In this chapter, the effects of the clergy’s movement along the Asia-bound religious itinerary on disputes over royal patronage in New Spain are examined. The chapter first explores how the route between Spain and Southeast Asia turned into a standardized itinerary. Attention is then shifted to disputes caused by the clergy’s movements along this route and the meaning the category of criollo acquired in them. Delving further into the uses of the logic of assessment, the chapter explores how the qualities of New Spain and its creole inhabitants were celebrated by clergymen with varying agendas. The chapter argues that the positive assessment of both from someone like the Spanish Augustinian Rodrigo Aganduru Moriz were the result of his efforts to defend the role of creole friars during the evangelization in Asia. Although Moriz’s celebrations mirrored those of creole clergymen, his aim of attracting friars to Asia actually collided with the interests of a considerable segment of the local clergy. Finally, the chapter uses the celebrations of Felipe de Jesús, one of the Nagasaki martyrs, to reconsider how the criollo identity was operationalized in struggles over the distribution of privileges and honors.

This chapter explore the dynamic relationship between two distinct forms of representing urban space. These more or less follow the path of the subject or that of the object, as the more subjective itinerary (i.e., an image of space that emerges from the individual subject’s perception or experience of places) necessarily elides much of what the abstract, apparently objective map (a “God’s-eye view” or “view from nowhere” that established as non-subjective overview) can reveal. Finding one’s way through urban spaces involves something more like an itinerary than a map, the latter involving some sort of supra-subjective perspective, and yet both forms are essential to the experience of metropolitan space. In situating oneself in a given place, and in moving from place to place, one traces out an itinerary that may be more or less useful, but one also must have some more abstract sense of the overall spatial array of which that itinerary is merely one part. Cognitive mapping, in this sense, combines the two at all times. I argue that every literary cartography—every work of creative writing, in fact—of the city must also put into play both modes to create a more dynamic mapping project.