CLAS faculty affiliate, Alcira Dueñas, will be hosting a workshop on "Archiving for the Empire: Indian Escribanos and Notarial Culture in Colonial Peru." Dr. Dueñas comes to us from the Newark campus and specializes in Colonial Latin American indigenous history.
The workshop is for faculty members and graduate students and all attendees are asked to read the corresponding paper ahead of time. For a copy, please e-mail Daniel Rivers at rivers.91@osu.edu. Pizza will be served. Please see a description of the workshop below:
Public writing was instrumental to the Spanish empire building goals in the Americas. Crafting legal proceedings, drafting wills, and recording myriad mundane transactions in the urban confines of the Lima valley's pueblos, indigenous escribanos played a crucial rule in the formation of the colonial archive in Peru. A source of legal memory and a wealth of local knowledge in Spanish were thus generated and circulated in various instance courts, which Indians deployed to settle claims of political inheritance, land disputes, and other community interests. While the resulting archive legitimized Spanish institutions, native escribanos were well aware of the notarial narrative's rhetorical power, and the authority and autonomy of the written document itself. They surely manipulated the genre for their own ends.
