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This thesis focuses on the socioeconomic and sociopolitical history of the Kingdom of Guatemala. It utilizes probanzas de méritos and informaciones de oficio y parte to explore how Spanish colonization in the region was enacted, narrated, presented, and understood by the Spanish settlers and the Spanish monarchy. This research contributes to our understanding of what the Kingdom of Guatemala represented for its settlers, how the elite influenced the region's social and economic development, and why they chose to remain there. By analyzing probanzas de méritos, the project aims to uncover the complexities of regional development during this period and the reasons behind settlers' long-term commitment to the Kingdom of Guatemala.
My findings reveal the perspective of Spanish settlers in the Kingdom of Guatemala—those who recorded their experiences in imperial memory through their probanzas and royal response to their petition—these documents, authored for and by the local colonial agents, reflect the power structures they helped to fabricate. While this project is settler-centered it is not in a celebratory tone. Instead, it interrogates how settler ambition, anxiety, and self-fashioning shaped the image of the colonial landscape. By examining their rhetorical strategies engraved in these texts, I approached the archive not merely as a collection of information but as a site of performance, exclusion, and contested authority in which the very imagination of a kingdom begins to exist at the tip of the settlers’ quill.