Creole Listening, Good Governance, and Tortillas in Alboroto y Motín de México

Abstract: This article demonstrates that the correlations between colonial theory on how urban politics and recent theories of space and listening become apparent when Creole listening functions as practice and tool of inquiry into the context of exemplary colonial governance and social disruption. Notions of indigenous subjectivity, characterized by histories of dehumanization and self-determination came with the changes of the aural relations of the baroque city. Written by a writer who claimed eyewitness authority (like colonial chroniclers) the textual authority established in Alboroto y motín depends most of all on Sigüenza’s listening. He collected vocal sounds. The letter is a historical example of the importance of listening in the deployment of colonial power and the illustration of its disruptions. Sigüenza’s discontent with the transformation of the normative aurality of the urban space brought by the economy manifests in the spatial frames around his listening. I argue that these represent a longing for the orderly relationship between the law, urban center, and authority, implemented by the ordered city, legal discourse, and the town crier. The representation of this longing speaks to the continuous articulation of the voices that did not embody such a relationship to dehumanization. Among them, Sigüenza’s critique of the indigenous women’s aural defiance through the acts of appropriation of corn, their labor, and the tortilla business, in the face of viceregal corruption and profit and the subordination of the Indian bakers of the traza (the space reserved for Spanish occupation) stands out.