Making the "Archival Turn" in Colonial Latin America Matter

(With Anna More) An ordinary indigenous woman named Tomasa went to court against her husband in Lima, Peru in 1798 and became part of history. Or, better said, her case entered the labyrinthine archive of the Spanish empire. Tomasa didn’t write. She probably couldn’t read, and neither could her husband. If here today, she would probably not be able to access the imposing building of the Archivo de Indias in Seville that houses the documents from her case. This repository requires researchers to register and be credentialed, to navigate the maze of organization, and to read late eighteenth-century handwriting and legalese.

We use Tomasa’s papers to consider how to “open” the archive, to engage the scholarly interest in the creation, maintenance and privileging of the “archive”— a subject of both now-canonical theoretical meditation and now-current scholarship. From Derrida’s reflection on Freud’s papers to newer academic scholarship exploring how actors such as enslaved women in the Caribbean are silenced in historical records, the “archive” has indexed the power to determine what history is and is not.

By asking about the archive of Tomasa’s case, we wish to move beyond the equally untenable positions that documents can tell all stories and that there are stories that are impossible to tell because of archival limits. Instead we trace how Tomasa managed to enter the archive and how we can activate this knowledge for the present. What effects does the process of archiving have on the personal stories of ordinary people? Can we read around these distortions, and if so, what methods do we use? Can we be imaginative in filling archival silences, or are archives essentially positivistic? How can we recognize acts of “opening” the archive in the past and how can our actions as researchers meet and support these acts today?