Sex, Lies, and Archives: A Case from Colonial Santo Domingo

In 1664, a visitador was sent to Santo Domingo to investigate irregularities in the Franciscan convent. A short time later, he was murdered. The subsequent inquiry, remitted in its entirety to the Council of the Indies in Spain, purported to present a case closed: all the actors identified and punished, no loose ends. The motive for the murder was a cover-up, and what was being covered-up was a pattern of homosexual relationships and sexual abuse within the convent and beyond. The file sent to Spain shows, at the level of one case, the sophisticated strategies employed by the church to separate out what we might call “thinkable” crimes (murder) from the “unthinkable” ones (not just clerical sexual abuse, but also homosexual desire). Using Trouillot’s conception of how archival narratives “convey plots” through “silences,” we can see, within the document, an institution manipulating a narrative in such a way that some ends are tied together and others loosened, so they never produce a history.