Los testamentos indígenas coloniales de Santafé de Bogotá y su realidad colonial

Leidy Johana Barrero, Purdue University

Abstract

My research argues that among the notarial records left by Indians, testaments have special interest because a will, more than other legal papers, summarizes the material and social outcome of a lifetime. A will is a window onto someone's life, an inventory of property, a list of loved ones remembered by bequests. How is it that historically these valuable documents have been overlooked by scholars of indigenous colonial history? I identify three factors that might help explain this oversight: 1) there has been a tendency to treat colonial indigenous peoples as an undifferentiated peasant mass; 2) there exists a prevailing myth that only elite Indians left testaments; and concomitantly 3) there is a mistaken belief that most indigenous peoples, especially women, in particular owned nothing and therefore had no reason to make wills. By focusing not only on the content of indigenous wills but also on the processes by which wills were prepared and the specific language used, my dissertation addresses these gaps and shows that these legal documents provide exciting new information in two areas. First, my research indicates that indigenous peoples strategically used wills to keep lands and property within the jurisdiction of the community, and thus they helped fortify communal identity in the face of changes produced by Spanish colonial rule. Secondly, in the case of indigenous women who were forced to migrate to more urban areas to find work, their wills and the stories they tell about bequests and inheritance become useful tools for documenting changing gender relations in a colonial context. My dissertation examines the wills and testaments left by Chibcha and Muisca indigenous men and women during the XVI and XVII centuries in the area surrounding Bogotá Colombia. I choose this specific century because it is during this time that Spaniards established and stabilized the New Kingdom of Granada. The age of conquest was coming to a close, and the generation of conquistadores was replaced by bureaucrats, merchants, and colonists as the institutions of colonial rule and the basis of the economy were regularized. It was during this century, too, that the Spanish legal custom of a written will was introduced into indigenous communities. Indigenous people made the custom their own, with their wills diverging in several ways from Spanish norms, and used them to further their individual and collective concerns. My dissertation proposes that by examining wills from this area it is possible to shed new light on the topic of how Colombian indigenous peoples, far from being solely victims of colonial domination, learned early on how to adapt their modes of productions and survival to cohere with the colonizer's world view and social/legal practices.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Stephenson, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Latin American literature|Latin American history|Latin American Studies

COinS