The Sick Sun: Poetics of Contagion in Seventeenth-Century Mexico City

This article focuses on the relationship between poetry and epidemics. It explores how poetry in seventeenthcentury Mexico not only disposed of epidemic endings; it also encouraged its diverse audience to reconceptualize time, and in so doing, reconsider their past and recent outbreak experiences. To show this, I analyze a series of Quintillas (five-lined stanzas) that narrate the festive processions held for the Virgin of Los Remedios in Mexico City, 1668, celebrating her divine intercession in ending a viruela outbreak and bringing rainfall after a period of drought. Within the linear narrative traced by the Quintillas—progressing from the sorrow of pestilence and drought to joy of rainfall and deliverance from contagion—a cyclical understanding of epidemic outbreaks and natural disasters emerges. Articulating ecological and spiritual imaginaries at the intersection of Catholic faith, European theories of contagion, and Nahua mythology, this poetic composition is shaped and informed by the historical experiences of past epidemic outbreaks and natural disasters in the central valley of Mexico.