This section—along with that of Voices--depicts most vividly different aspects and moments in the often elusive colonial past of El Cobre as a black pueblo. The written archive documenting life in this community is unusually rich. The displayed texts refer to El Cobre's early history as a community of slaves turned into royal slaves and free people of color, their fragile status as a community, their relation to the Spanish colonial state and to a lesser extent to the Church, their military role in the region, their grievances, persecutions and struggles. Because it seems artificial to separate them, texts in this section should be examined in conjunction to the documents displayed in the Voices section attending to how issues, motifs, stories, themes, actors overlap in them. After all, most of the historian's usual labor consists of establishing relations among various written documents in and through time.

While most texts double up as voices and images, some do so more than others. There are ways in which all texts constitute images —in terms of their materiality (paper and ink), handwriting or print, calligraphies, signatures, forms of inscription (albeit as copies of originals some of those elements are lost). In an even more basic, and perhaps trivial, sense, "writing" constitutes an abstract visual representation of sounds and words. The texts in this section highlight with particular clarity the relevance of some visual aspects of texts and their significance for contemporaries in the past and for us in the present. They also elicit suggestive comparisons to other kinds of images--from the past and the present--in the Images section.

The first two texts constitute inscriptions of people from El Cobre. They consist of listings or representations of subjects in the same place at two different points in time. The different forms of inscription used are suggestive of a deeper transformation in the way in which these subjects were conceptualized (or "constructed") at both moments in time. The first is an assessment of slaves which exhibits conventional ways of representing people as slaves, namely highlighting their price and value as a commodity. What other information is encoded or occluded in this form of inscription? Is listing order significant or arbitrary, for instance?

The second text is a local household census of El Cobre. Household censuses were common ways for the state to keep record of its subjects, vassals, rankings and relations among them. They constitute pictures of the Spanish empire's settlement and colonizing project in the New World. The whole business of keeping track of subjects--of counting and classifying them--is comparable to that of mapping the empire. It was often the resident parish priest who drew up local household and family censuses, sometimes, not always, "empirically" inscribing residents in each household and following the spatial order of the houses in the page. In the late 18th c., when more encompassing censuses of provinces and regions were drawn, statistics were abstracted from these local records. In Cuba, the first islandwide censuses were not drawn until the 1770s.

The 1709 excerpt displayed here is the first list found for El Cobre in this "genre" or format, and a particularly early one for the Island in general. There would be other local household censuses, particularly in the 1730s, 1750s, 1760s, 1770s which exhibited some variations in terms of detail, but all followed the basic conventions. They could be considered quasi family portraits and portraits of a community. Other pueblos and towns in Cuba were inscribed in similar ways although perhaps the series of El Cobre's censuses may be among the most complete not only because this was Royal territory and there was particular care in keeping the record, but also because many of them were compiled for a litigation at the end of the 18th century. In the case of other towns, local censuses were often scattered in the archive or lost.

As in the case of the local maps of El Cobre, the inscription of the community in this particular genre is especially significant. The inscription of subjects as a pueblo, and as families, was common in the case of free imperial vassals and vecinos [local citizens]. The members of El Cobre, however, were for the most part royal slaves. And yet, they were inscribed as free people were usually represented in these censuses, in family units and as heads of households of their own. The status of these subjects was then explicitly marked as either "free" or "slave of the King," thereby reflecting their ambiguous standing. What other information is encoded in this document? What uses could it have at the time? And for the modern historian?

Although in principle, the information in this local census (as in the "slave assessment") can be conveyed in a transcription that respects order and conventions, the document's image may have a particular “force.” Can it be considered a community portrait or a set of family portraits from the past? How does this document compare to those in the section on Portraits? And of Maps?

The last two documents illustrate in an even more immediate way the value of texts as images. They do so in terms of signatures and of handwriting or calligraphy. The first document is an order, one of many, that Gov. Canales sent to the men in El Cobre to report to the garrison of Santiago de Cuba (see Maps). As an Image, the signature of Canales authorized the orders in the document. It also constitutes a direct and unique inscription and self-representation of the subject, in this case the Governor, who designed his own signature. The document also shows how the Governor communicated with the local community some 10 miles away, a scrap of paper with a brief and neatly written message.

The document, of course, also represents the "voice" of the Governor and the state. Many inferences can be made from the content of the message, the tone employed, its destinataries, the line of communication from the state located in Santiago to the local level in El Cobre. The presence of bailiffs in the locality itself is meaningful, particularly since these were royal slaves, as is the "armed" character of the enslaved subjects in this village. This text is also related to some of the maps in the Mapping the Region section. How? Can you find any relation to documents in the Voice section too?

The last document consists of a petition, a common genre representing the "voice" of supplicants to the state--a "voice" that sounds very different from that of the state or its representatives such as Gov. Canales. The document was drawn by the parish priest (a representative of the Church) on behalf of the community. Aside from the documentary value of the story that the voice recounts in 1799, the image of that text also has particular value. Of interest are the signatures of the petitioners as a sign of literacy. The parish priest signed, which is not surprising since clergymen were always more or less literate subjects, sometimes the only literate subject in a rural community. In this text, however, some free and perhaps slave members of the community also signed suggesting literacy among some of these subordinate subjects usually associated exclusively with oral culture. Most "signed" just with a cross, illustrating their illiteracy, but also suggesting their presence, opinion and use of their right to sign the petition (which could sometimes be risky). The direct visual image of those crosses is also particularly moving because of their indexical relation to the subjects who, in some cases clearly with much effort, performed their illiteracy with an unsteady grip. In the Voices section other conventions regarding illiterate subjects can be identified.

There is yet another element regarding the visual significance of this document: the possibility of comparing calligraphies. Although the parish priest was the alleged speaker and the first signatory, he did not write the petition as the handwriting suggests. A scribe may have done so, a fact that may not have been clear from a mere transcription of the document. How about in Gov. Canales' text?

What further comparisons with other kinds of Images in this section can you think of? What kinds of "knowledge" do different kinds of images enable? What other comparisons can you make with documents in the Voices Section?