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Everyone involved in this story turned to dust around 400 years ago, but what I'm about to share could be seen by some as explosive. Most Latin American genealogies still place their (mostly Spanish) immigrant progenitors on a pedestal, tracing lines of (mostly male) descent with reverence like the Book of Genesis. The true origins of my own Colombian surname Rueda may not be so lofty, but they are still fascinating.
My Dad's Rueda bloodline, which traces back genetically to the R1b Y-chromosomal haplogroup that spurred on the Proto-Indo-European domination and repopulation of Neolithic Western Europe, has a well-preserved paper trail. The earliest Ruedas may have been obscure Spaniards, but their male Colombian descendants acquired enough property to ensure an enduring seat among the oligarchic upper crust. For example, Colombian Presidents Aquileo Parra and Virgilio Barco and Ecuadorian President Sixto Durán have Rueda ancestors in their family trees.
Open up Volume 8 of Genealogías de Santa Fe de Bogotá or consult the essay "Apellidos Regionales de Colombia" by acclaimed genealogist Flavio Álvarez Ángel (1935-2019), and you can easily find the first Colombian Rueda: "don Cristóbal de Rueda González," born around c.1569-1570 in Villa de Priego near Córdoba in Andalucía, Spain, and the son of Alonso de Rueda and Elvira González. Álvarez Ángel adds the extra detail that "don Cristóbal" lived in Tunja, Colombia by 1593, quoting a legal document from that year but sadly leaving out the citation.
Who was "don Cristóbal"? I learned another detail from Vecinos y Moradores de Tunja 1620-1623, a book I found in Bogotá during my 2015 trip that was written by a zealously thorough local historian, Magdalena Corradine Mora. Luckily, Tunja has a surviving town census from 1620 and a detailed map of people's homes from 1623, and Corradine Mora traced every family found in both record sets.
I finally came around to checking the source last week, since the Archivo General de la Nación has digitized and posted online a lot of its colonial-era documents. The reference is strange. It doesn't say that Cristóbal de Rueda was a merchant, and rather it's part of a larger court case that says legal authorities showed up to his house, and he was missing.
"Cristóbal de Rueda is not at home right now," the 1601 version.
There's a crucial excerpt above. You can see how hard this is to read, since it's written in "cortesana" script, a late medieval handwriting style that was slightly easier for scribes writing with a quill pen but much harder for untrained readers like myself to read. Letters are a little unfamiliar — in particular, lower case "h" resembles a capital "E." There is little punctuation and multiple words in this passage (conmigo, bienes, juramento, prometieron, preguntado) are broken between lines with no connecting hyphen. The name "Cristóbal de Rueda" is not only spelled as "Xpoval," using the Greek letters for Christ, but Rueda with its hard, rolling R appears variably with one R or two in the front. For help with deciphering this kind of handwriting, check out the transcriptions on CUNY Dominican Studies Institute's Spanish paleography tool.
Two pages, two different spellings of "Xpoval de Rueda"
Honestly, I need help with this document, because I can piece together paragraphs, but the broader legal context is even more difficult to grasp. Like any legal writing, there's a lot of repetitive wording and a little is said in a lot of space. But here's what I understand so far, and I'll update this page as I figure out more: In the summer of 1599, the stepfather-in-law of Cristóbal de Rueda, Francisco Mogollón, was being sued for payments by Cristóbal Patiño, on behalf of Patiño's wards, the young children of the late Antonio de Burgos. That's how the archive indexed the case, but it's unclear how Mogollón, Patiño, and Burgos were connected.
There is a mention of Cristóbal de Rueda as a merchant way back on folio 39 verso, when, on December 29, 1599, he paid bail to get Mogollón out of jail. An alleged accomplice of Mogollón, Cristóbal Mejía, was jailed a couple months before.
"Xpobal de Rrueda mercader v[ecin]o de esta ciudad" (Cristóbal de Rueda, merchant and resident of this city)
It seems Patiño had a letter implicating Mogollón and Rueda, but again it's hard to discern what the alleged misdeeds were. By August 13, 1601, the case was still unresolved, Tunja officials still sought the enormous sum of 3,390 pesos, and Patiño asked the court on that day to go to Cristóbal de Rueda's house and itemize his possessions. When the officials arrived at Cristóbal de Rueda's house, his wife, Damiana Rosales, and her mother, María López, swore oaths and testified that Cristóbal was not in Tunja and they had no idea of his whereabouts.
The authorities proceeded to list Cristóbal de Rueda's possessions. By the way, this is the same page 131 that Corradine Mora had cited as saying Cristóbal was a merchant, but that doesn't seem to come up in the record.
I haven't translated the whole list, as some of the words are antiquated and obscure, but it's a fascinating snapshot of a home in 1601. It begins, "First a wooden bed with its four wooden bedposts," followed by two mattresses and two sheets. Three benches, chests, a purple cloth blanket "that they said is from Castilla." A lot of items are described as "viejo" — two old boxes, two old armchairs, an old medium-sized pot, an old lampstand. The most intriguing item is "una tablita con una imagen pintada de una señora" — a small board with the painted image of a lady. Presumably this señora was not a religious icon, so was she a family member or ancestor? A mythical subject, or an idealized woman?
Time is a flat circle. It's interesting how as I write this, I'm collecting financial statements for my own ongoing divorce case. The latest Rueda and the first Rueda echo each other's litigations across the centuries.
I'm not sure what exactly happened to Cristóbal de Rueda and Francisco Mogollón, but it's interesting that Mogollón faced an earlier lawsuit claiming he was withholding funds from a fatherless child. The earlier case, from 1579, involved María López's younger half-brother, Francisco López, and has been digitized and posted online, along with many other 16th-century Tunja records, by the admirable team at Archivo Biblioteca de Neogranadina.
At the start of this earlier case, María López said in a statement, "I am a widow, a woman and poor." She was tasked by her dying father, Silvestre López, to care for little Francisco and his mother, Juana India, who was Silvestre's Indigenous servant. Silvestre left his mestizo son 200 sheep and a chestnut mare and its foal, but later on in the dossier, papers dated to 1584 say that Francisco had still not gotten his sheep. The court papers listed Francisco's faulty guardian as María's new husband... Francisco Mogollón. The case file continued to say that little Francisco finally received some payments in 1587-1588, and then ended the guardianship in 1590.
The final surprise is the 1578 testament of Silvestre López, which is also available on the archive's website! On the first page, Silvestre wrote his parents were Lope Váez and María Hernández, residents of Valencia de Alcántara, Extremadura, Spain. He also asked to be buried in Tunja's Iglesia de San Francisco and donated to several other local churches and monasteries.
The start of Silvestre López's testament, which mentions his parents and Spanish hometown.
The handwriting makes for slow, brutal reading, given it's cortesana written by a dying man. But flip over the page and there's even more indecipherable handwriting! It's an example of "procesal," a looser, rounder, curlier form of cortesana which helped scribes write quicker, but Miguel de Cervantes joked in Don Quixote that not even Satan could read it.
The court notation on the front of Silvestre López's testament.
Anyway, from what I can make out from the document, while Silvestre López did not seem to be a conquistador or encomendero, he still carved out a decent fortune from colonial exploitation. His testament distributed land, houses, money, and livestock, and his daughter María also inherited his two enslaved African men from Senegambia, "Anton of the Bran nation and Andrés of the Balanta nation." María's insistence on her poverty the following year comes across as rather hollow.
Silvestre López's family tree. Click to enlarge.
Questions? Comments? Please email me at ruedafingerhut (at) gmail.com.
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