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Distance and Documents at the Spanish Empire's Periphery
By Sylvia Sellers-García Stanford University Press
Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8705-5
CHAPTER 1
Documenting Distance: Form and Content
This level of discussion is beyond reach for the idiotic men who sit on the ... council of the town of San Pedro Carchá, and however useless their questions, it would be equally useless to reply. Vale.
—Anonymous Guatemalan official, 1792
It may be that in some cases distance presented an opportunity for people in the Spanish empire. Certainly the "witches" in Escuintla benefited from their remote placement on Guatemala's Pacific coast, far from the punishing presence of the Mexico City tribunal. But distance was, undeniably, also an obstacle. From the point of view of officials attempting to maintain the rule of law or merely gather information, distance created serious problems. One solution, of course, could be found in sending delegates: trusted individuals who would carry the norms and expectations of the center to the periphery. At times, however, "idiotic" delegates at the periphery failed to fulfill expectations. Even when delegates were reliable, those individuals had to find a way to report back, and documents provided an essential means of overcoming the obstacles posed by distance.
This chapter begins the discussion of this process by examining how both the form and content of documents reflected the imperatives of distance. Documents were initiated, elaborated, and concluded by many authors in various places and times: they were produced along a temporal-spatial route. But the intervals of time and space embedded in a document do not stand out because authors intentionally reduced them. Indeed, protocols were developed to deliberately flatten the effects of distance and to ensure that officials everywhere wrote in ways that were universally intelligible. Distance alone did not give rise to these protocols, but the impediments of distance certainly informed them.
Similarly, document content responded to the problems posed by distance. Most obviously, officials in Spain could not "see" the Americas. They relied continuously on American officials to make it visible and knowable. Concentrating on questionnaires written in Spain and the official reports—visitas and relaciones—written from Guatemala in reply, this chapter examines how documents were intended to "overcome" distance by creating Guatemala as an accessible, proximate place for the king and elite officials in Spain. Studying such content necessarily spills over into considerations of genre and form, as the relación and visita existed, to a great extent, purely because of long-distance readers.
In overcoming distance, these documents also described distance. Requests for information from the center of empire, initiated in the sixteenth century and repeated into the early nineteenth century, framed distance and space in specific ways. The questionnaires envisioned distance as route-based and organized around central, jurisdictional places. Toward the end of the colonial period and particularly in the early nineteenth century, a new emphasis on boundaries emerged in the questionnaires, but the preoccupation with routes and distances to central places endured.
The responses of writers in the Guatemalan audiencia absorbed and echoed this Spanish conception. A clear hierarchy of linked places emerges from the official reports written over the course of a half-century in Guatemala, and it is evident that Guatemalan officials incorporated the Spanish understanding of distance into their geographical descriptions. Yet the reports written in Guatemala were also composite in how they incorporated local (often Indian) geographical information. Thus the reports did not perfectly mimic the ideas projected by the center; rather, they introduced idiosyncrasies—or innovations, or distortions—as they relied on autochthonous sources. Officials created reports and descriptions that presented local, unofficial knowledge in official, Spanish terms.
Distance Protocols
It seems self-evident that in a realm as vast as the Spanish empire, documents traveled a good deal. Less evident is how authors inscribed that travel into their documents' content and form. Official documents for the colonial period that we read today rarely contain one author's writing, composed in a single sitting in a fixed place. Instead, they usually contain a series of compositions in different hands, elaborated in the margins at different points in time. The well-known dialogic quality of such documents does more than produce a conversation among officials; it also produces a chronological route, revealing spatial and temporal distances bridged by the document. The following document, a letter concerning a problematic portion of the King's Highway from Guatemala to Mexico, is typical.
It was signed by an official in Quetzaltenango on December 4, 1797. The Fiscal (crown attorney) in Guatemala took up the document, beginning his contribution to the text on the same page and continuing his writing on an appended page (below). By the time of the Fiscal's writing, the document had traveled many leagues to Guatemala and more than a year had passed. Ignacio Guerra y Marchan, the audiencia's escribano (secretary and chief clerk), processed the document on the following day, January 12, 1799. The document found itself next in the town of Concepción in Huehuetenango on February 6, 1799. Not evident in the page below but in those that follow, the document was signed in Concepción by three officials. A note in the margin indicates that the document was dispatched on February 8. It next reached officials in Totonicapán in May 1799 and received comment from several officials before continuing on to Guatemala in July of the same year, where Guerra y Marchan passed it on to the Fiscal. The document went on from there, processed by the audiencia and returning to Totonicapán before finding any conclusion.
This most basic attribute of Spanish documents may seem obvious to the point of insignificance. But I believe examining the obvious here yields some important insights. Most often, historians would read a document like this one to determine what the Fiscal opined about the King's Highway and how the officials deliberated and what decision was reached. Reading this document as a statement about distance and knowledge production, however, discloses different content. The document is revealed as a material object, circulating among specific people and places in eighteenth-century Guatemala. It appears as an object produced by the different hands that signed and carried it, the composite creation of many minds. Traveling between the audiencia capital and the highland towns near Totonicapán and Huehuetenango, the document was repeatedly read, discussed, augmented, and stored before traveling once again. Eventually, it was archived in Guatemala City.
The document was relied upon by officials to bridge spatial distances between the highlands and the capital and temporal distances between moments of decision-making and deliberation. A temporal chronology and spatial itinerary emerge from it. Here, revealing a first model in use throughout the Spanish empire, knowledge was built along a route. Using what might be termed an "itinerary" mode of knowledge production, a single document accumulated information from each of its stopping points.
While the distances in this case are fairly short, documents of course mediated much greater distances: from Escuintla to Mexico City; from Mexico City to Seville; from the extreme periphery to the center. Temporal distances, too, extended far beyond the three years reflected here. Documents not only traveled for longer periods; they remained in escribano archives for longer spans of time. In a way, this document and its trajectory reveal in miniature the larger processes examined in this book: the creation of documents in a formal manner informed by long-distance governance; the development of content resulting from spatial movement; and the shaping of both content and form resulting from temporal lapses in archives.
From the point of view of Spanish officials, each of these processes was plagued with possible pitfalls. In archives, documents could be lost or neglected into ruin. In travel, documents could be lost in ships that sank or were seized by pirates. Trunks left unlocked might be rifled through, their correspondence stolen. Every aspect of a document's treatment had to assist in preventing great distances from becoming greater obstacles. Creating multiple copies of original documents lessened the risk, and throughout the colonial period documents were sent in duplicate or even in triplicate. A strict protocol governed the opening and closing of document trunks: documents were to be carefully locked and opened only with the proper authorities present. On the Guatemalan end, where authorities from the mainland could obviously not be present to enforce proper procedures, two high-ranking officials were assigned keys and charged with opening the documents before the audiencia. Furthermore, precise inventories of the documents accompanied the trunks and new inventories had to be created upon receipt to ensure that each document reached its intended destination. The documents were handled very much like treasure, and the frequent orders specifying protocol for their treatment were intended to ensure their safety both across great distances and at a great distance—within remote peripheries like the Guatemalan highlands.
Even when the documents arrived safely, there might be other impediments. If correspondents in the peripheral corners of the empire did not adhere to a recognizable form, the document could be considered invalid or be rendered unintelligible. The documents' formal attributes were thereby as essential to effective communication across long distance as were the measures taken to ensure their material safety. As such, the guidelines and templates devised by the crown and elaborated by the administrators of the Council of Indies were partly dedicated to achieving consistency. Kathryn Burns discusses the importance of templates and standardization in her study of escribanos, and Angel Rama suggests that "the influence of the documentary umbilical cord that carried imperial orders and provided linguistic models for letrados in the far-flung dominions" resulted in unique written forms: "Royal directives elicited lengthy, elaborate replies that advanced counter-arguments point by point, making the official missive—along with official reports and chronicles—into a literary genre in its own right."
This genre (or, more accurately, these genres) was elaborated over several centuries, becoming carefully rule-bound. A major concern for the Council of Indies from the beginning lay in validating the authenticity of documents received from a distance. The "concern with authenticating documents and the desire to leave clear proof of all public documents, letters, and decrees" gave rise to the Registro General del Sello. The seal (pictured in Figure 1. 2), as well as the signature of a secretary or escribano, verified the legitimacy of documents received in Spain. Though the stamp tax, papel sellado, introduced in 1639 is cast by historians principally as a fundraising measure, the papel sellado shouldered the additional responsibility of ensuring a document's validity.
Other guidelines dictating the proper formal attributes for official documents reveal how document "safety" expanded to mean something more expansive and complex. A Guatemalan official attempted in 1784 to enforce a regulation from the king circulated in 1779 to "all the Viceroys, audiencias, Archbishops, Bishops, and judges both ecclesiastical and secular." Sent to the king's administrators at the highest level, the regulation would be repeated and disseminated by his delegates. The Guatemalan president dutifully did so, demanding that "in order to process without confusion or delay ... the many petitions, reports, and pieces of official correspondence ... the useful methods and rules expressed in the order should be observed in the preparation and execution of documents." He complained that "the orders have not been followed, and almost universally documents continue to be sent in the same confused way." The orders emphasize a system that both isolates and organizes pieces of information.
The petitions and correspondence sent to this office should address one and only one subject at a time without reference to others; documents should all arrive numbered, with a summary or abstract in the margin that succinctly expressed the relevant topic. They should be accompanied by an index in which the assigned number of each letter corresponds to the numbers in the margins. These letters and their indexes should be identified by a P for the originals, a D for the duplicates, and a T for triplicate copies.
These instructions stated that the numbered index should be continued in subsequent correspondence, so that, in theory, a sequential series of numbered documents would be sent and received in Spain. They specified the procedure for providing cover sheets and for including numbered subdocuments within the main document. And finally, they explained how to pack these fastidiously prepared masterpieces: ordinary documents were to be sealed, but "planos o mapas" (charts or maps) had to be packed carefully in wooden trunks; under no circumstances were they to be packed in "tin cylinders, which always arrive damaged or ruined." These regulations go beyond safeguarding the physical and formal integrity of documents, though this remains a concern; they also reveal something of the documents' use, circulation, and possibly storage upon receipt. Documents were sent to different offices of the larger administration and were archived in different locations, depending on their content. The enumeration of documents suggests a desire to perceive the documents in a chronology, giving them a precise place in a temporal sequence (rather than simply a date). The manner of marking duplicate and triplicate copies points to the frequent necessity of distinguishing identical documents once they had found their way to the same office. A need to prioritize and discriminate, if not stratify, is implied.
The producers—writers, carriers, and handlers—of official documents in the Guatemalan audiencia complied with all these regulations to varying degrees. By following regulations, they not only adhered to bureaucratic protocol, they also acquiesced to the political power of the empire's center. But every now and then the weight of administrative and political influence proved insufficient. Documents were stolen or opened on the road, in places along the route, and in the administration's offices. The safety net for the material document, depending on so many people scattered across the empire, sometimes disintegrated. Similarly, writers of official documents also sometimes failed to follow the prescribed forms that provided uniformity and facilitated the production of proper composite documents across temporal and spatial distances. Administrators with daily responsibilities in the audiencia or in frequent correspondence with officials in Spain may have had more practice and a greater sense of professional obligation, but this did not necessarily guarantee their adherence to protocol. In the mid-eighteenth century, for example, Guatemalan escribano Don Juan Antonio Betancur was accused of having produced no less than eighteen testimonios, or certified copies, without having properly verified them against their originals. He was accused not of sloppy copying but of falsifying documents.
A less egregious but rather more revealing example comes from the town of San Pedro Carcha, a town in the province of Verapaz. It will help to keep in mind that Verapaz was decidedly peripheral to Guatemalan officials—a backwater with too many Indians and a handful of friars. The city council's escribano wrote a letter of perplexed inquiry to officials in Guatemala City about the proper process for composing a requested document. The Alcalde Mayor had forwarded a request from King Charles IV for a "report on the most noteworthy aspects of the town that are worth knowing, such as descriptions of the four-legged animals, birds, trees, plants, and special rocks." Dividing the short, two-page letter into dignified "asuntos" (chapters) headed by roman numerals, the city council wondered "what kind of birds, trees, plants, and rocks should be described? And if all of the above, which should be given preference?" It further queried what, precisely, made certain birds, trees, plants, and rocks special. Were the "special" ones those discussed by Spanish and foreign writers or those mentioned by no one? And supposing the former, were the descriptions to be written based on the accounts of those authors "for the greater discovery of the truth"? Most tellingly, they asked, "what role are the naturales to play in preparing this report, since it is only from their statements that the provincial magistrate can form a report without exposing his good name to the censure of wise men and thereby failing in the tasks set by his sovereign?" The council concluded that since "honor, love for the King and for country" should be sufficient motivation, the decision had been made not to offer monetary compensation but to hold a contest, for which the prize would be the "honorary title of Honorary City Councilman of San Pedro."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Distance and Documents at the Spanish Empire's Periphery by Sylvia Sellers-García. Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press.
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