The roots of Mexican poetry wend out from many traditions. Indigenous epic and lyric poetry survive in early modern works that simultaneously preserved and overwrote them. They subtly informed the practice of Mexican poetry in subsequent centuries and reemerged in full voice in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Diverse poetic practices stemming from both popular and learned traditions were introduced by Spaniards into Mexico over three centuries of viceregal rule in New Spain. European languages, ranging from classical to vernacular, brought their respective forms and traditions to the Mexican poetic radix: Latin and Greek; Italian and then – centrally – French; and later English, with the stems of Portuguese and German traditions grafted on.

The literary oeuvre of the seventeenth-century literary genius Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is genre-diverse: it includes plays, texts defending women’s intellectual agency, correspondence, religious-themed works, and, last but not least, poetry. Sor Juana’s texts are touchpoints for nearly all facets of colonial literary studies; her lyric works are invoked in critical conversations treating transatlantic studies, Barroco de Indias, New Spanish creolism, and feminist studies. Sor Juana’s lyric works evince not only her intellectual prowess, but also her artistic mastery of a variety of poetic forms, unequalled in her day or after her lifetime. This chapter examines the range of Sor Juana’s lyric writing in its totality, from her masterpiece, Primero sueño, to her renowned romances, redondillas, sonetos, and villancicos, contextualizing these in the scholarly and historical contexts out of which they arise.

As we have seen in the innovative essays treating pre-Columbian and colonial-era literature in this book, answering the questions of what comprises text; who its producers were; and how to understand authorship, readership, and literacy in the colonial period continues to call for new and creative approaches. The cross-pollination of contextualized history (specifically that of individuals marginalized in colonial society) with sophisticated investigations into how agency was covertly and overtly asserted, combined with a reconsideration of the advancement and obstruction of textual production and circulation, has produced new lenses through which to interpret literature from the Mexican colonial period. The essays in this section of the book dynamically advance scholarship treating indigenous intellectual culture and textuality (Heather Allen, Santa Arias, Anna More); expand narrow or categorical views of key critical ideas (Patricia Ybarra, Ivonne del Valle); and reflect on women's historically unappreciated activity in learned circles (Mariselle Meléndez, Catherine Boyle).

In contrast to the idea that alternative literary or paraliterary readings of colonial-era writing result in a depoliticized understanding of a body of literature, the approach to the archive implemented in this essay accomplishes the opposite. By reading what could be considered a literary archive outside of the primary texts themselves (that is, the contents of the writing), the extent and shape of the community of reading for those texts emerges. The understanding and reading of literature has broadened to include quantitative approaches to reading and texts (Moretti, 2013), varying depths of reading and textual analysis (Love, 2013; Best and Marcus, 2009), considerations of the history of readers and reception, and historiographical/bibliographical approaches to print media specific to colonial Latin American letters (Leonard, 1992; Calvo, 2003; Chocano Mena, 1997). The method outlined here illustrates the reach and impact of writers who have not been seriously considered by critics, whether through their literary texts or in terms of the cultural influence they wielded.

This lateral approach avoids charging straight at the literary archive to examine the texts themselves; instead, it implements materials from various collections to define the scope and nature of reading, using, in effect, the archival past to define a writer or text's materiality.

Over the past fifteen years, the field of Mexican literary and cultural studies has grown and evolved considerably in the English-language academy. Although the shared border between Mexico and the United States has always precipitated cultural exchange and academic interest, the study of Mexican literature was for many years eclipsed by Chicano studies or by the dominant interest in the Southern Cone within Latin American letters. In the past decade and a half, however, a new generation of scholars of Mexican literature and culture has achieved tenure-line positions in universities in the United States and Canada, most tellingly at institutions where the field had not previously been represented. This is also the case in Great Britain, where scholars of Mexican literature are found not only at flagship institutions such as Cambridge and Oxford, but also, and increasingly, at universities from Sussex to Ulster. The number of graduate students pursuing doctoral work in Mexican literature has increased exponentially, and the quantity and variety of courses on Mexico aimed at undergraduates has grown correspondingly. The field has become so active that Mexican literature is the sole subject of three yearly conferences in the United States (University of California-Santa Barbara, University of Texas at El Paso, and University of California-Irvine). The Modern Language Association has a stand-alone discussion group on Mexican literature with nearly two hundred members, and the Mexico section of the Latin American Studies Association is currently the largest entity within the institution, due to the significant membership of literary scholars. This has tendered an interest in the study of Mexico, one separate from the continental Latin American perspective, as new scholarship has emphasized many specific traits and cultural processes that distinguish Mexico from the rest of the Spanish-speaking world. These include the nature of its indigenous cultures; the status of Mexico City as a viceregal capital during the colonial period; the early triumph of liberalism in the cultural field of the nineteenth century; the experience of the French and U.S. invasions; the Mexican Revolution; and, perhaps most notably of all, the two periods (the Porfiriato and the PRI regime) that established unparalleled, decades-long intervals of stability that in turn allowed for the construction of unusually institutionalized structures of national literature.