De estrechos, ancones islas y penínsulas: California y la geografía del deseo

Abstract

The ocean is understood here as a geography inhabited by the wonders that Europeans hoped to find and California an island absent in the sixteenth century, appeared in the seventeenth century and vanished in the eighteenth. After 1540 and for the subsequent 60 years California was a peninsula and the Gulf of California or Mar de Cortés a dead end; but from the first half of the seventeenth century, and for almost a century, California was again a gigantic and colossal island, separated from the continent by a tight and undulating strait of water. There is no single explanation to account for this fact, but we are interested in singling out the fictional forces that accompany the region and that kept the Californias in darkness, making it and undoing it for two centuries.