Rhetoric of Silence and Deviation: Women cronistas in Colonial Latin America

AÑÓN, VALERIA

Washington, DC

Conferencia; Colonial Latin American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue; 2016

University of Maryland

This presentation will focus on women-cronistas in Colonial Latin American Chronicles, especially some from New Spain, but not exclusively. I will look at legal and historical discourses which provide structure, topics, and description patterns that are deployed in letters, ?peticiones,? and ?probanzas? (in the narrative of Isabel de Guevara and Isabel Barreto, and the ?Información de doña Isabel Moctezuma? or the ?Proceso contra María de Bárcena?, among others). The main hypothesis is that women ?cronistas? resorted to three different types of rhethoric: the first dimension would be the rhetoric of ?silence? (the cases of Luisa Xicoténcatl, Doña Elvira, Doña Leonor Cortés Moctezuma, and María Estrada). The second dimension would be the ?neglect and claim? rhetoric, with the texts and stories of Isabel de Guevara, Inés de Bodadilla, and Isabel Moctezuma, and the letters sent from multiple women that migrated to the ?new? world during the sixteenth century. Lastly, the rhetoric of ?deviation? is represented in the writings of Leonor Cortés Moctezuma and Francisca Pizarro.