Indigenous peoples of early colonial Bogota as seen through their testaments and wills

• In Event: Wallmapu: agenciamientos indígenas, archivo.

Abstract

In recent years, the colonial archive has become an important resource for interdisciplinary research on Latin America. For investigators working on Latin American indigenous peoples during the early colonial period, the archive is an indispensable resource. Yet, while scholars of Spanish American colonial studies have consulted a wide array of indigenous colonial archival records to reconstruct the communal and individual ways of life in indigenous communities, surprisingly, testaments and wills have been neglected. My paper argues that among the notarial records left by Indians, testaments have special interest because a will, more than other legal papers, summarizes the material and social outcome of a lifetime. A will is a window onto someone's life, an inventory of property, a list of loved ones remembered by bequests. How is it that historically these valuable documents have been overlooked by scholars of indigenous colonial history? I identify three factors that might help explain this oversight: 1) there has been a tendency to treat colonial indigenous peoples as an undifferentiated peasant mass; 2) there exists a prevailing myth that only elite Indians left testaments; and concomitantly 3) there is a mistaken belief that most indigenous peoples, especially women, in particular owned nothing and therefore had no reason to make wills. By focusing not only on the content of indigenous wills but also on the processes by which wills were prepared and the specific language used, my paper addresses these gaps and shows that these legal documents provide exciting new information specifically in two areas.

Author

• Johana Barrero, Olivet Nazarene University