Judicial documents of Aguascalientes during the Viceroyalty: an approach to orality as a reflection of social practices

Abstract

In this document, we conducted a paleographic rescue of three ancient colonial documents of Aguascalientes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that lie in criminal, civil, and inquisitorial trials and are of interest due to several issues. First, they are a historical window into the social dynamics of the time, emphasizing that we analyze the role of women during colonial times. They are also a trace of the orality and the  Mexican Spanish of that time, lost in time because, for historical reasons, there are no recordings of those linguistic variants; likewise, in the historical grammar that addresses the various geographical variants of Spanish, Aguascalientes is a virgin territory, so documents like these can be of use to reconstruct linguistic speeches that were the source of what we witness today. Thus, the present text is a fragment of the region's historical memory in two modalities: social dynamics that revolve around the role of women and the orality and linguistic traditions used at the time.