ABSTRACT
This chapter's first sections, “In the Rain Place” and “By the Shores of the Mediterranean,” introduce the events that triggered the two inquisitorial investigations at the heart of this project, and then summarize how those investigations, once begun, developed over time. The second half of the chapter then discusses the history of Muslim/Native American comparisons from the sixteenth century to the present, outlines how the two investigations are similar and how they diverge, and concludes at the desk of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, who in the middle of the sixteenth century wrote two unpublished manuscripts in which characters from both the Oaxacan and Valencian investigations virtually cross paths.
