“My intent in gathering, editing, annotating and providing historical background for the documents is to help historians who may have an interest in Spanish Colonial history and who may not have access to such translators.”
History starts with what people remember and write down or report to others who write it down. The problem is that human memory is faulty; we add ourselves into it without any effort at all. But these written or oral memories and archaeological remains (which being objects have no faulty memories, but sometime are subject to faulty interpretation) are all we have of the distant past. So historians act like police investigators and corroborate written evidence with other written and then, hoping for the best, we write articles, papers, and books to present what we think happened.
My particular interest is in working with the special people who can transcribe and translate the archaic language and difficult handwriting of the documents. Knowing Spanish isn’t enough. I mostly worked with J. Richards Salazar but also others. My intent in gathering, editing, annotating and providing historical background for the documents is to help historians who may have an interest in Spanish Colonial history and who may not have access to such translators. Maybe even more important my intent is to provide information to the many New Mexican descendants of the Spanish Colonial men and women speaking, complaining, arguing, defending themselves, and ordering people around in the documents. In the two books published to date, eight-five documents have been transcribed and translated. We (Salazar and I) selected the documents partly because of their historical interest, but mostly because by reading them we could hear the early Spanish Colonial residents speaking for themselves (for better or worse).
As examples, three documents selected from the two published books are shown below. A date, citation number, summary and synopsis, and a multitude of footnotes are included, and sometimes an image.
Synopsis
On their return to New Mexico after the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, the New Mexican settlers confronted continuous raids by hostile Indians, disease, and an inhospitable landscape. In spite of this, the colonists went about their lives as best they could, as shown in the fifty-four documents transcribed and translated in Spanish Colonial Lives. These documents show them making trading deals, traveling on the Camino Real, sending petitions to the governor complaining about each other, and planning for the future of their children. They are also shown interacting with the presidio soldiers, the Franciscan friars and Inquisition officials, merchants from Chihuahua, and their Pueblo Indians allies. The documents were selected for their description of Spanish Colonial life, their interest to the many descendants of the people that appear in them, and because they tell a good story.
This book, the result of over six years of preparation, includes a summary of each document, editor’s notes, biographical sketches, and an extensive index including the names of all the participants.
BibTex