Díaz de Guzmán, Ruy (c. 1558–1629)

Ruy Díaz de Guzmán (b. ca. 1558; d. June 1629), known primarily for being the first creole historian of the Río de la Plata. Díaz de Guzmán was born in or near Asunción (modern Paraguay) and spent most of his early adult years fighting Indian wars and settling towns in the Río de la Plata, Paraguay, and Tucumán. Between the founding of Santa Fe in 1573, the recolonization of Buenos Aires in 1580, and the division of La Plata into two major jurisdictions in 1617, most littoral and interior towns had been permanently established. Díaz de Guzmán's history of the first half-century of Spanish rule is composed mainly of the accounts of town foundings and stories surrounding the early post-Conquest years. Known as the Argentina Manuscrita, it was first printed in 1835 and has had subsequent editions. Díaz de Guzmán died in Asunción. Ricardo Rojas (1882–1957), the Argentine writer and scholar whose pioneering Historia de la literatura argentina (4 vols., 1917) is a milestone in Argentine scholarship, traces influences of Díaz de Guzmán's history from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.

See alsoCreole; Spanish Empire.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Marcos, Juan Manuel. "Ruy Díaz de Guzmán in the Context of Paraguayan Colonial Literature." MLN 102 (March 1987): 387-392.

Pistilli S., Vicente. La primera fundación de Asunción: la gesta de Don Juan de Ayolas. Asunción, Paraguay: Editorial El Foro, 1987.

Spagnuolo, Marta. Tres visiones del encuentro de dos mundos. Buenos Aires: Federación Argentina de la Industria Gráfica y Afines, 1992.

                                     Nicholas P. Cushner