However, much of our critical understanding of this text will now have to be rethought in light of Ruth Hill's provocative new book. Hill's book not only brings into focus many previously unfathomed layers of Carrio's text but also provides a fascinating glimpse into the underworld of Bourbon officialdom - a world of sexual, social, and occupational intrigues in which racial and class identities were more complex than has generally been appreciated by literary critics. Hill argues that the proto-nationalist historiographic commonplace that has frequently been invoked in order to explain all of eighteenth-century Spanish American literary culture in terms of a conflict or rivalry between criollos and peninsulares is inadequate for an understanding not only of Carrio de Lavandera's text, but also for much of eighteenth-century Spanish American literature and culture more generally. Most immediately, however, there can be no doubt that Hill's new book stands as a model of scholarly erudition, historicist methodology, archival research for literary scholars and that if makes important critical interventions that will set the parameters for all future discussions of Carrio's text and stimulate critical debate beyond. Resenas.