| Sumario: | This essay explores the ways that Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora's "Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez" adapts the picaresque's classic and Golden Age generic conventions for a Baroque and New World idiom. By examining the nature of criminality in the work, I argue that the traditional Spanish "picaro's" ambivalent relationship to the law is, in Sigüenza's text, replaced by an ambivalent relationship to the notion of criminality itself. Building on recent work exploring "criollo" identity in Sigüenza's writing, I show how he complicates our understanding of identity by offering readers a version of transgression that is more existential than juridical, and how he uses Alonso's story to examine the role early modern capitalism and maritime culture played in the development of New World identities.
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