For: “Surveying the Andes: Indigenous Labor, Land Inspections, and the Technologies of Spanish Colonial Rule.”
The committee is pleased to award the 2022 Melvin Kranzberg Dissertation Fellowship to Alfredo L. Escudero Villanueva. Escudero is a student in the Doctoral Program in History at Florida International University, and he is working on the dissertation “Surveying the Andes: Indigenous Labor, Land Inspections, and the Technologies of Spanish Colonial Rule.”
Escudero’s project examines the 16th century technological interactions and negotiations between Andeans and Spanish agents drawing together a study of colonial data collection – as a technology of rule – and diverse indigenous technologies –as well as scientific epistemologies—as observed and documented in vistas (land inspections and censuses). By looking at how colonial agents gathered information about agricultural and textile technologies, techniques, and production, for example, Escudero draws attention to shifting colonial epistemologies and technologies of data collection and storage but also a complex history of indigenous knowledge transfer.
Escudero will use the Fellowship to conduct archival research in Peru and Bolivia.