A K'ichee' Document in Guatemala's Royal Court

The affidavit, written in the K'ichee’ language by an indigenous notary and attested by K'ichee’ and Spanish witnesses including Riba de Neyra, would become an important piece of evidence in this lawsuit. It is a powerful statement that constitutes a disjuncture from this case and involves the local politics of the indigenous township of Sipacapa. The declaration is unusual in its own right because it was not produced by the municipal council for the township; rather, its production was at the request of a Spaniard and made by an elite K'ichee’ woman who utilized the aid of a bilingual K'ichee’ notary, Joseph Sacarías, to produce an affidavit for an individual and non-collective purpose. Sacarías had been the scribe of San Bartolomé Sipacapa's cabildo several times. In 1674, he had acted as official interpreter in a consolidation measurement of five caballerías of extra land that both Miguel de Riba de Neyra and Christobal Sanches petitioned from the audiencia of Guatemala.Footnote ¹⁵ The Spaniard insisted Maria Sanches make the document for his benefit. That it was written in the K'ichee’ language was due to Maria being monolingual.

Riba de Neyra would later use this affidavit in a case brought by Maria Sanches and her sister, who had allegedly inherited the land from their father. Their father had been his business partner. The use of this document as evidence speaks to the nature of interethnic friendship and business relationships in the highlands of Guatemala and the possibilities of indigenous elites going beyond the corporate community and producing documentation in the K'ichee’ language for individual necessity and good business practice. It further shows the acculturation of a Spaniard to indigenous business and legal practice in the remote highlands of western Guatemala. These relationships were as complex and interwoven as colonial society in the late seventeenth century.Footnote ¹⁶

The Spaniard

Miguel Antonio Dias de Riba de Neyra was a businessman who acquired land for the production of wheat and the grazing of large livestock which included horses, mules, and cattle. He lived in a remote part of the highlands of Guatemala at the edge of the corregimiento (district under a corregidor or regional magistrate) of Quetzaltenango. San Bartolomé Sipacapa is situated close to the valley of Sija, where a Spanish township would be established in the eighteenth century. The town lay closer to the administrative center of Huehuetenango than it did to Quetzaltenango and was surrounded by Mam-speaking towns. From Tejutla, the parochial center or cabezera (head town of the period), it lay eight leagues, and from Quetzaltenango it lay 20 leagues.Footnote ¹⁷ Riba de Neyra's linguistic abilities helped him in acquiring land and allowed him to conduct business with a wider range of people, especially K'ichee’ principales like Christobal Sanches. His ability to speak K'ichee’ and Spanish could have allowed him to take a position as an official interpreter for the alcaldía mayor or the corregimiento of Quetzaltenango. He might not have wanted to be tied to a position as an official interpreter because such a position would have limited his movement and therefore his abilities to conduct business. It may have been this reason that precluded most Spaniards in the Guatemalan countryside from pursuing positions as underpaid interpreters, thereby opening up the position to mestizos and indios ladinos (bilingual, Spanish-speaking Indians).

The process of composition was part of a royal initiative to ease the acquisition of land, first used in New Spain and specifically in the Valley of Mexico in the 1590s. It ensured that land was being put to good use as either pasture or cultivated fields.Footnote ¹⁸ Its underlying aim was to increase the agricultural and livestock yields of the Spanish colonies by opening up land for Spaniards and others to purchase. The Spanish colonies in the Americas introduced such measures to combat the radical demographic decline of indigenous populations throughout Spanish America. The royal cédula (decree) permitting the incorporation of land composition in Guatemala dated to the year 1591.Footnote ¹⁹ Composition began in earnest in Guatemala in the 1600s and placed older land claims in jeopardy to newer claims in which colonial officials acting in the name of the king measured lands and gave them the stamp of Spanish officialdom.Footnote ²⁰

Diego Sanches (Christobal's father) and his “brother” Bartolomé Gomes first attempted to consolidate eight caballerías of uncultivated land in 1628 for a cattle ranch. Although not his biological brother, Bartolomé Gomes was also a principal from San Bartolomé Sipacapa and served as its choirmaster in 1628.Footnote ²¹ It is not coincidental that composition of lands was becoming threatening to indigenous communities that had lost vast portions of their demographics to disease in the early conquest period and were by the mid-seventeenth century demographically rebounding. Lands that had once been cultivated by a vast indigenous population prior to the Spanish invasion of the Americas were now up for grabs.

In 1699 all five of the children of Christobal Sanches made their way to the colonial capital of Santiago de Guatemala and appeared in the person of their advocate, Estevan de la Fuente, attorney for those who took a number at the Royal High Court. They were Nicolas, Diego, Antonio, Juana, and Maria. In a petition for a protective writ, their advocate claimed that they owned eight caballerías of land at the edge of San Bartolomé Sipacapa, located in the corregimiento of Quetzaltenango (now located in San Marcos, Suchitepequez). The lawyer alleged that Juana and Maria Sanches had legitimately claimed the measured lands and that they had traveled to Santiago de Guatemala to receive a protective writ known as an amparo (stay of execution of an action).Footnote ²² He argued that they had inherited the property from their recently deceased father, Christobal Sanches, and their deceased mother, Ana Peres, and that a Spaniard, Miguel de Riba de Neyra, who had been lent the land by their father was now through threats attempting to drive them from their possession.

Estevan de la Fuente argued before the chief judge and president of the high court that the Spaniard could not have procured the land for himself without the aid and “charity” of their father, who was a K'ichee’ principal from the town of San Bartolomé Sipacapa. He informed the court that the Sanches siblings were seeking remedy for “the manifestations, the insults, the pains, and the prejudices” they had received from Miguel de Riba de Neyra.Footnote ²³ The advocate used well-known legal arguments that included the diminished position of indigenous persons in regard to position and wealth and the defenselessness of women in the patriarchal society of colonial Spanish America.Footnote ²⁴ He argued that the siblings should be restored the lands that “anciently and justly they possessed” and that the Spaniard should leave the lands free and abandoned within ten days; further, if the Spaniard were to contest the order, the case should be brought before the high court and not before any other.

Riba de Neyra had made their lives so difficult, he continued, that the five siblings had had to come a long way to seek an amparo from the judge of the audiencia. This Spaniard, who was once a close friend of their family, was now their most bitter enemy. Their advocate argued that “he went against these women against all reason and without the fear of his conscience. . . and that no less [evil treatment] had they received of his dogs (that he had let loose on them) to kill (them).”Footnote ²⁵ Their argument was that the Spaniard wanted to make himself the owner of the lands that their father had lent him.

The petition brought before Doctor don Bartolomé de Amesqueta, the judge of the Royal Audiencia of Guatemala, set in motion the nomination of Juan Gregorio Vasquez to go to Quetzaltenango as the commissary judge and there appoint two witnesses, Miguel Palassios and Francisco Vasques de Figueroa, both of Quetzaltenango. Vasquez would not, however, appoint an official scribe; as was customary practice for provincial cases, the commissary judge acted as notary. Once he arrived in Quetzaltenango, the proceedings were removed to San Bartolomé Sipacapa, and on October 23, 1699, the magistrate appointed Dionicio Vazques de Figueroa O'Campo, a Spaniard and resident of Quetzaltenango, as protector and defender of the Indians Maria and Juana Sanches. O'Campo accepted the appointment and ratified the nomination through an oath sworn before god, the cross, and two witnesses. On the same date, the commissary judge named and ratified Juan de la Cruz Amaya, a mestizo from the pueblo of Quetzaltenango as interpreter and he duly swore an oath of office before God and witnesses. Amaya promised in the formulaic language of the court, “to use the charge well and faithfully without any fraud or collusion, interpreting legitimately without adding or taking away from what the parties said.”Footnote ²⁶ He did not sign his name because he was illiterate.

Upon his appointment, Dionicio Vazques de Figueroa O'Campo, protector of the Sanches sisters, Juana and Maria, promptly initiated the proceedings by appearing in person before the commissary judge in San Bartolomé Sipacapa and bringing the arguments of the original complaint before the court. This opened up the trial to rebuttal from the accused Spaniard, Miguel de Riba de Neyra, who appeared before the judge and submitted documents through which he gave testimony of his part in the composition of the lands in question.

He argued that the daughters’ claims were “sinister and unreasonable” and that his claim to the lands began with their measurement, which had been accomplished at the behest of Christobal Sanches, father of Maria and Juana's grandfather, Diego Sanches, and a K'ichee’ principal, Bartolomé Gomes, in 1628. Diego Sanches, Christobal Sanches's father, and Bartolomé Gomes the choir master of San Bartolomé Sipacapa, petitioned for a composition of the eight caballerías of land in question and they received an official measurement of the land but were apparently unable to complete the requirements for a title because they could not pay the assessment of ten ducats per caballería. Christobal Sanches in 1672 fulfilled his father's life-long dream of officially obtaining just and legal title to the pasturelands they had attempted to secure forty-four years earlier.Footnote ²⁷

Riba de Neyra explained in his defense that from 1628 until 1672 the Sanches family had been enjoying the use of the land without an official title. He claimed that Christobal Sanches came to him with a great amount of care and heavy spirit to explain that he did not have title to the land and that it weighed him down. Riba de Neyra states that he urged his friend to go to the capital to seek the title and then gave him a substantial loan in cash and several mules to be sold in Momostenango. Riba de Neyra encouraged Christobal Sanches to go down to Guatemala and to secure possession through a title of composition, which they had by December 12, 1672.

To acquire the title for the lands that they wished to be consolidated only one of the two men, the K'ichee’ principal Christobal Sanches, went to the Royal Audiencia of Guatemala in the capital city, Santiago. Sanches's petition did not require any further measurement because that had already been accomplished as part of the original request from his father and Bartolomé Gomes. The documentation for the eight caballerías of land consisted of Christobal Sanches's petition, the petition of his father and Gomes, and the official documentation of the measurements made in 1628.

In opposition, Riba de Neyra claimed in his testimony that Christobal Sanches went to Santiago and took the title for both of them. He then declared that in 1673, when the corregidor don Sancho Albares de Naba, made his general visit to inspect the town of San Bartolomé Sipacapa, the Spaniard and Christobal Sanches approached him with the title. Albares de Naba then declared that the possession belonged to both equally because Riba de Neyra had invested 217 pesos and two reales of his own money and effects because of his friend's profound poverty.

The 1628 consolidation was not the only land consolidation in which Riba de Neyra and Sanches partnered. In 1673, Spanish officials measured five caballerías of land in both of their names.Footnote ²⁸ In the documentation for that measurement there is no indication that the court saw Christobal Sanches as a K'ichee’ native of Sipacapa; rather, the documentation indicates that both he and Riba de Neyra were vecinos (citizens, neighbors) of the town.Footnote ²⁹ The term vecino commonly is reserved for Spaniards or those belonging to their republic. Did the court not recognize Christobal Sanches in this instance as an “Indian”? Was he seen as a Spaniard because he was working in concert with one? The court had identified him as a vecino and thus it was apparently so.

Later, in April, 1673, Christobal Sanches made a written declaration of the kind “used by the Indians” claiming that indeed he and Miguel de Riba de Neyra were equal owners of the lands in question and that Riba de Neyra had given him the money to make the title possible. The declaration was witnessed by “Indians” from Sipacapa: Joseph Sacarías, who had been the official interpreter in the measurement of the five caballerías of land owned by the business partners in 1674; Bartolomé Sanches, Christobal's brother; and Francisco Lopes, Christobal's possible brother-in-law. This document, presumably in the K'ichee’ language was not found as evidence in the court case and was, as later claimed, returned to Miguel de Riba de Neyra.

In the same testimony Christobal Sanches asserted that in 1673 some “Indians” from Texuta (Tejutla) attempted to encroach on the jointly held lands and that both men had to sue for an amparo from the audiencia in Guatemala. After the corregidor, don Melchor Mencos, read their amparo he commanded that the squatters from Texuta (Tejutla) not encroach on their lands anymore. When the corregidor don Juan de Urquiola came for his general visit to Sipacapa in 1676, Christobal showed him his documentation for his approval. In April of 1696, when Christobal Sanches died, Riba de Neyra testified that Maria Sanches had a document made “in the language that [he, himself,] translated into the Castilian language.”Footnote ³⁰ He testified that after his friend's death the corregidor don Sebastian de Loaysa had commanded that Christobal Sanches's goods be disbursed among his heirs and that Maria and Juana each received two caballerías and that he was to be left with the other four. Miguel de Riba de Neyra was following legal procedure carefully to prove that he was not encroaching on the property of indigenous peoples.

Language at the Fore

It is from this testimony that we learn that Miguel de Riba de Neyra was bilingual in K'ichee’ and Spanish. He wrote his own legal defense and was literate. He was also sufficiently skilled in the both languages to translate the document made for him and presumably presented to him by Maria Sanches. Miguel Riba de Neyra's informal language acquisition directly relates to Martin Nesvig's exploratory questions on the acquisition and use of Nahuatl by Spaniards who were not clergy in sixteenth-century Michoacán.Footnote ³¹ Riba de Neyra, however, lived in the highlands of Guatemala in the late seventeenth century, a period in which Spanish and indigenous society in Latin America was much more interactive and clear lines blurred in identity and identification of peoples. Riba de Neyra was a Spaniard who expertly translated an affidavit from K'ichee’ to Spanish for litigation in which he was the defendant. His translation reveals that he had a grasp of K'ichee’. Riba de Neyra lived in the indigenous town of Sipacapa and owned an estate with ranch lands and pasture nearby. His business transactions required the skill to communicate in K'ichee’. As Nesvig points out for the case of Nahuatl in Michoacán, informal language acquisition by Spanish men resulted from quotidian immersion through commerce, business interactions, through being reared among indigenous peoples (in the kitchen), and through romantic and sexual relationships. Nesvig asserts that scholars have studied this subject little and it is understood poorly.

Miguel de Riba de Neyra was abiding by proper judicial procedure, showing his documentation and right to possession of lands that were once considered baldías y realengas to the authorities who had the duty to protect the Indians in their districts from Spanish abuses, when they made general visits. To prove his claims, he petitioned the court to listen to the testimony of the witnesses who were present at the production of the documentation so that they could confirm the truth and their signatures. On October 24, 1699, Francisco de Vasques Figueroa, one of the assisting witnesses to the judge, testified that he could verify the translation of the K'ichee’ document into Castilian because he spoke and understood the K'ichee’ language. The assisting witness volunteered to read the document because the interpreter did not know how to read or write. Thus, Vasques Figueroa, a Spaniard from Quetzaltenango, read the document out loud “word for word” and both he and the interpreter, Juan de la Cruz Amaya, affirmed that the translation made by the defendant Miguel de Riba de Neyra, had been “translated to most accurately (al pie de la letra) and legitimately and neither adding nor subtracting [anything].”Footnote ³² These men had carried out the due diligence required by law to affirm the authenticity of the translation. Thus we know that Riba de Neyra could read K'ichee’ and write in Spanish and that one of the witnesses could also speak K'ichee’ because he was instrumental in reading the K'ichee’ document and checking it against the Spanish translation, ratifying its authenticity and acceptability as evidence.

Translation from one language to another in any context is political. The translator uses subjective interpretations while translating from one cultural register to another, and this subjectivity provides the translator with the power to decipher and clarify, or to subvert and obfuscate, which in turn may depend on whether he or she gains personally from the translation. The translator makes decisions on how terms and phrases should be understood in another cultural register, and a so-called “good translation” is one that is not literal. The translator also decides what should be included in the translation and how it will affect the outcome of their position. Even if the translator does not hold a stake in the outcome of a translated document, and is mediating as an uninterested party, the translated document still holds the translator's cultural bias. In short, the translation becomes a new document, authored by the translator.Footnote ³³

Upon Miguel de Riba de Neyra's request in his supplication before the court, a document that looks to be in the Spaniard's hand, the commissary judge allowed for the surviving witnesses to testify to the truthfulness of the evidence presented by the defendant. Seven indigenous witnesses, six from the town and one a Sipacapa resident originally from Huehuetenango, presented their versions of events.Footnote ³⁴ An interrogatory was not made to depose the witnesses. What the court used instead was the test that Miguel de Riba de Neyra had proposed in his declaration: that the surviving witnesses of the documents be brought forward to testify to their signatures, to the truth concerning the possession of the land, and to the relationship that Christobal Sanches had with the Spaniard.Footnote ³⁵ Each of the witnesses he brought before the court for his defense testified that he and Christobal Sanches had been friends and business partners and that his daughters had carried on the same association with him after their father's death. Each testified that the business relationship between Christobal Sanches and Miguel de Riba de Neyra was so strong that the two seemed as if they were brothers.

Nicolas de la Cruz, a witness in the case, declared that he was subpoenaed to testify to the affidavit because he happened to be passing by the house of Riba de Neyra, where the document's ratification took place. The scribe, Joseph Sacarías, called him in and he read aloud the previously produced document. He then signed his name to it. For a K'ichee’ community, it was an unusual practice to call in witnesses from the street. The presence of K'ichee’ q'anauinaq’ (witnesses), literally translated as “yellow or bright person,” was usually pre-arranged, and those called as witnesses were members of the town council or leaders of the chinamit, the moiety or ward, to which a litigant belonged. Spanish practice, however, allowed for this type of casual notarization.Footnote ³⁶

Most of the witnesses gave their testimony with the aid of the interpreter, Juan de la Cruz Amaya. Of the seven witnesses, two spoke Spanish in addition to their native tongue; they were Joseph Sacarías, the former scribe of San Bartolomé Sipacapa, and Ramón de Mendosa of Huehuetenango. Sacarías testified in Spanish and Mendosa bore witness with the use of the interpreter even though he attested that he knew Spanish.Footnote ³⁷ Knowledge of Spanish may have given Joseph Sacarías extra credibility as a witness.

Joseph Sacarías, as the notary of the document, also testified. He claimed to be more than 80 years old and that he was the author of both the document made for Christobal Sanches and the one made as an affidavit by Christobal's daughter Maria. He points out that his signature in the second document was more shaky than in the first because he had been quasi-debilitated by old age. He also affirmed that he had signed the names of all the witnesses who could not sign for themselves, naming each one. He declared that he had several times been the scribe of the town council and of one of the alcaldes and reaffirmed the good relationship between Riba de Neyra and Christobal Sanches.

A Closer Look at Maria Sanches's Affidavit

The K'ichee’ affidavit used in this case, dated April 20, 1696, proves that the complete contents of Maria Sanches's document were not used as evidence. It ratifies the business relationship between the deceased father of Maria Sanches and Riba de Neyra but also contains another world of information and local conflict couched in metaphoric terms.

The K'ichee’ document represents a disjuncture in the case because of the information it contains. The first part of this statement is a complaint that Maria Sanches makes about members of the cabildo of San Bartolomé Sipacapa and the elite who acts as the advocate and speaker before the cabildo for her moiety. Elements of the document are quoted in this section and on the following pages, with reference markers corresponding to specific elements.

Many of the cabildo members shared Maria's last name, Sanches, and the chinamital (an elite moiety advocate), shared the last name of her mother, Peres. The term calpul (elite ward advocate), commonly used in Spanish legal documents, represents the central Mexican equivalent of the K'ichee’ chinamital. Both terms are derived from Uto-Aztecan languages, one from central Mexico, Nahuatl, and the other from southern Puebla, Nahuat. The latter does not use the familiar enclitic endings of its central Mexican counterpart. Joseph Sacarías's use of the Nahautl term betrays his familiarity with Spanish legal forms and registers, even given their use of loan words from other languages. He also emphasized that the majority of the cabildo members and the chinamital were Maria's kinsmen and therefore should have esteemed her and her family.

Maria's complaint against those she names is not clear here, but the document shows a strong use of language that does not reflect the customary deference that is usually shown in official communiqués that speak of the relationship between those in authority and their charges.Footnote ⁴⁰ She literally calls them “shit” and adds that “from their asses flow their words,” a strong reference that connects them to the devil, who is called in Yucatec Maya, K'isin, (the flatulent one). The K'ichee’ likely had a similar context for the underworld, they imagined it filled with pus, excrement, and bad smells.Footnote ⁴¹

The men are referred to in a semantic couplet in which the term “barn owl” is used once and followed by the term for “owl” to emphasize its importance in the phrase. Joseph Sacarias uses the terms in relation to Gaspar Cuch; Nahuas used the name “Gaspar” frequently from the sixteenth century onward as a name closely associated with Jewish peoples.Footnote ⁴⁴ It is a reference to the devil or the idol that the Sipacapa leadership invoked. María Sanches uses the terms “barn owl,” and “owl” to reinforce the idea of the devil: Mesoamerican peoples considered owls messengers from the underworld.Footnote ⁴⁵ She claims that these men all acted as traitors, likening them to Judas Iscariot, and to the devil. She asserts through the use of metaphor that they practiced divination and that, “their hands and feet are in the stone,” the same stone, presumably an altar, that the idol with whom they communed sat upon. Having all ten fingers and all ten toes in the stone places each person Maria names metaphorically in the realm of the devil, in the underworld; their uinaq or person, the word for both person and the number 20, is stuck in the altar. The stone altar is the gateway to the underworld opened through divinatory practices wherein resides the god they have named Gaspar Cuch (Vulture) and his four wives: an old grandmother, Mariana Peres Put in the Sun, Dorotea, and Quil.

Such a strong reaction must have been provoked by an action or a lack of action on the part of the K'ichee’ leadership of the town of San Bartolomé Sipacapa to perform their obligations to this branch of the Sanches family. Did they fail in their duties to protect the rights of their citizens within their township? Is her response based on perhaps her leaders’ failure to provide the monies necessary to purchase the title to the eight caballerías of land from the community chest, the monies that a Spaniard, Miguel Dias de Riba de Neyra, fronted? Or was there some other political rivalry in the town of San Bartolomé Sipacapa that she wanted to address in writing? We may never know, because that part of the document was not necessary as evidence in the case described above, and because there are no other corroborating documents that might tell us about the internal politics of this town, with one exception. The exception was a murder case conducted in Sipacapa in 1699 in which the cabildo, composed of different leaders from those on the municipal council of 1696, was suspected of murderous intention and in framing one of their own people.

Maria accuses her leaders of practicing, at very least, divination, which Spanish officials would have considered idolatry, a crime that the Spanish commissary judge overlooked because it was not pertinent to the litigation before him. In 1744, Archbishop Pedro Cortés y Larraz conducted pastoral visits in all of the Kingdom of Guatemala with new questionnaires in an effort to root out idolatry. His report from the district of Quetzaltenango revealed that the following:

The practitioners of this divination “that they use for their government” utilized altars, as Barbara Tedlock described in her book on the contemporary K'ichee’ of Momostenango, Time and the Highland Maya.Footnote ⁴⁹

After damning the evildoings of the leadership of Sipacapa, Maria Sanches changes course in the document to extol the benefactor and patron to the title to the lands that her father in 1672 obtained from the judges in Santiago de Guatemala. Miguel Dias de Riba de Neyra receives her accolades for providing the funding that made the title possible and she describes him as a favor and blessing from God.

Maria continues, portraying Riba de Neyra as the good Christian who looks after the benefit of the poor.

According to a contract made in 1708, the four caballerías of land that Riba de Neyra received title to as a result of the defaulted case were put toward a capellanía, a sum paid to the church for masses that requires real property as collateral.Footnote ⁵³ The rent from the four caballerías and its houses, offices, and corrals in the sum of 50 pesos a month was to go toward the production of several masses to be said by the bachiller Diego Sanches. One question calls for attention: was it coincidence that the missionary friar had the same name as one of the sons of Christobal Sanches? In any case, the legal actions of Miguel de Riba de Neyra corroborate Maria Sanches's characterization that he was religious.

For the concluding words of the document, Maria Sanches made a declaration that the Riba de Neyra family not be bothered or molested at any time. The affidavit ends with a statement of authority, and witnesses and the scribe sign it: “q'a nimahaual dios ruc q'a nimahaual Rey mix q'a to oh tzih (Our Great God and our Great King have just heard our words).”Footnote ⁵⁴

The translation into Castilian that Miguel Dias de Riba de Neyra, the defendant, made of this document excludes the strong language used by Maria Sanches in the original even though his translation in other parts tends to be literally word for word from the K'ichee’ document. He omits the act of petitioning that is common in K'ichee’ bills of sale and in other extrajudicial documents. For example, K'ichee’ scribes commonly used the formulaic phrase “They have taken it before them one time, two times, three times, four times. . . .” The metaphor referred to how many times a claim should be brought before officials before it was regarded as serious and before they initiated action. The act of translation often includes serious editing and omissions that change the exactness, the tone, and the prosody of the original. Nevertheless, in this case, the Spanish judges and magistrates acquired the evidence that they needed from the translation, which was that Riba de Neyra and Christobal Sanches were indeed close friends and that Sanches had given the Spaniard the lands in question.

The testimony of witnesses and petitions from the defense were then turned over to the prosecution and Maria and Juana Sanches's defender read them the Spaniard's rebuttal to their petition. Whether these two sisters felt stunned, afraid, or shocked we will never know. Maria Sanches claimed through her defender that she did not know that her father had given Miguel de Riba de Neyra possession and that she did not know about the document that she, herself, had made for him. She and Juana dropped the case and did not file any counter to Riba de Neyra's defense.