Richard Anthony Grijalva

The direction that Matthew O'Hara took in his 2018 monograph "The History of the Future in Colonial Mexico" intrigues me as it introduces a methodological angle to colonial literature that focuses on how subjects carried out their lives from a temporal present into an uncertain future. O'Hara's approach not only opens up the colonial Latin American archive to a perspective that takes seriously the ways that peoples experience time, but it attends to the currents of contingencies and accidents lurking beneath what appears to be a stable, well-conceived past. Combining O'Hara's approach with a theory of discourse, space, and concepts is a direction that I will pursue in my own research projects on early 19th century Mexico, a historical period that scholars are beginning to focus on anew.