2
The true solution would be to congregate the towns in more well-appointed locations; in this manner the four annexed towns could become one and they would be placed on favorable land and not at such great distances, among hidden nooks and high peaks, where they gain only freedom from good conscience and freedom to disobey the law.
—Archbishop Pedro Cortés y Larraz, describing the parish of Opico
Archbishop Pedro Cortés y Larraz distinguished himself from other writers of geographical descriptions of Guatemala in many ways: among these, by his willingness to propose a solution to distance. But the archbishop also went further than other officials in identifying and articulating distance as a problem. Not content to merely observe the great obstacles posed by poor roads and impenetrable jungle, the archbishop argued that such obstacles created sizeable dangers in the form of “freedom.” Though Cortés y Larraz may have written of these dangers more explicitly than other authors, the assumptions about distance underlying his arguments are not unique to him. At the Spanish peripheries, distance from ecclesiastical and secular authorities was a problem that imperiled the spiritual and moral health of the empire.
Focusing on the visita written by Archbishop Pedro Cortés y Larraz in the late 1760s, this chapter examines how the conception of routes and key administrative centers, established in Chapter 1 as fundamental to many cuestionarios and relaciones, likewise influenced the archbishop’s understanding of distance and space. Archbishop Cortés y Larraz, who visited more than one hundred parishes in Guatemala and wrote a multi-volume illustrated visita, placed a great deal of descriptive emphasis on the route that he traveled. He thought carefully about how to measure the route, and his text places importance on rendering the length and conditions of each route for his prospective readers. Similarly, Cortés y Larraz emphasized central places, and distances to them, in his study of each parish. Placing the parish seat conceptually at the center, other towns, haciendas, and settlements were understood in terms of their distance from it.
This chapter also continues the consideration of “distant” as a pejorative term, in certain usage, for contemporaries in colonial Guatemala. Cortés y Larraz voiced a strong opinion throughout his text about the dangers of distance. The visita produced distance as a condition to be overcome and a problem to be solved. His text can be read as a strenuous argument for extending the reach of individual parishes and bringing the Guatemalan population closer to ecclesiastical centers. He despaired of succeeding in this, and when he returned to Guatemala City, he attempted to resign his post. On August 31, 1769, he wrote to King Charles III, saying that “with no other motive than to serve the glory of God and to serve you, I return to your hand this diocese with which you have honored me.” But the king replied on July 5, 1770 with a refusal, and Cortés y Larraz was forced to remain.1 Though the arhbishop’s concerns were widely shared, they were not universal. Certainly people in the parishes he visited viewed their “dangerous” freedoms differently. Two contrasting perspectives complicate Cortés y Larraz’s conception of dangerous distance. The paintings that accompany the text, which were painted by an unknown artist, provide subtle challenges to the argument of the archbishop’s text. And the account of a non-ecclesiastical traveler, an eighteenth-century writer and statesman who traveled the same routes and enjoyed many similar privileges, offers a very different view of Guatemalan distance.
Producing Dangerous Distance
Born in Zaragoza in 1712, Pedro Cortés y Larraz remained in Spain into adulthood, studying at the Universidad de Zaragoza and obtaining his doctorate in theology in 1741. He was appointed archbishop of Guatemala by Charles III in 1766 and arrived in Veracruz soon afterwards, in July of 1767. The archbishop embarked on the three-stage visita of his diocese the following year, traveling extensively and with only brief rests in Guatemala City: first from 3 November 1768 to 1 July 1769; then from 22 November 1769 to 9 February 1770; and lastly from 6 July 1770 to 29 August 1770.2 The reports that he prepared during and after these journeys were sent to King Charles III in 1771.
Though the document he created belongs to the tradition of parish visitas conducted in Guatemala and elsewhere, the descripción geográfico-moral—geographical and moral description—is in many important ways a relación geográfica as well.3 Cortés y Larraz was necessarily concerned with the state of his parishes, the work of his curas (parish priests), the practices of each congregation, and the consequent moral health of the Guatemalan population. But he was equally concerned with the demography of the region, the terrain across which the parishes were scattered, and the means of travel from one place to another. In fact, he found that the two concerns were inextricably bound together. From its inception, the document was conceived as a broad and comprehensive investigation into the social and geographical features of the region. Sending each parish in Guatemala a brief, ten-point questionnaire in the manner of the cuestionarios sent from Spain, Cortés y Larraz gathered preliminary information and ensured that every parish would be prepared for his arrival. Just as questioners in Spain had found replies from Guatemala varied in scope and quality, so the archbishop found the reports supplied to him sometimes thorough, sometimes remarkable, and sometimes entirely inadequate.
The contributions from local parishes reinforce two of the visita’s most striking characteristics: the visita is a composite document, informed by people all over the archdiocese; and the document is route-based, or produced around a route in the manner of the eighteenth-century relaciones. The document thereby incorporates both the radial and itinerary models of knowledge production proposed in Chapter 1. Like other European men who explored the New World, Cortés y Larraz depended heavily—both for his journey and for his text—on the assistance of people around him. The composite nature of the visita is evident in how the reports sent from parishes form an important appendix to the main text. Cortés y Larraz referred to the reports within his own writing, creating an internal dialogue that openly complimented or contested the portions written by individual clergy. In this sense, Cortés y Larraz was perhaps more explicit than other eighteenth-century authors—travelers, explorers, scientists—about the assistance he received. Neil Safier writes that Frenchman Charles-Marie de la Condamine, in his exploration of South America in the eighteenth century, relied on “Creoles, Jesuits, Amerindian informants, and enslaved peoples of African descent. But in order to impress his superiors at the Academy of Sciences, he suppressed the sources of much of this information and hid much of the assistance he received.” This allowed La Condamine to “fuse exceptionally diverse materials together and provide the illusion that they were collected and compiled using unified and recognizable standards.”4 Cortés y Larraz’s visita, like La Condamine’s text, is composite in less visible ways as well: the substantive material presented in both the reports and the main text was gathered knowledge which required the participation of parishioners in every town. To provide data on a town’s population and descriptions of its customs, parish priests relied not only on their own knowledge but on the information provided by their congregations. Similarly, Cortés y Larraz drew his information about the unfamiliar territory from his guides and assistants. One of these invaluable assistants was the unknown artist who accompanied him and created the landscape-maps that complemented the text. The images painted in an unknown hand for each parish, which were no doubt crucial to making the places accessible to Charles III, are at once one of the visita’s most expressive and most impenetrable elements.5
The reports contributed by the individual parishes also bring to light the underlying organization of the visita as a text. From its inception, the visita (meaning both the journey and the document) was conceived and executed around a route. The archbishop’s instructions to his parishes reflect the projected itinerary structure for his travels and the creation of the reports. As Julio Martín Blasco and Jesús María García Añoveros note in their introduction to their published version of the visita, the archbishop “introduced the novelty of sending ahead to each parish a letter with precise instructions regarding his visit as well as a ten-point questionnaire concerning the parish.” The archbishop ordered, “make a copy of this letter and the instructions, sending on the original to the closest parish, so that in this manner it will pass from one to another sequentially, and so that I may collect it at my last parish visit, for which purpose you will see in the margin the administrative centers of the parishes in order.” As the editors point out in reference to these instructions, Cortés y Larraz “expected to receive accounts of the parishes in the order in which he was to visit them.”6 The archbishop’s use of the word “order” both identifies explicitly a chronological “order” dictating travel (for him and the documents) and implies indirectly a hierarchical order. In the archbishop’s mind, travel and text would coincide to create a document that would unfold along the routes of the archdiocese.
This organizing structure, so clearly essential to Cortés y Larraz’s initial conception of the visita, was closely followed in the subsequent production of the text. Throughout the archbishop’s three journeys, the route became not only a foundation for the archbishop’s mode of knowing but also an essential narrative device. As rendered by Martín Blasco and García Añoveros, the archbishop’s itineraries crisscross central Guatemala and the Pacific coast.7 He traveled north into Chiapas, visiting the parishes around Jacaltenango, northwest into Verapaz, and south as far as Conchagua. Without reaching the coast of the Pacific or the westerly reaches of the Petén, he nonetheless crisscrossed the more densely populated corridor running north to south along the curve of the isthmus.
Cortés y Larraz introduced each of the towns he visited by noting its distance in leagues from either the cabecera or the town “prior” to it on the route. In each he also described the conditions of the route and the circumstances of his travel along it. The archbishop learned from experience what the authors of the 1776 questionnaire suspected: leagues were a slippery measure in Guatemala and they varied from one journey to the next. He warned in his opening prologue that “in calculating the distances from one town to another, or from the mountains to the sea, there can be several and even many errors made; because in this Kingdom the leagues are not measured, nor does anyone know how many leagues it contains.” Cortés y Larraz found that for all his careful questioning, these measures were elusive, “because even though I asked, it always happened that one person would say there were four leagues while another would stretch them to six or eight.” There were as many measured distances as there were travelers: “each person counted the leagues according the speed at which he traveled; on every occasion I made certain to use my watch, knowing well the deceptive effect of traveling on good roads or bad, traveling quickly or slowly.”8
The archbishop consequently made careful note of route conditions and timed his journey to measure the routes.9 The resulting descriptions are vivid snapshots of travel. Leaving Guatemala City, accompanied by servants and guides, Cortés y Larraz made the following representative observations:
From the city of Guatemala to the town of Petapa there are six leagues, traveling from west to east. The road is mostly good but it has its bad aspects as well; when one emerges from Guatemala the road follows a violent climb on a very bad road for about a league; after traveling two leagues one comes across some ranches called Las Ventillas, which belong to the parish of Santiago Sacatepequez. After traveling three leagues one comes across an hacienda called the Embaulada. At the four-league mark the Bárcena hacienda lies to the right and the García hacienda lies to the left; both are situated near the road and belong to this parish. At the five-league mark one passes through a town called Villa, an annex to the main parish, and at the six-league mark one reaches Petapa. From the hacienda called the Embaulada, the whole route is downhill, without any notably steep parts.10
Checking his timepiece as he traveled along the route, Cortés y Larraz surveyed the landscape around him and gathered information from his traveling companions. In his resulting description of Petapa, and many other parishes, he also included a “tabla” or table of distances for the town and its dependent haciendas, an itinerary that echoes the tribute tables pictured in Chapter 1. (See Table 2.1.)
Cortés y Larraz thereby laid out clearly for Charles III two views of Petapa: a timed and measured entry along an unfolding route, with named landmarks and travel conditions; and a hierarchical schema of the parish center, Petapa, and its dependent settlements and farms. With these two perspectives fully revealed, the archbishop proceeded to add detail to his portrait of Petapa, listing population data, describing the landscape, and recounting the recent history of the town. In Petapa the town counted primarily on “maize and beans,” as well as plantains which were taken daily to market in Guatemala. The majority of the population spoke Pokomam. Cortés y Larraz mentioned the cura, one “middle-aged” Don Antonio Laparte, and his income before reporting briefly on the content of the cura’s report and then drifting into one of his typically lengthy “reflections.”11 Cortés y Larraz is best known to historians for his detailed descriptions of Guatemalan parishes’ social and cultural characteristics, but to the archbishop, placing these parishes—measuring, describing, and rendering them visually—was just as important. In fact, locating the places he visited along a route and in relation to the cabeceras, the parish centers, appears to have been a prerequisite for understanding their other qualities.
TABLE 2.1.
Distances by Cortés y Larraz
Source: Derived by the author from documents at the Archivo General de Indias
As Cortés y Larraz continued his travels, he had occasion to observe more closely the “good and bad aspects” of the routes. Some of the unfavorable conditions the text describes are readily recognizable to modern readers. “A terrible, violent climb” leading to Los Esclavos was understandably challenging, and fording dangerous rivers would prove difficult today for even expert travelers.12 Cortés y Larraz repeatedly stated his preference for flat or moderate terrain, open pasture, and (to a lesser extent) straight roads. Dense forest and steep, winding paths created the quintessential “bad road.” To a great extent, his assessment of roads corresponded to contemporary European aesthetics and notions of transportation improvement. Bourbon policy emphasized the improvement of roads and transportation across New Spain and Guatemala with mixed results.13 “Good” roads both pleased the eye and served the crown by being broad, smooth, and easily traveled on horseback or coach.14 But considered more fully, the archbishop’s assessments of “bad roads” and “good roads” reveal themselves to be deceptively transparent. His judgments went beyond considerations of efficiency and ease. The “descripción geográfica-moral” of his title takes on new meaning as the text argues that, in fact, the landscape could be morally “good” or “bad”: conducive to moral behavior or not.15
In a manner likely surprising to most modern travelers, Cortés y Larraz on occasion signaled a vehement dislike for foliage and trees—particularly those growing densely and close to the road. As he traveled toward the parish of Guanagazapam, the archbishop noted that “everything is forested by trees and bushes, which even in the level parts of the road are extremely troublesome, as the mules get entangled or collide with the branches; the ground is a web of tree roots and one continually tears at the branches above with one’s head.”16 In this case the trees were an obstruction to travel; but Cortés y Larraz also objected to forested areas that obstructed his view. “From the moment one arrives in Parrasquín,” he wrote of the area near Quetzaltenango, “everything is boxed in by immense mountains, with no meadows or pastures and entirely enclosed by trees.”17 When the trees did not obstruct the road or his view, they struck him as more picturesque. The archbishop noted the attractive qualities of trees along the route to the parish of Guaymoco, commenting that “the road is a good one with many mountains and hills on every side and with abundant trees and foliage.”18 Confirming this view, he observed of the very different route to San Vicente that “all the land is very barren, like that near Titiguapa, and without any trees.”19 Evidently, the archbishop made a subtle distinction between types of trees—or, rather, types of tree growths. With a preference for “llanos” (meadows) and “valles” (valleys) that were both more attractive and easier to navigate, Cortés y Larraz objected to dense tree growth that was “frondoso” (leafy)—growth he frequently described as “monte,” meaning wilderness—when it obstructed the road or the view.20 However, individual trees in sparser formation indicated a healthy soil and could assist the appearance of the landscape. Vegetation had its proper place: far from the road.
Cortés y Larraz commented on the relative flatness or steepness of the route with far less ambivalence. The ideal route was flat and straight, as was the road to San Sebastián del Texar. “The road is quite good and very agreeable,” Cortés y Larraz wrote, “it is flat along an avenue of trees and there are many fields for the growing of maize and beans; the road can be traveled by coach.”21 There were precious few roads that could be traveled by coach; but even narrower paths through plains or between hills met with the archbishop’s favor. Seen from a distance and on either side of the route, hills complemented the route. However, once the route wandered into the hills the archbishop complained bitterly of the steep and “violent” climb. Among the pueblos and haciendas of San Pedro Matzahuat, he wrote, “there are terrible roads, because the whole area around the parish is a labyrinth of hills and ravines that are high and deep; in the towns of San Juan and San Miguel they are called tepezontes, which in their language means twenty score hills.”22 No route was worse, however, than the route to San Pedro Zulumá, which the archbishop traveled as he left Huehuetenango. The “incredibly bad road” stretched for nineteen leagues, and he wrote that “even though the first two [leagues] appear to be flat, they have their bad parts; the two that follow have violent ascents and descents along very poor, rocky paths.” Deeply affected by the route, he stated, “this road is so sad that it seems to make the sadness palpable. After leaving the ranches behind, the six remaining leagues are the worst kind of road imaginable. It is impossible to even explain what it is like: the route winds its way through rocky crags, and everything is rocky—steep cliffs and peaks and chasms of stone.” He saw the palpable dangers of the landscape in the “caves underground” where “many people and horses have fallen into the abyss.” He concluded, “it causes one horror to even contemplate having to penetrate such a great gathering of mountains.”23
The archbishop’s complaints—and horror, in this case—were less the protestations of a weary traveler and more the concerns of a spiritual leader.24 In the poor roads he traveled, Cortés y Larraz saw obstacles to the effective congregation of the parishes and obstructions to the diligent ministrations of the curas. In the landscape perceived by the archbishop, poor roads were, quite literally, spiritual hindrances. That this view was not shared by all of his travel companions is evident in the discussion he had with the Indians of Guaymoco. Both his estimation of the roads’ navigability and his conception of their spiritual necessity were hardly universal.
I stated above that the main town is located in a meadow, but the area around the parish is full of steep mountains and ravines, for which reason all the paths leading to the town’s adjoining settlements are extremely rugged. They are full of such precipices and dangerous turns, that even the Indians consider them as such, and it seemed only appropriate to put the question to them directly. It happened to me on one occasion as we commenced a particularly violent climb, that I said to them: Why didn’t they repair the roads that were in such a poor state? They answered me: That roads that are good enough for the deer are not poor roads; and that there are other roads in the region that are considered so bad that they do not always dare to walk along them, and if they have to travel along them by night some do it with the aid of a light and on hands and knees. For three years now the cura here has had the problem of sending his deacon to administer the sacraments to some sick person only to have him turn back on the road, not daring to go any farther.25
As Cortés y Larraz learned throughout his travels, there could be even less agreement between Indians and non-Indians as to the difficulty of roads. In some cases, such radically different views actually resulted in the existence of two different routes. The route from Jocotán to Chiquimula, for example, wound two leagues south, then two leagues west, and then two leagues north again. But, the archbishop noted, “the Indians can walk this road straight through, without the detour, climbing over the mountain that divides the two parishes; and they do it in two or three hours, walking east to west; I think perhaps not even deer could walk along that route that the Indians use.”26 Cortés y Larraz signals the wildness of the routes by claiming they are unsuitable even for animals; yet the Indians traveled these roads that were impassable and off-limits to him.
What emerge from such passages are different landscapes—not all of them visible to a single viewer. To some, certain routes were closed. Whether because Cortés y Larraz and his guides considered them impassable or because knowledge of them was not made available to him, many routes remained “off the map,” much like the territories described by Aldama in Verapaz. Alongside the network of principal routes traveled by the archbishop, other routes remained unseen. And Cortés y Larraz viewed the routes he did travel in a qualitatively different manner. Roads that were difficult, “sad,” “violent,” not to mention “bad” in his perception were not so to locals. Traveling with greater knowledge, familiarity, and possibly physical strength, other people in Guatemala experienced the roads differently. Finally, not everyone could see what the archbishop perceived in the difficult routes of the archdiocese: a labyrinth of spiritual obstacles, the undergrowth and precipices impeding the vital movement of curas and parishioners and thereby imperiling their salvation.
What began as a repeated observation in the early stages of the archbishop’s three-stage journey became a clamorous cry by its conclusion: the people of Guatemala were separated by impossible distances. In the parish of Atheos, which Cortés y Larraz visited fairly early in his travels, he made his argument as clearly as possible, claiming that “it is simply not possible but rather morally impossible for all the parishioners to attend mass on the days of celebration.” One problem was, of course, that “the Indian officials disdain the mass and the Christian doctrine as much as the rest do.” However, even had the Indian officials been more cooperative in bringing people together, the cura faced an additional obstacle:
What is more, this measure would perhaps be successful in the towns where mass is celebrated, but by no means would it be of use in the other towns that lie at such a distance and along such rugged roads, because even if the officials put the greatest care and effort into gathering people (which they certainly do not) it would be necessary for the officials to spend their whole lives on the roads. After going to mass and returning home, they would scarcely have arrived before they would have to leave again to attend another mass. Once one considers the distances between the towns, what I am stating here is made quite evident.27
Nor was it a solution for the cura to travel continually to his parishioners. Requiring guides and mules “because he must carry with him his bedroll, his water, his chair, a table, and in sum everything he might have need of because these things are not available in the villages,” the cura would have to be shuttled back and forth. A distance of eight leagues, Cortés y Larraz argued, would be quadrupled: “the Indians who travel to one town to find the cura to celebrate mass must leave town A and go to town B, which lies for a example eight leagues away; they then return with the cura from town B to town A, which totals sixteen leagues.” Then, they would have to repeat the journey “to return the cura to his home, and then head back to their own, which totals thirty two leagues.” A journey of eight leagues would become an unmanageable thirty-two. The archbishop concluded that, either way, such travel was too much to expect: “how can they be expected to suffer distances of 13, 16, 22 and 20 leagues, which are the distances between the main town and the smaller towns in this parish?”28
The archbishop recognized that this formidable obstacle, distance, was worsened by the population’s willingness and even eagerness to live out of reach. In the town of Guaymoco, near Atheos, people intentionally chose to live in remote places, even taking advantage of areas where routes did not connect. Remarking the great distances he had traveled in this region to get from one place to another, he acknowledged that his complaints might seem overstated: “with what I have said my narrative might grow irritating and might even appear to exaggerate the ruggedness of this mountain and the difficulty of the routes leading to the smaller towns.” But he was not belaboring the point, he insisted: “it seems necessary to repeat for the sake of clarity that between one town and another there are no routes nor can any be built.” There could be no doubt in his mind that people intentionally exploited this fact, for the places where they chose to live were “barren cliffs without any particular crops . . . which makes it clear that what they seek in such places is purely freedom from the officials and the cura, to wallow in ignorance and every manner of vice.”29 Such intentional isolation proved manifestly hazardous to the moral health of the population. As Robert Patch points out in reference to parallel circumstances in Yucatán, “libertad,” or freedom in this context, was incontestably bad—and dangerous.30 The cura of Guaymoco reported many “scandals” in this remote area, including “sensuality, drunkenness, theft, adultery, rape, incest, and couples living out of wedlock.”31 Clearly there were consequences to living in total freedom beyond the reach of the cura.
As Cortés y Larraz continued his visita, he returned again and again to the great obstacle posed by distance. And as he repeated this conclusion in one town after another, his recommendations for how to overcome distance grew more strident. Cortés y Larraz had determined at the start of his journey, after his measured analysis concerning the town of Atheos, that there was no possible solution other than “the division of the parish so that the cura has neither more territory nor more parishioners than those that he can teach and govern himself.”32 His reflections on the parish of Suchitoto were even more explicit. “This parish cannot by any means be well governed,” he concluded, “because it is evident that there are more than 136 families or 2794 people in the three towns, and there are an additional 185 families or 1355 people living beyond the towns.” He noted that those thirteen hundred people living in remote areas “lie at a significant distance in a tangle of highland wilderness, hills, and forests that make it impossible for the curas to minister to them and makes it equally impossible for them to travel to the parish.”33 In his sharp observations of how and why people lived so remotely, Cortés y Larraz invoked the need for “reducción,” the centuries-old policy of “reducing” the native population into congregated towns.
What they call haciendas, fields, and pasture should be considered nothing more than mere pretext to shake free every manner of spiritual and secular law, because these places are not in the least productive agriculturally. Consequently the only remedy is to reduce the people into a single settlement. Even the towns of Tenancingo and Jucuapa should be relocated, because they lie among rugged mountains, they produce no crops and their land serves for nothing else because travel through them leads nowhere. All of this arises from a single problem, and that is the stubborn tendency of Indians to live hidden away in isolation and the tendency of Ladinos (who comprise about half of the parish) to form settlements wherever they wish to, in order to avoid observing the law and to live in complete freedom.34
The parishioners not only avoided the parish priest, they also avoided the local corregidor or alcalde, in the archbishop’s view. He believed that seeking agriculturally productive land was the only valid reason for living remotely. No other justifiable motive was conceivable to him. His assessment that the mountains near Tenancingo and Jucuapa “serve for nothing” rested on the conclusion that they led “nowhere.” Naturally, in the archbishop’s estimation, a remote settlement was not itself a worthwhile destination. His characterization of Indian and Ladino motives is illuminating as well. While Indians sought to live hidden and in isolation, Ladinos sought to live wherever they pleased, far from the reach of authorities and in absolute freedom. Both strategies resulted in an equally damaging distance, but the archbishop shaded their intentions differently.
Cortés y Larraz recommended for the population at large a policy that had historically targeted the native population of Mesoamerica, beginning in the sixteenth century. The Laws of Burgos (1512) and the Leyes Nuevas (1542) both emphasized resettlement of the population through “congregación” or “reducción.” The Recopilación de leyes de las Indias (1680) made explicit the spiritual necessity of congregación, resolving that “the Indians should be reduced to villages and not be allowed to live divided and separated in the mountains and wildernesses, where they are deprived of all spiritual and temporal comforts, [and] the aid of our ministers.”35 In Guatemala, the process of congregación was initiated in the 1540s. Relocated both willingly and forcibly, Indian families gathered at new town sites where church, plaza, and other elements of Spanish architectural order were gradually assembled. “Designed with the goals of Christianization and economic exploitation foremost in mind,” George Lovell writes of the process in Guatemala, “the order inherent in congregación stood in sharp contrast, in Spanish eyes, to the morphological anarchy of the dispersed pattern of settlement characteristic of pre-conquest times.”36 However effective reducción may have been initially in Guatemala, its results were not uniform or permanent. In many places, settlement patterns either resumed their pre-conquest form or took on new, equally “scattered” formations. Lovell writes of the Cuchumatanes region that “recurrent fugitivism, triggered and sustained by a complex interplay of cultural preference and existential circumstance . . . constantly eroded Spanish notions of orderly, town-focused living.”37 Similarly, in Yucatán, “the Maya ever so gradually reversed the reducción policy imposed by their colonial masters.” Robert Patch observes that “the Maya of colonial Yucatan seem to have moved all over the place, in order to use their resources more conveniently, to seek opportunity elsewhere, or to escape from the colonial regime altogether.”38 Whatever the motivation, it seems clear that many sites of congregación failed to preserve the nucleated order envisioned by the Spanish.
That Archbishop Cortés y Larraz echoed the call for reducción more than two hundred years after the initial congregaciones in Guatemala speaks both to the durability of the concept among Spanish reformers and to the ineffectiveness of its implementation. Had the original congregaciones succeeded in concentrating the population, the archbishop would not have found so much of the Guatemalan population living “among hidden nooks and high peaks.” And while Cortés y Larraz updated the idea by applying it to both Indian and Ladino, in its essentials the concept remained unchanged. The archbishop identified scattered settlement as the single greatest obstacle to spiritual access; his solution was to physically relocate the population in order to facilitate the work of his curas. As his three-stage journey progressed, Cortés y Larraz heightened his language, calling for reducción in terms that recalled sixteenth-century practices. After visiting Chalchuapa, he offered the following stark prognosis: “based on the conditions of this parish and of nearly all of the parishes, it is evident that they cannot be competently instructed or governed, and that the true remedy can only be to burn pastures, ranches, and huts, reducing everything into the towns.”39 His recommendations for Metapa, which he visited shortly afterward, were similarly uncompromising:
The flat lands of this parish, which I have described as measuring roughly one league, would fit all of the parishioners in this parish, which measures fourteen leagues in longitude and nine in latitude. Reduced to the stated one league of flat land, it would be well served and governed; but spread out as it is, the parish necessarily will remain utterly abandoned, a condition made worse by its terrible roads. As a result, the only remedy is to burn pastures and farmland and for the people to live in the town.40
In his proposed remedy to burn and congregate, Cortés y Larraz appears aggrieved by what he perceived as literally too much space. If only, he lamented, burning could reduce a space of fourteen by nine leagues to one. The violent solution he proposed was one he emphasized more firmly later in his journey. Though in Atheos he recommended a more judicious re-parceling of communities and the deployment of additional curas, in Metapa he could see no alternative other than a drastic reduction of space through fire.
Archbishop Cortés y Larraz came away from his journey profoundly unsettled by the damaging effects of distance throughout the archdiocese. The dangers were several and occurred at many levels. Families—at times entire communities—frequently lived beyond reach of a parish’s cura. Whether they lived in isolation intentionally or not, their spiritual health was greatly imperiled by the lack of access to the cura and the sacred space at the parish’s center. But he also observed, on other occasions, that the curas themselves lapsed in their practices when they lived far from the influence of the archbishopric. After concluding that the parish of Ozicala could not be governed by a single cura and would have to be reduced, he considered the issues. “The impossibility of finding a solution may contribute to the carelessness of the curas and priests, to the point where they seem indistinguishable from the secular clergy, but the distance from the capital is also in this case a contributing factor.” Added to this, their involvement in “dye manufacturing” jeopardized their work, such that “several priests have entirely forgotten their true nature.”41 Distance from the capital was one factor among many that degraded the integrity of the curas. Finally, the archbishop observed a parallel phenomenon among secular officials. Toward the end of his journey, in Santiago Sacatepéquez, he hypothesized explicitly that greater distance from the capital led to greater dereliction of duty. “I comment once again here on the utter carelessness of the district governors,” he wrote, echoing the concerns of secular officials. Santiago lay only three leagues from the Guatemalan capital, and this led him to wonder: if at such a short distance from the capital, in the very presence of the President and the judges, they demonstrate such carelessness, what must occur in the more distant towns?42 In fact, he had seen what occurred in the more distant towns; it worried and aggrieved him. At the conclusion of his visita the archbishop appears to have believed some of the difficulties posed by distance were simply insurmountable.
Producing Proximity
The paintings that accompanied Cortés y Larraz’s text were intended to make the Guatemalan parishes visible for the Spanish monarch. They were, more specifically, intended to render visually the descriptions provided in the visita, particularly the hierarchical schema that Cortés y Larraz presented in tables. The towns and haciendas, numbered in tables in the text, were also numbered in the paintings. As such, the paintings were meant to reproduce and explain the spatial configuration described in the text. However, the paintings by the anonymous artist in many cases went beyond reproducing and explaining, at times subtly challenging Cortés y Larraz’s descriptions. They emerge from a different mode of knowing, clearly, than the archbishop’s. Though in some aspects they remain faithful to the literal descriptions of the text, they frequently deviate from the intended effect of the text, exposing a tension that pulls at the seams of the visita’s argument about distance.
The more than one hundred paintings are evidently created by the same hand, but their manner of composition varies. The paintings are neither purely cartographic representations nor purely landscape paintings. Their varied use of perspective is one attribute that places them between the two genres. Few paintings rely fully on a “profile view” or “prospect,” using terms discussed by Richard Kagan in his study of urban images. Such a view would show the landscape “as seen from the vantage point of a viewer standing directly on the ground.” Rather, the artist relied most heavily on views taken at different angles from above. The painting of the parish of Apaneca (Figure 2.1), for example, relies on an “oblique view,” which surveys the landscape from a higher vantage point.43
Other paintings, such as the one for the parish of Garcia (Figure 2.2), combine perspectives from various angles: an oblique view merging with a cartographic view.44 The coastline near Garcia and the rivers leading to the sea are depicted as they would appear viewed from high above, but the towns are seen in high profile.
FIGURE 2.1. The Parish of Apaneca
Source: Archivo General de Indias
FIGURE 2.2. The Parish of Garcia
Source: Archivo General de Indias
In other aspects beyond the use of perspective the paintings combine elements of cartography and elements of landscape painting, creating mixed images that I consider “landscape-maps.” Richard Kagan describes such images as “map-views,” but in this case it seems appropriate to use a term that emphasizes the cartographic aspect less.45 It is impossible to know for certain whether the artist traveling with Cortés y Larraz relied on surveying or measurements, but the cartographic element was clearly valued. Some of the paintings contain elements that lean more toward cartography in images that otherwise stylistically resemble landscape paintings. The use of numbers to identify towns and haciendas is the most visible cartographic element. A discreetly placed and unmarked scale at the corner of each painting and the compass marking north are two others. Towns are frequently symbolized by a single building rather than reproduced in their architectural detail. Finally, some of the paintings use dotted lines, rather than more realistic ribbons of road, to mark routes.
The paintings reveal fundamental tensions between the archbishop’s narrative and the unknown artist’s perspective. Cortés y Larraz placed greatest descriptive emphasis on the route between parishes. Though concerned with how parishes were connected internally, when he spoke of the landscape he devoted most space and effort to how parishes were reached from without. The paintings, in contrast, focus deliberately on the parish, often placing it at the center of the image and leaving the connecting route to the edges. In fact, routes sometimes do not make it into the landscape-maps at all. The parish of Apaneca (Figure 2.1) is depicted as a remote series of towns arranged on a steep descent. Dense forest at the bottom of the painting suggests that the mountain is inaccessible, and no route appears in the painting. Cortés y Larraz, in contrast, describes the route in detail:
The first league follows a good and very flat road, which crosses the above-mentioned valley; then it climbs a mountain and there is a league and half’s ascent that is violent in the extreme, but that is not considered a poor road because there are no rocks or cliffs; it is true that on either side there are ravines, but these are agreeable—fertile and in full flower—as is the entire mountain, planted with maize, beans, and sugar cane. Then one reaches the mountain peak, and the path begins an extremely steep decline of about two leagues. Along this part of the route it is neither fertile nor agreeable; one does not see crops, although there are dense outgrowths of trees and bushes. One then arrives at a small clearing surrounded by hills where the town of Apaneca is located.46
The artist has represented, in the faint rectangles on the mountain’s side, the crops described by the archbishop, and the towns appear in the suitably forested eastern slope. However, the route traveled, though invisible in the painting, clearly runs from left to right across the mountain’s peak. As a result, the painting and the text provide the reader with two different points of access. Grounded in the route, Cortés y Larraz described the rise and fall of the road and the changing view. The artist depicted Apaneca from a perspective entirely off the route, allowing the reader to see the parish from a distant, aerial view. In this case and in others, it appears that the artist placed a far greater emphasis on rendering the parish landscape, while distance and routes were of secondary importance.
Further, the artist often represents “good” roads and “bad” roads as essentially the same. Access to Mexicanos, of which Cortés y Larraz said “the road is a good one,” is presented to the viewer in the landscape-map as accessible by a subtle depression between low hills (Figure 2.3). Access to Texistepeque appears much the same (Figure 2.4).
Just to the right of center, a clear point of entry seems to lead directly into the open valley where the parish center lies. And yet Cortés y Larraz complained of the route to Texistepeque, “there are many hills and patches of forest everywhere; in sum it is a bad road.”47 The artist has faithfully represented the numerous mounds in the vicinity of Texistepeque, and a striking barranco lines the river, but in this landscape-map there are no obstacles to access. The routes, invisible for both Mexicanos and Texistepeque, are unimportant when the viewer enjoys a wide, aerial view. A consistent, if marginal, acknowledgment of distance remains in the unmarked scale at the corner of each painting. But as the paintings do not include routes, these scales seem designed not to quantify distance along routes but to give the viewer a sense of perspective.
The paintings that accompany Archbishop Cortés y Larraz’s visita demonstrate that not everyone who traveled through Guatemala placed routes at the center of their perspective on distance. Even someone traveling alongside the archbishop apparently experienced the route differently. At the very least, the artist and the writer had different opinions regarding which aspects of the human and natural landscape merited emphasis. Part of this difference doubtlessly lies in the descriptive potential of text versus image. But as much, if not more, of this difference is due to the perspective of the traveler. Cortés y Larraz perceived a spiritual landscape in which routes were vital conduits and distance was a hazardous obstacle. People, and particularly people as parishioners, were central to the landscape he perceived. The artist accessed an aerial perspective that in some sense made the routes inconsequential. Seen from above and with the human presence reduced to small buildings, the terrain unfolded effortlessly before the artist’s eye. It must have struck King Charles III that the text described such torturous means of access to the parishes of Guatemala while the paintings described broad, airy vistas that seemed just within reach.
FIGURE 2.3. The Parish of Mexicanos
Source: Archivo General de Indias
FIGURE 2.4. The Parish of Texistepeque
Source: Archivo General de Indias
Toward a Different View
Travel conditions in the Guatemalan audiencia did not change dramatically in the decades following Cortés y Larraz’s visita. Most roads continued to be impassable for coaches, and travelers journeyed them on foot or on horseback and with hired mules, when they could be afforded. This does not mean, however, that perceptions of travel—and correspondingly of distance and space—were uniform. As the anonymous artist traveling with Cortés y Larraz demonstrates, even two travelers in the same party might perceive the journey—or at least the landscape—differently.
Another example from the early nineteenth century notes that while the roads themselves remained very much the same, the mode of and motive for travel captured different views. Antonio José de Irisarri (1786–1868), a Guatemalan statesman and journalist who traveled extensively in his lifetime through South America, North America, and Europe, experienced the rigors of overland travel in Guatemala during a journey to Mexico when he was twenty years old. As someone who would later be involved in the struggles for independence in South America, he was in some sense at the heart of the political transformations taking place in the landscape in the early nineteenth century. His autobiographical account, published for a general audience, describes the difficulties of the routes in Guatemala with rather more humor than Cortés y Larraz, though the conditions he describes are much the same.48 In the manner of a relación that guides the text along the route, Irisarri addresses his reader, saying “let us follow the route from Quetzaltenango to Soconusco along the eternal San Pablo ridge,” a route, he notes, “that could easily be mistaken for the road to hell.”49
For the space of several lines, Irisarri describes the route as Cortés y Larraz would have, informing the reader that “the journey across the aforementioned San Pablo mountain is four leagues downhill from San Marcos to San Pablo and four leagues uphill from San Pablo to San Marcos.”50 He qualifies the difficulty of the peak by claiming that “whether one is traveling up or down along that Jacob’s ladder, it is essential to travel with mules that have learned the art of gymnastics necessary to transform ordinary humans into squirrels.”51 Not only the horses, but also the riders had to become expert gymnasts in order to survive the route. “In some parts of the road it is necessary to take perilous leaps more fitting to a fish or an acrobat,” he protested, “in others it is necessary to swim in deep pits of mud; in others one is forced to slide downhill as if on a roller coaster, and, in conclusion, along that route one travels in every manner imaginable other than in a comfortable manner.”52 No horse or mule in the world, he exclaimed, other than those native to San Marcos and San Pablo, would be able to navigate the route without breaking all their bones. Writing many years later, Irisarri was able to laugh at his inexperience, observing that he was continually “falling and getting up again, slipping, jumping, plunging into pits of mud, and learning to swim on horseback”—a skill he had not learned since it was not taught in Europe, he noted wryly. But it was a talent very necessary in the Americas, he observed, “because without this skill it is impossible to travel along the routes that were then called ‘royal highways’ and are now called ‘national highways,’ despite the fact that neither then nor now are they highways worthy of any name whatsoever.”53
Surely Cortés y Larraz would have sympathized with the slipping and sliding Irisarri laughingly complained of. But despite their concurring accounts of the route, the archbishop and the young adventurer observed different human landscapes. For one thing, while Cortés y Larraz was received as an eminent ecclesiastical authority, Irisarri was received as a companion of the traveling correo, or mail carrier. Irisarri had hit upon this solution because he knew that along the routes of Spanish America “there are no inns, or post houses, nor any of the other establishments one finds in England, France, and other European countries.” He had to travel with a bedroll and a cot, enough clothing for a five hundred league stretch, and a pair of mules to avoid hiring the “abysmal mules for hire” available in the towns along the way. It was also necessary to take measures to avoid being robbed, and Irisarri solved all his difficulties by hiring “as cook and butler, guide and bodyguard, one of the official mail carriers.” His name was Melchor Martínez, a “practical man” who readily agreed to be his personal traveling companion.54
It was easy to persuade the general administrator of the mail service to lend me the services of Melchor Martínez, for this was his name. He traveled as if on royal business, with the royal coat of arms emblazoned in silver on his chest like a military badge and the horn with which he announced his arrival at every point along the route, indicating to all within earshot that they were to allow free passage to the bearer of the King’s arms and announcing his presence to the Indian towns from a half-league’s distance. The Indians were thereby alerted that they had to prepare fresh mules, light a fire and fetch water for the cabildo, which was at that time the resting place for all travelers. The idea to travel like a portmanteau, under the care and protection of the mail carrier, was truly an inspiration . . . because while it was far more expensive than any other method of travel, it made ordinarily insurmountable difficulties disappear effortlessly.55
The Indians, upon hearing the horn, would go in search of fresh horses, and everywhere he went they assumed that the mail carrier was a special courier, traveling in the company of an official, because Irisarri “traveled in his uniform and carried a sword longer than he was.” Then all the town officials would emerge to ask him for news gathered along the route and to invite him to eat, sleep, and share conversation. Irisarri enjoyed this mode of travel immensely, concluding that “with the novel idea of being carried around by a correo like a letter, the journey succeeded in being as comfortable and entertaining as is possible along a route that is so long and that some have considered difficult and bothersome because they have not known how to make it pleasant and informative.”56
As Irisarri’s final comments suggest, he not only traveled with different company but also with different objectives. Cortés y Larraz traveled with the great burden of his concerns for the archdiocese’s spiritual and moral health continually hanging over him. Where he saw perilous distance at the end of the difficult routes, Irisarri saw “in all those places a liveliness, activity, and progress” that he had not expected to find. Where the archbishop saw entire villages at risk due to frequent “scandals,” Irisarri saw “Indians who were industrious, intelligent, capable, awake to their circumstances, well-built, robust, and earnestly dedicated to agriculture, commerce, and the arts.” In fact, he concluded, “everything could be found there, other than any sign of scarcity or misery.”57
The two men traveled with vastly different perspectives and purposes, and consequently perceived markedly different human landscapes. While the happy outcome of his observations may have been due as much to his background, education, and personality, Irisarri credits the success of his journey to his opportunity to travel with the mail carrier, “as if I were a letter.” Was his journey representative for a letter—or a mail carrier, for that matter? The following chapters turn their attention to the institution and travel mode of which Irisarri caught only a glimpse.