In Authority, Piracy, and Captivity in Colonial Spanish American Writing, Emiro Martínez-Osorio exposes the complexities of a work often dismissed as the product of a second-rate imitator of Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga, author of the celebrated epic La Araucana (first volume 1569). He thereby places Juan de Castellanos at the center of debates regarding the governance of the Spanish Indies, contextualizes his literary project within the geopolitical rivalries of the sixteenth-century Atlantic world, and provides a fresh, exhaustively researched reinterpretation of the Elegies as a genre-bending critique of Spanish colonial government and a defense of the encomendero class.

Martínez-Osorio begins by addressing prior readings of the Elegies (1589) as either a feeble work of imitatio or an untrustworthy chronicle in verse. He suggests that such interpretations fail to take into account the historical context and reception of Castellanos’s work, as well as the author’s critical engagement with Alonso de Ercilla, his better-known predecessor. Rather than mimicking Ercilla, Castellanos “rewrote emblematic sections of the Araucana” (xii) to undermine his predecessor’s authority and defense of Native Americans. Recasting iconic passages of Ercilla’s text in terms hostile to indigenous peoples and celebratory of those who conquered them, Castellanos lambasted representatives of the Crown in the Spanish American colonies and upheld the first generation of conquistadors and encomenderos as “ideal subjects of the Spanish global monarchy” (xxxiv). He thus joined the chorus of voices demanding textual authority derived from firsthand experience of the New World rather than from royal favor.

In chapter 1, a close reading of the encomium to elegy 1 reveals a wholesale rejection of Ercilla’s reformist project, particularly his Petrarchist/Garcilacist idealization of native heroines and critique of encomenderos. Suggesting that Castellanos wrote the Elegies in verse to avoid the tighter censorial scrutiny applied to historiographical works, chapter 2 traces out Castellanos’s appropriation of the very Petrarchist idiom that he rejected in the encomium in his portrayal of two native female protagonists. The first of these singlehandedly provokes the destruction of the Fuerte de Navidad with her adulterous treachery; the second, with her calls for revenge against the Spanish and cannibalism of those killed in battle, emerges as a satanic minion who violently resists benevolent Christian evangelization. Together, these women become synecdoches for the ostensible irredeemability of all indigenous females, in contrast to the noble heroines of the Araucana. Martínez-Osorio analyzes the “Discurso del capitán Francisco Draque” (Discourse of Captain Francis Drake) as a text evidencing “an internal ideological fissure” (42) that pitted encomenderos and conquistadors against royally designated colonial administrators (chapter 3); he then performs an in-depth textual analysis to reveal the tacit critique of those administrators and exaltation of conquistadors in canto 3 of the “Discurso” (chapter 4). Finally, chapter 5 examines the apocryphal captivity tale of Juan de Salas. The story of Salas, whom Castellanos claims to have known personally but of whom there is no trace in the historical record, represents the conquest “as a redeeming act endorsed by God to save the Amerindians” (103) and carried out by idealized conquistador/encomenderos. As such, it rebuts Bartolomé de las Casas’s indictment of the encomienda system and provides an unwavering apology of conquest grounded in fervent—though unverifiable—assertions of Castellanos’s authority as a personal friend of the protagonist.

Through the painstaking analysis of historical sources, Martínez-Osorio both illustrates the lacunae in previous interpretations of the Elegies and celebrates the contributions of other scholars. Some passages in chapter 5 seem hastily edited due to a number of erratas and weak textual evidence, for instance: “The notion that the exploration and conquest of the New World confronted the forces of good against evil is first alluded to in the words used by Amerindians to characterize their assault as part of a much larger confrontation: ‘[. . .] but for him to surrender as a their [sic] captive / if he wanted to escape this war alive’” (111). Occasional editorial oversight notwithstanding, this book provides an exceptional example of how literary criticism can deepen our understanding of colonial history. As such, it offers an invaluable contribution to the field and will doubtless become a required reference for future considerations of colonial Latin American epic poetry.