The Research Guide to Andean History is a practical working guide that will be useful to graduate students beginning field research and to more experienced historians. The Guide combines descriptive and thematic approaches: rather more description in the case of Bolivia and Ecuador; an attempt to link sources to certain themes in Chile and Peru. The coverage is necessarily somewhat random and the quality uneven. The present Guide should be used in conjunction with the Lino Gómez Canedo survey of 1947-49 (published in 1961), on which it sometimes relies and often goes beyond, as well as the several more specialized articles that have appeared in the past two decades.
A comparison with the Gómez Canedo, in fact, reveals the enormous change that has taken place in archival organization and accessibility over the past thirty years. Men such as Gunnar Mendoza at the Bolivian National Archive in Sucre have made extraordinary efforts to sort out and catalog documents. Formerly restricted material—especially ecclesiastical holdings—have become increasingly accessible to scholars. In other cases, wholly new deposits have been made available. Brian Loveman’s discussion of the Chilean Labor Archive provides one such example of twentieth-century sources, while nearly all the general descriptions of colonial archives reveal similar progress in organization and cataloging. In those cases where special permission is required to consult documents, the authors of the Guide often indicate procedures, addresses, and even the appropriate telephone numbers. It is this attention to practical detail that will be greatly appreciated by working historians in the field. I have in mind here especially the essays by Linda A. Rodríguez on Quito and the Bakewells on Bolivia.
In a number of essays, the sources are discussed in terms of potential themes or modes in inquiry. Robert Oppenheimer and Arturo Valenzuela, for example, indicate the points of departure for the study of economics and polititics in nineteenth-century Chile; Peter Klarén has a comparable discussion of Peru, and Thomas M. Davies, Jr., provides a succinct introduction to Indian historiography. Marcello Carmagnani and Susan Ramírez-Horton carry this approach a step farther by showing the appropriateness of archival material to certain methodologies.
Two contributions stand out: Elinor Burkett has a personal yet reflective essay on the colonial notarial archive of Arequipa that is at once a knowledgeable and literate description and a cautionary tale. Anyone approaching this vast sea of documentation in Arequipa or elsewhere in Spanish America would do well to take in what Burkett has to say. Finally, there is Hernando Sanabria Fernández’s charming, gently ironic, and erudite treatise on the perils of research in the humid tropics where the vulgar y repulsiva cucaracha together with a great host of other papirófagos are engaged in devouring documents faster than our dissertation writers can microfilm them. For a brief moment, Sanabria’s prose reaches the level of a García Márquez short story; it then descends to the level of competent and informed description of the archives of Santa Cruz.
