Published through Brill’s The Medieval and Early Modern Iberian World series, Robert Folger’s Writing as Poaching: Interpellation and Self-Fashioning in Colonial relaciones de méritos y servicios applies Michael de Certeau’s idea of bricolage to four colonial Latin American texts, three works that share critical characteristics with relaciones de méritos y servicios (documents describing service to the Spanish Crown and seeking remuneration) and one reconstructed autobiography. Reading against interpretations that would categorize such writing as “messy testimonies of authorial deficiencies” (52), Folger instead sees the purposeful appropriation of bureaucratic and historiographical discourses, reassembled and redeployed to create a legible, and meritorious, persona for a powerful audience.
In dialogue with the work of Rolena Adorno and Roberto González Echeverría, among others, Folger draws on Echeverría’s notion of a Latin American discursive archive, asserting that the relación de méritos emerges out of, is confirmed or contested by, and ultimately shapes that “imagined totality of information accumulated by state apparatuses” (15). Chapter 2 more fully develops this critical approach as it details the bureaucratic processes constitutive of the genre: the corroboration of a relación’s claims by witnesses, the assessment by colonial authorities of a petitioner’s worthiness, and the issuance of written opinions (pareceres) by such audiencias that served as the basis from which the Crown awarded or withheld mercedes. Folger argues that in compiling and presenting these materials, the relaciones de méritos were less procedural documentation, and more proof of the existence of a perfect Spanish subject, one deserving of privileges and office (a benemérito). Miguel de Cervantes’s relación de méritos is posed as an example of the genre’s elision of unique individual biography in order to confect a model vassal. The chapter maintains that the tactical reassembly and interpellation used to fashion the relaciones de méritos derived its source material from increasingly formalized historiographical works, regulated and frequently commissioned by the Crown. The claims of the relaciones de méritos were ultimately staked against and verified in comparison to those authoritative texts.
Chapter 3, “Tactical Appropriations,” examines three works that apply bricolage to ends echoing those of the relación de méritos: Baltasar Dorantes de Carranza’s Sumaria relación, Alonso Borregán’s Crónica de la Conquista del Perú, and Juan Rodríguez Freyle’s El Carnero. Developing out of Folger’s articles on the three texts, the chapter opens with a discussion of Dorantes de Carranza’s prototypical petition. The son of Andrés Dorantes de Carranza (who accompanied Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca), Baltasar Dorantes de Carranza produced a hybrid text that exemplifies the strategic poaching characteristic of the relación de méritos and simultaneously maps out the sixteenth-century “Mexican economy of mercedes” (80). While unsuccessful in garnering a merced, and censured by some contemporary critics for an unfocused and unsophisticated presentation, Folger maintains that the Sumaria relación uses bricolage to self-fashion a worthy criollo subject.
The case of Borregán, who was likewise denied compensation, is distinct in that his work has been read as a failed, chaotic historical crónica. Folger’s interpretation looks instead to the sixteenth-century Peruvian conquistador’s material motives, namely being appointed Peru’s royal chronicler, as the defining characteristic of a relación de méritos in which writing as performance is cast as service to the Crown.
Freyle’s multifaceted El carnero consists of two parts, an ethnographic history of the conquest and a literary section narrating the intrigues and personal conflicts arising within Nueva Granada. While not a proper relación de méritos, Folger proposes that Freyle’s work is topical to the genre as it emulates historiographical techniques and casts Freyle himself as an authoritative archivist of Nueva Granada. Folger’s book concludes with an analysis of Fray Servando Teresa de Mier’s Memorias as a “vehicle for the tactical assertion of the self, using the discoursive molds provided by bureaucracy” (138).
Writing as Poaching carefully scrutinizes the complex nature of a prevalent genre of writing from the colonial era to offer a nuanced critical understanding of its interior and exterior dynamics. Particularly useful to colonial Latin American literary historians, Folger’s book is an important contribution to this growing scholarly field.
