José Cárdenas Bunsen, Ph.D.

Arbeitsvorhaben

The Politics of Secrecy and Revelation: Foundlings, Intergenerational Alliances, and the Invention of Identity in the Early Modern Colonial World

This project takes up the subject of child abandonment throughout the Spanish Empire and its impact on legal, institutional, and literary representation. Entirely based on newly retrieved archival data, it asks how foundlings, who officially ignored their parents, construed their own identities before authorities; it argues that an intergenerational alliance between them and their protectors either revealed or concealed actual information about the foundlings’ provenance to help them attain their legal goals. The tense dynamics of revelation and concealment illuminate the history of privacy and the changing identities that foundlings adopted as they embraced social positions on their way to adulthood. Cast away from the institution of the family, foundlings did not have a clear personhood under Spanish law; but following the lead of Church law, Spanish authorities progressively opened paths to habilitate them case by case until the king legitimized all foundlings in 1794. These beneficial provisions required a confirmed foundling status defined by the official absence of parents, which explains the secrecy foundlings maintained even when they and their associates knew their provenance. I investigate the orphanages of Córdoba, Havana, and Lima to establish common patterns throughout the Spanish world while detecting social and racial differences between metropolitan child abandonment and abandonment in the colonies. Historians of childhood and literary critics have largely omitted the role of secrecy in shaping foundlings’ identities and have tended to rely almost exclusively on the notion of family in interpreting cultural phenomena. My project seeks to fill that lacuna and to reconceptualize trends of interpretation considering early modern foundlings and their lives.

Recommended Reading

Cárdenas Bunsen, José. Escritura y derecho canónico en la obra de fray Bartolomé de las Casas. Iberoamericana Editorial Vervuert, 2011.
–. “Consent, Voluntary Jurisdiction and Native Political Agency in Bartolomé de las Casas’ Final Writings.” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 91, no. 6 (2014): 793–817. https://doi.org/10.1080/14753820.2014.888887.
–. La aparición de los libros plúmbeos y los modos de escribir la historia: De Pedro de Castro al Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. Iberoamericama Editorial Vervuert, 2018.

Publikationen aus der Fellowbibliothek

Cárdenas Bunsen, José (Madrid, 2018)

La aparición de los libros plúmbeos y los modos de escribir la historia : de Pedro de Castro al Inca Garcilaso de la Vega Tiempo emulado ; 60

Cárdenas Bunsen, José (Abingdon, 2014)

Consent, voluntary jurisdiction and native political agency in Bartolomé de Las Casas' final writings

Cárdenas Bunsen, José (Madrid, 2011)

Escritura y derecho canónico en la obra de fray Bartolomé de las Casas Parecos y australes ; 9