In Spanish Colonial America, as well as in the Iberian Peninsula at the same time, different jurisdictions intertwined in the same space. By way of consequence, the complex political organization of the New World was composed, at the local level, by the Indian and Spanish Councils, the doctrines, and the provincial structures called corregimientos. Although the officials of those institutions received precise instructions, in which the Spanish Crown defined and limited their functions, tensions were common between the Indian governors, the clergymen, the Spanish Councils’ officeholders, and the Spanish provincial magistrates, or corregidores. The present article will analyze a series of lawsuits that occurred in sixteenth century Yucatan and in which those authorities were implicated, in order to highlight not only the nature of the jurisdictional conflicts, but also the modalities of ...

In Spanish Colonial America, as well as in the Iberian Peninsula at the same time, different jurisdictions intertwined in the same space. By way of consequence, the complex political organization of the New World was composed, at the local level, by the Indian and Spanish Councils, the doctrines, and the provincial structures called corregimientos. Although the officials of those institutions received precise instructions, in which the Spanish Crown defined and limited their functions, tensions were common between the Indian governors, the clergymen, the Spanish Councils’ officeholders, and the Spanish provincial magistrates, or corregidores. The present article will analyze a series of lawsuits that occurred in sixteenth century Yucatan and in which those authorities were implicated, in order to highlight not only the nature of the jurisdictional conflicts, but also the modalities of ...

In Spanish Colonial America, as well as in the Iberian Peninsula at the same time, different jurisdictions intertwined in the same space. By way of consequence, the complex political organization of the New World was composed, at the local level, by the Indian and Spanish Councils, the doctrines, and the provincial structures called corregimientos. Although the officials of those institutions received precise instructions, in which the Spanish Crown defined and limited their functions, tensions were common between the Indian governors, the clergymen, the Spanish Councils’ officeholders, and the Spanish provincial magistrates, or corregidores. The present article will analyze a series of lawsuits that occurred in sixteenth century Yucatan and in which those authorities were implicated, in order to highlight not only the nature of the jurisdictional conflicts, but also the modalities of ...

The province of Yucatan has been often described as a Spanish empire’s periphery, not only because of its farness from the Courts (of Mexico and Spain), but also because of its conquest’s incompleteness, since extensive territories remained out of the colonial control for centuries. However, in the sixteenth century the Defensores (or advocates) of the Indians, as well as the Procuradores (or representatives) of the local Spanish towns maintained a close relationship with both the Mexican Court and the Council of the Indies. This article examines those actors’ travels, as well as the circulation of the documents they produced in order to determine the differential impact of those two factors on the production of imperial law. Special attention will be paid to the strategies aimed at interfering with the free circ...

This article aims at identifying some of the actors responsible for the transportation of records from America to the Iberian Peninsula in the sixteenth century. We will also show how their intervention had an impact on political communication in the Spanish empire. Our goal is to analyse the formation of archives from the perspective of the agents who were charged with their transportation. We will examine the role that Indigenous messengers, as well as the lawyers who were expected to represent the Spanish King’s vassals from the overseas territories before the Council of the Indies in Spain played in the circulation, use and conservation of the records in the empire. Since it is impossible to be exhaustive, the analysis will be built on a series of examples relative to the province of Yucatán in New Spain.

La estancia en Madrid de Pedro Rengifo, que se auto-identifica como «mestizo» procedente del Perú, sirve de hilo narrativo a la obra de Adrian Masters, We, the King. Creating Royal Legislation in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish New World. A lo largo de los seis capítulos que componen el libro, seguimos entonces los pasos de Pedro que, en 1584, entregó al Consejo de Indias un voluminoso expediente, resultado de la movilización de más de ciento cincuenta actores del virreinato peruano, para pedir que los mestizos puedan acceder a los mismos cargos que los españoles. Este caso encapsula la ambición del proyecto de A. Masters cuyo objetivo consiste en reconstruir la forma en que las peticiones de los vasallos americanos de la monarquía española fueron creadas, movidas, escrudiñadas por múltiples actores y, en muchos casos, fueron convertidas, por la intervención del rey, en cédu...

Luis Miguel Glave's new book takes us down two paths: that of the hundreds of memorials written by Indigenous peoples and their allies during the Viceroyalty of Peru between the 17th and 18th centuries; and that of memory, the human activity that gives life and meaning to these writings, connecting them not only to a more distant past but also to our present, through the work of the historian, a citizen of two worlds.