Next meeting & José Antonio Mazzotti talk: 24 March 2010

The Cluster’s next meeting will be on Wednesday the 24th of March at 3:00 p.m., in Buchanan Tower 826. In a joint session with the Hispanic Research Seminar, Professor José Antonio Mazzotti (Tufts University) will give a talk on Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539-1616), the first American-born historian of the New World, and his master work, the Royal Commentaries of the Incas:

“Migration, Fragmentation and Reinvention in Inca Garcilaso”

The search for identity in Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539-1616), the first American-born historian of the New World, and his master work, the Royal Commentaries of the Incas, published in two parts in 1609 and 1617, remains a matter of great debate. As the son of an Incan princess and a Spanish conqueror, Inca Garcilaso experienced a quadruple migration in his lifetime: 1) the linguistic migration from his mother tongue of Quechua to his father’s Castilian; 2) the nominal migration from his given name of Gómez Suárez de Figueroa to his chosen name of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega; 3) the discursive migration from royal indigenous oral narratives to the high rhetoric of 16th–century Spanish historiography; and 4) the geographical and subjective migration from the city of Cuzco in highland Peru, where he spent the first twenty years of his life, to the southern Spanish cities of Montilla and Cordoba, where he spent his remaining fifty-seven. Each one of these migratory experiences helped define Garcilaso’s very particular writing style, one which is at times fragmented and at times syncretic. By examining some aspects of Inca Garcilaso’s life and the Royal Commentaries from the perspective of contemporary immigration studies, this paper sheds new light upon this American classic.

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