of Empire, increasing considerably the resentment between castes.36 The situation did not improve: in 1792, for instance, Archbishop Alonso Núñez de Haro—the same prelate who was to persecute fray Servando so relentlessly—ordered that Creoles be given only minor ecclesiastical posts. The Creoles began to prefer being called Americans rather than Spaniards. The enmity between Spaniards and Americans finds expression in cruel stereotypes: gachupines were regarded as ignorant misers, while Creoles were seen as well-educated spendthrifts.37
The situation in Spain was unstable: in 1795 the republican conspiracy led by Juan Picornell y Gomila was discovered, rumors of republican conspiracies proliferated in the north of the country, and many Spaniards shared the idea that their country was backward by comparison to the rest of Europe and ended up looking hopefully toward Napoleon Bonaparte. An uprising in 1808 forced Charles V to dismiss his minister Manuel de Godoy y Alvarez, Prince of Peace and of Basano, duke of Alcaudio y de Succa (royal favorite and twice prime minister) and abdicate in favor of his son, Ferdinand VII, the prince of Asturias. In Bayonne in April, Napoleon, who had already sent French troops to Spain, forced Ferdinand to abdicate in favor of Joseph Bonaparte, the emperor’s brother. The Spanish monarchy never recovered. When the masses took to the streets of Madrid to welcome Ferdinand back in 1814, the republican foundations for the antimonarchical revolutions that followed, from 1820 to 1931, were already laid.
The Creoles had been petitioning for greater political autonomy for their town councils since the middle of the eighteenth century, and Pedro Pablo Abance de Bolee, known as the count of Aranda, one of the most prominent reformers in the government of Charles III, had suspected for some time that Spain had best replace the old notion of Empire and accept independent Bourbon throne what history would have been like had these ideas been came to nothing, the social tension continued to mount the wars of independence, there was also the French Revolution of the United States, and of particular importance, Spanish helplessness in the face of Napoleon’s power and the country’s inability to supply goods to the colonies. “With Great Britain the major maritime and commercial power as its enemy, the disadvantages of ties with Spain and the advantages of Independence became clear…. The successive defeats of the Spanish forces in the peninsula, the abdication of Ferdinand VII and the ultimate failure of the Central Junta left the Spaniards feeling rootless and lost…. It was not that the Americans rose against Spain; it was that Spain fell away from America.” (Carr, 102–3)38
In Mexico, at the time when Bonaparte imprisoned Ferdinand VII, two out of every five inhabitants was an Indian, one out of every eight was a mestizo, and there were no more than seventy or eighty thousand gachupines. This meant that only one-seventieth of the total population occupied all of the administrative, ecclesiastical and military posts. Mestizos, even more discriminated against than the white Creoles, were able to find employment only as craftsmen, miners or household servants or in the low clergy. Indians were treated as contemptible foreigners; despite their having been exempted from paying tribute to the king, they were forbidden to own personal property and were made to live apart from others on barren land. Both deprivations and privileges were so extreme that poverty was widespread and the cities teemed with beggars. In accordance with the Laws of the Indies, every man able to work who was without a job was forced to choose between laboring on public works projects, entering military service or being sent to prison. “Of the 810,000 families in Mexico in 1799 Abad Queipo estimated that 540,000 were poor and, counting five to each family, there were at least 2,700,000 poor people in the viceroyalty.” (Fischer, 52–3)
In 1812, the Creoles joined forces to lend their support to the imprisoned monarch and demand their right to self-government. The ideological evolution of the Creoles is reflected in fray Servando’s thought: at first he advocates relative independence, in the manner of Blanco White, but over the years that follow he comes to realize that the system would be a farce and calls for the absolute emancipation of Mexico.39
The Creoles accused the Mexican gachupines of allying themselves with Bonaparte to ensure that Spain would surrender to the French. After 1810, during the uprising led by Miguel Hidalgo, they could give concrete expression to their longstanding resentment: the cry of “Death to the gachupines!” was heard everywhere. Hidalgo, a village priest with progressive ideas, led other priests in organizing a religious war to be waged by peasants, Indians and mestizos from Guanajuato, Guerrero, Jalisco and Michoacán, assuring them that the authorities of the viceroyalty were backing the French and the liberals. The rebel sectors held High Masses and Te Deums in the cathedrals of Valladolid and Guadalajara; following the execution of Hidalgo, another priest, José María Morelos, took over as head of the movement.
But all this happened later. At the time of Servando Teresa de Mier’s birth, the division of castes was on the rise, as was the power of the Inquisition. The schools were controlled by the clergy, whose only interest was in education as a means of producing people who would serve the Church. Despite these controls, the University of Mexico offered a high level of education to the Creoles, and the eighteenth century, like the Spain of Charles III, saw a great intellectual flowering. The natural sciences prospered, the Botanical Garden was founded and Creole writers such as Francisco Javier Clavijero, Francisco Javier Alegre, Andrés Cavo and Mariano Veyta flourished. The bishop of Michoacán, Manuel Abad y Queipo, produced an outstanding body of work from the philosophical, political and economic points of view. It is very revealing of the situation in New Spain that all the important men of learning were members of the Catholic clergy, that the principal insurgents of the war of independence were warrior priests, that the entire emancipation movement took place beneath the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and that even the declaration of Mexican independence is a document that unconditionally favored religion: in it Catholicism is proclaimed the sole national religion. It is no mere happenstance that a young man with as great an intellectual thirst as Servando Teresa de Mier decided to enter the Dominican order, thereby earning the opportunity to enter the university and obtain his doctorate in theology.
The Church was the most powerful institution in Mexico, not simply because there was only one religion but also because it had a monopoly on education and untold wealth that included buildings, loans, land holdings, urban constructions—all assets that once in the Church’s possession could not be alienated by governmental authorities. The high clergy (archbishops, bishops, prelates of the episcopal court or heads of urban monasteries and convents), was made up of peninsular Spaniards with high salaries and control over the religious orders.40 In the regular clergy were Creoles who could take holy orders, receive an education, hold certain Church posts and obtain a certain celebrity by virtue of their erudition, as in the case of Mier. This gave rise to problems, because, as the friar notes in his Memoirs, “[S]ince the Conquest it has been the constant policy of our Cabinet to keep out of America any of its sons who stands out and attracts the attention of his countrymen. If a pretext can be found, he is imprisoned as punishment.” (M 279).
The tensions between the regular and the high clergy were similar to those between castes and between Creoles and gachupines. Mier writes in his Apología:
Oh, bishops, bishops! You say that you are successors of the apostles, and would that you might ever have emulated their virtues, without any of you setting before yourselves as your model the accursed apostle Judas Iscariot. The miter and the power that your incomes give you, which except for a modest sum subtracted from them for your subsistence, belong in strictest justice to the poor of each diocese, and ought not to accompany you beyond the grave save to serve you to enter a realm of sternest justice. (M 219)
In any event, the regular clergy had access to a solid education, giving rise to the paradox whereby Mexican priests were more cultivated than those of the same level as they in Spain—a paradox or a verification of the fact that fray Servando’s vision of the world upside down, in which in the center/periphery relationship appears to be altered, is simply seeing the reality of the era by breaking through the discursive net that legitimized power over the colonies by maintaining, in order to justify itself, that they were inferior. Servando never ceases to be amazed at the ignorance of friars in Spain: “In Mexico City the royal preachers would barely pass for students practicing their rhetorical skills on Saturdays. They are idiots,” he says, confessing that it nearly made him split his sides laughing to hear the sermon of a Basilian monk. The parishioners were equally ignorant, for on seeing him people said to him: “You are laughing because he preaches to your liking, isn’t that so? He has a silver tongue.” (156)
There was a third class of priests in Mexico, the so-called low clergy (which included many white Creoles and mestizos), with little education and a salary that was scarcely enough to live on. Despite the precariousness of their situation, the priests of this low clergy had a notable influence on the people and were in the habit of preaching faith in the Virgin of Guadalupe; their hatred of gachupines was such that four out of every five Creole priests collaborated with the insurgents, despite the censure of the Church. The viceroy had to proceed with caution when it was a matter of punishing the rebel priests, out of fear of the reaction of the people, who worshipfully regarded this group as sacred.
Given this social background, it is not too daring a thesis to maintain that the war of independence against Spain would have come about sooner or later in any case and that the instability of the monarchy of Ferdinand VII merely served as a handy excuse for precipitating events. The Order of Preachers or Dominicans that fray Servando entered was Thomist: it represented ultra-orthodoxy, faith as absolute reason; the elegant and cultivated Jesuits found themselves expelled from America (Mier met many of them during his European exile) and later from Portugal, France and Spain as well.
David Brading explains the formation of the ideology of Hispano-American independence in accordance with two versions: one of them focuses on the dismemberment of the Hispanic world because of the Napoleonic invasions, a turn of events that the Creole elite took advantage of to demand the power of the colonial bureaucracy for themselves, invoking the Spanish constitution itself. The other has it that the ideas of the rights of man and of the citizen that sustained the French Revolution and the North American Declaration of Independence inspired the Creoles to destroy the old monarchic order and ethnic hierarchies. This second version is the one most frequently recounted in Latin America, citing the republican example of Simón Bolívar; but, at least in the specific case of Mexico, the necessary transition in order to break with colonial structures was slower. In fact, once independence was consolidated, instead of leading to the creation of a republic, it resulted in the coronation of Agustín de Iturbide as emperor.
“Our America takes its stand in defense of the American rights violated by the peninsular Spaniards.41 Our America takes its stand in defense of the universal rights of man and therefore of the American man, denied by monarchical despotism. But it also takes its stand in favor of the special interpretation of the history of our America created by American Spaniards. Integrating the most enlightened sectors of society, it is not surprising that history takes on the role of an affirmative ideological element of the American nation,” Ricaurte Soler writes.42
Thus, at the end of the sixteenth century, Creoles began to recall with nostalgia the era of the Conquest, whose heroism and heritage was denied them. The most intellectual among them, usually men of the cloth, began to extol the Aztec Empire as the principal glory of their Mexican fatherland. This too was part of a global phenomenon, an epistemologica! change in the West: the more secular powers, the experts, devote themselves to the esprit des nations and to specific national character. Johann Gottfried von Herder the German philosopher and poet, expresses this idea in the sentence: “Each nation, harbors within it the center of its felicity, just as a sphere possesses a center of gravity.” If the nations center of gravity was to be found within itself, then it should give evidence of very specific characteristics, it should be distinguishable from other nations.43
Writing as a serious pursuit in Mexico begins with a theological problem: if the discovery of the Indies was, as Cortes’s secretary, Francisco Lápez de Gomara maintained, “the greatest thing after the creation of the world, with the exception of the incarnation and death of the one in whom I believe,” the fact, by its importance, ought in some way to be already recorded in the sacred texts.44 At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Dominican monk Gregorio García ponders the question of whether at the time of the apostles the Gospel might already have been preached in these lands and bases his conclusion on a general principle: if Jesus had sent the apostles to preach the Gospel throughout the world, it was not possible to object that the distance across the ocean was an obstacle, for Saint Augustine had already resolved the problem by pointing out that the apostles could have been transported to one part of the world or another on the wings of angels.
A literal interpretation of Scripture made it imperative that at least one of the apostles should have evangelized the Indians fifteen centuries before the Spaniards. The Augustinians, through fray Antonio de la Calancha, were firm proponents of evangelism at such an early date, maintaining that it would be an insult to Gods merciful justice to think that since the coming of Jesus down to the arrival of the Spaniards He had left the Indians without the light of faith for so many centuries. The Franciscans were opposed, imposing the official thesis: the Indians had been kept in the dark for fifteen centuries in order that they might one day be chosen by the Lord, by a king and a people who had also been chosen. The providential right of the Spaniards appears as a divine grace, which promises the attainment of universal salvation through the intermediary of the Catholic Sovereigns.
Despite the Franciscan opposition, there was increasing devotion to a Creole virgin. Bishop Montúfar ordered an investigation and in 1555 founded the first basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Nearly a century was to go by before the Guadalupan faith was formulated in writing. In 1648 the Mexican Miguel Sánchez, a university graduate, published Imagen de la Virgen María Madre de Dios de Guadalupe, milagrosamente aparecida en México (An Image of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, of Guadalupe, which Miraculously Appeared in Mexico), in which he explains the tradition: the Virgin Mary appeared in person at Tepeyac, near Mexico City, to the illiterate Indian Juan Diego; as proof she left the imprint of her image on the Indians cape (a mantle woven of mezcal fibers). If the Virgin chose Mexico as God’s domain, the role assigned the Spaniards by Providence in America was diminished, since the divine image preceded the Conquest. The conquistadors continued to appear as the right arm of God, but the leading role belonged to the “first among Creole women.” The appearance of the Virgin conferred on Mexico a title of nobility: a nobility or grace that came not from the king but from God. The appearance of the Virgin Mary to the Indian Juan Diego signified that the Mother of God was the founder and the patron saint of the Mexican Church. This was a myth and a cult that kindled both religious devotion and patriotic sentiments (cf. Brading). It was imperative to find a new spiritual beginning: the more and more widespread cult of Guadalupe was also being identified with that of the god Quetzalcóatl, whom a number of priests had seen, beginning in the seventeenth century, as the incarnation of Saint Thomas the Apostle. From the theological point of view, the thesis is not far-fetched: Saint Gregory, in his Acta Thomae, had assured his readers that it fell to this apostle to preach in the regions supra Gangem, that is to say, to the east of India. With this religious idea of the world, it is not surprising that the Jesuits should discover signs of Saint Thomas’s preaching of the Gospel in Brazil and Paraguay (they interpreted certain religious symbols as Christian ones), that Marco Polo should discover the place where the apostle was martyred on the outskirts of Madras, or that more than one eighteenth-century apologist should stress the Christian coincidences to be found in Chinese Confucianism. The list of those who supported the thesis that Saint Thomas and Quetzalcóatl were one includes illustrious seventeenth-century figures such as the priests Bernardino de Sahagún, Diego Durán and Juan de Tovar, and in the eighteenth century, Manuel Duarte and the well-known writer Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora.45
None of these authors and none of the devoted followers of the Mexican Virgin (by 1747all the dioceses of New Spain had acclaimed Our Lady of Guadalupe as their patron saint and all the provincial capitals had erected special altars, often located on the outskirts, in emulation of her appearance at Tepeyac) dared put forth the theory of the preevangelization of America. For more than two centuries, the cornerstone of the Spanish Conquest had been evangelization, and that is where the famous sermon of 1794 that was to cost fray Servando Teresa de Mier thirty years of persecution enters history. His sermon conjoins the two traditions, as he assures his listeners that the Virgin did not appear to the Indian Juan Diego but to Saint Thomas, thereby canceling out with a single stroke of his pen the justification for the Conquest of America. “I have said that this opinion is the one that most closely conforms to Sacred Scripture, because Jesus Christ, sending his apostles forth to preach the Gospel, commanded them: ‘Go into the whole world and preach the Gospel to every creature under heaven; and be witnesses for me from Jerusalem and Judea to the ends of the earth.’ Is it feasible that in an order so compelling, general and absolute half the globe had not been included?” (M 21) Moreover, Mier maintains that if the conquistadors had recognized the Mexican religion as being a variant or a transfiguration of Christianity, the Conquest would not have necessitated the shedding of a single drop of blood. Hence the Spaniards desecrated the very religion that they professed.
The sermon is known from three different copies or versions that Mier handed over to the censors. There is also a syncretic version. Mier’s thesis differs from that of Sánchez on one basic point: the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe is the product of a meeting, which took place in Mexico, between the Virgin in person and Saint Thomas. Mier returns to this point in all his writings, but the sermon sums it up in four propositions or postulates that affirm: (1) the superiority of the Náhuatl language to others, (2) the evangelization of Mexico by Saint Thomas, (3) the great age of the image of the Virgin (it is seventeen hundred years old; therefore it is not contemporaneous with the Indian Juan Diego and 4) the biblical roots of the Mexican people. Rather than the prophetic reason that Miguel Sánchez attributes to it, Mier invents a historical reason, a sort of new lineage. Fray Servando cities dates and names, outlines conjectures and conclusions; the Virgin is the goddess Tonantzin, as she had been known by the Indians until “the Spaniards baptized her with a Saracen name, which has nothing in common with the sweet appellation of Mother of God.” (M 98)
His ideas are judged to be heterodox, and rightly so. For what underlies them is not a discussion of temporal details and goes beyond even the movements of religious fusion/conversion that had been gradually forming in the New World to further the acceptance of Catholicism as the local faith. His ideas point to a political revolution: “I say this because certain people accused me of having tried to rob Spaniards of the glory of having brought the Gospel [to Mexico]. How could I have intended to rob them of a glory that is so clearly ours, since it was that of our fathers the conquistadors, or the first missionaries, whose apostolic succession is to be found among us?” (27–8)
Alonso Núñez de Haro y Peralta, named archbishop of Mexico in 1791, was to make of the persecution of Mier a personal cause. As has already been seen, he himself, a few years before, had decreed that restrictions be placed on important ecclesiastical posts, and it is evident that this time a Creole priest has gone beyond the limits of the tolerable. It matters little that the friar offers to make a public retraction and even promises “to compose and publish at my expense a work contrary to my sermon” (M 108); Haro is implacable. (“Haro,” Mier writes, “liked only one thing about America, its hard pesos, to enrich his family.” [M 180]) Mier is brought to trial in an ecclesiastical court, he is placed on trial for heresy by an Inquisition court, and he is sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment “as a State criminal” in the monastery of Las Caldas. But before his first year as a prisoner is out, Mier cuts the lead bars of his cell and escapes through the window, leaving behind a letter in verse explaining why he has fled. He is immediately taken prisoner again and is sent to the Monastery of San Pablo (in Burgos); he manages to secure his transfer to Cádiz, and on the way there, petitions the Council of the Indies to review his case. Over the course of 1797 he writes a defense of his sermon to present to the council. In 1800 the Royal Academy of History rejects Haro’s edict and renders an opinion in Mier’s favor. Mistrustful that justice will be done him, Mier flees and is captured in Burgos, whence he will escape once again. He goes to Madrid, then to Val-ladolid and from there to France, beginning the stage of his life’s travels covered by this edition of his Memoirs. In 1802 in Italy he formally requests his secularization; he returns to Madrid and is once again imprisoned; he is then sent to Los Toribios (in Seville), escaping once more through his cell window. The story repeats; he is arrested in Cádiz and again sent to Los Toribios, this time in irons, but eventually he escapes yet again. This time he manages to cross the border and enter Portugal, where this series of adventures recounted in his Memoirs comes to an end and his life begins to take on a more political orientation: first he opposes the Napoleonic occupation, then the viceregal authorities in Mexico, and finally, Iturbide’s imperial dreams. He will then write such important texts as his Historia de la revolución de Nueva España, Memoria político-instructiva, his Apología, the Memorias and various open letters of political importance, but he will never disavow his sermon on the Virgin of Guadalupe, even though once it had been delivered, and in the face of the general scandal it aroused, he tried in vain to apologize for it.
On occasion Fray Servando contradicts himself in his defense, going so far as to admit that Borunda did not have the proofs he had promised for the Guadalupan sermon: “I confess that far from having found the indisputable proofs that the man had assured me he possessed, I discovered a fair number of absurdities characteristic of a man who was not versed in Theology, and even of any antiquarian and etymologist who begins with divinations, goes on to visions and ends up in fits of delirium. The man had read a great deal, conceived but was unable to give birth, and what he did give birth to he could not persuade me of, owing to his lack of other pertinent knowledge.” (M 108) Despite this, Mier never failed to stand his ground with regard to his thesis. Even in a text as late as “Carta de despedida a los mexicanos escrita desde el Castillo de San Juan de Ulúa por el Doctor don Servando Teresa de Mier Noriega y Guerra” (“Letter of farewell to the Mexican people written from the Castle of San Juan de Ulúa by Dr. don Servando Teresa de Mier Noriega y Guerra,” 1821), he emphasized not only his original thesis but also the biblical roots of Mexico, going so far as to use the country’s very name: “Yes, Mexico with its soft x, as the Indians pronounce it, means: where Christ is or is adored, and Mexicans means the same thing as Christians,”46 And he comes back to his accusation. “What was the religion of the Mexicans if not Christianity disordered by time …? The Spaniards…brought ruin to the very religion that they professed, and adopted as their own images that which they were in the habit of burning because they were under different symbols.”
One of Servando Teresa de Mier’s mistakes was to oppose a faith that had already become deeply rooted in his compatriots—oppose in the sense of wanting to modify it in order to make it politically more extreme. If on the one hand it is true that the bases existed for supposing that the union of Guadalupe and Quetzalcóatl could be accepted, it is also true that, by eliminating the intercession of the Spaniards, it reduced by the same token the role of the Indian Juan Diego, with whom the popular masses could more easily identify than with the remote Saint Thomas. Mier’s error lay in questioning a tradition that “had imperceptibly become another of the great symbols incarnating national aspirations.” (Ideario político, xxvi)
But in reality the arguments were a pretext for dealing out exemplary punishment to a Creole priest who had tried to be too clever. Mier explains it well: “I shall speak out clearly: all this is nothing more than a comedy in two acts with an interlude. . . . The Europeans, who despite their not believing in the tradition of Guadalupe, shouted louder than the Creoles in order to destroy the false information regarding Saint Thomas’s preaching, because they believe that it robs them of the glory of having brought the Gospel, and makes them the equal of the Indians in their own creation of the image of the Virgin of the Pillar. Unfortunately, a brilliant Creole struck precisely the right note.” (M 146–7) And a few pages later he emphasizes: “Americans, id iots that we are, the Archbishop’s Europeans made mock of us. . . . [0]ne of the reasons behind my persecution was that I secured equal favor [for the Virgins of Guadalupe and of Pillar] and made you their [the Europeans’] equals.”47 The image of Guadalupe and the tradition taken up by Miguel Sánchez (not Mier’s thesis) were raised on high by Father Hidalgo and by the insurgents, and even today they continue to represent Mexicans’ pride in their national identity.
Fray Servando’s body of work includes the Historia de la revolución de Nueva España (1813), written under the pseudonym of José Guerra, a text that has been regarded as a precursor of the thought that lay behind the movement for independence. In it Mier maintained that America was not really a colony of Spain but its equal, as decreed in the early Laws of the Indies. This idea implied that the American peoples should be able to govern themselves independently; on many counts his arguments become confused with the defense of the Mexican aristocracy. Fray Servando was the spokesman for the protest against the “otherness” of the religious orders and against the decrees giving the Creole friars no access to prelacies and wealth; it was he who set down on paper the rancor against the monarchy and the Creole protests against being obliged to assume all of the expenses of the Church in New Spain. But this does not mean that Mier supported the principle of equality or the abolition of the caste system, subjects on which he shared the reserve of Creoles in general. (Lafaye, 195et seq.)48
In the last analysis, despite the scandals, Mier was a legalist. As with most Creoles, espousal of revolution was a slow process in his case, becoming more and more pronounced as the driving force of historical events themselves increased. “I am a son of Spaniards,” he writes in his Manifiesto apologético, “I detest them only insofar as they are oppressors.” His original revolutionary act, in addition to the Guadalupan sermon and the attempt to diminish the importance of the evangelization of the New World, was to call for the application of a body of longstanding laws that formed, in his opinion, the real “American Constitution” within the framework of the Spanish monarchy. “I return to … the solemn and explicit pact that the Americans concluded with the sovereigns of Spain, which no other nation ever made more clearly; and its authentication is to be found in the very code of its laws. This is our magna carta.” {Histo ria, vol. 14) In Philadelphia in 1821, he wrote his Memoria político-instructiva, in which he says: “America is ours, because our fathers won it if there was such a thing as a right to do so; because it came from our mothers, and because we were born there. This is the natural law of peoples in their respective regions. . . . God has separated us from Europe by an immense ocean, and our interests are different.” He has turned profoundly republican: “God free us from emperors or kings. They keep none of their promises, and always end up becoming despots. All men are inclined to impose their will, without challenge. And there is nothing to which man is more accustomed.” In the Memoria político-instructiva, he was also to pen the words that were the cause of the last of his imprisonments: “Iturbide! Renounce the new opinion [giving Mexico a king according to the Plan of Iguala]. . . . Support independence; but absolute independence, independence without a new master, republican independence.”
Mier participated in the war against Napoleon Bonaparte; he carried on a correspondence with Blanco White (to whom he addressed two public documents, the first and second Carta de un americano al Español (1811 and 1812); he was elected a member of the Institut National de France (1814); he was a warrior who fought alongside Francisco Javier Mina in an attempt to liberate Mexico from the Spanish Empire (1817); he was a deputy.
The life and the work intermingle in this formidable thinker, one of the first to find the formula for imagining an autonomous America: the full observance of the Laws of the Indies, an idea that Simón Bolívar made good use of in his Carta profética. Mier also joined in the effort to recover a heroic past, exalting Montezuma and Cuauhtémoc as patriotic heroes, equating the morality of contemporary Spaniards with that of the conquistadors, thus following the best tradition of fray Bartolomé de Las Casas. Both were Dominican friars; that order—the Order of Preachers and also that of Inquisitors—tended to weigh and to denounce the excesses of the Conquest, whereas the Franciscans, for example, justified those excesses as a “necessary evil” for evangelization. This does not mean that, once condemned by the viceregal authorities, Mier received the support of the Dominicans—who were accused like all the rest of corruption—but rather that he subscribed to a critical tradition. Las Casas was the first to replace the providentialist legend (that is to say, Spain chosen as the savior of the New World) with the “black legend” of the Spanish Conquest; his denunciations were even invoked by Voltaire in the already cited Enlightenment attacks against Spain’s colonial regime.49
With regard to the dispute concerning the New World, fray Bartolomé had left a much more favorable precedent in the sixteenth century. In his De unico vocationis modo (On the Sole Way of Attracting All Peoples to the True Religion) he maintained that all the nations of the earth possess a similar level of intelligence, and in his Apologética historia sumaria de las Indias (Brief Apologetic History of the Indies) he showed that the Old and the New World were equal if they were compared both as to their barbarism and to their level of civilization. (Brading, 45–50) But, as has already been explained, polemics during the eighteenth century were based on a “borrowed language,” inherited from the language of science and its taxonomy, which gave the Encyclopedists an overall tone modeled on that of natural history that was imposed and/or super-imposed upon the colonial subject, in the guise of a “creative act issuing forth a unique, totalizing, hegemonic form of truth.”50 What Mier did in his Memoirs was to displace this “borrowed language” and apply it in reverse: what is filthy and crude is not on the periphery but in the center—a weak center, with poverty-stricken people, prostitutes, dung in the houses, priests with concubines, and governed by corrupt petty bureaucrats. The description of space is, naturally, a scientistic and legitimizing battle. It is therefore commonly asserted that both travel literature and maps were forms of the language of power and not of protest. The Memoirs serve as an invitation to a heterological rereading of these useful theories, because with marginalization and the periphery as their point of departure, Columbus’s voyage is undertaken in reverse: discovering the Old World, so as to reinscribe it and rehierarchize it, because the “place on the map … is … also a place in history,” and everything depends on how it is described.51
Fray Servando is, as I have already said, a traveler in reverse. Breasting the current of his era, he enabled his readers to reflect on reality in another way. The great Cuban writer of this century, José Lezama Lima, analyzing the greatness of this rebel priest and his historical projection, accuses him of turning out, in the long run, to be a conservative. “In Fray Servando, in that transition from the Baroque to Romanticism, we unexpectedly come across very American hidden surprises. He believes that he is breaking with tradition, when he is broadening its scope. Hence, when he believes that he is parting company with what is Hispanic, he finds it again in himself, ever on the rise. Reforming within the established order, not breaking the thread of what is Spanish but,rather, taking it up again, Fray Servando skims it off and makes it stronger, to the point of temerity. Catholicism leans on it and makes itself a throne.”52
A polemical figure even two centuries later, fray Servando Teresa de Mier deserves to be read today while taking into account the context that in his own era people were unable to see because it was too close at hand. Whether he was a conservative or a heretic, his Memoirs should be contemplated within the framework of the Spanish colonial era and the Bonapartist invasions, within the framework of the discourses of Buffon and the Encyclopedists, within the framework of the newborn (and still faltering) emancipation of America. In order to moderate the condemnation of those who accept his ideological contributions or the marvel of the “upside-down gaze” that his writings bring to bear on Europe, yet reject his bold Guadalupan theses, one need only call to mind how difficult the status of a supporter of the movement for independence must have been in New Spain. After three centuries of domination, thinking of oneself as independent was a real feat, even more so if we take into account the fact that the majority of the tools in vogue for proclaiming freedom among men were tools that made Americans out to be inferior. It is not surprising that there was more than one error made or blind swipe dealt in the search for images that would call forth republican sentiments and action. To this overall picture there must be added a most peculiar sociocultural condition; unlike other latitudes in which the arrival of the nineteenth century meant the separation of the powers of Church and State, Mexican independence was not achieved beneath the banner of the rights of Americans: the war was begun with the image of the Virgin and the initial cry of “Long live religion!”
Fray Servando’s life work lies between eras, between worlds: from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, from colonial status to independence, from America to Europe, from the Church to the Congress or the university. He was heretic, megalomaniac, rebel, character in a novel, and father of his country, a man perhaps sometimes misguided but also a visionary. The value of Mier’s Memoirs lies in the fact that—as a space par excellence outside imperial power, within Mexico and abroad—it is writing underscored by a perpetually differentiating, disorderly, dissident gesture; the reader will find his upside-down gaze contagious.
—Susana Rotker
1. The page numbers between parentheses refers to this edition.
2. Quotations from fray Mier’s Memorias (Memoirs), vol. 1, in the edition by Antonio Castro Leal, (Mexico City: Porrúa, 1946) will be indicated in the text by an “M” in parentheses, followed by the page number.
3. The monastery of Las Caldas, in the diocese of Santander (Spain), is the place to which Father Mier was sent from Mexico as punishment for his sermon on the Virgin of Guadalupe. He was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment there.
4. Mier was not the only traveler of his time who made frequent references to the body and to the vulgarity of European habits; cf. John Macdonald, Memoirs of an Eighteenth-Century Footman (London: Century, 1985) [1745–79]. Although Mier was the first Mexican to write about Spanish reality, there were a few other Americans who also criticized the social injustices and European urban poverty of that era, among them Simón Rodríguez; see Inventamos o erramos, ed. Dardo Cúneo (Caracas: Monte Avila, 2d ed., 1982).
5. See Peter Stallybras and Allon White, The Politics & Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986); M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hé;lè;ne Iswolsky (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968); Norbert Elias, The History of Manners, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon, 1987).
6. Except when otherwise indicated, in order to avoid repetition all references in the text immediately following concerning covachuelos and Spain are taken from M 234–47.
7. In the prologue to Historia de la conquista y población de la provincia de Venezuela (Caracas: Ayacucho, 1992) by José de Oviedo y Baños, there is a wide-ranging reflection on the Spanish disdain toward the New World and its effect on literature: “[I]f imperial culture itself did not discover epic traits in the captains of overseas territories, from what locus of speech, from what desperate backwater of silence ought those men lost in the vastness of America, the heirs of contempt, whose voices rarely reached the threshold of the Court, to have constructed their first accounts?” Citation from the preliminary study by Tomás Eloy Martínez and S. Rotker, xiii.
8. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1951); Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York: Norton,1969); Ulrich Im Hoff, Europa de la Ilustración (Madrid: Grijalbo,1993); Mark Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialéctica del iluminismo, trans. H. A. Murena (Buenos Ares: Sur,1994); Pierre Saint-Amand, The Laws of Hostility: Politics, Violence, and the Enlightenment, foreword by Chantal Mouffe, trans. Jennifer Curtis Gage (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1996); H. M. Scott, ed., Enlightened Absolutism: Reform and Reformers in Late Eighteenth-Century Europe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,1990). Of great interest: Arthur Preston Whitaker, Latin America and the Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1967).
9 Antonelli Gerbi, La disputa del Nuevo Mundo: Historia de una polémica, 1750–1900, trans. Antonio Alatorre (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica,2d ed., corrected and expanded,1982), 397.
10. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze selects a series of basic texts for understanding of the subject. See Race and the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Blackwell,1997), 33.
11. Aristotle defined the rationality of the human being by his ability to live in a society organized more or less along the lines of Athenian democracy. The Encyclopedists, seeing themselves as the embodiment of the Age of Reason itself, extended the concept by pairing the “cultivated” (now called the “civilized”) against the barbarians. Aristotle’s line of reasoning was to be used to support the opposite argument and rehabilitate America, since the architecture and the social complexity of the Aztecs, Mayas and Incas refuted the thesis of America as the locus of barbarism.
12. A large part of the information that follows, concerning the Spanish versions of the New World, including citations of texts, is taken from Manfred Tietz, “La visión de América y de la conquista en la España del siglo XVIII,” in El precio de la “invención” de América, ed. Reyes Mate and Friedrich Niewöhner, (Barcelona: Anthropos,1992) 219–34.
13. In his Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias(1542), Bartolomé de Las Casas characterized the Spaniards as thieves, torturers and murderers of defenseless Indians, “with the result that after half a century of European colonization, some fifteen million Indians had disappeared from the face of the Earth.” (Brading,45) These memoirs of Las Casas were partially responsible for the abolition of the encomienda system in the New World.
14. See René Jara, “The Inscription of Creole Consciousness: Fray Servando Teresa de Mier,” in 1492–1992: Re/Discovering Colonial Writing, ed. René and Nicholas Spadaccini (Minneapolis: The Prisma Institute,1989), 349–79.
15. Many other books deal with the same subject as Gerbi’s. A useful one is the overview in Tzevan Todorov’s La conquista de América: El problema del otro, trans. Flora Botton Burlá (Mexico City: Siglo XXI,3d ed.,1991).
16. On the influence of the Enlightenment in Spain, see Richard Herr, The Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1958). On the eclectic Enlightenment in Latin America, see José Carlos Chiara-monte’s excellent prologue to his Pensamiento de la Ilustración: Economía y sociedad iberoamericanas en el siglo XVIII (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho,1979). Chiara-monte says: “The fact that the intellectual movement of the nineteenth century is regarded as being the heir of revolutionary anti-metropolitan ideology led to a global condemnation of the colonial past and spared from this condemnation only those expressions that could be considered to be antecedents of independence, that is to say, primarily, enlightened manifestations dating from the late eighteenth century. The polemical attitude of Romanticism toward eighteenth-century rationalism, insofar as it had to do with Ibero-American expressions of the Enlightenment, was thus attenuated on certain planes. And consequently, the influence of the Enlightenment endured for a much longer time and with unusual vigor even at the height of the Romantic and positivist period, being safeguarded by the continual eclecticism of local thought as well.” (xii).
17. The antuerpia is a marine boar that was sighted in1537, according to Antonio Torquemada in his Jardín de flores curiosas (Salamanca,1570), cited by Alfonso Reyes, “De un autor censurado [Torquemada] en el Quijote” Obras completas, vol.6 (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica,1957), 378.
18. Gerbi, quoted in footnote,256. See also David Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots and the Liberal State, 1492–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1991); the quotations translated above are based on the edition in Spanish, Orbe indiano: De la monarquía católica a la república criolla, 1492–1867, trans. Juan José Utrilla (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Econòmica,1994), 82–83.
19. In order to reflect on this problem in relation to countries of the Third World in their postcolonial status, or that of “post-colonies,” see Partha Chatter-jee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1986).
20. There is an excellent article on the way in which the colonized subject incorporates the “borrowed language” (or the “imperial gaze”) in order to represent itself: Iris M. Zavala’s “Representing the Colonial Subject,” in 1492–1992: Re/Discovering Colonial Writing, 323–48. Another indispensable book is Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge,1992).
21. On the later development of ideas on emancipation in Latin America, see E. Bradford Burns, The Poverty of Progress (Berkeley: University of California Press,1980); also my prologue to Ensayistas de nuestra América, vol. 1 (Buenos Aires: Losada,1994).
22. On postcolonial theory useful for this specific approach, see Homi K. Bhabha, “A Question of Survival: Nations and Psychic States,” in Psychoanalysis and Cultural Theory: Thresholds, ed. James Donald (New York: St. Martins Press,1991), 89–103; “The Other Question: The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse,” in Screen twenty–four (1983): 18–36; and The Location of Culture (London-New York: Routledge,1994). Also Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,1993); Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (New York-London: Routledge,1989); and Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson, eds., Describing Empire: Post-Colonialism and Textuality (New York-London: Routledge,1994).
23. A number of excellent collections of documents endeavor to fill the vacuum of materials concerning this period in Latin America in general, for instance the previously mentioned Pensamiento de la ilustración: Economía y sociedad iberoamericanas en el siglo XVIII by José Carlos Chiaramonte, and although it concentrates on a slightly later period, Pensamiento político de la emancipación (1790–1825), 2 vols., prologue by José Luis Romero, ed. J. L. Romero and Luis Alberto Romero (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho,1977).
24. The authorship of the translation is a matter of dispute. Servando maintains that it is his work and says that “it was printed under the name of Robin-son, because this is a sacrifice demanded of poor authors by those who pay the expenses of having their works printed.”(20) This self-attribution would appear to be an overstepping of the limits on his part: Simón Rodríguez was as poor as he was and could scarcely have exploited him as a ghost writer in order to show off talents not his own. The maneuver seems, rather, to have been an act of revenge for the concrete fact that all the labors of translation finally appeared under the name Samuel Robinson; all the evidence points to the fact that it was a cotranslation.
25. El mundo alucinante has, among its merits, that of having popularized the figure of the Mexican friar. It has also aided in making a myth of him: taking all the liberties with history that fiction permits, Arenas casts his character Mier as the protagonist of this sort of “formless, desperate poem, this galloping, torrential lie, irreverent and grotesque, desolate and loving, this (it must have a name of some sort) novel,” as Arenas himself defines it at the end of the prologue that he added to the Monte Avila edition of the novel (Caracas,1980). This prologue is entitled “Fray Servando, Indefatigable Victim.” Arenas’s novel about Mier has produced in turn a great many interesting studies, for example: Perla Rozenc-vaig, Reinaldo Arenas: Narrativa de transgresión (Mexico City: Oasis,1986); Julio E. Hernández Miyares and Perla Rozencvaig, comps. Reinaldo Arenas: Alucinaciones, fantasía y realidad (Illinois: Scott, Forsman,1990); Francisco Soto, Reinaldo Arenas: The Pentagonia (Gainesville: University Press of Florida,1994); Alicia Borinsky, “Re-escribir y escribir: Arenas, Menard, Borges, Cervantes, Fray Servando” in Revista Iberoamericana (julio-diciembre1975): 605–16.
26. Alfonso Reyes, “Fray Servando Teresa de Mier,” in Visión de Anáhuacy otros ensayos (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica,1983), 33.
27. The mania for speaking at such length about oneself was not an exception in this period. Another distinguished traveler, a European, from a wealthy family and with access to official circles, was Viscount François-Auguste-René Chateaubriand. As is true of fray Servando, his major preoccupation was to talk about himself, to create himself as a fictional character(Mémoires d’outre-tombe, the writing of which Chateaubriand began in 1810).
28. Emir Rodríguez Monegal, ed., The Borzoi Anthology of Latin American Literature, vol.1 (New York: Knopf,1977), 16.
29. Tulio Halperín Donghi, “Intelectuales, sociedad y vida pública en Hispanoamérica a través de la literatura autobiográfica,” in El espejo de la historia: Problemas argentinos y perspectivas latinoamericanas (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana,1987), 53.
30. Cited by Edmundo O’Gorman in the prologue to his edition of Servando Teresa y Mier’s Ideario político (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho,1978), x–xi.
31. Cited in Servando Teresa de Mier’s Ideario politico, x. Other works by O’Gorman of the greatest interest: “Fray Servando Teresa de Mier,” in Seis estudios históricos de tema mexicano (Mexico City: Universidad Veracruzana,1960), 59–148, and “Estudio preliminar,” in Obras completas de Servando Teresa de Mier (Mexico City: UNAM,1981).
32. On literary genres in the Mexican Enlightenment, see Jean Franco, “La heterogeneidad peligrosa: Escritura y control social en vísperas de la independencia mexicana,” in Hispamérica, 34–35, (1983): 3–34.
33. In addition to Leal, O’Gorman and other studies cited, see also: Leda Arguedas, “Fray Servando: la contradicción de la nacionalidad,” in Letterature d’ America 5, no.21 (Inverno1984): 29–45; Marie-Cécile Benassy-Beding, “De Sigüenza y Góngora a Fray Servando Teresa de Mier: Vision de I’lndien par le Créole et enjeu politique,” in Les Représentations de I’autre dans I’espace ibérique et ibéro-américain, II: Perspective diachronique, ed. Agustín Redondo (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle,1993), 107–5; Margarita Bera Pierini, “De un fraile heterodoxo en la España de Carlos IV: Las Memorias de fray Servando,” in Actas del Congreso de Hispanistas: España en América y América en España, ed. Luis Martínez Cuitino (Buenos Aires: Instituto de Filología,1993), 806–15; Guadalupe Fernández Ariza, “Fray Servando en Madrid: Crónica de un romántico destierro,” in Anales de literatura hispanoamericana 22 (1993): 55—69; José Ignacio García Noriega, “Vida de Fray Servando Teresa de Mier,” in Boletín del Instituto de Estudios Asturianos 41 (1987): 299–310; Bedford K. Hadley, The Enigmatic Padre Mier (Austin: University of Texas Press,1955); Silva Herzog, “Fray Servando Teresa de Mier,” in Cuadernos Americanos, 154 (1967): 162–69; René Jara, “El criollismo de Fray Servando Teresa de Mier,” in Cuadernos Americanos 222 (1979): 141–62; Alfonso Junco, El increíble Fray Servando. Psicología y epistolario (Mexico City: Jus,1959); Luis H. Pena y Magdalena Mais, “El discurso de la identidad y la identidad del discurso. Memorias del padre Mier,” in Secolas Annals 24 (1993): 50–57.
34. See Lillian Estelle Fisher, The Background of the Revolution for Mexican Independence (New York: Russell òc Russell,1934); Doris M. Ladd, The Mexican Nobility at Independence, 1780–1826 (Austin: ILAS, University of Texas,1978); David Brading, The First America Prophecy and Myth in Mexican History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1984); David Brading, Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763–1810 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1971); Netti Lee Benson, ed., Mexico and the Spanish Cortes, 1810–1822: Eight Essays (Austin and London: Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas Press,1966); Charles Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519–1810 (Stanford: Stanford University Press,1964).
35. See also: José Miranda, Vida colonial y albores de la independencia (Mexico City: Sep-Setentas,1972); Francisco Morales, Clero y política en México (1764–1834): Algunas ideas sobre la autoridad, la independencia y la reforma eclesiástica (Mexico City: Sep-Setentas,1977); Navarro González, Cultura mexicana moderna en el siglo XVIII (Mexico City: UNAM,1964); Jaime E. Rodríguez O., ed., The Independence ofMexico and the Creation of the New Nation (University of California: Latin American Center Publications, Los Angeles; Mexico/Chicano Program, Irvine,1989); Frank Tannenbaum, Peace by Revolution: An Interpretation of Mexico (New York: Columbia University Press,1933).
36. Raymond Carr, Spain, 1808–1839 (London: Oxford University Press,1966, reprinted1975).
37. Before the end of the seventeenth century, there were seven universities in Hispano-America (at least a hundred years before the establishment of the first one in the United States), all created on the models of Salamanca and Paris. Instruction, despite the religious influence, was on a very high level; the problem was that the Creoles had so few public offices open to them that there was soon a superabundance of lawyers.
38. Nigel Glendinning, A Literary History of Spain: The Eighteenth Century (London: Ernest Benn; New York: Barnes & Noble,1972); W. N. Hargreaves-Mawdesley, Eighteenth-Century Spain, 1700–1788:A Political, Diplomatic and Institutional History (London: MacMillan,1979); Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, Historia de los heterodoxos españoles (Buenos Aires: Espasa Calpe,1951).
39. José María Blanco y Crespo was a famous Spanish journalist and liberal taken in as a refugee in London, where he wrote under the name of Joseph Blanco White. He was editor of the periodical El Español (1810–14), in whose pages he pleaded in favor of efforts to avoid a rupture between Spain and its American colonies by limiting the power of the monarch and giving the New World greater autonomy.
40. In Europe the division of classes among members of the Church was similar. In order to be named a bishop, proof of four aristocratic forebears was required. Later the requirement was even more strict: it was necessary to prove the nobility of sixteen, or even thirty-two, forebears. See Ulrich Im Hoff’s La Europa de la Ilustración.
41. “As in the mother country, a new interpretation of history contributed to the formation of a new ideology. The study of the pre-Columbian past provided the basis for the notion of a Mexican empire and post-conquest history seemed to confirm the existence of an American constitution. This line of thought culminated in the writings of Father Servando Teresa de Mier. His Idea de la Constitución dada a las Américas por los reyes de España antes de la invasión del antiguo despotismo argued that New Spaniards were mestizos who possessed rights derived from two sources: their Indian progenitors, who originally possessed the land, and their Spanish ancestors, who in conquering Mexico obtained privileges from the crown, including the right to convene their own cortes. Mier declared: ‘Our kings, far from having considered establishing a colonial system in our Americas, not only made our [kingdoms] equal with Spanish [ones] but also granted us the best [institutions] she possessed.’ He believed the early sixteenth century to have been ‘the age of the true constitution of America.’” Jaime E. Rodriguez O., ed., The Independence of Mexico and the Creation of a New Nation, 32.
42. Ricaurte Soler, Idea y cuestión nacional latinoamericanas: De la independencia a la emergencia del imperialismo (Mexico City: Siglo XXI,1980), 40–41.
43. Cf. David Brading, Prophecy and Myth in Mexican History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1971) and Jacques Lafaye, Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe (University of Chicago Press,1976). A large part of the references utilized below come from the indispensable collection Testimonios históricos guadalupanos, Ernesto Torre Villar and Ramiero Navario de Ande, comps. (Mexico City: Fondo de cultura Economica,1982) and also from El heterodoxo guadalupano: Obras completas [of Mier], vols.1–3, ed. Edmundo O’Gorman (Mexico City: UNAM,1981).
44. I owe the part that follows to the generosity of Tomás Eloy Martínez, who allowed me to use the (unpublished) notes of a seminar he prepared on the nation and the Guadalupan tradition (University of London,1990).
45. Lafaye’s Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe is a marvelous study of the formation of a national consciousness in Mexico through these inquiries of a religious nature. It is also worth citing Brading’s thesis, according to which the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Mexico can scarcely be interpreted as “a mere passive absorption of the currents of Enlightenment thought.”
46. This and the following quotation are from Mier’s Ideario político, 8–11.
47. See also: Ernesto de la Torre Villar and Ramiro Navarro de Anda, comps., Testimonios históricos guadalupanos (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Econòmica,1982); Jacques Lafaye, Mesías, cruzadas, utopías: Eljudeocristian-ismo en las sociedades ibéricas, trans. Juan José Utrilla (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura,1984); Bernardo Bergoend, La nacionalidad mexicana y la Virgen de Guadalupe (Mexico City: Jus,1968).
48. See also John V. Lombardi, The Political Ideology of Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, Propagandist for Independence (Cuernavaca: Sondeos, n. 25,1968).
49. See Irving A. Leonard, Los libros del conquistador, trans. Mario Monte-forte Toledo (Mexico City: fondo de Cultura Econòmica,2d ed.,1979).
50. Iris M. Zavala, “Representing the Colonial Subject” in 1492—1992: Re/Discovering Colonial Writing, 332. She adds: “Within this conception of knowledge based on the natural sciences, the associations and contiguities led to a technology of observing, dissecting and reordering objects (facts) according to mental imaginary constructs, which could then be inserted in the all-encompassing, systematic, ordering of knowledge. Buffon’s borrowed language projected an identity of the New World as weak, indifferent, incapable of progress (modernity), because the Americans (Indians) were limited to the satisfaction of immediate needs.”(333) Kathleen Ross confirms this sort of interpretation of the facts: “I read the Memorias as a natural history of the Old World, a direct descendant of the sixteenth-century histories of Las Casas and Acosta,” she writes in “A Natural History of the Old World: the Memorias of Fray Servando Teresa de Mier,” in Revista de Estudios Hispánicos XXIII (octubre1989): 90.
51. Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose, eds., Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies (New York and London: The Guilford Press,1994), 14.
52. José Lezama Lima, “El romanticismo y el hecho americano” in La expresión americana, (Madrid : Alianza,1969), 90.