González de Eslava and the Origins of Mexican Orientalism

Abstract

Orientalism bookends the literature of Hapsburg-era Mexico: if Cortés describes Tenochtitlan's temples as mosques and if early missionary plays paint the conquistador as a Muslim sultan, by the end of the seventeenth century Sor Juana uses Egyptian architecture as a signpost for her Mexican intellectual odyssey, Primero sueño. Little attention, however, has been paid to early depictions of East Asia in colonial-era orientalist literature. In this paper, I analyze the first Mexican play to treat East Asia, Fernán González de Eslava's Coloquio II. Written in the 1560s and performed soon after the first return of a fleet from the Philippines, this play broadcasts and codifies exoticized information about East Asia for Eslava's audience in the streets of Mexico City. While its East-Asian Orientalism departs from earlier depictions of the Middle East in many ways, Coloquio II ultimately calls for the same kind of crusading violence that characterizes early orientalist missionary plays. I then compare Coloquio II with another early orientalist play by Eslava, Coloquio VII, which eschews crusading violence and instead uses East Asia as a point of triangulation in the creation of an allegorical Mexican community. Here, the distance between Mexico and China corresponds to the distance between the play's Jewish protagonist, Jonah, and his Gentile antagonists. As Eslava examines and discards anti-Semitic stereotypes in the play, he also demonstrates that the attempt to bridge Mexico with China requires integrating Jews into sixteenth-century Mexican society. Thus, centuries before Sor Juana and Octavio Paz write about the East in their poetry, Eslava has already begun to use exoticizing discourse about Asian cultures in order to write Mexico into the center of the world while rethinking what Mexican society can become.