^M00:00:13 >> Welcome, everyone. Nice to see a full room of people here to celebrate Carmen Benito's republication here at the Library of Congress. My name is Talia Guzman-Gonzalez and I am a Reference Librarian in the Hispanic Division here in the Library, and it's my pleasure to welcome you all here to this presentation of Spain and the Atlantic Coast of The United States: Four Characters from the 16th Century in Search of an Author. On behalf of the Hispanic Division, our Chief, Dr. Suzanne Schadl, and everyone in the Division, I would like to welcome you. I'm going to give the stage, the podium, to Dr. Eyda Merediz, who is the Head of the Spanish and Portuguese Department at the University of Maryland, who's going to introduce the speakers. Thank you. ^M00:01:00 [ Applause ] ^M00:01:05 ^M00:01:08 >> Good afternoon. I have to thank very warmly Talia Guzman-Gonzalez because thanks to her we've been able to set up this kind of partnership with the Library of Congress for, i think, the third year in a row of presenting the wonderful work of our colleagues in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. So I'd like to thank Georgette Dorn, who is basically the outgoing Chief of the Hispanic Division, and I'd like to welcome also Suzanne Schadl, who's going to be our new Chief. And I cannot say enough good things about the Library of Congress and the Hispanic Division. You guys make these kind of events really worth it for us to come out here. And -- and it's a -- welcome to all of you. Thank you for being here. And it kind of helped that it's kind of humid out there and we can take refuge over here. But you'll see that this'll be worth it, every minute of it, because we have the presentation of this wonderful book written by my colleague, Carmen Benito-Vessels, Spain and the Atlantic Coast of The U.S.: Four Characters from the 16th Century in Search of an Author. If we had any doubts that Spanish should be spoken in Virginia, Washington, D.C., Maryland, all along the coast from the Carolinas up, this book has proven basically that it's probably the first European language that was spoken on the eastern coast of the U.S. We have two wonderful guests that I'm going to introduce. What I'm going to do is I'm going to introduce everyone here and then they each will take turns talking and we're going to open the conversation at the end so we can ask general questions and we can, you know, establish a dialogue. So Carmen Benito-Vessels received her B.A. in [inaudible] from the University of Salamanca in 1977, pursued post-graduate studies at the University of Lisbon, and English Philology at the University of Salamanca, and earned her Ph.D. at the University of California-Santa Barbara in 1988. I don't want to date you, Carmen. Benito-Vessels has worked at the University of Maryland since 1988, where she is Head of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and also been the Director of Graduate Studies. She's currently full professor in Spanish Philology, Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Her cutting-edge research skillfully combines classical and contemporary studies while insightful and original combinations of the diverse interests have captivated a wide academic transatlantic audience. Benito-Vessels has published numerous articles and chapters in collective monographs. In fact, the journal Mediaevalia from the UNAM in Mexico has just chosen one of her articles from 20 years ago about the Gran Conquista de Ultramar to be reprinted next year in a special edition celebrating 30 years of the journal. And she's also the author of four books. The first one is Juan Manuel: Escritura y Recreación de la Historia from the University of Wisconsin Press from 1994; La Palabra en el Tiempo de las Letras: Una Historia Heterodoxa from the Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2007; Lenguaje y Valor en la Literatura Medieval Española from Juan de la Cuesta Monographs from 2013; and the one that we are presenting today. If you haven't had a chance to look at the book, it's up there. Take a look at it. It's been published by the ANLE and just came out of the presses, hot from the press. She's also the collator of two volumes, The Picaresque: A Symposium on the Rogue's Tale from 1994 and Women at Work in Spain from the Middle Ages to Early Modern Times. She has lectured widely and participated in international seminars in the United States, France, Portugal, Spain, Germany, Argentina, Ecuador, Mexico. Benito-Vessels is also Miembro Numerario of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language. We are celebrating her today and don't forget to congratulate her. This is a wonderful occasion for us at the University of Maryland. This is the kind of talent that we have on our faculty and we are very proud of it. I'm also very pleased to have -- to welcome two guests that we have invited for today. Raquel -- Professor Raquel Chang-Rodriguez and Professor Allison Bigelow, who will be presenting the book for us. And let me just give you a brief introduction about each one of them. Raquel Chang-Rodriguez [inaudible] is a dear friend, wonderful colonialist. Her Ph.D. is from New York University and she's Distinguished Professor of Spanish-American Literature and Cultures at the Graduate Center at The City College (CUNY), where she co-directs the catedra [inaudible]. Her most recent publications is a translation edition of the Franciscan Luis Jerónimo de Oré's Account of the Martyrs in the Provinces of La Florida that just came out of the University of New Mexico Press. Other titles by Chang-Rodriguez are Cartografía garcilasista from 2013, Aquí, ninfas del sur, venid ligeras from 2008, Beyond Books and Borders: Garcilaso de la Vega and La Florida del Inca from 2006. And if you haven't seen an original edition of La Florida del Inca, it's right here. You can actually [inaudible] these wonderful books. And she's published that simultaneously in English and Spanish. She is the founding editor of the prizewinning journal Colonial Latin American Review, for we all are very thankful, and the recipient of several grants and awards, including the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and the Enrique Anderson Imbert Prize given by the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española. The National Atlantic University, Athens, Greece, awarded Chang-Rodriguez a Doctorate Honoris Causa. She is Profesora Honoraria of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima, Peru, and [inaudible] Academia Peruana de la Lengua and the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua, affiliates of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language. Welcome, Raquel. Thank you for being here. I'm also going to introduce Allison Bigelow, who is an Assistant Professor of Colonial Latin America in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese at the University of Virginia. Her research on indigenous literacies, gender systems, and colonial science, especially vernacular sciences like mining and agriculture, has been published or is forthcoming from journals like Anuario de Estudios Bolivianos, Early American Studies, Early American Literature, Ethnohistory, the Journal of Extractive Industries and Society, and the PMLA. With fellowships from the Huntington Library and American Council of Learned Societies, in 2017-2018 she completed her book manuscript, Cultural Touchstones: Mining, Refining, and the Languages of Empire in the Early Americas, which is due in the editor's inbox at the Alejandro Institute of Early American History and Culture by December 12. So cross your fingers for her. She is a star coming. So thank you again for being here. I'm just going to basically call Raquel to the podium and we can start this wonderful academic intellectual journey. ^M00:08:50 [ Inaudible background speaker ] ^M00:09:08 ^M00:09:14 >> Good afternoon, everybody. I'm very pleased to be here at the Library of Congress, particularly at this event sponsored by the Hispanic Division. The Library, of course, holds many books that are dear to us that do research in various genres and periods. And also it holds the voice of writers, authors, some of them are gone, and I was listening by chance the other day to the voice of a dear person that I know, Jose Juan Arrom, that was recorded here at the Library of Congress. And it was really moving and it's real because he has been gone for a number of years and he was a forerunner of colonial studies and the development of the field in the U.S. ^M00:10:14 I'm here thanks to Benita. Thank you for inviting me to be here. Thank you, Aida, a good friend with whom I have traveled in several areas, including the Galapagos Islands that we were reminiscing this afternoon on. Benita has brought us not only to -- to Florida with her book, but I think also with the climate. How did you manage that? And I want to thank Aida for the lovely introduction and mentioning that I am distinguished. Sometimes I feel extinguished more. But I am -- it's great to be here. So I will then read my thoughts on the book and share them with you. I have some slides that I will try to present as we go on. So in this -- in the España y la costa atlántica de los EEUU: Cuatro personajes del siglo XVI en busca de autor, Spain and the Atlantic Coast of the U.S.: Four Characters of the 16th Century in Search of an Author. Can you hear me? Im a little bit nervous with this microphone. I'm not Oprah Winfrey-like, but so anyhow, Carmen Benito-Vessels aims to recover without reservations the early history of the country of Washington and Jefferson by restoring a glaring omission, the Spanish presence in our land. The title alludes partially to a drama by Luigi Pirandello that in turn refers to a novel by Miguel de Unamuno. As the names given to people, to books, to geographical spaces are not assigned by chance, it is important to explore briefly the connections of this title. In his drama, Six Characters in Search of an Author, released in 1921, the Sicilian Pirandello presents the relationship of the playwright with his cynic protagonist. In his novel, Niebla, the Spaniard Unamuno created a narrative based on events from the life of its protagonist, Augusto Perez. Both works, the play and the novel, question the relationship between authors and characters. They offer also a philosophical meditation on existent identity, the link between reality and imagination. At the same time, the books inform readers as to how a dramatic piece or a work of fiction should be written. Like Pirandello and Unamuno, Benito-Vessels carefully selects her protagonists and situates them in a different paradigm. The paradigm is the reconfiguration of North American history of the Atlantic southeast. Through the analysis of the deeds of two native protagonists, Francisco de Chicora and Don Luis de Velasco, also known as Paquiquino or Paquiquineo, and two Spaniards, Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón and Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, the author guides us through a time when the Spanish presence in territories now part of the United States was paramount. By charting the itinerary of these characters, Benito-Vessels attempts to explain why they and also others are absent from the early history of the United States. It is worth remembering who these forgotten historical actors are. Francisco de Chicora, or Chicorano, was one of 70 natives of the coast of the current state of South Carolina deceived, imprisoned, and enslaved in 1521 by two Spanish conquistadors. When they arrived in Santo Domingo of Hispaniola, authorities there found that these natives were not rebels and therefore could not sold as slaves. The group was released and in their turn they were ordered to return to the mainland. However, the return trip was never made and most died in Santo Domingo. Among the survivors of the group was Francisco de Chicora, who was baptized, learned Spanish, and began to tell the wonders and riches of his native land perhaps with a secret desire to return to it. As expected, such descriptions did not go unnoticed. The learned and powerful judge Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón soon became protector of El Chicorano and took him to Spain to the court. There he met none other than the chronicler Peter Martyr d'Anghiera, who penned the descriptions of the land Francisco de Chicora was telling about and thus began to build the legend that resulted in the expedition to the [inaudible] Nueva Andalucia. Charles V granted lawyer Vázquez de Ayllón the right to explore and colonize the lands of Chicora and there he went with six ships and more than 600 persons, and, of course, the guide was Franciso el Chicorano. After arriving, Francisco disappeared and he was never seen. The expedition was a total failure. Vázquez de Ayllón died in North American lands. There was a settlement of a very brief duration. The colony was called San Miguel de Gualdape and it's now located in South Carolina. The San Miguel de Gualdape precedes San Augustin de la Florida, the English colonies of Roanoke and Jamestown for several decades. In a map by Diego Ribero, the area explored by the unfortunate oridor is called Tierra de Ayllón, and this is the map that Carmen has used for the cover of the book. Let's go to the second character, Luis de Velasco, or Paquiquineo, which is another protagonist discussed by Benito-Vessels. He was an Indian from the modern state of Virginia, Allison, probably of Algonquian ethnicity, who by force or by his own free will, we don't know, joined a Spanish expedition [inaudible]. Educated by Dominicans and Jesuits, protected by the Viceroy of New Spain, and baptized with his name, the young man traveled to Spain, Mexico, and Havana with friars who insisted on creating a mission in the Bay of Santa Maria de Ajacán, right here, Chesapeake Bay. Don Luis managed to return to his land acompanied by Jesuit priests and brothers. He served as a guide for them and then later on he murdered the priest and brothers. Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, then governor of Cuba and adelantado of La Florida, was in charge of punishing Don Luis and his followers for their misdeeds, but they were never found. It is worth mentioning or noting that Menéndez de Avilés, supported by relatives from Asturias and friends from that same area, had far more ambitions for La Florida. No. 1, he was determined to expel the French, which he did. No. 2, he wanted to find a land route from Zacatecas in Nueva Espana in order to cross the continent and with the silver from that mining town and avoid the pirates, French and English, that were roaming the Caribbean. ^M00:20:20 No. 3, and this was still interesting to us, he aimed to explore the north of Florida. I'm not talking about Florida peninsula. Florida was a vast land extending into what is today Kansas. And he hoped remotely to find a way to China. No. 4, to continue evangelizing the native of La Florida with Franciscan missionaries and obviously to colonize the area and establish settlement as point of entry to the center of North America. He, like happens, died of typhus before any of these plans could be realized. In an account backed by careful research, the characters Benito-Vessels -- of Benito-Vessels acquire a life of their own in a historical flow where the predominant role of Spain has been historically minimized. First, she explains, this was due to the territorial ambitions of England and France, and later, in the Independence period and in the 19th Century, to those who put together a history tainted with religious preferences, ethnic prejudice, outright carelessness or simple ignorance of the sources that amply support the role and the presence of Spain. Not many listen to Thomas Jefferson, and I brought his image to us because he donated his books to this very library, no. Not very many listen to Jefferson. He was a reader of Cervantes. And not only Don Quixote, but other nobles and tracks by Cervantes. And he find -- Jefferson frequently indicated that in order to know the early history of the United States, and to establish strong relations to our neighbors to the south, it is essential to learn Spanish. Carefully chosen and studied with determination by Benito-Vessels, her characters, de Chicorano, Don Luis Vázquez de Ayllón, Menéndez de Avilés, can be added to other early authors and protagonists: Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Hernando de Soto, Inca Garcilaso, Alonso Gregorio de Escobedo, Luis Jerónimo de Oré. That, in the words of Benito-Vessels, constitute the missing link to Spain in the early modern history of the United States. Their career, as the author has pointed out, and I quote her now, is full of the small triumphs, great failures, and enormous risks, end of quote. Without exception, Benito-Vessels' book illuminates these complex periods and helps us appreciate the many facets of an early Hispanic presence in territories which later will become part of the United States. The research summarized in the book by Carmen also leads to other facets of the early Colonial period of North American, particularly to translation and cartography. It is worth remembering how Spanish sources related to the area were put to use and also the preference on the part of the English to disseminate works where a given chronicle harshly criticized Spanish colonization. One work comes to mind, fray Bartolomé de las Casas' Brevísima Historia de la Destrucción de las Indias, translated with a very graphic title of Tears of the Indians. As for misrepresentations, perhaps the most notable case is a translation by Congressman Robert Greenhow of the Chronological Essay for the General History of Florida by Andrés González de Barcia. Following Anne Brickhouse, the author explains how Greenhow disassociates the history of Virginia from the Spanish presence in that territory thus diminishing its link to the indigenous past through the demonization of Don Luis. In this sense, Benito-Vessels' book brings to the floor the debate about what did give rise to possession, discovery or colonization. Obviously, England felt that colonization was the answer to that, but we can just talk about this later. Central to the [inaudible] illustrated by the biography of the four initial characters is the language of cartography. Maps, explains Carmen, do not just point to a route by means of the images illustrating their edges, the selection of drawing, of a style of arrangement, of colors and lines. They offer a language that first we must know how to decipher, how to understand. As we know, the Spanish navigational charts were jealously guarded in the Casa de Contratación in Seville. Sailors sponsored by Spain had the obligation to indicate new discoveries and routes in the royal register and could not discuss them under penalty of death. However, due to the defections of cartographers and the pressures of other European powers, secrets were frequently revealed. Benito-Vessels offers a classical example and I will bring this to your attention. The German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller inscribed the name of the continent, America, in his 1507 map prepared thanks to the information provided to him by Amerigo Vespucci, at that time at the service of the Spanish crown. Chapter 7's Cartographers to Power is a true treasure trove as far as information while also showcasing the practicing of the time. As the author points out, these struggles, cartographic struggles, make us think of Edmundo O'Gorman's classic book The Invention of America. Imagine not only by chroniclers but also by cartographers who responded to the interest of a wealthy and curious European readership devoted themselves to describing and plotting the wonders of the New World. We cannot fail to mention common practices in the Spanish colonial expansion evident in North America and in South America. For example, in the conquest of the Inca Empire, the Pizarristas, or the followers of Francsico Pizarro, sought with earnest the grave of the Inca kings. It wasn't because they were devoted. They wanted to basically, as far as the priests go, they wanted to find information to accuse the Inca kings of being idolaters. And the soldiers of Pizarro or Pizarro's [inaudible] knew that the Inca kings, the Inca lords, were buried with large amounts of gold and silver and treasure and they wanted to go to where they were buried just to check on the booty. On the Atlantic coast of North America, pearls often replaced the coveted metals and these are also sought in temples and graves. In his account of the marches of Florida, the Peruvian Franciscan Luis Jerónimo de Oré proposes to activate in La Florida a method of evangelization that was a disaster for the Indian population in what was then the Viceroyalty of Peru. ^M00:30:11 Deredduciones, it didn't -- it was never implemented in Florida. Now, in her desire to understand the kind of history that produces distortions and omissions, Carmen Benito-Vessels, a Medievalist by training, goes to the prologue of Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo in his recasting of the Amadis of Gual, the classic chivalric novel. In his prologue to this book, the author speaks of three types of history. No. 1 was a true factual narrative about real deeds provided by a reliable eyewitness. No. 2 was what he calls historia de la afición, hobby history, or writing history for the love of it and offering a partial representation. And No. 3 would be historia fingida, or false history, which recasts facts within the realm of the real maravilloso and is equivalent to fiction. As we know, the three models are evident in the stories and chronicles about the Spanish in this and its frontera norte. The frontera norte is what is now the United States. However, clarifies Benito-Vessels, in the configuration of the early history of the current United States, hobby history predominates with the consequent exclusion of the Hispanic component. So in her book, Carmen outlines this forgotten history and underscores the importance of its recovery and study. I conclude remembering, going back to the beginning, words attributed to Pirandello, and I quote, we do not give life to a character by chance. The victim helps us to understand why the author selected her protagonist, the four protagonists, Francisco de Chircora, Don Luis de Velasco, Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón, and Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, and placed them in the context of an exact textual journey. Like Augusto Perez in Niebla by Unamuno, the protagonist refused to disappear, they clamor for recognition, and from the atalaya, the watch-over of your journey, Carmen, who is a wise sentinel, recovers these historical figures and gives them new life. In this way, the book that we present and celebrate today contributes to the necessary and welcomed rescue of the early Spanish history of the United States in its Atlantic side. I thus congratulate Carmen for her accomplishment and thank her for plotting such a worthwhile journey, and I learned so much. Thank you. ^M00:33:39 [ Applause ] ^M00:33:47 >> Thank you, Raquel, for this wonderful intervention, for reminding us the treasures that are here at the Library of Congress for all of us to use, for reminding us about the ways of Jefferson, who insisted that we all must learn Spanish, and the University of Maryland is here to help you if you haven't started yet. We have a pretty serious program. Come to us. And I would like to basically call Allison Bigelow now to -- and by the way, I have to apologize. I mischaracterized this presentation today as a book presentation. It's really a mini-symposium. >> Thank you very much for the invitation to share some of my thoughts on this fascinating book and the questions that it opens up for our field with this group today. I'd like to begin by recognizing that we are on indigenous soil, the ancestral home of communities like the Piscataway, who were only recognized by the state of Maryland in 2012, and by recognizing the many intellectual and creative contributions of indigenous women and men present and past to the kinds of academic exchanges that we're engaging in today. In his capacious and meticulously researched comparison of British and Spanish imperial strategies and colonial practices, historian John Huxtable Elliott names what is perhaps the deepest and most persistent methodologically challenge in the study of the early Americas, our lack of a time machine. Without such a device, it's hard to say how the paths of the two largest European empires of the Atlantic world would have forked their ways and forced their powers upon the American landscape had their circumstances unfolded differently. What would Spanish colonization have looked like in places without large mines and without indigenous communities who had developed sophisticated metallurgical technologies to process those ores? What might English colonization have looked like in a place like Potosí or Zacatecas? Elliott, entertaining a well-reasoned counterfactual in his books -- in his book, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830, published by Yale University approximately 2006, argues that if large quantities of silver had indeed been found in Virginia, there's little reason to doubt that the development of an extractive economy would've created a high-spending elite which would have more than lived up to the dreams of the gentlemen settlers of Jamestown. But instead, the presence or absence of silver and of large native populations that could be domesticated to European purposes had other implications for the imperial enterprises. These implications were both local and global. Local because they affected the day-to-day realities of women and men who made their homes in Virginia before and after the forced and unforced arrivals of Africans and Europeans in the region, and global because scholars trace the origins of world trade to this historical moment in the 16th Century. Because silver was worth almost twice as much as gold in East Asia, Iberian agents extracted it in the Americas, shipped it to China and Japan, and traded silver, which they liked but not that much, for gold, which commanded the highest prices in European bimetallic markets at a profit of nearly 2:1. Then they used that gold to purchase people and goods on their return through the Indian Ocean world, West Africa, and Europe before departing to the Americas to once more extract silver and initiate a new cycle of world trade, slavery, and capitalist political economy. So these two factors, silver mines and indigenous population, shaped their respective crown's roles in all aspects of colonial planning. Because the English crown did not expect great profit from its plantations, it maintained a relatively low profile in the crucial opening stages of development, according to Elliott. In contrast, the Spanish crown intervened heavily in colonial affairs and documented its decision making powers in nearly every aspect of life in the Americas, letters, books that were printed and not printed, petitions from colonial subjects, policies determined at council, and maps that were shared and guarded. Scholars who study the Spanish empire do not suffer from a lack of primary sources, although these sources are often silent on the kinds of questions that we ask today. Hence, Elliott's question about the possible paths of colonization can really only be answered with a time machine that would allow us to place British imperial agents in what is today Latin America and to place Spanish imperial agents in what is today the United States. So fortunately for us, and with the use of textual interpretation, cartographic analysis, and historiographic study, rather than the time machine that our colleagues in physics have yet to build for us, this is precisely what Professor Carmen Benito-Vessels does in her new study, España y la Costa Atlántica de los EEUU: Cuatro Personajes del Siglo XVI en Busca de Autor, published this year in New York by La Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española. That is, Professor Benito-Vessels locates in a wealth of documentary evidence and visual sources, many of which are housed here in the Library of Congress, the materials for a history of Spanish colonization in what is today Maryland, Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas, and what was at the time a complex constellation of Algonquian-speaking communities who traded with diverse indigenous peoples, like copper-producing cultures of present-day Michigan and Iroquois merchants from present-day New York. These were not separate closed communities but critical players in a dynamic indigenous world that negotiated change and continuity before and after colonization. Two historical actors from these communities, two indigenous historical actors from these communities, are at the heart of Benito-Vessels' book, Francisco Chicora, or Chicorano in Spanish-language sources, a man we think to have been Catawba based on where he was captured by licenciado Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón, for whom he served as a guide and interpreter in what is now Georgia, Virginia, and the Carolinas, and Don Luis de Velasco, named after the Viceroy of New Spain, who served as guide and interpreter for Pedro Menéndez de Avilés in what is now Florida and South Carolina. The book focuses on these two indigenous men, although there are many other native actors whose histories we could trace as message-saving go-betweens. ^M00:40:03 The decision to reveal and conceal information, decisions made by men like Juanillo [Inaudible] in North America, by women like Pocahontas in Tidewater, Virginia, Doña Maria Magdalena and Antonia in Timucuan-speaking regions of La Florida, Doña Marina or La Malinche in Mexico, and the unnamed informants whom Colon took as his prisoners on La Hispaniola on November 12, 1492, believing that the women would teach him their language and that native men would not run away if Iberian forces held their families, shaped the movement of Spanish imperial agents as well as those of the many Italian explorers and Portuguese subjects who Carmen quite rightly points out worked on behalf of the Spanish crown in these early years of New World contact and conquest. As these examples suggest, La Florida was a space of contested waters and unstable ground, a shifting site of imperial rivalry between and among factors of English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese colonists who negotiated with indigenous confederations, or empires, as some might say, given that Captain John Smith calls paramount chief Wahunsenacawh, known as Powhatan in English-language sources, an emperor. And yet, as Benito-Vessels shows in her book, much of this multilingual pluricultural past has been papered over, or perhaps more accurately whitewashed, in a series of historical distortions, intentional or not, that have reinforced the narrative of what she beautifully calls "la accidental occidentalización de los Estados Unidos" or the careful fashioning of the history of the United States into a narrative of white Western modernity. Professor Benito-Vessels makes a convincing and well-documented case for a determined crafting of Western identity and heritage in British-speaking North America, one that marginalized its indigenous roots, African histories, and multiple European colonizations. As we learn in España y la Costa Atlántica de los EEUU, the making of an anglophone national identity was a slow process that unfolded over time as 19th and 20th Century academics and government officials like William Gilmore Simms, Robert Greenhow, mentioned by Raquel, and Frederick Jackson Turner funded, wrote, published, cited, and taught histories in which England and France became meta-geographic points of reference. Meta-geographic, Carmen explains, in the sense that these thinkers use cartographic logic and spatial imaginaries to project a particular vision about their country, its origins, and its place in the world. They chose to adopt France and England rather than Spain or Portugal as critical points of reference in this making of national mythology. France's alignment with England, in contradiction with other romance-speaking languages, where cause philosopher Immanuel Kant's two-part taxonomy of the character of the nations articulated in his observations on the feeling of the beautiful and sublime. Writing in 1798, Kant sketched a model of world division in which France, England, and Germany stood on one side and Spain, Italy, and Portugal on the other. These six European powers form the analogical root of his comparative framework wherein he writes, "If the Arabs are as it were the Spaniards of the Orient, then the Persians are the Frenchmen of Asia and the Japanese can be regarded as it were as the Englishmen of this part of the world." Such 18th Century assessments were not just anthropological aesthetic or racist. They were, for Kant, evaluations of morality as he argued, "The characters of mind of the people are most evident in that -- in them which is moral." Over time, these moral geographic assessments became indistinguishable from ideas about languages and the people who speak them. According to Walter Mignolo, in the transition from Renaissance humanism to 18th Century Enlightenment, English, German, and French replace Spanish, Italian, and Portugese as the perceived knowledge-generating grammars of reason and scientific modernity. In Mignolo's compelling history of the perception and power of language, there was a fracture within the romance languages and the fault line was French. Although French maintained what he calls the expressive flair attributed to romance languages, it was also the language of philosophical rigor and one of the colonial power's modernity. After World War II, these divisions were magnified by new geographic interpretations of political economy in which much of the Francophone world, with the exception of Canada, he notes, began to share with Spanish its belonging to the Third World. As Mignolo argues based on his reading of Martinique philosopher Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, to understand how these processes developed in the 18th and 19th Centuries and how they came to exert such influence over the 20th Century world, to say nothing of our world today, we must return to the kinds of spatial projections, geographic imaginaries, and real world questions of power that Carmen Benito-Vessels locates in the 16th Century inter-imperial contest to name, claim, and colonize particular parts of the Americas. At least 17 maps produced between 1526 and 1570 plot Las Tierras de Ayllón on the territories that we now think of as part of the ecosystem of the Chesapeake Bay as well as fictional projections that linked Virginia and Maryland with Zacatecas and the South Sea. As late as 1650, English promotional agents like John Ferrar and Edward Williams printed maps in which the backside of Virginia led to commerce with Asia via the South Sea. English imperial projectors thought that the Virginia colony would become if not a land of milk and honey, then certainly one with a vibrant culture of wine and a lucrative silk industry. Because Virginia was found on the same latitude as China, Virginian silkworks would equal or exceed what Williams called the more opulent provinces of the East to their wealth, reputation, and greatness (besides the most Christian of all improvements, the converting many thousands of the natives). These lines from Williams' Virginia: more especially the south part thereof, richly and truly valued, published in London in 1650, suggests how the same [inaudible] logic that gave pride of place to latitude rather than longitude, as we see with Ayllón, influence later generations of projectors. Recall that we heard that Chicora in Nueva Andalucia, or lands fit for peopling, porque hay muchas arboles y plantas de la Espana, according to the asiento that Vázquez de Ayllón negotiated with the crown in 1525, as Carmen analyzes in her book. Williams' work also shows how these English projectors, by which I mean early modern writers who proposed elaborate and often untested ideas to reform government and commerce in domestic markets and overseas territories, called projectors in English and arbitristas in Spanish, shifted the center of colonial possibility from Spanish Florida to English Virginia. Williams' Virginia: more especially the south part thereof was, as we see in Carmen's book, those portions of the Carolinas where Jesuit missionaries and Spanish imperial agents like Vázquez de Ayllón brought with them slave traders, women to bear children, and a variety of artisan laborers, including masons, tailors, carpenters, and ironworkers, to create the biological and physical foundations of a colony. And yet, as far as we know, there are no archeological remains to give testimony to this colonial project. Instead, we have maps that record the failures of permanent European settlement, such as that made by Diego Ribera in 1529 which relays how many of the early Spanish settlers of present-day Georgia and the Carolinas died of hunger over the winter because they lacked basic mantenimientos or provisions. These moments remain understudied in colonial history because their brief presences tend to leave scant long-term evidence of the things that we often analyze, such as political, social, and economic relations between and among indigenous, African, and European communities, or the realities of life on the ground for these diverse populations as they changed over time. We dismiss them as failed colonies and we turn our attention to the imperial projects with more visible long-term consequences. As Carmen's work shows, this approach is misguided. And as I conclude today, I'd like to suggest how Carmen's book opens up new questions in three areas of colonial study. As I see it, España y la costa atlántica de los EEUU invites us to consider three major questions of failure, race, and collaboration from a new perspective. First, it suggests that we need to critically revise dominant notions of failure. This definition, of course, presupposes an imperial viewpoint in which a successful colony is one that takes root and leaves a lasting imprint upon the colonized. That alone is enough to give us pause, but it also means that we prioritize places in context in which 16th and 17th Century events have lasting provable consequences in the 18th, 19th, and 20th Centuries. By starting with these later periods and mapping questions of power, inequality, and colonization back onto early colonial documents, we are doing history backwards. I'm not arguing that historical legacies of colonization are unimportant, rather that we prioritize particular histories because of their influences in later-day eras, and in doing so, we miss important opportunities to analyze what Robert Blair St. George called the possible pasts of colonial life. ^M00:49:58 We also miss opportunities to analyze what colonial subjects and imperial agents thought was possible at a particular moment in time. These possibilities tell us about the history of the idea of the New World and they are in many ways as important to understand as are the histories of the New World. After all, Vázquez de Ayllón may not have left a trace upon the landscape, but his story and the story of his story inspired other European agents who viewed the 17 maps of this territory to try their hand at New World colonization. Recent work on imperial failures, one of the two framing devices of a volume on European Empires in the American South, edited by Joseph P. Ward with an afterword by Kathleen Duvall and published by the University of Mississippi in 2017, provides what Ward calls evidence of the power of the concept of empire to hold the imagination of all concerned despite the many obvious challenges that would-be imperialists face when striving to bring their ambition to fruition. Indeed, this type of analysis suggests that the study of failed colonial enterprises can reveal critical insights into the many souths, a wide variety of forms and experiences of slavery, and myriad in changing empires, nations, confederacies, and towns, as Duvall writes in the closing pages. Second, as we think about these many souths, works like Carmen Benito-Vessels' book invite us to reconsider our study of race casta and the marking of human difference in the early Americas. We know that there are major differences in the way that Anglophone colonists in North America and Hispanophone colonists and Lusophone colonists in South America categorize human beings, whose humanity they denied, by external factors like skin color, spoken language, clothing, and hair texture as well as less observable features like religious professions, craft labor, and family lineage. We know also that ideas of a one-drop rule and the proliferation and contraction of casta categories shift by region and over time. So what would it look like to study early English reports on indigenous communities of Algonquin, Susquehannas, and Cherokees through the lands of Native American contact with Iberian empires? Recent research by scholars like Alejandro [Inaudible] begins to ask these important questions and to do so with methods that center indigenous historical actors. But more work is needed. For example, we know little of how the Spanish colonization of the mid-Atlantic might have shaped indigenous communities' ideas about race and how those expectations may have influenced their interactions with black Africans from Estevanico to the 20-odd women and men who landed in Hampton Roads, Virginia, in 1690 marking the first permanent community of enslaved Africans in British North America. Cassander L. Smith asks some of these questions in her research, and Cassie would be among the first to tell us that we need to know more about the complex interaction of indigenous African and European populations, insights with layered colonial histories. Third, and finally, Carmen's study of indigenous collaborators like Don Luis and Francisco Chicorano ask that we reconsider the nature of collaboration itself. As my colleague Anna Brickhouse shows in The Unsettlement of America, and as Carmen points out in her analysis of Brickhouse's work, indigenous agents were central to the movement of European empires, shaping, sharing, and withholding information to shape the path of colonization and to protect the people where they could. New studies of indigenous translators and messengers, such as Cecil Carrion's work on gestures in the French Atlantic, offers to extend our analysis of indigenous agencies into performative and non-lettered realms. Doing so also asks that we consider what it means to inform and to collaborate. We used to study hybridity and [inaudible] as powerful acts of transculturation and cultural accommodation, but now we see, as art historian Ananda Cohen-Aponte argues, the hybridity cannot happen without the kind of violence in which one side imposes its will and way of being in the world upon another. In a similar way, as we begin to center histories of Spanish America, including spaces like the mid-Atlantic and present-day DeSoto County in Mississippi, and to center indigenous actors within those histories, we will need to more carefully and more critically analyze the nature of colonial collaboration. Professor Benito-Vessels is right to detail the importance of la collaboracion con el indio Don Luis as part of the Spanish strategy against Colonial French interest and to note how Don Luis sabotaged Spanish imperial efforts. So what then does it mean for indigenous actors to collaborate with colonial officials? How should we study acts of colonial collaborations within what Enrique [Inaudible] identifies as the overarching framework of coercion within which indigenous women and men made decisions about where and how to work? So as we think about new directions in the field of colonial studies, whether on failure, race, collaboration, or any of the other rich avenues of inquiry laid out in España y la costa atlántica de los EEUU, we can all agree that Carmen Benito-Vessels' book gives us an exciting new way to approach and to frame these questions in a rich set of multidisciplinary methodologies with which to analyze them. Congratulations, Carmen, on a wonderful book. I look forward to reading all of the studies and future projects that your work inspires. ^M00:55:21 [ Applause ] ^M00:55:32 >> Thank you, Allison. If you're not blown away already by the possibilities of this book, you know, I know that your curiosity is now spiked, but I will actually urge you to go get a volume of, you know, get a copy. ^M00:55:47 ^M00:55:53 I was trying to plug-in Carmen's book. Get your own copy. Don't be satisfied. I know this presentation's absolutely marvelous and they have placed this book in a fantastic context in a, you know, multi-imperial context and also present a really, you know, the erasures that are there that are beyond the Hispanic population and those of indigenous and so on, but go get your own copy. And now I am going to call to the podium my esteemed colleague, Carmen Benito-Vessels, who will talk a little bit about her project as well, and maybe respond a bit to her two presenters. I want to announce that she is no longer a Medievalist, no longer a closet colonialist. She has just come out and she's now a full colonialist. >> Thank you. Very nice. ^M00:56:42 [ Applause ] ^M00:56:49 ^M00:57:00 Thank you. Thank you so very much for the generous introduction of the previous speakers and I owe a special thanks to Dr. Merediz. She is the mastermind behind this event because she created the series and gave us a forum for all the professors from the Spanish and Portuguese Department at the University of Maryland to be able to discuss our works here at the Library of Congress. I don't need to explain where we are. It's really a humbling experience for me to be here today and I don't - I hope that my work in a way is a contribution to the legacy started by Thomas Jefferson, and I can make my children proud of their mommy working day and night and be a citizen of both countries. Also, I don't have enough words to thank Dr. Chang-Rodriguez for her generous support from the very beginning. I was a little bit hesitant, I have to admit, because, yes, I was coming from the Middle Ages. Not the Dark Middle Ages, the bright Middle Ages, and having her accolades meant a lot to me. I knew that I had a story to tell, but I didn't know that my story had a place in the new modern times, in the colonial times. Thank you. Thank you very much. And of course, Professor Bigelow, she is - she has been the most generous person I have met in the last few decades. She accepted to leave aside her work. We know about the deadline that she has. We know how important it is to meet deadlines and she put her book on one side of the table in order to read carefully mine and discuss it with such eloquence. I think I'm going to read it myself after your presentation. It was - it was a very wonderful and insightful reading from both of you. Thank you so much. And of course, I cannot forget the help of my former colleague Talia Guzman, who has done impeccable work in order to make this event a possibility. We are here thanks to her and she has had [inaudible] in order to finally put us all together. And of course, the former and present directors of the Hispanic Division, Dr. Mere - Merediz? No. Dr. Georgette Dorn and Dr. Suzanne Schadl. Thank you. Thank you very much. Also, thank you to my family, friends, distinguished guests, my colleagues, of course, my students. Thanks to you I keep fighting every day and I keep reading to know any more than you already do. And thank you to all of you for being here today. As I say, it is a pleasure and an honor to be able to talk a little bit about work that is very solitary, and whenever I have an audience I try to please the audience. Let's see if I achieve my goal today. And since I cannot speak with - in an impartial manner about my work, I would - I thought that I could tell you a few [inaudible] how I became an author of this book. ^M01:00:22 It all started with a class, a class for a summer session, and that is an intensive summer session, five days a week, four hours daily. You have to be really, really - you have to have good material in order to captivate your students and in order to keep your sanity. So I started by calling this class Spanish Treasures in the Washington, D.C., Area, trying to bring the [inaudible]. I didn't have any idea where I was going, but trying to link what I saw at the National Gallery of Art. Of course, we have enormous treasures there. It's easy to connect Velázquez and Duran, Murillo, Goya, Greco, and all these painters with traditional literary works. [Inaudible] so I decided to go a step farther and come to the Library of Congress. And this is where I came face-to-face with Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón, who was in the entourage of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés. I knew a little bit about Pedro Menéndez de Avilés. I don't think I have heard the name of Ayllón, or at least I didn't register it in my mind, and I came also face-to-face and became good friends with the two Native American Indians that they are waiting in my book, Chicorano, Francisco Chicorano, and Don Luis de Velasco. So I started digging and reading and reading more and more and in order to reassure myself whenever I write to a colonialist or a professor of English history, I try to put just a little question to test the waters and to see what do you - and not much in the beginning, and I kept talking and usually the answer I received was, "Really? No kidding. Where did you get that? The Spanish were here in Virginia? No way. And I say, well, you know. I think that these characters are looking for an author. I volunteer. I volunteer and I will be the author for this and see where we go together. So we also know about the imaginary line on the Treaty of [Inaudible], 1949, which is marvelous. It's the wisest decision to divided the war in between two countries, Spain and Portugal. [Crosstalk] logical thing to do. No. Okay, so we knew about this line but as well if the Spaniards were here, there may be other lines that we don't know about. Sure enough, I found a book that was called Spanish Borderlands, written by Eugene Bolton. Coincidence. Coincidence. I live, we live, my husband and I, lived in Bolton Walk when we were in California. I didn't have any idea that Bolton will come back to me in my life. So the other imaginary lines for the Spanish borderlands were a little bit blurry and we, as Professor Chang-Rodriguez mentioned, La Florida, the colonial La Florida, the limits were much more extraordinary than anything that we can imagine. Some of them, like Escobedo, we don't - let's not be shy and we'll put an image between Siesta Key and the [Inaudible] Peninsula. Why? That's in my book. You can see the picture. So why? Why am I going to be shy? You know, let's go all the way there. I'm not saying he was right claiming that territory in reality, but what is extremely important to all of us is to know that he knew about these territories, that he had seen maps or he had seen documentation in order to speak about these territories and in order to claim them. So everyone, you know, you can claim whatever you want to. That's okay, you know. What's important is to realize what sources he was using. We also find - so the borderlines were a little bit blurry, as I said, for the Spanish borderlands, but then again that's nothing new. Professor Bigelow spoke about Virginia having a direct connection to China. I'll show you the slide later on because it's true. [Laughter] And you know, we all know that California was an island. That is the way it was described in Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo's Amadís de Gaula. It was not only an island, but it had a queen, La Reina Califia. So yeah, so we do - we do have maps and we do have literary works and historical works that can help us to document what we call cartografía en brocha, brush cartography. Thanks to that brush cartography, the letter of Amerigo Vespucci, who was a professor, as Chang-Rodriguez said, was working for the Spanish crown. He described it so well that Martin Waldseemüller was able to do that map adapting every [inaudible] what Amerigo Vespucci thought it was America. So what - it sounds so very - I thought it was very puzzling and I go back to Dr. Bigelow's comment on the Native Americans and the question of language. Language fascinates me. I think that is one of the - is probably the most powerful tool that we have. It's the only thing that connects human beings and makes human beings put at the same level as that. We can create with words the same way that God created the world with words. So don't this - don't take offense by this. [Inaudible] worth exploring. And these Native American Indians not only spoke Spanish, probably the very first speakers of Spanish in this land and we don't study them. To make things even worse, they tell the stories, an oral narrative. An oral narrative, as we know, doesn't have an author. It has a million of authors and only one - and we end that knowing one version. This is exactly the same thing that we have with oral epic, with the Spanish - all the Spanish epic, all the oral history of Northern Africa. I wish a commercial and we'll speak about this tomorrow at the conference of the [inaudible]. So I thought that this was kind of an issue that needed serious attention and I found myself that I have so much material and so many avenues to explore that I was a little bit puzzled and that was one of the hardest moments for me to react. How to put this together, how to make it readable, without making it just a series of lists which I use often in the book simply because I, you know, I have to document what I'm saying so I just use all of the bullets to say this, this, this, this in order to advance the narrative and to let the reader choose. If I want to see exactly every year, every comma, every period that she is mentioning, fine. If you don't want to do that, you can escape - escape that and keep going with a narrative. But anyway, I think that this book is just the tip of the iceberg, at least for me. I have many, many, many - and I do, I mention that at the end of the book, many other options. And one thing that I consider one of the achievements of or one of the things that I'm most proud of is this book, I believe, is very difficult to catalog. Many definitions. Many definitions will fit, but none of them will be exclusively. And I - this is also a collaboration that children, I mean, their books have a life of their own. They are like children. You have a child, but then the child do whatever it wants to do, and he brings you wherever he wants to bring you. And the book, that's in a way some - has a path of its own and you have to let it go a little, come back a little, go a little, come back a little, until you find common grounds and you become friends with your own book or with your own children. So that ability of making it really work was a real challenge. And as I said, if - another two things that I would like to mention about the book and 'Im very proud of is I didn't put a conclusion. It doesn't have a final - a final sentence. It's an open ending. And it's not that I forgot. No. I didn't forget. I knew I had to put an end one day to keep my sanity, too, but anyway, I didn't forget. I didn't want to put an end because the story goes on. The story goes on and we have much more to research. ^M01:10:11 And I wanted to have the last sentence as a sentence to speak to the reader. And it's a direct, it's a conversation, that way the reader and the scholars, students, right there, all of you, have to continue. Well, I hope that they continue one day. I came - many items can surprise us in the story of these characters. And another one, to go back to the Native American Indians, is that we have with Chicorano and with Don Luis de Velasco the first two persons who partially achieved their goal of defeating colonialism. So when we're talking about national history, well, are they not national enough? Why do we have to prove in which nation? And by the way, we use gross, very general and generic terms, the Indian Nation [inaudible]. I don't even want to enter that territory. The Indian Nations. I think that they can transfer a scholarship in order to be able to dominate this field a little bit because they are a question of nationality and defending your own land, that feeling that you are not national and you belong to a different race or you are still national. Anyway, of course, there are many other points in the book that I will have lots to pursue because they are really funny. But I didn't do it because I would lose track and that's why I have many pages so I don't lose track. But there are - they're the perfect explanation of how histories are always a mix of at least - of at least three kind of narratives: fingida, afición y verdadera, which is fictitious, [inaudible], and true history. All the histories have that and the fictious and this combination of three, I think, that is marvelously represented in, for instance, the wife, the Spanish wife of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, Doña Maria de Solis. Pedro Menéndez de Avilés's family wanted that - wanted to keep that guy close to home. Apparently, he was not a very peaceful person. And they tried to marry him or to make an engagement early in his teenage years. He was not very successful. Anyway, he ended up marrying this Maria de Solis, and this Doña Maria de Solis was informed by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés that they were going to cross the Atlantic and they were going to set up in La Florida. So Doña Maria de Solis puts to shame any character from [Inaudible], Mama Grande or anybody else, and they're put to shame. They don't get even close to this Solis. She decided, okay, it's time to cross the Atlantic. I want to bring my bed, my bedspread, my furniture, my silverware, enough plates for 18 people, chairs, enough products to cook cocido, Spanish cocido, nails to build my future house. She was determined to settle there. And that's another point. If she was going to settle, that's another very interesting difference between when we're speaking history of the English or the French and the Spanish or the Portuguese. We are conquistadores, they are settlers. I think that this lady was quite a settler. I mean, she got everything that one may need in her future - in her future home. We have mentioned before that Amerigo Vespucci's Letter and how that letter - by the way, there's a copy in this library, in the basement of this library, and here in the basement of this library you have the richest collection of maps in the world. Four million is the last number that I - five? Five, thank you. I knew that my [inaudible]. Five million maps. So you don't have anything else to do, get yourself a library card. And there's five million there. Five treasures that belong to the early American history, and one of them was shown by Professor Chang-Rodriguez by Diego Ribera in 1629. And there are others like the Romeo and other Portolanos. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful maps, and they're all right here. Anyway, I'm losing my track. I was talking about Amerigo Vespucci, how the importance of secrecy in the Casa de Contratación and the failure to keep those secrets and how they were sold, stolen, or simply spoken about in a bar. Who knows? Anyway, I want to conclude because I want to present just some images to prove that what we were telling you is true. And just one - a couple of things. I also expect that when my book is read, it is - I point out I say that's several times in the book, but I hope you use erasers in the reader's mind because sometimes we only read what we want to read and not what is written. And what is written in the book is that I do not point my finger to anybody or any country, and I do - the only thing I do is point out facts, and there's plenty of them, believe me. Also, I do not claim any national territory. I'm beyond that. I claim the knowledge of territoriality and the maps that prove that territoriality. Also, I hope that this book is a thank you note to the U.S. universities. I would not have been able to write - to write this book or any of my books if I had not been under the auspices of American universities. And finally is the late, late, very late thank you note also for my late parents who bought me my first book, the book that I own and treasure. I still have it in my library. It was a book, a history of Spain. It was, well, it was much better than that. It was called Soy Español. ^M01:17:02 [ Laughter ] ^M01:17:07 What's there I forgot, but what I didn't forget was the beautiful form of that book, the beautiful form in which the stories were told, they were all fantastic. And I loved that. I liked it so much that in the cover of the book I wrote my name and four family names, not two, four family names and my age so I look like an author. Finally, I have my own book and only two last names. But anyway, before we conclude and have time for questions, I would like to show you just a couple of images. This is - we know very well this map. This is the Juan de la Cosa Map in 1500. In it, we have the - ^M01:17:54 [ Background speaking ] ^M01:18:02 So this is a very famous map and we all know about it. It was - it was drawn after [inaudible] voyages in the Atlantic. [Inaudible] was working first in Spain and then in England, and we will go through that later, and this is the - ^M01:18:19 [ Inaudible ] ^M01:18:31 And we have the Amerigo Vespucci with America, the way it was described by Amerigo Vespucci in his letter to the King of Spain and Portugal. We have in the book you can find an engraving showing this part of the King - of Vespucci leaving the letter. This is the - the quality is the best I could with what I have. It is a very [inaudible]. I call him that way because he was signing that name. He was the nephew of Amerigo Vespucci, or Amerigo Vespuccio, and in this I think that [inaudible] where the Spanish line is and the imperial flag of Charles I is right there in the middle of the country. And of course - ^M01:19:23 [ Inaudible ] ^M01:19:30 You have an image from a modernization of that map and you see all the important things, not only the names of the regions but also the [inaudible] and towns are all in Spanish. This is the [inaudible] by Diego Ribero, 1527. We'll see detail later on. [Inaudible] 1527, 1529. We have the discussion on these two narratives. They are almost identical. And what is interesting is the detail. Here we have - ^M01:20:06 [ Inaudible ] ^M01:21:12 This is another very interesting and unique map. It's housed in this library. [Inaudible] 1562, and what is interesting is that Valla de Santa Maria is really not located in the Roanoke Sound area and - which is new and more interesting is that the English call it the Roanoke Colony, in Roanoke, of course, thinking that they were going to Valla de Santa Maria. This - Sir Walter Raleigh was guided by a Portuguese pilot [inaudible]. This pilot was not interested in how things [inaudible]. He was interested in letting his own portion and they were fighting all the way and [inaudible] knew about the information provided by the [inaudible]. And that's my theory. Some will refute it, but I have the maps. [Laughter] I'll be happy - I'll be happy to continue the conversation because I'm not the cartographer. And to show you California was an island. It was an island all the way to 1658. ^M01:22:45 [ Inaudible ] ^M01:23:11 In which we have the information here in the corner from the [Inaudible] and the chronicles, I think, described by Chicora as paradise. And to prove his idea was convincing [inaudible]. These are numerous forts and missions founded by the Spaniards in Florida all the way to Virginia and [inaudible] related to the New World, I think, Atlantic City, and his idea of personifying and making [inaudible] whatever you want to make. And of course, España is at the head. England's at the bottom. Okay, gracias. ^M01:23:59 [ Applause ] ^E01:24:09