Randolph-Macon College Spanish Professor Kimberly Borchard is the author of two recently published articles: “Appalachia as a Contested Borderland of the Early Modern Atlantic, 1528-1682” and “Diego de Molina en Jamestown, 1611-1616: Espía, prisionero, oráculo del fin del imperio.” Borchard researched and wrote the articles during her recent sabbatical.

“Appalachia as a Contested Borderland of the Early Modern Atlantic, 1528-1682” West Virginia History (Fall 2017): 91-120.

This article challenges the notion that Appalachian history is that of an isolated mountain region cut off from, and essentially irrelevant to, the rest of the early modern world.

“Appalachia is treated as an economically and culturally marginal region not only in contemporary American society, but in historical narratives of colonial North America,” explains Borchard. “While writing my doctoral dissertation on the discourse of science in colonial Latin American historiography, I began coming across references to a mythical place called Apalache in accounts of what is today the American southeast. Having grown up in Appalachian Ohio, I was intrigued to discover the Spanish colonial origins of the place I called home. After I finished grad school, I continued to study early descriptions of Apalache and found that after its initial appearance in Spanish sources, it re-emerged in the accounts French and English explorers, who likewise conceived it as a place of limitless wealth and expressed an urgent need to find and conquer it before other European powers did so. The first history of Florida, which was written in Spanish by a member of the Inca royal family and published in Portugal in 1605, exalted the bravery of the people of Apalache in a call for universal recognition of the native peoples of the New World and their valor in the face of the European invasion. Although at the time, the exact geographic location of Apalache was fuzzy at best (first associated with the Apalachee people of Florida), through its translation into Portuguese, French, and finally English, it eventually became associated with the eastern mountains of North America, where settlers and explorers continued to believe, well into the English colonial period, that they would find boundless wealth. While I had grown up believing that Appalachia had always been an isolated, impoverished backwater of the United States, it turns out that it had been a flash point of intense imperial rivalries throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, imagined as a northern El Dorado where European explorers would find—and conquer—opulent empires such as those of the Nahuas (Aztecs) and Inca to the south.”

“Diego de Molina en Jamestown, 1611-1616: Espía, prisionero, oráculo delfin del imperio.” Laberinto Journal 9 (Fall 2016): 30-51.

Diego de Molina is well-known to those who study the sixteenth-century colony at Jamestown: He was captured by the English while attempting to spy on the fledgling settlement and held prisoner for five years. While imprisoned, he wrote a series of letters to Alonso de Velasco, the Spanish ambassador in London; one of these letters (dated May 28, 1613) has been reproduced in English translation in anthologies of colonial American texts and studied by numerous historians of early America.

“In his letter, which I originally encountered in English translation when researching Spanish references to gold in the Appalachian Mountains, Molina warned the ambassador that the colony at Jamestown was a ‘hydra in its infancy,’ posing a threat to Spanish interests in North America and threatening to expel Spain from its northern territories if nothing was done to halt its growth,” says Borchard. “Thanks to this letter, Molina has proven such an intriguing figure for aficionados of colonial history that there are regularly scheduled historical reenactments in Jamestown in which an actor portraying Molina is available for ‘interrogation’ by spectators. While Molina is literally a tourist attraction here in Virginia, his original letter in Spanish had never been published and he is not mentioned at all in Spanish-language studies of colonial Spanish America (which, according to the Spanish Crown, still included Virginia in the early seventeenth century). In this article, I give context for Molina’s imprisonment, detail his importance for the history of Spanish colonialism in the New World—as an oracle foretelling Spain’s imminent expulsion from most of North America—and publish the transcription of his letter in Spanish for the first time.”

Kimberly Borchard
Borchard joined the faculty in 2009. She earned her M.A. and B.A. from Ohio University and her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. She teaches courses in Spanish language and Latin American colonial literature and is currently planning a reading-skills course in Spanish for Social Justice geared toward students with interest in both Spanish and professional fields in which they will confront the systemic inequality in health care, education, and legal representation faced by some of the most vulnerable sectors of the U.S. populace.

She was the recipient of a Rashkind Sabbatical Year Grant for the 2016-2017 academic year, without which research for the publications mentioned above would not have been possible. During her sabbatical, she completed the draft of a book manuscript drawn from the material discussed above, tentatively titled “Appalachia as a Contested Borderland of the Early Modern Atlantic, 1528-1715.”

She has published articles in journals such as Hispanófila and Laberinto, a book review in the Renaissance Quarterly, and numerous scholarly translations for the Journal of Modern History and Critical Inquiry. She has a forthcoming book chapter titled “The Andes in Appalachia: Inca Garcilaso de la Vega in a Hemispheric Curriculum,” in Approaches to Teaching Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s Royal Commentaries and Other Works, ed. Christian Fernández and José Antonio Mazzotti, to be published by the Modern Languages Association.