The image and the city are two essential elements of baroque culture in the first two viceregal cities of colonial Spanish America, Mexico and Lima. They generated a variety of interrelated cultural and literary texts that linked image, city and subject to impose order and produce and reproduce hegemonic power.
This dissertation explores the images of these two cities during the 17th and 18th centuries through the poems, La grandeza mexicana (1604), by Bernardo de Balbuena, and Lima por dentro y por fuera (1797), by Esteban Terralla y Landa in terms of the relationships they establish, within the baroque viceregal city, with other texts such as the accounts of festivals, earthquakes, autos de fe (Inquisition trials), riots and theatrical plays, proscribed songs, poems, and popular dances, as well as the visual texts of maps, pinturas de castas (caste painting), and painted folding screens or biombos.
This analysis of the viceregal city through such a broad cultural corpus applies the concept of le plí (the fold) developed by Gilles Deleuze, to reveal essential threads that permeate two centuries of written and pictorial texts. Negotiation of the subject is the first topic: while the no letrado, or non literate subject negotiates his/her relations with power through the body, the letrado or literate subject achieves it through use of an alphabetic text. Violence is a second aspect that is present in the interrelated practices of urban space. A third commonality is the representation of the city as a fragmented body (cuerpo), the result of the transformation of the gaze (mirada) that occurs as a political priority during the baroque period.
The publication dates of the two main texts in 1604 and 1797 mark the moments of construction and disintegration of the baroque order in Spanish America as revealed through the interaction of the connecting threads of subject, violence and fragmentation that characterize the cultural productions of colonial Mexico and Lima.