Arcadia suddenly found themselves disenfranchised and without a patron. Their poetry became less an emotional escape from reality, and more a catalyst for protest. The dissatisfaction of these intellectuals during the reign of Queen Maria I led them to start a movement to free Brazil from Portugal. This movement, known in Brazil as Inconfidência Mineira, was discovered and harshly quashed by the Portuguese crown. One of the leaders of the groups, Joaquim José da Silva Xavier (1746 –92), known as Tiradentes, was killed, and Cláudio Manuel da Costa died in jail while awaiting trial. The other participants were sent into exile in Africa.
Cláudio Manuel da Costa is generally considered the best poet of the group. His poetry incorporates aspects of both the Baroque and the Neoclassic. His poems were published in Obras (1768) and later in Obras Poéticas (1903), organized by João Ribeiro and published in Rio. Tomás Antonio Gonzaga is considered by Antonio Candido and Aderaldo Castello as a typical representative of neoclassic poets. Like Basilio da Gama, Gonzaga used love as a pretext to affirm himself as a poet. In addition to his poetry, Gonzaga is known as the author of the satirical poem Cartas Chilenas, written around 1787. It is a severe criticism of the corruption and abuses of power of Luis da Cunha Meneses, governor of Minas Gerais from 1783 until 1788. Due to his involvement in the Inconfidência Mineira, Gonzaga was exiled to Mozambique in 1792. In Mozambique he married into an important family of Portuguese colonizers and became a prosperous man. Alvarenga Peixoto and Silva Alvarenga were also exiled to
Africa. Alvarenga Peixoto perished, but Silva Alvarenga survived the exile and in 1797 he was granted a pardon from the queen and returned to Brazil. When the royal family arrived in Brazil in 1808, Silva Alvarenga was working for the journal O Patriota, one of the first magazines published in Brazil. Like the other members of the Mineiran Arcadia, Silva Alvarenga is mostly known for his lyrical poetry. Critics such as Antonio Candido and José Aderaldo Castello consider Silva Alvarenga a pre-romantic poet for his poem Glaura (1799) and for his modern ideas. Silva Alvarenga’s poetic work was published by Joaquim Norberto Sousa e Silva in 1864. The literature written in Brazil during the period that extends from 1792, the year when the Inconfidencia Mineira became public, until 1822, the year of independence, is usually considered inferior, in both content and form, in comparison with the vibrant work produced by the Jesuits and by the baroque and neoclassic writers. Finally, it was with the arrival of the Portuguese imperial family in 1808 that music, literature, and other expressions of European court society were implanted and flourished in Brazil in a way never seen in other parts of nineteenth-century Latin America.
References and Further Reading
1 Albuquerque, Severino J. (1996). “The Brazilian theater up to 1900,” in R. Gonzalez Echeverría and E. Pupo Walker (eds), The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature, Vol. 3: Brazilian Literature, Bibliographies, pp. 105–26. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2 Alencastro, Luiz Felipe de (2000). O Trato dos viventes: Formação do Brasil no Atlántico Sul. São Paulo: Companhia das letras.
3 Alden, Dauril (1996). The Making of an Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire, and Beyond, 1540 –750. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
4 Brandão, Ambrósio Fernandes (1987). Dialogues of the Great Things of Brazil. Trans. and annotated by F. A. Holden Hall, W. F. Harrison, and D. Winters Welker. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
5 Candido, Antonio e Castello José Aderaldo (1974). Presença da literature brasileira: I. Das origens ao Romantismo, 6th ed. São Paulo: Difusã Européia do Livro.
6 Hansen, João Adolfo (1989). A sátira e o engenho: Gregório de Matos e a Bahia do século XVII. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras/Secretaria de Estado da Cultura.
7 Mello, José Antonio Gonsalves de, ed. (1966). Diálogos das grandezas do Brasil. 2nd ed. Recife: Imprensa Universitaria.
8 Teixeira, Ivan (1999). Mecenato Pombalino e poesia neoclássica. São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo.
8 Violence in the Land of the Muisca: Juan Rodríguez Freile’s El carnero
Álvaro Félix Bolaños
El carnero as a Book of Brazen Tales
Juan Rodríguez Freile is perhaps, and definitely for the wrong reasons, the most famous colonial writer to emerge from northwestern South America. He is credited with having written a book filled with impudent – if not outright pornographic – stories related to the Spaniards and criollos residing in the main urban centers of the New Kingdom of Granada (today’s Colombia). However, El carnero – as the book has been popularly known for over 350 years – seriously intends to give an accurate report of the first century of Spanish conquest and settlement in the region. It was written between 1636 and 1638, probably during the idle moments provided by Rodríguez Freile’s not-too-demanding schedule as an employee for the local municipal bureaucracy.
A unique and interesting detail about El carnero is that it is the work of an old man who had little at stake in his job as a chronicler and amateur historian. Rodríguez Freile started writing the book when he was 70 years old and without the pressure of an official request. This may explain the pleasure he seems to convey in his writing – the relaxed style of his prose, the casual commentaries, the use of humor, sarcasm, and the frequent moral admonitions he displayed while reporting on both the transcendental and trivial historical events of the New Kingdom of Granada’s first century. This work circulated for 200 years in several different manuscript copies, until the Colombian criollo novelist and cultural promoter Felipe Pérez published it for the first time in Bogotá in 1859. Since then it has been republished over twenty times and has become an important part of the canon of Latin American literature, despite the fact that it was deliberately written as a work of history with no literary pretensions. There is even an English translation by William C. Atkinson, The Conquest of New Granada (1961); however, its scholarly benefit is limited by its severe abridgment.
Rodríguez Freile’s historical sources are similar to those used by most historians of the conquest and colonization working in the New World (Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Pedro Cieza de León, Juan de Castellanos, Fray Pedro Simón, etc.). They include testimonies by at least one indigenous informant, the author’s own observations of events, legal documents from the local cabildo, and the available histories of the region, either published or in manuscript form, such as those from Juan de Castellanos’s Elegéas de varones ilustres de Indias and Fray Pedro Simón’s Noticias historiales de las conquistas de Tierra Firme en las Indias Occidentales.
Although its reputation as a treatise concerning solely (or mainly) fictionalized stories about European and Euro-American people’s moral transgressions is an exaggeration, the fact remains that El carnero delves into a few scandalous stories (some of which are simply colorful vignettes), and it is on these, quite understandably, that most readers tend to focus. Sexual transgression has thus become a metonymy for the whole book; by combining themes of sex, greed, violence, lust, betrayal, and political manipulation with the stories of shameful celebrities (the O. J. Simpsons and Scott Petersons of colonial Spanish America), a small number of narrative units have allowed most commentators to consider it a text packed with imaginary, brazen stories. Infidelity is their most visible theme, and a few examples are in order.
Among the vignette-like stories is the case of don García de Vargas, a resident of the city of Tocaima (founded in 1544 in Panche Indian territory), who kills his wife in a jealous rage after an absurd misunderstanding. García de Vargas had bumped into a retarded mestizo man (who clumsily communicated with guttural
