The Elasticity of the Archive. the Case of Pedro De Peralta Barnuevo and His Lima Fundada

The newness of the New World proved a challenge for the archivists of the Americas. Here I am alluding to a simple notion of archive: that of a mechanism that stores and organizes a documental body which, in turn, historicizes and defines the institution to which the archive belongs. There is, of course, nothing simple about this —starting with the fact that the archive is required to contain the fundamentals of the institution that contains the archive itself. But even if one overlooks this circularity and takes this definition for granted, a critical problem arises in the context of the Americas. Archives tend (perhaps the right word is aspire) to be old. Archives are more venerable when they host and process the attributes of the archaic. Once they acquire the condition of repositories of archaic knowledge, archives become precious, precarious, and, in their most extreme forms, sacred —hence the historical veneration of the Alexandrine library and the pious reports of its tragic end, the fragility of the unarranged leaves dispersed in the cave of the Sybil, or the sacrosanctity of the Ark of the Covenant. These archives contained the Old, which in a way also rendered them, as recipients, equally old. All this collides with the New World, whose newness destabilizes and even sabotages the robust historical density of the archive. The realization of this aporia is not new, and I will later refer to important theoretical antecedents in the description of this phenomenon (in particular, to what Jacques Derrida has to say about archives, facts, and origins). I wish, however, to begin by highlighting the linkages between antiquity, knowledge, and authority because the cultural anxieties experienced by colonial American intellectuals often translated into a