Archival Crossings in Research into Colonial Afro-Andean Histories in Peru

Abstract Research into colonial Afro-Andean histories in Peru involves multiple crossings. Ethnohistory encourages researchers to cross disciplinary boundaries to try and reconstruct a more complete view of groups without a privileged place in the historical record. Beyond the methodological crossings that this approach and this subject require, there loom the often uncommented on archival crossings. These are formative in our orientations as academic researchers and transformative of our interpretive lens and the narratives we write and deliver orally. As important as these crossings are, we rarely comment on them in our scholarly publications, much less delve deeply into what they mean and how they shape us and condition how we view the past and its present-day relevance to us and others. The following pages will address my archival research into Afro-Andean experiences in colonial Peru. It takes place in what I call ‘living archives’. These are Church and state repositories that are still growing – sometimes daily – as parish records – such as marriage records – accumulate and are moved from local churches to the Archbishopric’s archives and notarial records are transferred to regional or national archives upon the death of the public notary or the closing of a notary’s office or practice. I wonder who will be the historians a hundred years from now who look at these records of our lives and deaths today. What will they make of our hopes and sorrows? Will they be any more adept than we are to make ‘informed’ guesses? And every day, I watch and sympathize as archivists struggle to make new spaces and install new shelving to house their unique and growing collection. Without their everyday efforts, those future approximations of our everyday lives will be infinitely more difficult and tentative. Every day I am reminded that these are ‘living archives’ in another very important way: members of the general public arrive every day to seek marriage, birth, and death records, or the titles to lands and other properties or inheritances. Although, it makes me uncomfortable that people must divulge all of this in front of me and other strangers busily beavering away to advance our careers and the ‘creation of knowledge’, as we like to say to ourselves, funders, and our administrative handlers, it humbles me as an interpreter of the past, makes me even more sympathetic to those whose traces of lives and hopes flight across the pages before me, and engenders a deep sense of gratitude and admiration for the archivists in these ‘living archives’ who make my work possible while also striving to meet the needs of the general public and future generations of Peruvians and historians.