Part One
1
This level of discussion is beyond reach for the idiotic men who sit on the . . . council of the town of San Pedro Carchá, and however useless their questions, it would be equally useless to reply. Vale.1
—Anonymous Guatemalan official, 1792
It may be that in some cases distance presented an opportunity for people in the Spanish empire. Certainly the “witches” in Escuintla benefited from their remote placement on Guatemala’s Pacific coast, far from the punishing presence of the Mexico City tribunal. But distance was, undeniably, also an obstacle. From the point of view of officials attempting to maintain the rule of law or merely gather information, distance created serious problems. One solution, of course, could be found in sending delegates: trusted individuals who would carry the norms and expectations of the center to the periphery. At times, however, “idiotic” delegates at the periphery failed to fulfill expectations. Even when delegates were reliable, those individuals had to find a way to report back, and documents provided an essential means of overcoming the obstacles posed by distance.
This chapter begins the discussion of this process by examining how both the form and content of documents reflected the imperatives of distance. Documents were initiated, elaborated, and concluded by many authors in various places and times: they were produced along a temporal-spatial route. But the intervals of time and space embedded in a document do not stand out because authors intentionally reduced them. Indeed, protocols were developed to deliberately flatten the effects of distance and to ensure that officials everywhere wrote in ways that were universally intelligible. Distance alone did not give rise to these protocols, but the impediments of distance certainly informed them.
Similarly, document content responded to the problems posed by distance. Most obviously, officials in Spain could not “see” the Americas. They relied continuously on American officials to make it visible and knowable. Concentrating on questionnaires written in Spain and the official reports—visitas and relaciones—written from Guatemala in reply, this chapter examines how documents were intended to “overcome” distance by creating Guatemala as an accessible, proximate place for the king and elite officials in Spain. Studying such content necessarily spills over into considerations of genre and form, as the relación and visita existed, to a great extent, purely because of long-distance readers.
In overcoming distance, these documents also described distance. Requests for information from the center of empire, initiated in the sixteenth century and repeated into the early nineteenth century, framed distance and space in specific ways. The questionnaires envisioned distance as route-based and organized around central, jurisdictional places. Toward the end of the colonial period and particularly in the early nineteenth century, a new emphasis on boundaries emerged in the questionnaires, but the preoccupation with routes and distances to central places endured.
The responses of writers in the Guatemalan audiencia absorbed and echoed this Spanish conception. A clear hierarchy of linked places emerges from the official reports written over the course of a half-century in Guatemala, and it is evident that Guatemalan officials incorporated the Spanish understanding of distance into their geographical descriptions. Yet the reports written in Guatemala were also composite in how they incorporated local (often Indian) geographical information. Thus the reports did not perfectly mimic the ideas projected by the center; rather, they introduced idiosyncrasies—or innovations, or distortions—as they relied on autochthonous sources. Officials created reports and descriptions that presented local, unofficial knowledge in official, Spanish terms.
Distance Protocols
It seems self-evident that in a realm as vast as the Spanish empire, documents traveled a good deal. Less evident is how authors inscribed that travel into their documents’ content and form. Official documents for the colonial period that we read today rarely contain one author’s writing, composed in a single sitting in a fixed place. Instead, they usually contain a series of compositions in different hands, elaborated in the margins at different points in time. The well-known dialogic quality of such documents does more than produce a conversation among officials; it also produces a chronological route, revealing spatial and temporal distances bridged by the document. The following document, a letter concerning a problematic portion of the King’s Highway from Guatemala to Mexico, is typical.
It was signed by an official in Quetzaltenango on December 4, 1797.2 The Fiscal (crown attorney) in Guatemala took up the document, beginning his contribution to the text on the same page and continuing his writing on an appended page (below). By the time of the Fiscal’s writing, the document had traveled many leagues to Guatemala and more than a year had passed. Ignacio Guerra y Marchán, the audiencia’s escribano (secretary and chief clerk), processed the document on the following day, January 12, 1799. The document found itself next in the town of Concepción in Huehuetenango on February 6, 1799. Not evident in the page below but in those that follow, the document was signed in Concepción by three officials. A note in the margin indicates that the document was dispatched on February 8. It next reached officials in Totonicapán in May 1799 and received comment from several officials before continuing on to Guatemala in July of the same year, where Guerra y Marchán passed it on to the Fiscal. The document went on from there, processed by the audiencia and returning to Totonicapán before finding any conclusion.
FIGURE 1.1. A document originating in Quetzaltenango in 1797
Source: Archivo General de Centroamérica. Photograph by the author.
This most basic attribute of Spanish documents may seem obvious to the point of insignificance. But I believe examining the obvious here yields some important insights. Most often, historians would read a document like this one to determine what the Fiscal opined about the King’s Highway and how the officials deliberated and what decision was reached. Reading this document as a statement about distance and knowledge production, however, discloses different content. The document is revealed as a material object, circulating among specific people and places in eighteenth-century Guatemala. It appears as an object produced by the different hands that signed and carried it, the composite creation of many minds. Traveling between the audiencia capital and the highland towns near Totonicapán and Huehuetenango, the document was repeatedly read, discussed, augmented, and stored before traveling once again. Eventually, it was archived in Guatemala City.
FIGURE 1.2. A 1797 document travels to the capital and elsewhere
Source: Archivo General de Centroamérica. Photograph by the author.
The document was relied upon by officials to bridge spatial distances between the highlands and the capital and temporal distances between moments of decision-making and deliberation. A temporal chronology and spatial itinerary emerge from it. Here, revealing a first model in use throughout the Spanish empire, knowledge was built along a route. Using what might be termed an “itinerary” mode of knowledge production, a single document accumulated information from each of its stopping points.
While the distances in this case are fairly short, documents of course mediated much greater distances: from Escuintla to Mexico City; from Mexico City to Seville; from the extreme periphery to the center. Temporal distances, too, extended far beyond the three years reflected here. Documents not only traveled for longer periods; they remained in escribano archives for longer spans of time. In a way, this document and its trajectory reveal in miniature the larger processes examined in this book: the creation of documents in a formal manner informed by long-distance governance; the development of content resulting from spatial movement; and the shaping of both content and form resulting from temporal lapses in archives.
MAP 1.1. The spatial and temporal sequences suggested by the document’s itinerary
From the point of view of Spanish officials, each of these processes was plagued with possible pitfalls. In archives, documents could be lost or neglected into ruin. In travel, documents could be lost in ships that sank or were seized by pirates. Trunks left unlocked might be rifled through, their correspondence stolen. Every aspect of a document’s treatment had to assist in preventing great distances from becoming greater obstacles.3 Creating multiple copies of original documents lessened the risk, and throughout the colonial period documents were sent in duplicate or even in triplicate.4 A strict protocol governed the opening and closing of document trunks: documents were to be carefully locked and opened only with the proper authorities present. On the Guatemalan end, where authorities from the mainland could obviously not be present to enforce proper procedures, two high-ranking officials were assigned keys and charged with opening the documents before the audiencia. Furthermore, precise inventories of the documents accompanied the trunks and new inventories had to be created upon receipt to ensure that each document reached its intended destination. The documents were handled very much like treasure, and the frequent orders specifying protocol for their treatment were intended to ensure their safety both across great distances and at a great distance—within remote peripheries like the Guatemalan highlands.5
Even when the documents arrived safely, there might be other impediments. If correspondents in the peripheral corners of the empire did not adhere to a recognizable form, the document could be considered invalid or be rendered unintelligible. The documents’ formal attributes were thereby as essential to effective communication across long distance as were the measures taken to ensure their material safety. As such, the guidelines and templates devised by the crown and elaborated by the administrators of the Council of Indies were partly dedicated to achieving consistency. Kathryn Burns discusses the importance of templates and standardization in her study of escribanos, and Angel Rama suggests that “the influence of the documentary umbilical cord that carried imperial orders and provided linguistic models for letrados in the far-flung dominions” resulted in unique written forms: “Royal directives elicited lengthy, elaborate replies that advanced counter-arguments point by point, making the official missive—along with official reports and chronicles—into a literary genre in its own right.”6
This genre (or, more accurately, these genres) was elaborated over several centuries, becoming carefully rule-bound. A major concern for the Council of Indies from the beginning lay in validating the authenticity of documents received from a distance.7 The “concern with authenticating documents and the desire to leave clear proof of all public documents, letters, and decrees” gave rise to the Registro General del Sello. The seal (pictured in Figure 1.2), as well as the signature of a secretary or escribano, verified the legitimacy of documents received in Spain.8 Though the stamp tax, papel sellado, introduced in 1639 is cast by historians principally as a fundraising measure, the papel sellado shouldered the additional responsibility of ensuring a document’s validity.9
Other guidelines dictating the proper formal attributes for official documents reveal how document “safety” expanded to mean something more expansive and complex. A Guatemalan official attempted in 1784 to enforce a regulation from the king circulated in 1779 to “all the Viceroys, audiencias, Archbishops, Bishops, and judges both ecclesiastical and secular.” Sent to the king’s administrators at the highest level, the regulation would be repeated and disseminated by his delegates. The Guatemalan president dutifully did so, demanding that “in order to process without confusion or delay . . . the many petitions, reports, and pieces of official correspondence . . . the useful methods and rules expressed in the order should be observed in the preparation and execution of documents.” He complained that “the orders have not been followed, and almost universally documents continue to be sent in the same confused way.” The orders emphasize a system that both isolates and organizes pieces of information.
The petitions and correspondence sent to this office should address one and only one subject at a time without reference to others; documents should all arrive numbered, with a summary or abstract in the margin that succinctly expressed the relevant topic. They should be accompanied by an index in which the assigned number of each letter corresponds to the numbers in the margins. These letters and their indexes should be identified by a P for the originals, a D for the duplicates, and a T for triplicate copies.10
These instructions stated that the numbered index should be continued in subsequent correspondence, so that, in theory, a sequential series of numbered documents would be sent and received in Spain.11 They specified the procedure for providing cover sheets and for including numbered sub-documents within the main document. And finally, they explained how to pack these fastidiously prepared masterpieces: ordinary documents were to be sealed, but “planos o mapas” (charts or maps) had to be packed carefully in wooden trunks; under no circumstances were they to be packed in “tin cylinders, which always arrive damaged or ruined.”12 These regulations go beyond safeguarding the physical and formal integrity of documents, though this remains a concern; they also reveal something of the documents’ use, circulation, and possibly storage upon receipt. Documents were sent to different offices of the larger administration and were archived in different locations, depending on their content. The enumeration of documents suggests a desire to perceive the documents in a chronology, giving them a precise place in a temporal sequence (rather than simply a date). The manner of marking duplicate and triplicate copies points to the frequent necessity of distinguishing identical documents once they had found their way to the same office. A need to prioritize and discriminate, if not stratify, is implied.
The producers—writers, carriers, and handlers—of official documents in the Guatemalan audiencia complied with all these regulations to varying degrees. By following regulations, they not only adhered to bureaucratic protocol, they also acquiesced to the political power of the empire’s center. But every now and then the weight of administrative and political influence proved insufficient. Documents were stolen or opened on the road, in places along the route, and in the administration’s offices. The safety net for the material document, depending on so many people scattered across the empire, sometimes disintegrated.13 Similarly, writers of official documents also sometimes failed to follow the prescribed forms that provided uniformity and facilitated the production of proper composite documents across temporal and spatial distances. Administrators with daily responsibilities in the audiencia or in frequent correspondence with officials in Spain may have had more practice and a greater sense of professional obligation, but this did not necessarily guarantee their adherence to protocol. In the mid-eighteenth century, for example, Guatemalan escribano Don Juan Antonio Betancur was accused of having produced no less than eighteen testimonios, or certified copies, without having properly verified them against their originals. He was accused not of sloppy copying but of falsifying documents.14
A less egregious but rather more revealing example comes from the town of San Pedro Carchá, a town in the province of Verapaz. It will help to keep in mind that Verapaz was decidedly peripheral to Guatemalan officials—a backwater with too many Indians and a handful of friars. The city council’s escribano wrote a letter of perplexed inquiry to officials in Guatemala City about the proper process for composing a requested document. The Alcalde Mayor had forwarded a request from King Charles IV for a “report on the most noteworthy aspects of the town that are worth knowing, such as descriptions of the four-legged animals, birds, trees, plants, and special rocks.” Dividing the short, two-page letter into dignified “asuntos” (chapters) headed by roman numerals, the city council wondered “what kind of birds, trees, plants, and rocks should be described? And if all of the above, which should be given preference?” It further queried what, precisely, made certain birds, trees, plants, and rocks special. Were the “special” ones those discussed by Spanish and foreign writers or those mentioned by no one? And supposing the former, were the descriptions to be written based on the accounts of those authors “for the greater discovery of the truth”? Most tellingly, they asked, “what role are the naturales to play in preparing this report, since it is only from their statements that the provincial magistrate can form a report without exposing his good name to the censure of wise men and thereby failing in the tasks set by his sovereign?” The council concluded that since “honor, love for the King and for country” should be sufficient motivation, the decision had been made not to offer monetary compensation but to hold a contest, for which the prize would be the “honorary title of Honorary City Councilman of San Pedro.”15
From a certain perspective, the letter seems a mockery of Spanish conventions. Is it really necessary to have “chapters” in a document of only a few hundred words? Content, too, the letter suggests, can be ridiculous. “Why would the king possibly want to know about our ‘special’ rocks?” it seems to ask. But it is more likely that the document was an earnest attempt to fulfill the expectations of the center on the periphery. The punctilious questions reflect a deep concern with observing proper form. The honorary title indicates a solemn recognition of the symbolic power of the crown in terribly remote places. Even in Verapaz, the town council escribano suggests, we are capable of following protocol, and we are ever cognizant of the importance of loyalty
There are also, however, clear indications in this letter about the composite nature of document production and how such production could fall apart over long distances. Here, the physical integrity remained intact and the formal conventions were observed scrupulously. But the content failed to deliver. Revealingly, the town council admits that its most accurate information would come from naturales—from the indigenous people of Verapaz who were thought, perhaps, less than worthy of participating in the dignified task of reporting to the king. Ultimately, whether because of their insolence or because of their perceived incompetence, the members of the town council were unable to complete the report required by Charles IV. In a bitter postscript, an unidentified official in Guatemala City deemed the council unworthy of even putting pen to paper, saying, “This level of discussion is beyond reach for the idiotic men who sit on the . . . council of the town of San Pedro Carchá, and however useless their questions, it would be equally useless to reply. Vale.”16
Revealing a second model of knowledge production, one that might be considered “radial” and clearly hierarchical, the reply was intended to travel back from San Pedro to the alcalde of Verapaz, then to the Guatemalan audiencia, and on to King Charles IV. Regions, the audiencia or viceroyalty, and the center of governance in Spain created nodes at different levels. We can imagine the convergence of replies from town councils all over the Americas, funneled through local administrators as they journeyed and accumulated in the hands of the King. The itinerary model and the radial model are of course not mutually exclusive, but often operated in harmony: documents built around a route would go on to centralize in the Guatemalan audiencia, the Council of Indies, or the king’s court.
Protocols did not always ensure satisfactory documents, and the norms of the center—however respected—could not always fully acculturate the margins. The failed attempt from San Pedro Carchá to create a successful composite document, providing information to the king about the peripheries of his domain, is only one example in the continuous, often frustrating conversation about producing knowledge that took place over the course of the colonial period. Even when form succeeded in bringing the center to the periphery, content did not always succeed in bringing the periphery to the center.
A Question of Distance: Queries from Spain
As the case of San Pedro Carchá demonstrates, the production of knowledge in the Spanish empire was a conversation in documents. Every institution in the Americas participated in this conversation. While the Council of Indies was the principal overseas interlocutor, particular offices and individuals carried on parallel conversations. Documents on geographic knowledge, as discussed above, offer a particularly clear view on this conversation. Wedding local information to Spanish protocols, such documents comment upon and describe the very distance they are attempting to overcome. This section and the next consider how the documents both mediated and talked about distance.
Official reports in the form of maps, relaciones, visitas, and the closely related descripciones and razones made accessible, known, and proximate places that were impossible for the king and his administrators to view firsthand. María Portuondo’s study of Spanish cosmography demonstrates that eyewitness reports and empirical investigations became essential to cosmographers working for the Spanish crown almost as soon as the New World was discovered.17 But the flow of paper carrying those reports east across the Atlantic ran parallel to a westward current: repeated commands requesting information. As the empire grew dramatically in the sixteenth century, any claim to “know” that empire necessarily rested on the information demanded and then provided by representatives of the crown.
Even as late as the fifteenth century, notes Barbara Mundy in her study of the sixteenth-century relaciones geográficas, Ferdinand and Isabella could expect to see much of their kingdom firsthand, as “traveling through their realms by horse or coach, however arduous, was still possible and practical.” But as the kingdom expanded, this became impossible, and for Philip II, such travel had to be substituted by other means of covering his territories. “The voyage to the Spanish Netherlands along the Spanish Road took about seven weeks; it took three months to get from Seville to Veracruz . . . Philip ruled over vast areas, even continents, that were out of his reach and far from his gaze.” Mundy places an emphasis on Philip’s inability to see his kingdom, arguing that “knowing was predicated on seeing.” Reinforcing Fernando Bouza’s argument regarding the importance of images in this period, Mundy stresses the power of images as the means by which Philip sought to bind the pieces of his kingdom, arguing that maps sent from the Americas “filled a void” that “substituted for his own vision.”18
The notion of “filling a void” created by distance resonates with how historians describe the imperial project in other parts of the world as well. Matthew Edney writes of colonial India that map-reading entailed “an act of spatial denial.” Of maps more generally, he argues that “in bringing a distant place to hand, the map reader ignores the realities of geographical space.”19 But cartographic representations are not the only instruments for such spatial denial. Though Mundy stresses Philip’s desire to have the New World “made visible for him,” she also points to his preoccupation with text as a medium for imperial control, noting that he “insisted on reading and personally signing every significant paper dealing with his realm, [knowing] that such a distance, both physical and psychic, between himself and his subjects hindered his ability to rule.”20
Without ignoring, then, the importance of images as an essential early means of long-distance visibility, I agree that the desire for information was more all-encompassing, both in Philip II and in later monarchs. After all, the requests were for maps and reports, not just maps. A king so concerned with the textual channels of communication understood the potential for texts to make the distant territories proximate. The “documentary umbilical chord” between Spain and the Americas described by Angel Rama may have first sprung from this awareness, and certainly the visitas, relaciones, as well as descripciones geográficas and other reports appear to claim that they make the Americas “visible” through text.21 This is not to say that images were not important, and the repeated push for “visuality,” to use Daniela Bleichmar’s term, certainly demonstrates that images were valued as means to make the Americas visible.22 But as the enormous body of documents that crossed the Atlantic also demonstrate, the Americas could additionally be made visible through text. These documents, along with or apart from images, aimed to make the distant near.
The questionnaires written in Spain provide insights into how officials imagined the replies would achieve this. Sent by the Council of Indies in the form of reales cédulas (decrees) or simply as cuestionarios (questionnaires) and instrucciones (instructions), requests were sent to ecclesiastical authorities and audiencia authorities beginning in 1530.23 Roughly thirty such requests were made throughout the colonial period, ending with questionnaires prepared by the Cortes de Cádiz in 1812. They vary in both emphasis and in the specificity of requested information. The brief 1530 cédula directed to the Council of Indies ordered a general but comprehensive account of the Isla Española, demanding information on “all the qualities and things of that island.”24 Only three years later, this request grew more specific, as a cédula sent to the audiencia in Mexico ordered it to send “geographical reports that describe, in detail, the characteristics of the land, demography, urban centers, waterworks, as well as information on the flora and fauna. . . .”25 Later cédulas sent to the archbishop in Mexico and the audiencia in Quito were similarly detailed, listing the subjects to be reported.26
The questionnaires sent by Philip II in the 1570s, however, went far beyond these in the specificity of their requests. The decrees approved in 1571 and penned by Juan de Ovando carefully prescribed not only the content of the expected reports but also the method of inquiry, form of presentation, and material treatment of the written product.27 The section on descriptions of city councils indicated in what manner the reports were to be prepared in books, in what manner the books were to be sent to the Council of Indies, and in what manner officials were to “always observe the prescribed manner of creating and ordering the books containing the investigations, descriptions, and reports, as well as the manner of making copies of them to send to [their] superiors, leaving the original documents in their archives.”28 In other words, every step in the documents’ creation, from the research process to the storage process, was carefully delineated. The intention was to create a comprehensive volume in Spain, radially incorporating New World knowledge. Had the project succeeded, the geographic knowledge would have been accumulated and synthesized for the benefit of Philip II and his governance.
While all of the previous questionnaires had requested information on the land and terrain, the instructions of the 1570s were more pointed. Among other things, they aimed to establish the basic proportions and distances of the New World, an objective that posed significant problems for the cosmographers in Spain: “as was emblematic of its stand outside the known order of things, the New World had yet to be reined in by cosmographers with lines of latitude and longitude, lines that would make rationally visible its global position in relation to Europe.”29 Calculating longitude and latitude were essential, the decrees argued, not only to place the locations in the New World but also to make their subsequent geographical descriptions more accurate and intelligible. “It is necessary,” the decrees stated, “that a Cosmography be created . . . that states the site and position that the Indies and every part of them occupies in the universe, because in this manner the particular descriptions that are afterwards made will be more true and will be better understood.”30 Explaining the method of calculation, the decrees recommended that “the descriptions be made using degrees of longitude and latitude written out in full and not in sum, because of the facility with which errors with numbers occur.”31 Ovando expected the reports on geography, chorography, and topography to build upon the foundation of longitude and latitude, stating that knowledge of these was “very necessary for those who govern, in order to make the subject closer to the things he must govern.”32
As is the way with leading questions, the manner of the questionnaires prompted a certain kind of content. A more general questionnaire sent in 1577, with its slightly different emphasis, probed further than had previous requests for information. Also designed by Ovando, the questionnaire first drafted in 1569 with thirty-seven questions ballooned to two hundred questions before its final draft with fifty.33 The extensive questions not only asked for more detailed information; the thoroughness of the instructions themselves necessarily communicated a particular vision of how the New World would be made known, visible, and proximate. As well as inquiring into each region’s history and political organization, the questions investigated “the leagues separating each city or town of españoles (Spaniards) from the city where its governing audiencia lies,” and “the leagues separating every city or town of españoles from the others with which they share borders.” The instructions were careful to qualify that the respondent should indicate “if the leagues are large or small, over flat land or hilly land, and along roads that are straight or crooked, good or bad to walk along.”34 Prioritizing distance to an administrative center as a crucial variable, the questionnaire also emphasized distances—and their qualities—along routes connecting places within a jurisdiction. The instructions on Indian towns isolated the importance of distance just as starkly, stating, “for the Indian towns report only how distant they are from the principal town of their jurisdiction . . . as well as how distant they are from the other Indian or Spanish towns.”35 And the questions pertaining to ecclesiastical institutions similarly inquired “which town it lies in and which jurisdiction it lies in; and how many leagues there are to where the cathedral and administrative authorities are, and if the leagues are large or small, along straight roads or crooked roads. . . .” The instructions seemed to imply that quantifying distances between places was tantamount to describing them. They went on, of course, to request information on the terrain, the weather, and nature of the people, but not without leaving a strong impression that place was determined by distance from a jurisdictional center.
The instructions for visual renderings were far less leading, asking only for “the location and setting where the towns are, and if they lie in highlands or lowlands, or flat lands,” alongside an accompanying “plan” of the towns.36 For guidance as to how this “location and setting” were to be figured, respondents would have to look elsewhere. If the respondents considered the questionnaire as a whole, the dominant organization of space projected by the instructions would be one of the places located at specific distances from jurisdictional centers, connected to the center and to each other by measured routes.
The responses to these questions were varied and partial. From the point of view of the Spanish cosmographers, the instructions had been followed poorly, if at all. The information provided to establish longitude and latitude was almost nonexistent, and the relaciones were too diverse in their substance and form. As a result, the initial plan “to take the written responses and distill them into a descriptive chronicle of the New World” was never completed.37 But the failure of the project did not deter future investigators from attempting to collect information that would make the distant Americas knowable to readers in Spain, and the steady dispatch of questions was more successful than they knew.38 Though the 1570s survey was a “fiasco” from the perspective of Philip’s cosmographers, it did succeed in establishing a language about distance, space, and place.39 The great diversity of pictorial responses tends to conceal how two crucial conceptions communicated in the questionnaires—routes and distances to key administrative centers—were absorbed by the respondents.40 Over time, the ongoing conversation between questioners and respondents further reinforced these two conceptions.
The Replies: Overcoming Distance, Producing Distance
Responses to the questionnaires trickled in from the New World, including from Guatemala. Replies were sent from Guatemala beginning in the sixteenth century, and several of the relaciones geográficas in response to the Philip II questionnaire feature places from the Guatemalan audiencia. In the eighteenth century, officials in Guatemala responded once again; in 1740, more than a dozen relaciones were prepared in response to a questionnaire sent from Spain. These replies reveal a few key tendencies. First, they demonstrate an obedient mirroring of the questionnaires’ emphasis on distance. Second, they use routes not only to explain distance but also as a mode of understanding space. Third, they showcase local knowledge as both a source and a constraint of official information.
Though the complete text of the questionnaire has been lost, Jorge Luján Muñoz has reconstructed the essential material of the real cédula based on the internal orders of Guatemalan officials. The questionnaire seems to have been brief, as the audiencia president states that in a real orden dated 28 July 1739, the king had requested “that there be sent . . . reports with the most precision possible of the cities, towns and villages contained in each province of this kingdom.” He asked for “their names and the names of their respective jurisdictions, listing numerically the residents in each” and he wished to be informed of “which fruits, crops, mines of gold and silver” there were in each region. Lastly, the president reported that the king wished to be apprised of “the distances to the capital of their jurisdiction; the characteristics of the land, their healthfulness and temperament, and anything else that might provide the most exact geographical description.”41 Distances, requested here along with only a handful of other variables, are clearly prioritized.
The questionnaire may have been a precursor to one circulated more widely in New Spain after 1743; Luján Muñoz points out that while it was not sent to Guatemala, it stresses similar topics. Two of these pertain to distance: it inquires first into “the distance from the center of the jurisdiction to the capital, and in which direction it lies, and the same information for all the towns, villages, and places within the jurisdiction, with their temperament, leagues, and orientation”; and after inquiring about the people, the state of the agriculture, the possibilities for mining, the ecclesiastical organization and “miraculous images,” it ends by asking about “the distance that separates each place from the administrative center . . . and if there is any need, due to difficulties posed by long distances, to create any new settlements.”42 Similar in both their scope and emphasis, these two questionnaires prioritize the question of distance to administrative centers and even state an explicit concern about the difficulties of distance.
The responses written in 1740 clearly bear the imprint of the Guatemalan president’s general line of questioning. Without exception, they list the distances between the towns of the province and its administrative center, and in most cases there is also mention of the distance to the Guatemalan capital. This distance is invariably measured in leagues and formulated in terms of distance away from the center. The relación for Chiquimula and Zacapa states that “to the capital city which is Santiago, Guatemala, there are fifty leagues.”43 But in other cases the towns are said to “be distant from” Guatemala by use of the verb “distar.” The author of the relación for Escuintla and Guzacapán, for example, stated that the town of San Pedro Aguacatepeque in Escuintla “lies distant (dista) from Guatemala three leagues in a southeasterly direction.”44 Similarly, the town of Huehuetenango “lies fifty miles distant from the capital of Guatemala.”45 In some cases the relaciones provide only limited information on climate, demographics, and commerce, but they unfailingly quantify distances to central places.
Though the questionnaire reconstructed by Luján Muñoz does not ask specifically about routes, the relaciones also frequently discuss distance in terms of routes. Precedent, here, influenced the manner of reply. As established early on by the 1570 questionnaire and repeated in later instructions, routes were crucial to describing space. In some cases, the authors actually traveled the routes in order to compose their relaciónes. In other cases the authors describe the routes based on prior travel, simply using the route as an organizational tool in the text for the description of the towns. In both instances, the mode of travel directed the form of geographical description. As Paul Carter has written with regard to the travel narratives of a very different time and place, “travelling was not primarily a physical activity: it was an epistemological strategy, a mode of knowing.”46 For the writers of relaciones in Guatemala, knowing beyond the route was impossible; their manner of both experiencing and describing Guatemalan space was therefore entirely contained by how they traveled.
Don Alonso Crespo, for example, a high-ranking official in Escuintla and Guazacapán, envisioned the towns placed along an itinerary, listing the “first town of the province of Escuintla” and then going into detailed description for the route to the town that “followed.”
The Town of San Andrés Echanosuna follows. Following a southeasterly direction for six leagues, the first league is a sharp and rocky decline, where there are many gorges and two very long and deep ravines. After one league there follows a savanna two leagues long which they call ‘the great savanna’ and which has a few shallow ravines and in the savanna there is a small hacienda called Mirandilla and some variation in the vegetation caused by the rather warmer climate. There follow another three leagues with a few ravines and two large arroyos and a great deal of rocky outgrowth where one encounters a very large hill covered with trees produced by the warm climate, with a substantial banana grove that in the rainy season becomes impassible due to the mud and undergrowth.47
The detailed description is worth considering closely as it demonstrates not only the official’s familiarity with the changeable conditions of travel but also how completely, in the author’s mind, the quantifiable measure of distance—the legua—is linked to particularities of a route and its surrounding terrain. His repeated use of “seguir,” to follow, clearly brings the process of travel into the text and partly recreates it for readers. This is typical of how, as Paul Carter has pointed out, travel writing constitutes “space as a track.” In Carter’s conception, “the life of this space resides in succession, in the demonstration that its parts link up, looking forward and backwards along the orientation of the journey.”48 Naming the landscape around the route, the Guatemalan official described the leagues of the route as steps in a journey that would be made vivid to distant readers in Spain who were unfamiliar with the region, let alone the route.
This conception of routes is corroborated by the account of Don José Antonio de Aldama, the district governor of Verapaz, who explicitly described the region’s space in terms of route-based travel. “The province of Verapaz begins,” he writes, “as one leaves Guatemala, eighteen leagues to the north at a river called the Rio Grande, from which one follows the same direction for ten leagues until reaching the town of Salamá.” Aldama saw this as the “first” town of the region, calling it “the first in the jurisdiction, which is followed by others along the King’s highway until reaching Cajabón, the last in this province.”49 Arranged from “first” to “last” along a route, the towns created an itinerary. The path continued fourteen leagues beyond the “last” town of Cajabón, leading through to the entirely uninhabited wilderness of El Petén. Aldama further relied on this route for a calculation of the area’s total size.
In this manner . . . it measures eighty leagues longitude from its stated starting point, the river, to the stated mountain were it ends. It is not possible to make a formal estimate of the latitude since the most impenetrable wilderness serves as walls on either side. This wilderness is largely unknown, and it has only been partly explored by some Indians who with considerable effort and with the intention of sowing their crops have made inroads into the formidable undergrowth. For this reason one can only describe the latitude of the areas that are populated and therefore transitable in this province; in these terms I would say it measures in some parts fifteen leagues, in others eight, and it goes on in this way until it ends.50
Aldama’s account of Verapaz is especially telling, because while it demonstrates a clear conception of the region as a two-dimensional space (rather than a one-dimensional itinerary), Aldama nonetheless relied on the itinerary of the route to construct and measure the broader area. Using “longitud” and “latitud” to mean length and width rather than to indicate coordinates, he described the route from Salamá to Petén as the region’s principal—and only feasibly quantifiable—dimension. Aldama’s accompanying explanation is also revealing because it points to the source of knowledge for the region’s routes and its dimensions. Only “some Indians” he says, had delved into the deep undergrowth to plant crops. This uneven knowledge of the terrain was evident in many parts of the audiencia.
Aldama provides a valuable glimpse into the landscape of Verapaz as perceived by colonial officials. While the region may today be cartographically represented as a two-dimensional space dotted with place-names, the region for Aldama was essentially a long, north-east leaning route. Known places were scattered on the route and at short distances from it. Beyond the route spread a vast uncharted territory that was not entirely unknown but was unknown to him. Placing knowledge of that region squarely in the hands of “some Indians,” he revealed an invisible boundary between the areas that were knowable to people like Andama and the areas that were not. He further emphasized this invisible boundary by effectively drawing the dimensions of Verapaz along the lines of the areas that were “populated and therefore transitable.” The region Aldama drew was an inhabited swath of land on either side of a long, arching route from Salamá to Cajabón. Beyond this strip lay “asperísimo monte”—dense jungle, impenetrable wilderness—that was known only to others and was therefore, effectively, another territory.51
While Crespo and Aldama wrote their texts in ways that recalled and then re-created the process of travel, other officials actually created the relación while traveling. Don Antonio Castellanos of Soconusco, the province on Guatemala and Mexico’s Pacific coast, traveled from place to place in order to gather the necessary information for his relación. Castellanos followed his initial statement, written in Escuintla, with a declaration of his departure in which he stated that in order to complete the relación “it was necessary, for greater clarity, to begin in the town of Tonalá as it is the first in this province and to return from there going town by town.”52 Castellanos visited Tonalá on 13 May 1740 and collected the necessary information for his account, certifying it by the hand of several witnesses since no escribano was present. He continued on to Pijiapa, a town twenty leagues distant, and on the nineteenth of May he “used the horn and drum to call together all the neighbors of the town,” and with all of the residents gathered before him he collected names and occupations from the roughly thirty mulattos—“people who were very poor,” he noted. Castellanos proceeded in this manner to compose the document from stop to stop, counting on locals to witness his account. The very composition of the relación incorporated the distances traveled by its principal author.
The 1740 relaciones, then, provide repeated and vivid illustrations of how two crucial elements informed conceptions of distance, space, and place in Guatemala. The importance of central administrative places was prompted by the questionnaires and duly acknowledged by the accounts. All of the relaciones are careful to note the distances, in leagues, to the capital and to provincial capitals. But while the guiding hand of the questionnaire might largely account for the emphasis on central places, the absence of any specific questions about routes in the cédula suggests that officials necessarily brought prior conceptions of space and distance into their writings. These conceptions, informed by previous official questioning, clearly cast Guatemalan space as oriented through and within routes. The route-based conception of space elaborated by the officials in Escuintla, Verapaz, and Soconusco is evident at several levels: in the creation of the text, as it is experienced by the traveling officials (whether the travel occurs in the moment or is remembered); in the organization of the relación, as it orders the places along a textual itinerary; and, by extrapolation, in the reader’s experience of the text, as the relación recreates the process of travel. Local informants were essential to the production of these documents, but they also delimited the boundaries of official knowledge. As Aldama reveals, there were other territories and other knowledges beyond the ones he offered.
The consistency of the officials’ replies in 1740 suggests a certain universality of spatial perception—or at least a certain agreement as to how space and distance should be explained on paper. But to what extent were these two elements, routes and hierarchies of place, dominant in later relaciones? My argument here is that routes and hierarchies of place were important and sometimes dominant modes of conceiving space, but this does not mean that they wholly excluded other conceptions. On the contrary: these modes complemented other ideas, becoming foreground or background, depending on the circumstances. Other informes, razones, and relaciones composed after 1740 provide some sense of how characterizations of space and distance differed depending on the particular requests of the questionnaires and the explicit purposes of the replies.
At least one example from the early 1740s suggests that relaciones for other purposes in this period may have also relied on different methods of description. The military engineer Don Luis Diez de Navarro was commissioned in 1742 to produce a series of reports on the ports of Guatemala, and the relaciones he prepared in the years that followed depended on a range of explanatory methods.53 Describing Nicaragua, he situated the alcaldía mayor by naming the regions that bordered it to the north, south, east, and west, a method that the authors of the 1740 relaciones did not utilize. He additionally surveyed the rivers that had access to the principal ports and indicated the distances traveled along them. Diez de Navarro relied on routes to both measure and describe regions as well, apparently perceiving route information as supplemental and qualitatively different to descriptions of coterminous territories. He described arriving in the city of Cartago in Costa Rica, for example, by recounting the day of his departure and by stating that he had traveled seventy-eight leagues along a route that was “in some parts flat and in others hilly.”54 Only after describing his entry to the city did he set out Costa Rica’s jurisdictional boundaries. From that point on, Diez de Navarro wrote a report that followed the familiar formula of relaciones geográficas, unfolding his narration along a route. “Leaving the aforementioned city for the Valleys of Barbilla,” he reached an Indian town after traveling for two leagues and a high ridge called “la Cordillera” after traveling for four leagues. He observed that the ridge followed the entire coast from the Gulf of Honduras to Tierra Firme, and he estimated that it was about ten leagues wide in some places and up to thirty leagues wide in others. The valleys formed by the ridges could be reached by two routes, he noted: one was the King’s highway and the other was called “de tierra adentro” (the inland route).55 Similarly, he followed the route from Cartago to the sea for thirty leagues, noting that this was a winding route through high hills and that parts of the route were so swampy that the horses sank in the mud up to their bellies. The remainder of Diez de Navarro’s account goes into great detail as to the populations and fortifications of the southern provinces, thereby demonstrating an appropriate focus in response to his original mandate. But while he relied on several methods to describe distance and space, accounting for borders and rivers, he never abandoned his perspective on routes and road conditions.
Other documents from the late eighteenth century demonstrate less of a preoccupation with roads and hierarchies of place. A set of relaciones written around 1763, for example, includes very little discussion of routes and terrain, emphasizing instead the demographics and agricultural products of each jurisdiction. However, the brief mandate sent by the king makes the reason for this emphasis immediately evident. Having consulted with the Council of Indies, he requested for each jurisdiction a brief and succinct relación that described its governance and its “value” or commercial potential.56 Demonstrating once again the composite nature of document creation, the officials in Guatemala determined that “the safest and most advisable method of acquiring the information is to request reports from Christian people who are intelligent and impartial,” and they thereby wrote to each jurisdiction requesting detailed relaciones which they would use to write the summarizing relación. The instructions sent from Guatemala to each jurisdiction requested information on the “value and utility” of each region, inquiring “what it produced and what it is capable of producing.” More specifically, it asked after “the extension of the territory, the number of settlements, the crops it produces and their quality” along with information about the jurisdiction’s administration. Details were requested as to the treatment of the local population and the presence or absence of governmental abuses.57 The resulting relaciones contained very little geographical information, as they intended to speak directly to the inquiries from the capital. What began as a laconic request from the king for information regarding the commercial potential and administrative function of each jurisdiction was interpreted more fully by the Guatemalan officials and thereby oriented away from a geographical description. By ignoring routes and distances in their reports, officials responding to the questionnaire were demonstrating an ability to follow instructions, not a diminished appreciation for these geographical elements.
Similarly, a report written by Joseph Gregorio Rivera after the 1773 earthquake relied on a different formulation of space necessary for the fulfillment of his prescribed task. Asked to survey the communities lying outside of Guatemala City for their possible resettlement to the new capital, Rivera created what he alternately called a “mapa” or “plano”: a table listing the towns, their dimensions, and the number of houses in each community. (His description of this text-based “map” is significant, as discussed further in Chapter 3.)
Rivera described the towns in terms of “varas cuadradas” and then recalculated the dimensions in terms of “cuerdas.”58 It is worth noting that Rivera distinguished these dimensions as “areas” and not distances.59 The report prepared by Rivera formed one part of a long discussion on how and whether to transplant the communities, and one of the most important considerations proved to be the total area they occupied rather than their respective distances. In other words, when necessary to the task at hand, other measures beyond distance to central places and route descriptions were readily utilized.
FIGURE 1.3. Mapa of places resettled after the 1773 earthquake
Source: Archivo General de Centroamérica. Photograph by the author.
Rivera’s plan also addressed the need to “unir” or unite groups of communities as part of the effort to resettle them. As discussed further in Chapter 2, the process of reorganizing and resettling communities had a long history in Guatemala, and the efforts to do so after the Guatemalan earthquake were by no means unique. The reorganization of communities was consistently motivated by concerns about effective governance—both spiritual and secular. Most frequently, the solution was seen to lie in either gathering the population or dividing jurisdictions. While Rivera’s plan addressed the need to “unite” communities, another report prepared a couple of years earlier on the Alcaldía of San Salvador recommended subdividing the region. Don Francisco Antonio de Aldama y Guevara wrote of the “need to divide the Alcaldía Mayor due to the reports of its large dimensions.” Echoing the concerns of the officials quoted in the Introduction, Aldama y Guevara observed that the existing distribution of officials permitted far too many abuses. Among the forty-two Indian villages and the twelve communities of mulattoes, there were some places that he lamented were “dens of evil which no pitiable district governor from San Salvador can do anything about.”60 Relying on considerations similar to Rivera’s for the resettlement of the Guatemalan communities, Aldama y Guevera took into account the sizes of the populations and the rough dimensions (“length” or “extension”) of their territories. He recommended at the very least dividing the alcaldía into two partidos: San Salvador and San Miguel. But he believed the better solution would be to divide the alcaldía into five smaller regions in order to make it possible to better govern so “great an area.”61 In describing the area, Aldama y Guevara did not rely on route measurements, counting instead on the size of the populations and the general league-measurement of the regions’ “extensión.” However, the entire purpose of his report necessarily emphasized the placement and reach of administrative centers. Without using the word “distant,” he was nonetheless arguing that the sizeable population lay at too great a distance from the local authorities.
As these few examples written between 1740 and 1780 demonstrate, relaciones did not uniformly rely on routes and central places to describe the Guatemalan landscape. Rather, relaciones were written in response to different inquiries and with various objectives. Officials throughout the audiencia relied on other descriptive methods and other important measures to describe ports, boundaries, and jurisdictional areas. However, the specific nature of these relaciones makes it unwise to assume that routes and the hierarchical organization of place were unimportant to the authors. Rather, these examples should be taken as evidence that relaciones were flexible documents in terms of scope and perspective, and, further, that an official preoccupation with routes and distances to central places did not preclude other methods of spatial description and explanation.
Indeed, while relaciones were flexible, allowing varied descriptive tools, the recurrence of routes and hierarchies of place in other document genres demonstrates the prevalence of these conceptions. Later chapters discuss the emphasis on itineraries and hierarchies in the documents penned by ecclesiastical authorities, mail officials, and escribanos; I’ll mention here two other common document forms used throughout the audiencia that emphasized these elements. The longer relaciones were, in some sense, elaborations of the more cursory reports prepared for calculating tribute. Listing distances from place to place, tribute reports abbreviated and summarized the findings of the relaciones. Two such itineraries for Quetzaltenango make apparent how vital such information proved for both exacting tribute and for communicating a sense of the region’s space. A 1747 itinerary for Quetzaltenango (Table 1.1) lists about ten places.62
In a method similar to that employed for the relaciones, the author notes in the last paragraph that he traveled from town to town, leaving no doubt that the measured distances were created by intervals along the route. The document “produces” the region as an itinerary of sixty-nine leagues connecting ten places. A tribute document prepared almost fifty years later, in 1796, relies upon a similar formulation to describe travel, stating that it provides the distances “from one town to another, as they were visited.”63 (See Figure 1.4.) The route is incorporated into the creation of the text much in the same manner as the relaciones. Here, the document produces a region with twenty-four towns and two hundred and three leagues.64
TABLE 1.1.
1747 Itinerary of towns near Quetzaltenango
Source: Derived from AGCA documents
Similarly, a 1780 “account of distances or leagues” between Guatemala and Omoa, organizationally identical to the 1796 itinerary prepared for tribute purposes, was prepared for discussions on improving the road to the port (Figure 1.5).65
Distance was thereby produced in a variety of document forms, not just in relaciones, as segmented intervals along a route. Complementing this conception was the notion of hierarchically organized places, which might be visualized along a route—as in the itineraries above—or at specified distances from an administrative center. The questionnaires requesting geographic information and the responding relaciones reinforced and built upon this foundational conception. The repeated usage in various document forms made this conception exceedingly durable, as the documents considered above demonstrate.
Further Questions
The fact that routes and hierarchies of place continued to influence the geographical understanding of administrators in Spain as well is evident in the kinds of questions sent to the Americas in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A 1776 cuestionario sent to New Spain spent considerable space on the question of how to measure the terrain. After a brief and pessimistic request for calculations of longitude and latitude accompanied by topographical maps, the questionnaire stated that “in the absence of both, the following method will be employed: 2. The Kingdom of Mexico will be considered the principal location and center, from which point the distance for every place described by the report will be measured.” Distances were to be described according to the cardinal points and expressed as “such-and-such a distance from that capital.” Beyond the capital, a further hierarchy was delineated. “Where there are Audiencias these will be used as central points to determine the subordinate places, these being wherever there are Bishops.” Similarly, these bishop seats were to be used as centers for determining distances to the subordinate municipal governments. And beyond these, parish towns were to be considered regional centers. Recognizing that distances would be measured by travel along routes, the questionnaire instructed that “these distances should be measured according to the common league, as measured by the distance traveled while riding over the course of an hour, this being the easiest method.”66 Thus, abandoning the possibility of a consistent spatial measure, the instructions relied on a temporal measure based on travel. However, to compensate for the irregularities of travel and to produce a measurement “in a straight line, or as the crow flies,” the questionnaire instructed the following:
10. On flat terrain that is not interrupted by ravines or noticeable crests, the travel time is reduced by one-fourth, and the remaining three-fourths are calculated as leagues, and this is to account for the twists and turns that the road always takes.
11. On terrain that has ravines or hills that cause the road to rise and fall, the travel time is reduced by one-third. 12. On terrain that follows a circuitous route, such as those routes taken to find a crossing point across or a river or avoid passage through a mountain, it is advisable to reduce the travel time by half; and if the road is very circuitous, by three-fifths, and even on occasion by two-thirds, decisions which are judged subjectively and aided by the observations made at the time of travel.67
The instructions required the traveler to make highly subjective judgments based on the terrain and the amount of time spent traveling. At best, such a method would have resulted in a rough estimate. Putting aside the questionable accuracy of calculating distance in such a fashion, it becomes evident that the questionnaire strove for objective measures but relied necessarily on subjective ones. The process of travel, and the calculations that resulted from travel along specified routes, remained the unavoidable basis upon which to both measure and understand distance. Prompted by the replies they had received over the course of the colonial period, officials had come around to the idea of travel as the most realistic “mode of knowing.”
FIGURE 1.4. 1796 Itinerary of places near Quetzaltenango
Source: Archivo General de Centroamérica. Photograph by the author.
FIGURE 1.5. 1780 Itinerary of destinations between Guatemala and Omoa
Source: Archivo General de Centroamérica. Photograph by the author.
Though it seems likely that this questionnaire did not reach Guatemala, as it did not elicit immediate replies, its formulation provides undeniable confirmation that a hierarchy of places and intervals of distances along routes remained crucial to the administrators who continually requested information from the Americas, even as they compromised on the manner of measurement. In fact, as late as 1812, instructions requesting “reports and descriptions” of the jurisdictions of Spanish America emphasized these elements. The Cortes de Cádiz inquired exhaustively into the topography and political geography of the region in three sub-points. They first asked for a plan or map (“plano o carta”) of the indicated province.68 The second sub-point emphasized surface area, terrain, and political boundaries, looking ahead to the nineteenth century’s dominant modes of spatial representation. It demanded the lines of latitude and longitude for each region and placed a particular emphasis on the borders, requesting that any boundaries with “foreign powers” be marked with particular precision. If there were territories to be reclaimed or if there were parcels of land whose purchase might improve the jurisdiction’s security, these facts were to be noted. Any barbarian Indian tribes had also to be clearly indicated. And the instructions requested a calculation of area—in leagues squared—as well as an exact description of the topography.69 Reflecting the heightened awareness of hostile territories occasioned by the wars in Europe, the instructions placed a new emphasis on borders, and above all boundaries with foreign powers—be they European or Indian. In this emphasis, it is possible to see the faint outlines of national boundaries that would come to dominate the maps and geographical descriptions of the nineteenth century.
But the shifting perception of the political and social landscape did not entirely exclude preexisting conceptions. The third sub-point of the instructions returned to the traditional method of describing space and distance, providing a table for the calculation of distances to central places. The seven columns of the table asked first for a list of the “names of the political jurisdictions, their municipal centers, towns, estates, farms, and settlements.” The remainder focused on distances and directions to and among these places (Table 1.2).70
TABLE 1.2.
Portion of the 1812 questionnaire
Source: Derived by the author from documents at the Archivo General de Indias
While the Cortes de Cádiz had begun to envision the Americas in a different manner, placing a heightened emphasis on borders and hostile territories, they had not yet discarded the traditional understanding of space and place that linked hierarchically organized population centers along routes. To make the Americas visible to readers in Spain, routes and hierarchies of place were still necessary. Officials over the course of the colonial period had incorporated these conceptions into their replies, but they had also shaped Spain’s conception of what was possible. Travel as a mode of knowing dominated. And local informants, often Indians, both supplied that knowledge and, as the keepers of the “wilderness” beyond the track, constrained it.