Mexican Jesuits write the history of the Americas

This book examines how three exiled Jesuits from colonial Mexico - Rafael Landívar, Francisco Clavijero and Pedro Márquez - shaped the discourse of continental emancipation from Spain. By considering their works in relation to critical debates about the root causes of the international expulsion, and suppression of the Jesuits and scholarship about the Spanish American Wars of Independence, the author examines these pivotal events as inextricably linked. All three authors arrived in Italy at different stages of their spiritual and intellectual development, and extolled their homeland through similar and distinct strategies of representation. They instilled in their compatriots a bolder understanding of colonial Mexico's place within the broader Republic of Letters, while prompting their Italian readers to question their assumptions about the New World. They broadened the horizon of an eighteenth-century European reading public eager for the most reliable information about the New World and gave the discourse of creole patriotism a past, present and futurist dimension. In so doing, Landívar, Clavijero and Márquez established the spatial and political parameters of an emerging continental poetics of independence, and their works served as a wellspring of literary inspiration that subsequent authors from Spain's recently emancipated colonies would draw from.