Colonial Loyalties

Celebrating the Spanish Monarchy in Eighteenth-Century Lima

María Soledad Barbón

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780268106478
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Lateinamerikanische & karibische Geschichte

Colonial Loyalties is an insightful study of how Lima's residents engaged in civic festivities in the eighteenth century. Scholarship on festive culture in colonial Latin America has largely centered on "fiestas" as an ideal medium through which the colonizing Iberians naturalized their power. María Soledad Barbón contends that this perspective addresses only one side of the equation.

Barbón relies on unprecedented archival research and a wide range of primary sources, including festival narratives, poetry, plays, speeches, and the official and unofficial records of Lima's city council, to explain the level at which residents and institutions in Lima were invested in these rituals. Colonial Loyalties demonstrates how colonial festivals, in addition to reaffirming the power of the monarch and that of his viceroy, opened up opportunities for his subjects. Civic festivities were a means for the populace to strengthen and renegotiate their relationship with the Crown. They also provided the city's inhabitants with a chance to voice their needs and to define their position within colonial society, reasserting their key position in the Spanish empire with respect to other competing cities in the Americas.

Colonial Loyalties will appeal to scholars and students interested in Latin American literature, history, and culture, Hispanic studies, performance studies, and to general readers interested in festive culture and ritual.

CHAPTER ONE

The Politics of Praise

In colonial Lima, all civic celebrations were carefully monitored and documented by the local authorities in Lima and the Consejo de Indias (Council of the Indies), which administered the overseas realms on behalf of the king in Spain. They were recorded, to a certain extent, through pictures, but above all they were preceded, accompanied, and followed by a flood of texts. Part of this documentation was submitted by the colonial subject of his or her own accord, as for instance in the petitions for favors that were sent to Spain once the festivities were over. Mostly, however, we are dealing with texts whose production was either encouraged or directly requested by the Crown and the local authorities. Among the latter group are some of the main written sources for the study of colonial celebrations: the laudatory speech (oración panegírica) delivered at one of the strongholds of the Creole elite, the University of San Marcos, for the welcome of the new viceroy; the cartel del certamen poético, the lengthy announcement and program of the poetry contest in honor of the viceroy, also sponsored by the University of San Marcos; the poetry composed for the king and his alter ego, the viceroy, on festive events; and the official court-sponsored festival account (relación de fiestas) depicting the processions through the streets of Lima, the royal exequies, the proclamation, and the following days of popular entertainments, that is, the so-called fiestas reales (royal festivities) or fiestas de plaza (festivities in the square), because they took place on the main square. All of these works followed to a certain degree the literary conventions of the panegyric. For this reason, they cannot be reduced to sources that simply provide us with factual information about the celebrations. The study of monarchical celebrations also has to take into account the particularities of the epideictic genre, the oratory of praise (and blame).¹

With the exception of the relación de fiestas, which has served cultural historians as the main narrative source for the reconstruction of colonial festivities, this vast corpus of laudatory literature remains understudied. Because of their highly conventionalized discourse, these texts have frequently been dismissed as mechanical imitations of preestablished models devoid of any literary merit and servile recognitions of the colonial order, in other words, as expressions of a poetics of empire, a genre that helped to maintain the hegemonic rule. The works of Pedro Peralta y Barnuevo (1664–1743)²—arguably Peru’s most prominent scholar and writer in the eighteenth century—have received considerable attention.³ However, critical studies have mostly focused on Peralta’s role as a member of the academic tertúlias, or literary gatherings, organized by Viceroy Marquis of Castell dos Rius in 1709 and 1710,⁴ and not on his participation in the academic reception of a new vice-sovereign or the festivals staged between 1723 and 1725 in honor of Louis I. The remarkable scarcity of studies on the panegyric genre suggests that the verdict pronounced by the Peruvian historian José de la Riva-Agüero many years ago for the poetry and speeches penned for the viceroy’s reception in San Marcos continues to be the prevalent position with regard to the panegyric within colonial literary studies: “All of these academic eulogies, with the exception, partly, of the one for Viceroy Guirior authored by Bouso Varela, are deplorable: they are as affected and monstrous in their form as they are low and servile in their content. Whoever writes the history of servility in Peru . . . will surely strike pay dirt in the study of the academic receptions in colonial times” (Todos estos elogios académicos, salvo en parte el del Virrey Guirior por Bouso Varela, son lamentables: tan afectados y monstruosos por la forma como bajos y serviles por el fondo. El que escriba la historia del servilismo en el Perú . . . ha de encontrar seguramente en los recibimientos universi- tarios el más rico filón de su estudio en la Colonia) (Riva-Agüero, “Don José Baquíjano y Carrillo,” 19—20).⁵ The only welcome speech that has garnered scholarly attention, because of the controversy it sparked among colonial authorities, has been the one delivered by José Baquíjano y Carrillo (1751–1817) in 1781 for Viceroy Agustín de Jáuregui. Thus, a systematic analysis of the large panegyric corpus produced in the wake of the welcome of the new viceroy or for royal celebrations is still lacking.

A closer look at these texts, however, defies Riva-Agüero’s categorical assertion about the servile nature of the panegyric. It reveals that within the set of rules stipulated for epideictic oratory since classical antiquity there was a certain flexibility that allowed overseas subjects to voice their demands and adapt the genre based on changing political circumstances. The epideictic genre, the oratory of praise or blame, was one of the three branches of rhetoric described by Aristotle and later developed by rhetoricians, among others by Quintilian in his Institutio Oratoria (The Orator’s Education). According to Quintilian, the laudatory speech (genus de- monstrativum; 3.7; 103–17) had to follow a chronological tripartite structure (temporibus tribus) and, contrary to the deliberative oratory (genus delibe- rativum), the positive evaluation of its object was not to be under dispute but something tacitly agreed upon between the orator and his audience. Hence the misleading assumption that the exclusive function of this particular rhetoric genre was to preserve the political status quo. When the object of praise was a man (laus hominum), the first part of the panegyric addressed his past (tempora, quodque ante eos fuit; “times before they were born"); the second his lifetime ([tempora] ipsi vixerunt; “their own lifetimes"); and the third his afterlife ([tempora] quod est insecutum; “the times after their death") or future, if he was still alive (3.7; 106-7). In the colonial context, therefore, the first part of a panegyric speech described the illustrious ancestors of the monarch or the viceroy, the second was a summary of his political and military achievements while emphasizing simultaneously the traditional virtues of an exemplary leader, and the third concluded with the hopes pinned by his subjects on his future government and the promise of honor and fame. The same order was maintained for the invective, just in reverse of the content.

The object of praise could also be a city. Although Quintilian kept this particular section on the panegyric short and rather vague, he did point out a few characteristics that are easily recognizable in the praise of the viceroyalty of Peru and of Lima, which is an integral component of many of the texts analyzed here. They include the encomium of the magnificence of its architecture, extolling the splendor of its festivals as well as the beauty and fertility of its localities. The age of a city is supposed to enhance its authority, while the city’s founder is equated with the figure of the father; Quintilian writes, “Citizens give credit to cities as children are to parents” (3.7; 115).

Of the different sets of panegyrics produced on festive occasions, the eulogies pronounced at the University of San Marcos during the welcome of the viceroy were the ones that most closely followed the guidelines articulated by Quintilian for the genus demonstrativum in that they contained all three stipulated parts, at least, as we will see in the next section of this chapter, until 1762. The panegyric also determined the cartel del certamen poético and the festive poetry, and it provided one of the subtexts for the relación de fiestas, without always following, however, the tripartite structure. In all of these texts, the praise of the new dignitary was coupled with a portrait of the magnificence of the viceroyalty and the city of Lima, its buildings, institutions, and citizens. As a result, and this is very important to always bear in mind, not one but two protagonists emerged from these works and the celebrations they described: the king and/or the viceroy, on the one hand, and the overseas subjects, on the other.⁶

The importance of the colonial subject in this particular context and the panegyric’s potential for ambiguity is underscored by Pierre Bour- dieu’s contention that every act of institution—in our specific case, the institution of a new king or his viceroy—is “an act of communication, but of a particular kind: it signifies to someone what his identity is, but in a way that both expresses it to him and imposes it on him by expressing it in front of everyone . . . and thus informing him in an authoritative manner of what he is and what he must be" (Language and Symbolic Power, 121; emphasis in the original). Praise, the French sociologist asserts, is one of the many acts of “naming” (105). It is not just an observational statement that simply records something that is already a given, but a creative act that brings the object of praise into existence by assigning it an essence. In his critique of John L. Austin’s theory of speech acts, Bourdieu shows that many of the statements that the British philosopher of language had classified as “constative” or descriptive are, in fact, simultaneously performative speech acts if we consider the pragmatic setting in which they have been uttered, such as the time, the place, and the agent who pronounces them.

Hence, in praising the king’s or the viceroy’s virtues (his magnanimity, his justice, his prudence, his liberality, his magnificence, his courage, and his temperance, to name just a few) during his rite of institution, the limenos were reiterating their loyalty and vassalage, but they were also telling him what he was supposed to be, “that he possesses such and such property, and . . . that he must conduct himself in accordance with the social essence which is thereby assigned to him” (Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 106). This was, in fact, already recognized by Aristotle, who asserted in his Rhetoric that “to praise a man is in one respect akin to urging a course of action Consequently, whenever you praise anyone, think what you would urge people to do; and when you urge the doing of anything, think of what you would praise a man for having done” (1367b-1368a). Lima’s eighteenth-century panegyrists were fully aware of the opportunities provided by the panegyric. “The praise bestowed on the ancestors,” Pedro Peralta y Barnuevo maintains in Lima triumphante, his relación of Viceroy Marquis of Castell dos Rius’s reception at the University of San Marcos in 1707, “[are] crowns intended for their descendants, and their examples are visible precepts which carry before them their execution” (Las alaban- zas que se dan a los passados . . . [son] coronas que se proponen para los futuros, y sus exemplos preceptos visibles, que llevan las mismas execu- siones por delante) (fol. [60r]).⁷

In this chapter I will analyze various sets of panegyric sources: first, the oración panegírica, in tandem with the cartel del certamen poético, then the celebratory poetry, and, finally, the relación de fiestas. I am interested, on the one hand, in the material information they provide about the organization and execution of the festivities, and, on the other, in how this information is presented, the political purposes and, at times, ambiguity of the subjects' praise of authorities, and in the case of the oración panegírica, the adjustments made within this panegyric subgenre, including the repercussions it had on viceregal politics and receptions. As I hope will become clear throughout this book, the colonial authorities in Peru and Spain were well aware of those ambiguities. They did not simply perceive these texts as standard reiterations of loyalty or servility, but closely followed and reacted to them.

WELCOMING THE VICEROY AT SAN MARCOS

Several months after making his solemn entrance into Lima, every new viceroy was officially welcomed in a separate grand ceremony by the faculty of the University of San Marcos as their “patron” and “protector.” Of all the public acts for the incoming viceroy that he observed during his stay in Lima, it was this academic reception that most interested the famous Spanish explorer Antonio de Ulloa, who dedicated a few paragraphs to the depiction of this event in his 1784 Viaje a la América Meridional (A Voyage to South America) (65-66). Nevertheless, detailed descriptions of San Marcos’s welcome reception for the viceroy are scarce. The university would at the end present to the viceroy and other dignitaries beautifully bound books that reprinted either the oración panegírica, the cartel del cer- tamen poético, or the prizewinning poems, and, in some rare cases, all three, but only two of all the volumes published during the eighteenth century offer a narrative of the actual ceremony: Lima triumphante (Triumphant Lima) (1708) and El cielo en el Parnasso (Heaven in Parnassus) (1736), honoring the arrival of the Marquis of Castell dos Rius in 1707 and of Viceroy Marquis of Villagarcia in 1736, respectively. Both accounts were authored by Pedro Peralta y Barnuevo, yet Lima triumphante is notably longer and provides far more detail than El cielo en el Parnasso. This, I believe, is no coincidence and is due to the particular political circumstances. The Marquis of Castell dos Rius was the first viceroy appointed under the new Bourbon rule, and Peralta was keenly aware that he was targeting a new metropolitan readership, the Bourbon administration, that he needed to bring up to speed with the situation of the viceroyalty in general and that of the university and its customs and traditions in particular. Academic receptions had been taking place in San Marcos since the seventeenth century (Bromley, “Recibimientos de los virreyes en Lima,” 34), and several comments made in passing by Peralta throughout his relación suggest that this one did not differ substantially from those held under the Habsburg rule, the only important exception being that this particular welcome featured maybe for the first time a poetic competition in honor of the viceroy, a competition that would henceforth become an essential part of the welcome ceremony organized by the university.

The preparations for the incoming viceroy’s reception at San Marcos typically began before his public entrance into Lima, often as soon as the city learned about his impending arrival and before the outgoing viceroy had relinquished office. In consultation with the faculty, the rector would commission one of the professors to write the eulogy and, from 1707 onwards, determine the topics of the poetry competition in honor of the viceroy (Peralta y Barnuevo, Lima triumphante, fol. [57r-v]). This contest was publicized in the cartel del certamen, which spelled out the topics of the poems and which had been prepared by another prominent faculty member. The cartel was then festively paraded through Lima. The procession started at the University of San Marcos and ended in the main square. It was led by those members of the university and the three royal colleges (reales colegios) that had also participated in the solemn entry of the vice-sovereign. At the center of the procession there was the rector of the university, who carried in his right hand a golden flagpole to which the cartel had been attached (fol. [65v]). Once the parade had reached its destination, the cartel was fixed for everyone to read to one of the porticos that framed the plaza mayor (fol. [67r] ). The poets were given a few days to submit their works, and shortly before the academic reception, a panel of judges evaluated the submissions.

Customarily, the ceremony in San Marcos took place a few months after the public entrance of the viceroy, and it was he who set the date. In honor of the occasion, the university, its walls, and columns were adorned with tarjas (large signboards or decorative panels on which the poems that had been entered into the competition were painted), and a portrait of the viceroy was hung at the entrance under a baldachin (dosel) (Peralta y Barnuevo, Lima triumphante, fol. [92r]). Clad in their traditional robes, the whole faculty welcomed the viceroy outside the university and led him into the main auditorium, which, according to Peralta, could seat more than four thousand people (fol. [93r] ). The viceroy was escorted by the local dignitaries: the audiencia (the highest court of appeals, which also served as an advisory council to the viceroy), the tribunal de cuentas (tribunal of accounts), and the cabildo (city council). Once the vice-sovereign and his entourage had taken their seats, the official act began. A distinguished faculty member pronounced the oración panegírica, then the prizewinning poems were recited and the prizes distributed. The winners received a fine object, such as a silver saltshaker, an inkwell, a serving dish, or candelabra. The academic ceremony concluded with regaling the viceroy, his family, the members of the real audiencia, and the city councilmen with costly presents and the volume that contained the speech and sometimes also the announcement of the poetry contest and the poems.

All certámenes stipulated a set of rules that remained more or less unchanged throughout the eighteenth century. The most elaborate guidelines were the ones formulated in the cartel titled El theatro heroico (The Heroic Theater) for the reception of Viceroy Diego Morcillo Rubio de Aunón in 1720, authored by Peralta. According to these rules, the poets had to adhere strictly to the meter chosen for a particular topic, no poet could receive more than two prizes (because “greed” should not be encouraged in artists), and plagiarism was strictly forbidden (Peralta y Barnuevo, El theatro he- roico, 119, 120). The competitors had to submit two copies of their poem: the first one in a sealed envelope, the second one elaborately painted on a tarja; a rule, as Peralta himself acknowledged, that a priori excluded a number of potential participants since it involved incurring a certain expense (121).

The certámenes poéticos and the oraciones panegíricas are proof of the strong ties that existed between the Creole and the Spanish elites. The academic reception clearly helped create new and reaffirmed old alliances between the university and the government. For the lettered Creole elite, participating in the reception of San Marcos could be a means for gaining entrance into palace circles and a stepping stone towards a government post. For newcomers from Spain, as, for instance, the viceroy’s pers...

Table of contents

• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• INTRODUCTION Celebrating the Spanish Monarchy in Eighteenth-Century Lima
• CHAPTER ONE The Politics of Praise
• CHAPTER TWO Discourses of Loyalty
• CHAPTER THREE Staging the Incas
• EPILOGUE From the “Very Noble and Loyal” to the “Heroic City of the Free”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index