Historians have paid closer, more anthropological attention in recent years to the making of documents. The more we learn about the people, relationships, and templates behind our sources, and what sources were meant to highlight and built to conceal, the better we can interpret their meanings. The shaping influence that archives exercise on our understanding of the past has started to make them enticing historical subjects as well.

Sylvia Sellers-García makes important contributions along these lines in her study of document-making in Guatemala's colonial audiencia (a regional governing body). She begins with reflections on distance, routes, and peripherality. From the vantage point of those generating the Spanish Empire's paperwork, to be “distant” meant to be situated at some remove from routes connecting hierarchically ordered places. Each of the book's three parts engages the theme of distance: how it affected documents’ creation, circulation, and storage.

Part One deals primarily with the creation of documents and the ways distance influenced their forms. The author starts with an intriguing look at how one document, which originated in Quetzaltenango in 1797, traveled through space and time. She maps the route this document took over two years during which various officials added their opinions and authenticating marks. By the time it was archived in Guatemala City it had become “the composite creation of many minds” (p. 29). Routes traveled in this way were fraught with pitfalls, since documents might be damaged, stolen, or otherwise lost. Various safeguards were developed to deal with such dangers, including inventories and “document trunks” that could only be opened in the presence of particular authorities (30). Documents were, in effect, treated as treasure.

Sellers-García examines most closely documents that responded to requests from Spain for information that would enable royal authorities to “see like a state” (e.g., relaciones geográficas generated to satisfy questionnaires) and those produced most peripatetically (e.g. visitas, assembled by traveling clergymen like Archbishop Pedro Cortés y Larraz, whose ecclesiastical visits to over a hundred Guatemalan parishes are central to Chapter Two). Yet many of her points also hold for documents that did not travel far, like the archives of the small-town notary public. These, too, were composite productions, and were indexed, inventoried, and safeguarded (or were supposed to be) as treasure.

Part Two focuses on the mail: the people who distributed documents around the Guatemalan audiencia and the routes they traveled. Sellers-García concentrates here on the reforms that created a relatively frequent and reliable mail system (correo) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

In Part Three the author treats the storage of documents in repositories by notaries and other officials. Especially valuable is the book's final chapter on the transition from colonial archives to national archives. As documents became less composite, “dissociated conversations in paper resulted in burgeoning local archives” (171). Centralization also continued, but in different centers. The author is able to trace the organizing activities of men like Miguel Talavera, who in the mid-1830s created a structure for what would eventually become Guatemala's Archivo General de Centro América.

In her epilogue, Sellers-García underscores that “[t]here is a politics” to our work “that we do not always draw onto the pages of our historical writings: what we do today as historians builds on colonial practices of organizing knowledge” (187). In Guatemala, as in Spanish America generally, much was excluded by these practices. The author might usefully have mentioned the fast-growing scholarship on alphabetic Mayan writing, also a colonial form of knowledge production albeit a very differently organized one. Overall, however, she does a fine job of grounding our appreciation of knowledge production in an actual colonial context. Her study also opens up a fascinating question for historians to pursue in greater depth: how national knowledge production did, and did not, continue along colonial lines and routes.