“As ill-luck would have it”
“As good luck would have it”

First let me welcome y'all to Atlanta.

Let me begin by telling you what I'm not going to do. There is no subaltern theory, gender theory, queer theory nor any discussion of race, class and gender (RCG) in my talk. Nothing will be constructed, deconstructed, structured, conceptualized or historicized. I will not speak of hegemony or hegemonic processes, “weapons of the weak” or contested terrains, discursive mechanisms or hidden discourses and I will not unpack concepts, tease out or discover embedded meanings or interrogate silences. Lastly, in this talk there are no subalterns and no one is contesting, negotiating, empowering or empowered.

The historiography of the book in the age of Spanish imperial expansionism has traditionally viewed printed works as repressive instruments of colonial domination that forcefully supplanted the native Americans' non-alphabetic vehicles of memory and communication. Accounts of the Europeans' wholesale destruction of native holy objects and material forms of expression bespeak the undisputable role of books in the Spanish colonization of indigenous memory and symbolizing practices. But the existence of colonial-era writings that testify to the resiliency of native technologies poses still-unanswered questions about the mechanisms by which this colonization took place and the ultimate reach of print culture in local native communities removed from the urban centers where, as Ángel Rama has suggested, written documents held sway. To what extent did native methods of communication endure under Spanish rule? What might the documentary traces of their use reveal about how they were transformed as a result of European contact? Can we tie their survival to concrete means by which native peoples withstood or adjusted to the Europeans' written culture and colonizing institutions? I would like to attempt to answer these questions by focusing on missionary uses of Andean khipus: the knotted cords used by the Inca for the purposes of accounting and historical record keeping, which native parishioners employed in colonial times for learning Christian doctrine and recalling sins prior to confession.

On the night of June 24, 1874, the illiterate farmer Francisco Angelino de Souza attended a St. John's party in the house of João Pereira, located in the estate Barra do Felipe in the largely rural municipality of Jucás, province (now state) of Ceará in Northeast Brazil. The celebrations unfolded uneventfully, with the guests singing to the rhythms of a viola (small guitar, typical of the Northeastern backlands) and drinking the sugarcane brandy called cachaça until late in the night. However, unexpectedly, a fight erupted between Francisco Angelino and António Rodrigues de Souza. According to eyewitnesses, Francisco Angelino stabbed António's leg with his knife after he had “offended” Francisco Angelino's reputation. In the midst of this commotion, one of the party guests performed an in flagrante arrest, taking an indignant Francisco Angelino to jail, while he clamored at the top of his lungs that he “was not afraid of any man, or even of being jailed, because he had a bull, a horse, lands and money” to defend himself.

In response to an anti-Federalist insurgency within the province of Córdoba in 1840, Manuel López, the governor (r. 1835-1852) and staunchally to Juan Manuel de Rosas, issued a directive to all provincial judges to round up all suspected Unitarians and their families, seize their property, and strip them of their citizenship. In following these orders, Pedro José García, the local juez de paz (Justice of the Peace), the principle law enforcement body of Pueblo de la Toma in the heart of Córdoba province, proceeded to the farmhouse of Faustino Avalo, who had recently been “classified” as a “savage Unitarian,” a political label describing any person opposing Federalist rule. García charged Avalos with secretly aiding and abetting Unitarian armies, which had passed through the province during the anti-Federalist uprisings in the previous year. As evidence of his guilt, according to the confiscation order, Avalos went missing for weeks and was nowhere to be found. Indeed, when García arrived, only Avalos's wife, María Juana Villafáñez, and their ten children remained. Nevertheless, García, along with two other “trusted” witnesses, read the order and confiscated the entire family's property. Villafáñez and her children could only watch helplessly as their clothes, toys, furniture, and livestock were taken away in wagons and their house boarded up. Yet, García did not arrest nor imprison Villafáñez and her children; instead, they were allowed to stay with her brother, Gervasio, a well-known Federalist and one of the “trusted” witnesses to his sister's material loss and public humiliation.