Growing up in Colombia, Amanda Ortiz studied economics at the Universidad de Los Andes, but she was always interested in her country's history. She knew it was likely that she would travel to the U.S. or Europe to continue her education, but wasn't sure where.
That changed thanks to a presentation by History Professor Nancy Appelbaum, who presented her work on 19th-century Latin America and introduced Ortiz to Binghamton University.
"[Appelbaum] was presenting her book, 'Mapping a Country of Regions,' which was translated into Spanish. And it captured my attention as someone in the audience asked her if she thought that Colombia had failed as a nation. Colombians sometimes are very pessimistic about our own country," Ortiz said. "Through her research, she conveyed the historical importance of nineteenth-century attempts in defining and portraying the nation; Colombians sometimes see these historical moments as failures."
Ortiz was amazed and soon applied. Now a doctoral candidate in the history department, she is interested in finding ways to contribute to the larger discussion about her home country. Ortiz said that becoming a teaching assistant and taking classes, even in U.S. history, has helped shape her views on colonization around the world and has ultimately shaped her studies.
She couldn't be happier about the opportunity to work with other academics; recently, she even went out of her comfort zone to work with History Professor Anne Bailey on her project at the Harriet Tubman Center for Freedom and Equity regarding the Underground Railroad.
Ortiz's academic career has been full of successful opportunities to collaborate, many of which she wouldn't have access to otherwise.
"One of the things that I've liked about Binghamton is that you can engage with professors who do research not just on the U.S. but in very different areas of the world. You have this multicultural country and the university is a multicultural university," Ortiz said. "In Colombia, you can meet people from other places, but people don't often go to live or study there, so you don't have as much space for long-term exchange, debate or friendship."
Her dissertation is based on finance, empire and race in colonial Latin America - specifically in the Spanish-run New Granada in the 18th century, which corresponds roughly to modern-day Colombia, Panama, Ecuador and Venezuela. At the time, the Spanish Empire forbade their colonies from establishing institutions of "financial intermediation," with very few exceptions. The people of New Grenada had to turn to other avenues to access credit or lend money. In larger cities, this wasn't usually a problem; individuals could go to notaries to validate economic transactions.
In many cases, however, this practice was only accessible to the wealthy elite: merchants, mine owners or Catholic institutions, for example. Ortiz argues that although those are the most obvious users of the system historically, people in other classes were commonly part of those transactions.
"The elite spring-boarded those practices, but Indigenous people, enslaved people or people of African descent were also very active in these financial practices," she said. "I study these financial practices to understand colonial power, negotiation or resistance between elites and non-elites, and I use these financial practices to study how elites and non-elites interacted."
Studying these interactions can be challenging; usually, the proof of these transactions has been lost to time. Yet there are some places where the proof still exists.
"In particular, one of the main focuses of my dissertation is this study of what is called a 'colonial frontier.' In the Pacific lowlands of modern-day Columbia, gold was very prevalent, and so gold mining was very prevalent, but the Spanish or Spanish descendant population was not very prevalent in these territories," she explained. "Historians have argued that you wouldn't find institutions like notaries there - so therefore credit didn't happen in these colonial frontiers."
But by studying first-hand sources, Ortiz can show a very different story.
"I study gold mining records. These miners kept diaries of what happened each day," Ortiz said. "And I see that they sometimes pay up front, but they're also acquiring goods on credit and they are indebted to Indigenous people. I also studied judicial cases when people didn't pay back their debts. Miners in that area in the Pacific lowlands were in debt to people in other places; I have been able to show that credit markets existed in this region."
These kinds of networks can get confusing quickly, but Ortiz and other researchers have a way to simplify them. As part of the Spatial Humanities Workshop, Ortiz uses digital and computational technology. Together, the interdisciplinary group can learn to use tools originally made for other purposes, such as mapping or statistical analysis, to create a relational database following individuals.
By telling the stories of these forgotten people, Ortiz is doing her part to reconstruct an accurate picture of the lives of the period. She hopes to one day return to Colombia and continue sharing her knowledge.
"By studying these financial practices, I'm also trying to understand cultures of trust and the everyday life of these individuals," Ortiz said. "By exploring financial transactions, we're not just understanding the importance of credit in terms of numbers or quantity, but also the cultural and social practices between individuals in Latin America."
