Interpreters and the Deep Layer of Spanish Colonial Justice

Abstract

The office of General Interpreter was a vital link in Spain's multi-ethnic American empire, bridging the jurisdictions overseen by Native lords and municipal authorities and colonial ecclesiastical and civil jurisdictions. This article analyzes the role of General Interpreters in making an empire of law and, at the same time, a distinctive regional society in Villa Alta, Oaxaca, a remote hinterland of colonial New Spain (Mexico) during the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although scholarship on General Interpreters in viceregal courts is growing, we know less about interpreters outside of colonial centers due to fragmentary evidence. This article relies upon data scattered across Oaxaca's local archives: Native-language petitions, notarial records, letters, and memoriales produced by Native scribes, and their Spanish translations penned by interpreters, as well as first-instance cases of land disputes, idolatry, murder, theft, and factional struggles over village elections. These sources and other materials allow the historian to move beyond the narrow confines of legal institutions to reconstruct how patronage, economic cooperation and exploitation, and inter-ethnic networks defined the work and translation practices of General Interpreters. Finally, they offer clues as to what the office of General Interpreter meant and how it was perceived by those who sought justice.