An exclusive excerpt from the introduction to Unveiling Stories: Writers in the General Archive of the Indies, a new Hay Festival collection published by Charco Press.
In Sevilla, Spain, the General Archive of the Indies has, for 240 years, been a repository for centuries of materials and documents gathering a record of the daily life of empire. Now 10 writers from Spain and Latin America have a chance to respond to this 80-million-page trove.
The greatest point of contention in the relationship between literature and history seems to lie in the truth status of each. Whether history is truer because it is based on documentary archive sources that can be produced as evidence; or whether literature is truer because it reads against the grain what the official history tells us, and situates itself in the latter’s silences, in what the archive fails to record. One establishes a relationship with power, we think; the other tells the counter-history of the silenced. But the question, like everything, is more complicated than that. Historical time periods tend to be broad, long, and like Chronos they devour their children. Literature foregrounds an instant: a few hours, a few years, or a feeling, and sets it against the vast canvas of the historical period, while charging it with the finitude of biographical time.
For this volume, the result of a collaboration between Hay Festival Global and the General Archive of the Indies, we have invited ten fiction and essay writers from two of the three shores of the former Spanish Empire, to make use of the favoured material of historiography – the archive – and unveil new stories based on one or more documents from the Archive. This initiative arose as a way of commemorating 500 years since the foundation of Santa Marta on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, one of the oldest continental cities of the Spanish Empire. It also responds to the proposal of the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean (known as CAF for its former name, the Andean Development Corporation) to digitalize the Archive of the Indies on its 240th anniversary.
One objective of Unveiling Stories is to bring the public closer to this site that holds and safeguards the largest collection of documents on the four-and-a-bit centuries of Spanish rule. From the Capitulations of Christopher Columbus in 1492, which authorize him to embark on the voyage that took him to these ‘new lands’ – new for the Europeans and ancient for their inhabitants – by way of the creation of the House of Trade in Seville, the materials even reach into the post-colonial period in the nineteenth century. Just as the historical period it encompasses is vast, so too is its geographic scope: the map of the empire takes in the immense Atlantic, embraces Cuba and Mexico and leaps across to the China Sea and the Philippines. From north to south, from California to Patagonia, it covers deserts and mountains, plains and jungles of the continent that bears the name of an Italian explorer.
No individual could ever read all that is contained on its endless shelves, its thousands of bundles, its millions of records. It is the very principle governing the collection that tells us we should read them as documents, testimonies, and evidence of what happened in the past. And, more specifically, in that shared past of what was once the vast imperial territory, over whose subjects the sun never set.
The archive abounds in administrative documents. They include the cargo manifests of the boats that sailed from Spain to America, carrying pitchers of wine for the Spaniards who longed for their peninsular vittles after months and years of eating turkey, fish, venison, tomatoes, potatoes, corn, chilli and chocolate. And, of course, the cargo manifests of the boats heading in the other direction, carrying gold, silver, pearls and other treasures extracted with slave labour from those distant lands to Spain, along with canoes and hammocks, and a new vocabulary to describe all the wondrous things they encountered in those lands of hurricanes, condors, and hummingbirds.
There are thousands upon thousands of royal decrees, statements of account, administrative lawsuits, appointments and dismissals of officials, reports on visits by the Royal Court, court correspondence, and a vast amount of notarial records. The purchase of slaves is authorized, indigenous people are placed under the care of the Crown, and the right to collect taxes is granted.
Among the countless documents preserved in the archives, we find Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s account of Pánfilo de Narváez’s harrowing expedition, the shipwreck, and the hardships endured by the survivors as they wandered for four years through the swamps of the Mississippi and the deserts of Texas until they reached Tenochtitlan. Preserved too are the accounts of friars who sought to eradicate idolatry, in which they recount fantastical stories of demonic possessions to further extol their achievements in the eyes of the king and earn greater favours. We find the anguished letters of provincial governors trying to maintain the old order amid the revolutions that shook the Caribbean in the nineteenth century and, little by little, all the overseas kingdoms, and we can read the daily reports of the viceroys who, stunned and terrified, chronicled the repercussions of the crisis of the monarchy and the rapid formation of governing juntas. Not to mention the wealth of those documents describing mutinies, riots, and rebellions, which offer us silent testimonies about the history of the indigenous peoples, and of the Bozales and the Cimarrones, opening up a crack through which we can glimpse the diversity of colonial society.
Beyond the monumental task of administering an empire, this vast universe of paper that is the General Archive of the Indies contains – hidden within the lines of official documents – countless personal stories. A license for the distribution of Indigenous people conceals the history of hundreds of individual lives, of fragmented communities, and of social upheavals. There is a wealth of estate documents in which a last will and testament expresses a desire to free a slave, to pay for the education of a ward, or to make a donation to a convent. Some events are more notable and perhaps better known, such as the request by a certain Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra to be granted a position among the four vacancies available in the Indies. In other cases, the archive documents what has become the stuff of legend, such as the story of ‘La Negra del Hospital’, the earliest known record of an African woman providing medical care from her hut on the island of Hispaniola.
Each one of the assorted texts that we present here is preceded by an image that depicts a single page from one of the documents that served as a starting point, an inspiration or source for reflection or imagining of an individual or collective history. This visual sampler is an invitation to the reader to learn more about and explore the rich universe of the General Archive of the Indies.
It is precisely this spirit of discovery that leads Unveiling Stories to join the tradition of anthologies curated by Hay Festival Global. This collection is preceded by two notable collaborations between the Hay Festival and the British Museum. In the first, ten writers from Latin America worked together with museum curators to write texts based on objects from the Latin American and Caribbean collections The result was the anthology Untold Microcosms: Latin American Writers in the British Museum, published by Charco Press, and simultaneously by Anagrama in Spanish.
The second collaboration gave rise to the anthology Explorers, Dreamers and Thieves, also published by Charco Press and Anagrama. In this project, six authors were invited to write brief fiction or non-fiction pieces that critically examine the complex and sometimes controversial stories behind the acquisition of the objects that make up the collection of the British Museum. The creation of each text implied a deep exploration of the museum archives – diaries, letters, sketches, jottings and contracts – documents that form a key part of the process by which each piece enters the collection.
A central aspect of these projects is that, beyond the anthology as a book, they serve as the starting point for countless vibrant and important conversations that then blossom at the various Hay Festivals in Wales (United Kingdom), Segovia and Seville (Spain), Cartagena de Indias (Colombia), Querétaro (Mexico), and Arequipa (Peru), enriching the dialogue and offering a creative and critical perspective on these topics.
In this light, Unveiling Stories offers new perspectives to address the question of how to tell the story of that vast and enduring empire, weaving together the distant voices that still echo from the Archive of the Indies with the concerns of the present. They invite us to engage in a conversation about the complex and necessary task of understanding and recounting that past, which both unites and divides us.
Discover more about Unveiling Stories: Writers in the General Archive of the Indies and pre-order your copy now here.