Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra's Itineraries in Mexico

Abstract

Graciela A. Mota Botello

In 1590, the New World was an attraction for many inhabitants of the old continent. This dazzling mirage could not have been alien to Miguel de Cervantes. The reasons why he wanted to leave Spain are unknown, but the congruence between the dreamer and the account of his experiences, Cervantes alludes to himself as a "desperate of Spain"; he confronts with his writing, the misery of those multiple universes, which make the encounter with the fatality of the everyday world, a forum where the dual triumph that defines the literary legitimacy of his spirit is questioned.

The events of this "Cervantes' itinerary in Mexico" are framed around three polemical circumstances: International events. The letters of request of 17 February 1582 and 21 May 1590. The day on which the first copies of The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha arrived in Mexico, 1605. There are reasons to suppose that Cervantes was in Mexico on two occasions: one between 1599 and 1600 and the other between 1608 and 1612.

However, far from borders and territories, over four centuries, the itinerary of his life and work in Mexico reflects the ideology of a life that underlies the greatest epic intensity that survives his time. Cervantes rides alongside his most edifying work, because he continues to establish the living soul of an identity united by language, which goes beyond the feelings of a single continent.

In the recognition of that other who puts the value of otherness first, concealed by an agreed pragmatism of one-sidedness. Such a protagonist highlights the decadence of values that are incapable of sustaining themselves.  Because of this uninterrupted dialogue over so many centuries, it came as a pleasant surprise to many Mexicans to learn that one of the wishes of the most famous writer of the Spanish language was to travel to Mexico and to have served as ruler of such an unprecedented "New Continent" in the 17th century.

It is also worth noting that the fact that he did not manage to do so meant that Cervantes left all his imaginary potential embodied in the figure of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, which gives rise to all kinds of conjectures that call into question the solidity of a monolithic and medioeval Hispanic culture, projected in the history of contradictions that became questioned in the face of the polyvalent appearance of a necessarily changing modernity.