Making the Municipio: Political Geographies in Colonial Guatemala

Boundaries in the Izalcos region of colonial Guatemala are the subject of numerous documents in the municipal archive of Caluco, El Salvador. Comparing sixteenth-century to later legal documents about land tenure shows that the continual reformulation of landscape knowledge in these proceedings did not erase, but instead perpetuated more ancient forms of landscape organization. Spatial knowledge depended upon survey of salient landmarks. Toponyms, textual surveys, and a metes-and-bounds survey indicate that the state rendered the final decision, but arriving at that decision involved indigenous frames of reference and negotiation to define relevance, the effects of which resulted in the department and municipal boundaries we observe today.