Introduction

ON SEEING DISTANCES

We have become increasingly accustomed, over the last half-century, to the idea that the globe is shrinking. If travel is fast, communication is faster. The instantaneous delivery of messages that would previously have taken days or weeks has done curious things to our sense of distance, so that space and time, those two reliable measures of remoteness, seem at times entirely eroded. What does distance mean when such previously formidable obstacles can be so easily overlooked? Surely distance has not disappeared entirely. Despite the illusion of universal proximity, there are yet ways of being remote and distant in our day.¹ Distance, it seems, is not so much about a spatial measure as it is about the endurance of those obstacles: space and time. In some cases they endure where they have been carefully cultivated as barriers from a world perceived as fast-paced; in other cases they endure where resources are scarce and the means cannot be found to overcome them. So, even now, not every place is equally connected and distance is, undeniably, relative and flexible. In this sense, there is little difference between our conception of distance and that of people in the colonial Atlantic world. Distance was then, as it is now, less a question of measurement and more a question of perspective.

Pertinent as it is to both modern and colonial life, I did not begin the research for this book with the intention of studying the conception of distance. It seems now that nothing could be more central to the workings of the Spanish empire, stretching so far across four continents that, as the saying goes, the sun across it never set. But, in fact, I began at the margins of the topic, both spatially and thematically, and I only fully perceived distance as a central research problem after some time.

The discovery of the problem began with a series of perplexing questions that arose while reading a document, an Inquisition case from the early eighteenth century housed at the Bancroft Library in Berkeley. Four elderly women in Escuintla, a town on Guatemala’s Pacific coast, were accused of witchcraft.² They were women of mixed race, and they were accused by neighbors, friends, and even a grandson. They had been known to perform rituals to turn themselves into turkeys; one had been seen naked about to take flight; another had made use of poisons. The local priest took the case seriously, filling page after page with testimony. The questions that came to mind while reading were too numerous to tackle all at once, and the questions that seemed most important then seem less important now. Why had a boy testified against his grandmother? How did the women know each other? What had they done to invite such treatment from the people of Escuintla? Fortunately for me, no clear answers emerged, and I was forced to turn to other questions.

The unanswered question that gradually rose to the surface concerned not the women of Escuintla and their witchcraft but the way the bureaucracy of the Inquisition managed their case. The tribunal in Mexico City had corresponded with the priest in Escuintla as the case progressed, ordering him to pursue testimony and requesting more when his first set of interrogations proved inadequate. But then the priest sent in his complete case, and the tribunal was silent. It remained silent for nine years. When the tribunal finally sent the arrest warrant for the four women, all of them had passed away. Why had the tribunal waited so long? How long had the case sat in a pile of paperwork, neglected? Had it been filed away by accident? How long had the documents taken in transit? How had the warrant actually arrived in Escuintla?

These questions opened up two related discoveries. First, I realized I did not know how the documents in the case had moved back and forth between Escuintla and Mexico City. Had they been carried by officials involved in the case? Had they been sent by mail? What mail service existed at the time? Without knowing how the documents traveled, I could not be sure how much of the delay had occurred in transit and how much had occurred within the tribunal. Second, I realized I did not understand how people in Escuintla viewed the distance separating their town from Mexico City. If correspondence from Mexico City could take nine years, did the place seem as remote to them as Spain? More so?

It became evident to me that however people in Escuintla viewed those distances, their conceptions of distance were contextual. What should have been an obvious point from the beginning finally became clear: the six hundred miles between Escuintla and Mexico City meant one thing to me and quite another thing to them. That distance was mediated by documents—by communication—in ways I found familiar. But here the familiarity ended. Created not only by geographical circumstances but also by political, social, economic, and cultural conditions, the conception of distance at the peripheries of the Spanish empire was one that I did not yet understand.

On Distance and the Periphery

This book is about how one idea, distance, might be better understood for the colonial period by considering it in the context of others: ideas that aren’t always paired with distance in the modern imagination. A first, crucial idea that illuminates the colonial conception of distance is the notion of peripheries. Distances in the Spanish empire, I believe, looked different from the center than they did from the periphery. In his work on early-modern European borderlands, Peter Sahlins writes that most of the literature on the emergence of nations and national identities is written “from the perspective of the centre,” but that “few reverse this lens, and consider the history . . . from the perspective of the periphery, of the borderland.” Yet as Sahlins points out, considering the empire from the perspective of the periphery allows for reconsideration of “fundamental assumptions about territory and nationality, about nation and state.”³ This is no less true for the Spanish empire as considered from its peripheries in the Americas.

From a certain point of view, the use of the term periphery to describe a colonial place might seem anachronistic. The term acquired currency in the historiography of Latin America only in the second half of the twentieth century. Through the work of sociologists Edward Shils and Immanuel Wallerstein, “center and periphery” became meaningful for scholars of Latin America focusing particularly on economic history. In the 1960s and 1970s, centers and peripheries proved crucial to the elaboration of dependency theory, but even after the widespread critique of dependency theory, the terms have remained in use. Though infrequently deployed in the sense developed by Wallerstein, historians of Latin America routinely rely on the terms to designate spatial, administrative, and economic relationships. More recently, scholars have used them to talk about the history of empire, thereby drawing the twentieth-century terms into colonial contexts.

Comparative studies of empire and Atlantic history have found fresh uses for the center-periphery framework, and these uses have necessarily resulted in new meanings.⁴ Space alone, it turns out, does not fully account for relationships between centers and peripheries, which are shaped as much by power as they are by distance.⁵ Wealth, bureaucratic or administrative significance, population size, importance to the flow of information, importance to the traffic of commerce, and level of ecclesiastical influence were all qualities relied upon to determine centrality in the colonial world. These qualities not only suggest “an elaborately articulated and hierarchical relationship of center and peripheries,” as colonial historians Lyman Johnson and Susan Socolow argue; they point to the fact that centrality in such hierarchical relationships was inescapably variable and relative.⁶ An American city’s waxing or waning commercial success, for example, could alter its peripheral status. And this status determined not only its relation to the center but to other peripheries.⁷ The words “relative” and “relatively” punctuate discussions of centers and peripheries, as authors yield to the comparative frame imposed by the terms. And where there is relativity, there is the possibility for subjective orientations, an “apparent change in the position of what constitutes center and what [constitutes] periphery resulting from a change in the viewer’s position.”⁸

This observation—that centers and peripheries look different depending on the viewer’s position—informs the postmodern critique of the center-periphery paradigm. The project of de-centering among scholars of Latin American studies concerns itself as much with resituating nodes of intellectual knowledge in academia today as with reconsidering the historical relationship between Spain and its colonies. Explicitly political in argument, de-centering aims most fundamentally to create Latin America as a site for intellectual and academic authority. In some formulations, this goal seemingly springs from an understanding of “the periphery” as “the margin.” As such, de-centering often seems to argue more for a relocation of the center than for a dissolution of the center-periphery paradigm.⁹ In fact, certain postmodern treatments of the paradigm aim to complicate and re-deploy rather than to discredit. As articulated by Enrique Dussel, for example, the center-periphery model becomes essential to challenging our conception of modernity and its origins. Dussel’s thesis, that modernity is the “fruit of the ‘management’ of the ‘centrality’ of the first ‘world-system’” aims not to discredit the center-periphery model but to credit Amerindia with the production of a powerful center.¹⁰ As creator of the center’s power, he argues, the periphery matters.

Postmodernist scholars and historians of empire, myself included, acknowledge the same key problem with the continued use of this framework: the term periphery identifies place pejoratively. Our approaches to this pejorative connotation, however, differ. While Dussel combats the problem by arguing that peripheries created the “value” of the center, other postmodern critics take a more indirect approach, claiming less that the center has no autochthonous value and more that the center should be relocated. Many historians of empire argue something similar. In framing the discussion of peripheral areas, historians make the implicit—or sometimes explicit—claim that these areas have been ignored by the historiography and merit attention.¹¹ As they make this claim, the discussions drift inevitably toward using the terms “center” and “periphery” to connote relative importance; since “peripheries” have been deemed unimportant, the author must lead the charge to secure their importance. As John Jay TePaske articulates it, “The existence of frontiers or peripheries in colonial Spanish American cannot be denied, but these peripheries all had important positions within the Spanish empire in America as component parts of an organic whole that constituted the Spanish enterprise in the Indies.”¹² Again, the periphery matters.

And this, of course, is the central dilemma for anyone who studies peripheries: the more one asserts the importance of one’s periphery, the more one asserts the value of the framework revolving around the center. Our accepted vocabulary subverts the argument we wish to make with it: “central” connotes importance and “peripheral” connotes unimportance. Even when used to argue for the importance of peripheries, the term “periphery” continues to connote pejoratively. As a result, we find ourselves arguing in defense of peripheries that peripheries are not peripheral at all—they are central.

This book, which focuses on a place with the dubious distinction of being as peripheral now as it was in the colonial period, faces the same dilemma. But here I suggest another approach to the dilemma. Instead of arguing for Guatemala’s importance, I suggest acknowledging and then examining Guatemala’s peripheral positioning. Instead of countering the pejorative connotation of “periphery,” I propose considering the connotation in historical context. By so doing, Guatemala emerges as a place that can assist our understanding of broader conceptions in the Spanish empire. As it turns out, the pejorative connotation proves remarkably useful for understanding the term “distancia” in colonial usage. Though—as discussed in the ensuing chapters—“distancia” or distance was frequently quantified and described with fairly objective measures, “distancia” was also used to connote pejoratively in much the same way that “periphery” is used today.¹³ The phrases “mucha distancia” and “a gran distancia,” meaning literally “at a great distance,” described in negative terms a place “on the periphery” or “at the margin” rather than all places that were simply “far away.”

On Guatemala as a Periphery of Empire

Our modern associations with peripherality, marginality, and centrality can therefore be useful as insights into the colonial conception of distance. One of these insights is that only places considered peripheral lay “at a great distance.” While the spatial distance from Spain to Guatemala was, of course, exactly the same as the spatial distance from Guatemala to Spain, officials in Guatemala did not describe Spain as “distante,” whereas officials in Spain writing of Guatemala—and other places in its overseas empire—did.¹⁴ Waldo Tobler’s first law of geography, the argument that “everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things,” seems to be only true from certain perspectives.¹⁵ The Spanish monarch, the Council of the Indies, the Board of Trade (Casa de Contratación), and later Spanish ministries all loomed large for Guatemalan officials, important as they were to colonial American governance. Even more revealingly, Guatemala, at the periphery of the Spanish empire, had its own peripheries, and in the correspondence and reports of Guatemalan officials, “distant” is used to describe places in the provinces but not to describe important places in Mexico or Spain. So, for example, the highlands province of Verapaz at seventy miles and the southern province of Costa Rica at five hundred miles were “distante,” while the Mexican port of Veracruz at a similar five hundred miles and Seville at more than five thousand miles were not.

MAP I.1. The Guatemalan audiencia in the eighteenth century

What qualities made places peripheral to Guatemala? Spatial distance appears to have mattered, but so did distance from a crucial route, inaccessibility (temporal as well as spatial), economic or commercial status, demography, social and cultural remoteness, and administrative insignificance. Historians and geographers of Central America tend to emphasize patterns of economic and social development, as do Christopher H. Lutz and W. George Lovell, who consider the Guatemalan “resource base,” landholding and settlement, economic life, and social life in identifying the peripheries of Guatemala. Building on Murdo MacLeod’s conception of a ladino east and an Indian west in Spanish Guatemala, Lovell and Lutz identify highlands and lowlands as integral to a more complex designation of cores and peripheries.¹⁶ In their conception, the core includes the colonial capital, the eastern highlands, the eastern lowlands, and the Pacific coast. The peripheries include the highland sierras in the middle of the country and the northern lowlands.¹⁷

Where the “core” had social and economic value, of course, it had value for Spaniards; this resulted in political and administrative structures that closely mirrored the core.¹⁸ The Spanish organization of the region transformed several times in the sixteenth century, reflecting an early ambivalence on the part of the crown as to how the region fit into the larger overseas empire. For the first two centuries of colonial rule, Spanish America was divided into two vast viceroyalties, New Spain and Peru, which were further divided into regional audiencias—governing bodies with fixed territorial jurisdictions that combined legislative, executive, administrative, and judicial functions.¹⁹ Occupying the space between the two viceroyalties, the isthmus could be considered proximate to either, and it was also closely linked to the Caribbean. When the dust settled, the audiencia of Guatemala stretched from modern-day Costa Rica to southern Mexico, including the jurisdictions (gobiernos) of Soconusco, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Guatemala—which included Chiapas and El Salvador.²⁰

With varied landscapes and climates, the area did not prove uniformly promising to Spanish settlers. High mountain ranges roughly parallel to the Pacific coast arched inland from southern Mexico, while sierras and cordilleras spread westward through Honduras and along a central spine through Costa Rica. Until the twentieth century, much of the region was covered by dense forest that made travel and settlement difficult. As Lovell and Lutz describe it, suffocating heat was the norm for the lowland coasts while frost was not unusual in the highlands. Spanish settlers consequently concentrated in the tierra templada, the valleys with more temperate climates that lay between the extremes. The first capital city, Santiago de Almolonga, was founded in the “warmer, lower altitudes in the highland core.”²¹ Even this favorable location was not perfect; in the mid-sixteenth century the long chain of volcanoes running parallel to the Pacific coast from Guatemala to Costa Rica proved perilous for the first time of many, and the capital was destroyed. The new capital, Santiago de Guatemala, was founded a few miles away in the valley between the Volcán de Agua and the Volcán de Fuego. Initially, as Spanish settlement spread from Santiago de Guatemala outward, the regions to the south and east of the capital were favored over the regions north and west.²² Though the Spanish pattern of settlement overlapped to a great extent with the preexisting Indian pattern of settlement, Indian communities at the Spanish peripheries fared quite differently than those at the Spanish cores, where demands for land were most intense.²³

Along with land, Spaniards demanded labor. Cacao provided the region with its first agricultural boom, but the later decline of the cacao plantations led Guatemalans to a greater reliance on mining, indigo production, and later cochineal production.²⁴ Cacao and mining were especially labor-intensive, and there is no doubt that part of Guatemala’s appeal to settling Spaniards lay in its potential to provide Indian labor. Slave raids led not only to the forced migration of Indians but often to their early death.²⁵ Of course the greatest demographic impact on the Indian population came not from slavery but from disease, and the dramatic population decline altered the social, political, and economic landscape. The population shrank from almost 6 million in 1500 to less than 300,000 in 1680. Despite this remarkable decline, the region as a whole remained approximately 95 percent Indian in 1680.²⁶ There continued to exist broad swaths of territory where the population was entirely Indian or where Spaniards were represented only by the parish priest. In the same period, the black slave population in Santiago de Guatemala reached its peak.²⁷ Both the black slave population and the free black population reached its highest rate in Santiago in the late seventeenth century, falling into decline afterwards for several decades. Though a number of plagues and diseases took their toll in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the falling figures for several demographic groups can also be partly explained by increasing mestizaje. Mulattoes and mestizos alike were identified as ladinos.²⁸

A term that has shifted in definition several times, ladino meant something different in the colonial period in Guatemala than it has meant in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.²⁹ In the colonial period, the term points to the growing number of castas, people of mixed race, in Guatemala and Spanish America as a whole. Eighteenth-century documents continue to identify españoles and indios, but they also identify indiosladinos, ladinos, mestizos, and other categories. This growth in the mixed-race population and the consequent disintegration of the repúblicas—the legal spheres separating Spaniards from Indians—necessarily affected the position of specific places within Guatemalan social space. While certain regions such as Totonicapán and Verapaz remained heavily Indian, many parts of the provinces to the southeast (such as Costa Rica) grew to become predominantly mestizo.³⁰

These demographic and economic factors most discussed by scholars are doubtlessly essential to determining colonial cores and peripheries, but they tend to deemphasize two key aspects that contemporaries also relied upon most in their conception of the central and peripheral. First, the spatial schema that emerges from the historiography is one that casts centers and peripheries as coterminous territories, while they were primarily understood to occupy places along routes. Routes, in this conception, are mental place-connectors; the paths themselves changed according to season and weather, but the abstracted routes, paced intervals between locations, remained constant. Second, the emphasis on economic centers and peripheries, while not incompatible with a contemporary Guatemalan understanding, reflects a view more in keeping with the perspective from the empire’s center in Spain. Officials writing in colonial Guatemala considered administrative influence crucial to centrality and peripherality. Centers were understood as places with dense and effective administrative networks, both secular and ecclesiastical; distant peripheries were understood as places beyond bureaucratic control. Three examples will suffice to introduce the discussion of how routes and administrative reach mattered in the colonial conception of distancia.

Costa Rica is an especially revealing case. In 1768, an official in Guatemala explained the difficulty of communicating monthly with Costa Rica due to “the great distance there is to Granada.”³¹ Lying more than five hundred miles away as the crow flies and fifty days of travel away, Costa Rica was arguably the farthest point within the audiencia from the Guatemalan capital. Its social, economic, and political isolation is emphasized in the historiography, and contemporaries in both Guatemala and Costa Rica seem to have felt the distance keenly. Panama and New Granada lay just beyond it to the south, but communication with them over land was virtually nonexistent.³² Costa Rican officials believed the solution lay in reorganizing the administrative structure, assigning Costa Rica to Tierra Firme. In a letter to this effect written by the cabildo (local council) in Cartago in 1625, the distance of nearly three hundred leagues to Guatemala City was cast as the culprit for the region’s ills. The “great harm” to the province resulting from being “so far away” (tan lejos) from Guatemala City affected the one hundred and twenty Spaniards and fifteen hundred Indians alike. The cabildo lamented that though the arrival of the governor had been a tremendous boon, he was present only once a year. In the interim, the four corregidores (district magistrates) assigned by the audiencia in Guatemala committed excessive abuses against the Indian population, but the corregidores knew they were beyond the governor’s reach and the Indians were too poor to travel the three hundred leagues to protest the injustices committed against them.³³

It is worth presenting the content of the cabildo’s complaint more at length—here summarized by an official in Spain—as it emphasizes the importance of distance to the inhabitants of Cartago.

In the city of Cartago in the province of Costa Rica, and in the name of said province and its residents, it is stated that the province lies 280 leagues from the city of Guatemala, where the Audiencia is located. To reach the city it is necessary to travel to Nicaragua, and of the 100 leagues that lie between Costa Rica and Nicaragua, 80 are uninhabited, and there are many wide rivers that are difficult to cross during most of the year, and as a result there are many people who either drown in the rivers or lose their farms after embarking on such a long journey along swampy routes that during much of the year are impassable. The residents who are obliged to travel to the audiencia for official business suffer great trials and discomfort and risk their very lives both because of the poor road and because it is impossible to leave their crops unattended for so long, and they have no money or other recourse, nor do they find anyone to help them in Guatemala City for it lies so far away. . . . And there is another even worse problem in that province, and this is that the naturales of this region are assigned by the President four district magistrates from the Guatemalan audiencia and though the naturales suffer a thousand injuries at their hands it is impossible for them to go beg for justice for they are so poor and the majority of the them go about naked. These difficulties and many others besides would cease if Your Majesty saw fit to assign the province of Costa Rica to the audiencia of Panama since it lies so close to it.³⁴

The portrait of remoteness painted here is extreme. By the late seventeenth century, Costa Rica’s Indian population had dwindled, and the Spanish population was widely scattered.³⁵ Roughly two hundred and fifty people lived spread out over the region between Nicoya and Cartago, and Miles Wortman cites a contemporary’s horror at the fact that in 1719 even the governor relied on subsistence farming.³⁶ Despite such indications of poverty, however, Costa Rica was not insignificant economically. The inhabitants of Cartago were not entirely wrong in claiming that given the opportunity, the province could become one of the area’s richest. By 1700, the Caribbean coast had become a major cacao-growing region, and its port became notorious for smuggling.³⁷ Thus Costa Rica’s placement beyond Guatemala’s administrative reach came to be exploited by many others besides the seventeenth-century corregidores; smugglers realized the potential of its trade network connecting it to the Caribbean, Panama, and Cartagena.³⁸ Costa Rica had no close ties to Omoa and Veracruz, the two main ports for the Guatemalan audiencia, and the difficult, lightly trafficked overland route between Costa Rica and points farther north could not draw the weight of the network southward. So despite its mainly Spanish population and its arguable economic importance in the eighteenth century, Costa Rica remained a final stop on the overland route south: beyond administrative control, linked tenuously to the center by a long route, and tied primarily by maritime routes to the Caribbean and Tierra Firme.

Clearly route placement was closely tied to socioeconomic factors, and while certainly in some cases economic demands created routes, in other cases the failure of establishing a route may have stifled potential growth. The perception of Alta and Baja Verapaz (in colonial usage, las Verapazes or la Verapaz) as distant peripheries came about in the colonial period after a failed experiment to establish a route through them to Puerto Caballos, a port on the Caribbean coast west of Trujillo (the first port developed in the sixteenth century). Though the route was meant to benefit the growing city of Santiago, the disadvantages of both the port itself and the route through Verapaz proved insurmountable. The “long, tortuous” road connecting to the capital, the pestilence of the port, and attacks by pirates all served to bring the port disfavor.³⁹ After the port was abandoned, the route through Verapaz led only to the province itself, and thus the area remained predominantly Indian. In 1682 there were 10,753 Indian tributaries in twenty-seven towns, and only eighteen to twenty Spaniards, mestizos, and mulattoes. The largest non-Indian presence was Dominican: a hacienda dating to 1579 produced sugar, relying on some 250 slaves and one thousand Indians in the early eighteenth century.⁴⁰ The non-ecclesiastical Spanish presence remained negligible. The Verapazes lay approximately seventy miles from Guatemala City—closer than the cities in what would become El Salvador—but the route was far more difficult. And unlike comparable places with large Indian populations and scarce economic opportunities lying farther west on the route to Mexico, the route led nowhere beyond the Verapazes. From the perspective of an official in the Guatemalan capital, the Verapazes followed a long and difficult route north into towns dominated by Indian and ecclesiastical authorities. Even as late as 1805, an official protested the impossibility of establishing regular communication with the Province of Verapaz because of “la grande distancia que media”—the great distance it measures—from the capital.⁴¹

Costa Rica and the Verapazes both combine so many potential attributes of peripherality—inaccessibility, cultural remoteness, small population, and periods of relative poverty—that it would be difficult to isolate one or two as the most important in determining their peripheral place. Surely people in the Guatemalan capital considered them in light of their economic and social characteristics as well as in terms of their placement on difficult routes beyond administrative reach. But the recommendations by an official from the province of Tegucigalpa, in present-day Honduras, bring the spatial conception of routes and the importance of administrative reach in determining “centrality” into sharper relief. Lamenting the “distance that separates the district from the provincial capital,” the former alcalde mayor (district governor) argued that during his tenure it had proved indispensable to have a judge assigned to the district of Cantarranas y Cedros. First, because of “the great number of people of all kinds who arrive, drawn by the mineral wealth of the district,” and second to avoid “certain fraudulent behavior that tends to take place on the Northern coast.” He recognized that the coast lay at some distance, “but as the mouth of the region, and as a necessary through-way to the other Provinces of this Kingdom, it proves indispensable and essential to have a deputy appointed by this Real Audiencia.” He warned that “it may be the case that due to the distance of thirty leagues separating Cantarranas y Cedros from the provincial capital, these local transgressions may remain unattended to and their perpetrators unpunished.”⁴²

Significantly, the district governor describes the area in question as a garganta—a throat or funnel—for the region. In describing it as a place, he invokes its use as a route. Furthermore, his description of Cantarranas y Cedros as a place of economic significance and heavy human traffic would seem to contradict its characterization as a “distant” periphery if we consider distante to imply primarily socioeconomic marginality.⁴³ But the district governor’s anxieties about the region concern its distance from government authorities. If we consider distante in colonial usage to mean, in certain instances, “beyond administrative control,” then the district governor’s urgent recommendations to appoint a deputy seem to underline the use of distante to describe Cantarranas y Cedros. The argument here is not that only routes and administrative reach mattered, but that they complemented and sometimes dominated contemporaries’ consideration of other factors.

Projected maps of the region incorporating the notion of routes and administrative reach might look something like what is shown in Maps I.2 and I.3. Consistent with Lauren Benton’s elaboration of colonial space as “enclaves” and “corridors,” Guatemalan routes connected places of greater and lesser importance.⁴⁴ In the late sixteenth century, principal routes connected Guatemala to Mexico and to the ports on the Honduran coast. Just as important as overland routes, maritime routes linked the ports to destinations in the Caribbean, principally Havana, and farther on to Spain. Overland routes to the provinces connected Guatemala to San Salvador and Comayagua, with far more tenuous routes connecting the northern reaches of the audiencia to Granada and Cartago.

MAP I.2. The late sixteenth-century Guatemalan audiencia depicted as a route

MAP I.3. The late eighteenth-century Guatemalan audiencia depicted as a route

By the late seventeenth century, the central artery through the audiencia was thicker; Chiapas was linked through Huehuetenango and Totonicapán to Guatemala, which in turn reached southeast to San Salvador, Comayagua, and beyond to León. Still oriented toward the Atlantic, the route to Veracruz provided the crucial link to Spain. By the late eighteenth century, the landscape had somewhat changed. A denser network of routes linked destinations within the audiencia, and Guatemala—in a new location after the 1773 earthquake—was connected to the port of Omoa (founded in 1752) through towns lying east of it, principally Chiquimula. The central artery connecting Ciudad Real through to Costa Rica branched out, reaching secondary destinations within the audiencia.

These maps are derived from an official, bureaucratic experience located in Guatemala City (in its various locations), but as they prioritize communication networks and, indirectly, trade networks, they may well reflect a more broadly held conception of Guatemalan social space.⁴⁵ An awareness of social and economic peripheries, as described above, complemented and complicated this conception. To demarcate this space as the territory of official culture is not necessarily to say that others outside of this space did not reflect and reinforce it. As suggested above, people in the internal peripheries such as Costa Rica contributed to this conception; they even actively delimited Guatemalan space. And as will be argued in later chapters, people living “off the route” may have contributed as well to both the formation and perception of this space. In his characterization of the early colonial period, Angel Rama describes the Spanish conquest as a “frenetic gallop across continental immensities . . . leaving in its wake a scattering of cities, isolated and practically out of communication from one another, while the territory between the new urban centers continued to be inhabited almost solely by the dismayed Indian populations.”⁴⁶ While in many ways these maps project a similar vision of “relay stations for the transmission of . . . imperial directives,” I would argue that the contours of this network were neither perceived nor determined by the urban centers alone. In other words, officials, Spaniards, Creoles, ladinos, and others living in the described space produced these routes of linked places in conjunction with people living outside them.

The view that stands in strong contrast to this particular sketch of Guatemalan space and place is that held by the administrative center in Spain. It seems likely that Spanish officials viewed the ports surrounding the audiencia of Guatemala—Veracruz, Havana, Cartagena, and for a time Portobelo—as central, important places, but none of these fall within the audiencia itself. Places lying inland within Guatemala were considered more peripheral. Without abandoning the idea that routes and administrative reach informed the conception of distance, the oft-made argument that a “major function of the colonies was to generate a surplus of wealth for export to Spain” should be credited.⁴⁷ Ports, as important places along the routes moving this wealth, would have occupied a prominent role in fulfilling this function, while cities such as Santiago would have occupied places of importance proportional to their ability to provide the “underlying structures that made empire possible,” to draw on Henry Kamen’s elaboration of Spanish imperial power.⁴⁸

But in the larger scheme, Spanish monarchs and administrators were also painfully aware of the Americas as distante, if we understand this to mean “beyond administrative control.” Even the American centers lay at a great distance. Officials in Spain knew that the long voyage across the Atlantic made necessary some degree of independent governance, but they did not like it. In the words of M. C. Mirow, who acknowledges the “great geographical distance” as a crucial element in Spanish governance, “Spanish institutions effectively bridged this vast space and governed a multitude of aspects of daily life with jealous, watchful specificity.”⁴⁹ To some degree, it might be argued that Spanish American bureaucracy’s primary purpose was to overcome distance. In the early colonial period, the Council of Indies in Seville maintained its “watchful” presence through its American audiencias and its related courts and councils. In the eighteenth century, secretaries absorbed the functions previously assigned to the Council of Indies and an intendancy system was created as an additional layer of regional royal power.⁵⁰ Nevertheless, sometimes urgent decisions simply had to be made without consultation. Charles III lamented in 1761 the “repeated cases in which emergencies do not permit, due to distance, direct recourse to my Royal Person.”⁵¹ One particularly vivid example comes from a Guatemalan mail official who wrote to his superior in Spain immediately after the devastating 1773 earthquake that destroyed the capital. He described the horrors around him, saying, “I bring it to your attention so that in your pity you may relieve us in whatever manner possible of the obvious emergency in which we find ourselves.”⁵² Needless to say, given the pace of overseas communication—worsened by the catastrophe—the official was forced to make many key decisions alone. To ensure officials in Guatemala and elsewhere remained accountable for their independent decisions, Charles III insisted on precise documentation of their every action.

In other words, documents were used to overcome distance. Yet Charles III and other monarchs, even the “rey papelero” (king of paper) Philip II, discovered on a broad scale what the witches in Escuintla discovered—to their benefit—on a smaller scale. Documents did not always overcome distance well. They could get lost, they could be ignored, and they could be interpreted in unpredictable ways. Or, as the earthquake crisis demonstrates, they were simply too slow. Whether they failed or succeeded, documents were a crucial ligature between Escuintla and Mexico City, between Guatemala and Spain, between periphery and center. The workings of empire depended on the flow of paper.

On Documents and Empire

While distance can be approached from many directions, this book arrives at a colonial conception of distance by examining how key ideas were manifested in the treatment of documents. A basic claim here is that documents were an essential tool in the workings of empire, and particularly long-distance empire. The writing, travel, and storage of documents therefore reveal much about how distance was mediated, if not always overcome.

The grouping of distance, documents, and empire draws together several lines of historiography that would not seem, at first glance, to intersect but that nonetheless complement one another well. Studies of communication beginning with Harold Innis’s foundational Empire and Communications (1950) have established the necessity of documents to empire-building.⁵³ Communication networks not only underpin the logistics of empire; as more recent publications argue, they also build hubs of information and power at the empire’s center. Histories of the Spanish empire have emphasized language, shaded slightly differently than “communication,” as an imperializing force. Citing the Bishop of Ávila’s comment to Queen Isabella of Spain that “language is the perfect instrument of empire,” authors point to the broad sweep of Castilian as a tool of domination.⁵⁴ But is it language or writing that works so effectively as a tool of conquest? Scholars focusing on sources of colonial power have pointed to print culture and the power of texts as the crucial instruments of empire building. Angel Rama’s vision of The Lettered City projects a Spanish America in which the very architecture and space “sprang forth in signs and plans, already complete, in the documents that laid their statutory foundations and in the charts and plans that established their ideal designs.” In fulfilling these designs, writes Rama, Spanish “conquerors” relied on the written word as a kind of magical force: “the written word became the only binding one—in contradistinction to the spoken word, which belonged to the realm of things precarious and uncertain.” Its permanence lent the text power, and its power was political.⁵⁵ Even authors like Fernando Bouza, who qualify the supposed dominance of text by arguing that images and speech also held power in the early modern period, accept that the written word—and particularly the printed word—gradually gained influence over the course of the colonial period. Bouza reminds us that this ascendancy was not a foregone conclusion.⁵⁶ The numerous social and cultural histories of reading, writing, and the rise of print culture that he speaks to (which focus mostly on Europe) nonetheless offer a compelling contextual story for how text was asserting its dominance just as Spain was buildings its empire.⁵⁷

Communication, language, text: these may seem variations on a single theme rather than distinct categories. Yet their differences are sufficient to have guided scholars onto divergent paths. While the rich cultural and social histories of reading, writing, and printing have focused on books and personal correspondence, studies of empire and power, when they speak of texts, largely imply the official paperwork of the Spanish crown. Publications—literary, scientific, and religious—as well as personal writings form part of the story, but the paperwork of the judiciary, of the church, and of the crown are central to its elaboration of a textual imperial power. Yet how much do we know about the production, circulation, and readership of these official documents? How much do we know about the cultural life of the documents that sustained the Spanish empire? The approach I take here, borrowing methods from one body of work and sources from the other, is to examine the social and cultural history of official documents in light of the broader history of empire. Examining official documents as “artifacts of modern knowledge practices” illuminates not only the trajectories of specific documents but also the social and cultural context of these trajectories.⁵⁸ The official document becomes an opportunity to observe the cultural life of an institution and, further, a social history of knowledge surrounding it.

In the case of the Guatemalan audiencia, the documents considered in this light reveal a particular history about people, processes, and institutions; these histories are many and varied. The social history of knowledge that these documents project is similarly complex, but woven through it is a common theme: distance, and specifically the spatial and temporal distances separating places in the Spanish empire. Here, of course, the argument is not unique to Guatemala. Scholars have connected geography to knowledge building in other regions. As Peter Burke posits in his panoramic social history of knowledge in early modern Europe, an important aspect of the history of knowledge is location, or placement, or geography. Considering centers and peripheries explicitly, Burke addresses “the ‘spatial distribution’ of knowledge, the places in which knowledge was discovered, stored or elaborated as well as those to which it was diffused.”⁵⁹ Burke points to how “the Casa de Contratación . . . in Seville was a store of knowledge, especially knowledge of sea routes, the site of a model chart (know as the padrón real) which was regularly updated when pilots returned from their voyages with new information.”⁶⁰ Throughout the early modern period, Spain—more accurately, Seville—was incontestably an immense storehouse of knowledge that arrived in reports, relaciones, letters, and petitions from every corner of the empire.

Yet documents were not the only form of knowledge crisscrossing the globe, accumulating in centers across Europe and making possible the expansion of the early modern empires. Rather, as Burke urges, “it should be obvious that there are ‘knowledges’ in the plural in every culture and that social history, like sociology, must be concerned ‘with everything that passes for knowledge in society.’” Oral knowledge, visual knowledge, and diverse others are just as vital. He suggests that one way of focusing on specific forms of knowledge would be to “distinguish between the knowledges produced and transmitted by different social groups. Intellectuals are masters of some kinds of knowledge, but other fields of expertise or ‘know-how’ are cultivated by such groups as bureaucrats, artisans, peasants, midwives and popular healers.” However, this distinction between forms of knowledge—particularly the differentiation of “elite” and “popular” knowledge—quickly breaks down. Can it really be claimed that knowledge found in publications and official documents is entirely the fruit of intellectual and bureaucratic wisdom? Surely not; as Burke himself observes, historians—particularly historians of empire—have begun to document “the contribution made by indigenous inhabitants to the knowledges which European rulers, cartographers, and physicians were claiming as their own.”⁶¹ As, for example, Karl Offen has demonstrated for the Mosquito Indians on the Caribbean coast, colonial Spanish knowledge of Guatemala was both enriched and constrained by non-elite, Indian sources. Maps of the region may be signed by Spaniards (or other Europeans), but they represent and reproduce local knowledge.⁶² Burke is loathe to overstate his case, but he suggests that what we think of as official, imperial knowledge may even be a kind of enshrining of collected, highly unofficial knowledge. These insights suggest that the documents examined in this book—the paperwork produced in the Guatemalan audiencia—cannot be considered purely “elite” productions by officials, bureaucrats, and scribes. As the ensuing chapters will demonstrate, official documents “depended on local informants” to a great degree; not only official knowledge but, just as importantly, the lack of official knowledge was determined by unofficial sources.

Therefore, the documents of the Guatemalan audiencia should be considered composite productions: informed to a great extent by local knowledge, penned by writers who were of varying degrees culturally Spanish, and composed largely according to guidelines and templates determined by administrators at the empire’s center. What can be read in the content of official documents from the Guatemalan audiencia is a confluence of practices and knowledges gathered from different parts of the empire onto a single page. The documents of the Guatemalan audiencia are also composite in another sense. Their movement and treatment are as much a part of their production as are the knowledges brought to bear. And in this sense, too, documents were literally produced by many hands, from the numerous officials who amended and augmented the content to the mail carriers who transported the pages. As material objects and as knowledge productions, documents were created by many people in diverse times and places.

On Finding the Document’s Route

The central claim of this book is that spatial history matters to the social history of knowledge. In the Spanish empire, knowledge was produced over long distances, and this is reflected in how the documents were used to overcome distance. Understanding colonial distance through these documents becomes, then, a way to understand how knowledge was created. So what is there to learn about colonial distance? I have argued in this introduction that in the colonial conception, distance connoted peripherality. The chapters that follow build on this argument, suggesting that space was predominantly organized along routes and that distances were understood as time-space intervals connecting hierarchically organized places. What does this say about how knowledge was created? This Introduction has also argued that documents, as composite creations, were produced across temporal and spatial distances. In the chapters that follow, I argue that these distances resulted in particular contents, forms, and practices. The organization of knowledge within this far-flung empire derived many of its attributes from spatial and temporal distance. Knowledge was created along routes, and it was gathered radially, resulting in a hierarchical structure that favored the accumulation of knowledge at the empire’s center.

The book is organized into three parts, which consider distance in relation to the creation, movement, and storage of documents. Chapter 1 focuses on document form, arguing that the formal qualities of Spanish paperwork reflect concerns about distance. Document genres—geographical questionnaires and responding reports—likewise reflect these concerns. Instructions requesting geographical reports were sent to the Americas from Spain from the beginning of the colonial period, and officials in Spanish America complied by writing and illustrating relaciones geográficas. Officials in Guatemala created reports that closely mirrored the conceptualizations of space and distance projected by the instructions sent from Spain. Quantifying distance to administrative centers was an important way of “placing” towns and villages. By describing each town as “distant from” an urban center and the capital, officials reinforced the empire’s hierarchy of place. Officials also relied heavily on routes to write their reports. In some cases, officials wrote their reports while traveling along a route from town to town, thereby emphasizing, once again, routes and temporal-spatial itineraries.

Taking up the notion of distance as pejorative, Chapter 2 examines the 1769–1771 report written by Archbishop Pedro Cortés y Larraz, a published text whose original is housed at the Archivo General de Indias (AGI). Recently appointed and arrived from Spain, the archbishop traveled throughout his archdiocese in the 1760s and compiled a multi-volume visita (visit), a “geographic-moral description” of Guatemalan parishes. The visita follows Cortés y Larraz’s three-stage journey, during which he wrote a detailed report on each parish accompanied by maps or paintings by an unknown artist. The archbishop’s visita shares many characteristics with the geographical reports discussed in Chapter 1. It unfolds along a route, and it clearly places an emphasis both on describing the route and on measuring it (an objective the archbishop accomplished by using his watch). Its descriptions also prioritize distances to administrative centers and parish seats as important measures. But the archbishop goes further than do the geographical reports by characterizing long distances in his archdiocese as problematic and even dangerous.

Part II turns from document form and content to document travel. After tracing the early history of the mail system, Chapter 3 concentrates on the changes that occurred in the eighteenth century. For most of the colonial period, few substantial changes were made to the Guatemalan mail system, but in 1764, reforms initiated in Spain resulted in a new mandate. Both in the service of generating revenue and in the interest of improving and centralizing communication, overseas and overland mail services were reformed. Mail traveled more frequently and to more destinations. By the end of the eighteenth century, mail traveled systematically to dozens of places within Guatemala. The mail officials who developed and improved these schedules represented their work to superiors in Spain by means of reports, and these reflect a conception of distance emphasizing hierarchies of place, routes, and temporal-spatial segments along them.

Chapter 4 concentrates on the men who actually traveled along the mail routes, the mail carriers (correos). While documents written by mail carriers are scarce, documents about them give us some sense of who they were and what their work consisted of. Correos are of particular interest because, unlike most Guatemalans, they traveled long distances on a regular basis. Some covered hundreds of leagues every month, and they therefore viewed those leagues in a somewhat different light. Chapter 4 argues that while correos may have shared the same “common skeleton” of distance built around centers, routes, and spatial-temporal intervals, they added to this framework a distinctive musculature geared toward absorbing the substantial potential risks entailed by their work.⁶³ Correos saw the long distances along their mail routes as so many leagues of potential profit or loss. In the nineteenth century, a changing political landscape that made the correos’ task more dangerous also resulted in altered conceptions of Guatemalan space and its boundaries.

Part III turns to document storage, emphasizing the temporal aspect of distance that underlies its broader conception. Chapter 5 draws together several themes of archival history in colonial Guatemala, pointing out first and foremost the ways in which methods of organizing document storage echoed methods of organizing document travel. Well-run archives, cast as “treasure” houses for documents in the early colonial period, were as essential to document safety as were well-run ships or reliable correos. Furthermore, both the mail system and archives were organized around routes. Chapter 5 also examines the role of escribanos as officials who were responsible for simultaneously providing access to and ensuring protection for archived documents. Disputes over archives in the late colonial period illustrate the difficulties inherent to balancing these objectives.

Chapter 6 follows the story of inventories as essential organizational tools for document preservation. Three officials from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Ignacio Guerra y Marchán, Miguel Talavera, and Victoriano Grijalva, organized the Guatemalan archive collections through inventories in revealing ways. The disputes over archival collections that occurred when the Central American states splintered in the mid-nineteenth century and the inventories created to ensure their safe transfer demonstrate that the inventory continued to be a crucial tool for the movement of documents over both spatial and temporal distance. Even as late as 1900, when the task of organizing the archive required a sizeable staff, inventories were relied upon to account for the archive’s content. We have no way of knowing how many were lost on the way, but the inventories created by mail officials, escribanos, and archivists ensured the safe travel of millions of pages over a distance of several hundred years, making them available for us today.