Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, Antiquarianism, and the Colonial Public Sphere

Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora (1645-1700) has often been considered the first antiquarian of New Spain.  His collection of pre-Columbian codices, much of which he inherited from the descendents of the Texcocan noble Fernando Alva Ixtlilxochitl, are central to his general interest in the history of New Spain.  Although many of his own writings on pre-Columbian history are now lost, it is clear from what has survived that Sigüenza was particularly interested in calendrics and genealogy.  It has also often been noted that this intense interest in pre-Columbian history paralleled an aggressive disdain for contemporary indigenous subjects of the viceroyalty.  This paper will look into this dual discourse of past splendor and present misery of Amerindian subjects not as an irony or paradox, as it has often been understood, but rather as a reflection of a larger crisis in nobility at the end of the seventeenth century.  It will argue that Sigüenza y Góngora envisioned a public sphere of readers and citizens as an antidote to what he understood as a decline in both an indigenous nobility and the Habsburg monarchy.  Even while he continued to advocate imperial policies that favored maintaining Amerindian communities intact, he acknowledged that by the end of the seventeenth century many subjects did not fit a two republic model.  If there is an irony in this story, it is that Sigüenza y Góngora’s writings on pre-Columbian history wished to delineat a citizenry of European descent out of what he acknowledged was a growing plebeian public sphere composed of Amerindians and casta subjects.