Desde la otra orilla: Cartas de Indias en el Archivo de la Real Chancillería de Valladolid (Siglos XVI – XVIII)

Abstract

In a beautifully presented book, Ma. del Carmen Martínez Martínez has collected, transcribed, and annotated 277 letters written between 1537 and 1819 by different individuals who were either in the Americas or on their way to and from the New World. These letters were found in the archives of the Chancillería de Valladolid, the court viewing and reviewing lawsuits proceeding, roughly speaking, from the northern half of Spain. Although motivated by personal interests — they were sent by litigants in order to advance their cases, mainly civil lawsuits but also demands for recognition as hidalgos — these letters nevertheless tell us much about a period and a place and the hopes, fears, plans, and anxieties of those involved in the overseas expansion. The letters cover almost equally New Spain and Peru, with the odd example from Central America, New Granada, the Caribbean, Chile, and Río de la Plata. The eighteenth century is best represented, with fewer examples from the sixteenth century; the seventeenth century is relatively poorly represented. This collection is a very welcome and important contribution to the understanding of the early modern period in general, and the colonial enterprise in particular. Decentralizing the state, it demonstrates the degree to which colonialism was not only, perhaps not even mostly, a vast impersonal machine. It was exercised from day to day by individuals who probably never thought of themselves as colonizers nor necessarily saw, understood, or cared about the “larger picture.”The book also includes a useful introduction and indexes that, besides including statistics and names of authors and places, also discusses the genre (letter writing) and the difficulties involved in writing and receiving letters during that period.Perhaps the greatest lesson implicit in this collection is the importance of peninsular archives to the writing of Latin American history. Indeed, it confirms the abundance and richness of the information that Spanish archives other than those directly associated with the colonial enterprise (such as the Archivo de Indias) contain. It thus tells us the story of how closely intertwined were the Old World and the New, and it reminds us that we must be careful not to separate the two, as many academic and scholarly traditions have tended to do in the past.