Abstract:
Throughout the seventeenth century, settlers and missionaries assiduously explored the Amazonian lowlands, located east of the Viceroyalty of Peru. The petitions that they sent to the Council of the Indies requested honors and awards for past or planned actions in the frontier. These documents also described Amazonian Indians and landscapes, relating them to rich imagined territories such as El Dorado and Paititi. In this article, I argue that these images must be understood not as a mythical predisposition, but as a discursive strategy for the negotiation of honors, awards, and privileges between local actors and the Spanish Crown. Although petitions provided information to the Council of the Indies about distant regions and the activities of settlers and missionaries who resided within them, the visions of Amazonian peoples and landscapes that they described were powerfully influenced by the political function of the document.
Keywords:
Amazonia; El Dorado; Paititi; encomienda; petitions; Council of the Indies.