Introduction

When Abraham Ortelius published his Theatrum orbis terrarium (1570), he introduced the book with an allegorical frontispiece of the four continents of the world (Figure 1.1).¹ The book’s title is framed to the right and left by the female sculptural figures of Africa and Asia. They are both making emblematic offerings to Europe, an armored Catholic queen sitting at the top of the image, dominating the whole earthly scene, with the terrestrial and celestial globes at her left and right hands, symbolic of her grasp of geographical and cosmological understanding. In a clear visualization of global power and control, directly below her and reclining on the ground is the warrior woman America, wearing nothing but a beaded anklet. Even though she is in a subordinate position, she is holding a feathered war club, bow and arrows close to her, a hammock by her side, and in her hand her offering: the severed head of a bearded European man. Beside her sits the flaming bust of Terra Australis Incognita, standing for the mythical fifth southern continent believed to have been found by Fernão Magallanes when he reached Tierra del Fuego.

Figure 1.1. Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum orbis terrarium (1570).

The image of America as an Amazonian warrior woman was reproduced widely in Renaissance art and thereafter. As a central feature of a global archive and an iconic symbol, she conveys a range of Eurocentric anxieties intertwined with the dominant vision of indigenous extreme primitivism. Travel and captivity accounts with marvelous encounters became foundational discourses enticing early modern readers as they legitimated Iberian imperial expansion. Thus, a gendered and imperial imaginary embodied by the savage, treacherous, yet seductive “Salomé” and woman warrior came to constitute a dominating symbol of the archive, surrounded by images of goddesses, noble women, and commoners reproducing and giving sense and order to the ancient world in the Americas.

What Is the Archive?

The elusive material and abstract notion of archive raise questions regarding the spatiotemporal nature of the production of knowledge. “Archive” is a word derived from the Greek (arkhē), which later passed to the Latin (tabulinun, archivum) to define a place where documents are kept. Corominas’s Diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana defines it as “residencia de magistrados” (magistrates’ residence), literally denoting a space for collection and management of legal documents. The notion of archive has become key in the humanities, leading to a critical inquiry of the archive itself. Indeed, the archive is a space and corpus of documents, a practice as well, all of which are bound to ideological practices embedded in the production of meaning (Stoler).

The archive is a story within a story; it is an account of the past that reveals as much about time and geographies as it does about the institutions that manage historical record and its spaces. Foucault and Derrida warned us about the contingent nature of the archive. In Michel Foucault’s idea of the archive, the “enunciative field” traps fragments of the past under layers of transcriptions, translations, and readings overdetermined by conventions of production and interpretation. Derrida does not deny the instrumentality at work in the archive, its search for origins and control. It has been suggested that regardless of Foucault and Derrida’s irreconcilable differences, their approaches invite us to excavate the archive subversively to identify silences in order to recuperate subaltern voices (Zeitlyn 464). To consider are those silences that hide, obscure, and bury other experiences and histories. Michel-Rolph Trouillot distinguishes four key moments in the creation of silence(s). The omission of certain voices from the archive occurs at “the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance)” (26). For Trouillot, these archival inequalities “lead to uneven historical power in the inscription of traces” (48). Therefore, any discussion on the constitution of the archive needs to be thought out with much caution.

In the study of the Latin American colonial archive, several scholars have engaged productively with the critical notion of the archive, including Roberto González Echevarría, Antony Higgins, and more recently Anna More. González Echevarría defines the archive as “a form of mythic discourse, not removed from the literary, but part of it” (153). Antony Higgins underscores that the archive designated not just discursive representations, but also institutional dynamics “in order to track the unfolding of spaces and forms of power” (12). Scholars who, like Higgins, have highlighted its problematic nature have claimed once and again that as a practice the archive shapes, limits, and even can erase history and memory, and not solely hegemonic ways of thinking. More recently, Anna More, in her examination of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora’s archival practices, demonstrates that the power of the archive can be instrumental to anyone anywhere. Indigenous, mestizo, and creole intellectuals engaged in ideological archival practices producing, reproducing, and manipulating history with new representations and performances.

Three Contingencies

The archive has been a patriarchal, geographical, and historical project dominated by political and economic interests biased toward regions with rich resources and populations. It is not surprising then that the history of the archive for Mesoamerica and the Andean region has been well documented. Yet, when considering the Iberian world and the global nature of colonialism, contingencies of time, place, and gender need to be considered in turn.

Regarding gender, the archive’s reconstitution should take into account that discursive understandings of the ancient world are a product of the partial and valued-laden experience of legions of male explorer-settlers, missionaries, surveyors, cartographers, and the like. Columbus sexualized “the discovery” most famously when he envisioned a pear-shaped globe in which earthly paradise would – similar to a woman’s breast – reside in the nipple. His obsession with the feminine, also entangled with his devout religiosity, extends to the Lesser Antilles’s northern archipelago, which he names “Las once mil vírgenes” awaiting their conquistadors. As he confirms the presence of mermaids, amazons, and effeminate Indians, Columbus erotizes the Americas in a move of “desire and disdain” (Zamora 176).

Of course, the gendered discourse and visual record were not unique to this explorer’s accounts. Sir Walter Raleigh, his British counterpart, upon his return from Guiana, described the land as a virgin, a “country that had yet her Maydenheath” (qt. in Graham 40). In Ralegh’s account, the metaphor of territorial conquest as sexual violence on the female body is more explicit. Graham Burnett observes that Ralegh’s choice of words does not hide the violence of the male conquest: the land had never been “sack [sic], turned, wrought, the face of the earth had never been turned.” Louis Montrose has argued that these sixteenth-century protocolonialist discourses describing the Americas gave continuity to Western, gendered discourses that began in medieval Europe and had become the norm by the Renaissance (2). As such, it is not surprising that the projected gendered narratives conjugating desire for and fear of the “wild territories” (and its others) came to find a place in the textual and visual record created by exploration.

Early imperial agents provided geoethnographical discourses connecting dispersed geographies. Hence, Ortelius’s allegorical representation of America with Magallanica beside her neatly connects the hemispherical archive of the Americas to that of other exotic regions in the Pacific and Asia. The not-so-linear route from the tropical Caribbean islands to the Pacific and across to Asia found its way into accounts and collections that were as much about discoveries as about their connected histories. In the archive, these regions could seem disconnected, but on occasions, they would become tightly bound by the force of images closely resembling one another.²

Following the route of navigators into the Pacific explains how traces of other ancient indigenous civilizations can be found in the Latin American archive. The distinctive experience of the colonization of the Rapanui of Easter Island redefines our understanding of “ancient indigenous cultures” as precontact societies (before 1492). How should we categorize the many native groups on the oceanic margins and in the continental interior of the Western Hemisphere that by the eighteenth century still had not had contact with Europeans? For example, many of the famous stone moai of the Rapanui were still standing and venerated when the Dutch expedition of Jacob Roggeveen first encountered this isolated Polynesian society on Easter in 1722, and when the Spanish expeditionary Felipe González de Haedo claimed the island for Spain in 1770. This “ancient” period only came to an end when Peruvian slavers and Chilean colonizers abruptly shattered the old ways on Rapa Nui in the 1860s and 1870s. Therefore, we need to advocate the careful consideration of gendered secular and ecclesiastical practices constituting the archive in different places at different times in history.

Archival Sites

A profoundly conflictive undertaking emerged in the creation of archival spaces, collections, and historical discourses on precolonial societies. This is especially clear in the Spanish, French, British, German, and Latin American archives, where one cannot escape the collision of ideological filters in such acts of recovery. Transnational archival operations of assembling, naming, describing, and selling and buying collections vested their holders with power, especially when these raw materials proved useful in the production of histories, fiction, poetry, and visual arts that sent “the secret” of the archives into the public domain. In the words of Roberto González Echevarría, “the archive suggests not only that something is kept, but that which is secret, encrypted, enclosed” (32). During the Hapsburg reign, archival documents pertaining to the “New World’s” geography, ethnography, and nature constituted secrets of state as recently examined by María Portuondo; later, with the Bourbon imperial revival, however, these documents were unveiled and celebrated as part of a conscious act of patriotic self-fashioning.

After the publication of Columbus’s illustrated Epistola (Rome 1493), the Spanish archive on the Caribbean grew impressively with both the navigator’s documents and those of others who traveled to the West Indies and depicted the cultural and natural exoticism of the tropical archipelago. The Eurocentric imaginary of navigators, missionaries, and chroniclers – figures such as Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Bartolomé de las Casas, Pedro Mártir de Anglería, among others – constructed long-lasting impressions of the history of the Taínos, Caribs, and Guanahatabey (Ciboney), who were hunter-gatherer-fisher societies that inhabited the region. While these accounts dealt with the indigenous past, the history of precontact women in the Caribbean remained marginal in their accounts. For the most part, these writers featured indigenous women in terms of the marvelous and the fantastic or in domestic roles that revealed very little about the significant part they played prior to contact with Europeans.

The production of the first chronicles, coupled with the Hapsburgs’ push for official histories to justify the new political order and personal epics, led to steps in Castile to assemble and secure these documentary sources. As Richard Kagan argues, “the emperor’s humanists” under Charles V, some successful, others less so, assembled their own historical mosaics to justify governance and preserve the construction of the empire (68–93). Despite Philip II’s decree to establish a royal library – which would become the Archivo de Simancas – to safeguard and organize imperial documents, many manuscripts from the first years of colonization were lost in unknown private collections in the Iberian Peninsula and other parts of Europe. For instance, Columbus’s Libro copiador, a collection of nine letters, including four relaciones to Ferdinand and Isabella, was found in a private collection in Mallorca in the 1980s. Other manuscripts shared the same fate; such was the case for the first ethnographical account by the Catalan friar Juan Ramón Pané. The first ethnography on the Americas, Relación de las antigüedades de los indios, was lost, but it survived in Spanish in the extracts by Bartolomé de las Casas and Pedro Mártir de Anglería, and in Italian in Ferdinand Columbus’s Vida del Almirante. Contemporary scholars on Arawak societies have had to confront the challenges of cultural and linguistic translations in order to arrive at Pané‘s interpretation of Caribbean mythical narratives, which identify Taíno deities with crucial roles in the myth of creation.

Although the Archivo de Simancas was created to provide “‘true and precise memories’ of the past” (qt. Kagan 97), it failed to keep the extraordinary corpus on the Americas in one place. In the late eighteenth century, this archive’s chaotic conditions influenced the decision for the creation of a separate space to centralize all “things” of the Indies. Under the authority of Charles III, a devoted antiquarian himself, José de Gálvez – acting in his capacity as minister of the Council of the Indies– founded the Archivo General de Indias in 1785. Once again, the creation of an archive reflected the imperial mission to support governance and control of the colonies.

The key figure of this major undertaking was Charles III’s Royal Cosmographer, Juan Bautista Muñoz (1745–1799), who had been commissioned to write a new “modern” history of the Indies. Spain’s enlightened idea for such history was global, transhistorical, and civil, natural and geographical following the mandates of the Real Academia de la Historia and Council of Indies. That same design influenced the choices Muñoz made for the expanding Archivo de Indias. With the support of Bourbon ministers, the count of Floridablanca (José Moñino) and Gálvez, Muñoz gained access to the archives of El Escorial and Simancas; he would also travel to private collections throughout the peninsula. He found documents by Spanish, creole, mestizo, and indigenous authors in Burgos, Zamora, Navarra, Cordoba, Granada, Cadiz, Seville, Madrid, and many other locales that included even Lisbon and Rome. Muñoz’s travails populated the Archivo, and a selection intended for private use constituted what became known as the Colección Muñoz: a personal collection of 166 transcriptions of original manuscripts including many originals he deemed important for his writing.

The imperial act of collecting for colonial management also points to questions of judgment and archival value in the Bourbon remaking of its empire. The Colección Muñoz – which is now divided among the Real Academia de la Historia, the Biblioteca del Palacio Real, and the New York Public Library – has been noted for its emphasis on the Caribbean, especially on administrative documents related to Hispaniola. After all, Muñoz devoted much time in the first volume of his Historia del Nuevo Mundo (1793) to the imperial obsession with Columbus.³ The plan to include in a second book the conquest of Mexico and its antiquities failed, but Muñoz succeeded in finding key manuscripts from Mesoamerica and the Andes.⁴ Among those is Bernardino de Sahagún’s Historia universal (general) de Nueva España, which Muñoz found at a Franciscan monastery in Tolosa, Navarra. From Peru, he retained a copy of the incomplete Primeros agustinos, also known as Relación de la religión y ritos del Perú hecha por los padres agustinos (1560), recently attributed to Juan de San Pedro (1514–1594), and many others.⁵

Relación de la religión y ritos del Perú sheds light on the role of friars’ visitas eclesiásticas and in understanding native spirituality outside Cuzco. In Peru, as in other regions, after intense missionary campaigns, members of the religious orders settled in newly established provinces; from there they were responsible for conducting regional inspections. The archival history of this particular account, a counterpart to the better known seventeenth-century Huarochirí Manuscript, allows for an understanding on the problem of the constitution of eighteenth-century archival projects, when rushed transcriptions and translations were based on judgments of their reliability and value for the empire.

Muñoz found the unfinished manuscript of Juan de San Pedro’s relación, split in three different bundles in Simancas in 1783 (Topic and Deeds 322). He deposited the original at the Archivo General de Indias after he had made a rushed copy for his personal archive. With the numerous errors made by Muñoz, this copy was used in the first two modern editions of the work (1865 and 1918). The book history of Juan de San Pedro’s relación, which was selected by Muñoz for his collection, constitutes an example of the imperial side of the story in the reconstitution of the precolonial and colonial archive on the Americas. Joining ranks with Muñoz is a long list of cultural brokers representing Spain’s archival efforts. Before Muñoz, Andrés González de Barcia (1673–1743) became responsible for the recovery and publication of some of the first key chroniclers; with Muñoz health in decline and his political ordeal the Real Academia, Martín Fernández de Navarrete (1765–1844) was commissioned to assemble the records of Spain’s naval history. He found Las Casas’s extract of Columbus’s Diario de viaje and published the five-volume Colección de los viajes y descubrimientos que hicieron por mar los españoles desde el fin del siglo XV (1825–1837).⁶

While bibliophiles and collectors have been “on site” since early in the sixteenth century, it is during the Enlightenment that publications with the branding title of catalogs, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and bibliotecas began to multiply in Spain, France, Great Britain, Germany, and the Americas. In the Spanish Americas, Juan José Eguiara y Eguren (1695–1763), José Mariano Beristain de Souza (1756–1817), Alejandro Tapia y Rivera (1826–1882), Joaquín García Icazbalceta (1825–1894), and José Toribio Medina (1852–1930) collected, described, and reflected on the nature of the archive and difficulties of recovery. Their efforts provide further evidence on how the constitution of the archive on the pre-Hispanic and early colonial past gave meaning to and justified patriotic agendas. Some of them were literary writers. For instance, Alejandro Tapia y Rivera, inspired by the Caribbean’s long-gone Taínos, authored La Palma del Cacique (1852) and the opera libretto Guarionex (1854). In 1852, he published as well his Biblioteca de Puerto Rico, a catalog of historical sources based on the first major archival effort on the history of the smallest of the Greater Antilles.

The recovery, publication, and creation of new archives and libraries served viceregal governments and more so, after the wars of independence, the Spanish American nationalist spirit. Spain had supported the establishment of a number of colonial libraries: New Granada’s viceregal library was initially constituted with expropriated Jesuit funds in 1777 and Buenos Aires established it first public library in 1794. Viceregal governments did not hesitate to raid Jesuit libraries to build their own collections. Yet the greatest reversal of fortune in the colonial history of libraries and archives is that of Portugal. With the Napoleonic invasion, Portugal’s Royal Court and its Royal Library were transferred to the viceregal capital in Rio de Janeiro. Those collections formed the core of the Biblioteca Nacional do Brasil, which opened in 1814 to the public. José de San Martín founded Peru’s national library in 1821, the same year as the establishment of the Archivo de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, which later was renamed Archivo General de la Nación. Guatemala’s Archivo General de Gobierno was founded in 1846, while Central American libraries and other national archives were not established until the 1870s under official prescriptions of liberal governments.

The intellectual entanglements of the history of archives in Mexico provide one of the best examples of the political use and manipulation of colonial documents on the ancient past in the Americas.⁷ The Bourbon government ordered the creation of a general archive for New Spain, but it was not until 1823 that the liberal scholar Lucas Alamán (1792–1853) took the lead to create the public Archivo General as part of the democratization of culture in the aftermath of independence. Such a project served as a cultural and architectural monument for the emerging nation. The Mexican Congress program to educate on antigüedades mexicanas enrolled as well Carlos María Bustamente (1774–1848) to lead the publication of works representing Mexico’s cultural patrimony, which individuals such as the Spanish compiler and editor Fernández Navarrete ignored for their collections. Thus, Bustamante published Sahagún’s encyclopedic history – using the manuscript from the Colección Muñoz – and converted it into a patriotic symbol of Mexico’s classical antiquity.⁸

From Mexico-Tenochtitlan to Paris

In Mexico, historians, collectors, and bibliophiles depended greatly on surviving indigenous painted books in European collections and the missionary archive. The latter had its origins in the controversial period of campaigns against idolatry and the violent conflagration of indigenous libraries that had begun with the mass destruction of artifacts and temples in places such as Tlatelolco, Yucatan, and Tenochtitlan. Of thousands of precontact lienzos, tiras, and rolls, only a handful survived the blaze, mainly from the Puebla, Tlaxcala, Oaxaca, and Maya regions.⁹ Among these, only four Maya pictorial manuscripts survived: Dresden, Paris, Madrid and Grolier codices, discovered in 1971. Calendrical-ritual codexes (tonalpohualli) were saved when sent to Europe as curiosities immediately after the conquest.¹⁰ Among those in Europe, valuable and well studied is the Borgia Codex, sent to Pope Stefano Borgia and identified at the Vatican by Alexander von Humboldt in 1805.¹¹

Fueled by the Counterreformation, Franciscans and members of other orders taught reading, writing and the Christian Doctrine, as well as established schools, workshops, and libraries.¹² Sacred texts for converts survived alongside copies made of precontact pictorial books and new accounts consisting of colonial annals of events and politics of their altepetl (community), theatrical texts, and new pictorial histories.¹³ Common themes include the migration of Uto-Aztec tribes, foundation of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, genealogies of rulers, and understandings of indigenous rituals and cosmology. While in Mexico members of the indigenous lettered elite were served at the colegios, recent research on the emergence of Andean indigenous intellectuals highlights the nonelite condition of these colonial projects in Lima and Cuzco (Ramos). Yet it is crucial to consider that regardless of the social status of these native scribes, what we know about the ancient past constitutes a minuscule selection of a long history on first peoples’ experience before the arrival of Europeans. As Elizabeth Hill Boone reminds us, in Mesoamerica “each painted history charts its own version of the past ... and each constructs the past from the perspective of the present moment when it was painted” (Stories in Red and Black 238).

Sahagún’s Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco became the most important center of collaborative efforts laying the foundation of the Mesoamerican archive.¹⁴ The first historians to make use of their collections were the same missionaries turned ecclesiastical historians: Andrés de Olmos (ca. 1485–1571), Jerónimo de Mendieta (1525–1604), Diego Basalenque (1577–1651), Diego Durán (1537–88), Toribio de Benavente (Motolinía) (1482–1568), Juan de Torquemada (1564–1624), and Agustín Dávila Padilla (1562–1604), among many others. Their new genre of ecclesiastical histories described the construction of the new religious regime, prefaced by their understandings of natives’ origins, material culture, and ancestral rituals.¹⁵ In many ways, demonization of precontact societies legitimated their efforts supporting the Crown and Catholic Church.

In the colonial Mesoamerican archive, researchers can find evidence on the gendered nature of ancient societies. Precolonial and colonial codices such as Nutall, Mendoza, Vienna, Magliabechiano, and Sahagún’s Florentine Codex (1570–1585) feature women prominently. In these accounts women appear performing as earth mothers deities, wise women, healers, mothers, warriors, key actors in religious rituals and festivities, students at the calmenac (schools for nobles), artists, and horticulturalists. Divinatory codices served as almanacs to guide gendered rituals. Colonial copies glossed in alphabetic writing the obscure symbols defining their calendrical nature organized according to a 260-day cycle closely resembling the 266 days of the female cycle of gestation (Boone, Cycle of Time 17). More importantly, these calendars were divided in twenty trecenas, each dominated by a male and a female divinity. Boone identifies the following female deities: Chalchiuhtlicue, “Jade Her Skirt,” goddess of floods; Chicomecoatl, “Seven Serpent,” maize goddess; Mayahuel, manifestation of maguey plant; Xochiquetzal, “Flower Quetzal,” youthful fertility goddess; Cihuacoatl, “Serpent Woman,” and Ilamatecuhtli, “Old Lady,” both the mother goddess; Tlazolteotl, “Filth Goddess,” goddess of childbirth, patron of weavers, and absorber of sins; Chantico, “In the House,” goddess of the hearth; Itzpapalotl, “Obsidian Butterfly,” ancient warrior goddess; Cihuateteo, “Goddesses”: souls of women who have died in childbirth, companions of the sun (43).

In book twelve of the Florentine Codex appears “La Llorona” (weeping woman). She is identified with the Postclassic earth goddess and warrior figure Cihuacoatl (woman-snake). In the codex, La Llorona represents the six omens announcing war and destruction of Aztec culture. She walks by night: “often was heard a woman weeping, crying out. Loudly did she cry out at night. She walked about saying: ‘My beloved sons, now we are about to go!’ Sometimes she said: ‘My sons, where am I to take you?’” (Book XII, 2–3). La Llorona served to connect past and present, the feminine with the masculine, and the earth and the sacred. Sahagún’s multivolume encyclopedia also discusses “bad women,” who include nobles, healers/midwives serving sorcerers, and seducers who could bring ruin to men.¹⁶ The idea of exclusive sexual access and female domesticity came into play in the rendering of indigenous society. These messages need to be examined carefully: There is no doubt that the zealous eye of the friars filtered representations of women according to Europe’s patriarchal structures and Christian moral values of medieval origin that served to justify the imposition of colonial structures.¹⁷

Symbolic narratives linking political authority and social agency to women are also found in the work of indigenous and mestizo intellectuals, some with ties to the Colegio Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco: Fernando Alvarado Tezozomoc (ca. 1525–ca. 1610), Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl (ca. 1568–1648), Juan Bautista Pomar (ca. 1535–1601), and Domingo Francisco de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin (1579–1660), among many others. Their reading of earlier printed sources influenced their representations of women artisans such as weavers (who produced goods for tribute), priestesses in temples, “keepers of maidens” (cihuatepixque), and elusive women warriors. Such stories were found in their ancestors’ amoxtli manuscripts (pictorial books). These colonial intellectuals were collectors, catalogers, and historians cognizant of their ability to interpret deep-seated obscure symbols and mythical narratives of precolonial sources. For instance, when Ixtlilxochitl acknowledges the difficulty of arriving at the truth in gathered testimonies and ancient histories, he underscores his privileged position before his archive: “and with all truthfulness, I have the ancient histories in my hand, and I know the language of the natives, because I was raised with them, and I know all of the elders and the principals of this land” (Chavero 64).¹⁸

Discussion of Ixtlilxochitl’s archival authority places at the fore his link to the writings of the nonelite intellectual Domingo Francisco de San Antón Chimalpahin. Chimalpahin, a name meaning “runs swiftly with a shield,” is one of the most noted indigenous writers, who authored Relaciones, Diario, and a rewriting of Francisco López de Gómara’s Historia de las Indias (1552).¹⁹ Written in the 1620s, his Relaciones follow the preconquest tradition of xiuhpohualli, a sort of annals to narrate events ordered chronologically by year. Schroeder argues that his account is the key piece with regard to the cultural role of Mesoamerican ancient women. In Chimalpahin’s writings women mattered and female actors appeared in vital sociopolitical roles not found elsewhere (Schroeder “Chimalpahin and Why” 109). The presence and absence of women in precolonial and colonial documents are not easy to explain. Lori Boornazian Diel explains that politics in the Mexican Empire defined the role of genders in their printed histories (83). That is also the case among the Incas and Caribs (Vallbona). In Tenochca and Texcocan histories women are absent, yet in earlier histories of migration (Boturini, Aubin, Azcatitlan codices) females are depicted in leading roles. For instance, in the Boturini Codex, Chilmalma, a women carrying a shield leads the migration across the water from the seven caves (Aztlan-Chicomoztoc), while others serve as god carriers (teomama) (Diel, Wood).²⁰ Chimalpahin’s account of commoner women (macehualtin) and nobles (pipiltin) counteracts patriarchal narratives that diminish women’s status and hide ancient indigenous worldviews of gender complementarity.²¹

Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s writings and archive, which included Chimalpahin’s writings, were acquired by Sigüenza y Góngora in 1670, a “gift” by his friend and protégé Juan de Alva y Cortés, the son of Ixtlilxochitl. As Anna More has stated, this event marked a new era in alliances between the Indian nobility and the lettered elite (155). For her, Creole Baroque authority was predicated precisely on the constitution of the archive: a process where the Amerindian past met Europeans’ sensibility (24).

Needless to say, in the colonial city writing, collecting, and preservation were bound to a sense of place, identity, and history, but such concerns favored the epic history of the male Mexicans. Sigüenza y Góngora bequeathed a total of 460 books and 28 manuscripts to the Jesuit College, Colegio Máximo de San Pedro y San Pablo, where Lorenzo Boturini Benaducci (1702–1755) and Francisco Javier Clavijero (1731–1787) were able to appreciate his transcriptions, translations, and manuscript collection. Eventually the creole’s treasure was dispersed, in part as a result of the aggressive collecting efforts by Boturini. Between 1736 and 1743, the Italian traveler turned antiquarian traveled across New Spain and amassed the largest collection of indigenous documents (including artifacts) any single person had in his possession at that time. He was obsessed with the Virgin of Guadalupe, and debates regarding the apparitions and scientific nature of the imprint. In 1743, his obsession and New Spain’s conflictive politics caused his arrest, deportation, and loss of all he owned. He cataloged the collection and included it as an appendix to his Idea de una historia de la América Septentrional (1746).²² Part of it was retained in Mexico, but in the early decades of the nineteenth century, most of the catalog landed in the hands of European collectors, including Humboldt, Lord Kingsborough, and Joseph Aubin, who sold his collection to Charles Eugène Espidon Goupil. In 1898, Goupil’s widow donated it to France’s Bibliothèque Nationale.²³

How was a foreign traveler able to obtain so many originals from secure archives such as the one at the Jesuit Colegio Mexico – before the expulsion – and smaller dispersed communities? In his account and legal documents produced after his arrest, his intention is clear, but nothing is indicated about how he was able to assemble such a magnificent archive including Sigüenza y Góngora’s most precious manuscripts. Among those, the three vellum-bound volumes that have come to be known as the Chimalpahin Codex were found in 1986 at the British and Foreign Bible Society in the process of moving the collection to Cambridge University.²⁴ The first and second include Ixtlilxochitl’s holograph manuscript of his Historia de la nación chichimeca and other writings including Diego Muñoz Camargo’s Suma y epíloga de toda la descripción de Tlaxcala; and Chimalpahin’s writings (Exercicio quotidiano, an account on the arrival of the Mexica, various genealogies, and Texcoca accounts of conquest, among others). During the postindependence education campaign, the collection was exchanged for Bibles by the Mexican priest and librarian José María Luis Mora Lamadrid in 1827.²⁵ As Schroeder explains, the volumes were sent, archived, and forgotten (Chimalpahin 20), slated for auction on April 18, 2014. Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia promptly made arrangements to acquire them. Five months later the Chimalpahin Codex was put on display at Mexico’s Museo Nacional de Antropología. The transnational history of the Chimalpahin Codex, meanings for its different owners, and its relationship to other works and authors point to the complex dynamics of the archive as a site, corpus of writings, and process.²⁶

Imperial Gendering

Histories and itineraries of the colonial archive from the Andean region and other areas of South America do not seem to have produced as much drama as those from Mesoamerica. One exceptional case, well studied, is that of Primer nueva crónica y buen gobierno (ca 1615) by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (1535–1616).²⁷ There is no doubt that he authored the most significant indigenous text on the colonial world: a twelve-hundred-page illustrated letter intended for the Spanish King Philip III. Guaman Poma, a Ladino from the Lucanas Province of Peru, sheds light on the gendered nature of the ancient world before the devastation caused by the conquest.²⁸ In Guaman Poma’s reconstitution of the past, gender relations define power and survival. The illustrated manuscript itinerary has taken decades to decipher: from Peru, it traveled to Spain to be acquired by a diplomat who took it to Denmark, perhaps the Danish ambassador to Spain, Cornelius Lerche, in the late seventeenth century.²⁹ It is not clear when it became part of King Frederick III’s library, and at what moment it was transferred to the Royal Library. What is certain is that it appeared on their records in 1724. In 1908, Richard A. Pietschmann located the manuscript at the Royal Library in Denmark and announced the find to the academic community. Nonetheless, Guaman Poma’s manuscript began to receive attention after the publication of Paul Rivet’s first facsimile edition in 1936.³⁰

Guaman Poma wrote his account prompted by legal battles over his family land and titles, and by so doing he reconfigured Andean ancient history and the religious rituals, cosmological frameworks, and socioeconomic traits of his people. His fight for rights was the fight of many; thus he wrote a collective history and provocative testimony that many other indigenous subjects suffered the usurpation of their lands and made their claims on the basis of tracing their family lineage and nobility.

Also significant was Guaman Poma’s distinctive perspective on women’s roles, before and after the Inca and Spanish conquests. His textual and visual catalog focuses on noble women, yet he also portrays commoners and prostitutes working in the tambos who are in much need of control. Much like Sahagún and other indigenous intellectuals, he frames women according to a European dichotomy defined by Christian values: Women are either good or bad. Among “good women” are his preconquest ancestors, mothers, and those of the Andean nobility (coyas ñustas, and acllas) (Guengerich). Scholars who have studied Guaman Poma claim that everything in the Primer nueva corónica connects to the present; even his portrayal of ancient women legitimates his denunciation of the new colonial ordering of society (Adorno, Quispe Agnoli, and Guengerich).

Tied to Guaman Poma’s remarkable visual depiction of the Andean women is the work of the Basque Mercedarian friar Martín de Murúa (1525–1618).³¹ Guaman Poma’s and Murúa’s visualization of history constitutes a crucial archive for the study of Inca nobility, particularly women, who for the Incas held symbolic power. As Irene Silverblatt has demonstrated, women were essential in the creation and expansion of the empire: “Women were the weavers of Andean society” (9). Social relations were clearly determined by the gendered nature of society. In the ayllu (communities), work was divided along gender lines. Chroniclers have accounted for women’s key roles: Peasants worked in agriculture, carried water, weaved, brewed chibcha, cooked, and raised children. Nobles served as priestesses; some married, helped manage the empire, and wove as well.³²

Much attention has being paid to the acllas (virgins of the sun) and the institution of the Aclla Huasi (Houses of the Sun). According to María Rostworowski, these young women were categorized by their beauty, place of origin, and skills (11). A crucial reading is Garcilaso de la Vega’s utopic account of these chosen women dedicated to their spirituality, cooking for festivities, and spinning and weaving. In Guaman Poma and Murúa’s illustrations noble women are shown with unique woven garments: The anacu (dress) is covered by an lliclla (a rectangular shoulder mantle pinned at the breast). Some were made with cumbi, a fine double-sided cloth with geometric designs (tocapu), which illustrated royal lineage. Garments of women also pointed to place of origin and marital status.³³

The archive on the Andean world demonstrates the high esteem Incas had for noble women. But Guaman Poma is also interested in leaving a visual record of sexual and labor abuses of women, particularly after the conquest, by conquistadors and friars. He views history as a continuum; again the ancient past is shown as a point of comparison to the unjust reality of the present. Irene Silverblatt maintains that neither Guaman Poma nor Murúa gives much detail on women’s authority, yet both indicate clues to their central place: Power was limited to males, but women had opportunities to rule when men were absent (59). Thus, noble women were chosen as wives for their abilities, sense of responsibility, and leadership.

Most of the scholarship on colonial Andes revolves around chroniclers, and a handful of mestizo and indigenous authors who achieved fame. Anonymous authors and informants, Kurakas, Inca lords, and a prolific generation of Indian and mestizo intellectuals taking roles as scribes to survive are seldom studied.³⁴ Undeniably they were crucial in making colonial archives, creating the paper trail of colonial governance, and reconstructing the basis of Andean precontact spirituality. Among those, recent research points to Cristóbal Choquecasa as the editor of Huarochirí Manuscript (ca. 1608): the key text on Andean myths and religion.³⁵ Untitled and undated, the first line begins with “runa yn(di)o ñiscap” (of the people called Indians) from Huarochirí, a highland province east of Lima.³⁶ Written in Quechua, it introduces the reader into the world of Andean ancestors, huacas, and the concept of Pacha (earth, time, and place). The document consists of a synthesis of regional reports coerced by Francisco de Ávila, an extirpator of idolatries who led the evangelical project against heresy. Some of the informants were women, and spiritual figures appear prominently in the manuscript. On the surface, the manuscript celebrates male heroes who founded the ayllus. Yet, female agency is present in oral testimonies that dealt with gender roles and the idea of complementarity in Andean mythology. Michael Horswell explain that the feminine is enunciated through tropes on sexuality found in agricultural rituals and religious ceremonies that gave the body a privileged place. These glimpses into the past were allowed upon recognition that they also provided stronger evidence of idolatry (127).

In much of the literature of the conquest, mestizo authors sought to vindicate the Incas and the Tawantinsuyo, yet when reading closely and examining other forms of representation a different story emerges. Subaltern voices can be found in metaphors regarding gender, sexuality, agriculture, and the divine. Histories can also be found in keros, women-made textiles, and basket weavings. These cultural products contribute to a deeper history and different perspectives on origins, migration, clan wars, conquests, and reconquests.

A Familiar Other

It is well established that representations of the present offer a window into imaginings of the past. Widespread European testimonies of women warriors as “Amazons” infiltrated the European imaginary and the archive, serving as symbols in art; histories; and, as in Ortelius’s Theatrum orbis terrarium, in early modern visualizations of territories (real and imagined). Representations of “men like women” were inspired by Greek classical myth. “Amazons” is a word literally meaning women without breasts, to describe fearsome warrior women from the barbarian world.³⁷ The Greek virgin goddess Artemis (Diana for Romans), virgin mistress of wild animals, and goddess of fertility and nature, came to be considered the Amazons’ patron (Rigoglioso 51). As an earth mother, her visualizations tied her to the moon and water to emphasize nurture and fertility. In the Greco-Roman textual and visual archive, these female warriors were also noted for their sexuality, consorting with men yet overpowering them. Achilles, Theseus, Hercules had to engage with them. Strabo, Homer, Diodoro Siculus, and Herodotus made them part of ancient history. In the Americas, chronicles reiterated encounters between male conquistadors who in the guise of classical heroes fought against Amazons in tropical climes.

Any discussion of the Amazon narratives of the Americas departs from Columbus’s understanding that in the Carib dominated island of Matinino (journal entry of January 13, 1493). Candace Slater underscores the significance of native reports of Amazon-like females from the Caribbean throughout the Amazon and Orinoco basins from eastern Brazil to northern Bolivia. They appear in many accounts such as those by Jerónimo de Ordaz, Hernán Pérez de Quesada, and Nuño de Guzmán. Francisco de Orellana’s search for El Dorado and the Land of Cinnamon (1541–1542), narrated by Dominican Gaspar de Carvajal (ca. 1500–1584), has as its climax an encounter with a tribe of “very white and tall” Omagua warrior women that were tied to a land of abundance “that inspire desire and fear” (88).

In the Americas, encounters with women warriors were very real. Their representations were influenced by a hybrid archive that intertwined the woman-warrior classical archetype and, as Slater has suggested, Iberian medieval and early modern adaptations and reports by natives and anxious explorers (85). Chronicles and explorers’ accounts inspired a visual archive of images of women-warriors reproduced widely to decorate maps cartouches, frontispieces, and art. Yet digging deeper in the archive and taking into account layers of symbolic appropriations, new questions about women in the ancient world of the Americas move to the forefront.

Woman warriors were not mere figments of the European imaginary. The military prowess of women and the meaning it had within ancient societies are often overlooked. In Mixtec precolonial codices, females were often represented as rulers and warriors. For instance, the Selden Codex tells the story of Lady Six Monkey, a powerful warrior whose fight to expand her territory had a tragic ending. In Aztec society, a woman giving birth was considered a warrior (McCafferty and McCafferty 104). While in the Andes women were not depicted in art as warriors, in Moche pottery women are shown to have been engaged in postbattle sacrificial rituals. Archaeological evidence from across the Americas demonstrates that women leaders and commoners were involved in warfare in support of their clans and often suffered from fighting as much as males (Bruhns and Stothert).

New forms of violence unleashed by European colonialism created new reasons for women to become involved in conflict. Men would go off to war or to hunt and fish leaving their women alone, and with the proliferation of enslavement and interethnic wars such situations could become longer term or even permanent. Among bellicose indigenous groups, it will not be hard to conclude that women learned military arts and the use of spears, blowguns, and the bow and arrow, if only for household defense.

Some of the most influential images of women possessing weapons and engaged in violence were in the narrative of captivity among the Tupinamba by the German artillery soldier Hans Staden (ca. 1525–ca. 1579). His testimony of “primitive” life in the village of Ubatuba contradicted previous representations of subservient indigenous women from the Brazilian coast, such as those from Pero Vaz Caminha, who reiterated the Columbian discourse on the noble savage in his letters from the turn of the sixteenth century. This letters describe women as naked innocents who would become good Christians. Many details of Staden’s account brought to life aspects of the myth of the Amazons, combined with horrific descriptions of cannibal ritual. He illustrated his account with woodcuts that featured women – sometimes within the same image – fulfilling traditional roles as farmers, mothers, cooks, and healers, while fulfilling the Amazonian archetype of sexual aggressors, sorcerers, torturers, cannibals, and warriors. Such imagery achieved wide influence when De Bry directly incorporated these visualizations in the archive (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2. Hans Staden’s True History: An Account of Cannibal Captivity in Brazil.

Archives: A Failed Project

The archive reveals as much as it conceals. Ethnographical representations of colonial female subjects abound in the archive, but the experience of these women in precontact societies remains heavily steeped in myths buried in layers of misreadings and misrepresentations. The lack of female authors, bibliophiles, and of national institutions with an interest on the role of women have denied access to them as leading subjects in the history of ancient societies. Moreover, colonial documentary sources were filtered by early modern gendered frameworks of morality, male-female relations, and male dominated spirituality.

In plural or singular, the archive, or the archives, are incomplete projects. Their cultural history is certainly political and inextricably tied to violent acts of territorialization. Beyond the wealthy and densely settled regions of Mesoamerica and the Andes, the recovery of the ancient past remained subjected to Spanish imperial projects. Uncovering the history and lifeways of ancient cultures in northern South America, the Southern Cone, and inland isolated territories labeled “tierras de nadie” has been a slow process, which continues.

Archives are itinerants, palimpsests, and a record of practices with shifting meanings depending on historical and geographical contexts. Often archives return full circle to their place of origin, but more often than not, they continue on unprecedented journeys dictated by their changing cultural value and national economies and policies on culture. Archives constitute a space where different ideologies, forms of knowledge, and conflictive representations collide. Yet, regardless of the heterogeneous and polyvalent nature of the archive, the history and experience of ancient women and the idea of complementarity remain hidden and intangible.

To excavate traces of indigenous women’s experience, we must go beyond what remains in the archive and engage with other forms of representation: indigenous oral traditions and myth, music and performance, visual representations found in murals and pictographs, archaeological sites, and especially material artifacts produced by women’s hands such as textiles, basketry, ceramics, featherwork, and more. For these engagements, interdisciplinary collaborations and transdisciplinary research can proved useful in reconstituting the archive and the history in traces of women of the ancient world.