The tribute assessments, tasaciones de tributos, carried out under President Alonso López de Cerrato between 1548 and 1551 are a key source for any study of the economic and demographic history of Central America and the Yucatán. They have been consulted by many scholars, often to great effect, despite their inherent problems as a reliable guide to the tribute-paying capacity of local populations from Chiapas to Nicaragua.
Working predominantly with these records, Lawrence Feldman aims “to provide a geographical, economic, and demographic framework to study the facts from the past” (p. ix) for sixteenth-century Guatemala. Additional archival sources are also employed to broaden these findings. The largest part of this work, section 3, consists of individual listings of sixteenth-century encomienda towns with their tribute requirements, arranged by region and department.
This is the author’s third effort to subject the Cerrato tasaciones to scholarly scrutiny. Although this latest version is better organized and more concise, it still suffers from a significant number of paleographic and interpretive errors. In many instances, data from the Cerrato document have been transcribed or translated incorrectly, and passages from the original text are missing. Unfortunately, these omissions and errors detract greatly from Feldman’s work and make it difficult to use his findings with any confidence.
Stylistically, Feldman writes in point-form prose, which gives his work the ring of a published notebook. The book also includes data that are unproven and incomplete: for example, his list of “other” sixteenth-century encomenderos (p. 77) should have been held in reserve until he was able to double-check the names and provide approximate dates, sources, and a more complete listing. In Figure 1, possible or probable designations of sixteenth-century encomiendas and corregimientos are put forward as fact, although little documentary evidence exists to substantiate their ascribed location and territorial extent.
Discussion of sources, so central to a work of this type, is sketchy and hurried, and archival references are cited in ungrammatical and often unintelligible Spanish. There are bewildering omissions of fundamental secondary sources, such as Francis Gall’s four-volume Diccionario geográfico de Guatemala and the regional studies of Guatemala by George Lovell, Robert Hill and John Monaghan, Sandra Orellana, Ann Collins, and André Saint-Lu. Feldman’s version of tasaciones found in the Archivo General de Indias (Indiferente General 857) contains misreadings of the original text, although that has been available in accessible, published form since 1986. For example, he states that Comalapa supplied 180 instead of 50 indios de servicio (p. 28); similarly, for Utatlán, he informs us that the tribute record was an entire year’s payment, when the tasación clearly states that the amount was to be furnished every 50 days (p. 13). Inaccurate rendering of data is compounded by what appears to be, at times, an inability to appreciate cultural and historical context: for Momostenango, Feldman claims that one thousand fanegas of corn, the native staple, were to be fed to the encomendero’s swine and livestock, when the original states only that the Indians are to furnish this amount (to the encomendero) (p. 22).
It has taken a considerable effort on Feldman’s part to get the essence of the Cerrato tasaciones out in published form. Studies like this are desperately needed, but they must be diligently researched and carefully transcribed if they are to serve scholars unable to consult directly the sources discussed.
