the historian of N

ew Mexico are little
remar ked in North or Central
American cultural
memory. To the c

ontrary, rat

her than doubly seal and commemorate their future glory, the alliance between these acts of war and these acts of writing instead reveal and figure their own forgetting. A Trope The sword and the pen: a grand trope of medieval Europe, a particular trope of the Spanish Golden Age (think of Cervantes), from which emerges a remarkable nexus of interrelated acts of war and writing that make up the world of Spanish conquest. We know that the cataclysms of Spanish "discovery" and conquest in the New World occasion furious circulation between the projects of war and the projects of writing: both mutually inform and advance New World carto-graphy. New World ethno-graphy. New World historio-graphy. These projects, in turn, are marked not by their "newness," but rather by their consistent attempts to account for the incommensurability of the "New" with recourse to known formulations of the "Old"Ñhence through acts of both war and writing, "Anahuac" becomes "New Spain." For Michel de Certeau, the "discovery" and "conquest" are themselves a greater project of writing: "the conqueror will write the body of the other and trace there his own history.... This is

writing that conquers. It will use the New World as if it were a blank, 'savage' page on which Western desire will be written" (1988 xxv). Here the sword is already a kind of pen, inscribing the narrative of Spanish empire onto the body of the land and its peoples; here the pen is already a kind of sword, violently reinscribing the newly discovered land and peoples of America into the book o