From a world’s destruction to the emergence of another: colonial semiosis in Mancebo de Arévalo's Tafsira and Chimalpahin's Ocho relaciones

Abstract

The Hispanist Luce López-Baralt outlined a relationship between the aljamiado-morisco literature and the Indian chronicles of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th. While the former account for the loss of Islamic culture suffered by the Spanish Moors, in the latter we see the emergence of a language that names the reality of the New World. In this work we recover the proposal of López-Baralt to analyze comparatively an aljamiado text, the Mancebo de Arévalo’s Tafsira, and a mestizo chronicle, the Chimalpahin’s Ocho Relaciones, from the notion of colonial semiosis of Walter Mignolo, with the intention of showing how the destruction of the known world is related in both works through a series of communication strategies that place the authorial voices in certain locus produced by the processes of conquest and colonization.