Acknowledgements
The research, writing, and rewriting of this book was a collective effort that would have been impossible without the extraordinary generosity and support of a number of people and institutions. It began as the subject of my doctorate at the University of Cambridge, which was funded by the Lightfoot Scholarship in Ecclesiastical History, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and Peterhouse. At Cambridge I incurred a great debt of gratitude to Gabriela Ramos for her rigorous criticism and patient support. It was Gabriela who first asked me many of the questions that this book has sought to answer, and its title, in part, pays homage to her work.Footnote 1 I am also indebted to Magnus Ryan, Patrick Zutshi, Scott Mandelbrote, and Peter Linehan for their mentorship and for providing me with tools that would later shed old light on a new context. I am also very grateful to Simon Ditchfield and Aliocha Maldavsky for their thoughtful observations and generous encouragement as examiners, which led me to broaden the scope of this project considerably, and for their support and advice as colleagues as I found my feet as a young academic.
I am profoundly grateful for the support I received from several institutions in Colombia. I was welcomed as a visiting scholar at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana by Juana Marín and Jorge Enrique Salcedo SJ. Diana Bonnett invited me to spend some time as a visiting scholar at the Universidad de los Andes, where I was also grateful to discuss my work with Carl Langebaek and Mauricio Nieto. At the Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, Jorge Gamboa and Guillermo Sosa gave me valuable advice, and with Bibiana Castro and her colleagues in the publications department also supported the production of La legislación de la Arquidiócesis de Santafé, one of the many detours and parallel roads I travelled in the journey to this book. Another has been Neogranadina, the non-profit foundation Santiago Muñoz, Natalie Cobo, and I set up in 2015 to contribute to rescue, protect, and promote the holdings of endangered archives and libraries in Colombia and elsewhere in Latin America, and to develop digital and public history initiatives to bring them to new audiences. Seven major digitisation initiatives, multiple digital platforms and projects, and many hundreds of thousands of images later, Neogranadina has become a major part of my life and scholarship. I am profoundly grateful to them, to our colleagues Andreína Soto, María del Pilar Ramírez Restrepo, Jairo Melo Flórez, and María Gabriela Betancourt, and to the dozens of students, interns, volunteers, and users around the world who have contributed in different ways to make possible Neogranadina’s work in Colombia, Peru, and online. Since 2016 I have also had the immense privilege of participating in the intellectual community of Department II of the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt, where my work has benefitted immeasurably from conversations with Thomas Duve, Benedetta Albani, María del Pilar Mejía, Otto Danwerth, Max Deardorff, Manuela Bragagnolo, Osvaldo Moutin, José Luis Egío, Christiane Birr, and other colleagues. Research stays at the institute were integral to rethinking important aspects of this book.
In 2016 I joined the faculty of the History Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I found a nurturing and supportive intellectual community. I have an enormous debt of gratitude to Sherene Seikaly and Utathya Chattopadhyaya, who painstakingly read and engaged with every word of this book and gave me generous comments, thoughtful insights, and much needed encouragement. So too to Cecilia Méndez Gastelumendi for her unwavering support of me and of this project and for our long conversations on Andean politics past and present. I am also very grateful to Manuel Covo for his support and thoughtful engagement with different chapters of this book. Alicia Boswell provided company and solidarity that made the lonely task of writing and editing much more enjoyable. Thank you to Hilary Bernstein, Beth Digeser, Erika Rappaport, Adam Sabra, Luke Roberts, Stephan Miescher, and Sarah Cline, who asked crucial questions and provided valuable advice at different junctures. I am also very grateful for the time I was able to spend at the John Carter Brown Library, with support provided by the Donald L. Saunders Fellowship, which allowed me to consult material that became central to this project – it was there, after all, that I first encountered Juan Sanz Hurtado – and afforded me crucial time to write and rewrite. I am grateful to Neil Safier, Bertie Mandelblatt, Domingo Ledesma, and Pedro Germano Leal for their support and advice, and to my fellow fellows, particularly Tessa Murphy and Franco Rossi, for reading and commenting on sections of this work, even after the coming of the pandemic.
This book relies on material from collections in Bogotá, Tunja, Seville, Rome, London, Cambridge, Oxford, and Providence. I would like to thank the many archivists and librarians that made my research possible, especially Francisco Molinero Rodríguez and Luis Emilio Calenda at the Archivo General de Indias (AGI), Mauricio Tovar at the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), María Rósula Vargas de Castañeda at the Archivo Histórico Regional de Boyacá (AHRB), and Germán Mejía and Alma Miranda at the Archivo Histórico Javeriano ‘Juan Manuel Pacheco’. I was also very fortunate to have been granted access to three ecclesiastical archives in Bogotá after many unsuccessful attempts. Fr. Antonio Balaguera OP was instrumental in helping me access the Archivo de la Provincia de San Luis Beltrán de Colombia, where archivist Martha Hincapié went beyond the call of duty to help me find what I needed. The rector and staff of the Colegio de San Bartolomé generously allowed me to spend many hours in their archive and trusted me with their materials. I had no such luck at the Franciscan archive in Bogotá, but I must thank Fr. Augusto Duque OFM for his valiant efforts to help me gain access. Fabián Leonardo Benavides, Andrés Mauricio Escobar, and their colleagues at the Universidad de Santo Tomás kindly included me in their project to commemorate the 450th anniversary of the Archdiocese of Bogotá, which afforded me a little access to the archives of the cathedral chapter.
Along the way, I presented portions of this project in different conferences and venues where it benefitted from the comments and insights of multiple scholars. I learned more than I can say from Beth Penry and Tom Abercrombie, generous mentors and kindest of colleagues, about confraternities, religious institutions, Indigenous politics, and much more beyond research. Aliocha Maldavsky, Roberto Di Stefano, Marie-Lucie Copete, and Ariane Boltanski generously included me in their research groups on lay sponsorship of the sacred and encouraged me to rethink the engagement of Indigenous elites and commoners with Christian institutions. Diana Magaloni invited me to participate in the preparation of the Portable Universe exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and with Julia Burtenshaw helped me to think about the persistent influence of colonial stereotypes and categories. Alcira Dueñas encouraged me to think more deliberately about the shape of the archive. Guillermo Wilde and Andrés Castro Roldán provided me with invaluable suggestions concerning language policy, Jesuit strategies, and missionary politics. Yanna Yannakakis gave me feedback on my efforts to historicise the cacicazgo. Juan Carlos Estenssoro, whose work inspired this project from the outset, was always generous with his comments and acute observations. I am especially grateful to Santiago Muñoz Arbeláez, my closest colleague, for his generous engagement with my work, invaluable advice, continuous encouragement, sharp insights, and friendship.
I am indebted to Kris Lane for believing in this project from its infancy. An earlier version of Chapter 5 appeared as an article in the Colonial Latin American Review and benefitted greatly from his input and advice. I am also very grateful to him and Matthew Restall for encouraging me to bring the manuscript to Cambridge University Press and for supporting me through the publication process. I am also indebted to Cecelia Cancellaro and Victoria Philips for their assistance, and to the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript for their insights and suggestions. Carrie Gibson, who was there at the very beginning of this project, also saw it to the end – rigorously copy-editing the final manuscript, just as she did its earlier incarnations, and providing thoughtful insights and patient comments. Esther González helped me tie up loose ends at the AGI, Yezid Pérez at the AGN, and Pilar Ramírez among AHRB materials from Tunja. María Alicia Uribe and her colleagues at the Museo del Oro aided me in obtaining permission to include the images of the objects in their collection that appear throughout this book. Julia Burtenshaw helped me obtain the images of objects in Los Angeles County Museum of Art and in a private collection whose owners, who wished to remain anonymous, kindly allowed me to include. Mercedes López provided valuable advice in the task of obtaining an image of Gaspar de Figueroa’s canvas in Cómbita, which Santiago Medina photographed for me with the kind authorisation of Hernán David López, parish priest. Andrés Cuervo took me to Sutatausa to see and photograph its striking murals many years ago, and he, Nohora, and Daniel put me up in Bogotá countless times and supported me in many different ways as I researched this book. Rosa Andalón, Andrea Conde, and Ximena Garzón helped us look after Sebastián while I wrote and rewrote.
This project would not have been possible without the limitless support and generosity of my family. I am grateful to my cousins, my brother, my grandparents, my aunts, my stepfather, and my wonderful mother, whom I will never be able to thank enough. My father, who always gave me the gift of his boundless encouragement, sadly did not get to see this book in print, but I will treasure the memory of the days we spent together working on its maps, images, and proofs. Finally, I will be forever grateful to Natalie Cobo, my closest collaborator, frequent co-author, sharpest reader, constant companion, and most generous supporter. This book is for her.
1 Gabriela Ramos, ed., La venida del reino: religión, evangelización y cultura en América, siglos XVI–XX (Cuzco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos “Bartolomé de las Casas”, 1994).
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