The Mail in Time: Postal Routes and Conceptions of Distance in Colonial Guatemala

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to William B. Taylor, Margaret Chowning, Linda Lewin, Alejandra Dubcovsky, Sean McEnroe, Heather Flynn Roller, Paul Ramírez, and the members of the writing group at the University of California, Berkeley, all of whom provided me with invaluable input on earlier versions of this article. I also wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers for the Colonial Latin America Review who provided review comments. The Archivo General de Centroamérica kindly gave permission for the inclusion of images taken from its document collection.

Notes

1. AGI, MP–Buenos Aires 253; 25-02-1804.

2. AGI, Correos 102B, 1772, Chart. The form of the chart reflects charts made of other regions: Joseph Nava's 1755 chart of North America combines cartographic forms, including a distance chart of this kind below an aerial map paired with cartographic illustrations. John Carter Brown Library: #28987; Cabinet Ea755. Mapa y tabla geográfica de leguas comunes, que ai de unos a otros lugares, y ciudades principales de la America septentrional. Joseph Nava: 1755.

3. AGI, Correos 110A, 1806, Report.

4. In Guatemala, Spanish administrators counted on a large body of Indians from Mixco Nuevo, an Indian town outside of the colonial capital, and about two hundred mules for transportation of the mail by 1590 (Barreda 1961, 38).

5. ‘In the period after the conquest,’ Barreda writes, ‘it was common to see, on the paths that crossed fertile plains and barren deserts alike, people of the indigenous races carrying official letters and personal correspondence to distant places’ (Barreda 1961, 36). Banks (2002) and Dubcovsky (2011) describe a similar reliance on native mail carriers in French and British north America, respectively.

6. Bose's chronology details the circumstances of each correo mayor's tenure.

7. AGCA, Sig. A1, Leg. 1509, ff. 27–30.

8. AGI, Correos 90B, October 1778, tables by Don Simón de Larrazábal.

9. Correos for this route were compensated at a rate of one real per league. AGCA, Sig. A1, Leg. 1508, f. 254.

10. A historian of the postal service in Mexico describes a similar informal system in New Spain that relied on ‘the goodwill of travelers’ in the early to mid-sixteenth century (Backal et al. 2000, 16).

11. AGCA, Sig. A1, Leg. 1508, f. 254.

12. In 1765 the Guatemalan correo was officially incorporated by the Crown. It took until 1767 for the change to take effect. Pedro Ortiz de Letona, then the Guatemalan correo mayor, was compensated for the office and appointed regidor of the mail system for the remainder of his lifetime (AGI, Correos, 90B, 31 December 1766). The date of incorporation coincided with broader trade and communication policies in Spain; Charles III implemented the first free trade measures in 1765, and these were followed by similar measures in 1778 (Gutiérrez Alvarez 1993, 25).

13. AGI, Correos 90B, 1766 decree and 1768 testimonio by Garayalde.

14. This bando partially overturned the 1764 regulations sent from Spain, which still allowed for the sobre-porte.

15. AGI, Correos 90A, 1768, bando by Don Pedro de Salazar Herrera. The fine was initially an exorbitant 500 pesos. In the late eighteenth century it was reduced to 50 pesos.

16. ‘Para la Provincia de Verapaz es escusado el correo por que no es posible que se costee atento a que no ay en ella otro español, que el Alcalde mayor, y la otra clase de gentes como son Yndios, mestizos, mulatos, y Zambos, no saben, ni usan escribir. Las correspondencias de los Frayles Dominicos que son curas en ella, ha de sufragar mui poco, pues todos los religiosos incluyendo los del combento de Covan, y Legos, apenas llegaran a veinte, y los mas de ellos no tienen correspondencias’ (AGI, Correos 90A, 1769, correspondence by Don Joseph Melchor de Ugalde).

17. ‘Por su comercio, y abundancia de gente Española, y Ladina’ (AGI, Correos 90A, 1 January 1770, correspondence from Don Joseph Melchor de Ugalde).

18. AGCA, Sig. A3, Leg. 2885, Exp. 42102: 1772.

19. The system was still rough at the edges. The 1773 earthquake, which resulted in the relocation of the capital, caused serious disruptions (see AGI, Correos 90A, 1 August 1773, letter by Don Simón de Larrazábal). The former capital, Antigua, lying eight-and-a-half leagues away from the new capital, became a marginal place on the route. The route to Mexico headed northwest through Mixco before heading to Totonicapan and Quesaltenango, and the route to the provinces headed directly southeast to Santa Ana. Even after the system regained its footing, remote places still struggled to receive regular service. In 1777, a lengthy correspondence ensued between Larrazábal, administrators in Spain, and the Governor in Cartago, Costa Rica, who protested of infrequent communication with the rest of Guatemala. Larrazábal, after weighing several options, decided the scant correspondence and the great expense of the journey made relying on travelers to carry occasional letters the most favorable alternative (AGI, Correos 90B, 1777, Larrazábal correspondence).

20. AGI Correos 90B, ‘Muy señores mios. Adjunto a VSS un plan extractado …’ 1778.

21. AGI, Correos 92B, 2 November 1795, correspondence by Don Miguel de Ateaga.

22. AGCA, Signatura A1, Legajo 2603, Expediente 21389.

23. Guatemalan administrators were the only ones to rely on charts and tables to represent postal routes. See, for example, a 1766 list of place names from Yucatan (AGI Correos 142C) and an 1814 list from Peru (AGI Correos 113B). Fernández de Mesa's 1755 account of roads, inns, and postal routes in Spain is one example. Part of his objective was to persuade the Crown to invest more heavily in the development and renovation of roads, and to that end he sought to demonstrate the utility and reach of the postal service. He, too, was creating a report for Spanish officials, albeit in an unofficial capacity and from the mainland. The treatise includes an appendix with a table of the ‘postal routes, established in Spain, and the distance in Leagues between one place and another’ (Fernández de Mesa y Moreno 1755, 182). The Fernández appendix represents the postal routes in two ways: as short links of consecutive leguas from one place to another—itineraries like Ateaga's; and as longer distances radiating out from a central city or place—like Larrazábal's 1778 table and Ateaga's 1793 table of distances from Guatemala. The great difference, of course, is that Fernández de Mesa's readers in Spain would have been intimately familiar with each location listed in his appendix, whereas the same readers, confronted with the Guatemalan charts, would have seen column upon column of unknown places.

24. The request for maps, specifically, echoed the instructions of roughly contemporaneous questionnaires for relaciones geográficas (Solano et al. 1988).

25. ‘Mapa Topográfico comprehensivo de las Estafetas agregadas a esta Pral, las distancias de unas a otras, su situación local, paradas de Postas, y ramales de division’ (AGI, Correos 92B, 2 April 1795, letter by Don Miguel de Ateaga). Ateaga's tables thus intended to record and describe the extent of the postal service rather than to provide correos or even other officials with a practical guide.

26. ‘Noticias que han comunicado los Administradores’ (AGI, Correos 92B, October and November 1795, letters by Don Miguel de Ateaga). In his correspondence with Madrid, Ateaga indicated repeatedly that he had relied on information provided by others for the creation of his table. Simón de Larrazábal similarly wrote in 1778 that he relied on the estimates of others to create distance reports of the mail system.

27. This 1772 list is found at the AGCA. It must have been rescued by Larrazábal from the 1773 ruins and may have been preserved in the correo archives for later administrators’ use.

28. Padrón makes much of the Hapsburg's prohibiting their maps from appearing in print. He observes, however, that the Spanish Bourbons corrected what was perceived as a consequent cartographic backwardness by importing cartographic techniques from France. It seems likely, however, that these techniques had not yet been systematically applied to the creation of detailed maps in Guatemala (Padrón 2004). For a closer study of cartography in the Spanish empire, see Sandman's chapter on Hapsburg practices (2008).

29. See, for example, the maps created for the Guatemalan relaciones geográficas and the landscape-maps accompanying the visita by Archbishop Cortés y Larraz in the late eighteenth century (Luján Muñoz 2006; Cortés y Larraz, Martín Blasco, and García 2001).

30. ‘En este Reyno no hay mapa general de ellas, como a esta subdelegación y superior gobierno he hecho presente’ (AGI, Correos 90B, 20 October 1778, letter from Don Simón de Larrazábal).

31. ‘La situación local de las Estafetas, que no puede expresarse por carecer el Reino de Mapas formales, y no ser las noticias que han comunicado los Admin. capaces de instruir en la material’ (AGI, Correos 92B, October and November 1795, letters by Don Miguel de Ateaga).

32. ‘Mapa – llamamos la tabla, lienço o papel donde se descrive la tierra universal o particularmente y puede venir de mappa, que quiere decir lienço o toalla’ (Covarrubias Horozco 1943).

33. ‘Espacio – del nombre latino spatium, capedo, intervallum; vale lugar. Mucho espacio, poco espacio. También sinifica el intervalo del tiempo, y dezimos por espacio de tiempo de tantas horas, etc.’ (Covarrubias Horozco 1943, 48).

34. ‘Espacio: capacidad, anchura, longitud, a latitud de terreno, lugar, sitio, u campo. Es tomado del Latin Spatium que significa esto mismo’ (Real Academia Española, 1964).

35. ‘Lugar se dize todo aquello que contiene en sí otra cosa […]. Lugar sinifica muchas vezes ciudad o villa o aldea, y assí dezimos: En mi lugar, en el pueblo donde nací […]. Hacer lugar, desembaraçar y dar passo. No tener lugar, no tener tiempo’ (Covarrubias Horozco 1943).

36. ‘Tener tiempo, tener lugar […]. Dar tiempo al tiempo, dar lugar’ (Covarrubias Horozco 1943).

37. ‘Lugar: El espacio que contiene en sí otra cosa. Sale del Latín locus, que significa lo mismo; lugar₂: significa también sitio u parage; lugar₃: vale también Ciudad, villa, o aldea; […] lugar₆: significa también tiempo, espacio, oportunidad u ocasión’ (Real Academia Española, 1964).

38. ‘La duración successiva de las cosas’ (Real Academia Española, 1964).

39. ‘El espacio o intervalo de lugar u tiempo, con que las cosas o los sucessos están apartados unos de otros’ (Real Academia Española, 1964).

40. ‘Espacio de camino, que contiene en sí tres millas’ (Covarrubias Horozco 1943). This suggests that he relied on the legua legal for his definition. For a discussion of the legua legal, see Chardon 1980.

41. ‘Medida de tierra, cuya magnitud es mui varia entre las Naciones. De las leguas Españolas entran diez y siete y media en un grado de circulo maximo de la tierra, y cada una es lo que regularmente se anda en una hora’ (Real Academia Española, 1964).

42. ‘Roughly, the distance that can be traveled on horseback in an hour, varying with the terrain’ (Wold and Márquez 1998). Other definitions include the following: ‘legua – la del país mide en longitud terrestre 5,000 baras o 4,190 metros lo mismo en Cuba, Puerto Rico y Guatemala’ (Santamaría and García Icazbalceta 1992). Also, ‘Legua – Medida lineal de dimensión variada. De las leguas españolas, 17 y media en un grado de círculo máximo de la tierra y cada una era la medida de lo que regularmente se camina en una hora’ (González Cicero and Pezzat Arzave 2001).

43. See, for example, the use of this phrase in the geographical report by Ramón de Anguiano (forthcoming in Mesoamerica, Summer 2012).

44. In any case, all of the dozen or more Spanish American leagues are roughly 4.2 kilometers or 2.6 miles in modern equivalences (Chardon 1980, 150).

45. ‘Estado o Razon de las distancias que hay desde esta Capital a las demas Ciudades de este Reyno y Cabezeras de Partidos’ seems to utilize three descriptive approaches (AGCA, Sig. A1, Leg. 2603, Exp. 21389). As stated above, this representation is nearly identical to the 1795 table housed at the AGI.

46. ‘Nota de estas Ciudades, Valles, Provincias, Pueblos, Poblaciones, Haziendas, y demas Lugares, de las Administraciones agregadas a esta Principal’ (AGCA, Sig. A3, Leg. 2885, Exp. 42102).

47. This depiction echoes Benton's conception of colonial spaces as ‘encased in irregular, porous, and sometimes undefined borders. Although empires did lay claim to vast stretches of territory, the nature of such claims was tempered by control that was exercised mainly over narrow bands, or corridors, and over enclaves and irregular zones around them’ (Benton 2009, 2).

48. Without putting too much weight on this characteristic, some explanation for such a double erasure can be traced through Adriaan van Oss's population data of the late eighteenth century (van Oss 1981). Van Oss's maps of asentamientos and population data demonstrate all too clearly the ‘blank spots’ of colonial rule—largely in the Guatemalan highlands and the broad swath of audiencia territory reaching inward from the Pacific. The mail routes naturally correspond closely to van Oss's population maps, and it comes as no surprise that within present-day Guatemala, the two ‘emptiest’ regions are the modern departamentos of Quiché and Petén.

49. ‘Lugares en que no hai Caxa por la mui escasa, o ninguna correspondencia que para sus Jurisdicciones ocurre’ (AGCA, Sig. A3, Leg. 2885, Exp. 42102; AGCA, Sig. A1, Leg. 2603, Exp. 21389).

50. The tables also include, in some sections, specific references to ‘correo de a pie.’ It seems likely that in these cases ‘legua’ signifies distance covered on foot in an hour.