From Print to Public Performance to Relaciones de fiestas: Don Quixote in Viceregal Festivals

Abstract

This chapter examines two Latin American festivals accounts, in which prominent Cervantine figures make their first American appearances. It contends that these accounts are paradigmatic examples of transition in colonial texts in at least two ways. First, they are examples of “theoretical transition” between marginal and canonical that produce new texts defined by their generic hybridity. Second, they offer thematic transitions, as the prominent Cervantine figures travel from Spain to the Americas as characters of a print book, they were then enacted in public performances in New Spain and Peru to be recorded in written accounts. In these texts, the prominent Cervantine figures meet Spanish American characters and places in viceregal festivals.