Distance and Documents at the Spanish Empire's Periphery by Sylvia Sellers-García

Author:Sylvia Sellers-García [Sellers-García, Sylvia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Latin America, General
ISBN: 9780804788823
Google: 7fILAQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2013-12-11T03:33:52+00:00

Part Three

5

The Distant Archive

I hereby order that from now on all decrees and letters . . . be stored in the archive of the audiencia and that a book be made to keep an accurate inventory of them so that they may be understood and obeyed with the greatest facility.1

—King Philip II, 1597

As Guatemalan peripheries shifted, distancing Spain and bringing formerly marginal places to the fore, a concurrent and related change occurred in how documents were stored. Chapter 4 has argued that while routes remained important to the imagining of places linked by distances, the perception of Guatemalan space into coterminous territories defined by political boundaries came into focus. It has also argued that conventions in correspondence changed, as the denser and more efficient mail system facilitated the creation of local correspondence “circuits” where previously the far-flung itinerary and radial modes of document travel had entirely dominated. As the next two chapters argue, the related manner of storing documents transformed as well, beginning in the late colonial period and continuing in the national period.

In the colonial period, the documents carried by Guatemalan correos traveled to the desks of ecclesiastical authorities and merchants, to the homes of individuals, and to officials in every corner of the Spanish empire. But once documents had traveled a particular spatial-temporal route through the audiencia, their travels did not end. Many of the official documents carried by correos traveled across the Atlantic or to a neighboring audiencia only to be stored for short or long periods of time in archives. These two stages of the document’s voyage were not unrelated; indeed, a pause in an archive was often simply a resting point in the creation of a composite document. The escribanos who kept colonial archives were also crucial to their composition and movement. Yet in the national period, the gradual transformation of composite documents made for documents with shorter life spans. Documents traveled from point of origin to point of receipt and remained there, their single journey complete. The archivists who replaced escribanos had less of a role in document creation and spatial movement: they primarily stored and organized sedentary paper. Archives, therefore, went from being nodes in the process of document creation and travel to being purely document repositories. Or, considered in a different light, archivists became custodians exclusively of a document’s temporal travel.

To reveal this transition, Chapter 5 focuses on the colonial period and argues that document travel and document storage were closely related practices. The organizational framework for document travel closely mirrored and complemented the framework for document storage. Correspondence inventories or indexes, in use even in the sixteenth century, were relied upon to organize documents sent between Guatemala and Spain. Similarly, the crown ordered that document inventories would form the necessary structure for official archives. “Books” were created to periodically inventory and index the contents of regional and central administrative offices. Additionally, the officials assigned to organize and safeguard archives, escribanos, had a close relationship to the mail system. As the official

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