Lizardi manuscript discovered
The Bancroft Library is one of the world’s richest repositories of Mexican Independence materials. Hubert Howe Bancroft bought much of them at auction in Europe when they were offered for sale after Maximilian’s failed attempt at empire in the 1860s. Produced in the first decades of the 19th century, when Mexico was fighting for its independence from Spain, the collection was part of an accumulation taken from public and private libraries, ecclesiastical records, and booksellers’ warehouses.
The major writer of that period, whom every student of Spanish-American literature knows as the author of Spanish America’s first novel, was José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi. Lizardi published that novel, El Periquillo sarniento, in 1816, in the midst of the colony’s war against Spain.
He also wrote plays and poetry and was an important social critic, with essays published in newspapers and political pamphlets.
My interest in Lizardi began in the 1970s when I was writing my Stanford doctoral dissertation on him. While seeking primary source materials, I worked at Bancroft every Thursday for a year reading the run of the Diario de México, a daily paper published in Mexico City from 1805 to 1812. Then Bancroft kindly accorded me user privileges as a member of the faculty at the University of San Francisco. Thus, over the ensuing years, I have returned to Bancroft many times for further research, working primarily with printed materials.
However, my most recent find is the kind of discovery that comes to very few scholars in a lifetime—an unknown manuscript of original poetry in Lizardi’s own hand. Some years ago I requested a microfilm copy of a Bancroft manuscript which I had seen listed in A Guide to the Manuscript Collections of The Bancroft Library of former Bancroft director George P. Hammond. According to Hammond’s index, one item—the last of six in the book—was written by Lizardi. But I had put the microfilm aside because of teaching pressures and only looked at it last October, when I was on sabbatical leave. There, in a neatly penned 154 pages, Lizardi had left an unknown, book-length manuscript. As part of the last poem, a sonnet dedicated to a friend, he had signed his name and given the date, 3 December 1822. Further, he had provided an index, ordering the poems in the sequence he wished and thus structuring the whole.
|
To my good friend Don Francisco Javier de la Peña. Congratulating him on his saint’s day, 3 December 1822, His recognized [friend] Joaquin wrote the following sonnet With the most sincere effusion of pleasure My poor Muse writes today; I do not know if it is Melpomene or Thalia, Nor if it should be festive or plaintive. A true friendship dictates it A simple friendship that persistently To manifest itself would wish A chest of glass so that it might be visible. I would want to wish for you happy days, Not the unfortunate days that we are living today. But, in short, may you live, [in] your continuing days And enjoy pleasures which are even doubled In peace, health, honors and wealth. Oh! May God grant to you days of unlimited length. This is the wish of your friend Joaquin Fernandez Lizardi. |
|
The poems are fascinating. In them Lizardi satirizes the wealthy upper class as it took on French refinements— fancy dress, dancing, etc. Yet he also attacks colonial practices such as racial stratification and immorality which discouraged marriage. He gives the examples of a Filipino woman and a man from Boston who pretend to be brother and sister so they can live together, and children from illicit unions referred to as younger brothers and sisters.
Several facts are significant. The poems, some known but most unknown or known only by their titles, date from 1810-1811, a period of censorship in the colony. They are perhaps evidence of a long-lost book Lizardi’s bibliographers have searched for. The date of the manuscript’s compilation in 1822 is interesting because Lizardi was excommunicated at that time as a result of having published a pamphlet ostensibly in support of freemasonry.
Beyond the specific example of Lizardi and the Mexican historical experience, however, the manuscript opens up the broader question of the role of manuscript literature in a colonial society struggling to become a nation.
In an essay which will accompany the poetry manuscript when it is published by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), I ask what use was made of this private kind of writing. First, politically sensitive ideas were frequently circulated only in manuscript. Handwritten copies, often of religious items, were also produced for people who could not afford to buy books. And men of the new sciences (botany, physics, etc.) wrote one another letters in a careful, footnoted format which suggests that they wanted these letters to be printed later, after censorship had ended and intolerance had dissipated.
The discovery of Lizardi’s manuscript at Bancroft has already caused a stir among Hispanists throughout the United States and Mexico. Lizardi is Mexico’s first national writer and thus has become a symbol of nationhood. In Juan O’Gorman’s mural in the Chapultepec Palace, he is depicted alongside Miguel Hidalgo and José María Morelos, fathers of Mexican independence.
Nancy Vogeley is a Professor of Spanish
at the University of San Francisco.
Volume 112
Spring 1998
Table of Contents
DeFeo, Conner papers add to Bancroft’s Beat collection
From the Director: What does Bancroft collect?
The Digital Scriptorium
Towards a Renaissance in medieval manuscript studies
Robert Frost Collection includes photos inscribed by the poet
Bancroft Fellows research images of the American West, history of Mexico’s Cora Indians
Freshmen discover the wonders of Bancroft
Bancroft staffer in the spotlight
An Oral History of Jack Stauffacher From letterpress to computer-designed fine printing
Where is the last portrait of Mark Twain?
