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Sara Castro–Klaren

From the perspective of the Amerindians, 1492 marks the inauguration of major, violent, and irreversible changes in their histories, ways of life, and situation in the world. That year inscribes the establishment of a potent and permanent machinery of war supported by devastating weapons (horses, gods, steel swords), fueled by a providential concept of history and the power of alphabetic writing. The conquest moved along the path of destruction created by ravaging epidemic diseases for which the Amerindians had no defenses. In less than thirty years the peoples of the Caribbean were nearly extinct, while Mexico and Central America began to experience the ravages of the destruction of their entire cultures by the military, the bureaucracy, and the evangelizing clergy. As the Spaniards moved South of El Darien (Panama) in search of El Dorado (a kingdom made of gold), smallpox, colds, measles and pneumonia preceded them. The death of Huayna Capac, the last Inca, the father of Huascar and Atahualpa, is attributed to one of these plagues. Much of this “glorious” march west and south is reported during the early stages of the conquest to His Majesty and crown officials in diaries, letters, chronicles, and reports (relaciones) and later, in local and general histories, as the Spanish letrados traveled side by side with the soldiers and priests in search of treasure and free labor.

In examining this palimpsestic corpus of materials, often written in the immediate aftermath of battle in America or in the midst of the endless struggle over the Spanish rights of possession and authority over the new lands and the Indians, it is clear that the polemic over the humanity of the Indians, and the issue of just war, permeated every page. Had the extinction of the Indian populations not become part of the generalized understanding of the conquest, this debate might not have reached the dominant tone that it acquired at the time and the force with which it thunders through the ages. The writing of the memory of the Spanish invasion, conquest, and colonization of America as available in the texts written by Christopher Columbus (ca. 1451–1506), Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478–1557), Francisco López de Gómora (1511–66), Hernán Cortes (1484–1547), Bernal Diaz del Castillo (1495–1584), Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474–1566), Pedro Cieza de León (1520–54), Juan de Betanzos (–1576), José de Acosta (1540–1600), Garcilaso de la Vega, Inca (1539–1616), and Guamán Poma de Ayala (–1615?), among many others, may vary a great deal in the practice of history that animates them, the kinds of rhetoric that they deploy, and their possible philosophical sources in Spain, but they all drip with blood, and to that extent the idea of reading them as an extended practice of writing violence, as José Rabasa has recently done (see Chapter 2 in this volume), does indeed go to the core of these texts. For reasons that cannot be taken up here, this heterogeneous corpus constitutes what Latin American literary critics and historians refer to as letras coloniales, or “colonial literature.” Despite the fact that the great majority of these texts were not intended by their authors as literature, nor were they read by their contemporaries as such (a good number of them were not published until the nineteenth century), critics have studied them under the lenses of literary analysis and have produced more complex interpretations than the first readings accorded to them by social scientists in search of “facts.”

However, as the distinction between literary and nonliterary texts has become less theoretically sustainable, and the interpretative power of this distinction has waned under the more general idea of “text,” these “letras coloniales” are often now accorded an interdisciplinary approach. Conceived as a cultural object, a text is a highly priced verbal act that plays a significant role in the organization of a given culture. Although most literary corpuses are articulated within the confines of a single language, in the case of the colonial corpus, it is the referent – America – that confers upon them a certain “unity,” despite the fact that some of these texts were written in Latin and even in Quechua. Walter Mignolo (1982) has classified this corpus into three major components: (1) cartas relatorias, or letters that tell of some event in some detail often provided by the eyewitness; (2) relaciones, or reports generally, but not always, requested by the crown in order to obtain extensive and detailed information not intended for publication or book form; (3) crónicas, or chronicles that generally narrate a series of events. However, the cronistas de Indias generally did not write crónicas in the medieval tradition of annals. Inasmuch as they tried to recover the past in texts that exhibit certain literary or historiographic characteristics and emphasized discursive organization, the cronistas wrote historia (Mignolo, 1982: 59). These histories are centered on heroic and even exemplary lives (76). Cronistas such as Las Casas and Garcilaso de la Vega, Inca were much influenced by Roman historians, Cicero above all.

The consensus of the time held that the writing of history should be in the hands of the lettered (letrados) class and not in the hands of soldiers like Bernal Diaz del Castillo or Indians such as Guamán Poma. History writing was itself divided into several kinds: divine, human, natural, moral, and general (Mignolo, 1982: 78). History writing during the period of the conquest was practiced by men who were both soldiers and letrados. Fernández de Oviedo, who had spent some time in Italy before coming to America and was thus acquainted with Italian humanism, is the first to attempt one of these new histories with his long Historia general y natural de las Indias (1535). Oviedo wrote also as an official crown historian. He wanted to be remembered as the Pliny of the Indies. His idea of historia natural was to pull away from the medieval bestiaries and offer instead descriptions and interpretations based on eyewitness observations made in the new lands. The conqueror–historian thought that history should deal with big and important subjects. Like other cronistas, Oviedo was also trying to follow Cicero when he fashioned his historia moral in a temporal frame that organized the reporting of worthwhile events from various sources. The influence of Pliny in the arrangement of nature would determine a hierarchical model with which to view America. Thus from the start, the idea of an historia natural allowed for the classification, not just of plants and animals, but also of peoples and civilizations in an ascending ladder in which Europe would figure at the top and the Amerindians somewhere at the bottom. This classification would blend the natural with the moral and infuse all reports, letters, histories, and polemics about the new world from Oviedo to Ginés de Sepúlveda (1490–1573), to Las Casas and Acosta in Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590).

The conquest of this continent brought about a profusion of texts beyond those identified above. Tracts, learned treatises, and even poems found an avid audience in both Europe and the colonial administrative centers. It gave rise to fierce debates about the nature of the Indians, colonial policy, and the right to wage war on civilian populations. Lawyers, jurists, academic intellectuals, crown officials, evangelizing and colonizing priests, official historians, and even Charles V himself participated. The early, prelapsarian image of the Indians created by the Italian humanists, who either worked in Spain or for the Spanish crown, soon came under attack by Spanish warriors and colonists in the Caribbean who painted their enemies as fierce, anthropophagic societies (Hulme, 1986).

The implicit critique of the conquest imbedded in the characterization of Indian societies as fresh versions of Ovid’s world by the Italians (Peter Martyr d’Anghera, Amerigo Vespucci) was not lost on the Spanish letrados or the crown. Despite the fact that by 1530 the demographic catastrophe was universally acknowledged, and despite the evidence that the Indians were exhausted by famine, slave labor conditions, and disease, Oviedo and Sepúlveda wrote stinging attacks on Indian societies. For these two members of the imperial school of cronistas, the Indians were lazy, vicious, lying, traitorous, half–witted beings given to melancholy, anthropophagy, and sodomy, among other things. The list of phobias remained expandable, as can be seen in Acosta’s rehearsal of the Indian portrait in 1590 and especially in his De procurandam indorum salute (1557), a manual for the evangelization of the Indians printed in Lima and quickly disseminated throughout the rest of the empire. Both Garcilaso and Guamán Poma would spend considerable ink and paper in responding to Acosta (Castro–Klaren, 2001).

Oviedo began making his cunning views public in various polemics and short publications. He arrived for the first time in the New World in 1514 as a notary public, and soon after participated in the bloody conquest of El Darien (Panama) in 1517. There he proudly took his booty in human flesh and himself branded the Indians to be enslaved. In 1532, after having gone to Spain to publish his Sumario de la natural historia de la Indias (1524) and to ask for royal favors, he returned to the New World. He then accepted the lifelong appointment as constable of the royal fortress of Santo Domingo and royal chronicler of the Indies (Brading, 1991: 33). Oviedo is regarded as one of the principal advocates of Spain’s imperial power. His arguments were fundamental to the cynical deployment of the idea of providential history in which Spain figures as the nation chosen by God to be universally triumphant. Along with the Spanish Neoplatonist theologians, Oviedo believed that the Emperor Charles V was indeed the new sun.

Subscribing to the same doctrine of providential history, Las Casas, a colonist and also slaveowner, suffered in 1514 a crisis of conscience. This crisis was due in part to his daily witnessing of the Caribbean holocaust, and in part to the preaching of Franciscan monks in Cuba who realized that the conquest ran contrary to almost every Christian principle. In 1531 Las Casas wrote a memorial to the Council of the Indies. There he warned Spain of eternal damnation if it did not stop the slaughter of the Indians. For years he had been intervening on behalf of the Indians as well as preparing a massive treatise in their defense and conservation.

Las Casas came from a family of conversos (Jewish people who had converted to Christianity). As an adventurous lad of 18, he arrived in Hispaniola in 1502 eager to make his fortune as a colonist. His father and uncle had accompanied Columbus on his second voyage. They brought him and an (enslaved) Indian boy as a souvenir from the islands. Between 1502 and 1514 Las Casas fought as a soldier in the conquest of Cuba. In 1510 the Dominicans arrived in Hispaniola and began denouncing the Spaniards’ treatment of the Indians. They also noted the demographic collapse. Friar Antonio de Montesinos gave an impassioned sermon in 1512 in which he articulated the questions and critique that Las Casas and his followers were to repeat throughout the centuries: “Are they [the Indians] not human? Do they not have rational souls? Are you not obliged to love them as yourselves?” (Brading, 1991: 59). The response was the official wrath of the crown and the church. More atrocities followed.

After his conversion, with the support of the Dominicans, he returned to Spain to campaign on behalf of the Indians and to build alliances, most especially with the bishop of Burgos (Castro, 2007: 63–102). Las Casas’s strategy, not unlike the advice Guamán Poma offered the Spanish king almost a century later, was to make the church and the crown realize that it was in their benefit to keep the Indians in good condition. His proposals were always reform. He wanted to improve the conditions under which the Indians were integrated, albeit more slowly and peacefully, into the strictly hierarchical colonial world that was emerging. The very title of one of his best known tracts, Memorial de remedios (1516), indicates that Las Casas’s project, heroic as it was in demanding that the power system in place recognize the humanity of the Indias, could not advocate a radical turn away from the policies of conquest and colonization. As one of his most recent analysts has put it: “What differentiates him from the rest is his willingness to reach out to offer temporary succor to those being victimized so that they could be benevolently converted, peacefully exploited, and successfully incorporated as members of the new subject–colony where existence depended on the dictates of the king in the imperial capital” (Castro, 2007: 8).

Nevertheless, Las Casas recommended the abolition of the encomienda, that is, the king’s donation of immense tracts of land and thousands of Indians in perpetuity to individual Spaniards who had served in the armies that carried out the conquest. The encomienda system and its later modifications stayed firmly in place until the first half of the twentieth century as the coloniality of power, or rather the dependence of the modern world on its colonial underside, never really entirely waned (see Mignolo’s Preamble in this volume). The Dominican friar hoped to persuade the king of the evils of the encomienda by citing the particular horrors and grief that accompanied the population collapse. In Hispaniola, he reported, out of the two million Indians in 1492, only 15,000 remained at the time he wrote the Memorial.

Las Casas, who had an encomienda in Cuba, described the forced labor conditions and wanton killings in wrenching detail. He had lost all confidence in the ability of his compatriots to treat the Indians in a Christian way. By way of remedies he suggested that Indians and Spaniards live in separate communities, a measure that to some extent was later put in place in Peru, not so much to protect the Indians as to better exploit their labor. The idea that the Indians should be left in communities of their own was predicated on the notion that they had demonstrable intelligence to rule themselves, even though they still needed the light of Christianity to fully achieve their divinely intended purpose on earth. Thus the Indian communities would be put under the care and tutelage of an evangelizing priest. This idea of separate communities was later embraced by Guamán Poma, who also wrote to the king in search of relief from the death toll of the conquest and Spanish rule. Guamán Poma, however, went beyond Las Casas in that he would also expel the priests about whose greed and unchristian practices he writes a scathing tract in his El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615).

The reforms spelled out in the Memorial de remedios constituted the seedbed for many of the later attempts by the evangelizing orders and even some crown officials to engage in what Las Casas envisioned as a peaceful conversation. His stance in defense of the Indians against the charges made by the school of Spanish imperial jurists, theologians, and historians (Brading, 1991: 2–75) has earned Las Casas the title of defender and protector of the Indians. He is also credited as the progenitor of the modern idea of human, that is, universal, rights.

As we shall see below, Las Casas went even further. After the killings of Moctezuma and Atahualpa, he argued that pagan civilizations had the right to keep their governments, and their members were entitled to restitution of the goods and life the conquerors had usurped. All of this swimming against the current earned him the hatred of many people in both the colonies and Spain. During his long life (1474–1566) he was feared, despised, and opposed by many who saw him as the enemy of Spain. Indeed, from the official point of view among Spanish historians, he was and is still regarded as the architect of what they called the Black Legend – the myriad facts and arguments that together question the legitimacy of Spain’s right to conquer and govern Amerindian societies, together with the unmitigated and unavoidable condemnation of the destruction of the Amerindians. The polemic that Las Casas’s criticism of conquest fueled with his Memorial dominated the whole of the sixteenth century, and nowhere was it heard more loudly or did it play a stronger role than in the dynamics of memory and writing of the former Tahuantinsuyo.

Las Casas crossed the Atlantic several times as he sought to obtain changes in policy in Spain and see them implemented in the New World. What he saw in his many journeys to Venezuela, Mexico, and Nicaragua never ceased to astound and shock him. Peaceful conversation was not even an idea in the heads of most of the evangelizing priests. In his Del único modo de atraer a todos los pueblos a la verdadera religión (1530–40), he argued that all peoples of the world were endowed with the same human qualities and cognitive faculties and that God had predestined all souls for salvation. This universalist argument could, however, be interpreted in two opposing ways. On the one hand, it could support the idea of a God–given human universal condition of all peoples, but on the other, it made conversion only the more urgent. In order to stem the force of the second reading, Las Casas argued that the Gospel should be predicated slowly and peacefully, that evangelists should seek to persuade and engage the cognitive capacities of peoples who, like all men endowed with natural enlightenment, sought to know the true God. Preaching was thus coupled with persuasion, an appeal to knowledge and love (Brading, 1991: 64). The violence of the conquest had created impossible conditions for the proper preaching of the Gospel, and it should stop, he argued.

The news from the Americas was shocking and alarming to many Europeans and there developed a great deal of pressure for reform. The pope finally declared the Indians to have souls. Las Casas’s most radical denunciation of Spain and proposals for change were published in his summary work Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1542). In this text he draws stark differences. Resting on the idea that the discovery of America was an act of divine providence, an idea that Garcilaso de la Vega would later exploit also, Las Casas paints the Indians as gentle and humble human beings in virtual expectation of conversion. The Spaniards, in contrast, are nothing but thieves and tyrants. They burn, torture, murder, enslave, and rape at will, as most eyewitness accounts attest. His proposal for radical reform not only recommends the abolition of the encomienda, but also the idea that once the Indians are converted and Spain has accomplished its duty as provided by God, the Spanish should retreat from America, a suggestion not lost in Guamán Poma, who not only promises the king good Indians (Christian vassals) but also unimaginable tribute. The restoration of Andean order and wealth will only be possible if the Spanish retreat to the coastal cities and leave the Andeans to govern themselves.

In 1542 the Spanish crown came out with new legislation for governing the colonies. Known as the New Laws, and in part influenced by Las Casas’s critique and recommendations for better government, the New Laws were rejected by the colonists. Civil war broke out in Peru and more Andeans were compelled to fight and die in the opposing armies of the Pizarros, Almagros, and other sundry caudillos. Las Casas, deeply influenced by Augustine’s City of God and the difference in the social orders created by the love of God as against the love of self, continued to question the entire legitimacy of the Spanish empire (Brading, 1991: 78). Derived from Augustine’s On the Predestination and the Gift of Perseverance, the idea of the providential discovery of America provides Las Casas with an explanation for the failure of the Spanish to establish the city of God in America. Carried away by the self–love that rules in the earthly city, the Spanish acted as if inspired by the devil (Brading, 1991: 76). The paramount role that providence plays in the polemics and policies of conquest and relations with other civilizations is only comparable to the extended functions invested in the Devil (Cervantes, 1994: 5–75) as the chief presider over the construction of Amerindian “otherness,” or colonial difference.

In response to the barrage of questions brought about by the vociferous interventions of Las Casas, Charles V called for a “junta” or meeting of jurists and theologians. The chief questions to be put to rest in Valladolid in 1550–1 were the human status of the Indians and the problematic behavior of the conquerors, never Spain’s right to dominion over the earth. The jury was composed of Dominican theologians and the two debaters were to be Las Casas, the friar, and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1490–1573), the lawyer, known as a defender of the imperial rights of the Spanish crown. The chief debaters never saw each other over the long year in which the debate took place. When Las Casas’s turn came he took five days to read his Apologetica historia to the judges

In the debate at Valladolid Las Casas had to contend not only with Sepúlveda, but also with another, absent adversary. Juan López de Palacios Rubios (1450–1524) had been one of the first Spanish jurists to come to the defense of Spanish lawful right to empire. He based his arguments on scholastic theology and medieval canon law rather than civil law. As far as he could reason and, basing himself on Aristotle, the Indians were “slaves by nature” in need of tutelage and correction before they could be fit for self–rule. This argument, like several of Las Casas’s arguments, would also reverberate through the centuries and can even be found today when “modern” democracies demand to be regarded and adopted as the universal model.

Palacios Rubios also worked very cleverly in finding an imperial genealogy for the pope’s political authority over the world. He argued that the world had seen four previous, universal “monarchies” – Assyrians, Medes, Greeks, and Romans – before Christ had inaugurated the fifth and last monarchy of the world. Thus the pope, as the vicar of Christ, exercised both spiritual and temporal power over the entire world and could indeed, delegate such authority on Spain (Brading, 1991: 80–1). So Palacios Rubios devised the Requerimiento (Seed, 1995), a document to be read to the Indians upon their first encounter with the Spaniards that would inform them of the hegemony of the pope and the king over the entire world. It followed that any Indian who did not accept the authority of the pope was subject to legitimate acts of war and conquest. The Requerimiento was used for the first time in the conquest of El Darien in 1517, a campaign in which Oviedo participated. This document made Oviedo’s taking and branding of slaves and the atrocities denounced by Las Casas “legal.” The stakes in the Valladolid debate could not have been higher.

Another absent interlocutor in Valladolid was the Dominican and professor of theology and philosophy at Salamanca, Francisco de Vitoria (1486–1546). Like Palacios Rubios, Vitoria had never been to America. He did not have the benefit or the authority of the ocular observer. He worked from reports and from his rich library. In 1534, he, like many others, was shocked to hear of the unlawful execution (regicide) in Cajamarca of the Inca Atahualpa and he wrote on the problem of Spain and the Amerindians without being solicited by the crown to do so (Pagden, 1982: 64–80). Vitoria was one of the leaders of the Thomist revival in Spain. He followed Thomas Aquinas’s reasoning regarding the difference between pagans and Christians. The theory of natural law was the discursive frame within which the theologians at Salamanca analyzed the critical question that Amerindians posed for European epistemology.

In 1537 Vitoria wrote Relectio de Indis (1557), a work that circulated widely in manuscript form and had a lasting imprint in all future discussion concerning the Indies. In de Indis, the theologian tries to find an answer to the unthinkable question: What if there is no just title to the conquest of America? As Anthony Pagden points out, with this question Vitoria takes the problem of “just title” out of the strict realm of the law and places it in the space of theology for the problem involved, settling the chief question regarding the nature of the Indian qua man (66–7). It was clear to Vitoria from the report received on Mexico and Peru that the Indians were not simple irrational beings, and thus any common–sense discussion could demonstrate that the Indians were not monkeys, but human beings. Relying on Aristotle, Vitoria reasoned that the Indians clearly had the use of reason, in their own way. They had order in their affairs, they had properly organized cities, recognizable forms of marriage, magistrates, rulers, laws, industry, and commerce. They also had religion. For Vitoria, as it had been for Aristotle, the city stood for the most perfect unit of society, the “only place where the practice of virtue and the pursuit of happiness” are at all possible. Man, for both Plato and Aristotle, can only realize himself as a citizen. Christianity transforms the secular, Greek city into a spiritual community (Pagden, 1982: 69). Indeed, St. Augustine could only conceive of the world, both celestial and earthly, as urban. People who built cities and lived in them could simply not be thought of as barbarians or natural slaves. By definition they were civilized. Vitoria found that the Indian societies also exhibited two other traits of civilization: they engaged in trade and hospitality and they had visibly organized religions.

However, in the second part of de Indis, the part that deals with just title to conquest, Vitoria starts to back–pedal and begins to offer the contra argument required in scholastic argument (Pagden, 1982: 80). There he speaks not of what Indian societies practiced but of what they did not, or rather how they did not resemble Europe, whose assumed normative character had underlined the entire discussion on natural and divine law. Vitoria argued that Indian law was insufficiently wise and unsatisfactory. He abandoned the urban model argument and focused instead on the reports of cannibalism, sodomy, and bestiality which he thought violated the natural order. The Indians’ dietary and sexual practices showed that they were not only irrational but even mentally defective and thus incapable of governing themselves (Pagden, 1982: 85–7).

Vitoria’s arguments exposed the insurmountable contradictions driving the discourses of the conquest–cum–evangelization. The contradictions embedded in the theory of natural law itself were brought to their critical limits, for they were being used to account for the simultaneous, but unthinkable, perception of sameness and difference that the European cognitive complex obtained from contact with the Amerindians. This conundrum, this limitation in European epistemology, has shadowed the history of Amerindian peoples to the present, for “if the natural slave is incapable of participating in a state of happiness, then he must also be incapable of achieving his proper end (telos) as a man. If nature never creates anything which is, of itself, incapable of accomplishing its ends – for such a thing would be useless – then the natural slave is not a man” (Pagden, 1982: 94).

Vitoria managed to cover over this blind spot in his discourse by appealing to the idea that God created man and that the essential characteristic of man is his rational mind. Thus the Indians’ faults and deficiencies could eventually be rubbed out with proper education and discipline, a solution that was not that far away from Las Casas’s idea of peaceful and slow conversion. Paradoxically this idea translated into the very harsh laws and bodily punishment that Toledo (1515–82) put in place in the Andes, in part supported by the denigrating ideas that Acosta put forth in the Third Council of Lima in (1579) and in the earlier De Procuranda (1557). From the clay that Vitoria’s hands molded, the Indian came out not a slave, but a child. In this scheme the king of Spain was the tutor of the Indians. When the Indians no longer required tutoring, they would be left to enjoy their proper liberty. Vitoria managed to dismantle Palacios’s argument on the universal authority of the pope and he even ended up reasoning that idolatry was not grounds for dispossession of the Indians. Upon hearing of this scandalous position, Charles V ordered Vitoria to stop interfering in the question of the Indies (Pagden, 1982: 106, Brading, 1991: 84).

Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda was partly educated in Bologna and Rome. He had been a tutor to Philip II, and by 1536 he was appointed imperial chronicler. He published a tract against Erasmus’s pacifism in order to defend the European warrior code and social structure (Brading, 1991: 86). In 1544 he wrote a dialogue, Democrates Secundus, in order to defend the Spanish conquest and empire in the world. He drew his information and arguments in part from Oviedo and Gómora. For him the Indians were slaves by nature for they lacked prudence, intelligence, virtue, and even humanity, all the attributes that the Renaissance thought citizens ought to have. He also defined the Indians by what they were not, especially when it came to lacking “writing.” From there he surmised that Indians also lacked history and laws, had no sense of self–consciousness, had no notion of private property and were, in general, ruled by tyrants. Sepúlveda’s challenge caused Las Casas to rethink his materials in order to demonstrate that the Indians were not different and that they could be both savage and as civilized as the Europeans (Brading, 1991: 88–9). The Dominican had to begin moving toward a comparative ethnography with the ancient world, a move not lost on Garcilaso de la Vega, Inca. In the Valladolid debate, Las Casas’s job was to prove that the Indians were neither natural slaves, nor “homunculus,” as Sepulveda would have it, but rather normal human beings created by God, even if the Bible did not mention them. By and large he accomplished this task.

The arguments that Las Casas brandished in this fight were garnished from his Historia de las Indias (1542) and his later Apologetica historia sumaria (1551). Probably the best study to date of Las Casas’s thought on the matter can be found in David Brading’s The First America (1991). In order to frame a sense of cultural evolution Las Casas turned to Cicero and his idea of stages in the natural history of humanity. For Cicero, all men in all nations are essentially the same in their nature. For Las Casas, it was not hard to show that the Aztecs and the Incas resembled the Greeks and the Romans. For instance, of Aristotle’s six requirements or marks of civilized life, all could be found in the Amerindian societies: agriculture, artisans and artists, a warrior class, rich men, organized religion, lawful government, and city life. Once again he deployed St. Augustine’s argument on natural enlightenment and the desire of all men to seek and serve God (Brading, 1991: 90). Las Casas’s approach to Amerindian religions required that he really stretch the comparative frame, and while the Greek and the Aztec pantheon could be safely compared, some of the rituals and practices of Amerindian religions simply had to be attributed to the Devil’s ability to gain hold of pagans. He made a particular point of arguing that the Incas had been very close to monotheism.

Despite his comparative ethnology and defense of the Indian’s humanity, Las Casas still had to devise a reason that would justify the Spanish empire, as he was an advocate of royal authority. He agreed with Vitoria’s argument on the natural right to rule of the Indian monarchs. Idolatry alone did not justify deposing or killing them. He attacked Sepúlveda’s argument on the natural slavery of the Indians by saying that it was blasphemy against God to say that He had created a brutish and inferior “race” (Brading, 1991: 95). Therefore, all wars of conquest against the Indians were unjust. At this point, caught in a dilemma, Las Casas had no choice but to follow Vitoria in defining papal authority as only spiritual, not political – a claim that left the king with no right to a universal empire. The Dominican friar pulled out of his blind spot, not unlike Vitoria, by claiming that very same spiritual authority obliged the pope and the king to see to it that the Indians were Christianized, that is to say, “educated” into being better men. With this argument he restored all political authority to the crown. Indeed, “the only way out,” as he entitled one of his tracts, was peaceful conversion, which to the conquerors and colonists sounded like more of the same. It proved impossible to find a balance between the right to convert the peoples of the world and the right of the pagan rulers to preserve their independence. How to serve God in the midst of thieves? is the question that hounded Las Casas all his life, as he saw the New World fall off a precipice of evil and injustice.

It is in the horns of these irreconcilable claims, these epistemological and ethical dilemmas, that the intellectual and political project of all those who wrote about the Andes after the fall of Cajamarca in 1531 are inscribed. The polemic on the nature of the American Indian that took place, as a result of confusing the Bible with world history, reverberated through the centuries, causing all kinds of distortions and misconceptions, blocking the ability to produce new learning and even a more accurate approach to empirical realities. When Francisco Pizarro (1478–1541) decided to execute Atahualpa and march to Cuzco with his Huanca allies, the priest who accompanied him wrote a report, today considered bogus, to justify the regicide. According to the Spaniards, Atahualpa had committed blasphemy. The scene has the Spanish showing the Inca a book – the Bible – and telling him that that is the word of God, to which the Inca must submit. Atahualpa receives the book from the friar’s hands, puts it to his ear, and upon hearing nothing, shakes it. He still hears nothing. Then, angered, he throws the book on the floor, saying that it cannot be God because it does not speak to him. Tom Cummins (1998) disputes the idea that the Inca would have expected an object to mimic the word because in the Andes, speech and writing were not associated with objects, as they were in Europe. It is clear also from the lack of adequate translators at the time that the Spaniards could not have conveyed the message they claim to have given Atahualpa about “the book–the–Word–divinity.” What the fiction of Father Valderde speaks of is the power claims that the written word and the representative relation with the king of Spain allowed them to make in imperial territories. This is the brash and unreflecting power amalgam of ideas and military strength that Andeans, and even Spaniards, would have to address every time they took up the pen to tell the story of the conquest, reconstruct the history of the Incas, petition for favors or advancement, or contest the practices and justifications for the injuries wrought upon people by the colonial regime. Again, providential history was the umbrella that protected all, from those who praised the conquest and destruction of the Andean way of life, to those who, like Garcilaso de la Vega, Inca wrote to correct the Spanish imperial historians, or Guamán Poma, who hoped to tutor the Spanish king into understanding what good government really would be like.

The conquest of Peru is dominated by a fractious engagement of Spaniards and Andean peoples who saw in the arrival of the Spaniards an opportunity to rebel against Inca rule. Starting with Father Valverde, many Spaniards wrote the memory of their part in the conquest in various forms and addressed different publics. The Crónica del Peru (1553) by Pedro Cieza de Leon (1518–53), a soldier and letrado, is the closest thing to a narrative of the conquest. The second part of the Royal Commentaries (1609) by Garcilaso de Vega, Inca (1539–1616) remains the classical account of the conquest because of its ample view of events, the clear concept of history that articulates it, and the beautiful style in which it is written. The recent Conquest of the Incas (1970) by John Hemming draws fully on the corpus of reports, letters, memorials, crónicas, treatises, and narratives that the conquest of the Andes, the ensuing civil wars, and the campaign for the extirpation of idolatries produced during the sixteenth century. He especially draws on Garcilaso and Cieza. The issues that dominated Las Casas’s writings are replayed in the writing of the Andes: encomienda, just conquest, evangelization, the right to universal empire, providential history, the place of the Indians in the new scheme of things, rights to private property, rights of the Indians to selfrule, and the quality of their culture.

One way of making sense of the proliferation of writings from Peru is to look at the authors of these texts as part of the ongoing Sepúlveda–Las Casas polemic and separate them by the perspective that they had on the Inca empire. This is more helpful than a generational or referential classification (Porras Barrenechea, 1962). Although the edges of all groupings are always blurred, and cronistas like Juan de Betanzos (–1576) are hard to place neatly on one side or the other, the separation in terms of the particulars of the polemic allows for a better understanding of the discursive forces unleashed into modernity by the conquest as well as the problematics of positionality that accompanied writing in the Andes. In general terms we can speak of two oppositional groups: (1) the Toledo Circle, a number of letrados who pushed forward, with all the resources of the crown, the basic principles of a justificatory imperial history and (2) the various individuals who wrote outside of the circle and who, for reasons of their own, resisted and opposed the ideological thrust of imperial history. The Toledo Circle encompasses the chroniclers, jurists, translators, notaries public, priests, and other letrados and scholars engaged by the viceroy to continue the Spanish imperial school of history and provide the crown with the necessary information and arguments to denigrate and deauthorize Inca rule and culture. In this group one can easily place the letrados hired by the viceroy himself: Juan de Matienzo (1520–79), Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa (1530?–92), Juan Polo de Ondegardo (–1575), and others who, like the Jesuit José de Acosta (1540–1600), had views of their own and were weary of the viceroy but did nevertheless confirm the normative and “superior” sense of European modes of cognition. They produced a harsh interpretation of Inca history, one in which they basically characterized the Incas as vicious rulers to whom Plato’s definition of the tyrant – a man ruled by the desires of the lower organs of the body – applied fully (Castro–Klaren, 2001).

Although very different among themselves and writing at a good distance from one another, the men who contested, in different ways, the discourse of the imperial historians were the mestizo Jesuit Blas Valera (1545–97; Varner; 1968), the Indian Guamán Poma de Ayala and the mestizo humanist Garcilaso de la Vega, Inca, the latter writing from Spain. Cieza de Leon, although holding onto the view of providential history and the superiority of Spanish culture, cannot be aligned with either group as he wrote with great admiration of the Inca empire. Although considered “reliable chroniclers,” their information needs to be corroborated with other sources. Cieza de Leon, for instance, is noted for his more or less objective descriptions of Andean culture and Inca rule. However, in this respect, his work cannot compare with Betanzos, who knew more Quechua and had direct access to the memory of one of the royal panacas (patrilineal descent groups in charge of preserving specific noble Inca houses). Cieza de Leon never failed to subscribe to the notion that Inca religion was inspired by the Devil, a “fact” that he did not try to reconcile with his extensive reports on and admiration for the exemplary laws and wise statecraft with which the Incas governed the immense Historia del Tahuantinsuyo (Pease, 1978).

Although hired by viceroy Antonio de Mendoza and with probably only an elementary education, Betanzos wrote quite a reliable history of the Incas. He had the great benefit of having learned Quechua in the field. This gave him an unusually great power to understand what was being reported to him and to attempt feats of cultural translation. His marriage to Doña Evangelina, one of Huayna Capac’s granddaughters, gave him unparalleled access to the Cuzco elite whose khipu and oral memory clearly informs both the contents and the shape of his narrative. In fact there are times when the Summa y narración de los Incas (1557) reads as if Betanzos were both transcribing and translating directly from the narrative of a Quechua speaker. It could be that one of his chief sources is Doña Evangelina herself, and certainly a good number of members of her family.

Gómez Suárez de Figueroa was born in Cuzco in 1539 and died in Spain in 1616. His mother was the Inca princess Chimpu Ocllo, later baptized as Isabel Suárez, and his father was the captain and nobleman Sebastian Garcilaso de la Vega. How Gómez Suárez de Figueroa became a canonical “author” in the Spanish language and better known as Garcilaso de la Vega, Inca, is a fascinating story of self–fashioning that involves the most amazing journey through personal and collective memory, the Renaissance, with its revival of Greco–Roman culture, and the will to recover the Inca past for posterity. Garcilaso has been fortunate with his critics. With the exception of a nineteenth–century Spanish critic who failed to appreciate Garcilaso’s ethnographic presentation of the Inca empire, and the ethnohistorian María Rostworowski, most of his biographers and analysts have described and brought out the complexity, subtle maneuverings, and intelligence of the Inca’s task with satisfied admiration.

His attempt, well into the sixteenth century, to write an account of the Inca empire that corrected and contradicted official Spanish historiography, was a monumental project for one man alone. El Inca: Life and Times of Garcilaso de la Vega by John Grier Varner (1968) still stands as the best biography and overall study of the political and intellectual milieu in which Garcilaso had to move in order to safeguard his person, arrange for conditions favorable to becoming an intellectual, and see to the possibility of writing and being published. He changed his name several times and each time the changes coincided with a new stage of consciousness and self–assurance. From the time of his birth the rights and the social and economic standing of mestizos had diminished rapidly. Officers of the crown considered them dangerous rivals, treacherous allies, and racially inferior (Mazzotti, 1996: 22–3). Mestizos did not fare any better with the Indians. In fact Guamán Poma, for a set of very complicated reasons that included wanting to stop the sexual practices that engendered mestizos, almost always illegally, recommended that the existing mestizos move to the Spanish towns. Garcilaso wrote to suture the split and the trauma that the conquest brought about. But he never rejected his father. Instead he sought to clear his name of accusations made about his conduct in one of the many battles of the civil war in which Spaniards changed sides easily.

For Garcilaso, mestizaje did not mean hybridity, as some recent commentators have wanted to label his efforts. Neither did it mean syncretism. Nor did it mean writing in between two worlds as if dangling from the edges that separated them. One of the purposes of his writing was to bring the two worlds together, in a dynamic of double valence, to create an epistemological and aesthetic space where double voicing was possible. The Inca in Spain practiced a doubled consciousness of wholeness rather than hybridity of dismemberment and paranoia (Castro–Klaren, 1999). From an Andean perspective, in love with the concept of duality, he sought complimentary and reciprocity. The binary of the duality of the khipu can also be seen to inspire the Inca’s efforts to find a harmonious “new world.” Each of the parts was to remain whole, with a logic of its own, and come together in a dance of complementarity. In a telling gesture of his Andean search for complementarity and reciprocity he translated from the Italian (1590) the Dialoghi di Amore by Leon Hebreo (1535), for in this piece from the “Old World” he found not so much inspiration as confirmation for the development of his capacities as a Andean writer and for his philosophical and aesthetic of complementarity.

As an illegitimate mestizo in Spain and despite his Jesuit connections, Garcilaso needed to authorize himself as a subject of knowledge in order to intervene in the ongoing discourse on the Indies. Any cursory reading of the Royal Commentaries yields an ample list of the many contemporary and ancient authors that Garcilaso read in order to prepare for his work. Further confirmation of his firm grasp of issues and debates came to light when in 1948 José Durand found the Inca’s last will. It included a list of the books he owned, which was considerable, given the size of private libraries at the time (Durand, 1963). The Inca had clearly immersed himself in the Italian Renaissance, the Christian theological and philosophical tradition, the rediscovery of Greek and Roman culture, and the literature and political thought of his Spanish contemporaries. He had difficulties in assembling an equally rich bank of sources for his writing on the Incas. Garcilaso relied chiefly on his memory, the memory of friends in Peru who responded to his letters and answered his queries, the chronicle authored by Cieza de Leon, and the great book that the Jesuit Blas Valera was writing in Latin on Inca history. The Inca seems to have incorporated this massive treatise wholesale into his commentaries. Beyond the efforts to recover the memory of the Inca world, the chief move that Garcilaso made was to claim greater and better authority over all Spanish theologians and historians, based on his knowledge of Quechua, his free access to the amautas on his mother’s side of the family, and his persistent demonstration of errors incurred by the Spaniards owing to their ignorance of Quechua and their misunderstanding of Andean concepts which only a thorough knowledge of the language could prevent. With one single move, Garcilaso authorized himself and deauthorized most of the detractors of the Indians, something that Las Casas would have dearly loved to do, but could not do because he never learned any Indian languages. Garcilaso slyly argued that not knowing Quechua and wanting to understand Andean culture was like not knowing Hebrew and wanting to understand the Bible.

Margarita Zamora (1988) has written at length on how Garcilaso deployed his savvy understanding of philology to institute Quechua as a language of knowledge comparable only to Latin or even Hebrew in the Christian tradition of exegesis. Antonio Mazzotti and other critics have pointed out that the majority of studies on the Inca concentrate on the humanist aspects that allow for the configuration of his works, an emphasis which does not allow for an analysis of the many features of both content and style that resist the European colored lenses. In Coros Mestizos del Inca Garcilaso (1996) he seeks to remedy the situation. He posits a reading of Garcilaso in which Quechua narrative modes and understanding of the past, concepts of time and subject, operate as a kind of subtext (28–9). Mazzotti brings out in Garcilaso the presence of the conventions of Quechua oral narrative and especially the discursive tradition of the Cuzco court and all the symbolism that such choral tradition implies (31–2). This kind of interdisciplinary study surpasses the more narrowly conceived literary and philological analysis. It brings to bear the information and methods made available by iconography, archeology, and ethnohistory in order to detect in the Inca’s text more than sheer information conveyed by the Cuzco arts of memory. Studies of post–conquest textualization of Andean memory in alphabetic texts and iconographic structures show that Garcilaso’s change of names owes as much to Spanish costumes of the time as to Andean practices of naming according to life stages. Christian Fernández (2004) analyses in detail Garcilaso’s coat of arms and shows how Garcilaso redeploys the European conventions of fields and arrangement of totems in order to represent his filiations with the Andean Amaru (97–111), the symbol of his panaca (37).

Garcilaso wrote at the time when the erasure of Amerindian memory and knowledges was already advanced. He wanted to stem the wave of forgetting that the claims of alphabetic writing, as the only site of memory, had already spread over the Amerindians’ sense of the meaning of their cultures. Drawing on the organizing principles of Roman historians, in chapter after chapter, peppered with seemingly arbitrary digressions, Garcilaso places the stones that together amount to the rebuilding of the Inca empire and way of life. He systematically moves from the location of the Andes in a world that is one and a human kind that is one, to the particulars of the Andean landscape, the agricultural system, social organization, war, legal, religious, and communications systems. Garcilaso stages his narrative rhetoric in order to assure his reader of the veracity of the facts and events presented and to distinguish his history from fables and fictions (Fernández, 2004: 32; Mignolo, 1982). Mignolo has pointed out that the Inca makes clear that he is in charge of writing history, that is to say, he organizes and gives meaning to the materials while his sources simply tell the story (relato) as best they remember (90).

The fact that he entitled his book “commentaries” and not history has always puzzled his readers. It has been said that he took Caesar’s commentaries as his model (Fernández, 2004: 26–8). It has also been argued that the Inca had in mind the genre of the philological biblical commentary prevalent at the time (Durand, 1963: 322–32 in Fernández, 2004: 29). Fernández shows that the commentary genre was widely practiced during the Middle Ages, establishing a heterogeneous legacy (41) of which Garcilaso was well aware (41–7). It would seem that the Inca chose the tradition of the critical commentary as practiced by St. Jerome in his Contra Rufino because this practice allowed him to gloss, expand, clarify, criticize, correct, and dispute, in collaboration with the subtle reader. For Fernández, the reader in Garcilaso, as in St. Jerome, is the necessary counterpart who will bring to full fruition the half–sentences, digressions, allusions, and invitations to draw the appropriate conclusions sprinkled throughout the text (48–55). This thesis is quite persuasive, for it fits Garcilaso’s rhetoric.

The richness and complexity of Garcilaso’s endeavor – to take on the entire panoply of imperial history that denigrated the Inca and, by extension, other Amerindian civilizations – has not yet been properly assessed. Although the chief villain of his history, the viceroy Toledo, was dead by the time the Commentaries appeared, readers understood that this was not a chronicle, but a formidable rebuttal that showed the refined intelligence of the Incas and the creative capacity of Andean culture. The influence that the Inca’s work had in shaping the European and American imaginary with respect to Inca society as sort of a utopia can never be underestimated. The Royal Commentaries rejoiced and influenced contemporary audiences in Peru and inspired many eighteenth–century encyclopedists and playwrights. It has been reprinted many times and its many and rapid translations into all the major European languages made it a bestseller. It accompanied Tupac Amaru II in dreaming of a more ordered and just world. Despite the fact that the circulation of the book was forbidden by the Spanish authorities, it was always to be found in Bolivar’s tents and San Martín’s luggage. Its readers recognized a monumental recovery of memory and epistemological potential essential to the maintenance of the community of mankind.

By the 1550s it was clear throughout the Spanish–American empire that the idea of evangelizing the Indians had failed rapidly. Between 1567 and 1582 the church held a council in Lima to discuss many matters, including the arrival of the new order: the Jesuits. Among other things it was decided to deny the Indians admission to holy orders and to forbid them from taking communion. The Indians were basically disenfranchised as Catholics. Toledo had put his ordinances in place and the whole Andean world was near collapse, with the demographic catastrophe in full swing. It is conservatively estimated that the population went down from 16 million to 3 million. Exhausted, resistance was no longer possible. Confusion and grief reigned everywhere. People fled their villages and abandoned their families in search of work in the Spanish towns. Guamán Poma seems to have paid very close attention to the proceedings of the Council as well as to all other matters in Peru.

In 1614, when he is about to hand his manuscript to the person who will take it to Spain and hand it either to Philip III or some trusted advisor, Guamán Poma claims to be 80 years old. Most of what we know about him is gleaned from his own auto-biographical presentation as “author” of the Primer Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1516). He claims to be from Lucanas, to be the son of a curaca, or “prince,” as he translates the term into Spanish. He casts himself as servant of the king, a noble Andean Christian who has sought to serve the cause of the king and justice, as a defender of poor Indians in court, as translator and advocate of true Christian causes. For such dedication to the king’s interests he has only received scorn and unjust treatment from the Spaniards, especially the priests, whose main interest is the spoliation of Indian labor and property, not to mention their compulsive desire for Indian women.

Guamán Poma, not unlike Garcilaso, knew Toledo’s work very well. He was surely familiar with Toledo’s Ordenanzas – the viceroy’s legislation over every aspect of human life in the Andes (Castro–Klaren, 2001). In fact his familiarity with the events of the extirpation of idolatries as well as the format of the informaciones – the canvassing of the Andean territory for information useful to the crown – suggests that Guamán Poma may have been a translator for Spanish extirpators, magistrates, priests, and other letrados. His familiarity with Christian doctrine is firm and well grounded. There is no doubt that Guamán Poma was endowed with a powerful mind and an indefatigable thirst for knowledge, for he seems to have heard of every argument and piece of information animating the polemic of the American Indian and his political and intellectual right to rule the land of his ancestors.

His Corónica or extended letter to the king (of 908 pages) is surprisingly critical of the Incas. He would agree with the Toledo Circle in claiming that the Incas were only recent rulers who, through conquest and tyranny, expanded their original Cuzco holdings into the huge territory of the Tahuantinsuyo. Guamán Poma even denies that the Incas were originally from Cuzco. But in a crafty redeployment of Las Casas, Guamán Poma proposes that the land and government of Peru be given back – restituted–to the Indians, that is to say to the curacas or ethnic lords, like his family, not the descendants of the Incas. On this other matter he was squarely against the Toledo Circle, and that included Acosta.

Guamán Poma’s account of universal time is even more surprising, as he not only tries to find the point to link Amerindian time to biblical unilinear time, but pushes back Andean time deeply into four pre–Inca epochs. New research into the differences that account for the passage of time in the Andes and the events concerning Inca rule and the making of the Tahuantinsuyo shows that some of the discrepancies among the cronistas are due to the fact that they interviewed different Inca panacas or came into contact with different ethnic accounts (Rostworowski, 1987). In this light it is clear that Guamán Poma offers an account of time and history that not only differs substantially, but is in fact at odds with the Cuzco accounts prominent in Garcilaso de Vega, Inca and Juan de Betanzos, for instance. The four ages that Guamán Poma figures preceded Inca times postulate about a million years after Adam (Brading, 1991: 150). He begins the history of the New World with the arrival of Noah sometime after the universal flood. The four ages tell of a human cultural development that precedes the arrival of Manco Capac – the first Inca and cultural hero – and accounts for most of Andean cultural developments: agriculture, cities, laws, and the building of fortresses. Brading notes that the evolutionary development in Guamán Poma is reminiscent of that advanced by Cicero and redeployed by Las Casas (1991: 150–1).

Guamán Poma’s boldness never ceases to amaze his readers, given the climate of orthodoxy and censorship in both Spain and the colonies. Not content with having grafted Andean time onto biblical time by having found the common and universal phenomenon of the flood, the khipukamayuc advances the notion that Andean civilization is actually a forerunner of Christianity. This idea is also advanced by Garcilaso. Although it is not possible to know how Guamán Poma came to learn the details of the Spanish controversy on the American Indians (Adorno, 1986), it is clear in the text that he nimbly uses the natural law argument developed by Las Casas and Vitoria in order to argue that in pre–Hispanic society, people were organized and governed by the reason of natural law. Andean peoples led virtuous lives, as they followed their own laws and the Devil was not anywhere to be seen, except in the person and life of some of the Collas, or Inca queens. There is no doubt that even in this account of Andean pre–Christian virtue, which defies the consensus reached in Spain about the Indian’s immaturity (as in Kant’s immaturity also), Guamán Poma feels “safe.” It may be that he is aware of the fact that his portrayal of the Incas as usurpers and tyrants coincides with the views sought and propounded by the circle of letrados serving the viceroy Toledo. He must have reasoned that his devastating critique of Spanish colonial rule, coming as it did from a doubly virtuous person, that is, Christian pre–Christian, or a natural intelligence taken to its true telos by the enlightenment of Christianity, would gain him an audience with the king.

If his account of universal history would have seemed outrageous to his contemporaries had they had a chance to read it – the manuscript got lost and was not read until 1911 – his daring to give advice to the king of Spain on how to govern so as to save his soul is as admirable as it is laughable. In one of his now famous drawings he imagines a scene in which he sits next to the king of Spain who, as his pupil, listens to the information and recommendations that Guamán Poma, the good governor, offers to His Majesty. Like Las Casas, Guamán Poma envisions the time when the Indians and Spanish will live in separate towns with the Indians having been given back their lands. In this utopian set–up all work would be paid, and the mita, and for that matter all daily life, should be modeled on Inca times and Inca ethics, for they, after all, had the best laws and really knew how to govern. Toledo instead is only creating havoc. His policy to move the Indians to towns, his exigencies of tribute and long periods of work in the mines, together with the neglect of the fields, is bringing the Andes to a catastrophic end, for the world is now upside down and the Indians are becoming extinct. In the end Guamán Poma’s Corónica is saturated by the grief of seeing an orderly and healthy world come to end, as he says, “without remedy in sight.” The pages written by the self–styled prince speak of the terrifying sense of holocaust, for an entire ancient civilization was about to disappear. The urgency of the demographic collapse is written on every page of text and picture that make up the 908 pages of his letter to the king.

How Guamán Poma was able to become conversant with the entire discursive complex of the conquest–cum–evangelization and redeploy it to critique the conquest and colonial rule, as well as offer a plan for good government, is a feat that remains unequaled in the history of colonial or modern letters. Compared with Garcilaso, his disadvantages were greater and his subalternity was extreme. He managed to learn doctrine by attending sermons, law by frequenting the courts, drawing by apprenticing himself to various churchmen and artists. Adorno also traces Guamán Poma’s ecclesiastical rhetoric to written sources that he quotes in his letter. He seems to have been thoroughly familiar, for instance, with Fray Luis de Granada’s sermon Memorial de la vida cristiana which was printed and widely circulated in the New World for evangelizing purposes (Adorno, 1986: 57). The new catechisms and sermonarios printed in Lima after the meeting of the Third Council of Lima allow Guamán Poma a firmer grasp of the problems that preaching Christianity to the Andean people entail. These texts help him sharpen his “pose as a preacher” (Adorno, 1986: 57). No less important are the confession manuals circulating in the Andes, for they offer a model to Guamán Poma for eliciting information and even for inventing the scene in which he instructs the king. Adorno writes that “Guamán Poma’s defense of his race is a direct reaction to the biases expressed in [the] doctrinal texts” (66), texts circulating in the Andes at the time of the Third Council in which the intellectual potential of Andeans is denigrated by none other than Acosta.

There is no doubt that Guamán Poma was also keenly aware of Las Casas’s position regarding the problematic justification for imperial rule and the natural intelligence and ethics of Indian societies. Like Garcilaso and Las Casas, he had no choice but to seek refuge under the umbrella of providential history and thus accept the king’s legitimate authority to govern. This move left open the possibility of demanding good government.

In conclusion, if, as it has been argued by Mendizabal, Botherston, and Brokaw, Guamán Poma worked from the cognitive order of the khipu, from the Andean ontology of numbers and the art of rectification (Brokaw, 2002: 293), perhaps we could say – as with the Cuzco school of painting – that we are confronting something new – modern – in the history of the world inaugurated by the year 1492. Perhaps we could suggest that it is the Andean structure of knowledge that allows him to dismantle European discourses, locate the fragile seems that hold the parts together, break the fragments, and reassemble them into new series with new semiotic relations, as he does in the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno. Perhaps we could say that in a perverse way, the urgent need to respond to the destructuration of the self–world, the vital impulse to retreat from agony, allowed Garcilaso and Guamán Poma – from their respective subaltern subject positions – to hone the subject position and discursive perspective that would allow them to redefine the polemic for the postcolonial world.