Viceroy Valero's Heart: A Traveling Relic and an Embodied Metaphor in Transit to the Indies

This chapter analyzes the sermon given by Francisco de la Concepción Barbosa (1729) in the funeral rites for the heart of Baltasar de Zuñiga, marquis of Valero (1658-1727) and Viceroy of New Spain from 1716 to 1722. Once he returned to Spain, he arranged that, after his death, his heart would be embalmed and buried in the high altar of the Corpus Christi Franciscan convent for the Indian Cacicas that he founded in Mexico in 1719 and was authorized by Luis I in 1724. It studies two aspects of the colonial discourse of the funeral for the heart: (a) its symbolic and emblematic context, as an imaginary relic that aspires to immortality beyond the corruption and fragmentation of the body; and (b) its historical context, in connection to the case of Bishop Fernandez de Santa Cruz, who also donated his heart to the convent of Santa Monica in Puebla (1699)