Introduction: Imperial Geographies and Spatial Memories in Spanish America

Efforts to assess and consolidate Spanish domains in the New World posed a series of administrative, judicial, and social challenges for Royal authorities. The Empire's rapid territorial expansion into most of the Western Hemisphere with its rich human and ecological diversity led to systematic evaluations designed to order the natural and built environment that would benefit Spain an ocean away. A multidisciplinary group of scholars including historians, geographers, and art and architectural historians author the six essays that compose this special issue for the Journal of Latin American Geography. Together, they analyze the strategies developed by people and institutions in Spain and Spanish America from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries to negotiate, describe, transform, occupy, and exploit the natural world.

The special issue is organized into two separate but interrelated themes. "Imperial Geographies" focuses on the Spanish crown's interest in the natural world, a practical matter defined by commerce and trade, as well as the need to administer its holdings efficiently. Royal officials, scientific and technical experts, merchants, jurists and the clergy on both sides of the Atlantic debated, designed, and implemented policies and programs aimed at maximizing the exploitation of the Spanish New World. These essays examine Spain's imperial ambitions in relation to mining practices in Peru, the prevention of flooding at Mexico City, and the scientific exploration of Buenos Aires. "Spatial Memories" turns to the experiences of individuals and corporate entities as they negotiated their own relationship with the natural and built world. Equally as significant, Europeans, Indians, Africans, and mixed-raced groups adapted, redefined, and invented new ways of controlling their body politic, spatial boundaries, and religiosity. The second set of essays examine how spatial knowledge was conveyed through indigenous naming practices in Santafé and Quito, in the cartographic traditions of the Mixtec in the Valley of Oaxaca, and in the religious processions devoted to the Virgin of Remedios in Mexico City.

Imperial Geographies

Mining fueled discussions in colonial Peru about society's relationship with the subterranean world. Heidi Scott proposes that a change in European attitudes towards underground environments facilitated a dialogue about the advantages of penetrating the earth's core. "Places which were widely considered forbidden, spiritually potent, and outside the boundaries of human lifeworlds," she writes, "were gradually transformed, in early modern European imaginations, into exploitable spaces." Scott problematizes the mining ordinances implemented by Francisco de Toledo, Viceroy of Peru from 1569 until 1581, as well as the writings of Franciscan friar Miguel Agia, Juan de Solórzano y Pereira, and Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala over the conditions of mines and Indian laborers. Toledo, she notes, carried out nothing less than a transformation of the Andean landscape to generate wealth for the Spanish crown through the strategic resettlement of indigenous communities into reducciones. Toledo intended reducciones to concentrate labor in specific sites to facilitate wealth extraction. The question of Indians laboring in the mines of Peru, as she points out, stood at the forefront of philosophical debates about the "natural" condition of native peoples. Scott analyzes the writings of Agia, Solórzano y Pereira, and Guamán Poma as part of colonial governance discourse that examine the extent of Indian participation in the mita—a form of legal servitude used in mining. All three, she notes, understood the perils of the mining industry on indigenous peoples and the effects on their bodies, but each viewed the extraction of silver from below the surface of the earth as a necessary activity for Peru's economic prosperity and, by extension, for that of the Spanish Crown.

Natural disasters posed considerable challenges for Spanish authorities. In Mexico City, recurring floods wreaked havoc on the Spanish Empire's de facto capital in the New World, causing significant interruptions in the political, social, and economic life of the city. John F. López' "In the Art of My Profession" examines an understudied flood control proposal by the Dutch hydraulic engineer Adrian Boot. In 1612, Phillip III (1598-1621) appointed Boot to assist the German-born engineer Enrico Martínez with the desagüe, an...