Reconstrucción de imaginarios en la Relación Breve de Fray Francisco de Aguilar

Abstract

Reconstruction of Imaginaries in the Brief Relation of Fray Francisco de Aguilar

Upon the discovery and colonization of the Americas, sixteenth‑century Spaniards had to face the process of interpretation of the new reality. To do this, they drew on a specific kind of writing, the chronicles of the Indies, and used specific social  imaginary, a way of conceptualizing which comes from Spanish and, more broadly, European cultural traditions. A Hispanic chronicler wrote about the Indians and about himself. The aim of this paper is to analyze one of those texts, the Relación Breve – written by one of the soldiers of Cortés and a Dominican friar, Francisco de Aguilar – in order to define his cultural tradition and his way of addressing the “Other”, an indigenous world. My study shows that the text by Aguilar is a mixture of medieval and Renaissance discourse; the author exposes his judgment about the native inhabitants of the Americas based on his viewpoint of a soldier or of a friar.