Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru (review)

This well-written and engaging book attempts to “historicize” the colonial archives of Cuzco in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by examining the role of notaries as legal intermediaries who translated the needs and desires of citizens into official notarized records (instrumentos). When Lockhart and a generation of scholars began relying on notary records as the basis for their studies, they emphasized that these largely mundane documents—used to transact a sale, make a loan, write a dowry, or to give testimony in a lawsuit—constituted a down-to-earth view of local social practices.¹ Burns probes more deeply into these legal transactions, however, arguing that notary offices were actually sites of negotiation, where the greed and trickery of both notaries and their clients helped to shape the production of notary account books (protocolos). Although Burns is thoroughly convincing in debunking the “transparency” of these apparently mundane documents, she is less successful in presenting the changing historical context in which these documents were produced.

Given their powerful societal role as “ventriloquists,” who prepared the documents that gave voice to people’s legal needs in everyday life, notaries often enjoyed a reputation in Spain and the Indies as rogues and scoundrels (2). As a result, the Crown attempted to regulate their activities by providing approved documentary forms and procedures. Legal self-help manuals emerged by the mid-sixteenth century to give notaries guidance about performing their functions properly. Nonetheless, Burns examines how Cuzco’s notaries became enmeshed in complicated colonial social networks, which allowed them to conduct their business effectively and also to prosper outside the notary workplace by investing in land, commerce, mining, and other (often illegal) economic enterprises. These outside activities and the notaries’ duties, such as taking testimony in a wide variety of cases, often led them to leave the more mundane, everyday clerical duties to a chief assistant (oficial mayor), who presided over a group of apprentices willing to learn the craft during a decade or more of training. Not all of these young trainees, who often began as teenagers, would succeed in becoming notaries themselves, since the Crown sold the offices and allowed the holders to turn them over to family members or close associates after paying a fee to the treasury.

Notaries used a variety of clever legal strategies to circumvent the intent of the law, such as fake contracts (confianzas) and documents that protested other legally notarized statements (exclamaciones). In short, notaries could manipulate the legal record in the service of a powerful client or on their own account to shelter assets, disguise debts, sell merchandise, control land, or engage in a host of other shady ventures. As a result, modern scholars must read materials from the notorial archives carefully and critically, appreciating the complex political, social, and economic interests behind their production.

Burns presents a fascinating and complex tale of intrigue, convoluted politics, and tangled economic and social networks that comprised the world of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century notaries in Cuzco. To serve their clients and themselves, notaries sometimes manipulated the very documentary record that they were sworn to uphold. According to Burns, notary documents reflect this complicated reality, rather than providing an authentic, unvarnished depiction of local social transactions. She also provides a corrective to practitioners of the “New Philology” (who use similar documents produced in indigenous languages by native notaries in Mexico) by pointing out gently that modern historians must not assume that “indigenous notaries spoke for their communities, faithfully representing their language and desires” (145).

Although Burns presents an intriguing series of stories to bolster her generalizations, she does not explain effectively how two centuries of changing political, social, and economic conditions in Cuzco might have altered or influenced the work of notaries and the production of notorial documents. Apart from this criticism, her fine book should appeal to a wide audience of historians and scholars in other disciplines interested in archives, writing, and the exercise of...