Modern Languages

How novice language teachers interpret research on writing pedagogy is based, in part, on how their professors present the research in class. A professor may highlight salient aspects of research to socialize novice language teachers into integrating theory into the practice of teaching second language composition. This article, thus, describes the highlighting practices of one professor in a course on teaching English as a Second Language (ESL).

In 1511, Juan de Valdivia"s expedition from Panamá to Santo Domingo was shipwrecked on the Yucatán peninsula. As many histories of the conquest of Mexico relate, the few men who escaped drowning reached shore only to be captured, enslaved, or sacrificed and eaten by the Maya inhabiting the land. Jerónimo de Aguilar, a Spaniard and ordained Franciscan priest, was one such survivor who was enslaved rather than killed or sacrificed. Living as a slave for eight years, he eventually became almost indistinguishable from his captors, wearing not much more than a threadbare loincloth and cloak, his hair grown long and matted. The only characteristics that set him apart from the Maya were his full beard anddepending on which history one readsa tattered book of hours he carried in a sack slung over his shoulder. Indeed, in 1519 when Aguilar was rescued by Cortés, who was looking for a translator to facilitate his expedition, the Spanish troops only recognized him after he uttered several words in Castilian and brandished his book of hours like a talisman proving his Christianity (Gómara 1932, 117-18; Díaz del Castillo 1960, 102-103). Yet in histories where the book of hours is absent, performative acts usually replace the devotional text, chosen to emphasize equally well Aguilar"s cultural difference from the Amerindians, and his firm Christian faith in spite of the bodily and spiritual temptations he faced as a captive among infidels.

I suggest that Diego Durán and Hernando de Alvarado Tezozomoc's handling of Mexica modes of record-keeping—both oral and material—as expressed through Moctezuma’s behavior provide insight into early modern beliefs about and attitudes toward European and Amerindian literacies and their dynamics within the contact zone.  Specifically, I argue that if we expand our understanding of Amerindian literacies to include embodied practices such as the rituals surrounding amatl—Amerindian paper—objects, Moteuczoma’s seemingly strange behavior may instead reveal traces of indigenous embodied practices associated with the preservation of knowledge. Such rituals are legitimate forms of knowing which the historiographers examined in this paper may flatten, consciously or unconsciously, due to the influence of a colonial administration that privileges European literacy as a method of control and as the only valid “system for storing and transmitting knowledge,” and an aesthetic view that legitimizes European Renaissance artistic ideals over Amerindian modes of representation.  My argument thus contributes to our understanding of literacies in the contact zone because, although we know a great deal about European reaction to Amerindian literacies, few studies have been conducted on indigenous reactions to European literacies, perhaps for lack of surviving sources.

Este artículo investiga el papel de la berenjena en El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha de Miguel de Cervantes. Aunque aparece solo cuatro veces, su función como signo ambivalente merece un análisis más detenido. A través de una examinación de sus funciones como epíteto para el narrador moro Cide Hamete Benengeli/Berenjena y adjetivo que describe una nariz protuberante y unos labios jaspeados de dos habitantes de Barataria, la ínsula gobernada por Sancho, demuestro cómo la verdura es aún otro medio con el cual el narrador moro ejerce control humoral sobre el protagonista, empeorando su locura. Propongo además que el uso de la berenjena como adjetivo para las partes del cuerpo de los personajes baratarianos evoca un ekfrasis fragmentado de Verano, un cuadro al estilo tromp l’oeil de Giuseppe Arcimboldo, el pintor oficial de la corte de los Habsburgo. Con su fragmentación literaria, Cervantes se burla de esta pintura que supuestamente alaba el reino del rey Habsburgo Rodolfo II. A través de este ekfrasis parcial, sugiero que Cervantes considera la monarquía española igual y desastrosamente fragmentada.

Despite the critical attention paid to the scapegoating of Moteuczoma in New Spanish histories, his frequent tears have unvaryingly been interpreted as cowardliness, which overlooks the wealth of information contained in the act of weeping. To address this gap, I investigate narrative and visual representations of Moteuczoma’s weeping, juxtaposing these episodes with other tearful characters in order to understand the discursive work such tears perform in the narratives. I show how tears Orientalize the weeper by exposing him as decadent, yet simultaneously depict him as shrewd by indicating his political calculations, resulting in ambivalent characterizations. Furthermore, the factors that build an economy of weeping constructed with visible public tears are arguably both European and native in origin. That is, whether these characters are largely vilified or elevated is not necessarily only a function of the author’s or his sources’ ethnic origin, but also a product of the mixed cultural milieu in which the text was written.

Although Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl largely follows Spanish historiographical conventions—using Spanish terms such as rey and república rather than the Nahuatl tlahtoani and altepetl to describe the prehispanic indigenous world, for instance—he strikingly relates interpersonal dialogue in the first person present tense characteristic of Nahua narration of past events. When Amerindians converse in his chronicles, Alva often reports their discussions as if he was present listening. Yet when Cortés speaks, whether to another Spaniard or a native ally, Alva for the most part reverts to Spanish historiographical convention, indirectly recounting the exchange in the third person past tense. The moments in which he breaks with this pattern—such as Cortés’s heated dialogue with Moctezuma when placing the ruler of Tenochtitlan under arrest—thus require explication.
Accordingly, in my paper I compare Alva’s fluctuating use of direct and indirect dialogue both within his Compendio histórico del reino de Texcoco, and with two contemporary prehispanic histories, the Crónica Mexica and the Historia de las Indias de Nueva España e Islas de la Tierra Firme, written by Amerindian Hernando de Alvarado Tezozomoc and Spanish Dominican friar Diego Durán, respectively. Because they rely heavily on the so-called “Crónicas X”—a hypothetical group of alphabetical and pictographic chronicles based on sixteenth century Amerindian oral histories of pre-conquest Mexico—in order to write their conspicuously similar works, Tezozomoc and Durán are most productively viewed in tandem. Through an evaluation of native and Spanish styles of reporting direct and indirect dialogue in these three principal works, I interrogate how these two discursive techniques are exploited in order to characterize the historical actors central to these chronicles and propel the narratives forward; and I examine how Alva’s oscillation between Nahua direct dialogue and Spanish indirect discourse converges or is at odds with his goal, as identified by Salvador Velazco, to place the indigenous past itself into dialogue with a Judeo-Christian teleological history of the world.

This chapter critically contextualizes early print culture in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century New Spain by examining the roles of printing houses and their output; the authors whose works circulated in both print and manuscript form; and the members of reading publics, whether elite or marginalized, who formed intellectual nexuses centered on these sites of publishing, textual circulation, and reading.

In this article I present the contents, discuss the scholarly significance,
and suggest further research and teaching directions for an unpublished
nineteenth-century romance in Spain’s National Library (BNE) in Madrid.
Intriguingly titled by the library staff “Romance octosilábico burlesco sobre
América: Me cago en el gran Colón…” (BNE MSS/12961/76), the poet
thoroughly curses the inhabitants, European conquistadors, explorers, and
politicians involved with Spain and the Americas from the fifteenth to the
nineteenth century, as well as the region’s major geography, climate, flora,
fauna, and products. The ire evident in the constant swearing (there are
over fourteen iterations of cagar, meriting the catalog title’s description of
burlesco) is apparently provoked by the poet’s exile from Spain to the
Dominican Republic. While there are several possible reasons why the
poem has not yet been published—it seems to have been part of a letter
exchanged between friends rather than something intended for the press,
the author is anonymous, its tone off-color, and its contents somewhat
repetitive—its social, historical, and political commentary and broad literary
intertextuality are particularly relevant for Hispanists in general for use in
research and teaching.