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The study analyses the creation of the Juzgado de Indias and the problems that arise between the first Official of the new institution, Francisco de Vera, and the Cabildo of La Palma, despite the determination with which the local government defended the establishment of the institution on the island, because it was the monopolistic control of commercial traffic between Canary Islands and America. For this work, we use as primary sources the Acts of the Cabildo de La Palma between 1559 and 1599 and the royal papers included in the Archivo General de Indias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes that the colonial discourse by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, the Official Chronicler of Indies in the first half of the 16th century, takes in contact with certain pre-Columbian indigenous expressions of the Caribbean and Central America. In particular, we focus on the representations that the chronicler creates about the areíto, or Indian feast, the most indescribable and incomprehensible manifestation among their practices. I propose that, in presence of the areitos, Oviedo's colonial discourse becomes brittle and contradictory, plurivalent. Thus, to approach the symbolic level of the Historia General j Hatural de las Indias, I utilize a literary-critical perspective together with the help of the study of some information provided by ethnography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Spanish colonization of America, representation of its territory became a necessity, a process in which a new hybrid style of cartography arose, that mixed Spanish and indigenous conventions as well as new ones, a result of mutual influences between cultures. Most of the maps that indigenous and Spanish mapmakers drew during the sixteenth century did not conform to the cartographic canons used in renaissance Europe. In this large corpus we find an exceptional case with all the characteristics of scientific representation, such as the Spanish royal cosmographers hoped the new overseas territories would be mapped: the map of Zapotidan. Although this document has been studied by several authors, this paper focuses particularly on the cartographic procedures, with new contributions: an analysis of the representation system used, the extent of area represented, and the determination of scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]