The following 14 chapters are structured in chronological order, and include comprehensive reports on a variety of vicissitudes of every civil and ecclesiastical administration throughout those hundred years. These contain details about the official terms and the personal lives of each president, judge (oidor), royal auditor (visitador), every bishop and priest of some distinction, as well as the most resonant civil, economic, criminal, and problems of public order (Rodríguez Freile called them “cases”) that these crown officials had to contend with during their respective administrations. This structure of the text follows the gradual establishment and recurring crisis of Spanish rule in the region, allowing an explanation not only of a few spectacularly criminal or shameful events and different clashes and conspiracies among powerful local men, women, and political figures, but also of the petty everyday cases of a culturally and racially diverse population. Even though the most shocking cases took place in the main cities of this Spanish kingdom (particularly Santafé), the book is not concerned solely with urban events but also with those taking place in the countryside and on the frontier. In this sense, El carnero follows the general pattern of most Spanish chronicles or histories of America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The title of Chapter 8 illustrates the structure and general theme of El carnero, that is, the intricacies of Spanish colonial imperial management: “Which tells of the arrival of don Luis de Lugo as Governor of this Kingdom; of the arrival of licenciado Miguel Díez de Armendáriz, the first auditor and judge, as well as of the events that took place until the foundation of the Real Audiencia.” A reiteration of this rigid structure is made in two final additional sections, entitled not “chapters” but “catalogues.” The first one is devoted to civil and military leaders: “A catalogue of governors, presidents, judges, and Royal auditors that this kingdom has had since 1538, the year of its conquest, until this present year of 1638, a hundred years after this Kingdom was conquered.” The last catalogue, in the same fashion, deals with ecclesiastical authorities “since the year 1569 when the holy church was given metropolitan status.” These final two summaries of sorts reiterate the plan of the book, which celebrate the colony’s consolidation during the first century of the Spanish presence in the region.
All of these stories (from the impudent to the serious) are nonfictional, well-researched and well-documented reports. However, like most writers of his time, Rodríguez Freile relies on literary strategies in the exposition of his stories and displays ample knowledge of the popular humanist literature available in Spain and the New Kingdom of Granada. Some of these literary techniques include the author’s effort to make the readers participants in the unfolding of the story by having direct contact with them. He fictionalizes himself as a busy narrator inside the text, appeals to his readers’ attention, and manipulates their interpretation. He creates suspense, by advancing or withholding pieces of information throughout several chapters, and by skillfully using dialogues. However, these literary strategies do not obscure the fact that the author explicitly states in his prologue, as well as throughout his work, that his purpose is to write a history of real events, based on existing documentation and available testimonies. Rodríguez Freile reminds us, for instance, that historians like himself “are compelled to tell the truth lest their conscience be compromised” (Chapter 11). He also frequently alludes to the historical documents consulted, “which can be found in the cabildo of this city of Santafé” (Chapter 8).
Rodríguez Freile’s frequent focus on the moral and civil corruption of Spanish and Spanish-American subjects has promoted, particularly among literary critics, a utopian interpretation of El carnero in which the text is seen as a glaring critique of the colonial status quo and the author as a candid social reformer. Such focus has also frequently encouraged (particularly among Colombian historians, sociologists, and literary commentators) an indictment of sorts of an alleged essential flaw in the region’s governmental fitness. These scholars tend to attribute Colombia’s persistent social and political crisis to the pervasive sleaziness of the same social and political classes targeted by Rodríguez Freile, while still having faith in the sound Iberian political and economic institutions that – according to them – were thwarted in the New World by the contingency of unreliable imperial administrators.
However, and as is apparent to anyone familiar with historiography on the Spanish conquest and colonization, venality and corruptibility of conquistadors and civil and religious authorities were not only widespread in the Americas but also inevitable in an Iberian migration program based on conquest (that is, the violence toward and plundering of the indigenous communities), and the notion of “getting rich overnight” in the imperial administration by whatever means necessary. In this sense, Rodríguez Freile’s focus on dishonesty is not unique, nor can this malady be identified with a single Euro-American society during early modernity. The three centuries of effective Spanish domination in America were the product of a rigid structure of control over its colonies. Not only did the Spanish crown establish a highly stratified social system that kept peninsulares at the top of the social hierarchy, followed by criollos, mestizos, indigenous, and Africans at the bottom – and which canceled upward social mobility and solidified the status quo – but also managed to permanently foster political, jurisdictional, and even personal divisions among the region’s authorities and powers in order to assert its uncontested domination.
These strategies encouraged both the total submission to royal authority and the immediate reward for corrupted officials who did whatever was necessary to protect the status quo during their presence on American soil. It was an official system designed to fracture potentially independent or rebellious American constituencies by sponsoring complacency, espionage, duplicity, and betrayal. Such a system of distrust and mixed signals created the climate for rampant fraud, embezzlement, and kickbacks (sometimes even assassinations) among the civil government and clergy. Examples of this situation are found not only in a text like El carnero (which happens to add a few cheeky twists to its illustration), but also “in the accounts of travelers, in the reports of bishops and viceroys, in edicts of the Inquisition, and in royal decrees and papal bulls,” as historian C. H. Haring reminds us.
Juan Rodríguez Freile: A Proud Cristiano Viejo in a Spanish Colony
Concomitant with the utopian readings of El carnero, Rodríguez Freile has been portrayed as a straightforward critic of the Spanish colonial system under which he lived, and as a man whose profession as a farmer offered an alternative spirit of government. This view is based on the author’s proud identification with a labrador (farmer) who carefully works on “the best plots of land with his well-primed tools that burst the plot’s veins” (Chapter 21). Literary critics have glamorized Rodríguez Freile’s selfascribed profession, considering his depiction of a decent, morally superior inhabitant of a pristine countryside a metaphor serving to criticize the corruption of urban power centers like Santafé de Bogotá. A look at his biography, however, complicates such a utopian view.
The little that is known of Juan Rodríguez Freile’s life comes from the scattered information in his own book and the legal documentation he left regarding a lawsuit leveled against him in 1621. He was born in Santafé de Bogotá on April 25, 1566. According to his own proud assertion, his parents came to Las Indias in 1553 in total compliance with the Spanish crown’s immigration policy. That policy demanded that permits were given only to cristianos viejos, or “old Christian” Spaniards (as opposed to persons of Jewish or Moorish ancestry); it also limited those permits to married persons emigrating together with their spouses (which discouraged miscegenation with the natives). Rodríguez Freile grew up surrounded by conquistadors. He was well acquainted with Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada (the conqueror of the region and founder of Santafé), and his own father participated in a military campaign against the Tairona Indians under the command of Pedro de