UC Berkeley

In this dissertation I study the fractality of the Spanish Empire in the Amazon, in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, and its effect on the creation of letters, petitions and chronicles written by Spanish evangelizers, civil agents, and travelers during this period of conquest and colonization. In chapter one, I rethink the concept of Ciudad Letrada with the notion of geontology (coined by Elizabeth Povinelli), which is a social contract whereby the members of a specific community-following their traditions, expectations, and symbolic structures-agree about what and who is a living being, and what and who manifests as an inert object in their community. In the case of the ciudades letradas, this geontological pact established the collective signs of the imperial power (words, maps, plans, emblems, and images produced by the letrados) as the most alive creature of the colonial city. With this assumption, Spanish colonial power was founded on the autonomy of signs as an animate organism; autonomy as the expression of a living and vital being through which the colonial order imposed its rule. In chapter two, I use the concept of fractality developed by Benoit Mandelbrot to propose that life in this period of the Spanish Empire circulated through networks and communication "trees" whose main characteristic was their irregularity and discontinuity. I followed the works of Sandra Negro and Pilar García Jordán to explain that the colonization of the Amazon, through the foundation of missions, reductions, and small towns, used intricate rivers routes as access to the Amazon. Spaniards built their missions and small towns on riverbanks to facilitate communication and connection. Consequently, the network of Franciscan and Jesuit missions had the same shape as the network of Amazonian rivers, which means that communication between missions followed irregular water routes. Unlike the literate circuits proposed by Ángel Rama (who explains that alphabetic colonial documents moved in Euclidean communication networks: square or rectangular circuits similar to the checkerboard structure of colonial cities), I propose that written communication in the Spanish Empire in the Amazon moved in fractal circuits characterized by intermittence. For example, a document written by Hernando Benavente in the 16th century had a path of communication intervened by the forces of insects, animals, excessive rain, and threats of war by the Xíbaro community. His document, like the ones written by Samuel Fritz and Gaspar de Carvajal, among others, communicates multiple interferences and an irregular colonial communication circuit. These circuits are alternative historical models to the colonial/literate/orderly cities, and elucidate the modernity/coloniality of America from prototypes and communication models where the constant interference of things and bodies is recognized. These prototypes function like literate cities, but in the opposite direction, revealing a model of irregularity in colonial/modern power in the Amazon. In chapter three I propose a new way of studying colonial documents that contests the generally accepted idea that historical texts represent, invent, or conceal colonial reality. The primary sources suggest that four basic agents participated in the production of colonial texts: Spanish authors/writers; Amazonian Indigenous communities (and their social and historical backgrounds); documents (understood as the materiality of writing: paper, ink, grammatical structures, syntax, etc.); and bodies of animals, plants, fungi, larvae, and viruses. I argued that these basic agents have a frictional relationship to the point that the production of the text is the result of their interaction and mutual influence. The kinesic structure and the metaplasm of the Amazonian colonial document captured the intersection of multiple forces and perspectives, human and non-human, and the influence of agents such as humidity, rain, and the resistance of the Andaquí community, suggesting that these forces were neither exogenous nor external to the document. As a result, I conclude that the Amazonian colonial document not only contains the perspective of the colonizing author, but also the perspective and pressure of these agents. The legibility of the historical image produced by these documents implies a different perception of the past: an image of the decline of tobacco revenue in the 18th century in the Amazon, for example, is built on the intervention, action, and participation of the tobacco plants themselves. Amazonian colonial documents emerged from the mediation of what I call “relational archive,” which is a system of friction between ecological, social, and material forces that occurs during the process of creating a written document. Examination of the corpus of these texts will show that colonial documents in the Amazonian space emerged, in part, from a non-binary archive in situations where the borders between subject/object, sign/reality, and culture/nature were fluid and not in opposition, revealing a model of irregularity that questions the Euclidean communication network as the norm for the Americas.