4

Taking It to the Periphery

OVERLAND MAIL CARRIERS

I, Blas Cabrera, his majesty’s mail carrier, with all due respect . . . state: That the receipt here enclosed . . . by the Administrator of the mail in this kingdom, proves that I delivered to the office in his care the closed mail trunk containing the correspondence from land and sea pertaining to the roundtrip journey that I undertook to Oaxaca.¹

—Blas Cabrera, official mail carrier, 1773

The correos, or mail carriers, of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Guatemala covered hundreds of leagues on foot and on horseback. Traveling as far north as Oaxaca and as far south as Costa Rica, they passed through cities, Indian towns, and long stretches of uninhabited terrain. Some correos served the postal system for fifteen or twenty years, journeying across Guatemala almost monthly. But even those who worked as correos for less time engaged in far more long-distance travel than the average person in colonial Guatemala. They experienced the journey to distant peripheries more often than others. Sources about correos therefore not only document how the peripheries were reached; they also offer a far more textured impression of what reaching the peripheries actually entailed.

The first three sections of this chapter focus on these correos in the colonial period, considering who they were, what their work required, and how their extensive travels informed a particular conception of distance. These shed light on the economic motivations, social violence, and inter-ethnic relationships that marked the correo experience. The last section of the chapter considers correo travel in the context of the early nineteenth century, when a changing conception of distance redefined space, place, and political boundaries for Guatemalan society as a whole.

Carrying the mail in late colonial Guatemala demanded of correos a continual balancing act. The dangers of the road—insufficient supplies, injury, banditry, inclement weather—could result in illness, assault, or even death. Correo travel consequently required a certain mettle, and as it tipped toward bravado, this necessary willingness to confront danger frequently brought its own, equally dangerous kind of peril. Officially, correos worked for the Spanish crown, but they often intentionally or unintentionally worked against it. They were on occasion arrested in late colonial Guatemala for insulting officials, for attacking people on the road, or for unduly harassing the residents of Indian towns. These arrests could end a correo’s career and take him off the road for good. Working as a correo also required a certain willingness to engage in financial risk, as payment barely covered the cost of travel and was, in any case, often difficult to extract from the central office. Correos found themselves attempting to supplement their income in ways that could also put them on the wrong side of the law.

The experience of long-distance travel under these conditions necessarily contrasted sharply with that of people like Archbishop Cortés y Larraz, who traveled rarely and with an entourage. But the overall conception of the Guatemalan landscape remained the same. Central, urban places were more tightly governed and more predictably disciplined. The routes or corridors leading away from them to some degree preserved these characteristics. But the greater the distance traveled into remote peripheries, the weaker the governing presence of the law. Dangerous and profitable in varying proportions, distance for correos was on every occasion a high-stakes gamble. While they may have measured distance in ordinary leagues, correos understood those leagues in terms of undeniable, often unpredictable, costs.

The Guía: Documentation on Correo Travel

Who were these men, the overland mail carriers of the Americas? For the period prior to the formation of the official mail system, little documentation exists on the travel of correos and almost none exists on correos themselves, and documenting their identity is challenging. It is certain that Indians were pressed into service as early as 1681 and likely earlier.² They continued to form the backbone of the mail system, especially in the highlands and southern Mexico, well into the early nineteenth century. As discussed in Chapter 3, a motley crew of travelers, soldiers, and Indians serviced some routes. Joseph Melchor de Ugalde, the Guatemalan mail administrator in 1770, provides a more specific appraisal of such characters:

If the need arises to send mail during the interval between the monthly mail deliveries, it should be sent by special courier, because while using couriers is more expensive than using militia to carry the mail, the following fact deserves consideration: from here to Zacapa there are daily twenty men who wait with no other motive than to await the chance of carrying a piece of mail, and if there is a regular mail on this route, it might happen that these men will wait a year or more before having occasion to carry a single letter. And while it is true that these are mulattoes, who do not pay tribute and in no other way recognize our sovereign king, it is also the case that almost all of them are miserable, naked wretches.³

The picture Melchor de Ugalde conjures up of men waiting along the main roads is suggestive. While we have no way of knowing how widespread this may have been, the description indicates a more than occasional expectation on the part of unofficial carriers. Despite Melchor de Ugalde’s recommendations, such “miserable, naked wretches” were gradually supplanted by official mail carriers after 1770. The practice of passing the mail from one person to another along segments of certain routes was replaced by the practice of sending a single carrier along the length of the route.⁴

Even before the incorporation of the mail, an informal distinction was always made between correos de a pie—those who traveled on foot—and correos de a caballo—those who traveled on horseback. By the late eighteenth century, a clear categorical separation is apparent in the documentation between the indios correos, Indian mail carriers who travel on foot, and the mestizo or Spanish correos who travel on horseback. The few cases that identify correos’ background in the eighteenth century showcase carriers who were mostly in their twenties or thirties (though one remarkable correo carried mail into his seventies) and were tradesmen—tailors, weavers, and carpenters—for whom carrying the mail became a second profession.⁵

While documentation on the identity of correos is scant, there is relatively more information on correo travel. Whether they traveled on foot or on horseback, early correos traveled as correos extraordinarios, or special-delivery couriers, and they traveled with a document called a guía, or register, that served the functions of permit, travel log, and delivery confirmation sheet. The official at the point of origin wrote the correo’s name, his date and time of departure, and the packages of correspondence he carried. As the correo progressed along his route, officials at each point signed the register with the date and time, acknowledging receipt of the mail. Thus in its ideal form, the guía is a composite document that reflects accurately each detail of the correo’s journey.

This document form continued in use after the formation of the official mail system, though few examples of it survive. Unless the correo’s journey became the focus of a legal dispute, the guía was discarded. However, after the formation of the official mail system, other documents came into use, allowing a broader view into correo travel. Logbooks recorded the departure and arrival times of correos to Mexico and the provinces. As the employees of the postal system came under the protection of a special fuero (exemption from prosecution in ordinary civil or criminal courts), their activities produced a growing body of correspondence and legal cases. And, increasingly, correos themselves found voice in official documentation by demanding pay, testifying as to the conditions of their travel, and weighing in on disputes about the administration of the system.

The correo guía continued to offer the most reliable, if not the most detailed, description of how a correo traveled. The case of Blas Cabrera, a correo who traveled the Oaxaca route, is illustrative. The opening page of the register provides information about the author of the document and the correo’s departure:

Don Simón de Larrazábal, appointed by his Majesty Principal Administrator of the Royal Mail in this Kingdom: I send Blas Cabrera, his Majesty’s mail carrier on horseback, to travel roundtrip from this Capital to the City of Oaxaca, with the trunk that contains the Document Packets of the Crown and the General correspondence of the Public, which he will deliver successively to the Administrators at each postal office he passes until reaching the city of Oaxaca. The Administrator in Oaxaca, as well as those along the route, will note the date and time at which they receive and dispatch the mail carrier, and on his return they will do the same until he returns to this Administration in my charge. And on behalf of his Majesty I order and require, and for my part I beg and charge the Magistrates, Officials, District Governors, or their officers of whichever towns he passes through to provide the said Blas Cabrera with all the supplies and pack animals necessary, as well as all the assistance he may ask for or require, so that there is not the smallest delay in the execution of this service so important to the Crown and the Public.⁶

Larrazábal goes on to list the packages of correspondence, which on this occasion—the first of December of 1772—were destined for Totonicapan, Quetzaltenango, Chiapas, Ciudad Real, Teguantepeque, Oaxaca, Puebla, Mexico, Jalapa, and Veracruz, this last including a package for Havana. Blas Cabrera arrived in Tuxtla on the seventh of December; the official there signed him in at nine in the evening and signed him out at nine-thirty. He arrived the following day at five in the afternoon in Teguantepeque and left half an hour later. Arriving in Oaxaca on the thirteenth at eleven in the morning, he deposited the remaining packages and waited three days to collect the return mail. He departed for Guatemala at midnight on the night of the sixteenth. After stopping at his destinations on the route back, Cabrera arrived in Guatemala on the twenty-seventh of December at eleven in the evening. The guía gives a clear sense of the journey’s duration, and it makes evident that correos frequently traveled at night. It further indicates that stopovers in the towns along the route were brief—as short as half an hour. Like the geographical descriptions discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, the guía was built along a route. While providing an overall arc for the correo’s journey, however, the guía has little to say about the conditions of travel and the misadventures that occurred along the way.

The Profits of Distance

The guía for Blas Cabrera’s journey to Mexico became one crucial document among many in a drawn-out administrative dispute, and the case as a whole offers some insights into the dilemmas of distance often confronted by Guatemalan correos. A resident of Guatemala City, Cabrera presumably planned to rest when he returned to the capital on December 27, 1772. As it happened, he did not have the opportunity to rest for long; the moment he arrived in Guatemala, city officials pounced on him. They had heard rumors before his arrival that Cabrera was illegally carrying two packages of clothing imported from China and destined for none other than Simón de Larrazábal, the administrator of the postal system.⁷

The debate over whether correos were permitted to carry encomiendas—parcels with items other than documents—raged throughout the late colonial period, and the central issue at stake was profit. Categorically different from arrieros, the muleteers who carried goods along Spanish American overland routes, correos were never intended to carry bulky or voluminous items. Muleteers traveled many of the same routes, but as the backbone of the overland trade system they journeyed with mule-trains and worked closely with merchants in Spanish American cities and ports. Correos, in contrast, were assigned to carry documents as their first and principal priority.⁸ But everyone recognized the potential afforded by the correos’ long-distance travel. Officials in urban centers, individual correos, and villages along the routes all stood to profit from the passage of the mail, but a continual and conflictive negotiation persisted over who would profit more. The carrying of encomiendas raised the prospect of additional gains or losses. On the one hand, encomiendas provided correos with extra income and individuals who could afford them with much-coveted goods. And it simply made good sense to send a vital packet of medicine to an ailing relative or a yard of lace to a friend with the only person reliably traveling to a given destination. On the other hand, correos were not always moderate; encomiendas sometimes ballooned from a handful of precious packets to a mule-load of heavy crates. They threatened to delay the mail by slowing the correo’s pace; as discussed below, they purportedly placed an excessive burden on Indian towns along the route; and in certain cases they defrauded the government by circumventing customs. For these reasons, the carrying of encomiendas was formally prohibited with the incorporation of the mail. In practice, however, correos continued to carry them with the tacit approval of administrators.

In the 1770s, the dispute grew particularly acrimonious as it became evident that many of the parcels carried by correos were destined for high-ranking officials in the city and the provinces. One illustrative and much belabored case concerned a crate of grapes carried all the way from León in Nicaragua to the homes of Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Cavello and Audiencia President Martín de Mayorga in Guatemala City. Though he should not have been carrying the grapes in the first place, correo José Rivera had difficulty exonerating himself with these august personages for his decision to abandon the grapes—rotted well before his arrival in Guatemala—along the route.⁹ Officials such as these had much to gain from sending and receiving the occasional encomienda, which almost always consisted of luxury or specialty goods unavailable in Guatemala. The Bourbon administration’s fiscal reforms beginning in 1763 (and nearly coinciding with the reform of the mail system) had the effect of significantly raising sales taxes in Guatemala on all imported goods. The alcabala, or sales tax, rose and fell during the 1760s, as the powerful merchants of Guatemala City battled the tax hike, and application of the tax was gradual and uneven across the region. Nonetheless, the unavoidable result was that goods carried by arrieros could no longer be received legally in Guatemala City without paying the alcabala, and receiving parcels through the correo thereby became one simple, if unreliable, way of dodging the tax.¹⁰

The others who stood to gain from carrying parcels were correos themselves. Correo Mateo Lopez, apprehended in 1805 for carrying encomiendas, might have made a substantial profit from the fifty items he carried to Guatemala, which included numerous rolls of fine lace, four pounds of chocolate, a barometer, packets of cigars, half a pound of cinnamon, four nutmegs, a pound of medicinal herbs, two packets of arsenic, copper sulfate, and two lumps of opium.¹¹ Correos had insisted from the inception of the mail system that their pay was insufficient; accepting encomienda commissions was a much-needed way of supplementing their income. In one of the documents added to the Blas Cabrera dispute, Cabrera himself demanded the 170 pesos he was owed for his round-trip journey to Oaxaca. Yet a payment schedule from 1778 indicates that the payment to a correo traveling to Oaxaca on horseback should have been more—about 289 pesos.¹² The continual complaints and demands made by correos throughout the colonial period suggest that they were often short-changed.¹³ A detailed estimate of travel costs prepared by three correos in 1784 puts the total cost of transportation for a round trip to Oaxaca at more than 146 pesos.¹⁴ The correos maintained that without even accounting for food, these expenses exceeded their payment. Complaints from other places in Guatemala tend to bear out the correos’ argument. A plaintive letter from the correos of Costa Rica written in 1787 suggests that if anything, the longer and more marginal routes were even less adequately compensated. “Until today,” they wrote, “we and our predecessors have been paid fifteen pesos for our work along each monthly mail route it being our responsibility to supply the Mule for the long passage of more than one hundred and fifty leagues.” However, travel along this route took a significant toll on the cargo animals. The correos pointed out that “if the Beast is incapacitated on the route, as often occurs, the cost of leasing a mule grows even greater.” Worse still, “if it should occur as is sometimes the case that the Beast should die while we are walking—this occurs mainly during the winter because of the poor roads—then the owners ask us for thirty or even thirty-five pesos and on top of this the four pesos for the lease.” The correos concluded that even when the mules did not die, the fifteen peso salary was woefully inadequate.¹⁵ Whether leased or purchased, cargo animals did not come cheap. The correos thereby often incurred debts of their own to pay for transportation and supplies. For correos on many routes, carrying only documents—the correspondence of the government and the public—was simply not profitable. Carrying encomiendas proved to be the only reliable way of making the journey lucrative.

Allowing correos to carry encomiendas could potentially work well for the mail system administrators as well. By effectively passing off the cost of the correo’s journey to individuals willing to pay for luxury items, medicine, and imported goods, the administration could keep the correo’s wages low. For this reason administrators like Larrazábal tended to support correos in their campaign to carry encomiendas. Larrazábal and other mail officials in Guatemala maintained that the practice of carrying parcels “fuera de valija,” or outside of the official mail trunk, dated back to the Guatemalan mail’s inception in 1620.¹⁶ Larrazábal insisted that he was doing nothing new by turning a blind eye, claiming that “the practice of carrying and delivering permissible parcels has always been allowed.”¹⁷ Administrators could also point to the fact that in 1766, the practice was even formalized to the extent that a set fee was determined for the carrying of encomiendas to the provinces: six reales per pound to Leon, Comayagua, and Tegucigalpa and four reales per pound to San Salvador, San Vicente, and San Miguel.¹⁸

On the other hand, however, administrators had also to reckon with the potentially detrimental consequences of carrying encomiendas, the greatest of which was a tendency to retard the correo’s journey. Though in 1773 Larrazábal excused the practice by pointing out that Blas Cabrera had returned from Oaxaca with his encomiendas of Chinese cloth two days earlier than expected, Cabrera’s load of roughly eighty pounds was lighter than some.¹⁹ Mateo Lopez, for example, carried with him many bulky items on his 1805 journey. Among his parcels were 70 containers of wire, 166 panes of glass from Puebla, and 45 jars of salt from England.²⁰ And José Rivera, the correo embroiled in the grape controversy, eventually lost his employment in 1805 over delays caused by excessive encomiendas. Already in his seventies, Rivera perhaps misjudged how much his mule would be able to carry. The administrator in San Salvador complained that “Jose Ribera arrived in this city yesterday the twenty-sixth of the month at ten in the evening being delayed more than a day and a half, according to the route schedule, and he was carrying an excessive load of two-hundred and seventy-five pounds and separately on the shoulders of an Indian sixty-six sacks.”²¹ The weight and size of the encomiendas were such that the pack animal fell several times. Rivera was fired, and the limitations on carrying encomiendas were once again reinforced.

The other argument leveled against Larrazábal in 1773 and the encomienda practice generally was that it placed an excessive burden on Indian towns along the route. When Larrazábal had the audacity to break the encomienda prohibition merely to acquire luxury goods (the Chinese textiles were reportedly for his mother-in-law), the Oidor Decano of Guatemala, Don Juan González Bustillo, took the matter into his own hands.²² He protested that “the Administrator of the Mail should be the most vigilant, precise and punctual in obeying the resolutions of the Crown,” but instead of preventing the problematic delays, Larrazábal contributed most to the problem by undermining the mail carriers’ regulations. And, he added, the “well-known burden placed by the mail carriers upon the Indian Towns along the route is no small matter, for it is they who provide the mail carriers with mules for their cargo and for themselves.” As Bustillo indicated in his letter, these supplies were in theory to be paid for by the correo according to predetermined fees (arancel); for most of the late colonial period the rate of compensation was half a real per league.²³ But, he wrote, “even if they are properly paid according the fee schedule (which I highly doubt), this payment is hardly adequate compensation for the extraordinary amount of work and the degree of danger to which the mules are exposed, conditions which lead to significant deterioration if not complete loss of life.”²⁴ In practice, correos often abused the animals, or underpaid for their supplies, or demanded more than the town could provide. When the fees were raised to one real per league, the mail administrator complained on behalf of the correos, claiming that the correct fees were never actually observed.²⁵ “Even when the mail service was not run by the crown, the Indians were never paid according to the fee schedule,” he insisted. Rather, their assistance to the correo was “based on their clear and implicit consent, which has existed from time immemorial and which was evident in the spontaneous generosity of their ancestors observed by the Conquistadors.”²⁶ This complaint resulted in an informal sanction from the administration in Spain, effectively condoning the practice of underpaying the Indian towns for the correos’ supplies. Needless to say, the Indian towns must have viewed their supposed “spontaneous generosity” toward the conquistador and the correo differently.

The relationship between the correo and the Indian towns along his route was a difficult and often exploitative one. As early as 1764, when the original regulations for the official mail were released in Spain, correos were explicitly enjoined not to delay their journey or overburden Indian towns by demanding extra transportation for goods or merchandise. It was ordered that “mail carriers should travel lightly, and should not demand of the Indians more pack animals than are necessary for carrying Letters.” Nor, the regulations warned, should they subject them to the “troublesome delays which his Majesty has been informed currently occur when certain said mail carriers exploit their station to play the role of merchants.”²⁷ Many towns along the route claimed to find the passage of the correo so taxing that they asked to be excused from any obligation to provide him with supplies. While the town could potentially earn income by providing mules and a tayacan (guide), for many the gain seemed not worthwhile. The town of Acala on the route to Oaxaca cited the “misery and calamitous state” of their town in requesting exemption. “As the town of Acala falls on the King’s highway,” they explained, “and as we are therefore obliged by law to provide food and supplies to travelers, and as this last obligation is indispensable, we ask only that we be excused providing for the monthly mail.” Excusing them would be as much a benefit to the crown as it would be to Acala, they argued, pointing out that “it has happened many times that since we do not have sufficient animals to provide him with, he has had to proceed on the route by foot, at great detriment to his Majesty.”²⁸ As Acala’s appeal makes clear, travelers of every kind could request (and pay for) supplies according to the arancel, but towns along the camino real had a particular obligation to the correo that often exceeded their means. Relationships with the mail system as a whole, if not with the individual correo, were developed over time, and the administration came to expect consistent services from certain towns.²⁹ Other, similar complaints from the same period indicate that the correo frequently took advantage of his position to demand extra supplies not only to accommodate his encomiendas but to provide for traveling companions. A correo traveling in the vicinity of Lake Atitlán in 1786 demanded supplies for his friends, and when the Indians of the town resisted he attacked them with his riding whip. According to the complaint, such conduct was not uncommon. What is worse, the passage of the correo along a given route gave other travelers the opportunity to impersonate the correo—usually by tooting a horn upon entry to the town—and demand supplies in his stead. Towns lying on the correo’s path had consequently to suffer the double burden of the exacting correo and his fraudulent imitators.³⁰

Angering the Indian towns along the mail route was decidedly not to the administration’s benefit, since the towns provided not only supplies but the crucial guides who led the correo along his route. Routes changed over time (and according to the season), making it essential that the correo travel with someone who knew the current route and was informed of its particular travel conditions.³¹ Certain routes were famously difficult to travel, and in discussing alternatives officials had necessarily to rely on the expertise of Indian guides. The route to Totonicapán, for example, plagued travelers and correos continually, and one exasperated official finally suggested changing the route, declaring that, “both have assured me that there is a path known to the Indians, and also to a few Ladinos and Spaniards, by which it is possible to avoid not only this Peak but also Hunger Peak and the infamous Slab Peak.”³² But the precise location of the alternate path was difficult to pinpoint. It was true that a Franciscan, Brother Josef Antonio Sánchez, had traveled the route twice in the company of Indians, and he could confirm that the path was a far easier route to travel than the principal road. But he could not locate the path on his own. The former alcalde of Totonicapán, Don Geraldino, had also tried to find it, but, it was reported, “the Indians who were leading him misled him, and got him lost on purpose.” The officials proposed different hypotheses as to why the Indians were so secretive: “according to some they did this out of fear that if the King’s highway were rerouted along that path it would harm their crops and pastures which they have nearby, or, say others, because they wanted to avoid having to work on building a New road as they were obliged to do in the repairs of the road through Slab Peak.” Whatever the reason, Don Geraldino had to return without having accomplished his objective of discovering the secret route.³³ Believing there was much to gain from exploiting the new route, officials in the city demanded that it be located and integrated into the camino real. The Indians were duly compelled to identify the path, and as construction on the route began, the alcalde confirmed that their concern had been losing the safety of their farmland and pasture.

The motivation the Indians had for hiding the route from Don Francisco Geraldino was this: the Indians have their grazing pasture and ranches in this place, and it is here that they keep their livestock safe from robbers, and they say this will no longer be the case once the road is built and that they will have to evacuate the area. In addition, it upsets the Indians and Ladinos of Sololá that where this route travels downhill to meet the King’s highway (near the town of Concepción) it passes through an open expanse about two leagues long, and it is here that the Naturales and vecinos have planted their crops; if the route is opened through there they will have to cut through good farmland and lose eighteen or more feet of it.³⁴

Moments of dispute like this one reveal the other perspective on “dangerous distances” observed by Cortés y Larraz. The freedom he lamented as perilous because it avoided the rule of law clearly had benefits for some. Almost everyone stood to profit from the new route other than the Indians who had kept the path secret and who soon found themselves working on its construction, destroying their safe pasture in the process. The new route avoided the perilous peaks that had so inconvenienced travelers and correos in the past, and as such it benefited not only the mail system but all those who relied on the King’s highway. It also economized three to four leagues and almost two hours of travel. Thus the mail system profited greatly from exploiting the hidden path; it could be assured that the new route would bring with it more reliable and more timely mail delivery.

Just how much the royal mail in Guatemala profited in financial terms during these years is somewhat difficult to determine. Consistent data on revenues and expenditures is not available for any year prior to 1810. A report produced in 1804 on the mail service’s income over the 1782 to 1803 period suggests significant growth, despite the wartime curtailments in maritime service. From 1782 to 1792, the Guatemalan office brought in roughly 1,760,800 reales, while from the 1793 to 1803 period it brought in roughly 2,443,531 reales.³⁵ Since the correo paid his travel expenses out of pocket, the mail service’s only substantial expense lay in salaries. In the 1790s, the monthly expenditures on salaries for correos and scribes averaged only about 450 pesos.³⁶ The central office in Guatemala City had four employees—the administrator, the bookkeeper, the administrator’s assistant, and the office boy—and ran on 3,000 pesos a year, with the administrator’s salary accounting for half of this amount.³⁷ Detailed accounts for the mid-1790s indicate that after paying salaries and other minor expenses, quarterly profits could range from 5,000 to more than 12,000 pesos.³⁸ To all appearances, the Guatemalan mail service was making a substantial profit.

The administrators throughout the late colonial period were aware, however, that the royal mail was not making as much money as it could have been making. As mentioned previously in Chapter 3, the general public’s stubborn insistence on sending private couriers, or what the mail administrators termed correos clandestinos (clandestine mail), undoubtedly robbed the royal mail of substantial income. Clandestine mail was defined broadly to include any correspondence not carried by the official correo in “la valija cerrada”—the closed trunk. Letters sent with friends and travelers were perhaps considered less egregious because they robbed the crown of less income, but they were equally illegal. Believing initially that a steep fine would dissuade individuals from sending their mail privately, administrators set the fine very high—at 500 pesos. However, the fine proved singularly ineffective in deterring the practice of sending clandestine mail. The traffic of clandestine mail continued unabated throughout the colonial period, despite the administration’s attempt to create more post offices for people in inaccessible areas. As with the sending of encomiendas, mail officials were vexed to discover that many of the individuals sending or receiving clandestine mail were of dismayingly high status. In fact, in 1779 a man was imprisoned for carrying clandestine mail to Archbishop Cortés y Larraz.³⁹ The cases of correos clandestinos are filled with clergy, military officers, or other people of good social standing who decided to circumvent the official mail system.⁴⁰

Encomiendas and clandestine mail alike were usually spotted by a guard at the checkpoint outside of a city, and if the observations of the guard at the San Salvador checkpoint were at all representative, the sending of clandestine mail was a regular occurrence. Juan Cestona reported in an 1805 letter that “counting only the towns in the immediate surroundings of the City, private mail carriers are sent almost daily.”⁴¹ In the same year, Faustino de Capetillo, the interim administrator in Guatemala, recommended dropping the fine to 25 pesos, as the 500 peso fine proved impossible to collect. “Since the year 1780,” he wrote, “when I first took office, numerous cases of clandestine mail have passed across my desk, and despite the efforts made by those of us in this office we have not succeeded in collecting more than two of the owed fines.”⁴² The new fine, eventually set at 50 pesos, would be split three ways between the mail administration, the judge who heard the case, and the individual who denounced the clandestine mail. The administration would not earn much, but it would still earn more than it would have in postage.

As long as the fines were paid, then, the mail system stood to profit even from the passage of clandestine mail. In the ongoing negotiation over who would profit most from the mail service, the administrators—and therefore the crown—were the clear winners. Earning substantial profits from postage even during times of decreased traffic, the Guatemalan office kept its costs low, passing much of the burden on to the correos and to the Indian towns that sustained them. While the correos may have found opportunities to turn an occasional profit by carrying encomiendas, Indian towns had few such opportunities. Proportional to their means, they shouldered the greatest financial costs of carrying the mail.

The Cost of Distance

Looking beyond the purely financial costs, however, correos stood to lose just as much. While the towns could lose pasture and farmland to a new route or valuable livestock to the correo’s carelessness, the correo risked his health, his personal safety, and his job on every journey. If the hardships of the road themselves did not end a correo’s career, avoiding them often did. Blas Cabrera might have made a small profit from his journey to Oaxaca, had the Chinese cloth not been discovered. As it was, he had to pester the beleaguered Larrazábal for payment of the official mail, and he probably received no payment for the confiscated encomiendas. Instead, he received continual visits from city officials attempting to pinpoint the source of the Chinese textiles. Eventually Guatemala City got too hot for Cabrera, and from one day to the next he vanished. Larrazábal sent the other correos to Cabrera’s house six times in the effort to locate him, but they reported that Cabrera and his wife had simply disappeared.⁴³

Blas Cabrera likely knew that many a correo had not only lost his job but ended up in jail for getting on the wrong side of officials in Guatemala City. As familiarity with the fuero resulted in more paperwork involving correos being forwarded to the central administration, the archives amassed a sizeable collection of colorful cases.⁴⁴ Correos were arrested not only for complications with encomiendas, but for trading insults with local officials, for drunkenness, for assault, for carrying illegal arms, and in some cases simply for failing to finish their route. While the genesis of many of these cases can be attributed largely to the preoccupations of Bourbon reformers, they are nevertheless reliable insights into the experiences of correos. In other words, the sociopolitical circumstances of late eighteenth century Guatemala were responsible for complicating, and in some cases criminalizing, certain actions and behaviors intrinsic to the correos’ circumstances.

The most likely penalty facing correos was incarceration for inability to finish a route. In some cases this inability was directly attributable to the high travel costs. The correos in Costa Rica who protested their insufficient salaries often simply did not have the funds to complete their journey. They were placed in an impossible situation when local officials threatened to imprison them for failure to reach the end of their route.⁴⁵ In other cases the correo fell ill and had to choose among several bad alternatives: he could continue the route, despite being ill; he could wait to feel better and risk delaying his arrival; he could entrust the mail to another person. Most correos chose the first alternative, jeopardizing their health even more in the process. Benito Arrevillaga, a correo for the provinces in the 1790s, forced himself to travel in such poor health that he died before reaching his destination.

He began his route in good health, but having arrived in the City of San Salvador, he felt quite ill as I am told by the Administrator, and he did not wish to abandon the journey. Nor did he wish to do so in San Miguel, where he arrived in even worse shape, and without pausing he continued on with the goal of reaching León. But after walking the connecting route, which is about forty-five leagues long, without taking any sustenance whatsoever, he arrived in the Town of Viejo unable to go any farther. There was time to do nothing more than prepare himself for death and receive the sacraments; he died immediately.⁴⁶

The administrator in Guatemala lamented that “this mail carrier has been one of the most respected and accomplished in the Service, a man who with his dedication to work supported a wife and four children,” and he recommended giving the family a small allowance.⁴⁷ As the account of Arrevillaga’s journey makes clear, portions of the route could be grueling, even for a healthy traveler. Relying on the calculations established in Chapter 3, by which a league might be understood as the distance traveled in an hour, forty-five leagues would entail nearly two days of uninterrupted travel. A forty-five league stretch without food would have been taxing regardless of Arrevillaga’s condition, and the route to the provinces was replete with such obstacles. Manuel de Mella, sent along the same route to León in 1778, nearly lost his life paddling a leaky canoe out of Conchagua.⁴⁸ With long, uninhabited stretches and waterways subject to flooding, the route to León was dangerous under any circumstances. These examples demonstrate vividly how peripheral Guatemalan peripheries really were. Reaching them required a significant investment of funds, time, and energy.

Other correos who fell ill chose to wait or hand off the mail trunk rather than imperil their health by continuing. José Romero, a thirty-five-year-old español who traveled the route to Oaxaca, initially attempted to follow Arrevillaga’s example by continuing to travel while ill. He left Oaxaca in late 1803 with a fever and chest pains, and when he arrived in San Lucas he was unable to continue. He entrusted the mail trunk to officials in San Lucas and returned to Oaxaca for medical attention. Once he had recovered, he returned to Guatemala, where he was promptly arrested for having left the mail trunk “abandoned to the Indians” on the Oaxaca route. The administrator in Guatemala insisted that he should have returned to Oaxaca with the trunk and there enlisted the help of the Oaxacan mail administrator. Romero pleaded that he had done what he could, and indeed there seems to have been no good option between delaying the mail by returning to Oaxaca with the trunk or “abandoning” the mail by entrusting it to Indian officials. Romero enlisted the support of the physician who had treated him in Oaxaca, and the officials in Guatemala City finally relented, ordering him to be set free in mid-April 1804, on the condition that he pay a 100-peso fine. Utterly unable to pay the fine, however, Romero was forced to remain in jail. After spending four months in jail, Romero begged for six months’ time in which to pay off his debt. He had been compelled to sell even his clothes in order to pay for his food in prison, and he was entirely without means. A relative, Manuel Romero, mortgaged his home in order to guarantee the debt, and José Romero was set free. Unfortunately, in 1805, the debt remained unpaid.⁴⁹

It is likely that officials in Guatemala City viewed José Romero and other correos who fell ill with skepticism because some “sick” correos were actually drunk. Indian towns and provincial officials complained repeatedly of the behavior of drunk correos, who disrupted town life in more ways than one. In 1791, correo Miguel Custodio was found lying by the side of the road outside of Nejapa, seemingly drunk, while the Indian guide stood by with the animals. The alguacil of Nejapa, who found them, escorted Miguel Custodio into town in order to sober him up with food, but upon arriving Custodio began raving that someone had stolen his firearm and his bedroll. He grew so agitated that he pulled out his knife and wounded the governador. Custodio was arrested, and the story he gave in his defense echoed that given by many other correos. He had left Guatemala in somewhat precarious health and had worsened on the route to León. After taking the medicine prescribed to him, vinagre de Castilla and limonada (vinegar and lemonade), he had rapidly improved. But on the return trip he had fallen ill once again.

In the Port of Conchagua he had a recurrence of the pain that he had first experienced leaving this Capital city, and he carried it while walking all the way to San Salvador, where the Administrator of the Mail Service Don Domingo Ferreros voluntarily gave him a drink of aguardiente. But since his stomach was empty and he is not accustomed to taking drink, the aguardiente went to his head on the journey to the town of Nejapa.⁵⁰

Custodio’s claim that he was not accustomed to taking drink was somewhat disingenuous. Other towns had complained of Custodio’s conduct before, and his behavior in Nejapa was probably in character, if somewhat more pronounced than usual.⁵¹ In some cases, officials had no difficulty determining the correo’s state of intoxication. José Andrade, a twenty-two-year-old carpenter who worked as a correo out of Guatemala City, was discovered in a state of undeniable inebriation by the alcalde of the Barrio San José, Don Manuel Sánchez. Andrade was reportedly barefoot and wielding a heavy stick against two other men. When Sánchez confronted him, Andrade retorted that the alcalde had no jurisdiction over him because he was a correo. Sánchez nevertheless threw him in jail, only to release him weeks later when his employment as a correo was confirmed by the administration.⁵²

The number of cases in which correos were involved in violent confrontations is suggestive, and in each case the fuero granting special privileges to the correos played an important part.⁵³ While not exactly placing the correos above the law—on the contrary, some correos found themselves in and out of prison—the fuero ensured that all criminal cases involving correos would fall under the jurisdiction of the mail administration. Consequently, if a correo was arrested by an alcalde or other official, he had only to declare that he was a correo for the matter to be removed from the official’s hands. This tended to inspire the correos with a certain degree of confidence—or insolence—when confronted with local officials. Correos held another advantage in their confrontations with local officials because of their special permission to carry banned weapons. In 1779, the Guatemalan Fiscal determined that employees of the royal mail could carry certain banned weapons as long as they were used purely for self-defense and in the service of the mail. Pistols, daggers, and other weapons that could be easily concealed were not permitted—though Miguel Custodio, twelve years later, carried both a short firearm and a knife.⁵⁴

In some cases, these special privileges prompted correos to challenge the growing authority of local officials, as Custodio and Andrade did. The local officials correos tangled with in urban areas were contributing to a deliberate and marked tightening of social control in the late Bourbon period. Ana Margarita Gómez’s work on the Bourbon military in Guatemala demonstrates that an increased military presence in the late colonial period led to a greater militarization of urban areas and to more invasive social coercion. Though troops were initially necessitated by the foreign wars (alternately with England and France), they were gradually relied upon more for domestic policing. Their duties in transferring the Guatemalan population from Antigua to Nueva Guatemala after the earthquake transitioned easily into urban patrolling, so that by the late colonial period troops in urban areas worked hand-in-hand with alcaldes to monitor and disarm the population.⁵⁵

The confrontations between correos and local officials therefore in many ways echoed those occurring throughout Guatemala, but the fuero gave the correo somewhat greater leverage. In 1778, correo Manuel de Mella flagrantly disavowed the authority of the alcalde ordinario in Guatemala City after an altercation with a merchant. Provoked because the merchant had thrown water on him, Mella threatened him with a knife and then resisted arrest when the alcalde arrived, shouting that he recognized no authority other than the mail administrator’s and the president’s.⁵⁶ And in Guatemala City’s barrio del Perú, two correos similarly defied the authority of the alcalde of the neighborhood. Don Juan José Soto, the alcalde, claimed that the two correos had called him (translating loosely) “shorty, a worthless shit, an ass and other names of a similar nature.”⁵⁷ The two correos, both tailors by profession and in their mid- to late twenties, claimed that a ruckus in the neighborhood had already started when they passed by. The alcalde had accosted them, wielding a gun and sword and accompanied by three drunk Indians carrying machetes and a pistol. To make matters worse, when the two correos invoked the fuero, the alcalde had scoffed at the badges they wore on their chests, saying “that he shit on them.”⁵⁸ The confrontation turned violent; being outnumbered four to two, the correos were quickly overwhelmed. As often happened with correo cases, the two were jailed temporarily before the mail administrator stepped in to release them. The conflict would not necessarily end there, however; as the Sargento Mayor de Plaza warned sourly, “a long experience with mail carriers has taught me that on few occasions do their cases allow the truth to be aired, and in general there always remain long-standing grudges and resentments against the testifying witnesses.”⁵⁹

In other cases, the correos entered into violent conflicts with people other than officials. One rather exceptional but illuminating case concerns correo Francisco Anzueto’s attacks against his wife in 1805. A twenty-four-year-old mestizo weaver, Anzueto had hit his wife repeatedly on the head but had only injured her so severely because of the weapon he carried: a “narrow, double-edged sword.”⁶⁰ As a correo, Anzueto was entitled to carry such a weapon, ostensibly for self-defense, but in this case as in others the weapon was used instead for assault. Most frequently, correos were arrested for assaulting other men, and just as in Anzueto’s case, the victim of the assault was more often than not someone well known to the correo. In other words, though the special dispensation to carry banned weapons was intended to protect correos while they traveled, correos turned their weapons against friends, family, and neighbors instead of strangers on the road.⁶¹

The cost of the correo’s special privileges, then, was to some extent paid by the people around him. However, the violence that accompanied correos at home and on the road cannot be attributed entirely to these special privileges. The violence directed toward correos must also have played a part, not necessarily by directly provoking violent behavior in response but by dissuading men who were unwilling to risk physical assault from becoming correos in the first place. Men who became correos knew that one of the greatest threats came from bandits who assaulted correos to steal the silver they carried or, during wartime, correspondence. The risk of falling victim to banditry came with the territory.

Correo Matías Fonseca, for example, was attacked in late 1789 only three leagues outside of the capital at one-thirty in the morning. Four men on horseback approached him, and while two attacked the guide the other two attacked Fonseca, cutting his hand with a sword or machete all the way to the bone. Fonseca was able to see little of his assailants in the darkness: he couldn’t tell whether they were descalzos (barefoot) or not; and he could only say that the man who attacked him had been tall and wearing a white shirt. The bandits stole the money Fonseca carried for his journey and left. Though “the guide, because he was Indian (and characteristically timid) ran to hide by the side of the road to avoid being assaulted and was only drawn out by the cries of pain from the correo,” the pair eventually made their way back to the city at six in the morning, where the administrator paid the surgeon to bind Fonseca’s hand. The testimony of the guide, “Jose Toc, Indian-ladino from the town of Chinautla,” concurred that the correo had not been to blame or—what would have been worse—in collaboration with the bandits. Since the bandits had stolen only what the correo carried, leaving the correspondence, Fonseca’s spare clothes, bread, and chocolate untouched, the greatest casualty was Fonseca’s right hand.⁶²

Attacked twenty-one leagues outside the city only three months later, correo Lugardo Herrera was less fortunate. At about eight-thirty in the evening Herrera was confronted by eight men wielding swords or machetes, firearms, and heavy sticks. Three attacked Herrera, another three assaulted the guide, and two pursued the mule carrying the mail trunks. Ripping open the trunks, they took all of the money and much of the correspondence. As the trunks contained an entire trimester’s worth of revenue from the provinces, hundreds of pesos were estimated stolen. When the correo was able to find aid, fifty soldiers were sent to the site of the robbery, but they could find no trace of the bandits.⁶³

The administration occasionally took steps to prevent such tremendous losses, shifting the dates of departure to avoid planned assaults, but for the most part the correos were expected to fend for themselves.⁶⁴ Accosted in 1808 by six men who shot at him until he fell from his horse, correo Mariano Aroche lost the thirty pesos he carried for his expenses, the ten pesos he carried in encomienda, and his clothes. The official trunks were kept safe because the guide (perhaps more wise than “timid”) had fled and hidden off the road. In ascertaining what had occurred, officials interrogated Brother Mariano Pérez de Jesús, who had traveled with the correo for part of his journey after the attack. Though in response to questioning Brother Pérez de Jesús confirmed that Aroche was seriously wounded and not drunk, and though Aroche had lost mostly his own money and not the mail administration’s, he nevertheless lost his job over the incident. Once again, the mistrust of the administration had proven an even greater liability than the perils of the road.

The correos understood distance somewhat differently than did mail administrators and privileged travelers. Where Archbishop Cortés y Larraz saw the long distances and difficult roads as obstacles to spiritual and moral safety, correos saw more earthly dangers. And while officials viewed the network of towns across the isthmus as sites for potential income, correos saw towns, haciendas, and individuals that they counted on for food and supplies. Some elements, however, created shared conceptions. Guatemalan space was understood as principally route-based and organized around central places. In this sense, the archbishop’s thorough descriptions of routes and hierarchies of parishes are consistent with the mail officials’ construction of route itineraries and tables of hierarchically placed towns. Both map well onto the correos’ vision of crucial stopping points on a web of intricate, dangerous roads. Peripheries were understood among all to be less policed and more dangerous, not to mention harder to reach; depending on the viewer’s perspective, these attributes could represent moral peril, administrative inconvenience, or an opportunity for sizeable profit despite sizeable risks. In the eighteenth century, these characteristics of space and distance dominated local conceptions. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the balance began to change: existing ideas about coterminous territories and boundaries became more dominant, while route-based hierarchies became less so.

The Nineteenth Century: A Changing Calculus

During the late colonial period, the mail administration profited at the expense of individual correos and the Indian towns that sustained their travel. For Indian towns, the passage of the mail was usually a losing proposition. Poor compensation for the mule and guide, brutal treatment of their animals, and the not infrequent harassment at the hands of unruly correos made the passage of the mail a costly nuisance. Correos may have stood to gain somewhat more from their middling pay (after expenses) and the carrying of encomiendas. But apart from the financial costs they absorbed to pay for supplies—costs that often resulted in substantial debt—correos also paid a heavy toll in terms of their personal health and safety.

In the nineteenth century, the stakes were raised significantly for correos. The period between 1821 and 1840 was one of intermittent warfare across the isthmus, and the continual crises required officials to rely heavily on special couriers. Correos stood to gain tremendously from these emergency trips, which were paid at a higher rate than ordinary travel. At the same time, correos were increasingly the target of assaults, as the information contained in the correspondence they carried became potentially as valuable as currency. For the first time, however, the high costs paid by correos were increasingly paid by the mail administration as well. Though the Guatemalan office had sent much of its accumulated earnings from the late colonial period on to the peninsular main office, some funds were reinvested in the system, permitting the establishment of new post offices throughout the region. As discussed in Chapter 3, the Guatemalan mail system had expanded significantly by 1820. Regular service linked Oaxaca to Guatemala and Guatemala to the provinces and Omoa. Local post offices had enabled the formation of a regional network, and despite tussles over encomiendas, correos could be relied upon for reasonably regular delivery. Between 1821 and 1840, the mail system struggled to preserve this system while paying mounting costs for special couriers and absorbing the continual losses occasioned by minimal correspondence and disrupted service.

In 1821, Central America followed Mexico in declaring independence from Spain. Never a whole-hearted commitment, the alliance with Mexico fell apart in 1823 with the overthrow of Agustín de Iturbide, and Central America declared itself a separate republic. Between 1823 and 1826 an uneasy peace among the united Central America states persisted, overseen in part by Salvadoran Manuel Arce, who was appointed president of the federation in March of 1825. As Arce attempted to consolidate the union by creating an army and imposing taxation, towns throughout Central America broke out against him in rebellion. Internal war lasted until 1829, when Honduran Francisco Morazán succeeded in unifying a coalition of Nicaraguan and Salvadoran troops. While Morazán kept a loose hold on the Central American Federation from his base in Honduras and later San Salvador, the state government in Guatemala expanded under Governor Mariano Gálvez. Between 1831 and 1838, Gálvez embarked on extensive reforms, “setting the model for nineteenth-century liberalism throughout Central America.”⁶⁵ But his later reforms challenging both local political power and clerical power throughout the state went too far. Provoked by the extremity of the reforms as well as by the passage of a deadly cholera epidemic, towns in Guatemala and elsewhere revolted. Rafael Carrera led what would become the most consequential revolt in Chiquimula, between Guatemala and El Salvador. In 1839 the federation of Central American states was abolished, and Carrera continued to skirmish against the remnants of opposition before being formally declared president in 1844.

These political and military ruptures could not but affect the operation of the mail system. The detailed impact of these upheavals is difficult to document, precisely because the normal functioning of the system found itself repeatedly disrupted. Nevertheless, it is clear that the violence of the period impacted the mail service in two main ways: correos as individuals found themselves in greater danger on their routes; and routes were reoriented by the mail administration in order to compensate for the observable danger of particular roads and regions. As a result, certain destinations effectively lost communication with Guatemala City while others maintained or improved their communication ties. Initially, after the break from Spain in 1821, the mail system maintained a policy of continuing its established service to Mexico and the provinces, essentially preserving the colonial system.⁶⁶ But by 1822, regional offices were receiving a mandate from the central administration to improve mail service throughout the region, signaling a new set of needs: a colonial province’s network would not be sufficient for a national and federal system.⁶⁷

Over the next twenty years, the administration attempted to increase the frequency of service and the number of destinations within Guatemala and Central America. In February 1823, an attempt was made to establish three monthly trips to Mexico, departing on the first, tenth, and twentieth of the month.⁶⁸ Though the attempt was short lived, it demonstrated the administration’s intention to sustain more frequent communication with the important cities in the region. But by 1824, these important cities lay southeast, rather than north, and the system consisted of “two trips on horseback per month to Oaxaca, three of the same to the Eastern Provinces, two trips on foot to Chiquimula, Zacapa, and Gualan, two to Verapaz and Peten, and two to Antigua Guatemala.”⁶⁹ Destinations within the state of Guatemala were serviced twice a month and the provinces to the southeast could expect mail from Guatemala City three times per month. The expenses incurred by special couriers were already, by this time, putting the mail administration in Guatemala in the red, and the cost-cutting measures suggested in 1824 by the administrator indicated a new set of priorities. Antonio Batres y Nájera recommended a range of options: paying the special couriers as ordinary correos; eliminating one of the trips to Oaxaca; eliminating one of the three trips to the provinces; or, lastly, sending the mail to Oaxaca only as far as the border between Guatemala and Mexico.⁷⁰ As it is the first mention of a correo handing off mail at a border, the final recommendation bears notice. It suggests a new conviction that the responsibility for the documents carried by the correo might cease at a specific, politically determined place along the route. And, of course, it indicates that the connection with Mexico was no longer the most vital, to be preserved at all costs.

In 1824, the administrator also attempted to create a special mail service between Guatemala City and Antigua Guatemala, calling it the correo de gabinete (cabinet mail service). Since the authorities of the Guatemalan state resided in Antigua and the authorities of the Central American Federation resided in Guatemala City, a constant communication was required between them. Batres y Nájera established service departing Antigua on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and returning to Guatemala City on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.⁷¹ The two cities thereby created a communication link that must have been experienced as a tremendous contraction of temporal and spatial distance. In 1826, before warfare disrupted service further, the state government recommended expanding this close communication network by creating more regular service to the “interior” of the state.⁷² This suggestion was abandoned for three years, during which warfare necessitated the frequent and expensive use of special couriers. Then, beginning in 1830, attempts were once again made to solidify communications within Guatemala and the Central American Federation. A proposal was made to link the long-neglected capital of Verapaz, Salamá, with a direct service to the capital. A weekly mail was established with Quetzaltenango, and every other week a correo would travel from the capital to Chiquimula and Cobán.⁷³ In 1831, the state government advised the Central American government that regular service should be established to Petén.⁷⁴ Despite a number of setbacks, weekly service between Guatemala and Chiapas was established in 1835, and in the same year proposals were made for providing a regular delivery of mail carried on horseback to San Salvador and León.⁷⁵ The temporary relocation of the Central American government’s capital to San Salvador in the 1830s made the route southeast of particular importance. Clearly, the reforms were intended to enable a more consistent and above all more frequent flow of information among the important cities and towns of Central America.

These ambitious efforts to provide Central America with more regular internal communication were plagued increasingly by warfare, cholera epidemics, and a lack of funds. In the year following its establishment, the mail to Chiapas had to be suspended due to insufficient funds, and the cholera outbreaks in the early 1830s and again in 1837 had the effect of paralyzing communication with Chiapas.⁷⁶ The epidemic had been controlled in 1834, but an outbreak in Belize in 1836 could not be effectively contained, resulting in a devastating 17% rate of illness and 5% fatalities.⁷⁷ Most scholars credit the 1837 cholera epidemic at least partially for provoking the rebellions that broke out after 1838.⁷⁸ During those years, Guatemalan Governor Mariano Gálvez was forced to abdicate, the Central American Federation was abolished by the Guatemalan state government, and then Central American President Francisco Morazán was called on to contend with Rafael Carrera and other leaders of rebellions across Guatemala. Necessarily, the pace and pattern of communication changed dramatically. The mail administration struggled to remain functional and was forced to entirely refocus its energies. Chiapas, previously one of the most important locations on the crucial route to Oaxaca, became one more outlying departamento in the eyes of the central office. By 1840, the administrator did not even consider the eighty-peso trip on horseback to Chiapas worth reestablishing, so paltry was the correspondence it carried.⁷⁹ While service to Chiapas, Verapaz, Petén, and other northern destinations continued sporadically, the Guatemalan government and the mail administration concentrated their attention and funds heavily on the route to the southeast, particularly to El Salvador. A city that had previously oriented itself primarily northward, emphasizing communication with Oaxaca and, beyond it, Spain, Guatemala became if not cut off certainly distanced from Chiapas and Mexico, reorienting itself to the southeast.

As the Central American conflict nucleated between the Guatemalan and Salvadoran capitals, the trip to San Salvador became the single most important information corridor between 1838 and 1845. Costing forty-two pesos and three reales for the roundtrip, the ordinary mail was rarely sufficient, though it was intended to travel weekly.⁸⁰ Special couriers were repeatedly required to communicate with officials in Chiquimula, Santa Ana, and El Salvador. The very importance of the communication they carried ensured that correos on the southeastern route became the targets of frequent assaults. Rafael Carrera himself assaulted the mail in September of 1839 near Jalpatagua, and in 1840 Salvadoran troops assaulted the mail in Quetzaltepeque and at the Río Paz.⁸¹ As the route to El Salvador grew in importance, it inevitably became more dangerous. Salvadoran troops became a frequent presence on the route, occasioning injury or even death for correos such as Julián Pacheco, who was killed in Santa Isabel, near Santa Ana, in 1840.⁸² The motives for assault had become decidedly strategic. As the presence of troops on the route grew and the number of assaults increased, the nature of the terrain changed. The routes were not only more dangerous; they had become politicized. For the first time, correos were forced to try alternate routes, not because of weather or the complaints of Indian villages, but to avoid confrontations with troops.⁸³ It is perhaps not too great a stretch to characterize the correo’s role, in this period, as quasi-military.

The strategic nature of the assaults is itself an indication of the kind of correspondence carried by correos during the period of turmoil in the late 1830s and early 1840s. The general dysfunction of Central American commerce and government during the 1837–1844 period makes it likely that the official mail dwindled during this period to correspondence relating directly to the political situation. In fact, even the correo on the crucial Guatemala–El Salvador route frequently returned to Guatemala without any correspondence at all.⁸⁴ And so, in a self-reinforcing cycle, the absence of correspondence prevented the reestablishment of consistent (solvent) mail service, which in turn made it impossible for people outside of the highest political circles to rely once again on the mail. Well into the 1840s, then, while the correo partly occupied his former role as a courier for the government and the public, he simultaneously functioned as a military messenger. Requiring safe-conduct papers and facing the likelihood of assault from hostile troops, the correo traveled a politicized and necessarily more dangerous route.⁸⁵

While ongoing challenges to Rafael Carrera’s leadership continued in the early 1840s, attempts were made to restore the mail service. A report prepared in early 1840 by Mariano Córdova, the Guatemalan mail administrator, gives some sense of the existing structure. Post offices in the state of Guatemala were located in Nueva Guatemala, Antigua Guatemala, Chimaltenango, Amatitán, Escuintla, Salamá, Zacapa, Chiquimula, Gualán, and Izabal. Córdova proposed sending and receiving mail according to the schedule shown in Table 4.1.⁸⁶

TABLE 4.1.

Incoming and outgoing mail schedule for Guatemala City, 1840

Source: Derived by the author from documents at the Archivo General de Centroamérica

Córdova attempted to launch this schedule despite the persistence of occasional assaults and the more than occasional absence of correspondence. He purchased new trunks for the mail routes within the state and gradually commenced weekly service to the more far-flung destinations. But after only a year and a half of following this schedule, Córdova was forced to admit that the routes were scarcely solvent. In an illuminating report written in 1841, Córdova declared that “the only routes I consider necessary and productive are those passing through the Department of Chiquimula, which channels the correspondence from overseas and the Port of Izabal and is therefore of value to commerce.”⁸⁷ In fact, the route to the port via Chiquimula was not only the sole profitable route: the revenue from the route financed all the others in Guatemala. The weekly mail to Antigua, which had become necessary to government officials and businesses alike, brought no profit but at least paid for itself. Meanwhile the routes to Salamá, Amatitán, Escuintla, and Los Altos barely brought in enough to cover a third of their cost. As Córdova argued, “this demonstrates that they are unnecessary, as there are very few people in them who even write.”⁸⁸ The old difficulty of finding enough writers to finance the passage of the mail had resurfaced once again. Despite the existence of a functional network and the capacity to deliver mail frequently, relatively few correspondents in Guatemala required the services of the system.

The mail system found itself in a paradoxical situation. While the Bourbon-era reforms had succeeded in creating a foundation for a relatively effective communications system, the two decades of internal conflict had dried up the sources of correspondence. Over the course of seventy-five years, document travel had become both faster and more frequent. In the absence of any significant technological change in the means of transportation, the mail system had nonetheless managed to create a network that reached more destinations more often and more quickly. These changes had the effect of creating a temporal and spatial contraction—of shortening distances. The mail system had also, in part, become more functional and maneagable because the territory it covered had become dramatically smaller. Distances had, then, also become literally shorter. Correos who had previously traveled hundreds of leagues north and south to Oaxaca and Costa Rica now traveled only as far as Chiapas and El Salvador. And Guatemala was no longer oriented as it had been toward Mexico and Spain.

This altered pace and orientation accompanied new conventions for the production of documents, resulting in a virtual end to the creation of “composite” documents. Documents written in Guatemala after the first quarter of the nineteenth century are more likely to be authored by a single person at a particular place and time than by several authors along a temporal and spatial route. Documents accumulated at each end of a correspondence, rather than circulating and concluding in a single place. While bureaucratic practices, the quality of and access to paper, and the reorganization of administrative offices doubtlessly played some part in restructuring document form, it seems clear that the new pace and systematization of communication had an impact as well.

The changing correspondence between Guatemala City and Chiquimula helps explain how composite documents transformed as communication improved. In 1769, the newly appointed mail administrator in Guatemala generated correspondence with other officials about establishing a monthly route that would pass through Chiquimula on the way to Honduras. The resulting thirty-page composite document involved nearly twenty distinct instances of writing or signing by officials in Guatemala City and Spain, and it was composed over the course of 1769 and 1770.⁸⁹ They determined that the mail would travel monthly through Chiquimula on the way to Honduras.⁹⁰ By 1795, the monthly mail route had made possible a fluid correspondence (discussed further in the next chapter) about the custodianship of an escribano archive in Chiquimula. The composite document about the archive was initiated in Chiquimula; it traveled to Guatemala City early in the month of August; and it returned to Chiquimula with the officials’ replies by the end of the month.⁹¹ Yet the adoption of an even more frequent mail delivery schedule would change the possibilities for this kind of composite document. By 1822, Chiquimula sent a correo to the capital every two weeks. The mail administrator wrote several letters to his superior in Guatemala City with every dispatch: individual letters that accumulated in the capital in files according to their subject and place of origin.⁹² The new mail schedule made it possible for the office in Chiquimula to communicate in greater volume and with greater speed, but both made it difficult to pursue the continuous chains of communication required to create composite documents. The increase in speed and volume made the free-form correspondence more practical. By the 1840s, the correspondence of the mail administrator to other officials rarely contained marginalia. Comments that would have gone in the margin of Córdova’s letter (Figure 4.1) were sent to him separately. The itinerary model and the radial model of correspondence, upon which colonial knowledge was built, were being replaced by a network formed of closed circuits.

These changes in communication and in the perception of distance were part and parcel of how Guatemala and the Central American states understood themselves to be taking shape politically. The conception of key places linked by routes necessarily contended with the conception of the new Central American states as bounded spaces. With the determination of boundaries came a new emphasis on demarcating space beyond that occupied by important roads and towns. For correos, dangers were no longer exclusively tied to treacherous routes and distant peripheries; dangers emerged from the politicization of regions and borders. The conception of bounded space had always been present, but it had not dominated the local perception of space and distance as it came to in the nineteenth century. At the highest administrative level, this was reflected in the first effort to create cartographic representations of the Guatemalan state. The recurrent military threat in different parts of what had formerly been the Kingdom of Guatemala necessitated more information than that provided previously by charts, tables, and relaciones geográficas. “Without maps, without tables, without surveys we cannot presently estimate the value or potential power of our province,” protested the director of the Sociedad Económica de Amantes de la Patria (Patriots’ Association of Economists), José Cecilio del Valle. He demanded the publication of “less inexact maps of our province . . . so we can at least have these drafts while the ones we should have are created.”⁹³ Valle knew of only five maps of the region, all of them inaccurate, and he hoped to have at least three maps: “one, of Indian Guatemala; another, of its Spanish political subdivisions; and a third of its post-independence departments, with a report on the resources of each one.”⁹⁴

FIGURE 4.1. Mariano Córdova letter from 1840

Source: Archivo General de Centroamérica. Photograph by the author.

José Felipe Mariano Gálvez commissioned the improved maps in 1831 and received them in 1832. The maps, executed by Miguel Rivera Maestre, are the first official cartographic representation of the state of Guatemala created in the region, and they reveal a remarkably altered landscape.⁹⁵ Though they were created for Gálvez in 1831–1832, when Guatemala was part of the Central American Federation, they specifically delineate only the “state of Guatemala in Central America.” This is hardly accidental; as Raymond Craib posits in his study of nineteenth-century Mexican state formation and cartography, the re-formulation of space in cartographic form served a political purpose. Craib argues that regional conflicts in Mexico “confounded any comforting thoughts of a unified national space and repeatedly raised the specter of total national disintegration.” Countering such disintegration, “a national map refuted such troublesome realities by visually affirming what supposedly already existed . . . Even simply delineating where Mexico ended and other nations began could be significant at a time when established boundaries and territorial cohesion were increasingly regarded as integral features of the modern nation-state.”⁹⁶

In the Guatemalan case, the shifting political relationships with Mexico and the states to the south necessitated a delineation of Guatemalan territory. As the Rivera maps make clear (Figures 4.2 and 4.3), territory was perceived as a measured, bounded landscape marked by topographical features, routes, and place-names. At this time and for these purposes, it made sense to use cartographic representations rather than itineraries. A first plate shows the whole of the state, bordered by the otherwise blank territories of “State of Honduras,” “State of Salvador,” “State of Chiapas,” “Tabasco,” and “Yucatán.”

The remaining seven plates detail of each of Guatemala’s new “departments,” including limited topographical markers (volcanoes, rivers, and rough elevations), towns, political boundaries, and roads. The maps rely on longitude and latitude, creating a landscape that is measured—and bounded—by a grid, as the map of Chiquimula demonstrates.⁹⁷

The Guatemalan landscape was clearly being represented in new ways. But to what extend do such representations reflect an end to colonial conceptions? Though these maps contrast sharply with the representations of space evident in the itineraries used by colonial mail officials, authors of geographical reports, and travelers, they should be interpreted as the culmination of gradual change and a shift in emphasis rather than a radical break with colonial notions. The altered political landscape of the nineteenth century foregrounded another dimension to the conception of Guatemalan space, but preexisting notions of distance, routes, and space remained in place as underlying elements.

The early nineteenth-century writings of José Arjona demonstrate aptly that there were as many continuities as there were changes. In a sense, the orders given to Capitán de Ingenieros José Arjona in 1826 were centuries old. He was asked to survey the newly independent states by traveling to Soconusco, Chiapas, Belize, Guatemala, and then farther south: another request for relaciones geográficas.⁹⁸ Yet some aspects of Arjona’s orders and his reports differ sharply from the conversation among colonial writers. Arjona’s orders were to provide a “military survey” of the region, and he obligingly provided a “military glimpse of the border—or rather a plan of defense for each of the contact points between departments.” Mirroring the cartographic depictions from the 1830s above, he emphasized the “demarcation of the dividing line, statistical sketches of the districts on either side of the line, and itineraries of the routes that lead to it.” Arjona set out to survey the Central American states just at the moment when they were beginning to fracture along the lines he described. From March to July of 1826, he traveled through the region and wrote detailed reports that belie the difficult circumstances of their composition. Arjona did not travel with a retinue and ecclesiastical privilege, as did Cortés y Larraz; nor did he have the obligatory support of townspeople as did the officials who composed relaciones geográficas in the colonial period; he could not even count on the basic supplies afforded to the mail carriers.

The difficulty of his task made itself evident in the questions he communicated to his superiors at the beginning of his journey to Chiapas.

Upon examining the weighty commission assigned to me, I have had the following doubts: First, if I should cover the entire province of Chiapas up to the old border (antiguos límites) between this state and Mexico. Second, if I should travel in private and if I should conceal all aspects of my purpose in making surveys and inquiries. Third, if I should observe the same behavior in acquiring information in this district as I did in the region of Soconusco. Fourth, if in some of the towns I may ask for assistance from the authorities, be it for a guide, supplies, or for information about the region.⁹⁹

Arjona’s doubts present a clear image of a man planning to travel with a low profile—if not, precisely, in disguise—and in a possibly hostile terrain. His would clearly not be a composite document; on the contrary, he was acutely aware of his isolation in completing his assignment. The note appended to his letter, which falls at the end of his portfolio, points to the dangerous nature of his work. Creating a secret code for the correspondence sent between him and the minister of war, Arjona implied the possibility that his documents might be stolen or read by enemy eyes. He may have been describing the same geographical region described by previous writers, but he was nonetheless describing a distinct social, political, and military terrain (Figure 4.4).

FIGURE 4.2. Rivera Maestre’s map of Guatemala

Source: Miguel Rivera Maestre

FIGURE 4.3. Rivera Maestre’s map of Chiquimula

Source: Miguel Rivera Maestre

FIGURE 4.4. José Arjona’s key to the code

Source: Archivo General de Centroamérica. Photograph by the author

The altered political landscape—a landscape that in Arjona’s time was also a militarized landscape—initially appears to be completely altered from the network of towns and parishes visited by officials in the eighteenth century. Borders matter in ways that they did not before. Both Arjona’s means of travel through the potentially hostile peripheries of the region and the objective of his descriptions are distinctive. They are not without precedent, however; instructions from mainland Spain during the colonial period placed intermittent emphasis on determining the military potential of roads, forts, and urban defenses. And upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that Arjona relied on assumptions common to the colonial period: “The long and extremely difficult communication existing between this district and the other points along the frontier will not permit a single officer (jefe) to govern its defense: it is therefore indispensable that this section be assigned to one separately.”¹⁰⁰ Though his concerns were military rather than spiritual, Arjona echoed Archbishop Cortés y Larraz, emphasizing the poor roads and the difficulty of governing a single area. The parallel becomes more striking in the description of the two routes into Soconusco: one had only two small, impoverished towns along a forty-eight league stretch; the other one ran along the coast. Arjona pointed out that “the towns from which we must draw resources lie at a great distance,” and he was worried about “the great misery of these towns and the tremendous obstacle posed by the roads, the weather, and the swarms of mosquitoes . . . that would all greatly debilitate the troops.”¹⁰¹

Arjona was clearly focused on a potential military campaign rather than on the spiritual health of the region’s people, but in many ways his observations echo those written by Cortés y Larraz more than fifty years earlier. The routes were poor and difficult to travel; the population was dispersed; the terrain was such that any governing individual would have to focus on a small area. Evidently the landscape in certain peripheries had not changed so radically. Arjona also described routes in detail, once again echoing Cortés y Larraz and the authors of geographical reports from the colonial period.

What of the use of spatial/temporal measures? Accompanying Arjona’s meticulous descriptions of the route and his travel along it are tables that seem to borrow from the colonial distance-interval charts and offer new improvements (Table 4.2).¹⁰² Arjona not only provided his measurement of the intervals listed in the left-hand column; he also detailed precisely his method of calculation. Describing a league as six thousand paces, or the number of two-and-a-half foot steps taken along a flat road in an hour, he provided an exact calculation for each segment of the journey. Segments running uphill or downhill were accounted for accordingly. In some sense, he was following the instructions sent from Spain fifty years earlier in the 1776 questionnaire that requested variable measures for different terrain (as described Chapter 1). His careful accounting leaves no doubt that he relied on a temporal/spatial measure for distances along the routes he traveled. It is also worthwhile noting that he titles his documents “itineraries.”

TABLE 4.2.

Portion of José Arjona’s distance measures

Source: Derived by the author from documents at the Archivo General de Centroamérica

Thus, despite Arjona’s unique military and political agenda specific to 1826, the tools and perspectives relied upon in his report are in many respects colonial in origin. The other portions of his report confirm this. Arjona provided detailed demographic tables listing “souls, men, households” for each town, and he reported on local production of maize, rice, and beans, the livestock holdings of each town, and the number of cacao trees.¹⁰³ For Belize (Walize), he listed the number of whites, free pardos, free blacks, slaves, and soldiers.¹⁰⁴ These charts are not unlike the colonial tribute tables and the geographical reports compiled by colonial officials. In other words, Arjona’s methods for taking stock of the regions he visited were essentially colonial methods.

There is nothing surprising about this overlap, if we consider that Arjona and his contemporaries were only recently “national” rather than “royal” subjects. It seems natural that they would rely on the practices that they had perfected over many decades. Even the apparent novelties of his approach have their roots in the late colonial period. The most notable novelty of Arjona’s account is the way in which it treats centers and peripheries. Spain, of course, is no longer a center at all. Mexico looms large as an absence. Guatemala, as center, is the vital place he corresponds with and returns to. And while peripheries are described in similar ways—hard to govern, hard to reach, slow to access—not all former peripheries remain peripheral.

How new is this, really? By considering the changes in the mail system alongside the new representations of space in the national period, it becomes clear that this novelty is in fact a colonial novelty. In the 1750s, as this and the previous chapter have shown, Guatemala City corresponded with various points within its administrative boundaries on an irregular, occasional basis. Within the reino, every place other than Guatemala City lay at a great distance, in terms of communication and travel. But by 1800, Guatemala City communicated with many locations monthly and with some places weekly. Quetzaltenango, Chiquimula, San Salvador, and Omoa, among others, were no longer as peripheral as they had been. Moreover, places other than the capital within the reino communicated with one another more easily and frequently. Some internal peripheries acquired a greater importance and facility of access than they had previously enjoyed. After independence, mail administrators essentially attempted to preserve and in some cases improve upon this colonial achievement. While certain places, such as those described by Arjona, remained peripheral, others had become regional centers. The facility of communication with internal peripheries added a new density and complexity to Guatemala City’s network as a whole. Gradually, Guatemala had become a place with peripheries that lay at less of a distance.