Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. John Gillis’s elaboration of “remoteness” examines, along similar lines, how spatially near places can be contextually remote. John R Gillis, Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World, 1st ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

2. Case against Magdalena Durango, María de la Cruz, María Candelaria and Michaela Gerónima. Bancroft Library, BANC MSS 72/57 m, Box 4, 1704.

3. Peter Sahlins, “Centring the Periphery: The Cerdanya Between France and Spain,” in Spain, Europe, and the Atlantic World: Essays in Honour of John H. Elliott, ed. Richard L. Kagan and Geoffrey Parker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 230. See also Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

4. Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820 (New York: Routledge, 2002). Amy Turner Bushnell and Jack P. Greene posit in their Introduction that “the concepts of center and periphery may be usefully applied to the historical understanding of colonial centers and their peripheries in the early modern Americas” (3). They add that “many colonial scholars have yet to exploit the potential of centerperiphery concepts for analyzing the internal organization of Europe’s early modern American empires” (7). In this endeavor, the editors frame more current work as building on Shils’s conception of centers “less as a physical place than a socio-intellectual construct,” but departing from Wallerstein’s scheme, which “grants too much power to European cores [and] is too exclusively focused on the creation of international trading systems and other broad economic developments . . .” (3–5) D. W. Meinig’s influential work does not adapt what he calls a “simple core-periphery or metropolis frontier concept,” but his study of the shape of empires’ growth across the Americas also in some respects acknowledges peripheries implicitly. His notion of “distance decay,” for example, in North America posits that “imperial power declined with distance from the European capital until it became feeble and indirect in the interior of North America where it was represented by European seasonal agents and Indian allies.” Incorporating the idea of distance into his framework, he suggests that some places were partly beyond imperial reach. D. W Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 265. Though he does not rely on the terms periphery and center, Edward Said’s conception of imperialism and colonialism do rely on distance: “the term, ‘imperialism’ means the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory; ‘colonialism’ . . . is the implanting of settlements on distant territory.” Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 9.

5. A.J.R. Russell-Wood has demonstrated the limitations of spatial distance as a defining variable, pointing out that “although distance may be a factor, this is not a sine qua non. Brazil provides numerous examples of regions that were peripheral in that they were separated from their cores not by distance but by topographical features.” A.J.R. Russell-Wood, “Centers and Peripheries in the Luso-Brazilian World, 1500–1808,” in Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820 (New York: Routledge, 2002), 123.

6. Susan Migden Socolow and Lyman L. Johnson, Colonial Centers, Colonial Peripheries, and the Economic Agency of the Spanish State, ed. Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy (New York: Routledge, 2002), 60.

7. Authors recognize the flexibility of these qualities, citing, for example, the waning of Portobelo, in present-day Panama, after the 1720s and the transformation of Cuba into a “vital center of empire” in the eighteenth century. John Jay TePaske, “Integral to Empire: The Vital Peripheries of Colonial Spanish America,” in Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820 (New York: Routledge, 2002), 38.

8. Russell-Wood, “Centers and Peripheries in the Luso-Brazilian World, 1500–1808,” 106.

9. See, for example, Emil Volek, Latin America Writes Back: Postmodernity in the Periphery: (An Interdisciplinary Perspective) (New York: Routledge, 2002). Volek observes that “too much U.S. research on Latin America moves in circles and is written for local consumption,” and he is troubled by how to find Latin American authors outside of this circle: “In my search for the Latin American perspective(s) I recognized the nomadic nature of intellectual work today, and although I felt that it might be preferable if the contributors actually lived in Latin America, this wish did not seem to me to be the determining factor. Many live there and write happily mimicking the North or Europe” (xvii, xv). As Volek does not explicitly examine the notion of “periphery” and what it constitutes, he implicitly suggests that it is these authors—those who do not mimic—who form the periphery.

10. Enrique Dussel, “The ‘World-System’: Europe as ‘Center’ and Its ‘Periphery,’ Beyond Eurocentrism,” in Latin America and Postmodernity: A Contemporary Reader (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2001), 104.

11. This seems especially true of “internal peripheries.” See, for example, Lowell Gudmundson and Justin Wolfe, Blacks and Blackness in Central America: Between Race and Place (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010). In Ida Altman’s formulation, the movement toward regional studies is an effort to consider peripheries—illuminate the center by looking elsewhere. Ida Altman, “Reconsidering the Center: Puebla and Mexico City, 1550–1650,” in Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820 (New York: Routledge, 2002), 44.

12. TePaske, “Integral to Empire: The Vital Peripheries of Colonial Spanish America,” 33. A similar instinct is evident in Peter Sahlins’s essay, cited above, on “centring the periphery.” Sahlins, “Centering the Periphery: The Cerdanya Between France and Spain.”

13. “Periferia” appears in dictionaries of the mid-nineteenth century, but earlier sources, such as the Diccionario de autoridades and the Tesoro de la lengua castellana make no mention of the term. Sebastián de Covarrubias Horozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española según la impresión de 1611, ed. Benito Remigio Noydens and Martín de Riquer (Barcelona: S. A. Horta, 1943); Pedro Felipe Monlau and José Monlau y Sala, Diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana, 1881; Real Academia Española., Diccionario de autoridades, vol. Ed. facsímil. (Madrid,: Editorial Gredos, 1964).

14. One notable example is Carta sobre lo que debe hacer un príncipe que tenga colonias a gran distancia (Philadelphia: s.n., 1803).

15. Jerry Brotton makes an interesting application of Waldo Tobler’s first law, seeing it as a metaphor for the Internet. The argument here about colonial Guatemala does not exactly refute Tobler’s law, but it does complicate it; surely colonial Guatemala is not the only place in which physically distant places are perceived as near while physically proximate places register as “peripheral” and “distant.” Jerry Brotton, A History of the World in Twelve Maps (London: Allen Lane, 2012), 428–429.

16. W. George Lovell and Christopher H. Lutz, “Core and Periphery in Colonial Guatemala,” in Guatemalan Indians and the State: 1540 to 1988 (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1990), 35–51; Murdo J. MacLeod, Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520–1720, vol. California library reprint (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

17. Centers include the present-day departments of Sacatepéquez, Chimaltenango, Guatemala, Jalapa, Chiquimula, El Progreso, and Zacapa as well as portions of the Mexican and Salvadoran Pacific coasts. Peripheries include the present-day departments of Huehuetenango, El Quiché, Alta Verapaz, Izabal, and Petén.

18. Maya—later Indian, in Spanish legal terms—centers and peripheries overlapped to some extent with Spanish centers and peripheries but also differed, forming various centers over the course of the colonial period. In 1500, the Maya population in Guatemala was concentrated in highland and lowland areas that in some cases were deemed “peripheries” in the Spanish conception one hundred years later. While the region mainly populated by the Cakchiquel came to form the site for the Spanish colonial capital (later Antigua), the Quiché stronghold in the northern highlands became a Spanish periphery. The center of Pipil society, Cuscatlán, was located to the southeast in what would be become El Salvador. Pre-Columbian social, political, and economic life across the region is beyond the scope of this book, but for a succinct depiction of Mesoamerican settlement patterns around 1500, see Carolyn Hall, Héctor Pérez Brignoli, and John V. Cotter, Historical Atlas of Central America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003).

19. For a thorough and cogent discussion of Spanish American legal and administrative institutions, see Matthew Campbell Mirow, Latin American Law: A History of Private Law and Institutions in Spanish America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004).

20. Initially, most of modern-day Guatemala and El Salvador formed part of the Audiencia of Mexico, while Honduras formed part of the Audiencia de Santo Domingo centered in the Caribbean, and the Audiencia of Panama began as far north as Nicaragua. In the mid-sixteenth century, the Audiencia of Panama briefly stretched even farther north to include much of El Salvador and all of Honduras. A visual summary of these transitions is well presented in Hall, Pérez Brignoli, and Cotter, Historical Atlas of Central America., 32–33.

21. Lovell and Lutz, “Core and Periphery in Colonial Guatemala,” 38.

22. Encomienda grants for the period between 1525 and 1550 were heavily concentrated in the region from the Pacific coast inland and from Tecpán in the north to Cuscutlán in the south. After 1550, the Spanish population expanded into other regions, including Comalapa, Chimaltenango, Sumpango, and Amatitlán, as well as farther south and east. Ibid., 71.

23. Ibid., 41.

24. See MacLeod, Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520–1720. The cacao boom was initially centered in Soconusco, an area between Guatemala and Mexico on the Pacific coast.

25. Indian slavery was officially abolished in 1550. On uses of Indian labor, see Lovell and Lutz, “Core and Periphery in Colonial Guatemala”; MacLeod, Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520–1720.

26. These estimates vary. High estimates for all of Central America (the region encompassing Chiapas to Costa Rica) range from 10.8 to 13.5 million; the lowest estimate is 800,000. Lovell and Lutz’s more detailed data for regions within the area show a precipitous decline in Costa Rica (400,000 in 1520; 1,343 in 1682) but recovery beginning in the 1680s. (In Guatemala, 2 million in 1520; 128,000 in 1625; 242,020 by 1684.) W. George Lovell and Christopher H. Lutz, “Anexo o apendices a perfil etno-demográfico de la Audiencia de Guatemala,” Revista de Indias LXIII, no. 229 (2003): 759–764; Hall, Pérez Brignoli, and Cotter, Historical Atlas of Central America, 76.

27. Christopher Lutz, Santiago De Guatemala, 1541–1773: City, Caste, and the Colonial Experience (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 88.

28. Ibid., 95. For a more detailed discussion of the turn-of-the-century crises, see Miles L. Wortman, Government and Society in Central America, 1680–1840 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 88.

29. Carol Smith demonstrates that the term ladino began to acquire its modern meaning during the nineteenth-century coffee boom. See Carol A. Smith, “Origins of the National Question in Guatemala: A Hypothesis,” in Guatemalan Indians and the State: 1540 to 1988 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).

30. Hall, Pérez Brignoli, and Cotter, Historical Atlas of Central America, 88–89.

31. “De las [respuestas] de Cartago, Capital de Costa Rica, que no llegan, hasta pasados tres o cuatro meses, a causa de la corta correspondencia, y de la mucha distancia que hay a Granada, que es donde se introducen, para su conducción a esta Capital.” AGI, Correos 90B, February 29, 1768 letter by Joseph de Garayalde. A 1766 letter from Pedro Ortiz de Letona which summarizes the state of communications to the provinces makes the point even more starkly, describing all of Nicaragua and Costa Rica as only tenuously linked to the Guatemalan capital. This situation changed only gradually in the late eighteenth century. AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 137, Expediente 2754.

32. In 1768, the governor of Costa Rica proposed for the first time the creation of a mail route overland into South America and as far as Peru. AGCA, Sig. A3, Leg. 2885, Expediente 42100.

33. AGI, Audiencia de Guatemala, Cartas de Cabildos Seculares, Guatemala 44B, N. 71.

34. AGI, Audiencia de Guatemala, Cartas de Cabildos Seculares, Guatemala 44B, N. 75. Costa Rica’s proximity to Panama is described elsewhere in these documents as “tan cerca de ella que solo hay veinte y cuatro o treinta horas de camino por la mar y cuarenta y ocho leguas por tierra.” It is worth noting that this summary and the one quoted at length, written by officials in Spain to summarize the points of the cabildo’s complaint, cast Guatemala and Panama as “tan lejos” and “tan cerca,” respectively. This does not reflect the cabildo’s usage, which states that “la provincia de Costa Rica está distante de la ciudad de Guatemala.” The passage quoted above from 1625 similarly describes the province of Costa Rica as “tan lejos de” Guatemala. Which place is cast as distant depends on where the author is located; from Spain, Guatemala might be cast as “distant,” whereas within the audiencia, authors describe Costa Rica as distant.

35. For population figures, see MacLeod, Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520–1720, California library reprint:131–133.

36. Wortman, Government and Society in Central America, 1680–1840, 77.

37. For growth of cacao in Costa Rica see MacLeod, Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520–1720. Wortman cites specific examples of smuggling through Costa Rican ports: Wortman, Government and Society in Central America, 1680–1840, 99.

38. Murdo MacLeod describes its trade and communication network as linked south and east: “The Matina Valley on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica . . . was tied commercially and culturally to the Cartagena, Portobelo, Panama, complex of ports. (As we have seen, Costa Rica felt much more affinity for nearby Panama, or Tierra Firme, than it did for distant Guatemala, throughout the colonial period.) Consequently its economic history belongs only marginally to that of the Audiencia of Guatemala.” MacLeod, Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520–1720, California library reprint: 330.

39. Ibid., California library reprint: 156. Karl Sapper describes in detail the travel conditions along roads in the Verapazes, which in some cases have not changed significantly even today. Humidity and high altitude add further challenges to roads that are steep, narrow, and muddy during the rainy season. Creating patches of “bottomless” mud, the rain along a route can delay travel by several days. Karl Sapper, The Verapaz in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: A Contribution to the Historical Geography and Ethnography of Northeastern Guatemala (Los Angeles: Institute of Archaeology University of California, 1985), 7–11.

40. Wortman, Government and Society in Central America, 1680–1840, 80–83. Rabinal, in Baja Verapaz, was the site for Bartolomé de las Casas’s attempt at peaceful conversion in the mid-sixteenth century. The region’s former name, Tezulután, was changed to Vera Paz—true peace—in recognition of what appeared initially to be a successful conversion effort. Sapper, The Verapaz in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: A Contribution to the Historical Geography and Ethnography of Northeastern Guatemala, 2.

41. AGCA, Sig. A3, Leg. 147, Exp. 2945. 1805 Letter by Faustino de Capetillo.

42. AGCA, Sig. A1, Leg. 4792, Folio 25. 1770 letter by Joseph Salvador de Cassares. “Asi mismo la distancia que regula de la cabezera al referido Partido devo decir . . .”

43. Before this period Comayagua had been primarily a cattle-ranching region. See Wortman, Government and Society in Central America, 1680–1840, 84–85.

44. Lauren Benton, “Spatial Histories of Empire,” Itinerario 30, no. 3 (2006): 19–34; Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900, 1st ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

45. To some extent, these maps echo the visualizations created by D. W. Meinig for the Atlantic World. Though the maps created by Meinig are self-consciously a modern reader’s interpretation, there might yet be points of synchrony with the visualization of contemporaries. Meinig’s description of the Spanish Atlantic as “not a broad diffusion of ships across the ocean as in the north, nor a simple axis, but as a circuit along a relatively narrow routeway” confirms the image of a fairly narrow maritime route depicted above. Meinig, The Shaping of America, 59.

46. Angel Rama, The Lettered City, trans. John Charles Chasteen (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 10.

47. Hall, Pérez Brignoli, and Cotter, Historical Atlas of Central America, 128.

48. Henry Kamen, Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492–1763, vol. 1st Perennial (New York: Perennial, 2004), xxiii.

49. Mirow, Latin American Law: A History of Private Law and Institutions in Spanish America, 19.

50. Ibid., 32.

51. “. . . Repetidos casos cuya urgencia no permite, por la distancia, el recurso a mi Real Persona.” AGCA, Sig. A1, Leg. 4622, Folio 134.

52. “Lo . . . hago manifesto a VSS para que su piedad nos alivie en la mayor parte que puedan de las notorias urgencias en que nos hallamos constituidos.” AGI, Correos 90A, August 1, 1773 letter from Simón de Larrazábal.

53. Harold Innis’s study on the role of communications in empire building treats empire broadly, considering pre-modern civilizations and the emerging technologies of parchment, paper, and printing. Harold Adams Innis, Empire and Communications (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950). Scholars writing since the publication of Innis’s work have considered the role of communications in more recent periods, including the eighteenth century. Kenneth Banks’s study of the French Atlantic concentrates on how “the challenges posed by transatlantic communications impinged on, modified, and increasingly undermined the French state’s control over its colonies during the first half of the eighteenth century.” Kenneth J. Banks, Chasing Empire Across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic, 1713–1763 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 13. Other studies have expanded and sharpened the treatment of “communication” to include gossip, surveillance, intellectual production, and other forms of social or institutional information. C. A. Bayly’s study on “empire and information” in India between 1780 and 1870 explores a wide range of information networks, permitting a textured and concrete investigation into sources of colonial “knowledge.” The emphasis on colonial knowledge evident in Bayly’s study reflects a broader interest in framing and localizing sources of colonial “power.” C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

54. John Elliott calls the statement by the bishop “prophetic,” arguing that “one of the secrets of Castilian domination of the Spanish Monarchy in the sixteenth century was to be found in the triumph of its language and culture over that of other parts of the peninsula and empire.” J. H. Elliott, Imperial Spain: 1469–1716 (New York: Penguin, 2002), 125. Similarly, Henry Kamen stresses that “Castilian speech was a crucial focus of identity because it became in some measure the language of empire. Spaniards used it everywhere in order to communicate with other Spaniards.” Not unaware of the importance of the written text as an extension of this linguistic spread, he states that “Castilian literature also crossed the Atlantic, to a continent where the art of writing was unknown, and where it definitely shaped the early American mind.” Kamen, Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492–1763, 1st Perennial: 336.

55. Rama, The Lettered City, 6–8. Other scholars have expanded Rama’s formulation, which sets the written word in opposition to the spoken word, pitting “text” against “speech” and “image” alike. Walter Mignolo’s treatment of “the colonization of languages, of memories, and of space,” casts writing as a driving imperial force which non-textual aspects of Amerindian culture labored under and in some cases resisted. Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 1–5. In Mignolo’s rendering, the European conception of the category called “writing” privileged a single form, causing images, memory, and oral culture to suffer as result. While less stark in its characterization of this oppositional relationship, Serge Gruzinski’s study of images in the Americas also argues that “Indians did not share the Spanish conception of the image.” The Spanish did not recognize that “when the Indians painted they designed shapes that were both illustration and writing, graphism and iconicity.” Serge Gruzinski, Images at War: Mexico From Columbus to Blade Runner (1492–2019) (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 49–50.

56. Bouza recognizes that writing “became identified with the arrival and continuance of the early modern period,” but he resists the historiographical tendency by which “writing the history of communication in the early modern period amounted fundamentally to tracing the ‘progress’ of reading and writing from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries.” Fernando J. Bouza Álvarez, Communication, Knowledge, and Memory in Early Modern Spain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 6. Bouza’s work also speaks to a related line of research focusing more on personal correspondence as a form of communication than print culture. These might be seen as indirectly confirming the growing emphasis and reliance upon writing as a culture form in the early modern period across Europe. Eve Tavor Bannet, Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1688–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Roger Chartier, Alain Boureau, and Cécile Dauphin, Correspondence: Models of Letter-Writing from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997).

57. This story offers a secondary but essential background. See, for example, Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994); Maxime Chevalier, Lectura y lectores en la España de los siglos XVI y XVII, 1st. ed. (Madrid: Turner, 1976); Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); José García Oro, Los reyes y los libros: La política libraria de la corona en el siglo de oro, 1475–1598 (Madrid: Editorial Cisneros, 1995); Carlos Alberto and González Sánchez, Los mundos del libro: medios de difusión de la cultura occidental en las Indias de los siglos XVI y XVII (Sevilla: Diputación de Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla, 1999).

58. Annelise Riles, Documents: Artifacts of Modern Knowledge (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 7. Recent studies by sociologists and anthropologists consider documents in both Foucaultian terms as objects that “produce the very persons and societies that ostensibly use them” and in Weberian terms as “crucial technological elements of bureaucratic organization” (9, 10). Both approaches acknowledge the importance of bureaucracy and institutions surrounding—or created by—document use.

59. Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 55.

60. Ibid., 61.

61. Ibid., 13–14.

62. Karl H. Offen, “Creating Mosquitia: Mapping Amerindian Spatial Practices in Eastern Central America, 1629–1779,” Journal of Historical Geography 33 (2007): 254–282. Barbara Mundy lengthens and gives complexity to this argument in her study of the relaciones geográficas. Barbara E. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

63. Roger M. Downs and David Stea, Maps in Minds: Reflections on Cognitive Mapping (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 104–5.

CHAPTER 1

1. AGCA, Sig. A1, Leg. 4502, Exp. 38311.

2. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 193, Exp. 3934: 1809

3. As Harold Innis has suggested in his study of empire and communications, even the choice of paper as the vehicle for communication indicated an emphasis on the necessity of covering spatial distance. Though he does not concentrate on the Spanish empire, he does discuss empires that similarly rely on paper—a medium that emphasizes space. “The growth of bureaucracy in the Roman empire had followed dependence on the papyrus roll, but stability assumed a fusion with religious organization based on the parchment codex. Bureaucracy in terms of the state implied an emphasis on space and a neglect of the problems of time and in terms of religion an emphasis on time and a neglect of the problems of space.” Innis, Empire and Communications., 167.

4. José Joaquín Real Díaz, Estudio diplomático del documento indiano, vol. 1st (Sevilla: Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos, 1970), 25–26. Real Díaz points to distance directly as the reason for this measure. “Unas circunstancias, por completo ajenas al campo diplomático, determinan [la existencia de este grupo de originales múltiples]: la enorme distancia que separan los supremos organismos de gobierno en la península de los centros de gobierno delegados; un mar inmenso y peligroso—no sólo por los posible accidentes naturales que podrían producirse, sino por los muy frecuentes ataques de piratas y corsarios y armadas extranjeras en guerra—para los navíos que lo surcan, transportando en uno y otro sentido la documentación que relaciona la metrópoli con los súbditos americanos de la corona.” (25) He also credits the distances between places in the empire as responsible for the other group of “originales múltiples,” circulars sent to several places at once: “Uno de los grupos, que podíamos llamar disposiciones generales o circulares, nacen del concepto unitivo de la política indiana que dentro de la diversidad de territorios, separados geográficamente, a veces por enormes distancias, debe mantenerse.” (23) Kenneth Banks discusses the parallel French system of writing multiple copies of each piece of correspondence in the eighteenth century. Banks, Chasing Empire Across the Sea, 50.

5. AGCA: Sig. A1, Leg. 16, Exp. 447; Leg. 1515, Folio 209; Leg. 1518, Folios 1v, 244; Leg. 1519, Folio 110; Leg. 1521, Folio 145; Leg. 1529, Folio 638; Leg. 1535, Folio 398; Leg. 1545, Folio 31; Leg. 1762, Folio 138 v.; Leg. 2577, Exp. 20781, Folio 28; Leg. 4575, Folio 115v. Sig. A3, Leg. 143, Exp. 2886; Leg. 144, Exp. 2896, Folio 6; Leg. 2558, Exp. 37546. After 1772, the treatment of correspondence of document “treasure” changes somewhat. Concerns for cost and weight overwhelm others, and orders are given to exchange the trunks for more practical, light-weight containers.

6. Kathryn Burns, Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010). Rama, The Lettered City, 33.

7. Real Díaz, Estudio diplomático del documento indiano. Vol. 1. Real Díaz’s study, while in some sense entirely devoted to the question of document authenticity, also provides a careful formal examination of official documents composed both in the Americas and in Spain.

8. María Luisa Martínez de Salinas, La implantación del impuesto del papel sellado en Indias (Caracas: Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1986), 56–58.

9. Ibid., 58–59. The papel sellado, however, introduced its own difficulties relating to distance. In their deliberations, the Council of Indies lamented the mounting costs caused by the long-distance haul across the Atlantic. They worried that unless they doubled or even tripled the cost of the papel sellado, the costs would outweigh the benefits: “considering that the paper must be sent from here either already stamped or to be stamped, and that it consequently must be carried from one place to another, and that the distances extend to 5000 leagues, or 3000 leagues, or at the very minimum 1600 to 2000 leagues,” ample opportunities arose for waste and loss. All things told, it seemed probable that once the proceeds of the papel sellado were collected, “the gains would be so minimal that they would not cover the costs.” (Cited in Martínez de Salinas, La implantación del impuesto del papel sellado en Indias, 231. AGI, Indiferente General, Legajo 1739, Madrid 5 September 1637.) Though a plan was formulated to send the paper from Spain for the first year and afterwards have it stamped in the Americas, in practice the paper was sent from Spain throughout the colonial period. (Martínez de Salinas, La implantación del impuesto del papel sellado en Indias, 111.)

10. AGCA, Sig. A3, Leg. 848, Exp. 15762, Folio 14. November 20, 1784. “Para poder dar curso sin confusión ni demora . . .”

11. Kenneth Banks writes of the “reliance on a clear hierarchy of command to communicate orders and receive reports” in the French Atlantic, which resulted in a similar process of duplication and a “use of written records and legal documents according to prescribed formulas.” Banks, Chasing Empire Across the Sea, 4.

12. “Canutos de hoja de lata, en que siempre llegan maltratados e inservibles.” AGCA, Sig. A3, Leg. 848, Exp. 15762, Folio 14. November 20, 1784.

13. In 1805, for example, Don Antonio Decano, the Alcalde Ordinario of the Villa de San Vicente, was accused of having opened and possibly stolen a document intended for a member of the audiencia. AGCA, Sig. A3, Leg. 147, Exp. 2940. In 1794, Don Francisco Galindo attempted to vindicate his honor after he was accused of having opened important documents not directed to him in Omoa. AGCA, Sig. A3, Leg. 142, Exp. 2858. And when an interim administrator of the mail service opened a letter destined for his superior in Guatemala in 1793, he was soundly censured by the main office in Spain. AGI, Correos 92A, June 2, 1793 correspondence.

14. AGCA, Sig. A1, Leg. 347, Exp. 7230, Folio 6. See Kathryn Burns for a detailed discussion of escribano fraud. Burns, Into the Archive.

15. AGCA, Sig. A1, Leg. 4502, Exp. 38311. “Noticia de las cosas mas apreciables que hay en este pueblo . . .”

16. “Este modo de discurrir no corresponde a los hombres idiotas . . .” Ibid.

17. María Portuondo’s study of Spanish cosmography in the early colonial period examines the broader story of how this body of documents formed part of a changing science. Maria M. Portuondo, Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2009). For the later colonial period, see Daniela Bleichmar, “Visible Empire: Scientific Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment,” Postcolonial Studies 12, no. 4 (2009): 441–466; Daniela Bleichmar et al., eds., Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009).

18. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas, 8–9.

19. Matthew H. Edney, “Bringing India to Hand: Mapping an Empire, Denying Space,” in The Global Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity A. Nussbaum (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 65. See also Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1999).

20. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas, 9.

21. Rama, The Lettered City, 33.

22. See Daniela Bleichmar’s chapter in Bleichmar et al., Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800. There is no reason to think the valuing of images excluded the valuing of text. On the contrary, as the relaciones geográficas and other questionnaires indicate, the two were thought to complement one another. My argument here is that text was also valued as a means to make the Americas visible.

23. For a more focused study of the Spanish cosmographers and the creation of these questionnaires, see Portuondo, Secret Science.

24. Francisco de Solano, Pilar Ponce Leiva, and Antonio Abellán García, Cuestionarios para la formación de las relaciones geográficas de Indias: siglos XVI/XIX (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas Centro de Estudios Históricos Departamento de Historia de América, 1988), 3.

25. Ibid., 4.

26. These include a real cédula sent to the archbishop of Mexico from Valladolid on 27 November 1548, a real cédula to the archbishop of Mexico requesting “descripciones geográficas y eclesiásticas” sent from Madrid on 23 January, 1569, and a real cédula sent to the Audiencia of Quito from El Escorial on 16 August 1572.

27. “In the Ordenanzas,” José Rabasa writes, “a brief version of the questionnaire structures the subject matter that the so-called pacificadores were to cover in their relaciones.” José Rabasa, Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of Sixteenth Century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 98. While the ordenanzas and the 1577 questionnaire were separate documents, many of the priorities overlapped. See also Portuondo, Secret Science, 115–125.

28. Solano, Ponce Leiva, and Abellán García, Cuestionarios para la formación de las relaciones geográficas de Indias: siglos XVI/XIX, 33.

29. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas, 13.

30. “Es necesario que se haga la Cosmografía . . . que dice el sitio y posición que las Indias y cada parte de ellas tienen respeto del universo, porque de esta manera las descripciones particulares que después se hicieren, serán más ciertas y se entenderán mejor.” Solano, Ponce Leiva, and Abellán García, Cuestionarios para la formación de las relaciones geográficas de Indias: siglos XVI/XIX, 33–34.

31. Ibid., 34. Barbara Mundy and María Portuondo both discuss extensively the scientific background of Philip’s cosmographers and the limited reach of their techniques among officials in the New World. A questionnaire on eclipses was sent to the Americas prior to the 1577 questionnaire, in an initial sweeping effort to establish longitudes. See Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas; Portuondo, Secret Science.

32. Solano, Ponce Leiva, and Abellán García, Cuestionarios para la formación de las relaciones geográficas de Indias: siglos XVI/XIX, 38–40.

33. Rabasa, Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier, 97–98.

34. Solano, Ponce Leiva, and Abellán García, Cuestionarios para la formación de las relaciones geográficas de Indias: siglos XVI/XIX, 82.

35. Ibid., 83.

36. Ibid., 82.

37. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas, 11.

38. A questionnaire was sent to bishops of the Indies in 1581, and a 1603 questionnaire inquired into the “cities, towns, and other Spanish places and the towns of the natives.” A specific request for “maps and plans” was sent from Madrid in 1621, and in the seventeenth century more than one chronicler attempted to elicit sufficient material for a comprehensive account of the Indies. A 1635 real cédula requested “geographical and ecclesiastical descriptions to assist the chronicler of the Indies Don Tomás Tamayo,” and a little over a decade later Don Gil González Dávila required similar information for his Teatro eclesiástico de las Iglesias del Perú y Nueva España. These questionnaires placed less emphasis on distances, in some cases asking only as a matter of course and in others asking for more general geographic information. Interestingly, the request for “maps and plans” seems less preoccupied with quantifications of space or distance. Concerned primarily with “where my Audiencias reside,” it requests “plans and drawings of all the cities . . . with their ports, rivers and distances to the sea with all the qualities necessary so that each thing might be better understood.” The main objective of these visual aids was “so that when it is desirable to see their disposition it will be possible to see them by ocular sight.” Solano, Ponce Leiva, and Abellán García, Cuestionarios para la formación de las relaciones geográficas de Indias: siglos XVI/XIX, 111.

39. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas, 27.

40. The maps of the relaciones geográficas are beyond the scope of this study, but it is worth pointing out that many if not most prioritize both routes and central places.

41. The fairly brief and general inquiry circulated by the Guatemalan president departs from the minutely detailed questionnaire prepared in Madrid around 1730, which, with more than four hundred questions, would have required a far more precise reckoning from Guatemalan officials. Jorge Luján Muñoz, ed., Relaciones geográficas e históricas del siglo XVIII del Reino de Guatemala, 1st ed. (Guatemala: Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, 2006), xvi.

42. The practice of reducción or congregación is discussed further in Chapter 2. Solano, Ponce Leiva, and Abellán García, Cuestionarios para la formación de las relaciones geográficas de Indias: siglos XVI/XIX, 143–144.

43. “A la ciudad capital que es Santiago de Guatemala, hay cincuenta leguas.” Luján Muñoz, Relaciones geográficas e históricas del siglo XVIII del Reino de Guatemala, 29.

44. “Dista de Guatemala tres leguas al rumbo Sur Sudeste.” Ibid., 7.

45. “Dista de la capital de Guatemala cincuenta leguas.” Ibid., 101.

46. Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History, 1st American ed. (New York: Knopf, 1988), 69.

47. Luján Muñoz, Relaciones geográficas e históricas del siglo XVIII del Reino de Guatemala, 7.

48. Carter, The Road to Botany Bay, 76.

49. Luján Muñoz, Relaciones geográficas e históricas del siglo XVIII del Reino de Guatemala, 92.

50. Ibid., 92.

51. I am relying on the ideas of “cognitive distance” and “invisible landscapes” as elaborated by Peter Gould and Rodney R. White, Mental Maps, vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 1986); Downs and Stea, Maps in Minds: Reflections on Cognitive Mapping.

52. Luján Muñoz, Relaciones geográficas e históricas del siglo XVIII del Reino de Guatemala, 167.

53. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 1508, Folio 35 (1742).

54. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 2335, Exp. 17508 (1744).

55. Ibid.

56. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 2019, Exp. 13999. “He resuelto a Consulta suya de cuarto de Junio próximo pasado . . .”

57. Ibid.

58. A vara (today about three feet) would measure roughly 70–90 centimeters; a cuerda contained 8.5 varas.

59. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 2445, Exp. 18753 (1776).

60. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 1530, Folio 480 (1774).

61. “Tan basta extension . . .” Ibid.

62. It is unclear in some cases whether the towns are considered sub-jurisdictions of others. AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 246, Exp. 4670.

63. AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 240, Exp. 4768.

64. These towns are not new: most of the places listed in the 1796 itinerary were mentioned in geographical report from 1740. Nor have the jurisdictional boundaries of the area changed. But the inclusion of the additional towns “lengthens” the distances of the region.

65. AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 1936, Exp. 30113, Folio 412.

66. Solano, Ponce Leiva, and Abellán García, Cuestionarios para la formación de las relaciones geográficas de Indias: siglos XVI/XIX., 177–178. Also found in AGI, Indiferente General, 1525, Doc. 33.

67. Ibid., 177–178.

68. Boundaries were to be marked with dotted lines and the political jurisdictions marked by different colors. A double line was to mark the principal thoroughfares, and the principal places along them were to be marked by circles. Single lines were to be used to mark lesser roads and byways. Other important elements of the landscape—mountains, forests, rivers, bridges, lakes, and so on—were to be included as well. The first line of inquiry thereby expanded and sharpened the expected contents of the “plano o carta,” and while it placed a newer emphasis on boundaries and political territories, it continued to emphasize routes and particularly the lines of communication between places. Ibid., 205.

69. Ibid., 206.

70. Ibid., 207.

CHAPTER 2

1. Pedro Cortés y Larraz, Julio Martín Blasco, and Jesús M. García, Descripción Geográfico-moral De La Diócesis De Goathemala (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2001), 12. Remaining in his post until 1779, he returned afterward to Spain and concluded his career there.

2. Cortés y Larraz, Martín Blasco, and García, Descripción geográfico-moral de la Diócesis de Goathemala.

3. For discussion of a visita’s objectives and analysis of how one seventeenth-century visita unfolded, see Bravo Rubio, Berenise, and Marco Antonio Pérez Iturbe. “Tiempos y espacios religiosos novohispanos: la visita pastoral de Francisco Aguiar y Seijas (1683–1684).” In Religión, poder y autoridad en la Nueva España, 67–83. 1st ed. México D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2004, 67–83. Published Guatemalan visitas include Casaus y Torres, Ramón Francisco. Carta del Illmo. Sr. Dr. D. Fr. Ramon Casaus y Torres, Obispo de Rosen, y Arzobispo Electo de Guatemala, á todos los Diocesanos de su iglesia Metropolitana. Tapana, México, 1811; Jesús M. García, Población y estado sociorreligioso de la Diócesis de Guatemala en el último tercio del siglo XVIII. Guatemala, Centroamérica: Editorial Universitaria Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, 1987.

4. Neil Safier, Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South-America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 59.

5. Julio Martín Blasco and Jesús María García Añoveros argue persuasively that Cortés y Larraz did not travel with a single guide, as other authors have claimed. They point to the rich knowledge of the terrain as evidence that the archbishop traveled with local guides, and they indicate that the identity of the painter is unknown. He may have been local as well. “El arzobispo habla en diversas ocasiones de ‘mi familia’, de ‘mis capellanes’, de ‘mi secretario’; seguramente les acompañarían también algún escribiente, varios criados o mozos de confianza (los cita en alguna ocasión), sin olvidar el dibujante, autor anónimo de los excelentes mapas en color de cada una de las parroquias. A este grupo se unirían de una parroquia a otra los guías (en una ocasión dice que se extraviaron), un grupo de indios encargados de trasportar las cargas . . . el cura, el alcalde . . . , y principales del pueblo. Son tantos los datos que aporta y los nombres de ríos montañas, haciendas, pueblos, etc. que cita en el camino de una parroquia a otra que es preciso suponer la presencia en el grupo de un buen conocedor del terreno que fuera facilitando la información.” Cortés y Larraz, Martín Blasco, and García, Descripción geográfico-moral de la Diócesis de Goathemala, 16.

6. Ibid., 14.

7. Ibid., 15.

8. Ibid., 37. As discussed in Chapter 3, leagues were defined in particular ways in Guatemala. For a thorough discussion of league-measures throughout North America, see Roland Chardon, “The Linear League in North America,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 70, no. 2 (June 1980): 129–153.

9. Cortés y Larraz exemplifies what Bernhard Klein has described for the “writing of space” in early modern England and Ireland as three conceptual stages: space is measured, space is visualized, and space is narrated. Klein perceives these as a “cartographic transaction” which he studies in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, but the strategy of measuring, visualizing, and narrating clearly emerged beyond this region and period as well. Bernhard Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), 3–5.

10. Cortés y Larraz, Martín Blasco, and García, Descripción geográfico-moral de la Diócesis de Goathemala, 67–68.

11. Ibid., 68–72.

12. “Una cuesta muy mala y violenta . . .” Ibid., 72.

13. Bruce Castleman confirms for Mexico what seems also to be true for Guatemala, stating that “the metropolitan government was primarily concerned with the lines of communication between Mexico City and port cities in Spain.” This led to attempted improvements in the late Bourbon period: “The colonial government devoted a great deal of concern and effort to the improvement of overland transport during the late eighteenth century, but the problems posed by terrain and distance were immense.” Bruce A Castleman, Building the King’s Highway: Labor, Society, and Family on Mexico’s Caminos Reales, 1757–1804 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005), 7–8.

14. Stephen Daniels’s study of the landscape architect Humphry Repton places particular emphasis on the aesthetic and functionality of roads in late eighteenth-century England. During a period (1750–1811) that saw the journey between London and other major cities in its environs cut by nearly two-thirds, roads were a rapidly transforming element of the landscape. Daniels points not only to the importance of roads and movement along them in Repton’s landscape architecture, but also to the developing social mores to arise dictating forms of polite and proper travel. Improvements in travel permitted a markedly different sensibility as, for example, “walking along country lanes and by-roads acquired a serious moral purpose among those intent on observing the details of God’s handiwork or the lives of the poor, which speeding carriage-folk overlooked.” Stephen Daniels, Humphry Repton: Landscape Gardening and the Geography of Georgian England (New Haven: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in the British Art [by] Yale University Press, 1999), 30.

15. I am relying here on ideas elaborated by Yi-Fu Tuan, in particular his notion of how the understanding of “good” in assessing the natural and man-made landscape incorporates a moral sensibility, as well as the comparative work by Mary W. Helms on cultural distance. Yi-fu Tuan, Morality and Imagination: Paradoxes of Progress (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). Mary W. Helms, Ulysses’ Sail: An Ethnographic Odyssey of Power, Knowledge, and Geographical Distance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988).

16. Cortés y Larraz, Martín Blasco, and García, Descripción geográfico-moral de la Diócesis de Goathemala, 467.

17. Ibid., 405.

18. Ibid., 105.

19. Ibid., 191.

20. Paul Carter discusses a parallel usafe of “plains” and bush” in the Australian context, where plains could be “visibly possessed” and “bush” came to mean the area “which lay beyond the bounds of settlement.” Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History, 1st American ed. (New York: Knopf, 1988), 148–149.

21. Cortés y Larraz, Martín Blasco, and García, Descripción geográfico-moral de la Diócesis de Goathemala, 420.

22. Ibid., 139.

23. Ibid., 374–375.

24. It would seem reasonable to expect that Cortés y Larraz traveled on a mule or even on a chair carried by one of his guides, but an occurrence in Santa María Nevah (today Nebaj) gave him occasion to describe his travel circumstances in more detail, and he appears not to have been above walking. “Desde el pueblo de Santo Domingo Sacapulas al de Santa María Nevah hay ocho leguas, rumbo de sur a norte. El camino es el [más] pésimo que puede imaginarse. Los indios de Nevah acudieron al pueblo de Sacapulas con sillas de mano para toda la familia, diciendo: que no podía pasarse a su pueblo de otro modo. Las montañas que habían de pasarse estaban a cien pasos de Sacapulas, y me mostraban sus sendas para que viera que eran intransitables; con todo y por la grande repugnancia que siento a ir en silla, considerando que es ajena de mi estado, me obligó a perseverar en la determinación de ir en mula o a pie, no obstante que me decían que era imposible el ir en mula y más imposible a pie.” Ibid., 313.

25. Ibid., 106.

26. Ibid., 261. Robert Patch, in his study of Maya and Spaniard in colonial Yucatán, identifies another impenetrable mountain in the southern reaches of Yucatán; while Spaniards called this region the Montaña, he points out the “strange choice of word, given the area’s almost uniformly low terrain.” In fact, he argues, “the Montaña, rather, was in the mind of the Spaniards. To people of Mediterranean culture, mountains were not exclusively topographic features. They were refuges, places difficult to control, and, in Fernand Braudel’s words, regions of a ‘separate religious geography.’” Robert Patch, Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1648–1812 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), 46.

27. Cortés y Larraz, Martín Blasco, and García, Descripción geográfico-moral de la Diócesis de Goathemala, 111.

28. Ibid., 112.

29. Ibid., 106–107.

30. Patch, Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1648–1812, 46.

31. Cortés y Larraz, Martín Blasco, and García, Descripción geográfico-moral de la Diócesis de Goathemala, 107.

32. Ibid., 112. By the time he reached Titiguapa, his tone was rather firmer: “This parish in its present situation cannot be governed, even if the cura had the assistance of two deacons, which the income for this parish cannot support. The only remedy is to gather the multitude of people spread throughout the towns in what are called haciendas but are not really haciendas—these are rather ranches erected here and there by the Indians and Ladinos according to whim, where they manage to live in complete freedom and without observing any laws whatsoever.” Ibid., 188.

33. Ibid., 202–203.

34. Ibid.

35. Quoted in W. George Lovell, Conquest and Survival in Colonial Guatemala: A Historical Geography of the Cuchumatan Highlands, 1500–1821, 3rd ed. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 76.

36. Ibid., 77.

37. Ibid., 83.

38. Patch, Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1648–1812, 52.

39. Cortés y Larraz, Martín Blasco, and García, Descripción geográfico-moral de la Diócesis de Goathemala, 227.

40. Ibid., 250. John Lynch’s analysis of Cortés y Larraz identifies a similarly stark prognosis that “the Indians of Guatemala were irredeemable. Lost to God and the Church. For the adults there was no remedy.” John Lynch, New Worlds: A Religious History of Latin America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 90.

41. Cortés y Larraz, Martín Blasco, and García, Descripción geográfico-moral de la Diócesis de Goathemala, 183.

42. Ibid., 435.

43. Richard Kagan, Urban Images of the Hispanic World, 1493–1793 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 2.

44. Kagan identifies the following views: profile view, drawn at eye level; equestrian view, at an angle of ten degrees; oblique view, at an angle of thirty degrees; bird’s eye view, at an angle of forty-five degrees; cartographic or perspective view, at an angle of sixty degrees; ichnographic or orthogonal view, at ninety degrees. Ibid., 5. The artist for the visita appears to have used the full spectrum of perspectives at different moments, but a majority of the paintings rely on views drawn from angles of thirty to sixty degrees.

45. Ibid., 64.

46. Cortés y Larraz, Martín Blasco, and García, Descripción geográfico-moral de la Diócesis de Goathemala, 88.

47. Ibid., 217.

48. Irisarri’s account in many ways differs from the texts Mary Louise Pratt considers in her study of eighteenth and nineteenth century travel literature, but certain aspects of his account resonate with those which she examines as demonstrations of “creole self-fashioning.” Irisarri was almost certainly not referencing Alexander von Humboldt in his fictionalized autobiography, yet the impulse to reimagine and celebrate the Americas runs through his text. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2007).

49. Antonio Irisarri, El cristiano errante: novela que tiene mucho de historia, 3 vols., Biblioteca Guatemala De Cultura Popular 31–33 (Guatemala, C.A.: Ministerio de Educación Pública, 1960).

50. Ibid., 181–183.

51. Ibid., 181–183.

52. Ibid., 181–183.

53. Ibid., 181–183.

54. Ibid., 126–127.

55. Ibid.

56. Ibid., 126–127.

57. Ibid., 128–129.

CHAPTER 3

1. AGI, Correos 90A, August 1, 1773 letter from Simón de Larrazábal.

2. The Maya kingdoms in the future audiencia of Guatemala relied on foot-messengers who needed to possess knowledge of the terrain, physical stamina, and an ability to retain and convey royal messages. Their rulers doubtlessly communicated with each other by messenger (as they did with rulers in Mexico), though their means of doing so is scarcely researched. The communications network of the Aztecs has received more attention: Aztec messengers, who belonged to the military class and as such serviced only the empire, carried both written and oral messages, and their status approximated more what we think of today as dignitaries than mail carriers. The system of runners (paynani) was administrated by a yciuhuatitlanti, “one who goes quickly,” and organized spatially around resting points set approximately six miles apart. By relaying messages from stop to stop, the paynani covered an estimated three hundred miles per day. Alicia G. de Backal, Laura Edith Bonilla, and Servicio Postal Mexicano, Historia del correo en México (México: Servicio Postal Mexicano: M.A. Porrúa Grupo Editorial, 2000). The continental Spanish communication system seems, in comparison, somewhat late to formalize. Its antecedents can be traced to the Roman system, but the considerable lapse between the dissolution of the Roman empire in Spain and the development of the Spanish imperial system left little for the early modern mail to build upon. In the thirteenth century, Spain and Europe more broadly developed a degree of reliance on official mail carriers. Alfonso X of Castile and León (1221–1284) termed the mail carriers “mandaderos” (messengers) and defined them as those who “bring messages in the form of letters, which like the feet of men, travel to bring messages without speaking.” As early as 1293, there is evidence of mail carriers or “troters” organizing cofradías in Catalonia, and in the mid-fourteenth century the kings of Majorca and Aragon almost simultaneously developed legislation to establish official, royal mail services. From other related legislation the existence of a mail service for public use in Aragon can be confirmed as early as the fourteenth century, and the innovative use of horses to carry the mail in the ensuing century indicates an increasing prioritization of reliability and speed. In the fifteenth century the “leaders of the correo guilds” established more powerful cofradías, and legislation from the Concelleres in Barcelona testifies to their growing importance. Spain. Dirección General de Correos y Telégrafos., Anales de las ordenanzas de correos de España (Madrid: Imprenta Central a Cargo de Victor Saiz, 1879).

3. Ibid., XVIII. Postal systems in continental Europe emerged roughly contemporaneously. See Alvin F. Harlow, Old Post Bags; the Story of the Sending of a Letter in Ancient and Modern Times (New York: D. Appleton, 1928).

4. Backal, Bonilla, and Servicio Postal Mexicano, Historia Del Correo En México, 15.

5. Quoted in Ibid., 17. Transatlantic communication would prove similarly challenging for the French and English. See especially Kenneth J. Banks, Chasing Empire Across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic, 1713–1763 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002); Howard Robinson, Carrying British Mails Overseas (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1964).

6. Correspondence between Spain and the Americas flowed initially from Seville, by way of Cádiz and then the Canary Islands, to Santo Domingo in Hispaniola. Santo Domingo was soon discarded in favor of safer harbors in the Caribbean, and on the mainland the harbors in Veracruz (Mexico), Portobelo (Panama), and Cartagena (Colombia) were deemed the most suitable. Documents between Spain and Guatemala traveled initially through the port of Veracruz, and from Veracruz they were carried overland through Mexico to Guatemala and its provinces. However, this route proved cumbersome, and in the early seventeenth century an alternative was proposed that would funnel correspondence into Guatemala by way of the Yucatan. In practice, correspondence to and from Spain continued to travel mainly through Veracruz. In 1630, the crown acceded to the Guatemalan audiencia’s request that the maritime correspondence be unloaded in Veracruz rather than Yucatan. (AGCA, Sig. A1, Leg. 1515, Folio 235.) Not until the later colonial period was the more convenient port of Omoa, in what is today Honduras, developed as a channel for communication between Guatemala and Spain. Routes through the Caribbean changed repeatedly in the colonial period in response to weather and piracy. See Ernst Schäfer’s publication for a detailed discussion of how maritime routes changed over the colonial period and for descriptions of the maritime routes to destinations in what is today South America. Ernst Schäfer and John Pilaar, Communications Between Spain and Her American Colonies and Inter-Colonial Communications (Los Angeles, 1939). See also Secundino-José Gutiérrez Alvarez, Las comunicaciones en América: de la senda primitiva al ferrocarril, Colecciones MAPFRE 1492 (Madrid: Editorial MAPFRE, 1993).

7. Schäfer and Pilaar, Communications Between Spain and Her American Colonies and Inter-Colonial Communications, 5, 8. Despite efforts to avoid the tornado season, the fleet to New Spain that was intended to leave in April rarely left before June, and the fleet bound for Panama and Peru that was meant to leave in August or September usually left in November.

8. AGCA, Sig. A1, Leg. 1512.

9. AGCA, Sig. A1, Leg. 1513. Kenneth Banks has studied the travel of documents across the Atlantic through the French communication system. See especially his analysis of “response time.” Banks, Chasing Empire Across the Sea, 54–55.

10. “Ya en 1529 la correspondencia oficial, la del comercio, la de los particulares y la de los empleados que circulaba entre las poblaciones del interior de la Nueva España y las del resto de las colonias se transportaba mediante conductos privados. Era el único medio de comunicación de que se disponía. Por lo general, esta correspondencia era interceptada y rara vez llegaba a su destino.” Backal, Bonilla, and Servicio Postal Mexicano, Historia del correo en México, 16.

11. Pedro Froilán Barreda, Geografía e historia de correos y telecomunicaciones de Guatemala: sus estudios (Guatemala, 1961), 38.

12. Walter Björn Ludovico Bose, Los orígenes del correo terrestre en Guatemala (Santiago de Chile, 1930), 8.

13. Ibid., p. 22. Walter Bose’s chronology details the circumstances of each correo mayor’s tenure.

14. These reforms were mirrored by reforms elsewhere in Europe. For concurrent reforms in Canada and France, see Banks, Chasing Empire Across the Sea, 181. See also K. V Bazilevich, The Russian Posts in the XIX Century (Rossica Society of Russian Philately, 1987); Robinson, Carrying British Mails Overseas.

15. Backal, Bonilla, and Servicio Postal Mexicano, Historia del correo en México, 31.

16. Spain. Dirección General de Correos y Telégrafos., Anales de las ordenanzas de correos de España, 90–98.

17. AGCA, Sig. A1, Leg. 1508, folios 75, 86, 88. The mail was dispatched by order of Don Thomas de Rivera and left for Mexico on no set date; in these instances it departed on the 25th, the 15th, and the 7th, respectively.

18. By the 1740s, the practice of sending a single protected fleet to and from Spain once a year had been abandoned. While the navíos de registro, registered ships that navigated their own routes independent of the fleets, had been sailing unofficially since the sixteenth century, these were officially recognized in 1720. In the 1740s licenses for the navíos de registro were increasingly easier to acquire. In this period the maritime routes to New Spain and Tierra Firme continued, but additional routes reaching Chile, Peru, and Buenos Aires were solidified. Schäfer and Pilaar, Communications Between Spain and Her American Colonies and Inter-Colonial Communications, 27.

19. The utility of the monthly mail service was hotly debated in Guatemala and in Spain. The Fiscal in Spain argued that an expense of more the five thousand pesos per year could not be considered egregious, as the six-year period had fallen during a time of war when the need for immediate and unexpected communication was inevitable. He concluded, however, that the monthly mail project should be attempted, setting as a condition that the Guatemala archbishop would report on the project’s effectiveness. In Guatemala, the financial support the project received made clear that establishing a monthly mail service benefited local business as much as it did administrators who wished to communicate more frequently with Spain. “En Diciembre de 1748 quedaron establecidos los Correos Mensuales entre Guatemala y Nueva España (Oaxaca). Con este motivo el Gobernador comunicó el hecho a la Junta de Comercio y a la Compañía de Minas y Comercio, a fin de que contribuyan cada una con los 1,000 pesos que habían ofrecido para el establecimiento de los Correos. Al propio tiempo se dio aviso a los Oficiales Reales de Veracruz, para que no envíen con correos extraordinarios los cajones que traían los Navíos de Aviso, sino que lo hiciesen con el Correo ordinario semana hasta Oaxaca, donde se entregarían al correo mensual de Guatemala.” Bose, Los orígenes del correo terrestre en Guatemala, 22–27.

20. AGCA, Sig. A1, Leg. 1509, Folios 27–30.

21. AGI, Correos 90B, October 1778 tables by Don Simón de Larrazábal.

22. AGCA, Sig. A1, Leg. 1508, Folio 254.

23. In 1765 the Guatemalan correo was officially incorporated by the crown. It took until 1767 for the change to take effect. Pedro Ortiz de Letona was compensated for the office and appointed Regidor of the mail system for the remainder of his lifetime. (AGI, Correos, 90B, Dec. 31, 1766.) This date coincided with broader policy initiatives in Spain. Charles III implemented the first free trade measures in 1765, and these were followed by similar measures in 1778. Gutiérrez Alvarez, Las comunicaciones en América: de la senda primitiva al ferrocarril, 25.

24. Other accounts date the mail service to the provinces back to 1749. In either case, the route was financed by a sales tax of four reales for every tercio of indigo. AGI, Correos 90B: 1773 draft of letter to Grimaldi.

25. AGI, Correos 90B: 1768 testimonio by Don Joseph de Garayalde.

26. AGCA, Signatura A3, Legajo 137, Expediente 2766. The carta sencilla, any letter weighing up to 1/2 ounce, would cost four reales de vellón in Spain and three reales de plata fuerte in the Indies. The carta doble, weighing between 1/2 and 3/4 ounce, would cost nine reales de vellón in Spain and five reales de plata fuerte in the Indies. Letters weighing 3/4 ounce would cost twelve reales de vellón in Spain and seven reales de plata fuerte in the Indies. For larger letter packets the cost would be twelve reales de vellón in Spain and ten reales de plata fuerte in the Indies. Mail sent among the Caribbean islands would be charged at a rate of 1/2 real de plata fuerte for the sencilla, one real for the doble, one and one-half real for the 3/4 ounce, and 2 reales per ounce for packets. Letters from the Indies mainland to the islands would also be charged at this rate. Correspondence between New Spain and Tierra Firme would be charged double these rates.

27. AGI, Correos 90B, 1766 decree and 1768 testimonio by Garayalde.

28. This proclamation partially overturned the 1764 regulations sent from Spain, which still allowed for the sobre-porte.

29. AGI, Correos 90A, 1768 Bando by Don Pedro de Salazar Herrera. The fine was initially an exorbitant 500 pesos. In the late eighteenth century it was reduced to 50 pesos.

30. AGI, Correos 90B, 1770 Bando by Don Pedro de Salazar Herrera.

31. AGI, Correos 90A, 1768 Correspondence by Don Joseph de Garayalde.

32. AGI, Correos 90A, 1768 Correspondence by Don Joseph de Garayalde.

33. AGI, Correos 90A, 1769 Correspondence by Don Joseph Melchor de Ugalde.

34. AGI, Correos 90A, April 1, 1770 Correspondence from Don Joseph Melchor de Ugalde.

35. “. . . Por su comercio, y abundancia de gente Española, y Ladina.” AGI, Correos 90A, January 1, 1770 Correspondence from Don Joseph Melchor de Ugalde.

36. AGCA, Sig. A3, Leg. 2885, Exp. 42102: 1772.

37. AGI, Correos, 90A, September 16, 1773 letters by Don Simón de Larrazábal.

38. The system was still rough at the edges. In 1777, a lengthy correspondence ensued between Larrazábal, administrators in Spain, and the governor in Cartago, Costa Rica, who protested of infrequent communication with the rest of Guatemala. Larrazábal, after weighing several options, decided the scant correspondence and the great expense of the journey made relying on travelers to carry occasional letters the most favorable alternative. (AGI, Correos 90B, 1777 Larrazábal correspondence.)

39. AGI, Correos 91A, 1778 bando by Don Martín de Mayorga.

40. The correo on horseback, who paid for his own expenses, cost 1,360 reales; the “indio correo” who carried the mail on foot between Totonicapan and Quesaltenango cost 6 reales; and the two Indians who carried the mail between Ciudad Real and Tuxtla cost 32 reales. AGI, Correos 91B, 1778 Report by Don Simón de Larrazábal.

41. Adapted from tables in AGI, Correos 90B, 1778 Report by Don Simón de Larrazábal.

42. AGI, Correos 91A, July 16, 1781 letter from Don Juan Miguel de Yzaguirre.

43. See, for example, the 1787 debate that resulted in switching the departure date from the fifteenth to the second of the month. (AGI, Correos 91A, 1787 bando.)

44. AGI, Correos 92B, November 2, 1795 correspondence by Don Miguel de Ateaga.

45. AGCA, Signatura A1, Legajo 2603, Expediente 21389.

46. AGI, Correos 102B, 1772 Chart.

47. This chart bears a striking similarity to a general “mapa y tabla de leguas comunes” found at the John Carter Brown Library and showing distances in Spanish North America. The table showing distances is accompanied by a map and illustrations. Joseph Nava, “Mapa y Tabla Geográfica de Leguas Comunes, que ai de unos á otros Lugares, y Ciudades principales de la America septentrional.” (Puebla de los Angeles, 1755), Record number 28987, John Carter Brown Library.

48. AGI, MP—Buenos Aires 253; 25-02-1804.

49. AGI, Correos 110A, 1806 Report.

50. See, for example, a 1766 list of place-names from Yucatan (AGI Correos 142C) and an 1814 list from Peru (AGI Correos 113B). One notable precedent from Spain is Fernández de Mesa’s 1755 account of continental roads, inns, and postal routes. Fernández’s appendix on “postal routes, established in Spain, and the distance in Leagues between one place and another” represents the postal routes in two ways: as short links of consecutive leguas from one place to another, or itinerary tables identical to Ateaga’s, and as longer distances radiating out from a central city or place, identical to Ateaga’s table of distances from Guatemala. Tomás Manuel Fernández de Mesa y Moreno, Tratado legal, y politico de caminos publicos, y possadas. Dividido en dos partes. La una, en que se hable de los caminos; y la otra, de las possadas: y como anexo, de los correos, y postas, assi publicas, como privadas: donde se incluye el Reglamento general de aquellas, expedido en 23. de abril de 1720 (Valencia: J. T. Lucas, 1755), 182.

51. “. . . Mapa Topográfico comprehensivo de las Estafetas agregadas a esta Pral, las distancias de unas a otras, su situación local, paradas de Postas, y ramales de division.” AGI, Correos 92B, April 2, 1795 letter by Don Miguel de Ateaga. Ateaga’s tables thus intended to record and describe the extent of the postal service rather than to provide correos or even other officials with a practical guide.

52. Maria M. Portuondo, Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2009); Alison Sandman, “Controlling Knowledge: Navigation, Cartography, and Secrecy in the Early Modern Spanish Atlantic,” in Science and Empire in the Atlantic World, ed. James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew (New York: Routledge, 2008). For a more general history of how cartographic forms evolved, see John R. Short, Making Space: Revisioning the World, 1475–1600 (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2004); J. B. Harley and David Woodward, The History of Cartography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Leo Bagrow and R. A. Skelton, History of Cartography (Chicago: Precedent Pub., 1985).

53. Ricardo Padrón makes much of the Hapsburg’s prohibiting their maps from appearing in print. He observes that the Spanish Bourbons corrected what was perceived as a consequent cartographic backwardness by importing cartographic techniques from France. It seems likely, however, that these techniques had not yet been systematically applied to the creation of detailed maps in Guatemala. Ricardo Padrón, The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Recent studies suggest that while the crown may have succeeded only unevenly in preserving maps as state secrets, it certainly succeeded in stifling the production of state-of-the-art maps. This would explain the relative absence of not only maps but of cartographic production in Guatemala. Portuondo, Secret Science; Sandman, “Controlling Knowledge: Navigation, Cartography, and Secrecy in the Early Modern Spanish Atlantic.”

54. Kit S. Kapp, The Printed Maps of Central America up to 1860 (London: Map Collectors’ Circle, 1974). See also the following recent collection: Jens P Bornholt et al., Cuatro siglos de expresiones geográficas del istmo centroamericano, 1500–1900 (Guatemala: Universidad Francisco Morroquín, 2007).

55. “En este Reyno no hay mapa general de ellas, como a esta subdelegación y superior gobierno he hecho presente.” AGI, Correos 90B, October 20, 1778 letter from Don Simón de Larrazábal.

56. “La situación local de las Estafetas, que no puede expresarse por carecer el Reino de Mapas formales, y no ser las noticias que han comunicado los Admin. capaces de instruir en la material.” AGI, Correos 92B, October and November 1795 letters by Don Miguel de Ateaga.

57. Padrón, The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain, 71.

58. Ibid., 47. “Mapa: La descripción geográfica de la tierra, que regularmente se hace en papel o lienzo, en que se ponen los lugares, mares, ríos, montañas, y otras cosas notables, con las distancias proporcionadas, según el pitipié que se elige, señalando los grados de longitud y latitud que ocupa el País que se describe, para conocimiento del parage o lugar que cada cosa destas ocupada en la tierra.” Real Academia Española., Diccionario de autoridades, vol. ed. facsímil. (Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1964).

59. Padrón, The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain, 47. “Mapa—llamamos la tabla, lienço o papel donde se descrive la tierra universal o particularmente y puede venir de mappa, que quiere decir lienço o toalla.” Sebastián de Covarrubias Horozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española según la impresión de 1611, ed. Benito Remigio Noydens and Martín de Riquer (Barcelona: S. A. Horta, 1943).

60. See Denis E. Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Bagrow and Skelton, History of Cartography; Harley and Woodward, The History of Cartography; Short, Making Space: Revisioning the World, 1475–1600.

61. Padrón, The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain, 79–82.

62. “Espacio—del nombre latino spatium, capedo, intervallum; vale lugar. Mucho espacio, poco espacio. También sinifica el intervalo del tiempo, y dezimos por espacio de tiempo de tantas horas, etc. . . .” Covarrubias Horozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española según la impresión de 1611, 48.

63. Padrón, The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain, 47. “Espacio: capacidad, anchura, longitud, a latitud de terreno, lugar, sitio, u campo. Es tomado del Latin Spatium que significa esto mismo.” Real Academia Española., Diccionario de autoridades.

64. Real Academia Española., Diccionario de autoridades.

65. “Lugar se dize todo aquello que contiene en sí otra cosa . . . Lugar sinifica muchas vezes ciudad o villa o aldea, y assí dezimos: En mi lugar, en el pueblo donde nací . . . Hacer lugar, desembaraçar y dar passo. No tener lugar, no tener tiempo.” Covarrubias Horozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española según la impresión de 1611.

66. “Tener tiempo, tener lugar . . . Dar tiempo al tiempo, dar lugar.” Ibid.

67. “Lugar: El espacio que contiene en sí otra cosa. Sale del Latín locus, que significa lo mismo; lugar2: significa también sitio u parage; lugar3: vale también Ciudad, villa, o aldea; . . . lugar6: significa también tiempo, espacio, oportunidad u ocasión.” Real Academia Española., Diccionario de autoridades.

68. “La duración successiva de las cosas.” Ibid.

69. “El espacio o intervalo de lugar u tiempo, con que las cosas o los sucessos están apartados unos de otros.” Ibid.

70. Roland Chardon, “The Linear League in North America,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 70, no. 2 (June 1980): 131.

71. Ibid., 130.

72. “Espacio de camino, que contiene en sí tres millas.” Covarrubias Horozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española según la impresión de 1611. This suggests that he relied on the legua legal for his definition. For a discussion of the legua legal, see Chardon, 1980.

73. “Medida de tierra, cuya magnitud es mui varia entre las Naciones. De las leguas Españolas entran diez y siete y media en un grado de circulo maximo de la tierra, y cada una es lo que regularmente se anda en una hora.” Real Academia Española., Diccionario de autoridades.

74. “Roughly, the distance that can be traveled on horseback in an hour, varying with the terrain.” Lillian Ramos Wold and Ophelia Márquez, Compilation of Colonial Spanish Terms and Document Related Phrases, vol. 2nd (Midway City, Calif.: SHAAR Press, 1998). Other definitions include the following: “legua—la del país mide en longitud terrestre 5,000 baras o 4,190 metros lo mismo en Cuba, Puerto Rico y Guatemala.” Francisco Javier Santamaría and Joaquín García Icazbalceta, Diccionario de mejicanismos: razonado, comprobado con citas de autoridades, comparado con el de americanismos y con los vocabularios provinciales de los más distinguidos diccionaristas hispanamericanos (Méjico: Editorial Porrúa, 1992). Also “Legua—Medida lineal de dimensión variada. De las leguas españolas, 17 y media en un grado de círculo máximo de la tierra y cada una era la medida de lo que regularmente se camina en una hora.” Stella María González Cicero and Delia Pezzat A., Guía para la interpretación de vocablos en documentos novohispanos: siglos XVI a XVIII. Presentación de Stella María González Cicero; introducción de Delia Pezzat Arzave, vol. 1a (México, D.F.: Secretaría de Gobernación: Archivo General de la Nación-México, 2001).

75. In any case, all of the dozen or more Spanish American leagues are roughly 4.2 kilometers or 2.6 miles in modern equivalences. Chardon, “The Linear League in North America,” 150.

76. Ibid., 150, 134.

77. AGI, Correos 90B, 1778 Report by Don Simón de Larrazábal; “Estado o Razon de las distancias que hay desde esta Capital a las demas Ciudades de este Reyno y Cabezeras de Partidos” seems to utilize three descriptive approaches. AGCA, Sig. A1, Leg. 2603, Exp. 21389. As stated above, this representation is nearly identical to the 1795 table housed at the AGI. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991), 151.

78. “Nota de estas Ciudades, Valles, Provincias, Pueblos, Poblaciones, Haziendas, y demas Lugares, de las Administraciones agregadas a esta Principal.” AGCA, Sig. A3, Leg. 2885, Exp. 42102.

79. This depiction echoes Lauren Benton’s conception of colonial spaces as “encased in irregular, porous, and sometimes undefined borders. Although empires did lay claim to vast stretches of territory, the nature of such claims was tempered by control that was exercised mainly over narrow bands, or corridors, and over enclaves and irregular zones around them.” Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900, 1st ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 2.

80. The tables also include, in some sections, specific references to “correo de a pie.” It seems likely that in these cases “legua” signifies distance covered on foot in an hour.

CHAPTER 4

1. “Blas Cabrera, correo de su majestad, en la mejor forma que haya lugar . . .” AGI Correos 90B, “Don Simón de Larrazábal, Administrador Principal, por su Magestad . . .” 1772.

2. A document from Honduras indicates that the Indians of Comayagua were obliged to provide correo services on demand. AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 1566, Exp. 10210, Folio 58: 1681 Reglamento. For mention of Indian correos as much as a century earlier, see Barreda, Geografía e historia de correos y telecomunicaciones de Guatemala: sus estudios, 38.

3. AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 137, Exp. 2767: 1770 letter by Melchor de Ugalde.

4. The routes to Omoa and to the coast seem to have allowed for this relay method more than other routes. The routes to Oaxaca and the provinces were more often walked by solitary indios correos. A representative case is that of Marcelo Moya, an indio correo who was paid 100 pesos to carry certain books from Guatemala to Granada. (AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 265, Exp. 5790.)

5. See legal cases against correos: AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 146, Exp. 2927; 1803 case against José Andrade, a 22-year-old Spanish carpenter; AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 146, Exp. 2935: 1804 case against José Romero, a 35-year-old Spaniard; AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 147, Exp. 2941: 1805 case against Francisco Anzueto, a 24-year-old mestizo weaver; AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 147, Exp. 2947: 1805 case against José Rivera, in his seventies; AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 149, Exp. 2983: 1819 case against José María Custodio and José Maria Crujente, 25 and 32 years old, respectively, and both tailors.

6. AGI, Correos 90B, “Don Simon de Larrazabal, Administrador Principal . . .” 1772.

7. The textiles from China would not have been considered contraband; rather, their transportation by the correo broke taxation laws and the specific encomienda laws. In fact, contraband trade was a much larger problem for city officials in Guatemala at this time, in light of which the transgressions by Larrazábal seem relatively minor. See Gustavo Palma Murga’s chapter in Jordana Dym and Christophe Belaubre, Politics, Economy, and Society in Bourbon Central America, 1759–1821 (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2007). Whether or not they were carried as encomiendas by correos, goods from China were in great demand in Guatemala. “It was estimated in 1746 that 150,000 to 175,000 pesos of Asian goods entered Guatemala City annually, ‘the principal commodity of the goods that are purchased in Mexico.’ Trade expanded with Campeche and Havana from Honduras. Small vessels sailed between Cartagena, Portobelo, and Granada via the Río San Juan. The mule trains from Costa Rica to Panama became larger and more frequent.” Wortman, Government and Society in Central America, 1680–1840, 117. Imports from China, specifically, continued to form the greater proportion of imports to Guatemala. Except for during wartime, textile imports from China exceeded even trade with Mexico. Miles Wortman, “Bourbon Reforms in Central America: 1750–1786,” The Americas 32, no. 2 (1975): 222–238.

8. Though the categories seem to overlap, in practice correos and arrieros were clearly distinct and were treated as such by administrators. Muleteers not infrequently traveled with a dozen or more mules, and they are sometimes described as “merchants” in documentation. Both scale and the decidedly commercial bent of their work set muleteers apart.

9. AGI Correos 90B, “Muy señores mios: la adjunta copia del respectivo expediente . . .” 1777.

10. Wortman, Government and Society in Central America, 1680–1840; Troy S. Floyd, “The Guatemalan Merchants, the Government, and the Provincianos, 1750–1800,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 41, no. 1 (1961): 90–110.

11. AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 146, Exp. 2938.

12. AGI Correos 90B, “Muy señores mios. Adjunto a VSS un plan extractado . . .” 1778. The mail system calculated its expenses in both reales and pesos. The real de plata fuerte—silver real—was the standard for much of the eighteenth century; a peso was worth eight reales.

13. See, for example, AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 137, Exp. 2747 (1725); Leg. 140, Exp. 2813 (1791); Leg. 142, Exp. 2849 (1794) and Exp. 2864 (1793); Leg. 146, Exp. 2928 (1805).

14. AGI Correos 90B, “Muy señores mios: Para mejor inteligencia de lo que tengo informado . . .” 1784.

15. “Hasta la presente se nos dan y han dado a nuestros antecesores quince pesos . . .” AGI, Correos 91A, #13, 1787 letter by correos.

16. AGI, Correos 90B, #25, August 1773 letter to Grimaldi.

17. “Siempre se toleró que los correos llevasen, y trajesen encomiendas permitidas.” AGI, Correos 90B, #25, July 1773 letter from Larrazábal.

18. AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 137, Exp. 2754.

19. AGI Correos, 90B, #21, 1773 letter from Juan González Bustillo puts the weight of the cloth at 3 arrobas, 6 pounds.

20. AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 146, Exp. 2938.

21. “José Ribera llegó a esta ciudad ayer . . .” AGCA, Sig. A3, Leg. 147, Exp. 2947.

22. In his complaint he solicited support from none other than the viceroy of Mexico. The dispute among these high-ranking officials continued for years, finding a tentative resolution only in 1777. The final decision from Spain to continue permitting small encomiendas, as long as they did not retard the correo’s journey, effectively condoned the former practice of turning a blind eye. This decision allowed the debate over encomiendas to continue for decades, so that in the early nineteenth century it remained a problem. (AGI Correos 90B, #25 1773–1777 correspondence.)

23. The correo generally paid for at least three animals, however: a mount for himself, a mule for the mail trunks, and a mule for the tayacan. The total cost might be 1.5 or 2 reales per league, depending on the number of trunks.

24. AGI Correos, 90B, #21, 1773 letter by Juan González Bustillo.

25. Disputes over arancel rates and the payment of fees went beyond the mail system. William B. Taylor’s discussion of disputes among parish priests over aranceles, for example, points to a similar delicate balance. The fee schedules might have, theoretically, prevented exploitation on either side. In practice, the arancel could be either rigid or flexible as the parties involved allowed. William B Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 435–438.

26. AGI Correos 90B, #23: “Goathemala a 1 de Octubre de 1772 . . .”

27. AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 137, Exp. 2752: 1764 maritime mail regulations.

28. AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 137, Exp. 2774: 1773 Complaint by the naturales of Acala. This case resolves itself in a revealing manner. Simón de Larrazábal and other officials in the capital consider rerouting the correo to avoid Acala, but they determine that the fourteen-league detour would be to great. Instead, Larrazábal suggests preserving the existing route but demanding that ladinos, rather than indios in Acala provide the supplies.

29. The town of Chinautla had the misfortune of finding itself directly on the outgoing route for both Oaxaca and the provinces after the relocation of Guatemala City following the 1773 earthquake. For eighteen years, they provided supplies to every correo who left the city, but in 1793 they finally complained, stating that they spent three days accompanying each outgoing correo to Petén and Omoa and their animals simply could not shoulder the burden. AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 141, Exp. 2837.

30. AGI Correos 91B, #5: “Testimonio de las providencias de este Superior Govierno para el mas pronto curzo de los correos . . .” 1786.

31. In discussing how a route to Petapa might be detoured, officials noted that the route, “which was previously part of the King’s highway and was therefore traveled by mail carriers, muleteers, and travelers” had fallen into disuse after the earthquake that ruined Guatemala City. People were traveling instead to and from the provinces “by the route called Canales, and since the former route has consequently become impassable, the old route to Petapa has been closed.” AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 141, Exp. 2837.

32. “Me han asegurado ambos que hay vereda conocida por los Indios . . .” AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 193, Exp. 3934.

33. “Pero los Indios que lo conducían, lo extraviaron . . .” AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 193, Exp. 3934.

34. “El motivo que tuvieron los Indios para haberlo ocultado . . .” AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 193, Exp. 3934.

35. AGI, Correos 90B, #20: “En 13 de Agosto ultimo mando verificar este cavallero Presidente . . .” 1804.

36. AGI Correos 92A, # 21, 24: “Estado del corte general de Caja hecho . . .” 1793, 1794.

37. AGI Correos 93B, #24. The administrator, however, suggested more than doubling these costs to expand the office and compensate the employees more fairly.

38. AGI Correos 92A, # 21, 24: “Estado del corte general de Caja hecho . . .” 1793, 1794.

39. AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 139, Exp. 2799

40. See AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 144, Exp. 2905; AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 146, Exp. 2930; AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 151, Exp. 5562 and 5563. And see the inventory of clandestine mail cases created by Faustino Capetillo in AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 147, Exp. 2944.

41. “De solo los pueblos inmediatos a esta Ciudad salen casi diariamente correos propios.” AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 147, Exp. 2939.

42. “Desde el año pasado de 1780 en que tome posesión de mi empleo . . .” AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 147, Exp. 2944.

43. AGI Correos 90B, #27: “Don Simón de Larrazábal, Administrador Principal, por su Majestad . . .” 1772.

44. After 1777, there is roughly one criminal case per year against a correo until 1812. See AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 139–150. Logbooks from the end of the eighteenth century indicate that in any one year there were roughly twenty correos operating the routes. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 6086, Exp. 55056: 1898.

45. AGI Correos 91A, #13: 1787 document.

46. “Su marcha la verificó con buena salud . . .” AGI Correos 92A, #19: 1794 case.

47. “Este conductor ha sido uno de los de mayor aprobación y cumplimiento en la Renta, con cuyo inmenso trabajo mantenía a su mujer y cuatro hijos.” Ibid.

48. AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 139, Exp. 2790: 1778 documents.

49. AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 146, Exp. 2935: 1804 case on José Romero.

50. Aguardiente—burning water—is the generic term for liquor with a high alcohol content. AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 140, Exp. 2810: 1791 case against Miguel Custodio.

51. AGI Correos 91B, #5: 1786 complaint that mentions Miguel Custodio.

52. AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 146, Exp. 2927: 1803 case against José Andrade. In these cases, the use of alcohol coincided with violent behavior, but as other cases involving violent correos demonstrate, the two were not necessarily linked. Furthermore, correos and officials did not use alcohol as an explanation for violence. If anything, alcohol use was posited as an explanation (or excuse) for sickness or confusion resulting in poor work performance. William B. Taylor, Drinking, Homicide and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1979).

53. See AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 137, Exp. 2752 for the 1764 regulations that establish the fuero. Ana Margarita Gómez discusses the social and legal dimensions of the comparable fuero for members of the Bourbon military. Gómez suggests that the fuero allowed soldiers (often of low social standing and mixed race) a rare social distinction. Ana Margarita Gómez, “The Evolution of Military Justice in Late Colonial Guatemala, 1762–1821,” A Contracorriente 4, no. 2 (2007): 31–53.

54. AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 139, Exp. 2793: 1779 documents allowing banned weapons. The first Bourbon prohibitions on carrying arms in Guatemala date to 1759. These prohibitions carried with them different penalties for españoles, indios, and castas. A 1779 acuerdo reinforced the prohibition and amplified the penalties associated with it. Ana Margarita Gómez and Sajid Alfredo Herrera Mena, Los rostros de la violencia: Guatemala y El Salvador, siglos XVIII y XIX, vol. 1. (San Salvador, El Salvador: UCA Editores, 2007). pp. 123–132.

55. Ibid., 1.:123–158.

56. AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 139, Exp. 2786.

57. “. . . Un Alcalde de mierda, un papo, un carajo, y otras expresiones de igual naturaleza.” Ibid.

58. “. . . Que se cagaba en ellos, en [sus] cadenitas de divisa.” Ibid.

59. “Una larga experiencia me ha hecho conocer que de los correos, pocas ocasiones aparece de su conferencia y convencimiento la verdad, y que por lo común quedan largos . . . resentimientos entre aquellos testigos que se disponen.” AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 149, Exp. 2983: 1819 case against José Maria Custodio and José Maria Crujente.

60. “. . . [Una] espada derecha de hoja angosta con dos filos.” AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 147, Exp. 2941: 1805 case against Francisco Anzueto.

61. For cases of assaults against men, see for example AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 145, Exp. 2919; AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 149, Exp. 2968; AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 149, Exp. 2970; AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 149, Exp. 2977; AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 154, Exp. 5588. A thorough study of social violence in late colonial Guatemala would permit a more contextualized consideration of these cases. The cases of domestic violence, for example, clearly extend beyond the correo population. Faustino Capetillo, the interim mail administrator in Guatemala City at the turn of the century, was brought up on charges of domestic abuse brought by his wife in 1803. (AGCA, Sig. A3, Leg. 145, Exp. 2922.)

62. “El Tayacán como era Indio (por lo común tímido) huyó a esconderse a un montecito para libertarse de que lo maltrataran, hasta que las lamentaciones y voces que daba el correo lo trajeron.” AGI Correos 92A, #8: 1790 correspondence.

63. AGI Correos 92A, #7: 1790 correspondence.

64. For an example of changes to the route designed to avoid assaults, see AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 142, 2859.

65. Wortman, Government and Society in Central America, 1680–1840, 254.

66. Service to “New Spain” (meaning Mexico) and Petén would continue to leave Guatemala on the third and eighteenth of the month, as would the mail for Gualán. The mail to the provinces would leave for León on the seventh and twenty-second of each month, returning on the first and seventeenth. Established by decree of January 25, 1821. (AGCA Sig. B, Leg. 4125, Exp. 92802, Folio 17v.)

67. AGCA, Sig. B, Leg. 1300, Exp. 31477.

68. AGCA Sig. B, Leg. 72, Exp. 2037, Folio 74.

69. “Las salidas de dos correos montados, mensualmente, a Oaxaca, tres de igual clase para las Provincias Orientales, dos verederos de a pie para la provincia de Chiquimula, Zacapa, y Gualán, dos para la de Verapaz y Petén, y dos para la Antigua Guatemala.” AGCA, Sig. B, Leg. 95, Exp. 2620.

70. AGCA, Sig. B, Leg. 94, Exp. 2570.

71. AGCA, Sig. B, Leg. 1198, Exp. 29367, Folio 5v. As of 1824, the Renta de Correos became the responsibility of the Ministerio de Hacienda. This remained the case into the 1830s. AGCA Sig. B, Leg. 140, Exp. 3175, Folio 4.

72. AGCA, Sig. B, Leg. 3483, Exp. 79641, Folio 534.

73. AGCA, Sig. B, Leg. 1937, Exp. 44583; AGCA Sig. B, Leg. 1939, Exp. 44629. The fact that these proposals were in some cases made repeatedly over a period of several years indicates that “established” service sometimes failed to take hold immediately. Another proposal was made in 1834 for a weekly service between Guatemala and Quetzaltenango. AGCA, Sig. B, Leg. 1940, Exp. 44708.

74. AGCA, Sig. B, Leg. 176, Exp. 3757.

75. AGCA, Sig. B, Leg. 1301, Exp. 31585; Exp. 31586; Exp. 31589; AGCA, Sig. B, Leg. 1940, Exp. 44711;

76. AGCA, Sig. B, Leg. 1301, Exp. 31595; Exp. 31601.

77. Wortman, Government and Society in Central America, 1680–1840, 262.

78. Wortman, Government and Society in Central America, 1680–1840; Douglass Sullivan-González, Piety, Power, and Politics: Religion and Nation Formation in Guatemala, 1821–1871 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998). For more in-depth discussion of the transformations occurring in this period, see also Lowell Gudmundson and Héctor Lindo-Fuentes, Central America, 1821–1871: Liberalism Before Liberal Reform (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995); Arturo Taracena Arriola, Invención criolla, sueño ladino, pesadilla indígena: Los Altos de Guatemala: de región a Estado, 1740–1850, 1740–1850 (Antigua, Guatemala; San José, Costa Rica: Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica; Porvenir, 1997); Ralph Lee Woodward, Central America: A Nation Divided, vol. 3, Latin American Histories (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

79. AGCA, Sig. B, Leg. 3610, Exp. 84169.

80. AGCA, Sig. B, Leg. 1301, Exp. 31590.

81. AGCA, Sig. B, Leg. 1301, Exp. 31631; AGCA Sig. B., Leg. 1301, Exp. 31658; Exp. 31649. These assaults seem to have been an almost regular occurrence on the route during this period. In a single month, three of the weekly mails from El Salvador were assaulted in 1840. AGCA, Sig. B, Leg. 3610, Exp. 84160.

82. AGCA, Sig. B, Leg. 1301, Exp. 31652; Exp. 31703; Exp. 31705.

83. AGCA, Sig. B, Leg. 3610, Exp. 84221.

84. AGCA Sig. B, Leg. 3610, Exp. 84179; AGCA, Sig. B, Leg. 1301, Exp. 31702. Nor was there frequently correspondence from other regions: AGCA Sig. B, Leg. 3610, Exp. 84173.

85. AGCA, Sig. B, Leg. 1301, Exp. 31618; AGCA, Sig. B, Leg. 3610, Exp. 84138.

86. Table prepared from AGCA, Sig. B, Leg. 3610, Exp. 84165. The state of Los Altos, formed by the Guatemalan departamentos of Sololá, Totonicapán, and Quesaltenango, enjoyed a brief independence during this period.

87. “Que necesarios y productivos solo considero los del Departamento de Chiquimula, por que girando por medio de ellos las correspondencias del Puerto de Yzaval y ultramar, son interesantes al comercio.” AGCA, Sig. B, Leg. 1301, Exp. 31675.

88. “Esto demuestra que son innecesarios, puesto que no hay sino muy pocas personas que escriban por ellos.” Ibid.

89. AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 137, Exp. 2767.

90. Ibid.; AGI Correos 90A, April 1, 1770.

91. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 2791, Exp. 24477.

92. See, for example, AGCA Sig. B, Leg. 1300, Exp. 31475; Exp. 31476; Exp. 31479; Exp. 31480; Leg. 2508, Exp. 56322; Exp. 56324; Leg. 3610, Exp. 84112; Exp. 84113; Exp. 84115.

93. Taracena Arriola, Invención criolla, sueño ladino, pesadilla indígena: Los Altos de Guatemala: de región a Estado, 1740–1850, 1740–1850.

94. Robert H. Claxton, “Miguel Rivera Maestre: Guatemalan Scientist-Engineer,” Technology and Culture 14, no. 3 (1973): 391.

95. Rivera Maestre had unusual training for this project. With formal school in neither engineering nor architecture, he was first distinguished as an artist of particular talent. He studied drawing at the Guatemalan Economic Society’s School of Drawing, and he was either apprenticed to a surveyor or taught himself. After the 1823 split with Mexico, Rivera Maestre accepted a government position advising the new state on how to develop its economy, though he turned down many other government posts in the post-independence period. As Robert Claxton’s study of Rivera Maestre sums up, “While Rivera Maestre may have been a most reluctant politician, he was a more willing scientist and public works administrator.” Ibid., 389.

96. Raymond B. Craib, Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 24.

97. Miguel Rivera Maestre, Atlas Guatemalteco: Año De 1832 (Guatemala: Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, 2001).

98. AGCA Sig. B, Leg. 2488, Exp. 54973–54981: 1826.

99. Ibid., undated.

100. Ibid., “La larga y dificilisima comunicación en que está este distrito con los demás puntos de la frontera no permite que un solo jefe pueda atender a la defensa de toda ella: es pues indispensable que la de esta parte esté confiada esclusivamente a uno.”

101. Ibid., “No podrá ser grande a causa de la mucha distancia . . .”

102. Ibid., 1826.

103. Ibid., 1826.

104. Ibid., July, 1826. The total population was 4,100: 150 blancos; 600 pardos libres; 500 negros libres; 2000 esclavos; 850 soldiers.

CHAPTER 5

1. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 1523, Folio 758: June 25, 1597 Real Cédula.

2. “Clerk” may come closest to encapsulating the escribano’s position. For a detailed discussion of the history and function of escribanos in Guatemala, see Jorge Luján Muñoz and Instituto Guatemalteca de Derecho Notarial, Los escribanos en las Indias Occidentales y en particular en el reino de Guatemala, vol. 2 (Guatemala: Instituto Guatemalteca de Derecho Notarial, 1977). Kathryn Burns considers the escribano and notary as writers of official “truth.” Kathryn Burns, “Notaries, Truth, and Consequences,” The American Historical Review 110, no. 2 (April 2005): 43–68. For a history of escribanos in colonial Quito that places an emphasis on the escribano’s role as archivist, see Tamar Herzog, Mediación, archivos y ejercicio: los escribanos de Quito (siglo XVII), Ius Commune. Sonderhefte; 82 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1996). Research by Pilar Ostos Salcedo and María Luisa Pardo Rodríguez on the escribanos of Sevilla in the medieval period looks closely at document production and suggests that many of the processes evident in late colonial Guatemala (and Spanish America as a whole) have their origins in early practices. Pilar Ostos Salcedo and María Luisa Pardo Rodríguez, Documentos y notarios de Sevilla en el siglo XIII (Madrid: Fundación Matritense del Notariado, 1989); Pilar Ostos Salcedo and María Luisa Pardo Rodríguez, Documentos y notarios de Sevilla en el siglo XIV (1301–1350) (Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla, 2003).

3. As Kathyrn Burns writes, “Their truth was recognizable not by its singularity but by its very regularity. It was truth by template—la verdad hecha de molde.” Burns, “Notaries, Truth, and Consequences.”

4. Rama, The Lettered City, 8–9.

5. Burns, “Notaries, Truth, and Consequences,” 3.

6. Burns, Into the Archive, 93–94.

7. Luján Muñoz and Instituto Guatemalteca de Derecho Notarial, Los escribanos en las Indias Occidentales y en particular en el reino de Guatemala, 82. AGCA, Sig. A1, Leg. 4575, Folio 43v.: April 12, 1535. A similar request for a report on existing escribanos was made in 1540. AGCA, Sig. A1, Leg. 4575, Folio 49v.: November 5, 1540.

8. Burns, “Notaries, Truth, and Consequences.”

9. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 1514, Folio 46: November 15, 1576; AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 4578, Folio 26v: August 16, 1622. Although restrictions on escribano assignments were also intended to minimize potential abuses from other directions as well. A 1603 cédula prohibited any of the president’s, oidores’, or fiscal’s relatives from serving in the post of escribano de cámara y gobierno. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 1514, Folio 49: December 31, 1603.

10. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 1515, Folio 40: October 19, 1619.

11. Herzog, Mediación, archivos y ejercicio: los escribanos de Quito (siglo XVII); Luján Muñoz and Instituto Guatemalteca de Derecho Notarial, Los escribanos en las Indias Occidentales y en particular en el reino de Guatemala, 2:.

12. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 4575, Folio 403: May 24, 1582; Sig. A1, Leg. 1513, Folio 608: May 27, 1582; Sig. A1, Leg. 1514, Folio 64: May 11, 1605. The eventual reply from Spain indicated that the post of escribano had never been intended for Indian towns, but only for the towns with a Spanish population. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 1517, Folio 184: May 27, 1640.

13. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 5405, Exp. 46049: October 28, 1638. Tamar Herzog writes that in seventeenth-century Quito, the category distinctions among escribanos may have existed more in theory than in practice. In Quito, at least, they were not easily classifiable as either “notary” or “secretary.” It seems likely that in Guatemala, where the number of escribanos remained (comparatively) small throughout the colonial period, a similar blurring of lines existed. Herzog, Mediación, archivos y ejercicio: los escribanos de Quito (siglo XVII), 13.

14. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 2195, Exp. 15749, Folio 217v.: October 6, 1525.

15. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 2195, Exp. 15749, Folio 116: May 19, 1536.

16. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 2195, Exp. 15749, Folio 79: December 18, 1566.

17. Luján Muñoz notes that escribanos beyond the city in smaller towns of the audiencia were also relied upon to manage and respond to official documents, logging incoming judicial correspondence and writing replies. Luján Muñoz and Instituto Guatemalteca de Derecho Notarial, Los escribanos en las Indias Occidentales y en particular en el reino de Guatemala, 2:40.

18. “Presidente y oidores de mi Real Audiencia que reside en la ciudad de Santiago . . .” AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 1513, Folio 758, 1596 real cédula. Later cédulas echo the import of the 1596 cédula: AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 1514, Folio 002.bis: May 31, 1600; AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 1514, Folio 57: February 13, 1604; AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 1516, Folio 81: October 8, 1635.

19. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 2195, Folio 61: July 13, 1587. “Para tomar la hizo sacar del archivo . . .” A similar case resulted in the same order being repeated one year later. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 2195, Folio 63: May 1, 1588.

20. AGCA, Sig. A1, Leg. 4576, Folio 65: June 7, 1621.

21. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 4576, Folio 109v: October 16, 1624. “Por el peligro que tienen de perderse y desminuirse . . .”

22. AGCA, Sig. A1, Leg. 3089, Exp. 29520, 1626.

23. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 1517, Folio 39: May 4, 1643.

24. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 1523, Folio 80: October 13, 1692. The Fiscal, as an attorney for the Crown, likely required the documents for a case he was pursuing.

25. “La Audiencia de Guatemala, por su parte, por auto acordado de 29 de abril de 1699 . . .” (Citing José Joaquín Pardo, Efemérides de la Antigua Guatemala, 1541–1779. Guatemala: Unión Tipografía, 1944, p. 97.) Luján Muñoz and Instituto Guatemalteca de Derecho Notarial, Los escribanos en las Indias Occidentales y en particular en el reino de Guatemala, 2.:57. For further mandates on providing traslados or copies, see AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 1525, Folio 11: May 30, 1708; Folio 21: October 13, 1708; AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 2026, Expediente 14049, Folio 71: October 7, 1764.

26. This may be due to the absence of an escribano training facility in Guatemala. Luján Muñoz notes that Guatemala never boasted a training facility for escribanos, while Mexico and other places in Spanish America did. “En Guatemala nunca existió una institución en la cual se diera, a los futuros escribanos, una preparación especial. En México, con la fundación del Real Colegio de Escribanos, establecido por Real Cédula de 29 de junio de 1792, se abrió una academia dependiente del Colegio, la cual tenía a su cargo la formación de los escribanos. A esta Academia debía asistir el futuro escribano por un período de seis meses.” Ibid., 2.:66–67. While escribano practices across Spain and Spanish America in the eighteenth-century bear certain similarities, the absence of a school for escribanos does set Guatemala apart. Differences with Mexico and, even more so, places in Spain become more marked in the eighteenth century. See, for example, Raimundo Noguera de Guzmán, Los notarios de Barcelona en el siglo XVIII (Barcelona: Colegio Notarial de Barcelona, 1978).

27. AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 503, Exp. 10350, Folio 1: July 21, 1721.

28. See, for example, AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 3089, Exp. 29528.

29. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 2820, Exp. 24962, 1710–1727 correspondence.

30. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 4622, Folio 134.

31. Ibid.

32. Herzog indicates that keeping track of documents was a challenge for escribanos elsewhere, as well. “El flujo de papeles que salían y volvían a los archivos debía controlarse mediante un registro llamado ‘libro de reconocimientos’. En él, el escribano debía anotar los datos de los documentos (la identidad de las partes interesadas y su naturaleza jurídica) y el nombre de la persona que los sacaba. Esta última tenía que mostrar su conformidad con esta información firmando la razón insertada en el libro. El escribano tenía la obligación de velar por la devolución de los papeles y asegurarse de que la nota correspondiente en el libro fuera tachada a medida que iban regresando los documentos. Pero, según se desprende de los mismos libros de reconocimiento . . . así como de las visitas a escribanos, la mala gestión de la salida y entrada de documentos en los archivos era un fenómeno muy común.” Herzog, Mediación, archivos y ejercicio: los escribanos de Quito (siglo XVII), 25.

33. See, for example, AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 347, Exp. 7229, 1734–1738; Exp. 7232, 1739–1752; Exp. 7233, 1754–1758; Exp. 7234, 1748–1760; Leg. 4504, Exp. 3830, 1745; Leg. 4505, Exp. 38359, 1766; Exp. 38360, 1766; Leg. 4506, Exp. 38367, 1768; Exp. 38369, 1768; Leg. 4508, Exp. 38389, 1774–1778; Exp. 38394, 1776; Leg. 4509, Exp. 383400, 1777; Exp. 38401, 1777–1794.

34. AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 2169, Exp. 32567, 1771. Similarly, a 1768 volume indexed correspondence with León and San Salvador (AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 1366, Exp. 22855) and a volume from the same year indexed correspondence with Tuxtla and Tegucigalpa (AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 1366, Exp. 22858).

35. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 4521, Exp. 38521. Document is undated, but the reference to “Vieja Guatemala” suggests the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century.

36. AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 1365, Exp. 22851, 1767.

37. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 349, Exp. 7253, 1753–1792.

38. Burns, Into the Archive, 68.

39. “Será obligación de los Escribanos de Ayuntamiento de las Cabezas de Partido . . .” AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 1531, Folio 355: January 31, 1768.

40. “El Instrumento que se há de exhibir en el Oficio de hipotecas . . .” Ibid.

41. “Para facilitar el hallazgo de las cargas y liberaciones . . .” Ibid.

42. “Como la conservación de los documentos públicos importa tanto al Estado . . .” Ibid.

43. AGI, MP-LIBROS MANUSCRITOS, 59/1726, “Representación sobre el desperdicio y perdida de los Papeles Políticos de España y remedios que deben practicarse para su conservación,” Folios 9v–10, 15.

44. Ibid., folio 23v. “En el año de 1718 . . .”

45. Ibid., 93v.

46. Ibid., 103–103v. “Se han tratado con tal abandono . . .”

47. Ibid., 158v–159. “. . . Lleva el Consejo de Inquisición a los demás la gran ventaja . . .”

48. Ibid., 163.

49. Ibid., 118. “La forma en que se manejan sus Papeles . . .”

50. Ibid., 132–133. “Sería muy importante se hiciese un Índice de estos papeles . . .”

51. Herzog, Mediación, archivos y ejercicio: los escribanos de Quito (siglo XVII), 18. “Durante el siglo XVII se crearon y ordenaron los archivos centrales de la Monarquía Hispana en Simancas y Roma y se insistió en la posibilidad de formar archivos locales, tanto de documentación gubernativa como de carácter particular. Se concibió así la posibilidad, nunca plasmada en la realidad, de acabar por esta vía con el monopolio de los escribanos sobre los archivos que contenían documentación producida por ellos mismos.” It seems questionable that these two tendencies—the divesting of escribano power and the consolidation of archives—were causally related in such a clear-cut way. For one thing, Simancas was created in the sixteenth century, when the intention of minimizing escribano control was not even contemplated, so the creation of archives (like Simancas) cannot necessarily be taken as evidence of a desire to minimize escribano control. Furthermore, as Riol and the escribano disputes in Guatemala (discussed below) suggest, document access was only as important—and perhaps less important—than preservation. As a result, in Guatemala—and likely elsewhere—there appears to have been far more enduring ambivalence throughout the eighteenth century over the question of whether or not archives belonged to escribanos.

52. Luján Muñoz and Instituto Guatemalteca de Derecho Notarial, Los escribanos en las Indias Occidentales y en particular en el reino de Guatemala, 2:57. “La Audiencia de Guatemala, por su parte, por auto acordado de 29 de abril de 1699 mandó establecer el archivo de escribanos públicos y reales, adscrito al Ayuntamiento de la ciudad de Santiago. En este archivo se debían depositar los registros de los escribanos fallecidos “. . . y de los que de aquí en adelante fallecieren . . .” (Citing José Joaquín Pardo, Efemérides de la Antigua Guatemala, 1541–1779. Guatemala: Unión Tipografía, 1944, p. 97.)

53. Ibid.

54. AGCA Sig. A1., Leg. 3089, Exp. 29550: August 26, 1755.

55. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 4004, Exp. 30381: 1769. “El sindico Procurador general de VS dice . . .” Coincidentally, Pedro Ortiz de Letona was also the royal mail administrator prior to the mail service’s incorporation by the crown.

56. “El sindico Procurador General de este N.A. hace presente . . .” AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 3089, Exp. 29564: 1778.

57. “Por quanto, aviendome representado los Oficiales de mi Real Hacienda de las Islas Philipinas . . .” AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 2026, Exp. 14049, Folio 71: October 7, 1764.

58. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 1586, Expediente 10230, Folio 64. “. . . Y mandarse restituya luego y sin dilaciones alguna . . .”

59. Burns observes the same about escribanos keeping their offices at home in Peru. Burns, Into the Archive, 70.

60. Ibid., “Para que los alcaldes ordinarios de la villa de Sonsonate . . .”

61. It is possible that the “su” refers to Sonsonate, but it is much more likely that it refers to the escribano.

62. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 2791, Exp. 24477. “El escribano de estas dichas provincias . . .”

63. Ibid. Unfortunately, a severely damaged page makes this passage somewhat difficult to decipher. “[. . .] escribanos que. [. . .] en este juzgado hayan tenido [. . .] casas dicho Archivo: si no es que siempre sea mantenido como va dicho en la casa Real . . .”

64. Ibid. “Me presenté a fin de que se me entregase el Archivo correspondiente a este Juzgado . . .”

65. Born in Cuzco in 1751, he held various posts, including alguacil mayor for the Inquisition, the alcalde mayor for Suchitepequez, and juez subdelegado de tierras. For information on Mollinedo y Villavicencio, see the entry in “AFEHC: Diccionario: MOLLINEDO Y VILLAVICENCIO Tomas: MOLLINEDO Y VILLAVICENCIO Tomas,” n.d., http://afehc.apinc.org/index.php?action=fi_aff&id=630.

66. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 2791, Exp. 24477. “El Fiscal dice: que por que el archivo esté en la casa del corregidor no dejar de ser el cargo del escribano.”

67. Ibid. “Se declara que el archivo debe existir en la pieza destinada para él . . .”

68. Ibid. “. . . Que a mi me corresponde tener dicho Archivo.”

69. Ibid. “No es esto Señor lo mas, cuanto que en la Pieza en donde existe . . .”

70. Ibid.

71. AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 138, Exp. 2776: 1774.

72. Ibid.

73. Ibid. “Con lo cual se expresó no haber ya más Papeles, Cartas, ni Muebles pertenecientes a la Administración.”

74. AGI, Correos 90A: November 1, 1770 letter by Don Simón de Larrazábal gives notice of Melchor de Ugalde’s death on October 18, 1770.

CHAPTER 6

1. AGCA B, Leg. 2406, Exp. 50422: June 30, 1836. “Sin embargo de mi achacosa salud . . .”

2. In 1812, for example, the position of escribano for the Guatemalan ayuntamiento was dissolved and replaced by a secretary. AGCA Sig. B1, Leg. 7, Exp. 282: July 10, 1812; Sig. A1, Leg. 2595, Folio 333: August 22, 1812. At the same time, the sale of office for escribanos was abolished.

3. Oscar A. Salas M., Derecho notarial de Centroamérica y Panamá (San José, Costa Rica: Editorial Costa Rica, 1973), 29–30.

4. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 4795, Folio 146v.: July 8, 1777.

5. The exact date of his death is unknown, but a document from 1815 disposes of his archive after his death. AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 207, Exp. 3736, Folio 38: May 10, 1815.

6. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 349, Exp. 7250: 1600–1782.

7. Ibid., 1–7.

8. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 4509, Exp. 38400: 1777; Exp. 38401: 1777–1794; Exp. 38405: 1778–1781; Leg. 4510, Exp. 38406: 1779–1789; Exp. 38407: 1778–1780; Exp. 38408: 1778–1780; Leg. 4511, Exp. 38411: 1779–1793; Exp. 38415: 1779–1785; Exp. 38417: 1779–1795; Exp. 38419: 1780; Exp. 38423: 1781–1782; Exp. 38430: 1782; Leg. 4513, Exp. 38433: 1784; Exp. 38436: 1778–1793; Leg. 4514, Exp. 38441: 1768–1789; Exp. 38422: 1780–1792; Leg. 1977, Exp. 13483: 1806; Leg. 2565, Exp. 20684: 1800; Exp. 20686: 1802–1815; Exp. 20687: 1802.

9. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 4513, Exp. 38436: 1778–1793. A similar logbook for the 1808 to 1813 period kept track of the documents provided to procuradores. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 2569, Exp. 20706: 1808–1813.

10. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 4512, Exp. 38422: 1781.

11. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 2564, Exp. 20675: 1793–1804.

12. See, for example, AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 2565, Exp. 20687: 1802.

13. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 349, Exp. 7250: 1600–1782. See Chapter 3 in particular in Burns, Into the Archive.

14. Ibid.

15. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 2821, Exp. 24991: September 28, 1780. “Respecto a que aun se halla en la arruinada Guatemala el archivo secreto de cabildo . . .”

16. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 2214, Exp. 15849: September 27, 1780.

17. Ibid: May 25, 1781.

18. Ibid. “Quisiera que Vm se pusiera a considerar lo mucho que se ha trabajado con los papeles que vinieron de Guatemala del archivo de cabildo . . .”

19. Ibid: December 10, 1781. “Contra la terminante disposición de la ley . . .”

20. Ibid: December 22, 1781.

21. Ibid: February 22, 1798.

22. AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 1943: August 5, 1802 (Madrid).

23. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 1595, Folio 333: August 22, 1812. Nor was it necessary to be licensed as an escribano to be appointed secretary of the ayuntamiento. AGCA Sig. B1, Leg. 7, Exp. 282, Folio 1: July 10, 1812.

24. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 1538, Folio 65: August 22, 1812; Folio 121: October 9, 1812.

25. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 1538, Folio 276: April 23, 1813. “Las Cortes generales y extraordinarias, deseando que se cumpla puntualmente su Soberana resolución de 12 de Marzo de 1811 . . .”

26. AGCA Sig. A3, Leg. 207, Exp. 3736, Folio 38: May 10, 1815.

27. AGCA Sig. B85, Leg. 1146, Exp. 26217: 1825.

28. AGCA Sig. A4, Leg. 1, Exp. 43: 1823. Grijalva was temporarily substituted by Manuel Beteta in the early 1820s.

29. AGCA Sig. B117, Leg. 2406, Exp. 50407: August 13, 1823.

30. AGCA Sig. B108, Leg. 1933, Exp. 44324: August 19, 1823.

31. AGCA Sig. B80, Leg. 1074, Exp. 22588: September 29, 1832. Similarly, documents were requested from Bernardo Martínez, who was thought to have documents relevant to the region’s history. AGCA Sig. B83, Sig. 3591, Exp. Exp. 82364: Sept. 21, 1832.

32. This was done as a matter of course, so little documentation exists other than for those cases that presented obstacles for the archivist, such as the recovery of the documents by escribano Francisco Quiroz. AGCA Sig. B, Leg. 2418, Exp. 50765.

33. AGCA Sig. B92, Leg. 1391, Exp. 32137: 1835.

34. AGCA Sig. B117, Leg. 2414, Exp. 50698: 1830 (?). The document is undated, but Los Altos was dissolved in 1829.

35. AGCA Sig. B, Leg. 2519, Exp. 56835: April 18, 1834. “Don Manuel Toledo vecino de Zacapa . . .”

36. A clear representation of these changing centers and boundaries can be found in Hall, Pérez Brignoli, and Cotter, Historical Atlas of Central America, 172–175.

37. AGCA Sig. B6, Leg. 98, Exp. 2711: March 9, 1824. “Habiéndose ya instalado el Congreso constituyente de este Estado . . .”

38. Hall, Pérez Brignoli, and Cotter, Historical Atlas of Central America, 174.

39. AGCA Sig. B10, Leg. 178, Exp. 3819: August 6, 1835. “. . . Es de pedirse al Gefe del Estado de Guatemala el archivo del referido Consulado por pertenecer a la federación . . .”

40. Though it is impossible to say for certain, it seems likely that the Miguel Talavera assigned to attend to the consulado archive’s organization and transfer was the same person designated in 1802 among the “archivero” appointments in the office of the president. Miguel Talavera’s reference in 1836 to his “cuarenta y siete años de una larga carrera por la senda del honor” make it likely that he was, in fact, employed in 1802.

41. AGCA Sig. B117, Leg. 2406, Exp. 50422, Folio 1: May 13, 1836. “Puse en conocimiento del Ejecutivo nacional la comunicación de U. de 5 del corriente . . .”

42. Ibid., May 26, 1836.

43. Ibid., June 3, 1836.

44. Ibid., June 10, 1836. “En cuanto logre mejorarme de mi actual enfermedad . . .”

45. Ibid., June 30, 1836. “Este voluminoso archivo . . .”

46. Ibid., August 8, 1836.

47. Ibid., August 8, 1836.

48. AGCA Sig. A1, Leg. 349, Exp. 7250: 1600–1782. Guerra y Marchán’s regional subdivisions are: Leon, Subtiba, Matagalpa, Sonsonate, Chiquimula, Sacatepequez, Quetzaltenango, Suchitepequez, Ciudad Real, Tuxtla, Soconusco, Omoa.

49. AGCA Sig. B117, Leg. 2406, Exp. 50422: September 4, 1836. “De aquellos que se ha verificado aparece en ellos muchos picados e incompletos, y por lo tanto inútiles los cuales ascienden incluso los rompimos y sucios . . .” At this point, Talavera continued with his efforts to erect the new shelving and store the archive in the aduana.

50. Ibid., November 4, 1836; November 24, 1836. Talavera’s budget from November 24 provides a remarkable snapshot of the material aspect of the archive’s reorganization. He carefully itemized the cost for each item, including also a ruler, string, and needles (to bind loose documents). The total budget came to eleven pesos and three reales.

51. Ibid., December 21, 1836.

52. Ibid., January 6, 1837.

53. AGCA Sig. B177, Leg. 2415, Exp. 50720: 1838.

54. AGCA Sig. B117, Leg. 2406, Exp. 50426: May 29, 1840; Sig. B118, Leg. 2438, Exp. 52239, Folio 56: June 4, 1840; Sig. B92, Leg. 1392, Exp. 32181: 1841.

55. AGCA Sig. B117, Leg. 2406, Exp. 50429: December 29, 1841. “. . . Pues corresponde a toda la nación.”

56. Ibid.

57. Ibid.

58. AGCA Sig. B117, Leg. 2416, Exp. 50727: December 10, 1847. Additional inventories were composed in this same period for the transfer of documents back to Guatemala. AGCA Sig. B117, Leg. 2416, Exp. 50728: July 10, 1847; Exp. 50726: December 28, 1847.

59. AGCA Sig. B117, Leg. 2406, Exp. 50432: July 3, 1843.

60. AGCA Sig. B117, Leg. 2406, Exp. 50439: November 6, 1844; Exp. 50449: May 29, 1848; Exp. 50450: November 9, 1848.

61. AGCA Sig. B117, Leg. 2406, Exp. 50438: June 19, 1844; Exp. 50436: December 31, 1844.

62. AGCA Sig. B117, Leg. 2406, Exp. 50441: July, 1945. “El archivo general del Gobierno se halla en un estado de trastorno tal que dificulta y retarda el despacho con grave perdida de tiempo, y recargo de trabajo no solo para el archivero sino para esta Secretaría.”

63. Ibid., July 10, 1845.

64. AGCA Sig. B78, Leg. 864, Exp. 21213: May 4, 1821.

65. AGCA Sig. B78, Leg. 859, Exp. 20749: October 25, 1853; Leg. 860, Exp. 20864: December 19, 1872.

66. AGCA Sig. B78, Leg. 755; Exp. 17921; Exp. 17892; Leg. 862, Exp. 21040; Exp. 21041; Exp. 21072; Leg. 887, Exp. 21592; Sig. B107, Leg. 1856, Exp. 43061.

67. AGCA Sig. B78, Leg. 860, Exp. 20902: July 6, 1875.

68. The following are examples of numerous inventories or requests for inventories made over the period. In 1855, it was once again necessary to recover and inventory the documents from the colonial government archive. (AGCA Sig. B117, Leg. 2416, Exp. 50734: 1855). In 1866, the síndico of Guatemala noted that the archive was in disarray and that it had to be inventoried. (AGCA Sig. B78, Leg. 655, Exp. 13718: April 27, 1866.) In 1873, escribano nacional Francisco Solares offered his services for the formation of an inventory of the archive. (AGCA Sig. B78, Leg. 655, Exp. 13720: July 1, 1873.) An inventory commenced in 1880 took stock of the archive of in the capital. (AGCA, Sig. B117, Leg. 2426, Exp. 50801: 1880.) A similar inventory was created in 1891. (AGCA Sig. B117, Leg. 2423, Exp. 50790: October 12, 1891.)

69. Another notebook is signed “Victor González.” AGCA Sig. B177, Leg. 2419, Exp. 50773, 50775.

70. AGCA Sig. B177, Leg. 2422, Exp. 50777.

71. AGCA Sig. B177, Leg. 2406, Exp. 50457: October 15, 1892.

72. AGCA Sig. B, Leg. 2414, Exp. 50677: January 15, 1902.

EPILOGUE

1. AGCA Sig. A, Leg. 2335, Exp. 17508: 1744, Folio 4v, 5.

2. Carlo Ginzburg, Martin H. Ryle, and Kate Soper, Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).

3. Greg Grandin and René Reeves discuss one example in the western Guatemalan highlands. While the AGCA in Guatemala City does have a sizable nineteenth-century collection, the Los Altos region has significant holdings for the nineteenth century. Greg Grandin and Rene Reeves, “Archives in the Guatemalan Western Highlands,” Latin American Research Review 31, no. 1 (1996): 105–112.