Archivo General de Indias

Hey folks, Brad here. I know y’all are all asking yourselves, “what is it exactly that Brad is doing again?” Sometimes I ask myself that very question.

El Archivo General de Indias (AGI), or the General Archive of the Indies, is the official repository of all documentation in Spain relating to the colonial administration of Spain’s American colonies: from Cuba to Chile, Mexico to the Philippines (yes, the Philippines were part of Spain’s “American” colonies).

The Archive is housed, as Neely has mentioned, right next door to Seville’s Cathedral in the 16th-century Casa Lonja ("LONE-ha"), the old merchant exchange. Spain’s King Carlos III, in 1785, established the archive here because Seville had been the point of departure for the Americas in the early colonial years and was the homebase of the Spanish colonial enterprise.



Today, the AGI houses one of the most important collections of colonial documents in the world. Here you can read letters from Cortés, Columbus, and even George Washington. But I am mostly interested in looking at things that give me a better idea of what was going on in the city of Tetzcoco, Mexico, in the earliest years of colonialism.

Cortés and Malinche are greeted by a group of indigenous rulers in a scene from the Lienzo of Tlaxcala.

I’ve really only just started to dig through the documents, but I’ve already found a very interesting case. It’s from the year 1537, which is earlier than anything I’ve seen in Mexico (the Spanish climate is a little easier on 500-year old paper), and it’s about 290 pages long. It’s a lawsuit brought by a group of indigenous leaders from one town against the indigenous leaders of my city of Tetzcoco.

The coat of arms of the city of Tetzcoco.

From this document, one gets a sense of the kinds of things that were happening in this very early period—only 15 years after the fall of the Aztec capital to Cortés! Mostly, I see that early colonialism was a period when people were trying to figure things out. In this particular case, they test the Spanish legal system to see what it can do for them. “Will the Spaniards really give us these lands if we hire a lawyer and sue for them?” “Will they find out that they’re not really ours?”

If it weren’t for the handwriting, this would be a quick read. But as it is, it’s taken me about two weeks to get through half of it. Whew!

Here are some examples of the types of handwriting that I find in the archive (click for larger image):