2025/07/28 · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Politics and Society in Latin America #Earthquake and Disaster Impact Studies #Historical Studies in Central America
paper · pdf · doi:10.1215/00182168-11997969
openalex publication_date 2025/07/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/03/09
T his special issue of the journal emerged organically, as all four of its articles reflect innovative new work on infrastructures of the Spanish Empire in colonial Latin America.Beginning with Christopher Columbus's landing in Hispaniola in 1492, followed by the conquests of the Aztec and Inca Empires in Mexico and Peru in the sixteenth century, Spain developed new infrastructures of information management to govern its new, large, and distant swath of territories.Collection and systematization of knowledge from the colonies were central to its imperial project.Yet, despite the massive amount of paperwork produced about these territories, challenges plagued the crown's efforts to know and govern them.The articles in this issue span the entire colonial period and explore different facets of imperial infrastructure, joining recent works that have advanced and expanded theoretical understandings of infrastructure. 1 Together, they shed light on local and contingent histories of imperial power, showing that it was far from omniscient or omnipotent.Mallory E. Matsumoto's "Narrating Boundary Markers in Early Colonial Highland Guatemala" examines how within the first 100 years of Spanish contact, Maya speakers of the K'iche'an languages in colonial highland Guatemala utilized bureaucratic and legal practices of the colonial administration to their own advantage.By reading the titles (t tulos) that proved their territorial rights to Spanish authorities, Matsumoto shows how these peoples narrativized their territorial boundaries, imbuing them with sociopolitical and spiritual meanings.In this way boundaries were used to preserve a kind of knowledge that did not conform to Spanish understandings of land and to maintain their sovereignty.Antoine Duranton's "The Transplantation of Wheat in Sixteenth-Century Hispaniola: Royal Institutions, Colonization, and Agronomic Testing" takes a different lens to colonial land policy, revealing how important plants were to colonization and the expansion of royal power.Driven by a belief that mimicking Spanish agriculture would "civilize" Hispaniola, at the time the Spanish crown's main possession, and by a burgeoning field of agronomic experimentation, the 1.