A History of Latin America

THE CHURCH IN THE INDIES 109

Happened in Peru in 1598” was devoted to expos-
ing Lima’s social ills, the wealth that fl aunted itself
in the colonial capital, and the “sea of misery” that
was the life of the mass of ordinary people. In an-
other poem, a mock epic that described a viceroy’s
handling of the defense of the viceroyalty against
English pirates, Rosas reduced a celebration of the
victory of the Spanish fl eet over a single English
ship to “a lot of cackling over a single egg.” His
conclusion, sums up Julie Greer Johnson, was that

the ruling aristocracy shared “the same basic attri-

butes of ugliness, corruption, and hypocrisy” of the

lower classes, differing only in their manifestations.

“Anarchy and fraud prevail at court just as they do

on the street, and money again controls lives, this

time by buying power and infl uence.”

In the same satirical tradition is the work El

Carnero (the meaning of the word has not been

fi rmly established), a history of the fi rst century of

Spanish colonization in New Granada begun late

in life by Juan Rodríguez Freile, an impoverished

creole landowner, and not completed until 1638.

The ironic tone of the work, says Greer Johnson, re-

fl ects “the creole resentment and frustration of be-

ing considered a second-class Spaniard, the result

of his American birth, and of being treated more

like the colonized than the colonizers.” Reversing

the approach of offi cial chroniclers of the Conquest

and Spain’s work in America, Rodríguez Freile

questioned the “justifi cation for the Conquest, the

effectiveness of colonization, and even the char-

acter of the conquering Spaniard.” Government

offi cials appear as bumbling fools who “literally

tripped over one another in the performance of

their duties.” Rodríguez Freile appears as the “om-

niscient narrator” who passes judgment on a long

succession of crimes and follies but is capable of

laughing at himself, even admitting to “having

pursued the Golden Alligator like the conquerors

who sought the illusive El Dorado.”

Juan del Valle y Caviedes, who arrived in Peru

from Spain between 1645 and 1648, is commonly

considered the best colonial satirist and second

only to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz as a poet. Evi-

dently because of his unfortunate experiences as

a patient, Lima’s physicians became the principal

targets of his savage mockery, but he also subjected

Lima’s women, nobility, and other social types to

ferocious verbal attack. In his collection of poems,

Diente del Parnaso (Tooth of Parnassus), incompetent

medical practice is presented as a full-scale conspir-

acy against patients by members of the profession,

who were described as troops led by their general,

Death. By equating seventeenth-century Peruvian

doctors with sixteenth-century conquerors and

then with modern pirates—a growing threat to the

colony—Caviedes gave a subversive tinge to his

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, sometimes called the
greatest Spanish American poet of the colonial
period, entered a convent when she was eighteen
years old and died at the age of forty-four. Sor
Juana wrote both secular and religious poetry,
but she was most admired for her love poems.
[Bradley Smith Collection/Laurie Platt Winfrey, Inc.]