The cartonera project will consist of you creating a cartonera (cardboard book), which will include 6 cartonera assignments, 1-2 page diary entries written from the perspective of your choice of 7 different historical figures we will be studying. During club hours, we will hold several non-mandatory cartonera workshops so that you can work on your projects together and be inspired by each other.

Your entries should reflect that you have read about each of these historical figures and understand their context, writings, historical views, biases, motivations, etc. However, this cartonera project encourages creative expression so you do not need to use formal academic writing. Each diary entry will ask you to think of how your historical figure would write in one of the most intimate ways possible: their personal diary. Creativity (in language, style, visuals, paleography, etc.) is encouraged. Feel free to use profanity (not gratuitously, of course), make jokes, complain, etc.! No citations or bibliographies are necessary. Please do proofread and avoid repetition.

This is also a venue where you can explore and develop your artistic side. For example, you may decide to include codex-style drawings in addition to the text. Or you may decide to write the diary page as if it were a page from a graphic novel. This would be an example of anachronism, since graphic novels were not around in the 15th, 16th, or 17th centuries, but this whole assignment is creative, so I will allow it! You do not need to submit artwork along with your uploaded diary entries; these can be included in the cartonera itself.

Entry 1: Cahonaboa’s Diary

We’ve read Margarita Zamora’s article “‘If Cahonaboa learns to speak …’: Amerindian Voice in the Discourse of Discovery Pretend that you are Cahonaboa and that he does get a chance to speak. Write about your experience of the Conquest. What do you think about the newcomers? How do you feel about Columbus? What about the men he left behind in La Navidad? About the treatment of your people? About Guacanagari? You may write about more than one of these things, but in a single page, you may not have room for more than one focus. Although no formal citations are needed, your entry must reflect that you understand Cahonaboa’s position and the historical events taking place at the time. You should be able to complete this assignment based on our in-class readings but you are welcome to do outside research as well.

Entry 2: First Blacks Diary

Choose to write from the perspective of any of the black historical figures mentioned in the digitized manuscripts of the First Blacks website. Make sure to identify yourself clearly in the narrative (but please also refer to the relevant manuscript number somewhere in your entry). Explain how you feel about slavery and/or colonization by focusing on either the event(s) described in the manuscript or another event/situation that you imagine may have transpired based on this historical figure’s circumstances.

Entry 3: Las Casas’s Diary

Pretend that you are Bartolomeo de Las Casas. It’s the fall of 1551 after the famous debate at Valladolid and you are back in the Caribbean. You have a conversation with some of the figures we have read about on the Dominican Studies Institute’s First Blacks in the Americas who are upset about your writings advocating for the use of black slaves in place of natives. But it’s 1551. You have already published Historia de las Indias (1527) expressing your regret about your earlier views on slavery, upon learning that Caribbean slaves were not captured in “just war.” How do you feel about the exchange? How do you respond?

Entry 4: Malintzin’s Diary

Pretend that you are Malintzin. Focus on how you feel about your own people, about other indigenous groups, about the Spaniards (or Cortés or Aguilar specifically), about your children, or about your prospects for the future.

Entry 5: Guamán Poma’s or El Inca’s Diary

Imagine that Guamán Poma de Ayala and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, who were contemporaries, met and had a conversation. Choose one of them and write from that man’s perspective. Choose one thing that they might have discussed at their meeting and make your entry a commentary on that topic.

Entry 6: Columbus’s Diary

Imagine that you are Christopher Columbus. You have a dream that posterity will built statues to you and name a holiday after you and that others will be upset about it and protest both the monuments and the holiday. In the dream, contemporary opinions about you are revealed to you, so you understood the context for the monuments, the holiday, and the protests. You wake up and you write a diary entry about it. How do you feel about the statues? What about the holiday? Do you feel that you deserve such praise? Or such censure?