In the summer of 1993 I began a long stay in Tucurrique, Costa Rica, a town I had lived in for some years as a child but could not remember. A Costa Rican friend later laughed at the mention of Tucurrique, saying that though he had never heard of the town, the word meant something like “that out of the way place” or “that corner in the middle of nowhere.” And, in fact, Tucurrique felt to me on that trip like a place in the middle of nowhere. I flew to San José, took a bus to Turrialba, waited for a bus connection, and then took another bus to Tucurrique. We passed more than one mud slide on the winding dirt road, and the River Reventazón, as the name suggests, was swollen to bursting with muddy water. The months I spent in Tucurrique were profoundly disorienting in the way an extended dislocation always is the first time. On the one hand I found myself in a kind of earthly paradise, a valley where you could pick fruit off the trees and then in the afternoon watch the clouds roll in to dump rain of biblical proportions on the corrugated aluminum roofs. On the other hand, being among habits and livelihoods so new to me threw off my inner compass, so that I could no longer remember why certain things mattered and others didn’t. Every few weeks I visited friends in San José and reminded myself, vaguely and not too persuasively, of what the world had previously been like. Even there, it was difficult to remember. The Miami airport where I’d made my connection months earlier seemed a hazy, fictional place that I might have imagined.
When, many years later, I read the geographical report by engineer Luis Diez de Navarro, who in 1744 traveled throughout the Kingdom of Guatemala reporting on the state of the provinces, I was astonished to see Tucurrique lying, seemingly unchanged, in the middle of his description. “Going along the latter [route],” he wrote, “one finds two Villages of Indios Talamancas called tucurrique and Attirro, which are overseen by Franciscan friars from the Province of Nicaragua.” He also noted that he passed a “famous River” that was “more than one hundred paces wide.”1 Finding the obscure but familiar Tucurrique in a colonial document housed at the AGCA had a strangely foreshortening effect, so that for a moment I had the sense that I knew this Diez de Navarro and had walked alongside him on that winding route inland through Costa Rican valleys. And I experienced a similar foreshortening in 2004, when, in the last paper letter sent to me from Tucurrique, a friend suggested we correspond by email. She gave me her email address as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and I found the prospect of an immediate exchange with that remote place curiously disturbing. The document in the archive abridges temporal distance with as much facility as the electronic document, now, abridges spatial distance. But the disorientation lingers.
Carlo Ginzburg’s collection, Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance, is more about critical distance and metaphorical distance than about spatial or temporal measures, yet its concern with distancing, as a crucial tactic for the historian, offers a useful perspective for the kind of distance considered here. Ginzburg writes of “making it strange”—the need to dispel the illusion of a familiar past by infusing it with some estranging, distancing element.2 Viewed in this light, the historian’s work is entirely about distance. Some documents, during the research process, seem impossibly remote: inscrutable and all too foreign. At other moments it is too easy to overlook the countless ways in which the author of a document—like Diez de Navarro tramping through Tucurrique—is unfamiliar, distant, and unknown. The historian has to reckon with the illusion of proximity on the one hand and the illusion of insurmountable distance on the other.
The chapters in this book attempt to follow Ginzburg’s advice in “making it strange.” Distance, as we understand it today, and whether we measure it in meters or yards, is too easily projected onto the minds and habits of past subjects. In colonial Guatemala, distance was “strange”; at the very least it was different. Bound to a particular geographical, political, social, and economic context, it was conceptualized and represented in ways that are unfamiliar and worth understanding. Distance was thought to connote pejoratively, and distant places—whether distant from Spain or Guatemala City—were considered beyond the reach of secular and ecclesiastical authorities. Administrators in Spain strained to see and govern the Americas, sending and gathering paper in growing volume. Their Guatemalan counterparts in the audiencia capital despaired of reining in those distant places like Costa Rica that were separated by so many of leagues of uninhabited terrain: places where spiritual and moral dangers abounded and the word of the king was a distant echo. The spatial movement of documents from peripheries to centers and their temporal movement through archives reveals, like a dye poured into a network of waterways, the trickle and rush of these efforts.
Reforms in the late eighteenth century began a process of change that would result in a radically different structure for knowledge production. The strain to reach the edges of empire was no longer so great. Mail reforms allowed places within regional peripheries, like Guatemala, to communicate with one another more often and more quickly. Local networks had denser traffic, and document patterns changed. The results of these changes are today most evident in how archives operate. To study the colonial period, historians of the former Kingdom of Guatemala visit the central archive in Guatemala City (AGCA) or the Archivo de Indias (AGI) in Seville, where composite documents carrying the cumulative writings of peripheral and central authors came to rest. There is a politics to this that we are all aware of but that we do not always draw onto the pages of our historical writings: what we do today as historians builds on colonial practices of organizing knowledge. The argument here, I hope, matters for people beyond Guatemala and beyond the Spanish empire: the structure of colonial archives reveals something about the structure of colonial knowledge production. And understanding those modes of organizing knowledge allows us different insights into all of the documents we use as colonial historians. For Guatemala, informing the Spanish center, knowledge was built radially and along routes. Thus the bulk of Guatemalan official documentation lies in the former seat of the audiencia and the former seat of the Council of Indies. Documents from Guatemala look the way they do and say the things they do partly because of this.
For the nineteenth century, the picture looks very different. To study the period after independence, historians travel to local archives scattered through the Central American states, where regional officials amassed boxes of correspondence, legal documents, and account books. Their half of the conversation lies in Guatemala City, more often than not, but the replies from the center are diffuse and scattered.3 Partly this underscores the obvious point that knowledge in the colonial period was centralized, and knowledge following independence was more localized. But the surprising corollary is that central knowledge in the colonial period was peripheral: created by peripheral authors and informed by peripheral knowledges. Does it follow that in the national period it was less so? I think this remains an open question, but there is no doubt that knowledge production worked differently in the national period; and it works differently today, because peripheries have a different significance and documents operate differently. Administrators in Spain held peripheral knowledge close, no matter how obscure its origin. By enabling local peripheries to draw closer to places like Guatemala City, administrators in Spain changed not the meaning of distance but who was distant. Once proximate and looming, even in the most remote corners of empire, Spain receded.