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

In 1704, four elderly women in Escuintla, Guatemala, were accused of witchcraft. The priest who had collected the testimonies in the case, under the guidance of the tribunal of the Inquisition in Mexico City, eventually sent the complete file to the Mexican tribunal. Nine years later, the tribunal sent arrest warrants but the women had already died. This case led Sylvia Sellers-García into questions about documents (how were documents created, how did they travel, how were they preserved?) and distance (how did people understand distance in the colonial period?). By looking into the nature of documents and notions of distance, Sellers-García proposes a reconsideration of the center-periphery framework that informs some scholarship on colonial studies by grounding the conception of distance, implicit in that framework, in its historical context. Sellers-García argues that distances, which connoted peripherality, “were understood as time-space intervals connecting hierarchically organized places” (p. 19). Distance shaped the content and form of documents and the practices that produced them. Sellers-García studies the case of Guatemala, a region far away from Spain and on the margins of the empire, and the administrative documents exchanged between Guatemala and Spain. Her book is based on archival research at the Bancroft Library in Berkeley, California, the Archivo General de Centroamérica and the Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica in Guatemala, and the Archivo General de Indias in Seville

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Context (archaeology · Empire · Garcia · Humanities · Latin Americans · Political science · Scholarship · Tribunal · Historical Studies in Latin America · History · Latin American history and culture · Law