Although elites in Spanish America did not embrace Enlightenment ideals until the last years of the 18th century, authors began much earlier to explore the new ways of thinking about nature and to develop new ways of imitating it in fiction and new ways of viewing their societies. The exaggeration of Baroque tendencies marks much of the literature from the first half of the century. In some authors’ works, a swollen Gongorism mixes with the rationalism prescribed by French Neoclassicists to produce an incipient Rococo period of intense preciosity. This is especially true of the works of those authors who wrote occasional theatre and poetry—that is, dramas and poems that celebrated the arrivals or birthdays of archbishops and viceroys, military victories, and so on.

Unlike the historiographers, those agents of revolution and republicanism, playwrights throughout the 18th century imagined spectacles of royal power in which hierarchies of estate, caste, and gender were reinforced for literate and illiterate spectators alike. Reworkings of plays by Calderón and Lope de Vega competed with original dramas that glorified the reconquest of Spain from Muslim invaders and the conquest of America. Fernando de Orbea, whose family occupied government positions throughout the Viceroyalty of Peru, wrote one of the few surviving plays from what is today Colombia. In La conquista de Santa Fé de Bogotá (“The Conquest of Santa Fé de Bogotá [an early name for the city of Bogotá],” which may have been first performed in 1710), arias and recitative in Spanish and in Quechua present a vision of the Spanish conquest that was modeled after Virgil’s Aeneid and several colonial chronicles. In Lima the dramas of Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo ranged from adaptations of French Neoclassical plays to librettos for operas at the viceregal palace. A mathematician, poet, attorney, accountant, and historian, Peralta dazzled European visitors to Lima. La Rodoguna (written about 1719) is a free adaptation of Pierre Corneille’s drama Rodogune (the name of the play’s heroine); it is more Neoclassical than Peralta’s occasional plays. The best of the latter is El Mercurio galante (“The Gallant Mercury”), an operetta performed in 1720 between the acts of Afectos vencen finezas (“Feelings Conquer Finery”). A spoof of the courting devices of Spaniards from different kingdoms, El Mercurio galante was Peralta’s rejoinder to the tales of Spanish suitors and seductresses published in the lighthearted Parisian magazine Mercure galant. Eusebio Vela, a transplanted Spanish actor and playwright, wrote plays that were popular in Mexico City. El apostolado en las Indias y martirio de un cacique (“The Apostolate in the Indies and Martyrdom of a Chief”), first performed in 1732, presents a somewhat sanitized account of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire. While the plot and diction owe much to Spanish Baroque theatre, the hero Cortés foreshadows the rational, sensitive leaders that came to dominate the Spanish and Italian stage during the second half of the century. Santiago de Pita, an army officer from Havana, wrote El príncipe jardinero y fingido Cloridano (c. 1730; “The Gardener-Prince and Feigned Cloridano”), a musical play on love and kingship that was inspired by Italian operas. It was performed in Spain during the 18th century. Francisco del Castillo, a blind Mercedarian friar who was called “El Ciego de la Merced,” was a favourite at the viceregal court. His La conquista del Perú (performed in 1748; “The Conquest of Peru”) and his tragedy Mitrídates, rey del Ponto (before 1749; “Mithridates, King of Pontus”) show his range as a dramatist who, like Peralta, was negotiating the Spanish Baroque and French Neoclassicism. Castillo’s complete works were published in the 20th century.

Poetry

Lyrical and spiritual poems have survived, although they are of uneven quality. Mother Francisca Josefa de la Concepción de Castillo y Guevara, who wrote a prose autobiography, Vida (published 1817; “Life”), at the behest of her confessor, also composed the poetry in Afectos espirituales (written mostly in the early and mid-1700s; published 1843; “Spiritual Feelings”). Both these works are notable for their mystic reflection. The Jesuit Juan Bautista Aguirre wrote spiritual, lyrical, and satirical poetry that was published after his death. His “A una rosa” (“To a Rose”) and “Descripción del Mar de Venus” (“Description of Venus’s Sea”) illustrate the prolonged transition from late Baroque to Neoclassical aesthetics that characterizes the Rococo. Manuel de Zequeira y Arango, a Cuban Neoclassical poet, is best known for his idyllic portrait of Cuba, “A la piña” (“To the Pineapple”), which was written sometime before 1821 and published posthumously.

Epic poetry was not often attempted in Spanish during the first half of the 18th century. Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo’s Lima fundada; o, conquista del Perú (1732; “Lima Founded; or, Conquest of Peru”) illustrates the promise and the pitfalls of the genre. While Peralta’s occasional poetry often confirms the staying power of Góngora, Lima fundada blends Alonso de Ercilla’s poetics with French Neoclassical prescriptions for epic and bucolic poetry. Intellectual achievements interested Peralta more than military feats: continuous footnotes on men of letters in Spain and Peru dwarf the descriptions of battles, and Francisco Pizarro goes missing for pages. Some two decades later, in Mexico City, Francisco Ruiz de León created a Cortés who appears less a conqueror than a courtier in Hernandia (1755; “Ferdinand”). The frequent appearance in Hernandia of the Italian scena (a form of solo vocal composition in which the recitative is followed by arias) and several allusions to soft music and song during battles are firmly Rococo and confirm his debts to opera, which had been popular in the viceregal courts of Spanish America since the late 17th century.

An exiled Jesuit, Rafael Landívar, wrote Rusticatio mexicana (1782; The Rusticatio Mexicana of Rafael Landívar), a Latin poem that owes much to the bucolic poetry published in France and England a century earlier. Rusticatio mexicana exalts the animals, plants, and minerals native to New Spain, detailing the agricultural, textile, and mining practices of the region.

Satirical poetry was much more common. Friar Castillo’s salty “Conversaciones” (“Conversations”) reveal tears in the social fabric of Lima. Miscegenation, smuggling, prostitution, fashion, and feigned nobility are all targeted in the tradition of Rosas de Oquendo and Caviedes. The Andalusian Esteban de Teralla y Landa, who lived in Mexico City before he moved to Lima about 1782, contrasted appearances and realities in a manner reminiscent of Juvenal. Written under the pseudonym Simón Ayanque, Lima por dentro y fuera (1797; “Lima Inside and Out”) is his best-known work. In a style representative of Rococo poetics he lays waste to Lima’s enlightened facade.

Early novels

The late 18th century saw the rise of the Latin American novel. In these early novels, one encounters at every turn the Neoclassical conviction that society would be reformed by a combination of informed individual choice and state regulation. Francisco Javier Eugenio de Santa Cruz y Espejo, son of a Quechua father and a Spanish mother, penned satirical novels, treatises on medical and religious matters, and legal papers. His novel El nuevo Luciano de Quito (written in 1779; “The New Lucian of Quito”) and its sequel La ciencia blancardina (written in 1780; “Blancardian Science”) ridiculed the schoolmen’s educational program. He proposed cultural reforms that borrowed from Thomas Hobbes, Sir Francis Bacon, Voltaire, Adam Smith, and Neoclassical authorities from France, Spain, Italy, and Portugal. Espejo was active in Santa Fé de Bogotá’s economic society, and in 1792 he founded Quito’s first newspaper, Primicias de la cultura de Quito (“Seedlings of Civilization in Quito”). His satires circulated widely in manuscript but were not published until the 20th century.

The Peruvian Pablo Antonio José de Olavide y Jáuregui was the quintessential Enlightenment reformer. Among other things, he worked at establishing immigrant colonies to expand the agricultural sector and reinforce the notion that manual labour was not dishonourable, and he was one of those who aimed at teaching trades and persuading the aristocracy to use trained workers on their lands. In his early 20s Olavide bought a seat on the royal court in Lima. Within a year he faced legal sanctions for his role in the reconstruction efforts that followed the massive earthquake of 1746. He fled to Spain, where he married a wealthy middle-aged widow. His Paulina (1828), Sabina (1828), and other sentimental novels and short stories were influenced by Samuel Richardson, Voltaire, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. After several years of working on immigration and economic projects, Olavide was persecuted for his unorthodox religious views and took refuge in France. His eventual disavowal of such views is fictionalized in the melancholic tale of fall and redemption El Evangelio en triunfo; o, historia de un filósofo desengañado (1797; “The Gospel in Triumph; or, History of an Undeceived Philosopher”) and explored further in Poemas cristianos (1797; “Christian Poems”). Olavide’s poetry and prose maintained the didacticism of Neoclassicism while they foreshadowed the tenebrism of Romanticism.

The most famous literary figure of late colonial New Spain is the novelist, poet, and journalist José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi. His acerbic wit and wide-ranging interests are evident in his best-known novels, El periquillo sarniento (vol. 1–3 were published in 1816; vol. 4 was suppressed, probably for “offense to public morals,” until 1830–31; The Itching Parrot) and La educación de las mujeres; o, La Quijotita y su prima (incomplete edition 1818–19; complete edition 1831–32; “The Education of Women; or, Miss Quixote and Her Cousin”). The first is a raucous journey through late 18th-century Mexico in the form of an elderly man’s picaresque life story. Its successor asks prospective female readers to look in the two mirrors that are its two female principals and to rid themselves of the same vices that they see in the ill-fated Quijota. Lizardi’s novels present a sometimes patronizing, always rationalist perspective on lives that do not measure up to Enlightenment ideals.

For late 18th-century authors and their crown and church patrons, Neoclassicism represented both the spirit of their age and the destined fate of society under their tutelage. But by the fourth decade of the 19th century, many of Spain’s American dominions had achieved political independence, and authors elected to wrap Neoclassical forms around the goal of cultural independence or to discard them altogether as unwanted remnants of the crown.