This essay approaches transitions by tracing the shifting representation of indigenous–authored texts, in both alphabetic and non–alphabetic scripts, in a series of key colonial–era bibliographies, beginning with Antonio de León Pinelo’s Epítome (1629), passing through Andrés González de Barcia’s expanded reedition (1737–38), and culminating in Antonio de Alcedo’s reinvention as a Bibliotheca Americana (1791/1807). By exploring the continuities and disjunctures in inclusion, representation, and classification in this trajectory, we seek to explore how the evolving tradition of the Bibliotheca Americana–a form conceived to accommodate imperially–sanctioned imprints and manuscripts–structured the legibility of indigenous manuscript forms as legitimate modes of knowledge production. It aims to better understand how transitions in bibliographic form enable or foreclose historiographic possibilities, a previously unexplored line of inquiry with implications for our engagement with the legacy of Americanist bibliography in the present.

This chapter examines Friar Gerónimo de Ypori’s Relacion about the controversial expedition led by Pedro de Ursúa into the Amazon Basin (1560-1561). This expedition led to the rise of the infamous Lope de Aguirre, leader of the Marañones soldiers and explorers. Ypori’s account intended to understand the unknown Amazonian space through description. In doing so, the writer carries out an epistemological exercise to exert sovereignty over a placethat is amorphous in the eyes of his European readers and “uncovers it” for them. Departing from Mary Louise Pratt’s and Edward Said’s discussions about the close connections between writing, cartography, geography, conquest and colonial control, this chapter focuses on the complexity of modes of discourse and ways of writing that were further influenced by the transition of the Spanish legal and bureaucratic writing models into the colonial space of the New World.