Whether they be the painted walls and highly ‘dressed’ altars of Andean churches, or the collective knotted strings and litigation proceedings housed in locked chests in local Indian municipal councils, artifacts conjure up cultural interstices instrumental for discerning the “fine grain” of Spanish colonialism in the Andes. After the early years of the Spanish presence, the Andes became a mosaic of multifarious articulations of indigenous, European, and African ways of thinking, living, and weaving a social order that continued to change over time and across the geographical space of the viceroyalty of Peru.
The complex amalgam of articulations that characterizes the important interventions of colonial indigenous actors defies simplistic views of the Spanish Empire as a system of institutions that Spain swiftly transplanted to the New World and managed to expand and consolidate by its own impetus alone. This special issue is devoted to illuminating various spheres in which native Andeans stood at the liminal space between the legal and religious domains of the Spanish empire and their fellow indigenous inhabitants of Andean America—the purported receivers of imperial programs. Looking at early modern empire building from the ethnohistorical perspective of indigenous colonial agents operating in such interstitial spheres allows for a nuanced understanding of both transatlantic colonialisms and the everyday workings of colonial cultures.
As they performed their work at the lower echelons of state and church bureaucracies, as notaries, interpreters, litigants, artists, artisans, or in varied combinations of such roles, indigenous cultural brokers’ mediations took place in both urban and rural settings. Instead of treating each role as discrete, with its own set of actions and circumstances, the articles in this issue attempt to explain how Andean intermediaries became agents of colonial culture and history, producing rarely acknowledged representations and agendas. As they did so, they devised and conducted alternative cultural practices of social networking that would mold colonialism in uniquely Andean ways.
This essay collection is based on the understanding that a critical look into the substance of Andean cultural brokering requires a close reading of the textual and visual sources, attending most especially to the historical events that surrounded these brokers’ actions. Scholars should be mindful also of the circumstances of production of the texts, with the understanding that archival and visual sources are not only what we can readily see but are also products whose manufacture articulated cultural assumptions and bore a political purpose. The authors have come to understand, as they pursued varied paths, that indigenous intermediaries, because they possessed valuable local knowledge and had been exposed to the religious and legal culture of the colonizers, acted as cultural translators of colonial law and Christianity, both to and from their communities and to and from Church and state authorities. In other words, they recreated, modified, and somewhat ‘Andeanized’ the formation and daily expression of the Spanish empire at the local level.
Thus, this issue offers an ethnohistorical perspective on empire-building, going beyond the ways in which Spain sought to modify the social and cultural landscape in the Andes. As indigenous cultural translators contributed to the communication and implementation of systems of justice based on Spanish law and legal culture to their own communities, they crafted notions of justice that responded to Andean concerns with local autonomy and expressed them through Andean media in colonial courts. In the church, native painters and artisans also intervened in the structuring of liturgical spaces and devised aesthetic forms that conveyed the doctrinal message of the Catholic Church to indigenous parishioners, while also producing local idioms of expression in the realm of the sacred.
A Review of the Ethnohistorical Scholarship
In the last three decades, the field of ethnohistory has produced burgeoning scholarship that recognizes colonial indigenous peoples as social agents in capacities that supersede essentialized identities as tributaries, servants, or even slaves.Footnote 1 The figure of the indigenous intermediary began to come more sharply into scholars’ focus after Rolena Adorno's seminal scholarship on don Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. She established the centrality of indios ladinos as a useful category of analysis for approaching the articulation of the “Republic of the Indians” and the “Republic of Spaniards” as well as the instrumentality of these subjects for the Spanish colonial project in the New World. Linguistically and culturally ambidextrous, Catholic and literate ladinos resided in an uncertain space, at the interface of the Spanish and Indian worlds that came into conflicting contact in the Americas. Just like the Andean colonial actors studied in this essay collection, the indios ladinos spoke and wrote from that liminal space and made choices that gave singular form to the colonial society they inhabited.Footnote 2
Since the 1970s, scholars have paid attention to the use of the royal courts, particularly by caciques and their representatives. Caciques argued vehemently for revisions of tribute rates and mita quotas. They also contested the appointments of native and non-indigenous authorities perceived to be illegitimate. As colonial demands advanced, native lords sought redress for such imbalances as the loss of lands and the abuses of encomenderos, corregidores, and priests.Footnote 3 The pertinent scholarship in this field has established ample groundwork on Indian legal activism as a response to the new colonial challenges in both civil and ecclesiastic courts.Footnote 4 From raising questions about the ‘proclivity’ of Indian authorities to litigate, to discerning the legal strategies of caciques and the juridical doctrines applied to the adjudication of Indian litigation, scholars have focused on caciques as the prime mediators within the legal system, while attempting to assess the impact of litigation on the internal cohesion of indigenous communities and the ability of Amerindians to attain justice.Footnote 5 Interdisciplinary dialogues drawing from linguistics, anthropology, literary studies, and art history have nurtured this new wave of ethnohistorical scholarship.
As these studies were turning the focus on Andeans and their contributions, a new understanding emerged of the Spanish and Indian worlds as porous spheres in Spanish America. This perspective defies the ideal of separation between the two republican jurisdictions of the Habsburg administration in America. Such discernment has led the way to new and more specialized research that looks at the roles of indigenous brokers in the contentious field of knowledge and colonial power by raising issues with the previous assumptions regarding the monopoly of writing and legal knowledge by peninsular Spaniards and creoles in colonial society.Footnote 6 Ethnohistorians have thus come to acknowledge indigenous writers and legal advocates as intellectuals in their own right, and have expanded the notion of the Lettered City to include the different uses of writing and law by indigenous Andeans and mestizos. And rightly so, since it was they who appropriated the written word and legal culture, partaking in the production of laws for advancing their own sense of justice and ethnic autonomy before the Spanish authorities.Footnote 7 These studies have also established a conversation with the abundant scholarship on the roles of cabildos and colonial indigenous officers in Mesoamerica, where the existence of a vast array of visual and written sources in native languages, by and large unavailable in the Andean case, has advanced the study of such indigenous mediators in both similar and particular forms.Footnote 8
Andean intermediaries were also to be found outside of the legal arena. In the 1990s, scholars broadly identified with postcolonial studies paradigms brought provocative new approaches to the study of the social and cultural contributions of colonial subordinate subjects and the transformation of their cultures under Spanish rule. More specifically, art historians, along with literary scholars and anthropologists, made pioneering strides in challenging conventional notions of writing, cartography, and literacy. They shared the notion that visual representations can be also read as “texts,” thus opening a new understanding of both pre-Hispanic and colonial Andean cultures, an understanding not attainable when restricting sources to alphabetic writing alone. For the Andes, art historians who follow this methodology look at the symbolic meaning of Inca iconography in textiles, ceramics, maps, and various ritual objects, and their colonial interpretations. Such artifacts say much about the roles of Andean kurakas and artists as mediators between Spanish authorities and Andean communities. Historians have also reflected on the colonial uses of native artifacts and their changes over time.Footnote 9
Art historians have also reconstructed the historical contexts in which such artifacts were produced and used. A more refined comprehension of Andean notions of power and hierarchy and their colonial uses has thus come to light. Such knowledge has allowed, in turn, for the redefinition of identity and the repositioning of Andean authorities and communities in the postconquest periods. For the most part, the essays of Cohen Suarez and Stanfield-Mazzi in this issue share such a method and expand the field to the study of Andean painters and textile weavers, who have received little attention so far, as mediators. Colonial paintings have also inspired studies about the subordination of Andean culture and power under colonial rule. In her renowned study of the role of Inca authorities in the ceremonial religious culture of Cuzco, Carolyn Dean contrasts the idealized images of Inca presence in the public religious realm, where they functioned as signs of successful conversion, to the ways in which they also revealed the actual subordination of Inca authorities.Footnote 10 Other studies illuminate the role of religious icons and specific artists as intermediaries, along the lines of two of the works in this special issue.Footnote 11 In her approach to the social history of colonial architecture, Susan Verdi Webster uncovers cross-cultural collaboration in the making of the colonial city, and specifically addresses the ubiquitous participation of indigenous artists in the formation of the architectural landscape of colonial Quito (churches, convents, houses, and public works), in conjunction with a cohort of European and creole sponsors, builders, and other artists, giving further substantiation to the idea of intercultural brokerage in the colonial cities of the Andes.Footnote 12
New Approaches to Andean Brokerage
The four articles included in this special issue illuminate hitherto understudied aspects of the everyday workings of the República de Indios, from the mid-sixteenth century to the late eighteenth century in two major colonial arenas: the legal system and religion. The range of topics is diverse, from the legal interpretations and practices of indigenous cabildos to the intervention of Andean painting and textile work in the religious space of the parish church. José Carlos de la Puente Luna opens this collection with a reflection on communal understandings of litigation and the internal dynamics behind the management of collective assets that made litigation possible in the repartimientos of Jauja during the second half of the sixteenth century. In this case study, the author effects a close reading of Viceroy Francisco de Toledo's Información, an inquiry into the expenses which Andeans incurred for litigation, and archival material on related indigenous lawsuits. De la Puente Luna finds that Andean accountants and record keepers (khipucamayos) from Jauja, acting as legal administrators of the pueblos of the valley, responded to the Información by reviewing the litigation data encoded in khipus (knotted strings), and then ‘translated’ the encoded messages into alphabetic writing reports. Thus, they rendered khipus into khipus de papel, which Toledo would use for the broader purpose of curtailing the ‘excessive’ inclination of indigenous authorities to litigate.
In analyzing the content of the khipus de papel, the author posits that Andean intermediaries interpreted the expenses involved in litigation as sapci, an Andean notion denoting “that which belongs to all.” Sapci was understood as communal assets (goods, labor, and ultimately cash) that were produced by all ayllu members’ labor for their collective needs, and thus the ayllus held their higher authorities and legal representatives—those who mediated between the communities and the royal courts, including the Council of the Indies—accountable for how these assets were used. The study of colonial sapci in Toledan Jauja, then, attests not only to the adaptation of Andean understandings of community but also to a cultural translation of sapci that indicates how Spanish innovations in the Andes made litigation a collective need and success in litigation an important skill for legitimate caciques and Indian officers.
The khipus de papel produced by native cabildo intermediaries offer a new angle for approaching the interfaces between precolonial and colonial Andean management of community assets. These records stand as reminders of the khipus’ impressive plasticity as cultural and administrative media and as instruments of legal defense by Andeans. As veritable registers of the new practices and strategies of cacique-based colonial rule, the khipus de papel also point to the stages of the transition in which khipus evolved into written, alphabetical records. The Información commissioned by Toledo was in itself a work of cultural and linguistic translation in which the data content of the khipus were rendered in the alphabetical writing of the final report, on paper, through the mediation of the indigenous contadores, quipucamayos, and, likely, the indigenous escribanos of the cabildo as well.Footnote 13
Finally, this analytical approach to the cacique's management of sapci makes one aware of the history behind the making of the judicial record in the Andes. The writing of the litigation proceedings reveals the intra-communal context of what appears condensed therein.Footnote 14 As a result, De la Puente Luna's analysis sheds light on how the power structure implicit in legal proceedings and the ways of the legal courts rendered invisible important communal intermediaries in litigation. He shows how commoners and lesser caciques appeared in courts, demanding restitution for what they perceived as ill-expended sapci by their paramount lords, whose transatlantic journeys for litigation in the highest instance were financed by that very sapci. The author also surmises that court records obscure alternative uses of litigation by caciques and the implications of those uses for the preservation of communal assets and community internal cohesiveness.
The roles indigenous officials played in the articulation of Spanish law and practices in the pueblos de indios varied across Andean space and according to the unique exigencies of the time. By the 1730s, a pre-rebellion time in Peru, newly emerging concerns and forms of organization were prompting Andeans to put forward new legal agendas. Alcira Dueñas's essay looks at expanded forms of legal activism by officers and interpreters of the indigenous council. Andean engagements with Spanish law in the area of El Cercado radiated outward from the viceregal capital, a major legal market in colonial Peru, whose audiencia or high court became a bustling center of legal action for indigenous authorities. Dueñas argues that such Andean cabildo officials extended and stepped out of the prescriptive functions for these local-level offices of the colonial state that had been defined at the moment of their inception by the Viceroy Toledo, back in the 1570s.
Andean language interpreters and indigenous escribanos, procuradores, and aldermen from Lima's El Cercado (at the northeastern outskirts of Lima) corresponded in Spanish with their legal advocates across the Atlantic. The petitions they elevated to the king resulted in royal decrees that had the potential to alter power relations between the Republic of Indians and the Republic of Spaniards. One of these decrees involved replacing the long-standing position of the Spanish procurador de naturales with an officer who belonged to the “Indian Nation,” seemingly an attempt to reconstitute the Habsburg notion of the Republic of Indians at a time when the Bourbons were increasingly marginalizing traditional indigenous authorities.
Dueñas looks closely at the 1731 correspondence between the native interpreter don Nicolás Tupa Guamanrinchi Inga, from the Lima area, who worked in conjunction with don Vicente Morachimo, an indigenous noble from the northern coast of Peru. The latter had been recently appointed by Viceroy Príncipe de Santo Buono to represent Andeans from Lambayeque in the royal court in Madrid. She demonstrates that Guamanrinchi's activities in his role as interpreter more closely resembled those of a local protector de naturales, substantiating for Morachimo the minutiae of colonial authorities’ abuses and the inefficiency of the local system of justice by Spanish corregidores. The idea was to provide Morachimo with useful information to advance Andean lawsuits in Spain and to charge him with the legal representation of new cases from Andeans in Peru, while seeking justice in the last instance from the hand of the king himself.
The legal activities of Guamanrinchi, himself a mediator between communities in the Lima Province and Morachimo in Spain, are linked with the more politically driven activism of Alberto Chosop and Santiago Ruiz Tupac Amaru Inga, respectively an alderman and an escribano of the El Cercado indigenous cabildo in 1735. The author demonstrates how Chosop and Ruiz Tupac Amaru, representing “el común” (the commoners), set out to make official and permanent for El Cercado what had been only occasional representation of the Lambayeque caciques by Morachimo in Madrid. They sought this approach as a means to overcome the negligence, procrastination, and inefficiency of Spanish procuradores, corregidores, and audiencias in processing indigenous lawsuits in the local and regional courts.
In assessing the effects of Andean legal intermediaries, the fact that these petitioners were able to secure a royal decree from the king himself granting them such an opportunity is in all senses remarkable. However, because of the staunch opposition of the incumbent Spanish procuradores de naturales and their alliance with the Lima Audiencia, El Cercado native officials were forced to extend their legal engagement to negotiations for the enforcement of the law, a rather long and contentious process in itself. Nevertheless, it is clear that by the late colonial period native officials were using the cabildo structure to put forth in a more visible way an agenda for the reconstitution of a República de Indios wherein they could have more direct control of justice for their corporate jurisdiction.
By looking closely at the interpretations and practices of legal intermediaries, the historicity and politics of the legal document and the archives in which such documents were collected comes to light. De la Puente Luna's essay exposes aspects of the historical formation of written legal records of the early colonial pueblos de indios and their intercultural communal archives. Concomitantly, Dueñas's essay illuminates the ethnohistory behind the formation of law by pointing to the engagement of late colonial Andean representatives in the production of royal decrees for indigenous jurisdictions, arguably part and parcel of what came to be known later as derecho indiano.Footnote 15 The struggles over the custody of the native archive's legal proceedings, discussed in this essay, symbolized the power of writing and information at the outskirts of the colonial ‘lettered city.’
The work of men of letters bridged the worlds of law and religion in Spain and Spanish America. As did the legal intermediaries referred to above, Andean ladinos mediating in the ecclesiastic sphere attract the scholarly interest of two contributors to this issue. In the process of converting Amerindians to Catholicism, the Church also attempted a takeover and reconfiguration of sacred space in the Andes. The colonial Church itself, however, can be seen as an interstitial space wherein quotidian encounters between Andean parishioners and the colonial magistrates of the sacred were mediated by a variety of Andean sacristans, mission aides, interpreters, artists, and fiscales de iglesia (native church assistants). These native intermediaries usually worked in conjunction with the officials of the Indian governing councils introduced above and made their own imprint on the church atmosphere as they attempted to modify the experience of the sacred in the colonial Andes.
Maya Stanfield-Mazzi invites us to look at Andean mediation between the sacred and the profane through the contribution of Andean artisans to the formation of a liturgical culture of consumption in churches of the Cuzco region between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. The practice of ‘dressing the church,’ a byproduct of priestly purchases and religious patronage, refers to the work of weavers and tailors who produced sacred ornaments to cover walls, floors, and altars, as well as liturgical vestments to cover the bodies of the priests.
In setting a texture for her own work, Stanfield-Mazzi relies on extant pieces of liturgical textiles, colonial paintings featuring textiles, and archival documents as contextual sources. She posits that, in spite of the restrictions placed on their access to the priestly hierarchy, Andean artisans were able to shape liturgical spaces and create a new visual culture of the sacred in colonial Cuzco. They did so by incorporating Andean materials, designs, and images that brought an “Andean textile vocabulary” into the final products they were expected to produce, thus imbuing the pastoral message with an Andean visual language. Artisans employed Andean looms and applied llama wool, gold, and silver threads to textiles and furniture covers. They also introduced Andean designs to the borders of imported European cloth to further adorn the clergy and the sacred spaces these artisans thus redefined.
Ultimately, by uncovering these layers of adaptation and recreation of sacred spaces by indigenous cloth makers and weavers, Stanfield-Mazzi also allows one to see these mediators facilitating the daily operation of the spiritual economy in rural Cuzco. As weavers and cloth makers crafted sacred ornaments in their unique forms, they articulated the relationship between parish priests and local church patrons, both Indians and Spaniards. Concomitantly, they facilitated a primordial connection of the Andean faithful with Christianity as they ‘colored’ European textile designs, materials, and techniques with familiar Andean expressions, thus contributing to make Andeans regular consumers of liturgical practices and ornaments.
Continuing this scholarly journey across colonial sacred spaces, Ananda Cohen Suarez takes us to the aesthetic world of Andean rural churches to discuss the intricate ways in which Andean artists bridged the distance between European religious imaginaries and Andean visual languages. Giving flesh and blood to a “history of things,” an approach used in anthropology and art history since the 1980s, Cohen-Suarez traces the transatlantic trajectory of a single painting, The Baptism of Christ, from Italy and Malta to Cuzco's rural provinces. She goes about her journey by analyzing the pictorial narrative strategies of two Andean painters, Diego Cusi Huaman, who painted murals at the church of Santiago Apóstol de Urcos (ca. 1630s), and Pablo Gamarra, who did likewise in the church of San Miguel Arcángel de Pitumarca (1777). The author argues that Cusi Guaman and Gamarra departed from the European prototypes of the Baptism of Christ that informed their religious art and took mural painting to a new level. By appealing to Inca cosmology and communal knowledge, these painters articulated biblical messages in ways that evoked a common historical memory. They collapsed Inca and Christian mythical stories and rendered landscapes through a shared local geographical knowledge.
Cohen Suarez's essay brings to light the transatlantic circulation of visual sources evident in local Andean religious art of the colonial period. As aesthetic mediators, Andean “itinerant artists” drew from complex “networks of images” that put visual sources from Antwerp and Malta in dialogue with mural paintings from rural doctrinas in the cuzqueño Andes. In this case, too, the artistic contributions of these cultural mediators imbued liturgical spaces with a colonial sacredness through which Andean parishioners would be exposed to alternative pastoral messages in the visual register—a case of “visual literacy” at the service of indoctrination.Footnote 16 In doing so, Cohen Suarez draws our attention to rarely acknowledged rural settings where Andeans put their imprint on the negotiation of visual culture and sacred space within the wider context of Andean conversion and colonial religiosity.
The works of Stanfield-Mazzi and Cohen Suarez provide scholars of transatlantic colonialisms with a more refined knowledge about the ways in which Spanish colonialism was ‘plasticized’ in the quotidian and specifically in the newly defined sacred spaces of the Andes. Through particular aesthetic and productive choices, indigenous artisans and artists endeavored to translate and convey devotional messages in a local idiom. These two essays approach the roles of Andean mediators between the Church and indigenous parishioners through the construction of visual culture in sacred liturgical space.
Taking Stock and Looking Forward
The four essays in this collection offer new perspectives on colonial relationships that understand the interstitial spaces as places of constant and changing re-creation by subjects commonly believed to have been mere ‘recipients’ of acculturation and colonial dominance. Colonial society in the Andes looks different when studied from an interdisciplinary and ethnohistorical perspective, as a series of cultural articulations between worlds,. This is also possible when the researcher digs more deeply into the regional and possibly the local archives where the fine print of life in the pueblos and rural doctrinas (rural parishes) usually resides. By closely examining archival texts and visual artifacts with the analytical tools of anthropology, history, linguistics, art history, and literary studies, it is possible to identify the legal and discursive strategies of indigenous litigants, the visual narratives of artists and artisans, and the social networks in which they operated. Through this examination, one can also trace the circulation of the written, visual, and tactile information that Andeans used as they altered the notion of the two republics as discrete jurisdictions of the Spanish American empire in the Andes. The contribution of indigenous intermediaries is more clearly distinguishable in their mobilization of what Cohen Suarez calls “communal knowledge”—the reservoir of cultural, artistic, and intellectual resources that Andean mediators possessed for interpreting, modifying, and dealing with the colonial innovations that Spain brought to their homelands. Whether by applying their own knowledge of the local environment and its representation in the visual atmosphere of churches, or by articulating local understandings of justice and judicial procedure, or taking care of communal assets and their management, these subjects were essential in the making of colonial society in Andean Peru.
The four contributors to this special issue also advance a reflection on the formation of colonial administrative tools as historical processes. In multiple ways, the authors approach the question of how the colonial record, written and visual, and the resulting archives are formed, along with the social and political practices behind them. Examining litigation as sapci and the production of laws and their conflicting enforcement by Andean officials themselves, more directly addressed by José Carlos de la Puente Luna and Alcira Dueñas, implies a reflection on the colonial archive itself. The centrality of information in the colonial administration and its manipulation, storage, and uses make the archives veritable cultural and political artifacts with a social history of their own, beyond conventional notions of the archive as a simple repository of old written documents that historians can use as empirical data. Indeed, when put into perspective, these two essays draw a historical trajectory between two moments in the formation of the colonial Andean archive: from the sixteenth-century khipus de papel of the Jauja valley, itself a transitional moment between knotted cords and alphabetical writing, to the expansive paper trail generated by El Cercado Indian officers during the eighteenth century as they articulated their legal activism through reformulated notarial practice. Beyond the traditional duties, they were involved in raising petitions for direct legal representation through Indian procuradores de naturales, and any acceptance of those petitions entailed further writing and litigation to ensure their enforcement.
The two essays on colonial Andean art allow for further inquiry into the historical construction of archives of visual culture and the local sacred spaces that have housed them. Such repositories, to a large degree, were produced and preserved for the faithful to ‘read’ daily. Thus, the walls and altars of rural Andean churches, as well as their floors and stairs, kept the record of Andean intermediation within the confines of the Church. These were indeed encompassing archives containing sacred ornaments and art, regardless of whether they were displayed in the public spaces or deposited in the chests of Andean pueblo sacristies.
Finally, the examination of legal and artistic and religious intermediaries’ work from an ethnohistorical approach in this issue reverses unidirectional views on the social and cultural change produced by Spain in America. Andean legal and aesthetic practices of colonial intermediation are part of a much wider historical register: the transformation that Spanish law, Christianity, and their corresponding practices underwent in America as the boundaries of the Lettered City unwittingly expanded to the uncharted territory of the secular and religious spheres of indigenous doctrinas and the pueblos de indios.
Extending the significant advances in the study of the indigenous brokers in the last few decades, this special issue also suggests new thematic avenues for expanding and refining our understanding of the everyday workings of empire-building from an ethnohistorical perspective. Given that historical research may well advance as more sources become available, the field of art history has much to teach about the colonial aesthetics of indigenous, Afro-descendant, and mestizo artists who operated outside the confines of the state and the Church. Even within these frameworks, more studies are needed, following in the path set by Ananda Cohen Suarez and Maya Stanfield-Mazzi in this essay collection, which gives much needed visibility to the work of Andean artists in rural areas.
Further comparative research is also required to put into perspective the findings in this issue, addressing both the scholarship reviewed and the bountiful harvest of recent research on the encounters of other subordinated groups with the written word in colonial settings. In particular, it is necessary to widen the scope of comparative studies to include those dealing with the use of writing, litigation, and visual culture by such important groups as Afro-Peruvian women and men and indigenous women in various locales of the colonial world.Footnote 17 Such a comparative focus would address the commonalities and singularities in legal strategies, social networking, identity formation, and intercultural engagement among these groups. It is hoped that continuing research will permit us to reconceptualize what we know of colonialism from the perspective of the intersticial social, cultural, and intellectual agency of groups who have rarely been visible in colonial history.
