[DOWNLOAD] "Mapping the Work of Stories in Villagra's Historia de la Nueva Mexico (Gasper Perez de Villagra)" by Journal of the Southwest " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free

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eBook details

• Title: Mapping the Work of Stories in Villagra's Historia de la Nueva Mexico (Gasper Perez de Villagra)
• Author : Journal of the Southwest
• Release Date : January 22, 2006
• Genre: Social Science,Books,Nonfiction,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 231 KB

Description

Published in 1610, Gasper Perez de Villagra's epic poem Historia de la Nueva Mexico relates the history of Spanish exploration and settlement of lands north of Mexico during the first years of the Juan de Onate expedition. Throughout the poem Villagra, a member of the expedition, illustrates how the Spaniards codified their experiences through oral stories, dramas, and even legal documents--documents that he transcribes and intersperses between cantos. These minor stories within the poem underpin the larger story of the settlement of New Mexico to reveal the work of stories as they provide relief from troubles, give pleasure, legitimize Spanish rule in the New World, and demonstrate how the story of an individual can become the story of a people or nation. The text emphasizes how we use narratives to organize and understand the complexity of our lives, nation, and ancestors. Villagra attempts to create a collective imaginary space through his poem; in other words, his project seeks to organize and then assimilate events into a social imaginary of New Mexico. (1) I borrow the term "social imaginary" from political scientists, philosophers, and Chicano/a theorists to refer to a shared understanding of events, experiences, or beliefs that reinforces a group's collective identity. (2) Yet various complications arise within and outside the text that undermine Villagra's epic as a foundational text--one that creates and records national origins. Despite Villagra's attempt to establish his poem as a foundational text of the New World, the text's assimilative effect breaks down when storytelling occurs in what Mary Louise Pratt (1992, 4) refers to as the "contact zone," or those "social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination." Indeed, much of Villagra's text involves sorting out experiences within the contact zone, as he writes about the Spaniards' settling/invasion of New Mexico. Throughout his poem, miscommunications and misunderstandings emerge during scenes in which Spaniards interact with indigenous peoples of the New World. When the Spaniards and natives come together, it is as though they behave and interact according to different behavioral scripts. Villagra seems at pains to explain these moments, because he fails to realize that his foundational text seeks to create and record national origins where origins already exist.

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