AUTHOR’S NOTE ON TRANSCRIPTIONS, TRANSLATIONS, ARCHIVES, AND SPANISH NAMING PRACTICES

Although I have not included the Spanish originals of most colonial documents discussed in this volume, I include some brief transcrip- tions in the endnotes or parenthetically. My transcriptions attempt to preserve the orthography and punctuation of the original documents while at the same time rendering them comprehensible to twenty-­first- century readers. Thus, I spell out most abbreviations and generally convert the letter “f” to “s” and the initial “rr” to “r,” but do not always convert “y” to “i,” “u” to “v,” or add the letter “h” where it is missing. I do not include accent marks in my transcriptions, as they were not used in the colonial period; for this reason, names like “Bogotá” will appear with an accent mark in the text, but without an accent in doc- umentary citations and quotations. I do not reconcile divergent spell- ings of a word or a proper name, which might be written in different ways in the same document; this is particularly true for toponyms and anthroponyms in native languages, which Spanish scribes struggled to record using Castillian phonological conventions, although they were not proficient in the language in question. I also preserve the gender of certain nouns, such as “la color,” in their early modern form. Co- lonial documentary writing frequently has run-­on sentences. In the interests of making quotations in translation more readable, I have opted for dividing some run-­on sentences into more coherent phrases in my translations. Likewise, I have removed “said” (dicho/a), which means “aforementioned,” from certain translations in the interests of a more fluid reading, although I have retained it where it is central to the meaning of the sentence. I have used the acronym agi/s to refer to the Archivo General de Indias, Seville, and agn/b to refer to the Archivo General de la Na- ción, Bogotá; other archives and their abbreviations are listed at the beginning of the bibliography. I have also abbreviated the names of sections in the archives, such as ci for Caciques e Indios in agn/b; a key to these abbreviations can be found at the beginning of the bibli- ography. I have arranged agi documents into legajos (l.), números (n.), and ramos (r.); I use these abbreviations in my documentary citations. Documents from agn frequently include a document number (doc.), which is useful for locating digitalized manuscripts on the archive’s web page. Spanish surnames combine a patronymic with a matronymic, the patronymic coming first: the first surname—­the patronymic—­of Prós- pero Morales Pradilla, a twentieth-­century author I mention in passing in these pages, is “Morales,” and he will appear in the bibliography under the letter “m.” The matronymic (in this case, “Pradilla”) is op- tional in everyday usage, so that Morales Pradilla can also be called “Morales.” I will sometimes reduce surnames to the patronymic after initially introducing individuals by their full names, both in the body of the text and in the bibliographic references in my endnotes; com- plete surnames are recorded in the bibliography, alphabetized under the patronymic. However, in some cases, individuals are called by other than their first surname, a very common occurrence in the co- lonial period, when the conventions of naming were less strict than they are today and when some individuals did not use their patronym- ics, but instead went by their mothers’ surnames (or even sometimes by other surnames). The colonial administrator Andrés Díaz Venero de Leiva, for example, is commonly referred to as “Venero de Leiva” or “Venero,” and not “Díaz,” perhaps because his second surname was less common than his first. I implore readers to try to adapt to colonial usages, instead of demanding that all persons be referred to according to the editorial conventions of twenty-­first-­century English-­speakers.

xiv Author’s Note