The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World
by Carlos Fuentes
Houghton Mifflin, 399 pp., $35.00
New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery
by Anthony Grafton, with April Shelford, by Nancy Siraisi
Harvard University Press (Belknap Press), 282 pp., $29.95
The Times Atlas of World Exploration: 3,000 Years of Exploring, Explorers, and Mapmaking
edited by Felipe Fernández-Armesto
HarperCollins, 286 pp., $75.00
Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 9001900
by Alfred Crosby
Cambridge University Press, 368 pp., $13.95 (paper)
The Early Spanish Main
by Carl Ortwin Sauer, foreword by Anthony Pagden
University of California Press, 306 pp., $16.00 (paper)
The Native Population of the Americas in 1492
edited by William M. Denevan, foreword by W. George Lovell
University of Wisconsin Press, 353 pp., $14.95 (paper)
The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus
by Irving Rouse
Yale University Press, 211 pp., $25.00
Disease and Demography in the Americas
edited by John W. Verano, edited by Douglas H. Ubelaker
Smithsonian Institution Press, 294 pp., $62.00
Letters from a New World: Amerigo Vespucci’s Discovery of America
edited by Luciano Formisano, foreword by Garry Wills, translated by David Jacobson
Marsilio, 214 pp., $24.00
Portugal and the Discovery of America: Christopher Columbus and the Portuguese
by Alfredo Pinheiro Marques
Portuguese State Mint, 135 pp.
L’expansion Portugaise dans la littérature latine de la renaissance
by Luis de Matos
Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 671 pp., 70,000 escudos
The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus
by Valerie I.J. Flint
Princeton University Press, 233 pp., $24.95
Isabel The Queen: Life and Times
by Peggy K. Liss
Oxford University Press, 398 pp., $30.00
The Portuguese Empire in Asia 15001700: A Political and Economic History
by Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Longman, 324 pp., $13.25 (paper)
Columbus was mugged on the way to his own party. The American quincentennial year drew to a close with barely a mention of the Admiral of the Ocean Sea and would-be “Viceroy of India.” Even the advertising agencies found him too hot a potato (the potato of course being one of Europe’s more useful American acquisitions resulting from Spain’s conquests in the New World). By October Columbus had become what advertisers dislike most, especially when they are promoting department store sales on family holidays: he had become controversial.
Kirkpatrick Sale made a preemptive strike against Columbus as a destructive colonizer in The Conquest of Paradise (1990), and in spite of criticism of Sale for tendentiousness, the wave of subsequent publications could not erase the initial tone he had set. The great birthday therefore passed with barely a murmur of national celebration. Two multimillion-dollar movies about Columbus came and went, largely unattended. Carlos Fuentes presented several hours of televised historical travelogue in Europe and the Americas, ending predictably at the US-Mexican border, where he asserted (at least culturally speaking) Mexico’s claim to the lost northern territories, an irredentism President Salinas must have found singularly illtimed as the debate over NAFTA heated up.
Fuentes’s book The Buried Mirror, like much of its bibliography, in fact appears firmly stuck in the 1960s. His presence seemed intrusive in the otherwise well-filmed and constructed television series with the same title, which would have been much better had it made more use of the originator of the idea, Peggy Liss, a distinguished historian of Spain and Spanish America and author of an excellent new biography of Columbus’s sponsor, Queen Isabella. Fuentes, never one to use two words if more will do, throws in virtually every stereotype of hispanidade propaganda (Bulls, Virgins, Tangos, Gauchos, Don Quixote) while adding little that is distinctive of his own. Latin America, mired in disaster, is somehow to be “rescued by culture.” His book looks attractive, as do parts of the television series in which he appeared, and we are given good views of the crossing of the Andes by San Martín, of the Baroque churches of Mexico and Peru, and of paintings by Velázquez and Goya. Such skillful and expensive packaging is not an uncommon characteristic of the quincentennial year, where the wine is often less impressive than its container.
The Spanish government had earlier set store by the quincentennial (and had subsidized the Fuentes undertaking along with the many other projects, books, and exhibitions in the quincentennial cause); but it virtually banished Columbus’s name from the great Seville exposition as soon as the organizers began to realize that Spain risked alienating Jews, Muslims, and much of Latin America by too direct a celebration of Columbus’s accomplishments. As for the Pope, in arranging his long-planned visit to Hispaniola in commemoration of the evangelization of the New World, some last-minute rescheduling was needed so that he might avoid the controversy surrounding the inauguration of the …
