Part Three
5
I hereby order that from now on all decrees and letters . . . be stored in the archive of the audiencia and that a book be made to keep an accurate inventory of them so that they may be understood and obeyed with the greatest facility.1
—King Philip II, 1597
As Guatemalan peripheries shifted, distancing Spain and bringing formerly marginal places to the fore, a concurrent and related change occurred in how documents were stored. Chapter 4 has argued that while routes remained important to the imagining of places linked by distances, the perception of Guatemalan space into coterminous territories defined by political boundaries came into focus. It has also argued that conventions in correspondence changed, as the denser and more efficient mail system facilitated the creation of local correspondence “circuits” where previously the far-flung itinerary and radial modes of document travel had entirely dominated. As the next two chapters argue, the related manner of storing documents transformed as well, beginning in the late colonial period and continuing in the national period.
In the colonial period, the documents carried by Guatemalan correos traveled to the desks of ecclesiastical authorities and merchants, to the homes of individuals, and to officials in every corner of the Spanish empire. But once documents had traveled a particular spatial-temporal route through the audiencia, their travels did not end. Many of the official documents carried by correos traveled across the Atlantic or to a neighboring audiencia only to be stored for short or long periods of time in archives. These two stages of the document’s voyage were not unrelated; indeed, a pause in an archive was often simply a resting point in the creation of a composite document. The escribanos who kept colonial archives were also crucial to their composition and movement. Yet in the national period, the gradual transformation of composite documents made for documents with shorter life spans. Documents traveled from point of origin to point of receipt and remained there, their single journey complete. The archivists who replaced escribanos had less of a role in document creation and spatial movement: they primarily stored and organized sedentary paper. Archives, therefore, went from being nodes in the process of document creation and travel to being purely document repositories. Or, considered in a different light, archivists became custodians exclusively of a document’s temporal travel.
To reveal this transition, Chapter 5 focuses on the colonial period and argues that document travel and document storage were closely related practices. The organizational framework for document travel closely mirrored and complemented the framework for document storage. Correspondence inventories or indexes, in use even in the sixteenth century, were relied upon to organize documents sent between Guatemala and Spain. Similarly, the crown ordered that document inventories would form the necessary structure for official archives. “Books” were created to periodically inventory and index the contents of regional and central administrative offices. Additionally, the officials assigned to organize and safeguard archives, escribanos, had a close relationship to the mail system. As the official secretaries and scribes at various levels of government, escribanos were responsible not only for storing documents but also for discharging and receiving them. The principal escribano (escribano mayor) for the audiencia, for example, had the task of copying and disseminating mandates from the Guatemalan president, the king, and the Council of Indies.
This chapter also considers, relatedly, how escribanos acted as keepers of documentary “treasure” in their capacity as archivists. While documents created locally were certainly of importance, archives fulfilled the vital purposes of storing mandates that had traveled from central authorities. Decrees and letters sent by administrators in Spain were crucial to effective governance, and it was essential for the king to be assured that escribanos would protect, preserve, and disseminate his word in distant archives. The audiencia archives preserved orders from Spain, and regional archives preserved orders from the Guatemalan capital. Likewise, the audiencia preserved the gathered replies from its provinces, and the documentary storehouse in Seville preserved replies from every corner of the empire. Archives organized and directed the hierarchical movement of documents.
Treasure from Afar: Early Archival Practices
Essential to the granting of land titles, the writing of contracts, and the execution of justice, escribanos were critical to the early days of the cabildo and, later, the audiencia. More than mere scribes (escribientes), escribanos could be secretaries, notaries, witnesses, and archivists who oversaw the entire production of official documents.2 In light of their multiple responsibilities relating to document production, escribanos might also be considered the essential agents of standardization in processes that were necessarily composite.3 As multiple authors in various places contributed to a document’s formation, the presence of an escribano ensured that the document would follow prescribed guidelines and remain valid. Certainly the escribanos’ legal imprimatur was as important—if not more important—than their technical skills. Without the escribano’s signature or stamp, documents could not become official instruments. Angel Rama has written that escribano documents laid the groundwork for the future of American cities, stating that “before becoming a material reality of houses, streets, and plazas, which could be constructed only gradually over decades or centuries, Latin American cities sprang forth in signs and plans, already complete, in the documents that laid their statutory foundations and in the charts and plans that established their ideal designs.”4 Nevertheless, despite the crown’s reliance on the escribano as a stamp of legitimacy and an insurer of standardization, escribanos were “not disinterested bystanders,” as Kathryn Burns has pointed out.5 Escribano work did not always proceed “by the book,” and “words got to paper through a complicated relay process, one that might involve several people and considerable filtering and rewriting.” But it is precisely this composite relay process that made the escribano so essential.6 As producers of documents, escribanos necessarily determined many aspects of their creation, treatment, and storage.
The importance of escribanos was such that by 1529, the Guatemalan city council already relied on three, and in 1535 the Council of Indies requested detailed information on any additional escribanos in the province.7 From early on, an effort was made to ensure that escribanos were, as Burns puts it, “as Castilian as possible.”8 Guatemalan records indicate that legislation sent from Spain prohibited mestizos and mulattoes from becoming escribanos.9 They were subject to other constraints as well: as of 1619 in Guatemala they were not permitted to engage in commercial ventures, and they were generally not permitted to leave their jurisdiction.10 This was due in part to how escribanos were distributed throughout the audiencia and appointed at different ranks. Escribanos reales (royal scribes), not assigned to particular jurisdictions, could be further distinguished as ecclesiastical scribes, as escribanos de cámara y gobierno, or as escribanos for the city council, the province, or the audiencia.11 The escribano público del número (notary scribe), which Jorge Luján Muñoz likens to present-day notaries, were assigned to particular jurisdictions. It is worthwhile noting that escribanos in heavily Indian regions had to be repeatedly reprimanded for poor treatment of Indians, such that in 1605 the bishop in Guatemala requested that Spanish escribanos be removed from pueblos de indios for causing so many disputes.12 It is unclear whether this recommendation was followed, but in 1638 at least one position was created specifically for an Indian escribano, evidently because the corregidor believed him more capable of carrying out the necessary tasks.13
Legislation from the sixteenth century indicates that the crown considered the document repositories created by escribanos in the Americas equally vital to effective governance. A 1525 decree ordered that escribanos in the Caribbean periodically deposit indexes of any notarized documents with the newly created governing bodies of the islands.14 The organization and protection of archives was addressed in a 1536 real cédula sent to Guatemala mandating that all orders and decrees be stored in the council safe and be organized according to an inventory. The cédula urged that the council should “take great care” of the documents, and even went so far as to say that if “any of the stated provisions and ordinances that have previously been sent cannot be located in the province,” official copies would duly be made.15 Evidently knowledge of the contents of the decrees was not enough; their physical embodiment, certified and on paper, had its own significance. A real cédula sent several decades later to the Guatemalan audiencia further clarifies this intention. In 1566, the crown explicitly ordered that copies of cédulas, certified letters, and other mandates be stored in the cities and towns of the audiencia.16 The dissemination of such official copies would ensure both that the word of the king would be present throughout the audiencia and that his subjects would have recourse to local copies.
Certain escribanos had a particularly important role to play in ensuring that this procedure was followed. The escribano de cámara had a special obligation to not only copy and store such official mandates but also to be present for their initial receipt. A 1587 cédula reprimanded the officials of the audiencia for opening the correspondence from Spain without the escribano de cámara present. A cédula dated only a week later took the Guatemalan audiencia president to task for having sent a letter penned by a common servant rather than by the escribano de cámara. The escribano thereby played a unique role in legitimizing every aspect of how a document was handled. He had to supervise a document’s creation, he had to be present when official documents from Spain were received, and he had to be involved in a document’s subsequent storage and, if necessary, duplication.17
The escribano’s role as intermediary between the processes of sending and storing documents appears to have been entirely by design. The archive played a key part in both processes. As a 1596 real cédula makes explicit, the archive was conceived in early legislation as a kind of safety net (or, to mix metaphors, a “backup” system) for the process of exchanging correspondence. The brief cédula is worth quoting fully, as it explains precisely the rationale linking document travel and document storage.
President and high judges of my royal audiencia in the city of Santiago in the province of Guatemala it being convenient and Necessary that a register be kept there of the letters sent to me from that audiencia, and it being my understanding that this is not done, I Order that from now on, all letters sent to me from that audiencia, regardless of what matter they pertain to, be copied and a register of them be kept and that you the president and high judges who write them keep a record of them in bound books because it is my wish that you have such books there and because it is also convenient that all provisions, decrees and letters sent from here be carefully safeguarded from now on. And in order for this to be done with the proper clarity and order, I Order that that they be placed in order in the archive of that audiencia and that there be a book where they shall all be recorded to the letter, and So that they may be found and obeyed easily they should be organized according to topic and a table should be made of them because it could happen that if some of the orders in them are not made known they will not be obeyed. And once this book is made you shall send me a copy with an account of the decrees it contains and which have been obeyed and which have not and why this is so.18
This cédula succinctly combines the imperative to see ingoing mandates logged, copied, safeguarded, and obeyed with the need to see outgoing correspondence copied and accounted for. Philip II leaves no doubt that these two forms of record-keeping were meant to be stored in the same place. The audiencia archive therefore had the double task of storing copies of outgoing correspondence and storing books of incoming decrees and mandates. As the cédula clarifies in its final section, Philip also wished to have sent back to him a copy of the book storing his own decrees. Perhaps the distant archive in Guatemala can be more clearly conceptualized not as a safety net or a backup system but as a mirror: a documentary reflection of the paperwork on the other side of the Atlantic. In its ideal form, the archive in Guatemala would have mirrored the correspondence sent to Spain and the book of cédulas would have mirrored Philip’s own collection of decrees. At the heart of the cédula lay the objectives of good governance. Acknowledging that orders could not be fulfilled if they were not well and widely known, the cédula characterized the archive as a place that would both safeguard and, crucially, make accessible the decrees and provisions sent by the king.
The archive had consequently to protect information and provide information at the same time. To this end, escribanos were charged with duplicating documents that might be required by officials while guarding their originals. From early on in the colonial period, officials attempted to “borrow” documents from the archive, a practice the cédulas from Spain strictly prohibited. A 1587 cédula castigated one of the audiencia judges for taking the safe filled with cédulas and provisiones to his home. Protesting that a stray document could easily be lost in this manner, the cédula ordered that officials were to request only the specific document they needed.19 Some decades later, the practice was amended to prevent even a single document from leaving the archive. In 1621, a high judge in the audiencia had an entire bundle of papers sent to the office of an escribano público, a notary outside of the audiencia office. This prompted an order stating that no original was to leave the archive; rather copies were to be certified and witnessed for consultation outside the archive.20 The clearest articulation of what would become standard policy came only a few years later, in a 1624 cédula that decried the rumors of documents floating free outside the archive and insisted, “because of the danger that they may be lost or damaged . . . I do order that the books and papers be stored in the archive . . . under two locks and that none shall be taken from it but rather when necessary they shall be viewed in the archive and copies made there.”21 The archive safe of the Guatemalan audiencia was from then on kept under lock and key.
As access to the archive was strictly controlled, so did control over its papers become contentious. In 1626, a Guatemalan regidor (councilman) demanded that he be given one of the keys to the archive, since the officials who held the keys appeared to treat the documents carelessly. The councilman found one of the “ancient books pertaining to the founding of the city” missing, and upon inquiring was coolly informed that another official was keeping it at home. He protested that this would not do, since there were “ancient documents that must be protected as they guard secrets that should not be known by anyone.”22 The documentary treasure, then, consisted not only of more recent cédulas and mandates from Spain essential to effective governance but also ancient documents considered vital to the city’s foundations. What made them valuable, in the councilman’s eyes, was their “secret” content and their pertinence to the city’s establishment.
Implicitly, however, what made them particularly valuable was their status as originals. In other words, they were valuable as material objects apart from their content. The solution to protecting the valuable material objects in the archive while making their content accessible to officials therefore relied heavily on escribanos and their compliance in providing certified copies (traslados or testimonios). Reales cédulas repeatedly stressed that escribanos were obliged to copy documents faithfully, even if they had not authored the originals. In 1643 escribanos were exhorted to take greater care, as their copies of documents penned by others were observed to be “not very faithful or legal.”23 As control of archives—particularly the audiencia archive under the charge of the escribano de cámara—grew more effective, their documents were both safer and harder to access. Escribanos could either readily provide faithful copies of archive documents or, on the contrary, refuse to provide copies or provide sloppy copies. In the late seventeenth century, the Guatemalan Fiscal himself had difficulty extracting documents from the escribanos, prompting him to level a fine against the escribano de cámara and certain escribanos de provincia.24 Writing from Spain, the king found himself apologizing for the escribanos to the Fiscal while demanding that they comply with his requests. He recognized that escribanos occupied positions of unusual power. They provided the vital protection for archives and the equally vital stamp of validity for documents, but as keepers of both their lack of cooperation could potentially obstruct the entire flow of paperwork that allowed the transatlantic empire to function.
Archives and Escribanos in the Eighteenth Century
Throughout the eighteenth century, Guatemalan escribanos continued to play a crucial role in the organization and safekeeping of documents. Efforts were made to improve Guatemalan officials’ accessibility to archival documents, such as in the creation of a central depository for the documents of deceased escribanos and in the greater emphasis on the escribano’s obligation to provide copies of documents under lock and key.25 But this did little to change the escribano’s role as the principal overseer of document production in eighteenth-century Guatemala. Likewise, escribano archival practices changed little during this period.26 The principal tool relied upon by escribanos for the organization and safekeeping of documents continued to be an inventory or index.
Echoing the 1596 orders, the king reprimanded his Guatemalan audiencia in 1710, saying “the Council of Indies has received various documents of yours, and there was not an index accompanying them, as is customary.” Even when the index traveled in the same ship with the indexed letters or decrees and therefore ran the same risk of loss or theft, it was seen as a necessary safeguard.27 Indexes were likewise relied upon for the ordering of archives, as the early cédula quoted at the beginning of the chapter and many later decrees demonstrate.28 Lest this identical method of organization seem a superficial similarity, it should be noted that the rationale for indexing archival contents was the same as the rationale for indexing correspondence. Indexes of archival contents were necessary to account for “lost” documents. As an early eighteenth-century set of instructions for re-ordering the Guatemalan ayuntamiento archive makes clear, the intent was to avoid the “very evident risk as is today lamentably manifest in the loss” of documents. The official complaining of the archive’s deplorable state pointed to the absence of important volumes and demanded that “an inventory be made of all the papers in the archive, which . . . should be executed by the escribano of the ayuntamiento.”29 The archive contained a great deal of documentary treasure, as the official was careful to point out.
Internal complaints were echoed by later decrees sent from Spain and elaborated by audiencia officials. In 1761, the king wrote to the audiencia upbraiding its officials for the poor state of their archives. Pointing directly to the difficulties posed by distance, which precluded his subjects from consulting with him directly, the king stressed the need to not only keep cédulas and mandates in order but to also keep careful records of all documents produced by the audiencia.30 The audiencia officials put the king’s orders into effect by addressing the “disorder” of the archive papers and noting that a loose cédula was too easy to misplace (“traspapelarse”) or steal. The Guatemalan Fiscal admitted that in the escribanía de cámara “many cannot be found, either due to poor organization or to carelessness.” He reminded the audiencia that the correct procedure was for the escribano to keep a “book of copies” of the decrees, so that the original might be kept safe. He also called for the decrees to be indexed, “as was done in the past”: a lapsed practice that the Fiscal insisted the escribanos adhere to.31 Much like correspondence that might be ruined by water, lost during travel, or stolen as it changed hands, documents in the archive ran analogous risks due to poor storage conditions, poor organization, and theft. While proper procedures were crucial at each stage to minimize these risks, the most reliable way to both prevent and account for lost documents was to keep rigorous inventories and indexes of every single document received and produced by the audiencia.
The indexes of Guatemalan escribanos testify to their efforts in fulfilling these mandates. Escribanos duly kept copy books of all decrees, as well as log books of all document traffic (libros de conocimientos), draft books with notes and rough copies of letters, and books recording incoming correspondence.32 The libros de conocimientos kept by the escribano de cámara could span several years, listing each document acted upon by the office.33 Separate books recording correspondence with subordinate offices were in some cases organized based on location, as, for example, a notebook initiated in 1771 recorded all correspondence with the administration in Tuxtla. Noting the date of the incoming correspondence, the escribano also indicated when a reply had been sent, thereby giving a clear sense of the pace of communication. Receiving on average one or two pieces of mail from Tuxtla each month, the escribano in Guatemala usually took two weeks to a month to reply.34 Demonstrating once again the escribanos’ role in the movement of documents, the itinerary for cordilleras in Table 5.1 suggests that the Tuxtla book would have been one among many. With a circulation route in mind, the escribano would keep correspondence books for each location.35
TABLE 5.1.
Late colonial itineraries for escribano documents
Source: Derived by the author from documents at the Archivo General de Centroamérica
With such an active role in document circulation, the escribano naturally incorporated the organization of document circulation into the organization for document storage. Other volumes grouped correspondence from various locations but organized the documents geographically within the volume. A 1767 book of correspondence with tax collection offices throughout the audiencia subdivided the correspondence with Omoa, Golfo, Chiquimula and Zacapa, Sonsonate, Quetzaltenango, Totonicapán, Sololá, Escuintla, Verapaz, Mazatenango, Sacatepéquez, and the capital.36 Adhering to the rule of keeping even their rough drafts logged, the escribanos de cámara kept books of their office’s preparatory work, thereby providing some insight into the less official side of their workday.37 The book preserved the doodles, drafts, and idle musings of escribano staff over a forty-year period, from which the cover of this book is taken. Burns has observed a similar, more extensive “menagerie of fanciful creatures” in the colonial archives of Peru, and such pages offer brief, distorted glimpses into the many aspects of escribano work that was not preserved, cataloged, and indexed.38
The escribanos in regional offices were charged not only with overseeing the production and storage of documents in their district, but also with coordinating their documents with escribanos at other levels of government. A set of guidelines sent from Spain in 1768 outlining the procedures for writing and storing mortgages at the regional level highlighted the methods of organization and archiving demanded of local escribanos.
It will be the obligation of the Escribanos of the municipal governments to keep one book or several with separate registers for each of the towns in the district, with their corresponding log, such that there is a clear account of which mortgages exist in which town, and the logs should be organized by year, so that updates might easily be made, and they should be paginated and bound in the same manner used by Escribanos for their notary books, and if the mortgages be located in more than one Town, they should be registered in the books for each corresponding place.39
The instructions emphasized a method of organization that was primarily spatial and secondarily temporal. They also specified which documents were to be archived by the escribano, stating that “the legal instrument that should be exhibited at the mortgage Office, should be the first copy made by the Escribano, which is called the original, except when it is an ancient document that has been misplaced or lost, in which case it should be a copy certified by a competent Judge.”40 While the latter instructions placed greatest emphasis on the safety of the document and its status as an original copy, the former focused on ease of access. The guidelines took the matter of locating documents further, specifying that in addition to organizing the mortgages by location and year, escribanos were to keep separate indexes.
To facilitate locating documents, the municipal government’s Escribanía should have an index Book or general Register, in which according to the letters of the alphabet the names of the Signatories to the mortgages and the districts or parishes where they are located should be listed, and next to each should be noted the page where the document regarding the given mortgage, person, parish or territory is to be found: by this means it will be possible to find any mortgage that needs to be located by three or four different methods; and to facilitate the creation of this general alphabetical index, whenever the document is created it should be entered in the Index.41
The instructions indicate clearly that the documents were stored not only for their value as originals but also for their continued use as legal instruments. The emphasis on being able to locate documents easily and by various routes suggests that the escribanías anticipated a fair amount of traffic from people who wished to see copies of mortgages. In other words, the archive was now constituted in the instructions not as a treasure house of untouched documents but as a living archive frequently consulted by officials and other individuals. “Since the conservation of public documents is so important to the State,” the instructions continued, “all the Escribanos throughout the region should send to the Judge or District Governor an annual register of the legal instruments existing in their notary books, so that it be stored in the Escribanía of the municipal government.”42 The index would permit the official and the escribano to identify any missing document not registered in the logbook. In a manner exactly parallel, then, to the system promoted for keeping track of correspondence, the guidelines sought to create matching indexes in two places that would mirror each other and signal the absence of missing documents. Just as the king expected to receive an index of correspondence matching the index of sent mail in Guatemala, the district governor or judge would receive an index of documents ideally matching the register held by the local escribano. Indexing thus served the dual purpose of facilitating “way-finding” within an archive and preventing document loss.
The other, complementary method of facilitating way-finding and document safety was to promote centralization and consolidation of archival material. Already, the structure of composite documents inherently encouraged both. When a single matter was initiated and elaborated in multiple sites, then sent to a central office for approval, the composite document reflecting all of these steps would naturally be stored in its final destination—the central office. Thus places like the Casa de Contratación in Seville or the Guatemalan audiencia effortlessly accumulated documentary material on matters large and small. But the range of institutions and the presence of regional notaries complicated this centralization. Just as the mail service kept its own archive, so did the escribano in Totonicapán keep his own protocolos. Beginning early in the colonial period, efforts were under way to consolidate document holdings in both Spanish America and Spain.
The Simancas archive, founded by Philip II between 1540 and 1545, became a primary site for document collection in the eighteenth century. A 1726 manuscript by Agustín Santiago Riol, titled “Report on the waste and loss of political papers belonging to Spain and remedies that should be followed for their conservation,” lamented that foreign invasions and the habits of a traveling court had resulted in many documents being lost or destroyed.43 Riol observed, giving due credit to internal strife and rapacious royal councilors, that by the early eighteenth century archives found themselves in a truly sorry state. He felt obliged to point out that the king’s effort in 1718 to transfer documents to Simancas had not improved the situation. “In 1718,” he wrote, “your majesty ordered taken to the Archive of Simancas all the papers of the Councils and Offices for which there was already a given place, but this was done with such careless haste that it left no occasion for the offices to inventory which documents were taken.”44 Riol did his best to counter these adverse circumstances by surveying the state of existing archives.
The report demonstrates clearly that royal offices in Spain each continued to keep their own archives in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, and it was his belief that this had in part permitted the very uneven treatment—and consequent occasional neglect—of royal documents. The Council of Castile’s papers, for example, suffered from similar indignities to those experienced in Guatemala, where officials withdrew documents whenever and however they saw fit.45 The papers at the archive of the Presidency of Castile, Riol protested, “have been treated with such neglect that I have seen them many times thrown on the floor of the room, exposed to the view of anyone and everyone. Their state is so grave and they require great care,” he insisted, due to the important “secrets” that they contained.46 The Inquisition, by contrast, had kept its archives in very good order, such that “the Inquisition has a great advantage over other councils in that it can easily determine what has transpired to its benefit in the past because its papers are in better order than those of the others.”47 Thus by 1726 official document troves found themselves in varied conditions, and no small part of the confusion was due to the fact that their contents had already been partly transferred, either informally and gradually by officials or by direct order in larger chunks. Riol pointed to the fact, for example, that he had written his brief account of the Inquisition for his report based on documents found at the Simancas archive.48
Their consolidation would, in theory, make it simpler to consult related documents pertaining to a single issue or branch of government. As various documents were transferred to Simancas in 1718 and other document caches were combined, the task of finding them was potentially made easier. Riol repeatedly argued, however, that consolidating archives was no substitute for careful inventorying. Writing of the office of the Cámara de Gracia, for example, an archive that had its origins in medieval record-keeping, he observed that some documents were not inventoried at all and others were inventoried poorly.
The manner in which its papers are kept is not in so disorderly a fashion as with the other offices, but it is still confusing and obscure, because while the case documents and others are inventoried, the inventories are so minimal that they only list the names of the interested parties, and when one looks for a document it is difficult to find it without knowing its date.49
Other portions of the archive had no inventory at all, and when he recognized that “it would be very important to make an Index of them” because the time-consuming project had never been accomplished, he took on the task himself. “I began to silently make a few notes along an alphabetical index of some particulars,” he wrote, “and realizing that there was no unimportant document among those precious pages I thought to embark on a fundamental and universal work treating all of them without omission.”50 Riol’s report is thus not bent wholly on the goal of archive consolidation. Transferring papers to Simancas was a worthwhile goal, he implied, as long as this was done by preserving and properly indexing them.
In Spanish America, these priorities were reflected in both the mandates received from Spain and in the consequent reforms carried out in official archives. Tamar Herzog, in her study of escribanos and archives in Quito, also places the initial stages of archival consolidation early in the seventeenth century. Herzog characterizes the early formation of archives in Spain as an effort to wrest control from escribanos who held a monopolistic control of documents, rather than as an effort to preserve documents.51 She indicates that later on in 1780, a concerted effort was made in Quito to gather government-related documents in a central location. It seems that in Guatemala—consistent with Riol’s manuscript—efforts at consolidation were more concerned with preserving documents than with wresting control from escribanos. Luján Muñoz points to the 1699 mandate in Guatemala to create an archive in the ayuntamiento for the records belonging to deceased escribanos.52 And he points to a case in Veracruz in which an escribano attempted to retain the notary books of a deceased colleague and was overruled.53 Similarly, an escribano for the Guatemalan city council was ordered to return certain books and papers within three days when they were found missing from the archive in 1755. The official complaining of the missing documents pointed out that they were not bequeathed to the escribano by his predecessor for him to do as he liked.54 So while an escribano maintained control of his documents during his lifetime, the central administration effectively absorbed his documents after his death. Nonetheless, escribanos were still trusted more than other officials with document holdings prior to their eventual incorporation.
Stray papers were repeatedly ordered back into the escribano’s care in Guatemala. In 1769, for example, an order was given for papers found in the office a deceased official, Pedro Ortiz de Letona, to be handed over to the escribano. The official giving the order agreed that these documents were necessary for bookkeeping purposes, and he demanded that the escribano create a proper inventory of the papers “for their improved organization.”55 Similarly, after the 1773 earthquake, efforts were made to restore to the escribano mayor’s care papers abandoned in the ruined capital. Ordering that the abandoned documents be restored to the escribano within fifteen days, the decree lamented the state of the archive, emphasizing that it contained “the most sacred deposit of treasures and public writings, which preserve the most ancient contracts and the wise decrees of the king spanning more than two centuries.” Languishing in the ruined capital, they lay “on the floor, exposed to dampness, rot, and vermin.”56 Once again, the welfare of the city’s documentary treasure—at least among certain officials—prompted efforts to consolidate stray papers.
The efforts at archive consolidation can be seen as corresponding with and reinforcing the continued emphasis in the eighteenth century on prohibiting original documents from leaving official archives. Since escribanos were the established custodians of archives, this resulted in a consistent and enduring privileging of the escribano’s control of important papers. The matter could not have been put more clearly than it was in 1764, in a decree sent from Spain responding to rumors of documents being withdrawn from the Royal Treasury in the Philippines.
I have resolved, that under no pretext may the books or papers archived in my Royal Offices be withdrawn, nor may they be handed out for any reason by their custodians; and only in very exceptional cases may Viceroys, Presidents, and Governors send an audiencia minister from the district accompanied by a government escribano, to make any copy that might be necessary.57
Curtailing even the power of his highest officials in Spanish America, the king placed the safety of the documents above all other concerns. But as the decree makes clear, the intent was not to empower escribanos but to assure that documentary treasure was kept secure. In the attempt to obey these orders, officials in Guatemala in the eighteenth century placed their escribanos in command of archives that were increasingly consolidated and well organized.
The Keys to the Archive: Disputes over Custodianship of Guatemalan Documents
Disputes over archival materials in eighteenth-century Guatemala are relatively rare. The numerous and explicit decrees from Spain and the long tradition of assigning custodianship to escribanos left little doubt as to the rightful place of official documents. Most documents pertaining to archive management in the eighteenth century address the problem of stray papers and the persistent tendency among high-ranking officials to withdraw original copies from the archive. To a lesser extent, Guatemalan officials echoed Riol’s call for greater tidiness and organization. The disputes discussed below that did occur, however, are particularly illuminating, as they shed light on the question of ownership versus custodianship.
In the 1720s, a bitter personal dispute between the district governor of Sonsonate and the district’s escribano, Juan Antonio de Torres, led the escribano to seek an injunction against the district governor and his family. Traveling to Guatemala to seek the injunction, the escribano necessarily abandoned his post, a circumstance which prompted the district governor to take a radical step. “The papers and books of his archive were taken from the house of the escribano” and placed in the central office. The district governor claimed that the escribano had essentially forfeited his post and his right to the archive by abandoning his position and traveling to the capital. The dispute made its way all the way to Spain, where the king weighed in on the question of whether the escribano had neglected his duties. In 1728, Torres was ordered back to Sonsonate and was charged with a fine for having temporarily abandoned his post. However, it was also ordered that he be fully restored to his position as escribano “quickly and without delay and that the district governor and the council return to him all the papers pertaining to his office and that in the future they treat him respectfully and without giving cause for any complaint.”58
The dispute provides a glimpse into the surprising enmity that occasionally arose between officials, but it also offers telling indications of the escribano’s position as the custodian of official documents. It is worth noting that the documents were originally kept in Torres’s house (identified, quite explicitly, as his “casa”), which demonstrates that he probably conducted his business as official escribano for the district from his home.59 The district governor’s abrupt removal of the documents during Torres’s absence may have been motivated largely by spite, but it nonetheless suggests that the papers were of continuing use to officials in Sonsonate; or, at the very least, it was plausible that the papers would be of continuing use and had therefore to be made accessible. Even when Torres was found to have been to some degree at fault for neglecting his post, he was considered the rightful custodian of the documents. The emphasis of the 1728 document, with its composite parts written in Guatemala and Spain, is clearly directed toward the restoration of the escribano office. The 1728 document was stored in the Guatemalan capital under the heading, “Ordering that the district governors of Sonsonate return and restore to Don Juan Antonio de Torres, escribano, all the papers and legal instruments belonging to his archive with all due accounts, and that they execute the other matters discussed herein.”60 Written as a matter of course, the title’s mention of “his” archive is nonetheless worth noting.61
A similar case occurred in the late eighteenth century in Chiquimula. The corregidor for the province of Chiquimula and Zacapa, Tomás de Mollinedo y Villavicencio, complained that the escribano, one Enrique Girón Alvarado, had attempted to transfer the archive to his house.
The escribano of this province, Don Enrique Girón, wishes to have the Archive presented to him so that he may move it to his house, a wish that I, your corregidor, have not agreed to. In the first place because the archive should remain in the building that belongs to the Royal office, and said escribano should assist in the archive at least three hours in the morning and three in the afternoon to attend to any tasks that might arise.62
Mollinedo y Villavicencio went on to claim, in the second place, that the archive had always customarily been held in the royal offices and in the power of the corregidor because of the “bad consequences that have resulted on occasion.” While in the power of the corregidor, he argued, the archive was made available to the escribano by granting him a key that would permit him free access to any papers he needed for the fulfillment of his obligations.63 Mollinedo y Villavicencio concluded by asking his superiors in Guatemala City to clarify the obligations and privileges with regard to the archive.
The escribano, Enrique Girón Alvarado, simultaneously wrote to officials in Guatemala protesting that the archive had been withheld, despite the fact that his real título, the document bearing his license and notice of his appointment, indicated that the archive would be his responsibility. “It was denied me,” he wrote, “on the pretext that said archive should remain in the charge of the corregidores, when in fact it should be the contrary, since it has been the custom from time immemorial that the Archives have been and are in the charge of the Escribanos, as it is to them that their custody corresponds.”64 The opposing interpretations of the escribano and the corregidor appear to have been motivated by causes other than personal enmity—at least initially. Girón evidently was a recent appointment to the post in Chiquimula, and Mollinedo y Villavicencio was a veteran official who had only lately arrived in the region.65
The response from officials in Guatemala was in some degree surprising. The Fiscal stated that “if the archive is situated in the house of the corregidor it does not cease to be the responsibility of the escribano.”66 The audiencia’s final verdict suggested a compromise, since it gave some responsibility to both the corregidor and the escribano but by doing so it created space for contradictory interpretations.
It is ordered that the archive should exist in the room designated for it: that the escribano should be presented with all the papers pertaining to his office accompanied by a formal inventory, and he should have in his power a key permitting him to attend the office during the hours determined by the corregidor for the transaction of business.67
By ordering that the archive should be kept “in the room designated for it,” the officials either unwittingly or intentionally left the precise location of the room unspecified. Perhaps the instructions stating that the escribano was to be given a key were suggestive, indicating that room would not be his; but this implication was not sufficiently transparent. Mollinedo y Villavicencio wrote back at once, promising to put the orders into effect, and evidently interpreting the orders heavily in his favor.
The dispute over the archive did not end there. A full four years later, Enrique Girón Alvarado wrote to the officials in Guatemala again, protesting that the corregidor had failed entirely to present him with the papers of the archive as ordered. Girón took a particular view of the orders sent from Guatemala, which he cited as stating that “it falls to me to have the Archive.”68 Instead of presenting him with the papers as ordered, Girón argued, the corregidor had followed his own “capricious system” and denied him the papers for all of four years. Girón claimed to be most disturbed by the state in which Mollinedo y Villavicencio kept the archive.
This is not the worst, Sir, as the Room in which the archive is kept is also used as a Storeroom or Dispensary where rifles and even comestibles are kept. And these naturally attract insects, rats, and other pests that eat the papers, a fact I can testify to as I have had occasion to see the door casually left open. There are many documents, lying unused, that have been eaten by moths and rats, for where hygiene and care are lacking this often occurs.69
As if to provide damning evidence of the poor treatment of documents in Chiquimula, all the papers pertaining to the case—including Girón’s—were duly eaten away (Figure 5.1).
The troubling state of the archive, Girón wrote, impelled him to write once again to the officials in Guatemala. He could not be responsible, he protested, for the poor state of the papers when they were handled by the corregidor, his family, and others who had no sense of how to treat valuable documents. He begged the officials to insist with the corregidor, so that the archive might be turned over to him. In a brief postscript, he asked the officials to request the intervention of higher authorities in Chiquimula. The corregidor, having been informed on the first occasion that Girón was pursuing retrieval of the archive, had taken revenge by incarcerating one of the escribano’s domestics.70 Girón’s letter reached Guatemala, and the officials of the audiencia ordered that an inquiry be made into the situation in Chiquimula. They sent a letter to the corregidor, and they sent an official, Don Juan de la Paz, to investigate, but nothing further is known of where the archive remained or who took responsibility for its care. Perhaps the state of the documents themselves speaks most clearly as to their probable fate.
FIGURE 5.1. A document from Chiquimula, eaten by vermin
Source: Archivo General de Centroamérica. Photograph by the author.
The decision taken by Guatemalan officials in the Chiquimula case was clearly not the only opinion rendered on the custodianship of archives, so it would be a mistake to generalize too broadly based on the dispute. However, a few points might be safely inferred. The reaction of the officials in Guatemala in response to the Chiquimula dispute, whatever ambiguities it may have permitted, clearly privileged the escribano as the custodian of the archive under any circumstance. The Fiscal emphasized that even were the archive to be situated in the corregidor’s own rooms, the escribano would still bear responsibility for the archive. Seen in this light, the ambiguous instructions to place the archive in the “room designated (destinado) for it” appear to convey the message that the room itself was irrelevant: wherever the designated room might be, the archive was the responsibility of the escribano. The important question was not ownership so much as custodianship.
The decision—or, rather, the follow-up to it—also makes apparent the officials’ continued concern with the safekeeping of documents. No doubt Girón expected to strike a chord with his vivid description of documents carelessly strewn in a storeroom, prey to insects and rats. The officials’ decision to send a representative in person surely testifies to the seriousness of their response. Lastly, the original instructions from Guatemala also place a distinct emphasis on the use of an inventory for the transferal of documents. Their orders stating that the archive should be presented to Girón with a “formal inventory” were intended to ensure that the papers were presented according to protocol. The transfer of documents—and other materials—by inventory constituted one important step in the transfer of office between officials.
A transfer of archival papers beyond the office of escribanos will help to demonstrate the importance of the inventory as an instrument in “moving” papers. The Guatemalan mail office did not hire its own escribano, but it nonetheless relied on an extensive archive that included legal documents, correspondence, and logbooks of incoming and outgoing mail. In the 1770s, the Guatemalan mail administrator Simón de Larrazábal found himself still deprived of the archive held by his predecessor, Joseph Melchor de Ugalde. The death of Melchor de Ugalde had left the archive and the contents of the office in the hands of the interim administrator, Andrés Palomo, who had failed to deliver them. The documents and other effects were found in Melchor de Ugalde’s house, kept and cared for by his widow. In 1774, a formal inventory of the archive and other contents of the office was finally created by an escribano, Don Joseph Sánchez de León, who was attended by several witnesses. A clean copy of the inventory, destined for the mail administration’s archive, was written on papel sellado. Beginning the list of “papers and furniture,” he inventoried the “books” found in Melchor de Ugalde’s care. Notebooks containing accounting information, logs of incoming and outgoing mail, communication with regional offices, and other important paperwork were described in terms of their contents and number of pages. The inventory made note of blank pages and the frequent absence of signatures on many of the documents in the notebooks.71
Several pages inventorying documents were followed by a list of furniture. The office contents offers both a detailed visualization of the mail office and a clear explanation for why the documents and “furniture” were equally important to the transfer of office. Melchor de Ugalde’s office included generic items, such as six metal candleholders, two narrow cedar-wood tables, and a large writing table. But it also contained a collection of items without which it would have been difficult to execute the receipt and delivery of mail at all. His office contained a scale, crystal inkpots, two wooden seals bearing the inscriptions “Yndias” and “Guathemala,” a mailbox for the receipt of local mail, a sign with a coat of arms for the office door, numerous large and small mail trunks with their chains and locks, and an office safe.72 The inventory concluded that “there are no additional papers, letters, or furniture belonging (pertenecientes) to the Administration.”73
The retrieval of the documents and furniture reveals the various levels of custodianship. Melchor de Ugalde’s widow, who had implicitly cared for the documents and furniture since October of 1770, when her husband passed away, had no claim upon the objects she had housed for four years.74 Andrés Palomo was their temporary custodian, as is made clear in the questions put to him about the contents of the office safe. Their ultimate custodian was Simón de Larrazábal, but they “belonged” to the Administration. Just as Palomo and Melchor de Ugalde’s widow would not have dreamed of keeping the seals, the mail trunks, and the office safe, they made no claim to the documents written by Melchor de Ugalde—the archival documents essential to the effective management of the mail system.
The “delivery” of the archive by means of an inventory highlights the use of the inventory as an instrument for safekeeping. It also points to the similarities between the risks of moving documents across extended spatial distances and the risks of moving documents across shorter distances: from one office to another, or from one custodian to another. During transportation to Mexico or Spain, documents might be lost, stolen, or destroyed by poor weather. Similarly, as the Chiquimula dispute makes evident, documents might be destroyed or misplaced while stationary. The use of an inventory permitted accountability and therefore greater safekeeping. As the numerous cédulas sent throughout the colonial period make evident, the safety of documentary treasure continued to be a concern even when documents were nominally under the escribano’s lock and key. Certainly it was essential to facilitate access to useful documents, but preventing loss or theft was paramount. The archive inventory provided both, creating ease of access and ensuring—theoretically—the safety of each listed document.