At the intersection of transpacific and transatlantic commerce, the Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez (1690) was produced in New Spain during the late seventeenth century. While the narrative's authorship is largely attributed to Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora—polymath, polyglot, cosmographer, archivist, historian, and frustrated Jesuit of New Spain—since 2007 a critical consensus has been reached that identifies Alonso Ramírez as the primary source of the story published by Sigüenza y Góngora in 1690.

The Infortunios is considered a foundational text, one of a few that contend for the status of “first novel” in the Latin American lettered tradition, all the while it exceeds—as Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel (2008) has argued—the transatlantic paradigm. Various elements of the narrative herald the themes and positions taken by Latin American authors over the longue durée: hybrid genre, multiple authorship, the blurring of history and fiction, and the various plays on political authority as well as authorial voice in the text. At the same time, the travails narrated in the Infortunios serve as a reminder of the discontinuities as well as the continuities between the precarious conditions faced by peripatetic subjects in the Hispanic-inflected world, both in the seventeenth as well as the twenty-first centuries.

The itinerary of Alonso Ramírez's various misfortunes invites us to think of New Spain at the center of the Spanish empire, but also of Spain at the periphery of the Pacific theater where various European empires—including the Dutch, English, and Portuguese—competed for regional hegemony.