Subverting the Classics in the Early Modern Americas

Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá’s Historia de la Nueva México (1610) is all but ignored in twentieth-century literary criticism.

In what would become known as the Valladolid Debate, between 1550 and 1551, the Royal and Supreme Council of the Indies summoned Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de las Casas to debate whether the indigenous people of New Spain were Aristotelian “natural slaves” (Lupher 2003, Martínez Torrejón 2013).

In the mid-sixteenth century CE, Bartolomé de las Casas, an encomendero turned Dominican friar, wrote a series of works decrying the inhumane treatment of indigenous Americans at the hands of Spaniards in the New World.

In 1510, Las Sergas de Esplandián (The Labors of Esplandián