This is a book of questions. Who were the two men living on the edge of society in late colonial Mexico that William Taylor writes about? Can picaresque novels of the period shed light on these elusive characters whose Inquisition records, dense though they be, leave these men as spectral figures? Do we know enough about the religious, economic, political, and social contexts to interpret these men’s disorganized, harmful lives in a way that shines some light on the late colonial and pre-independence periods?
William Taylor’s magisterial contributions to colonial Latin American history are well known. This book is of a piece with his most recent publications that examine religious, social, and cultural history in close detail. In this work, Taylor writes about two late colonial vagabonds whose exploits, in particular impersonating priests, brought them before the Inquisition. Born in 1747 into a poor family from which he became estranged early on, Joseph Aguayo led a rootless life during which he repeatedly came to the Inquisition’s attention for impersonating a priest. Literate, mobile, and lacking any sign of a conscience, his desire for status and respect seems to have driven his serial impersonations. Juan Atondo, born around 1783, seems the more troubled soul, who perhaps suffered from serious mental illness. He nonetheless sought human connection through religion, marriage, even war (joining a colonial regiment, later coming into contact with insurgent independence forces), yet he could never achieve it. Both men sought to belong to organized society, seemingly seeking prestige more than wealth and power, but both rebelled against belonging at the same time. How to explain them?
The author interprets their lives through ingenious readings of picaresque novels of early modern Spain and New Spain. Placing Fernández de Lizardi’s independence-period classic, El periquillo sarniento, in extensive historical and literary context, Taylor illustrates how fictional characters could achieve redemption in ways neither Aguayo nor Atondo did, despite the best efforts of inquisitional judges, especially toward Aguayo. The novels, he concludes, cannot explain the lives of these troubled souls but do suggest an inspirational cultural inclination arising out of this literary genre toward a kind of rootless freedom on the part of some. While left longing for more analysis of a changing Inquisition, in the hands of a master historian the story of these two men sheds light on the tensions that heterogeneity and inequality evoked. A challenging read for undergraduates, the book is perhaps best suited for graduate student and specialist readers taking up complex questions about what biographic microhistories tell us about institutional contexts and times in which Aguayo and Atondo lived.
University of California Press