Lay agents, legal knowledge and political communication: Buenos Aires, at the beginning of the seventeenth century

Abstract

The political communication between the Buenos Aires Council and the Court reveals a degree of specialization that goes beyond the simple internalization by certain lay agents of Catholic anthropology, and suggests a need to problematize the phenomenon of discursive construction in a marginal area of the Hispanic world with limited presence of jurists. This article seeks to show that this circumstance - which can be linked to the presence of "infraletrados" during the first two decades of the seventeenth century - must not be naturalized, since its explanation is consistent with the regional and Atlantic integration processes involving the port and with several specific mechanisms which allowed the availability of legal knowledge at a local level. As an example, the figure of Juan de Vergara, the leading businessman from Buenos Aires in the period, is analysed. Acting as procurador and specialist in legal culture, he pleaded in favour of a body of vice-royal bylaws of 1613. An interpretation framework was defined on the basis of legal-political speeches in essentially lay spaces during the early-colonial period. This framework suggests the complexity of the political communication and the integration of these marginal territories in the Hispanic world to the extent that they became part of legal culture.: