Against all Change: Description and Memory of “The Notable” in Colonial Texts of the l6th Century

Abstract

This paper discusses the formation of a descriptive model to see and order “Matters of the Indies” starting from the consideration of metropolitan state politics of the l6th century. The commands and interrogations sent from the Council of the Indies, with the purpose of organizing the information in order to better govern the colonies, assumed the obligatoriness of providing information on the part of officials belonging to civil and ecclesiastical orders and also on the part of the subordinates that “dwell and move about," within these orders. Such a policy generated consequences in the area of mandate propagation and in the gradual standardization of a descriptive view of social importance.

The descriptive model that registers and describes the reality of the Indies through the selection and profiling of specific aspects constitutes a “migrating” element in relation to the “textual types” and from there, its presence in written accounts, descriptions or travel narratives from the period. The choice of one aspect to describe —“the notable”— permits us, in a quick contrastive study of the cases, to notice the way in which what is considered “worthy of mention” emerges and the perspective laid out from each enunciation space to familiarize the metropolitan reader with the heterogeneous colonial world.