Reading the Illegible: Indigenous Writing and the Limits of Colonial Hegemony in the Andes 081654753X, 9780816547531

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READING THE ILLEGIBLE

LAURA LEON LL E R E N A

READING THE ILLEGIBLE Indigenous Writing and the Limits of Colonial Hegemony in the Andes

The University of Arizona Press www.uapress.arizona.edu We respectfully acknowledge the University of Arizona is on the land and territories of Indigenous peoples. Today, Arizona is home to twenty-two federally recognized tribes, with Tucson being home to the O’odham and the Yaqui. Committed to diversity and inclusion, the University strives to build sustainable relationships with sovereign Native Nations and Indigenous communities through education offerings, partnerships, and community service. © 2023 by The Arizona Board of Regents All rights reserved. Published 2023 ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-4753-1 (hardcover) ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-4754-8 (ebook) Cover design by Leigh McDonald Cover art: Quipus 20B, Codice Sul Volo Degli Ucceli E Sugli Annodamenti Di Leonardo by Jorge Eduardo Eielson, courtesy of Martha L. Canfield Typeset by Leigh McDonald in Warnock Pro 10.5/14 and High Tower Text (display) Publication of this book is made possible in part by support from Durham University and by the proceeds of a permanent endowment created with the assistance of a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Leon Llerena, Laura, 1976– author. Title: Reading the illegible : indigenous writing and the limits of colonial hegemony in the Andes / Laura Leon Llerena. Description: Tucson : University of Arizona Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022014544 (print) | LCCN 2022014545 (ebook) | ISBN 9780816547531 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780816547548 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Quechua language—Writing—History. | Quechua language—Peru—History. | Quechua language—Peru—Texts. | Quechua Indians—Peru—Huarochirí—Manuscripts. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Indigenous Studies | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social Classification: LCC PM6302 .L46 2023 (print) | LCC PM6302 (ebook) | DDC 898/.323—dc23/ eng/20220714 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022014544 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022014545 Printed in the United States of America

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

Introduction. “Writing Is a Strange Thing”: Making the Case for Legibility 1.

vii ix

3

Reading Through the Eyes of an Extirpator of Idolatries

19

2. The Absent Knot: Narrating and Counting in the Andes

64

3.

Writing in Quechua, Reading in Spanish

4. “We Christians”: Andeans Rewriting Christianity

100 145

Conclusions

176

Notes References Index

181 225 243

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

An Andean authority writing down a petition on behalf of a commoner. Alphabet and syllabary (right) included with doctrinal materials (left). Title page of Verdadera relación de la conquista del Perú by Francisco de Xerez (Seville, 1534). Andean knotted cord or quipu, made of cotton, c. 1400–1532. Folio from the legal process brought by Huarochirí locals against Father Ávila. Title of HM’s chapter 3 in Quechua with what looks like the later addition of a title in Spanish on top. Title page of Francisco de Ávila’s incomplete Tratado y relación de los errores (1608). Opening folio (untitled) of the Huarochirí manuscript. Qorikancha wall drawn in the Relación de antigüedades by Joan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti. Title page of Nueva corónica y buen gobierno by Guaman Poma. Huarochirí manuscript detail of cross drawn at the beginning of Choque Casa’s story. An Andean administrator of resources holding a quipu and a book.

47 54 57 66 95 105 118 128 151 156 157 163

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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owes its existence to the intellectual generosity, unflinching friendship, encouragement, and patience of many across borders. It was in a memorable history class taught by Luis Millones Santagadea at Universidad de San Marcos that I read the Huarochirí manuscript for the first time in José María Arguedas’s enthralling translation to Spanish. Carmen Cazorla and Ladislao Landa patiently taught me Quechua as we read together the manuscript in its original language, not an easy task. Thanks to Aurelio Ramos Antiporta’s kindness I was able to explore the beautiful Huarochirí landscape that animates many of the stories of the anonymous Quechua document. As years went by, stimulating conversations with Jussara Menezes Quadros, Paul Firbas, Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, the late Ricardo Piglia, Arcadio Díaz Quiñones, and Antonella Romano prepared the ground for this book. Sincere thanks to the staff at the archives and libraries in Lima, Sucre, La Paz, Madrid, Berlin, Chicago, and Providence that patiently took care of my requests and suggested sources that would let me retrace the paper and ink universe of early modern Peru. I am particularly grateful to Laura Gutierrez Arbulú, former director of the Archivo Arzobispal de Lima, and to Carla Rahn Phillips at the Newberry Library for teaching me how to decipher colonial scribes’ use of Latin script and how to approach HIS BOOK

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

calculations with Roman numerals from a different perspective. Uninterrupted research and writing time were facilitated by generous longterm fellowships at the Dahlem Humanities Centre, Berlin (Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Volkswagen Stiftung), as well as the John Carter Brown Library (Donald L. Saunders fellowship). I would like to thank especially Neil Safier, former director of the JCB, for fostering a stimulating intellectual environment that welcomed me and the fabulous cohort of researchers with whom I shared texts, ideas, and good food. I see no need to apologize for not having English as my native language, but I do want to sincerely thank all those who helped make this book a bit more legible. I remain thankful to all those who took the time to read the manuscript at different stages of its development and helped me sharpen arguments, explain things more clearly, avoid baroque syntax, and understand how a book is conceived in English-speaking academia. Among them, Joanne Rappaport, Leonardo Carrió Cataldi, Marta Ortíz Canseco, Yamile Silva, Esperanza López Parada, Michelle Molina, Kelly Wisecup, Gonzalo Lamana, and Nathalie Bouzaglo. Gratitude is a term that does not fully capture what I would like to convey towards my Andeanist gang in Chicago, Mary Weismantel and Walther Maradiege, who kept me going even when the going got tough. Likewise, my Newcastle/Durham pandemic bubble without whose encouragement and a “patadita” this book would have never made it to print: Rosi H. Song, Duncan Black, Marc Schachter, Adam Talib, Zoe Roth, Emily Rohrbach and William Schaefer. Long before the pandemic and through it, I have had the good fortune of receiving unending support from my family and friends in Lima, Buenos Aires, London, Florence, and Madrid. Kristen Buckles, editor-in-chief at the University of Arizona Press, and her amazing team were key in turning my manuscript into a book. I also want to thank Rome Hernández Morgan for her careful and thoughtful copyediting and Andrew Ascherl for writing the index. The detailed and constructive criticism of two anonymous readers selected by the UAP were crucial in giving this book its final shape. I would like to dedicate this book to three resilient women whom I admire for more reasons than could be listed here: Lourdes Llerena Butrón, Silvia Chambilla, and Regina Grafe.

READING THE ILLEGIBLE

INTRODUCTION “WRITING IS A STRANGE THING” Making the Case for Legibility

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a book that begins with one very singular book, one with no title nor date of creation, and which does not disclose for whom it was written. We do not know the identity of its author(s). It has survived as a fifty-folio manuscript written almost exclusively in Quechua, one of the most widely spoken Indigenous languages in the Andes. The narratives it contains reveal that it was created by Indigenous Andeans of Huarochirí, a province in the proximity of Lima, the capital of the viceroyalty of Peru, sometime between the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century. It is generally known as the Huarochirí manuscript.1 The manuscript has long been considered unique. Almost all surviving texts written in Quechua at the time were part of the evangelization effort. The Catholic Church had adopted one variety of the Quechua language—there were many—as the linguistic tool used in the evangelization of Indigenous peoples. The particular kind of Quechua that was regulated by the Church through grammars, vocabularies, catechisms, and other evangelization texts had become by the 1580s a language of educated ecclesiastics, taught at university and in the seminaries of the ecclesiastical orders, and turned into “a game for lettered men.”2 HIS IS

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INTRODUCTION

Indigenous Andeans had no say in that transformation of their spoken language into a written one. The Huarochirí manuscript (HM) does not fit into the genre of Churchsponsored Quechua writings. It is, instead, one of a very small number of non-evangelization texts written in that language at the time. Leading scholars have so far identified only twelve mundane texts, from wills to letters and petitions, written in Quechua by Indigenous peoples in the colonial period.3 The HM is the only book-length one. The contrast between the Andes and Mesoamerica could not be more pronounced. There is an abundant corpus of non-ecclesiastical texts written in Mesoamerican languages in the colonial period, two thousand in the Maya language alone.4 The scarcity of such writings in the Andean region has long puzzled scholars raising important issues about the social role of Quechua and of alphabetic writing in the colonial Andes.5 Writing progressively became the backbone of the spiritual and earthly colonial reorganization. Yet, in the Andes, the European media vied for preeminence with one of the most important Indigenous modes of inscription, the system of knotted cords known as quipu. At the time of creation of the HM, Indigenous people of Huarochirí continued using quipus while appropriating writing in Quechua and Spanish, as a tool among others, to define their own place in their own terms within the colonial order. How do we read an exceptional document such as the Huarochirí manuscript? “Any document, even the most anomalous, can be inserted into a series; but not only that: it can, if properly analyzed, shed light on a still-broader documentary series.”6 These words by Carlo Ginzburg, well-known for his deep involvement with Italian microstoria, offer one interesting inroad to this question. As Ginzburg and his fellow microhistorians have shown brilliantly, an in-depth study of one anomalous case placed into its proper context can be enormously fruitful. Every anomaly contains the norm; in fact, it helps us to make implicit norms visible.7 Yet as much as I agree with Ginzburg’s insight into the relation between the norm and the exception, I would suggest that the Huarochirí manuscript and the other documents that I study in this book to contextualize it, should in fact be thought of as the “exceptional normal.”8 I appropriate this expression from Edoardo Grendi because it opens up the possibility to account for an additional complication in the Andes of

INTRODUCTION

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the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In the period under study, I argue, there was not yet a clear definition of the social role of writing. Instead, there were several coexisting, sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory, uses of writing. The HM is exceptional to us. But it was part and parcel of a process of cultural encounter and the establishment of colonial hegemony, in which some norms were still to be defined. My strategy in this book is to put together on an imaginary long table the Huarochirí manuscript and a series of contemporaneous written documents that constitute its context. Some were owned by the same person who also owned the HM, Father Francisco de Ávila (c.1573–1647). Others attest to the interaction between Ávila and Indigenous parishioners of Huarochirí and nearby areas where the priest worked at the turn of the seventeenth century. The objective is not just to gain a better understanding of the HM. Instead, I want to lift the gaze from the HM to understand better why this exceptional document has become a serious challenge to the history of alphabetic writing in the Andes.9 That means we have to question not only the linguistic characteristics of the manuscript but we have to go beyond and interrogate the very notions of literacy, alphabetic writing, the materiality of written documents, and the social role of those who wrote and read them within the Andean world of the early colonial period. Early colonial Peru was an emergent society in which a polyphony of modes of communication competed with and complemented alphabetic writing—often on the same page. Text and image; Spanish, Quechua, and Latin; Arabic and Roman numerals; and the quipu cords were part of a complex landscape of production of knowledge and power. In order to analyze Indigenous uses of one of these modes of communication, such as alphabetic writing, it needs to be placed within the wider landscape. Therefore, this book argues for the pertinence of thinking about Indigenous uses of alphabetic writing in terms of legibility rather than literacy. In this book, legibility is understood to encompass both the ability to read a particular technique of inscription (Latin script) and the understanding of a set of cultural and social expectations necessary to unlock the meaning of the inscribed. It allows us to give a decolonial twist to Levi-Strauss’s observation that in the hands of the Nambikwara peoples of Brazil, “writing is a strange thing.” The transformation of a mode of

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INTRODUCTION

inscription that was familiar to him into a strange practice in the hands of natives that the anthropologist characterized as “still in the period of the stone age” had to do with their being outside the western logic of literacy.10 Rather than exoticize writing, legibility allows us to recuperate the multiplicity of ways in which one medium, such as writing, could be used to communicate (in the act of writing) and differentiate it from the social role that, symbolically and materially, its users assigned to it. The notion of legibility opens up the possibility to understand how Indigenous peoples, whose societies before European contact were characterized by multimedia and multilingual dynamics, made sense of and produced meaning with a new media introduced in the Americas in the process of European colonization.11 Legibility invites us to historicize the uses of writing and how its social functions and legitimacy were not established straightaway. Instead, they were forged in a long period of colonial power struggles, in which Indigenous peoples and their own modes of communication and inscription played a role that needs to be recuperated. Legibility contributes to the study of the social roles of writing in the colonial Andes in three ways. First, in a context where Andean and nonnative systems of recording and decoding information coexisted and interacted, legibility discerns the ways in which Andeans and colonizers constantly renegotiated the social role assigned to writing vis-à-vis native media (i.e. quipu). Since the second half of the twentieth century, scholarship has critically moved away from an evolutionary understanding of media that placed alphabetic writing as the civilizational end-point.12 My stance builds on this scholarship but seeks to move beyond it by providing a common framework within which to study different contemporaneous media. Second, the notion of legibility recuperates the multiplicity of ways in which one medium could be used to produce meaning. This allows me to show how different legibilities could be conferred upon the same medium (for example, alphabetic writing) and why some texts, such as the Huarochirí manuscript, became “illegible” for some readers. This approach goes beyond the question of commensurability and incommensurability in an intercultural contact zone. Third, legibility stresses the relevance of disentangling media and the social role of their materiality from the process of sense-making. It

INTRODUCTION

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historicizes the discussion about writing and hegemony by paying close attention to the cultural practices of Andean society. I build on work that has pointed out the epistemological strategies deployed by Europeans to explain, without being able to decode, quipus and their functions in Indigenous society in spite of their material unlikeness to alphabetic writing. Europeans even managed to turn quipus into a functional tool of colonial administration even though they were unable to understand or reproduce them.13 Finally, legibility also allows me to take a critical distance from notions of literacy that presume an unambiguously established social role of writing in Europe. It enables me to question the idea that ready-made European sense-making with writing was simply transplanted to the New World and that it was from the outset an unchallenged tool of colonial hegemony. This book engages scholarship across literature, anthropology, history, and Indigenous studies that places the introduction of alphabetic writing at the heart of our understanding of colonialism and the transformation of Indigenous societies in the Americas. Especially in the field of Latin American studies, scholars continue to debate implicitly and explicitly Angel Rama’s foundational and influential essay, The Lettered City (1984). Rama argued that the medium in itself was a crucial tool for the Spanish Empire to colonize materially and symbolically vast and diverse human landscapes of the Americas. In his Foucauldian elucidation, by the final third of the sixteenth century, writing had facilitated the control of space—with the founding of cities and consequent reorganization of centers of power—and established cultural, political, and economic hegemony in its American colonies. Rama identified the “letrados,” the European and Euro-descendant lettered elite associated with state institutions, as those whose command of Spanish and Latin languages and whose ability to transit the discursive genres of Empire (legal, poetic, religious, etc.) turned them into key players in the articulation of the lettered city. The letrados were more than simple bureaucrats who executed orders. They were intellectual producers who shaped colonial ideology in their written practice. Central to this was, indeed, the superiority of writing which “took on an almost sacred aura [ . . . ] where it remained so rare and so closely linked to royal authority.”14

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INTRODUCTION

Walter Mignolo’s The Darker Side of the Renaissance (1995) inquired deeper into the link between colonization and a European notion of literacy that took paper, books, writing, and maps as superior vehicles for and symbols of knowledge. Mignolo argued that the intellectual assumptions carried by Europeans to America were shaped by Renaissance philosophies of language and writing and denied the coevalness of Amerindian cultural practices and ways of knowing. Through written documents and maps, Europeans simultaneously produced knowledge about the New World while colonizing Indigenous languages, memory, and space.15 Rama’s and Mignolo’s works have served in my book as strong reminders for how notions of literacy and of knowledge took shape on the eastern side of the Atlantic. But as I show in chapter 1, it is problematic to assume that European written culture was already an established epistemological space, particularly within the context of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Europe. Furthermore, studies by Burns, Charles, Rappaport, and Rappaport and Cummins have more recently moved away from writing’s “sacred aura” and instead analyze more quotidian and diverse practices of writing in colonial Spanish America.16 Going beyond the realm of the letrados, these studies have shown how alphabetic literacy practices allowed Andeans to address, question, and negotiate various spheres of colonial power. The set of texts analyzed in this book reflects this vividly. Closely related to this body of literature, my book has also benefited from the comparative approaches in the discussion of Indigenous appropriation of alphabetic writing to produce knowledge and to articulate Indigenous identities in colonial Peru and Mexico, the largest political and economic units in the colonial Spanish Americas.17 Hemispheric studies on Native American modes of communication and inscription have invited us to consider a wider context of communication practices, dissolving the unproductive dichotomy of oralityliteracy.18 This is an important critique of the evolutionary history underlying definitions of alphabetic writing. Studies about Ojibwa birchbark scrolls, the Mesoamerican codices, Native North American wampum, and the Andean quipus have shown how the processes of production of meaning were directly linked to the social role and legitimacy that each media had in the society where it was functional.19 Crucially, these studies have placed much emphasis on the materiality and the process of

INTRODUCTION

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production of those objects that eventually became conveyors of information. In that sense, Warkentin’s use of “objects of knowledge transfer” to refer to these diverse media is extremely illuminating.20 In the field of Latin American studies, there has been an inclination to vindicate Indigenous media and to revalue Indigenous uses of writing by labeling them “writing without words” and “alternative writing.”21 Warkentin’s less catchy term, by contrast, calls attention to how “unlikeness” among the various Indigenous media in the Americas, as well as their material difference from the European book, strongly require us to acknowledge that media are indeed objects whose role is socially and historically constructed.22 It also helps dispel any unconscious urge to replicate Christopher Columbus’s renaming of the island of Guanahani into San Salvador. We may rename quipu as “Andean writing,” but in so doing we would just recolonize the Andean mode of knowledge keeping. From the Andean studies side, Cummins reminds us that while the social life of objects begins with the act of creation, an object can transform into an intermediary of social relations, “perhaps even participating equally in the formulation of those relations.”23 In a colonial context where social relations of colonized peoples were profoundly disturbed and reframed, how would Indigenous people use an object such as writing—in its material form of ink and paper—to formulate their relations among themselves and toward the colonizers? New scholarship has also shed light on the complex issue of Indigenous writing as an instrument of mediation vis-a-vis those texts that had limited or no circulation at the time of their creation. In the case of the Andes, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega is a prime example of an author whose texts circulated widely. He remains to this day one of the beststudied authors of Spanish Peru. Born in the former capital of Inca Empire, Cuzco, the mestizo (mixed race) Garcilaso wrote the widely circulated two-volume Comentarios Reales de los Incas (Royal Commentaries of the Incas, 1609, 1616) in Spain, where he lived from a young age to the end of his life. Addressing Spaniards, mestizos, and Andeans, Garcilaso revised versions written previously by Europeans about Inca history and culture in a “vast enterprise of exegesis and interpretation” which relied on his authority as a cultural mediator.24 Yet his intellectual models as well as his conceptualization of language—writing in Spanish but presenting his knowledge of Quechua as an advantage over

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INTRODUCTION

European authors—and his notion of literacy were shaped by Renaissance humanism and imperial ideologies.25 These elements made Garcilaso’s interpretation of Indigenous culture legible in his time and beyond. All of these elements though also place Garcilaso and his writings beyond the scope of this book except for a very brief analysis of how his Comentarios influenced one reader’s understanding of Andean culture in colonial Peru (chapter 1). Unlike the Comentarios, the Huarochirí manuscript (c.1598–1608), written in Quechua, El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (c.1615), written in Spanish by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, and the Relación de antigüedades deste reyno del Pirú (c. 1613), also in Spanish by Joan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti, circulated little or not at all at the time of their creation. It took a long time for them to be considered objects of serious scholarly inquiry. They are the only extant book-length texts authored by Andean people in the early colonial period and had become almost illegible after their creation. It has taken a persistent effort from scholars since the late nineteenth-century to turn attention to these rediscovered Indigenous texts.26 By contrast, Garcilaso’s Comentarios started circulating beyond Spain soon after its publication. In the twentieth century Garcilaso was, as those of us who attended school in Peru in the 1980–1990s can attest, solidly established as an example of what an Andean could achieve with a masterful command of alphabetic writing and of Spanish language. The Comentarios’ textbook version was (hopefully no longer is) presented as a compelling account of the transition from one empire (the Inca) to the next (the Spanish), which foregrounded the Spanish colonization of Indigenous Andean peoples as an almost harmonious process of building an identity functional to the modern Peruvian nation state—a nation state that until the 1970s did not recognize any language but Spanish as its official language.27 An explanation for the very different trajectories that the texts by Garcilaso, Guaman Poma, Pachacuti, and the anonymous author(s) of Huarochirí had in the construction of a corpus of knowledge about colonial Peru is the fact that only Garcilaso’s was printed while the rest remained in manuscript form. Yet studies of colonial era manuscripts written by Europeans and Euro-descendants have shown how widely those could circulate and influence contemporary and later writers even if they were

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never mechanically reproduced.28 The reasons for the long silence of Andean voices were not technological. From the second half of the twentieth century, pioneering scholarship has focused on Indigenous manuscripts and opened the way to rethink their limited circulation in terms of coexisting but diverging literacy practices. Studies by Adorno, López-Baralt, Quispe-Agnoli, Duviols, Harrison, Taylor, and Salomon, to name but a few, have crucially contextualized Indigenous authors’ relation to colonial written and visual culture.29 In the 1580s Spaniards had already identified “indios ladinos” as a social category that included literate and mostly bilingual “Indians” whose acquired skills with alphabetic writing allowed them to work as translators, assistants to colonial officials, and even hold newly created colonial offices in their own communities such as village council scribes.30 But, as this interdisciplinary body of scholarship has shown, not everybody shared a common understanding of the way in which writing and language (in Spanish and Quechua) were meant to produce meaning in terms of communication and in the articulation of social relations. There were coexisting legibilities. I want to emphasize what may seem a superfluous but constantly noted characteristic of Garcilaso’s Comentarios: it is “well-written.” “Well-written” means that a text follows a discursive and chronological organization of events that coincides with a European notion of literacy and of history. Father Ávila owned both texts, the Huarochirí manuscript and Garcilaso’s Comentarios written around the same time. After reading the HM, he could not help but note that the stories incorporated in the Quechua text authored by Indigenous Andeans were “notable nonsense” and that he had “not been able to find out the order and sequence [of events].”31 Raúl Porras Barrenechea, one of the most important Peruvian historians of the twentieth century, echoed Ávila’s unease with Indigenous people taking to writing unrequested texts even if it happened to be one of the rare book-length texts they produced in colonial times. Of Guaman Poma’s Nueva Coronica, Porras stated that its “tangled ideas and information, and its disorganized and barbarous style and syntax” made of the text “pure mental confusion.”32 Porras, as Adorno elegantly noted, “was no admirer of the chronicler’s literary accomplishment,” which went hand in hand with the modern historian’s effort to deny the value of Guaman Poma’s eyewitness account.33

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INTRODUCTION

Granted, it is easy to criticize an early twentieth century reading of a seventeenth century manuscript whose context of production has only in recent years begun to be understood. In the three centuries that separate Porras’s reading from Guaman Pomas’s writing, the social roles of writing and literacy practices certainly changed. Yet, as we will see, already in the colonial period there were coeval understandings of the role that writing had in society, various literacy practices and, thus, different notions of the legibility of writing. My claim builds on the network of documents that link the Huarochirí manuscript with Father Ávila and the inhabitants of Huarochirí, Guaman Poma, and Pachacuti. I take advantage of the fact that the HM is the only one of the three manuscripts that documents in itself how it was read by a colonizer and how those who created it wanted it to be read. The HM provides a striking insight of competing legibilities: Ávila read the text and left marginal notes, the anonymous scribe’s reactions to them are inscribed in the text, and Ávila’s way of making sense of the Quechua manuscript is captured in his incomplete translation to Spanish. The survival of this exceptional sequence tells us much about what each actor thought the norms of writing were—their notions of literacy—and the social role that they imagined for writing as a practice and as an object, that is, the legibility of alphabetic writing. It reminds us that “continuity of words does not necessarily mean continuity of meanings.”34 My study of the Huarochirí manuscript has only been possible thanks to the extensive studies undertaken since the second half of the twentieth century by ethnolinguists, historians, and anthropologists, whose works I engage with extensively throughout the book.35 This scholarship has provided invaluable understandings of the ways in which the power imbalance of the larger colonial context and the local characteristics of Catholic evangelization frame the creation of the HM. Yet, there has been a notable tendency to echo a legibility of the HM that corresponds to colonial and nineteenth-century notions of literacy and authorial attribution. I argue that this is rooted in the appealing narrative reconstruction that Francisco de Ávila wrote for posterity about the Indigenous peoples of Huarochirí from a doubly privileged and largely unquestioned locus of enunciation: from his role as priest devoted to extirpating Indigenous idolatries and his status as a lettered man.

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Born in Peru a few decades after the Spanish conquest, Ávila’s career as a priest in parishes for Indigenous Andeans and his accomplishments within the lettered culture of the time exemplify, as I show in chapter 1, the intertwining between colonization, Catholic evangelization, and the introduction of alphabetic writing. And yet, as discussed in chapters 2 and 3, obtaining a bachelor’s degree and, later, a doctorate in canon law from the University of San Marcos in Lima could not help him understand the various ways in which his Indigenous parishioners appropriated alphabetic writing and the social role they endowed to the new media. Ávila could make no claims to being part of the colonial elites. Born in Cuzco, the capital of the former Inca empire, he was at times unfavorably identified as a mixed blood, a mestizo, due to lack of clarity about his racial background.36 However, literacy and fluency in one of the major native Andean languages, Quechua, opened to him the possibility of social mobility at a time when colonial society was still largely in the process of being organized. Under Spanish control since 1533, Cuzco was a city located on the frontier between the Andes mountain range and the Amazon jungle.37 The remains of impressive pre-Hispanic stone buildings conveyed, like a petrified book, the conceptions of the sacred that articulated Inca cosmovision and served as a reminder of the task that lay ahead for colonizers pushing for cultural conversion of the colonized.38 Almost three decades after the beginning of Spanish colonization, Quechua was still the prevalent language in Cuzco, as it had been during Inca times. Approximately five hundred Spaniards and sixty thousand Andeans inhabited the hectic and multilingual city at that time.39 Cuzco remained an important city for Spaniards until 1543, when the city of Lima—founded in 1535 by the conquistadors in the central coast—became the capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru and the Catholic Church’s central see of the vast Peruvian territory.40 Lima’s political and economic power was cemented a few years later, when it became the first city in South America to have a functioning university and a movable type printing press.41 Ávila learned Latin and attended lectures on arts and theology in the school that the Jesuits set up in Cuzco, and later pursued and obtained a university degree in Lima.42 In 1596 he was ordained as secular priest and started his ecclesiastical career as priest for the Indigenous inhabitants of Huarochirí.43 But, as I show in more detail in various sections

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of this book, Ávila’s complicated and sometimes testy relations with his Huarochirí parishioners have to be analyzed in relation to shifts in geopolitical power in colonial Peru and a major change in the direction that the Church took regarding the evangelization of Indigenous Andeans. Following the Spanish conquest of Peru in 1532 and up until the 1580s, missionaries had approached Indigenous Christianization with diverse strategies that opened up cultural bridges. In the “first evangelization,” as scholars label the period, the aim was to inquire into Andean culture, with priests favoring, if not encouraging, the adaptation of Christian concepts and rituals to Indigenous languages and cultural practices. Andeans, as will be discussed, were legitimized as agents of their own conversion. But by the 1580s, a second stage of evangelization, influenced by the fears of Counter-Reformation Europe, put an end to the dialogic project of Christianization in the Andes. A centralized and unified strategy of indoctrination that included a tight control of the use of Indigenous languages and translation practices sought primarily to avoid syncretism and limit interpretations of Catholicism. Priests were then encouraged to acquire knowledge of Indigenous culture in order to delegitimize it. This time, Andeans’ agency was expected to consist of their own denunciation of surviving idolatrous beliefs and rituals.44 Just as these changes were taking place, Ávila was ordained as secular priest in 1596 and, shortly after, appointed to the San Damián de Checa parish, which oversaw an important reducción (resettlement of Indigenous people also known as an “Indian town”) in the Huarochirí province, within the jurisdiction of the Archdiocese of Lima.45 The parishes of Huarochirí were among the richest ones of the archdiocese and the Jesuits had already established a mission there in 1570.46 By 1607 a significant number of Huarochirí locals, including those from Ávila’s parish, brought more than one hundred serious charges against the priest. The legal dossier that documents the two-year judicial process has been studied fragmentarily as a portrayal of the abusive economic relations endured by Indigenous people. The economic aspect, as I argue in chapter 2, is but one dimension revealed through the legal procedure. I reconstruct the detailed portrayal of cultural, and even moral, dynamics that shaped the negotiation of power, including the views held by Huarochirí peoples of what their Catholic evangelization should be and the missional shortcomings of their priest, Father Ávila. Huarochirí peoples’ contrasting

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views reveal how they conceived of social interactions in relation to alphabetic writing, quipus, Spanish, Quechua, and numeracy. Around the time of the legal process against Ávila, anonymous hands were writing down elaborate narratives about the effects that the colonial hierarchies of language and knowledge had on the ways in which people of Huarochirí made sense of their past and their present. Not being inscribed within legal discourse nor the language of denunciation, the stories and profound reflections conveyed in the Huarochirí manuscript were not quite accessible to Father Ávila. He read it and partially translated it, instead of destroying it as he did with Indigenous cultural objects that he and the Catholic church had delegitimized with the label of “idolatrous.” The materiality of idolatry could not, at least in Ávila’s view it seems, take the form of ink, paper, and alphabetic writing. Yet, while it was Ávila who preserved the Huarochirí manuscript for posterity, he was also the initiator of a process of decontextualization that transformed the Indigenous text into an illegible artifact from its time of creation until the present day. Ávila’s incomplete translation into Spanish of the first seven chapters of the HM not only foregoes mentioning that an Indigenous text was its original source, but also pushes Indigenous knowledge into the frame of orality and superstitions. The title of his unfinished version of the HM provides a transparent declaration of his intentions: Treatise and Account of the Errors, Fake Gods, and other Superstitions, and Diabolical Rituals Held in Ancient Times by the Indians of the Provinces of Huarochirí, Mama, Chaclla, and to this Day they Live Deceived With Great Loss of Their Souls.47 Almost three hundred years later, Ávila’s version would become the first print edition of Huarochirí peoples’ narratives, one in which Indigenous authorship and their understanding of the social role of writing were erased.48 The original Quechua manuscript survived, but the perspective that it provides about the history of alphabetic writing and the process of colonization has been muddled by the notion of literacy that has been imposed on it since Ávila’s time and taken up by modern day scholars. The priest did not establish an explicit link between the Quechua manuscript—whose existence he never mentioned—and an author, but in identifying and telling the story of one of his close Indigenous allies, Don Cristobal Choque Casa, he presented Indigenous literacy as a tool for mediation and collaboration with the colonizer.

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In the preface to his two-volume book of sermons (Lima, 1648), Ávila reminisced about his days in the parish in Huarochirí, and the protagonist role that he had in uncovering and extirpating idolatries.49 He indicates though that it was the confession of “an indio principal [Andean noble or office holder], very religious, who lives to this day, and is called Don Christobal Choqueccaca [Choque Casa], from San Damián” who led him to discover the continuity of idolatries.50 Choque Casa wrote a brief text in defense of the priest during the two-year long legal process. But Choque Casa was not the only one in Huarochirí who was literate. Three centuries later, the Quechua manuscript is usually described as a project encouraged by Father Ávila, while the authorship of the text is attributed to Choque Casa.51 But the Quechua manuscript turned out to be an “obstinate thing” that resists a colonial notion of literacy: it refuses to be a text of denunciation of Indigenous culture nor does it unproblematically embrace Christian evangelization.52 Instead, it presents an understanding of literacy in relation to colonization and Indigenous culture that contrasts that of a lettered man like Ávila.

CHAPTER SUMMARIES Chapter 1 sheds light into the largely unacknowledged roles that Andeans played in the construction of a colonial body of knowledge. Mostly as objects of study but also as subjects that produced texts, Indigenous Andeans surreptitiously inhabited the lettered world of Francisco de Ávila. The secular priest of Indigenous parishes was notable not only for the violence of his campaigns to extirpate idolatries but also for his library, one of the largest private collections in the Spanish American colonies. An analysis of the manuscript documents, translations, his published book of sermons, and the inventory of his printed book collection demonstrates the ways in which a wide variety of texts that went well beyond pastoral concerns shaped this priest’s interaction with his Indigenous parishioners. My analysis of written culture breaks away from a history of the book approach that considers Spanish American libraries as confirmation of a unidirectional knowledge transfer that shaped colonial dynamics.53 The chapter argues that the edifice of letters imposed limits to what could be legible, and thus relevant, about Indigenous culture

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from the point of view of a European notion of knowledge. But, even more critical, it marginalized and eventually rendered invisible Andeans’ uses of writing and their written production of knowledge. Chapter 2 approaches colonial legibility through a close reading of judicial sources that demonstrate how the legitimacy of quipu and writing in the context of economic and power struggles between Andeans and non-natives hinged on the legibility that each side attributed to these media. The core of this chapter is the 144-folio legal dossier of charges made between 1607 and 1609 by various Huarochirí communities against their priest, the very same Francisco de Ávila, and his subsequent counteroffensive. The chapter shows colonial officers’ narrow ideas of how the knotted cords could be instrumental to their ends. Diverting from scholarship that surmises the extent to which this media was modified to suit colonial administrative purposes, this chapter argues that Andeans constantly repositioned quipu in relation to writing depending on their assessment of the power imbalance they faced in the two-yearlong negotiations with their priest.54 Their parallel uses of writing and quipu point to their conviction that both systems could be comparable as record keeping systems and yet different in the roles they had in colonial society. This chapter also analyses instances of mundane Indigenous writing, from brief notes to longer statements, which illustrate the ways in which writing was dealt with in Huarochirí and how it connected the town with the city of Lima. Chapter 3 turns directly to the Huarochirí manuscript to show that quipu was not the only illegible media for non-natives. Alphabetic writing’s legibility was also compromised when Indigenous Andeans used it to produce meaning in a way that diverged from the prescriptive colonial notion of literacy. Analyzing the structure, language, and content of the HM, the chapter argues that Indigenous appropriation of writing unwittingly subverted the colonial expectations of legibility for written Quechua. Going beyond scholarly work that has focused on the ethnolinguistic value of the text, my close reading of the document evinces Andean ideas of the social role of Quechua that differed notably from the Catholic Church’s pastoral goal for written Quechua.55 The anonymous text was penned around the same time as the litigation against Father Ávila and survived in a stash of documents that belonged to the priest. The chapter’s attention to the meaningful traces of its process of

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production and limited circulation sets a different interpretive path from the valuable historical and anthropological readings of the manuscript that have tended to isolate it from a larger web of sense-making processes.56 Comparing the Indigenous text with the priest’s reading of it, the chapter argues that the choice between writing in Spanish or Quechua exposes the distinct concepts of legibility held by Ávila and his parishioners. This chapter also tackles the question about the HM’s authorship by demonstrating how the point of view and organization of the stories can give us clues into this much debated issue. Finally, chapter 4 challenges the assumed hegemony of writing by detailing the various ways in which Indigenous Andeans articulated legibility when using the European mode of inscription. The chapter reads the Huarochirí manuscript in the mirror of the other two known booklength texts written in Spanish by Indigenous Andeans in order to highlight the crucially different attributes that contemporaneous Indigenous writers gave to this medium as a tool to redefine social and cultural categories and relations of power. The anonymous HM, the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (c.1615) by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, and the Relación de Antigüedades (c.1613–1620s) by Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti have resisted scholars’ attempts to fit them into narrative genres and categories of written knowledge shaped by a European—and colonial—notion of literacy.57 The chapter contends that these Andean writers’ stance regarding authorship and implied readership of their texts was shaped by the asymmetrical social roles they attributed to the different languages (Spanish and Quechua) and different media (Andean and non-native) that coexisted in the colonial space. Each chapter offers concise conclusions, therefore the overall conclusions are kept brief in a final section.

CHAPTER 1 READING THROUGH THE EYES OF AN EXTIRPATOR OF IDOLATRIES

T

HE PARTICULARITIES surrounding the introduction of alphabetic writing in the Andes afforded the Huarochirí manuscript its subsistence for posterity while also making it an illegible artifact. Alphabetic writing was introduced to the Andean region with the Spanish conquest in the 1530s. But this technology of communication was hardly an overnight transatlantic transplant for at least the first century after the conquest. The potential of media to become extensions of men and enforcers of their desires depends on its users. And while alphabetic writing was singled out by Spanish colonizers as a symbol of their cultural superiority to Indigenous American societies portrayed as lacking letters, not all colonizers could actually put that medium to practical use. Notoriously, Francisco Pizarro, one of the Spaniards who led the conquest of the Inca empire, could not read nor write, and yet he did understand its symbolic power. Pizarro’s illiteracy made a poor impression on the last Inca, Atahualpa, but it did not hinder conquest.1 The legitimacy of the Spanish conquest and the ensuing colonial expansion was linked to Catholic evangelization in the New World, but this was entangled with the introduction of alphabetic writing. The conversion of Indigenous inhabitants into Christians and vassals of the king

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of Spain was a central concern for the juridical, philosophical, and practical dimensions of the colonial process. The evangelization of Indigenous populations was, thus, not simply a matter of forcing them to learn the doctrine of the new religion by heart. A particularly intricate point for the conversion of Indians into Christians was imposing a role for the technology of writing in sustaining a political structure, particular modes of knowledge, and legitimizing a system of beliefs.2 Conversion was supposed to turn “barbarous” Indians into “political men” who could engage with colonial institutions and fulfill the obligations imposed on them by colonizers.3 This chapter explores one of the most outstanding private libraries in Spanish America, a collection of manuscripts, and a book of sermons, in order to piece together the entangled history of writing, religious evangelization of Indigenous peoples and colonization. The life story of the author of the sermons and owner of the library and manuscripts, secular priest Francisco de Ávila, is inextricably linked to the anonymous Huarochirí manuscript and to the conditions that made possible its creation and also saved it from destruction.4 And though there is solid scholarship about the life of Ávila, this chapter moves away from a biographical approach, instead accessing his universe of written and printed documents to trace the written culture of his time and the place that Indians were given in it. This collection of documents, I argue, also gives us an invaluable insight into the lettered world of the keeper and possibly the only non-Indigenous contemporaneous reader of the HM. While Indigenous peoples were one of the main concerns and targets of colonization and Catholic evangelization, priests were the cornerstone of any strategy in those two regards. It became clear soon enough to the higher ranks of the Catholic Church that the effectiveness and quality of evangelization depended on the training of priests, whether secular or belonging to religious orders. As agents of a specific ideological aspect of the colonial enterprise, priests needed more than knowledge of the fundaments of their faith to attempt to convert Andean neophytes into good Christians and vassals of the king. Literacy was as important as faith. Spanish speaking missionaries in early colonial Peru could not take for granted that they were preaching to the choir. Ávila summed up

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the issue in one of the sermons he designed for his own Andean choir: “Because you, my sons, are new to the knowledge of God and recently converted, and because you have no knowledge of writing and do not read books, for this reason in teaching you, we cannot explain things that are difficult or subtle [ . . . ].”5 The connection between Christianity, alphabetic writing, and books was not only crucial to an understanding and acceptance of the authority of the word of the Christian God and its materialization into the sacred scripture. European lettered culture also provided contextual background to the diverse peoples that considered themselves a part of the expanding Christian world. Ávila made that world intelligible to his parishioners through references to European culture. But to the priest, born in Peru and of uncertain ethnic origins, the political geography of the world was also only accessible through books, maps, and manuscripts that were part of his education, and those that he collected. While Jesuits had made it explicit that writing was a tool to better serve God, the same idea, as the first section of this chapter explains, animated other religious orders and ecclesiastical institutions tasked with the practical and symbolic incorporation of Peru and its inhabitants into the Christian world. The expansion of literacy impacted the circulation of information from Europe to the Americas but it also enabled the production of knowledge about the immediate context. The instrumental interest in Indigenous culture and peoples encouraged the creation of vocabularies of Indigenous languages and a chair of Quechua language in the newly founded University of Lima (1551) to educate Spanish speaking priests. The first printing press of Lima (1583) produced religious doctrinal texts translated into Indigenous languages to aid preachers. These, however, did not dispel fears about the full conversion of Indigenous peoples and how to keep them from some of the perceived dangers that the Reformation and Counter Reformation in Europe brought to Catholicism. These concerns, as explained in this section, shaped the specific missional approaches of the first and second stages of evangelization in colonial Peru (1532–1583; 1583–1649). The second section of this chapter, “The Library of an Extirpator,” zooms in on the remarkable collection of books owned by Ávila. The inventory of his library guides us into the kinds of religious and nonreligious knowledge that were configuring colonial relations at large,

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while also providing context for a community of readers that shared a sense of belonging to the broader Christian world. I argue that the ideological frame provided by such a body of written knowledge shaped the way in which priests such as Ávila engaged with Indigenous evangelization. I show how, in conveying some of that knowledge to his Andean parishioners, Ávila attempted to make the Christian world legible to them, expanding the community of readers, or rather secondhand readers, of European written knowledge. The third section of this chapter focuses on what I consider to be Ávila’s “Andean archive.” It is composed of manuscripts that range from partial to complete copies and summaries of texts. Their authors—a Spanish officer, a Spanish priest, a mestizo who wrote from Spain, Andeans, and Ávila himself—intended, from different points of view, to expand or correct the existing information about the genealogical, social, and religious aspects of Andean life. The writings of colonizers, I argue, seem particularly concerned with describing Andean media while attempting to homogenize Andean culture. The influence that the information conveyed in those texts had on Ávila materialized later in his sermons. Additionally, this section argues that Ávila’s collection of manuscripts reveal the subtle traces of Andeans who, in the role of scribes, produced some of those texts. These traces crucially uncover the difference between literacy and legibility, or between learning to employ Latin script and articulating meaning with that mode of inscription. The final section of this chapter focuses on the book of sermons that Ávila authored. His experience on the ground, preaching mostly to Andeans, overlaps in his sermonary with the world he came to know through his books and manuscripts. 6 The importance of this twovolume book of sermons, I show, goes beyond its theological content and doctrinal lessons. His Quechua-Spanish sermons, I argue, can also be taken as lessons on writing or, rather, on how the new material and symbolic order of colonial society, and the place for Indians in it, was configured by the authority of alphabetic writing. And while Ávila dutifully noted in his sermons that Andean society “lacked” writing, they also reveal the extent of his awareness of the legitimacy that quipu still had for his Andean parishioners as a mode of inscription and recording, and in configuring social relations and sustaining a particular notion of knowledge.

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THE PRIEST LEARNS TO WRITE The “spiritual conquest” of Indigenous peoples in Spanish America was quite a material challenge. Roughly between 1532 and 1583, in what historians identify as the first stage of evangelization in Peru, a limited number of ecclesiastics of different regular orders were tasked with establishing the first mission stations, monasteries, and parishes for the Christian indoctrination of Andeans.7 Yet almost immediately after the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire in 1532, the social and political upheaval brought by civil wars among conquistadors (1537–1554) and the revolt of a surviving faction of the Inca nobility that established a parallel Inca state (Vilcabamba, 1537–1572) seriously encumbered the missionaries’ work.8 These circumstances gave the process of evangelization in Peru different characteristics and challenges to that of New Spain.9 Few details remain of the pedagogical strategies and catechetical materials used in the first decades of evangelization.10 Some early missionaries reported achieving close to miraculous mass conversions and baptisms of Indigenous peoples in short periods of time. These notably repetitive and formulaic narrations were less interested in conveying accurate portrayals of the early process of evangelization in Peru than in fitting “into an existing framework of Christianization that stretched deep into the history and identity of the Roman Church.”11 What is known from that early stage is that there were a limited number of missionaries in Peru, the quality of their training was mostly lacking, and there was an absence of a unified strategy for Indigenous indoctrination. The effectiveness and quality of evangelization in Spanish America depended largely on the tools available to bridge cultural differences between priests and parishioners. Yet even priests’ ability to read and write could not be taken for granted. This was a major concern in Europe as well, especially given the central role that literacy and its far-reaching effects had in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation of Christianity (1517–1648).12 Religious and political strife at the time propelled transformations in institutions of learning in Europe that emphasized the significance of shaping and controlling literacy practices. The Society of Jesus (Jesuit order), established in 1540, placed much effort in the education of elites on both sides of the Atlantic to fend off non-Catholic views of Christianity. Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the order, referred to

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its education project as an “edifice of letters,” indicating that Jesuits had to “find the way to use writing to better comprehend and serve God.”13 But Jesuit education went beyond religious and moral teaching. Useful or prescriptive knowledge, such as mathematics and physics, was included in the curricula of their colleges. This, as Mokyr has noted, stimulated some of their students to produce innovations that were not always well regarded by the Jesuits themselves.14 Before 1545 the use of writing to better serve God had just been an aspiration for the clergy in Spain. The minimum requirements to become part of the lowest rank of Catholic priesthood had been literacy in Spanish language and knowledge of the basic prayers. After the reforms promoted by the Council of Trent (1545–1563), that is, with the beginning of Counter-Reformation, the level of training expected and received by those who joined the lower clergy in Spain increased. Parish priests were from then on required to achieve the sixteenth century equivalent of a secondary education, imparted in the new seminaries or in Jesuit colleges.15 Although the Council of Trent did not explicitly recommend higher education for parish priests, the higher ranks of the Spanish Catholic Church thought otherwise. Learning Latin was encouraged because a good number of doctrinal books were still being written in Latin rather than vernacular languages such as Spanish. The demands increased for those looking to move up the ecclesiastical hierarchy: they had to possess knowledge of Latin and of diocesan liturgy. In fact, higher ecclesiastical appointments had been given preferably to those with a university degree from the time of Isabel of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon.16 After Trent, as Sara Nalle has argued, “a university education had become so highly valued that few who lacked noble birth or a powerful patron could afford not to invest towards a degree.”17 Education would also become a worthwhile spiritual and material investment on the other side of the Atlantic. In the newly colonized territories of America, the preoccupation with the specific qualifications that priests needed was complicated by additional challenges: how would they preach to Indigenous peoples with whom they did not share a system of beliefs nor a common language? From the time of the Spanish conquest of Peru (1530s) to 1560, a total of 128 ecclesiastics of lower rank (without academic titles) emigrated from different regions of Iberia to Peru. Only twenty ecclesiastics with

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academic titles, and sixty-two titled lawyers and physicians, arrived in this period. Others who presumably had at least minimal literacy and numeracy skills, such as notaries (101) and merchants (125), disembarked in relatively large numbers.18 The colonial city of Lima was founded in 1535 and became the capital of the new Viceroyalty of Peru in 1542. In spite of the limited number of priests in those first decades, the Church saw enough urgency to organize the First Provincial Council of Lima in 1551. The ecclesiastics who attended it underlined the need for a more careful selection of priests who were to be appointed to Indigenous parishes. The authorities were specifically concerned with what hitherto had been the common characteristics of priests in Peru: lack of advanced studies of theology and ignorance of Latin (the language in which the liturgy was carried out) and of Indigenous languages. The unreliability of the messengers could engender a confusing message that, the ecclesiastical authorities feared, was contributing to doctrinal errors and encouraging syncretic beliefs among Indigenous peoples.19 How could the Church ensure that priests were qualified to preach to Andeans? That same year, the University of San Marcos was founded. The first university of the viceroyalty and of South America, San Marcos was a higher education project conceived by the Dominican order. It initially only offered courses in theology, arts, and Latin, and was geared towards those with links to the order. Francisco de Toledo, viceroy of Peru since 1569, opened the university to lay students, with the goal to reform colonial Peruvian society.20 Local elites attended San Marcos, an institution that educated the future civil and ecclesiastical officials of the viceroyalty. Andeans and those considered castas (of mixed race) were excluded from university education.21 But some who were neither Indians nor part of the local elites found a possibility for social mobility in university studies. Francisco de Ávila, born to unknown parents and suspected of being a mestizo, achieved a degree of doctor in canon law from the University of San Marcos. The title conferred on Ávila the right to be called a letrado or “man of letters,” a social distinction that in Spain and Spanish America was reserved for those who knew Latin and had obtained a law degree.22 Lettered culture was only slowly starting to take root in Peru almost two decades after the founding of the University. The Jesuit order established itself in Peru in 1569, founding soon after the Colegio San Pablo in Lima. Two years later, Father Gómez of the Jesuit college conveyed

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enthusiasm about the future of written culture, acknowledging that so far it had been all but absent: “The number of students grows every day because they are starting to like letters, which so far was not a fruit of this land; and now we have up to one hundred students with us, more than less; and we estimate that in less than a year there will be two hundred.”23 By 1582 Jesuit colleges had expanded beyond Lima to Cuzco, Arequipa, La Paz, and Potosí, the most important and densely populated cities of the viceroyalty.24 As explained before, the Jesuit college in Cuzco provided Father Ávila his early education, after which he moved to Lima in 1592 and pursued a degree at San Marcos. The order would eventually also establish formal institutions for the education of the Andean nobility in Lima and Cuzco.25 A significant shift in evangelization strategies and practices in the Andes took place around the 1580s, which scholars refer to as the “second evangelization.” This period of decisive implementation of Tridentine reform in Peru began around the time of the Third Council of Lima (1582–1583).26 The Council of Trent focused on the reform of the Church in Europe and the effects of Lutheranism and Calvinism. Emperor Charles V, by then also king of Spain, deemed it futile for bishops from the American territories to participate. Yet, Charles V’s successor, Philip II, ordered the application of Trent’s decrees throughout the Spanish possessions, encouraging their adaptation to local realities with an eye on preventing the complications of Reformation Europe.27 Acting effectively within local realities required careful fine tuning of the relation between priests and their prospective parishioners in the New World. The Catholic Church in Peru was aware that this relation was complicated on two fronts: first, the imbalance between the size of the Indigenous population and the number of priests qualified for Indigenous parishes and, second, the cultural diversity in the Andes.28 Friars from various orders who had been doing missional work for years in Peru congregated at the Third Council of Lima. Its acts called attention to the unfulfilled reforms set in the First Council. They noted that the results of fifty years of pastoral work in Peru had been meager. The Peruvian Church’s internal critique was motivated by theological but also political reasons. The pessimistic judgement about the previous decades of evangelization in Peru might have been an exaggerated claim to allow then Archbishop of Lima, Toribio de Mogrovejo, and his Jesuit

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allies to push for a series of reforms.29 Be that as it may, the end result was indeed an important transformation of the legislation and strategies for the evangelization of Indigenous Andeans along with increased power for secular clergy and the Jesuit order. By the time the Third Council took place, the Archdiocese of Lima held jurisdiction over territories in present day Ecuador, Chile, Colombia, Argentina, Bolivia, and Paraguay. The geopolitical changes that reshaped the jurisdiction of the viceroyalty of Peru and the Archdiocese of Lima in the coming decades and centuries would not, however, diminish the authority of the Third Council’s acts, which remained valid throughout Spanish South America for more than two centuries. The high-ranking ecclesiastics who attended the Third Council took up again the issue of education for prospective priests and for Indians. This time, though, it became clearer that reforms needed to be effectively made on two interrelated fronts that were as fundamental to the practical needs of colonial expansion as to the legitimacy of Christian evangelization in the New World: missionaries’ “duty of knowledge” about their parishioners’ context and the obligation to explain to Indigenous peoples what they were required to believe in. On the one hand, as Romano has argued, missionaries had the duty to produce knowledge about the new territories and their inhabitants. This demand “emerged from the metropolis, following the logic of colonial expansion, as well as from Rome, where the reappraisal of papal policy toward the growing pagan world forced the authorities to have their agents acquainted with the novelties of the New World.”30 Missionaries acted, thus, as agents of Empire (the spiritual and worldly), contributing culturally and economically to the transformation of Europe and the Americas with the creation of new knowledge that circulated in the form of various genres of texts, images, and objects.31 Much of this knowledge was the product of a dialogical relation between colonizers and colonized, though generally the latter side of the exchange was anonymized or unacknowledged.32 On the other hand, the legitimacy of the Catholic Church’s mission in Spanish America was predicated, as Durán underlined, on its duty to prepare Indigenous inhabitants “to become sufficiently educated Christians, conscious of what they were required to believe in and practice, to deserve being part of the Kingdom of God [ . . . ] avoiding, in this way, any voluntary or culpable ignorance.”33 To make “good Christians” out

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of Andeans, doctrinal education was insufficient. Christianization also meant “converting ‘barbarous’ Andeans into ‘political men,’ that is, men that could engage with institutions and obey and fulfill the social responsibilities imposed on them.”34 Evangelization, therefore, also required from priests the ability to make European and Christian culture intelligible to their Indigenous parishioners. In the first stage of evangelization in Peru, missionaries taught Christian dogma by setting analogies with elements of Indigenous culture and attempted to establish the authority of Christian doctrine by relating to Andean notions and terms that referred to the sacred. But by the time of the Third Council of Lima, there was pressure to end such strategies that favored cultural bridges, fearing that those had encouraged syncretic beliefs.35 After Trent, the struggle over the production and control of meaning and knowledge had become both a European and a colonial endeavor, deeply shaping missionary practices of the second evangelization in Peru. A number of those present at the Third Council were experts in Andean languages and knowledgeable about local cultures. They favored the design, printing, and circulation of texts that could help priests to communicate with their Andean parishioners in local languages and that would unify catechetical practices overall. Reading and writing about Andeans’ beliefs and cultural practices and prescribing ways to persuade or force them to convert to Christianity and embrace its dogma became as central as the actual preaching in the field. At this point, it was clear for the Church that language was key to understanding Indigenous beliefs and its transmission from generation to generation.36 The second stage of evangelization thus focused as well on the standardization of Quechua and Aymara, the most widely spoken languages in the Andean region. This implicated transforming them into an alphabetically written form for pastoral purposes, encased in Latin script and reshaped with Latin grammar as its model.37 Serious plans for the institutionalization of the teaching of Quechua for missional purposes had begun taking shape in the 1560s. As early as 1575, the Jesuit school of San Pablo started offering Quechua classes, and later also Aymara, which were taught to young and senior priests of the order. In 1580, a chair in Quechua language was created at the University of San Marcos.38

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Evangelization goals set by the Church relied heavily on the newly ordained priests’ ability to communicate with their parishioners in their native languages. A royal decree even forbade bishops from ordaining or giving license to preach to those priests who did not speak an Indigenous language.39 The Third Council placed attention on the rhetorical and linguistic strategies deployed in sermons addressed to Andean parishioners who were not necessarily familiar with Spanish language. Translation became fundamental to converting Indigenous peoples to Christianity, which made priests’ language skills ever more important. Bishops began to consider that priests of criollo (those born in Spanish America of Spanish parents) and mestizo descent were preferable for evangelization due to their skills with Indigenous languages.40 Before the Spanish conquest, Quechua had a central role for Inca administration of the territories and peoples under their control. It was still the most commonly spoken language in Cuzco three decades after the beginning of Spanish colonization.41 There were, and still are, various coexisting dialects of Quechua, with phonetic, lexical, and grammatical differences amongst them.42 Linguist Alfredo Torero proposed the grouping of these dialects in two large families. Quechua I, spoken on the province of Lima and on the Western slopes of the Andes, was initially taken by the colonizers as a general language (lengua general) to be used for evangelization. But in time, the prestige acquired by the city of Cuzco and its Indigenous nobility meant their local variety, Quechua II—spoken in the Northern coast and Southern territories of Peru, as well as in the territories that correspond to present day Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile—became the new general language.43 The lengua general was the variety sponsored by the Third Council of Lima as a “gold standard for language teaching and testing.”44 Under the auspices of the Council and using the newly installed printing press (1583), basic pastoral materials were printed in Spanish, lengua general Quechua, and Aymara. These trilingual publications, which included a catechism (1584), sermons (1585), and a confessional (1585), avoided translation ambivalences in the key terms and concepts of Christianity and Christian dogma.45 Notably, its authors chose a collective anonymity for the first texts to be conceived and printed in South America.46 Conceived to aid the evangelization of Andeans, these texts included descriptions and explanations of the kinds of Indigenous beliefs, rituals,

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and deities that priests had to identify and uproot. Knowledge of Indigenous practices was also vital in guiding the repression and eradication of Indigenous culture in the form of extirpation of idolatries, a practice that became institutionalized in the second evangelization. Priests had to be educated first to be able to achieve any success in the indoctrination of neophytes. Indigenous peoples were granted no say in how their own languages were to be used in their evangelization.47 Yet ecclesiastics debated about whether the chosen variety of Quechua as lengua general was one that Andean commoners could understand and thus be effective for their indoctrination.48 Anticipating such criticism, the acts of the Third Council decreed: “Because for the good and benefit of the Indians matters much that not only in the substance and form there is agreement, but also in the language and the terms [used]. Therefore [the Council] prohibits and bans that anyone produce and use an interpretation or translation in the languages of Cuzco and Aymara, both in the cartilla or Christian doctrine as in the catechism, other than the translation produced with and approved by its authority [ . . . ].”49 The Third Council also prohibited manuscript copies of those texts, controlling their circulation to keep an undistorted message.50 The demands and obligations of evangelization thus inaugurated a new chapter in the history of alphabetic written culture in the Andes where Quechua language intertwined with the history of printing press. Persuaded by the challenges faced by the monarchy’s religious obligation, the king of Spain authorized the installation in Peru of the technology of mechanical reproduction of writing. While the printing press significantly accelerated the availability and circulation of ideas that the Catholic Church considered errors, if not heresy, in Europe, its absence in Peru had, paradoxically, the same effect.51 In arguing for a license to print new pastoral materials, those gathered at the Third Council pointed out to the king that there were bound to be errors if the texts they were producing were to be copied by hand, as had been the practice with the limited printed texts that came from Europe or other missional texts written by evangelizers in the Andes. Those errors, the Council emphasized, could have drastically negative consequences for the evangelization of Indians in Peru.52 Errors—from orthography and syntax mistakes to problematic assertions that could lead to dangerous interpretations—were also almost

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unavoidable when a manuscript written in Peru had to be taken to Europe to be printed, where neither printers nor censors had knowledge of Andean languages. Domingo de Santo Tomás, a Dominican friar who lived for more than a decade in Peru and was named bishop of Charcas (present day Bolivia), authored a vocabulary and a grammar of Quechua.53 Printed in 1560 in Valladolid, they became the first print texts in Quechua language.54 But even though Santo Tomás traveled to Spain to make sure that there were no errors in the print version, a page of “errors of vocabulary that should be corrected” had to be included just before the first page of the vocabulary itself.55 As happened with any other book printed in Spanish territories within and outside Europe, Santo Tomás’s too required a license which was granted after one or more readers or censors evaluated whether a manuscript’s contents were suitable for Catholic readers.56 But there were no censors knowledgeable in Quechua who could evaluate if the analogies and explanations that the Dominican friar used to help Andean parishioners understand Catholic concepts and practices could induce them instead into dangerous doctrinal errors.57 Two decades later, the Third Council of Lima would use these arguments to criticize Santo Tomás’s texts. By then, there were enough missionaries knowledgeable of Andean languages that could act as translators and censors for the first texts to be printed in Lima.58 After the publication of the pastoral texts prepared by the Third Council, fourteen additional texts in Quechua were printed in Lima between 1586 and 1649.59 Texts in Quechua were also printed in Rome, Naples, Seville, and Valencia during this period. These were missional texts, grammars, and vocabularies of the Andean language. Print texts in Quechua were exclusively being written by non-Indigenous peoples and fundamentally for pastoral and pastoral-related (such as teaching priests the Andean language) purposes.60 By contrast, the few known cases of texts written in Quechua by native speakers are non-pastoral and all of them manuscript documents.61 This seems to suggest that written Quechua was created for an explicit pastoral purpose, as Durston has noted.62 It also has to be taken into account that the colonial administration in Peru only accepted documents written in Spanish.63 And although the official policy regarding teaching Spanish to Andeans remained fluid and a matter of debate, there was “growing pressure on the Indian population to use Spanish as its main means of communication.”64 This pressure,

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Ramos asserts, limited the services available for those who did not speak Spanish when dealing with official bureaucracy.65 This bifurcation of the social role of Quechua—doctrinal purposes and for everyday life interactions—is discussed in chapter 3. The circulation of pastoral texts produced by the Third Council after the installation of the printing press in Lima would, in theory, ease the pressure on priests who were assigned to parishes with Indigenous peoples. But could books about Indigenous languages and translations of Christian doctrine offer enough tools for priests to successfully incorporate Andeans into the Christian world? Jesuit José de Acosta, who played a crucial role in the creation of the pastoral texts promoted by the Third Council of Lima, aimed at “encapsulating America into the Christian world” in his practice and his writings, which were defined by his evangelizing experiences in Peru and New Mexico.66 On the one hand, as Romano has argued, in his Historia natural y moral de las Indias Occidentales (Seville, 1590), Acosta’s “explicit goal is to incorporate America into a new conceptual framework that would integrate Americans, their customs, their languages, and their histories.”67 This conceptual framework was based on a comparative analysis of America and Asia—Acosta read reports about Jesuit missionaries’ work in China and Japan—more interested in exploring familiarity than strangeness of non-Europeans. It tapped into the traditional map of (European) knowledge, which allowed Acosta to argue that there was no epistemological discontinuity between the ancient world and the new. That is, a European analytical framework— categories, concepts, terms—could be useful for the new territories. On the other hand, acquiring knowledge on the specific characteristics of the Indigenous peoples of America and Asia and comparing them justified and legitimized the need for diverse evangelical techniques.68 It can be argued that these ideas were propelled by the reforms undertaken in Peru by the Third Council. But how could those born in the New World who never went beyond the geographical frontiers of the viceroyalty of Peru engage in such a comparative and analytical project? Written culture was the only way to familiarize them with an expanding Christian world, as had been the case with Acosta himself and his secondhand (written) knowledge about Asia. Indeed, the Jesuit college in Lima would place much attention and effort in having a large and well-stocked institutional library. Dating back to 1568

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with the arrival of the first Jesuits to Peru, it had four thousand volumes with no duplicate titles by the beginning of the seventeenth century.69 Jesuit libraries, however, were open for their students, professors, and priests, while access was not granted to those with no links to the order.70 For those in Lima who had no access to Jesuit libraries, the growing book market offered a possibility to build their own library with all kinds of books printed throughout the Christian world. Most likely this is how Father Francisco de Ávila acquired his own copy of José de Acosta’s Historia, a treatise on tobacco and chocolate in New Spain, and three books about China, among many others.71 Ávila’s impressively large and varied book collection, which also included several volumes on the history of Europe (ancient and contemporary) was crucial for this Peruvian parish priest to understand—to educate himself on—how the Christian world was defined conceptually, culturally, and geographically.

THE LIBRARY OF AN EXTIRPATOR OF IDOLATRIES Francisco de Ávila built his own edifice of letters to educate himself but also to impart secondhand knowledge to his Andean parishioners through his Quechua sermons. Evangelization went beyond teaching doctrine. Christian dogma needed to be contextualized to assert its legitimacy over other systems of belief. That contextualization meant, on the one hand, introducing neophytes into a new world of individual and social practices legitimized by social, political, and economic colonial institutions. On the other hand, the second evangelization in Peru had little enthusiasm left for missionary attempts at reinterpreting or endowing Andean rituals and objects with new (Christian) meaning. But Indigenous objects had meaning because of their links to the landscape, to people, and to their past. Filling that void implied the introduction of new objects (churches, crucifixes, paper, ink, paintings) and the ideology and narratives that gave them meaning and function. What being a Christian and belonging to an expanding Christian world meant was not obvious. And this was true both for a priest born in Peru as for his Indigenous not-yet or not-entirely Christian parishioners. The inventory of Ávila’s earthly possessions made at the time of his death in 1647 lists 2153 titles of books with a total of 3108 volumes (some

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titles consisted of multiple volumes), of which 3061 were printed books and forty-five were manuscripts, one of the largest private libraries of its time.72 Alongside the predictable readings for a Catholic priest such as the Summa Theologica by Saint Thomas of Aquinas, the Introducción al símbolo de la fe by Fray Luis de Granada, and the publications by the Third Council of Lima, the library also contained literature considered polemic at the time.73 Ávila owned texts that were listed on the Spanish Inquisition Index of Prohibited Books.74 He was certainly aware of the Counter-Reformation book censorship; he owned a copy of the 1559 catalogue of prohibited books ordered by the archbishop of Seville and Inquisitor Fernando de Valdés.75 Those interested in reading and possessing books that were on the catalogue required a special dispensation. But the inventory of Ávila’s collection that was prepared for the auction of his possessions listed books that had been prohibited, which suggests that a number of readers in Lima were not very concerned about buying prohibited secondhand books. The number of private libraries increased noticeably from the beginning of the seventeenth century. These were usually owned by professional men and men of letters who, on average, had collections of a hundred titles.76 Although the first printing presses were established in New Spain in 1539 and in Peru in 1583, at least until mid-seventeenth century most books were imported to Spanish America from printing shops in various European cities. By mid-seventeenth century, around the time of Ávila’s death, the Tridentine Seminary of Puebla in New Spain could be counted as one of the largest institutional libraries, containing between five thousand and eight thousand volumes.77 Libraries in Spanish America were mostly institutional at first. Regular ecclesiastical orders, such as the Jesuits, had libraries for the benefit of their clergy and those preparing to be ordained, but access by others was restricted. The poor condition of some of Ávila’s books, as described in the inventory, suggests that he took advantage of the secondhand market.78 The elevated price of books in the Spanish American territories did not hinder the development of a dynamic and ever-growing market.79 Soon a secondhand market blossomed as well, with the Jesuit college of San Pablo contributing to it by selling some of its books to anyone interested in buying them.80 The inventories of possessions and wills of deceased inhabitants of the colonies indicate that readers had eclectic interests,

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including different kinds of religious literature, historical accounts, and practical knowledge manuals or scientific texts, and what we would now consider fictional literature (chivalric, satirical, erotic novels, etc.). The identity of book owners in Spanish America was also heterogenous, including archbishops, merchants, Crown officials, masons, and specifically in the Viceroyalty of Peru a curaca (Indigenous local authority), a free mulata, a self-proclaimed Indigenous chronicler, and an Indian parish priest.81 In Ávila’s library, books that dealt with orthodox or polemical issues on religious dogma stood alongside treatises on the practical application of mining, veterinary, surgery, pharmacology, and secular nonfiction titles related to philosophy, medicine, mathematics, canon and civil law, anatomy, magic and superstition, and history. His readings covered the history of the world from its beginnings to Ávila’s time, including the conquest and colonization of Mexico, Paraguay, Chile, Brazil, Guatemala and Peru. Most of the books were in Latin and Spanish, with some in Italian, and were brought to Peru from printing houses in various parts of Catholic and Protestant Europe. He also owned books in Quechua written by ecclesiastics who had done missional work in the Andes. Among them was the devotional manual Directorio espiritual (Spanish, Latin, and Quechua) by Jesuit Pablo de Prado, and the grammar Arte de la lengua Quichua by Jesuit Diego de Torres Rubio, both books printed in Lima in 1641 and 1619 respectively.82 Besides titles related to evangelization in Peru, Ávila owned a few additional titles printed in Lima such as the Miscelánea austral by Diego Dávalos y Figueroa (1602), considered one of the first literary texts written in Peru.83 He also owned a few books printed in New Spain. The Peruvian priest read about the conquest of Mexico, Mexican poetry, and a treatise that, besides describing the effects of the Mexican environment (winds, lakes, etc.) on health, also argued for the importance of astrology for the practice of medicine.84 Ávila’s ownership of a limited number of texts related to the New World printed locally or elsewhere has been characterized by Hampe as a relative lack of interest on information about Indigenous populations and the history of “his own context.”85 Hampe claims that there was a “well-established general tendency” of readers in the Spanish American territories, asserting that a noticeable increase in the export of Spanish books to Spanish America in the first half of the seventeenth century

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coincided with scarce demand in the Spanish American markets for texts on local subjects.86 However, we need to reconsider what “local” and “own context” meant in the seventeenth century for someone like Ávila, in order to understand the impact that the circulation of books, not only the printed ones, had in Spanish America. Titles in his private library dealing with explorations to Turkey and Constantinople, histories of the Moors of Spain and their rebellion in Granada, exploits of Spaniards in Flanders, books on the history of Ethiopia, England, and China, as well as the books he owned about legislation in Mexico, Manila, and the kingdom of Castile, were texts that contributed to the larger picture of a Catholic world in which religion intersected with local histories, commercial routes, legislation, and governance.87 The increased circulation of printed books from various cities in Europe to Peru also has to be placed in its proper context. The inventory of Ávila’s library lists a significant number of books printed in places other than Spain. Antwerp, Paris, Cologne, Venice, Naples, Lyon, Lisbon, Genève, were also part of the Christian—if not necessarily Catholic— world and, in some cases, under the political control of the Spanish monarchy. This was the context that Ávila was part of. Even after the first presses were installed in Peru and New Spain, and some more started functioning in other cities of both viceroyalties, the printing capacity in all of Spanish America was less than half that of contemporary Europe. Between 1539 and 1600 there were three hundred editions produced in Mexico City, with 2,007 editions added in the following century, while the printing shops in Lima produced 1,106 titles between 1584 and 1699.88 Ávila was not the only inhabitant of Peru who participated in the larger Christian world through print culture. Print shops in Lima were busy during that period reprinting texts originally printed in Europe concerning royal celebrations and political conflicts, matters that were of interest for readers in Lima.89 The number of books Ávila possessed has shifted scholars’ attention to the economic aspect of the collection. They have pondered how much the collection was worth, and how an Indian parish priest acquired the resources to finance it.90 While this is undeniably an important aspect that sheds light on economic relations in the colonial context, I focus on a less-explored side of book collecting: what it can tell us about the kinds of knowledge that were configuring colonial relations at large and,

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more specifically, how that shaped evangelization of Indigenous peoples and the relation between them and written culture. It is relevant here to underline how practical or useful knowledge was, at this time, circulating in print form almost as intensely as religious literature. We should thus consider to what extent and in which ways manuals conveying all sorts of practical information were recasting, along with theological writings and doctrinal books, the social relations of those who, like Ávila and his parishioners, lived neither in the metropolis—which would have then been Valladolid, Cadiz, or Madrid—nor in the periphery, but rather in a peripheral metropolis. Ávila was not the only reader in a peripheral metropolis, and other private collections were equally diverse in content as his.91 The diversity of topics included in those collections can also be taken as a measure of the increasing information produced in connection to missional and commercial exploration of extra European territories, the establishment of new trade routes, and colonial expansion. In other words, religious and secular texts were circulating at a faster rate and being made accessible to a wider readership. Francisco de Ávila appears to have never ventured on a sea journey nor outside the viceroyalty of Peru, and his economic interests centered on his rural parish in Huarochirí. But the priest owned and possibly read most of the titles that populated the library of a welltraveled merchant. Book owning in colonial Peru did not respond to narrowly defined personal or professional interests. Narratives of voyages to faraway places, information about commercial routes and resources, religious debates, and manuals containing practical knowledge were instead all part of a shared experience.92 It was not necessarily lived or firsthand experience, but this written knowledge shaped the lives of those who, from the periphery, took part in the Christian world. In turn, European legibility structured the way of experiencing a world that few could see with their own eyes in its entirety: a shared cultural and social ideological frame that assigned to alphabetic writing, images, and objects specific roles of inscribing information and of using those elements to construct an interpretation of the world and one’s place in it.93 Particularly remarkable is the kind of information about exploration and trade in the wider world that Ávila conveyed in the sermons that he delivered to the Indians of his parish. This shines through, for example, in

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the sermon of Dominica Cuarta Cuadragessimae, where Ávila narrated the miracle of the multiplying of fish and bread, emphasizing that Christ provided food to all humans and animals. To stress how outstanding the feat had been he enumerated all the places inhabited by humans, taking his parishioners onto an imagined trip around Spanish America and then the rest of the world: Consider and ponder how many villages may exist throughout the earth’s roundness, you, Indians, do not know a thing about this, I will tell it to you now [ . . . ]. Let’s begin in Panama, and following the sea route to here [Peru?] there are many villages, and coming the way of the Darien, we reach Quito, and from Quito we reach Chimu, which is Trujillo, and we come this way and from here we go to Chile, and from Chile to the Strait of Magellan, and then we continue turning onto Brazil, and on the same coast to the Amazon river, and turning once more towards Cartagena we end up again in Panama; this is all on the coast of these lands, and it is full of peoples and villages. Now we leave the coast of the sea, and we reach the middle [sic], and there is Quito, Popayán, the Kingdom [sic], Cuzco, Collao, Omasuyo, Qquechhua, Ccana, Ccanchi, Aymará, Sora, Rucana, Guamanga, Huanca; and taking a leap, we get to Potosí, Tucumán, Paraguay; there is all of this and much more. And all of these in this side [of the earth]. On the other side there is the land of Mexico, which has innumerable people, and after this the islands, archipelago, Malocas, and then India, China, Japan, Persia, Tartary, Constantinople, Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Africa, all of these, and much more beyond words and innumerable, and here [there are] men, some white, some brown, others black, infinite [numbers].94

Books on exploration and trade also provided the priest information about Indigenous populations of other parts of the continent. Ávila had in his collection a total of five volumes of different books about America illustrated by the protestant Theodor de Bry. One of these books was Thomas Harriot’s illustrated account of the first English settlements in North America’s Virginia (1590). Ávila was not only getting acquainted with the geography and natural resources of the northern part of America but through Harriot’s account he also read about Native North Americans’ rituals, beliefs, practices, and language. Harriot, a mathematician

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and astronomer, was probably the first European to create a phonetic alphabet to transcribe Algonkin, the language spoken by Native Americans of the territories that the English settlers referred to as Virginia (present day North Carolina). The account also reveals how the English thought they could impose good government on those territories in order to civilize and bring natives to the settlers’ religion.95 Thanks to books brought directly from Europe or bought in the various bookshops in Lima, a priest and his Andean parishioners imagined their way through the same commercial and missional routes. Ávila thus complied with both of his duties; he educated himself and taught his parishioners. In the process, he turned his Indigenous flock into more or less willing members of the wider world as Christians saw it. The dissemination of European written culture in America was part of the colonial move to integrate Spanish America into the Christian orbit, although the Spanish monarchy and the Catholic Church also aimed to control the kind of information that circulated. The robust, and not very discreet, contraband of books from various European print shops (not necessarily Catholic) to Spanish cities, and from Spanish ports to America, seemed to have been more effective than the official attempts to control that circulation.96 The size and diversity of subject matters contained in libraries such as the Peruvian priest’s run counter to lingering misconceptions of cultural obscurantism in the Spanish American colonies. Such misrepresentations have their own history, cemented by the likes of the English poet and polemicist John Milton. Writing in 1643 against the proposal to regulate book printing with the establishment of a license in England, Milton evoked the (by then already established) stereotype of the Catholic world’s abuse of book censorship: “If the amendment of manners be aimed at, look into Italy and Spain, whether those places be one scruple the better, the more honest, the wiser, the chaster, since all the inquisitorial rigor that hath been executed upon books.”97 Inquisitorial rigor had deadly consequences for some in Spanish America. Yet it is important to clarify that the issue was less about the kinds of books owned by those who were reported to the Inquisition and more about the ways in which bookish knowledge was put to use.98 Colonial institutions, universities among them, tried to uphold their control over practices, application, and meaning of the written word vis-à-vis that of Euro-descendants,

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Afro-descendants, and Indigenous populations, though the mechanisms to do so differed.99 Indeed, lacking books and letters was more damning for Indigenous peoples. It condemned them to an idolatrous life, according to Ávila.

FRANCISCO DE ÁVILA’S MANUSCRIPTS: AN ANDEAN ARCHIVE Colonial legibility—the ideological frame by which both Indigenous peoples and the colonial dynamics became readable—was not exclusively tied to knowledge circulating in the form of printed texts coming from Europe, or even those printed in Mexico and Peru. Manuscripts also had an important role, and Ávila’s private collection included, according to the inventory of his possessions, forty-five untitled manuscript books.100 We do not know what happened to Ávila’s print books and most of the manuscripts after his death; the library was broken up and sold off. But the National Library of Spain holds a bundle of 174 folios catalogued as MS 3169 that was part of Ávila’s possessions and which may have made its way to Spain as early as the mid-seventeenth century.101 The texts contained in the bundle include complete and partial copies and summaries of writings authored by mestizo Garcilaso de la Vega, Spaniards Polo Ondegardo and Cristóbal de Molina, Andean Joan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua, and an (or a group of ) anonymous writer(s) from Huarochirí.102 Some folios contain only stand-alone annotations about contemporary and past historical events. The manuscripts were collected by Ávila, as is attested by his own handwriting in the main body of the texts and the marginalia except for a brief note in one of the folios about a judicial case that was written years after the priest’s death. MS 3169 also includes an incomplete treatise on idolatries that was authored by Ávila.103 This collection of manuscript texts offer us privileged insights into Indigenous presence in alphabetic writings in colonial Peru. First, most of Ávila’s manuscripts reveal a common set of interests and expectations shared by the authors and the reader who ordered or made the copies. The manuscripts owned by Ávila can be taken as an indication of the kinds of information that he and others who lived in Peru had

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an interest in and which shaped how they approached, interpreted, and acted upon Andean society. The genealogies of Andean people, their social and religious organizations were described and analyzed in these manuscripts, which dealt with American reality as it happened in situ. Manuscripts, as Chartier has argued, allowed for the circulation of texts within a social world defined by family ties, a shared status, or a common social milieu.104 In the case of Ávila’s manuscripts, the authors of the texts and their readers shared a connection to Peru and a concern about the legitimacy of Indigenous institutions and beliefs in the colonial present. Second, just as manuscripts such as Ondegardo’s and Molina’s literally rewrote Andeans’ past and present—and in many ways wrote them out of their own history—handwritten texts opened new ways for Andeans to participate in written culture. They were authors and producers of some of those texts rather than mere objects of analysis.105 I discuss the two manuscripts of Andean authors Pachacuti and the anonymous author(s) of Huarochirí in more detail in chapters 3 and 4. Here I focus on the more subtle ways in which Indigenous presences may be detected in Ávila’s library: some of the texts authored by Europeans seem to have been copied and written down by Indigenous hands. As it turns out, Ávila created the material conditions for Andeans to participate as scribes in manuscript culture. Manuscript texts—particularly those that were not conceived as drafts for publication—offered a more immediate, and thus sometimes less articulated, approach to the American reality as it was unfolding. Print books and manuscripts coexisted, but the latter carved a consumer niche that could not be covered by the former. That niche covered texts from wills, family histories, political discourses, and defamatory libels, to writings about magic, alchemy, astrology, and scientific observations. In some cases, the preference for the manuscript was a strategy to circumvent political or religious censorship, but this was not always the case. The manuscript form sometimes freed a text from the economic interests that came along with print.106 The urgency of local political demands sometimes created the incentive for a swift production of manuscript texts, as in the case of manuscripts by royal official Polo Ondegardo (c.1500–1575) and Mercedarian friar Molina (1529–1585). Ávila’s copy of the text by Ondegardo is untitled but matches to an extent with one written by the royal official in 1571,

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while Molina’s Relación de fábulas y ritos de los Incas was written sometime between 1575 and 1583.107 Both texts were written under the auspices of Viceroy Toledo just before the printing press was set up in Peru.108 Viceroy Toledo compiled information that could be instrumental to the legitimation of the Spanish monarchy’s rights of possession of the American territories, the reorganization of the institutional structure of the viceroyalty of Peru, and the expansion of a solid evangelization strategy.109 But why would an Indigenous parish priest such as Ávila need this information? The texts by Ondegardo and Molina did prove helpful for the Viceroy’s purposes. Both of them had explored the Andean region and had referred to Indigenous informants for details on their society and culture. Ondegardo presented a thorough explanation of the Inca organization of labor and tribute in their territory. He argued that certain elements of that system could be useful for colonial administration of Andeans.110 Molina’s text offered detailed descriptions of various kinds of rituals and the role they had in the articulation of Indigenous social relations.111 In making Andean society legible to Toledo, Ávila, and others, the authors employed discursive tactics that Merrim has noted at play in early writings of other Europeans. They tried to “assuage anxiety” about their encounter with the new worlds. Such tactics helped their authors “blunt the new by regulating it, delimiting it, obliterating it.”112 In the texts by Ondegardo and Molina, the issue was not so much how to deal with the new, but rather how to deal with—and how to regulate—the cultural heterogeneity of peoples who were not yet very familiar to European eyes. The wealth of information on Andean society described and analyzed in the texts by the royal official and the Mercedarian priest convey a diverse cultural landscape within the territories that were governed by the Incas. However, their discursive tactics also evince a tendency to conflate many aspects of the societies that inhabited those lands within the term Inca, that is, an Inca-Andean fusion. Inca (also written as “Inka” and “Inga”) became a useful term to make legible to non-Indigenous readers the heterogeneity of Andean society. But it also became a category of analysis that configured an epistemology of Indigenous culture at the service of the colonial enterprise, which most likely goes some way to explaining the appeal that the texts by Ondegardo and Molina had for other colonial writers who read and quoted them extensively.113

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But in the manuscripts the effort put into delimiting and ultimately homogenizing Andeans as Inca still shines through. Polo Ondegardo had traveled through the viceroyalty of Peru. He acknowledged in several texts written between the 1550s and 1570s about Inca social organization, religion, and governance that there were different kinds of Andean institutions, some of which served the Inca state and others that responded to local communities’ interests. Yet in the text that Ávila had copied, the Spanish official discusses having provided ample proof to a skeptic bishop of Charcas, Friar Domingo de Santo Tomás, about the universality of the ceque system, the Inca distribution of sacred sites throughout the territories under their control.114 Notwithstanding diversity, he implied that after all there was a universally legible Inca structure in the Andes. Molina’s Relación de fábulas, too, was based on information provided by Inca and non-Inca informants and includes prayers that they offered to the Inca and other Indigenous deities in Quechua. His mastery of the Andean language was recognized by higher ecclesiastical authorities and gained him an invitation to participate in the production of the pastoral materials for the Third Council of Lima.115 Molina pointed out the heterogeneity of cultural beliefs and practices in the Andes, yet he also subtly revealed how useful its standardization was for a better spiritual administration: “In this land there are different nations and provinces of Indians, and each one of them has its own rites, practices, and ceremonies [ . . . ]; it is convenient to enquire about the cults and ceremonies that the Incas had in each province, which is what I have written here, in order to dissipate and root them out from their idolatries and misfortunes.”116 The tensions and contradictions that emerge in these texts may suggest that the authors had a somewhat careless approach to writing. But those unresolved argumentative and discursive issues also indicate a key difference between manuscript and print culture: legibility. Print culture, as discussed previously, was regulated in formal and bureaucratic terms (censorship, cost, availability of print shops). Additionally, as Adorno has pointed out, when it came to writing about Amerindians, writers felt compelled to offer justifications for their subject matter and disclaimers on how the reader should approach it. This was the case for authors of ethnographic, philosophical, and fictional writing.117 Writers worked to convey a portrayal of Indians that would be appealing to their readers while simultaneously shying away “from any association with the kinds

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of writing which were condemned by Christian moralists and censors.”118 I would argue that the strategies of Bartolomé de Las Casas, Francisco López de Gómara, and Pedro de Oña to position themselves and their subject matters also responded to the implicit possibility that a printed text would have a wider circulation in geographical terms. If they wanted to sell copy, authors needed to give readers clues as to how to make the texts they bought legible. By contrast, Ávila’s manuscript copies of the writings of Ondegardo and Molina are characterized by immediacy and malleability. They were relevant and legible mostly for those who shared a specific sociocultural context with the author. The information that circulated in these manuscripts required a reader that shared contextual references. Ávila did not need any explanation of where Peru was or who the Incas were to understand those texts. Manuscripts were more malleable in the sense that they allowed the reader to mold someone else’s text to his or her own needs and interests. This is crudely confirmed, for example, by the sentence that marks the end of Ávila’s copy of Molina’s text: “And this ended here like this, unresolved.”119 The improvised title to the copy of Ondegardo’s treatise, on the other hand, indicates the way in which the Spanish official’s work was edited to suit Ávila’s interests: “Taken from a folder, as a draft found in the papers of Licenciado Polo de Ondergardo about the lineage of the Incas and their conquests.”120 In Ávila’s hands, a report written to the viceroy as a means to improve colonial administration was narrowed down to a genealogy of the Incas. The priest’s interest in the issue of Inca lineage also becomes evident in his reading of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s Royal Commentaries of the Incas, first published in Lisbon in 1609. Although Ávila owned a print copy, he wrote three folios of notes that summarize Garcilaso’s description of Lake Titicaca as the place of origin of the Incas and their lineage beyond Huascar and Atahualpa, the heirs to the Inca throne that were warring each other at the time that Spaniards set foot in Peru.121 The priest dated his notes to June 1613. Garcilaso belonged to the first generation of mestizos born in Peru immediately after the Spanish conquest. The son of an Andean noble woman with Inca lineage and a Spanish captain, Garcilaso (1539–1616) was born in Cuzco, like Ávila, but at the age of twenty left for Spain to never return. The Royal Commentaries was not his only published work,

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but it was his last and most widely circulated one, offering a revision of Inca history that departed from and corrected previous versions written by Europeans. With the authority of someone who straddled two different cultural traditions, Garcilaso skillfully weaved a powerful parallel between the Inca and Roman empires, establishing thus an interpretive frame that eventually circulated in translation in territories outside of the Iberian Peninsula.122 The influence of Garcilaso’s Royal Commentaries on Ávila materializes in sermons that the priest wrote for his Andean parishioners. He incorporated Garcilaso’s portrayal of Inca genealogy, but also referred to the Inca-Andean fusion strategy found in texts by Ondegardo and Molina. In his attempt to delegitimize past Indigenous beliefs, rituals, and social dynamics, Ávila pointed to the Incas as the root of many of his parishioners’ errors.123 But it is not clear whether such an interpretation of Andean history had an edifying effect on parishioners in Huarochirí who did not consider themselves as part of Inca culture. A second point to be made regarding Ávila’s manuscripts, as noted at the start of this section, is how the handwritten texts reveal the simultaneous roles that Indigenous people could have in the construction of a written culture in Spanish America. Andeans were both the object of study of Ondegardo’s and Molina’s writings and the subjects who produced the manuscript copies for Ávila. Some scholars have noted that the handwriting of Ávila can only be detected in the titles of those two manuscripts, while the handwriting in the main body of the texts and, more importantly, in the kinds of errors found in them suggest that they were created by the hands of anonymous Indigenous scribes.124 Comparing Ávila’s copy of the text by Ondegardo with a similar document found elsewhere, Lamana noted that the former bears a number of spelling mistakes and blank spaces not found in the latter. The writing errors suggest that the scribe who produced the copy was not a native speaker of Spanish and may have been one of Ávila’s Andean assistants who, as I discuss in the next chapter, were literate to different degrees. The copy also has a number of nonsensical sentences that, remarkably, are grammatically correct.125 That is, they were written by someone who had learned how to use the Latin-script alphabet but who was not necessarily completely familiar with the construction of meaning in Spanish language. Thus, that person would be capable of writing a grammatically correct sentence in Spanish, while the sentence was illegible. Learning

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the alphabet—to recognize the letters and to draw them—did not necessarily grant access to sense-making. These instances suggest that literacy and legibility are two different things. The same hand that copied Ondegardo’s text for Ávila also produced the copy of Molina’s manuscript. A detailed and insightful paleographic study of these texts has led Cuenca to call attention to the abundance of ex post corrected or crossed out single letters and complete words in Spanish and in Quechua throughout the copy of Molina’s text.126 Cerrón-Palomino interprets these, together with the numerous blank spaces in mid-sentences and apparent difficulties in identifying Quechua terms, as evidence of the bilingualism (Spanish-Quechua) and semiliteracy of the Indigenous copyist.127 While it seems rather clear that the work of the anonymous scribe in the two manuscripts reveals a particular level of bilingualism, literacy, and translation skills, it is also a reminder that the process by which meaning is produced was not embedded in the technology of writing. Similarly to the process of fashioning a Quechua language variety for pastoral purposes, the writing of history (past and present) of Andean peoples involved them as sources of information but not as authors. Whereas discursively Molina and Ondegardo wrote Andeans out of their own history, the latter were materially writing themselves into the texts of those who claimed to know better about Indians. Notably, it seems that Ávila may have been the one providing Andeans who “lacked” writing the tools to produce it. Along with the lengthy list of books, the postmortem inventory of Ávila’s possessions also mentions a variety of objects that suggest intensive writing was taking place under the (material) auspices of Ávila. The inventory lists an astounding fourteen desks of different kinds and value, from rough wood to ebony with ivory and gold details. One of the desks is described as still holding “all of Ávila’s papers.”128 The inventory also includes chairs, a knife to sharpen quills, and a scissor to cut paper.129 The priest left two blank books and a startling total of sixteen reams of papel quebrado, which could be either low quality paper used by printers for proofs or to list a book’s errata, but it could also be the kind of ruled paper that would be used when teaching someone how to write.130 The documentation does not allow me to assert that these writing tools were indeed used by Andeans. Yet besides the anonymous Indigenous scribes whose presence is hinted by their errors

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in making the manuscript copies of Ondegardo’s and Molina’s texts for Ávila, one wonders who was sitting at those fourteen desks using paper meant to help beginners write on a straight line.131

FIGURE 1 An Andean authority writing down a petition on behalf of a commoner. From: Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (c.1615), fol. 770 [784]. Reproduced by permission of the Danish Royal Library (Det Kongelige Bibliotek).

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And then there is the important matter of Ávila’s ownership of two texts authored by Andeans mentioned before. Folio 64 of MS 3169 is the beginning of an untitled, undated, and anonymous text known as the Huarochirí manuscript the only non-pastoral book-length text written in Quechua by Indigenous peoples of Huarochirí. Its fifty folios contain narratives about the past and present of different non-Inca ethnic groups that inhabited the Huarochirí region, where Ávila was a priest for more than a decade. The anonymous narrative voice of the manuscript identifies itself as “we Christians,” although it never explicitly identifies the creator nor the scribe of the text, as is discussed in chapter 3. The second Andean-authored text in Ávila’s library does, in contrast, state clearly who the author is. Entitled Relación de antigüedades deste reyno del Pirú, it contains the first-person narrative of Don Joan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua, a self-defined Christian of nonInca noble lineage. In forty-three folios he tells how his ancestors became Christians, while repudiating the surviving idolatrous beliefs of many of their contemporaries. The text was written in Spanish but includes six prayers or songs in Quechua related to pre-Hispanic Inca rituals and a few drawings that seem to illustrate elements of that cosmovision. Ávila probably got hold of Pachacuti’s manuscript during the years that he held office in the Archbishopric of La Plata (present day Bolivia).132 The renown he achieved from his campaigns of extirpation of idolatries in Huarochirí and elsewhere earned Ávila a much-sought promotion to a mid-ranking post that he took up around 1618 in La Plata, although this did not measure up to his ambitions.133 Neither the Huarochirí manuscript nor the Relación de antigüedades identify explicitly an intended reader. But Ávila read both documents and made marginal comments to them. In the case of the HM, he left an incomplete translation of some of its chapters under the title Tratado y relación de los errores, falsos dioses y otras supersticiones, dated 1608. Chapter 3 offers a comparative analysis of these texts. It should be noted that becoming part of Ávila’s collection most likely guaranteed the survival of these unique Andean texts. But the collector bears some responsibility for the fact that Indigenous material culture and texts disappeared out of sight. The HM and Pachacuti’s Relación de antigüedades were neutralized, taken out of circulation and out of context, as happens with looted objects that end up in a museum. In the case of the

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Andean-authored texts owned by Ávila, the decontextualization implied their virtual erasure from colonial written culture. Ávila never mentioned that he owned the Relación de antigüedades and the HM, it was only in the nineteenth century that their existence was acknowledged. In closing this section, I want to underline how the manuscripts analyzed so far can reveal a complementary dimension to the history of writing and the circulation of ideas in colonial Peru. From a material point of view, paper and ink created a field of contention between authors (Ondegardo, Molina), their reader (Ávila), and the copyist (Indigenous scribe).134 Texts that were originally created in response to an imperial request—or through its representatives, a viceroy and a bishop—were repurposed to suit the needs of a non-Spanish priest who, from the periphery, imagined the larger Christian world while negotiating with his local reality. Writing (in the form of texts authored by himself or others) was one of his tools to intervene in that local context. Yet writing was not always in his hands.

A SERMON A DAY KEEPS THE DEMON AWAY: THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURES In more than 500 pages of sermons, Father Ávila summarized and explained the wider (Christian) world as he knew it to his parishioners in their language. The effort he made to go beyond doctrinal teaching was outstanding, especially considering that he, like many other priests, characterized Andean parishioners as having the intellectual capacity of children. In this section I propose a new approach to the much-studied doctrinal content of the sermons, focusing instead on the strategies attempted by Ávila to establish the authority of writing both in religious and political terms.135 When preaching to Andean parishioners about the Christian world and how one became part of it, perhaps one particularly difficult task was to explain the authority of the Holy Scriptures. Ávila unleashed a series of strategies that leave us to wonder how sure the priest was of the legitimacy of alphabetic writing in a multimedia and multilingual society. Ávila’s attempts to impose the authority of writing also reveal a concern that there could be a divergence between European legibility

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of alphabetic writing and Andean legibilities. In other words, the discursive strategies in Ávila’s sermons regarding the role of alphabetic writing suggest that the priest was unsure as to how to legitimize the authority that was endowed to different media that coexisted in colonial Peru. When the Tratado de los Evangelios (Treatise of the Gospels) was printed posthumously in Lima in 1648, more than half a century had passed since the Peruvian Catholic Church had agreed in the Third Council of Lima (1583) to sponsor the creation and publication of unified basic pastoral materials to aid priests working among Andean parishioners.136 The earlier Quechua-Aymara-Spanish publications, as discussed before, aimed to establish careful translation parameters to avoid ambivalences that could open the doors to Indigenous heterodox interpretations of Christianity, particularly when it came to concepts such as God, soul, demon, faith, resurrection, sin, saint, confession, and so on. But the singling out of terms that were not to be translated into any Andean language also included “soltera” (unmarried woman), “matrimonio” (marriage), “orden” (order), “rey” (king), and the days of the week.137 The Christianization of Indians involved turning them into political men who could understand both religious and secular colonial institutions and obey them. The untranslatability of terms such as these meant Indians had to accept a new social and political order that shaped even a new way to measure time and space. By the time of his death in 1647, Ávila had spent already a good number of years correcting his book of sermons before submitting it for printing. He had even asked permission from his superiors to limit his preaching duties in the Cathedral of Lima to focus on his book.138 It was not an easy task. The Spanish-Quechua sermons (with some untranslated phrases in Latin) occupy more than five hundred pages which, including the introduction, letters of approval by the censors, and other texts bring the total to more than eight hundred pages, organized in two volumes. They present an orthodox understanding of doctrine, giving much attention to the identification and refutation of so-called Andean religious errors.139 In terms of style, most of the sermons employ the usual format for this genre, with questions and answers pertaining to a given religious lesson, in the manner of an elaborate catechism. In general, the sermons choose a biblical text or passage as point of departure and then pause to

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imagine and counter doubts and questions that parishioners may have about what they heard from their preacher. Sermons, as Estenssoro has argued, had progressively become the most important tool of persuasion, but their effectiveness depended on linguistic homogenizations.140 The Third Council’s sermons made it a point to include references to the cultural context of the Indigenous peoples of Peru, in order to make their message more effective among parishioners but also, and crucially, to make sure that the colonial order—in its earthly and spiritual dimensions—was legible to Andeans.141 Ávila, however, avoided copying the Third Council’s sermons, as others did at the time.142 But between the 1580s and 1640s, when Ávila finished polishing his written sermons, the world at large and that of Andeans in Peru had changed, as his book and manuscript collection made him aware. Ávila’s sermons went beyond borrowing the examples of outlawed Indigenous rituals given by the Third Council two generations earlier. He updated the doctrinal teachings of his sermons with references to contemporary events in Peru and the (Christian) world at large, as in his explanation of God’s hidden message behind an attempt by Dutch ships to reach the coast and the Indigenous peoples of Chile: Don’t you know that only three or four years ago ships arrived to Chile carrying men that are called Pichilingues or Dutch, that come from very faraway lands? They brought some letters for the Indians of Chile, stating that they [the Dutch] wanted to come to Chile and be their friends, become allies, and throw away the Spaniards from those lands. Didn’t you hear about that? [ . . . ] See that those men, although bad and heretics, enemies of God, they came as his messengers, to remind us to fear God and do nothing to offend him, otherwise they will come back, and God will allow them to declare war on us, and take away our homes and possessions, and take away our lives [ . . . ]143

Ávila seemed very keen to establish his own authority vis-à-vis his parishioners by assuming the role of both the lettered man who explained the world to them and the good shepherd who translated God’s message. Sermons can give the impression that the preacher has a complete control of the meaning that lies behind each of the stories. The rhetorical strategies, the verbal images, the intonation of the preacher, and of course

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the message or revelation were all meant to touch the soul of the listening parishioner and effect a change in him or her. This is what Ávila claims his sermons did: “It has happened to me that when interrogating an Indian to enquire about his sins [he] emphatically denied [having committed] them, and [after] listening to two sermons [ . . . ] [preached] in the said way, he came back convinced that he had to show himself repentant of having denied [his sins].”144 But how the preacher delivered his sermons was one thing, and how the parishioners understood them was another. With all his experience, Ávila could not help but concede that the Andean parishioners to whom he read sermons every Sunday might understand the biblical narratives and their doctrinal lessons as if they were tales and fables told by their forefathers. In one of his sermons he admonished: “[ . . . ] and first of all I warn you, that for your own benefit you have to believe what I tell you, but not like [you believe] the stories and fables of your ancestors and elders; because those were fabrications and lies of the demon, and what I told you is the word of God himself, which you cannot go without.”145 Ávila’s concerns about how Indians made sense of the sermons were not just connected to the imperfections of oral transmission. Ávila very clearly stated in the introductory pages to his book that his sermons would be useful for preaching in Indian parishes. But this did not mean that sermons were only meant to be read by priests to Indians. Sermons could be read by Indians as well. In his notice of approval to print Ávila’s book of sermons, Jesuit father Francisco de Contreras stated: “This will also be a useful book to initiate what his Majesty and the Royal Counsel of the Indies have desired, that Indians are guided to learn and know well the Castilian language: If they learn how to read with this book [ . . . ] they will be able to achieve it, because they will find that this book, written in in their Indic language with great propriety and elegance, has its equivalent in Castilian.”146 Using an over five-hundred-page book of sermons as language learning material may not seem a promising pedagogical approach to teaching Andeans how to read in Castilian or even in the “Indic” language, by which he referred to the now standardized Quechua used for evangelization. Contreras’ suggestion, though, was not new. In 1536 the queen of Spain ordered then viceroy of New Spain, Antonio de Mendoza (who later became viceroy of Peru), “to order the preceptors who instruct them

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[the Indians] to read books of Christian and moral doctrine always, for there are works among these in which they can progress quite well in the Latin language.”147 From the early stages of evangelization in Peru, the church had tended to consider that the indoctrination of Indians had to be done in their own languages (mainly Quechua), given that teaching them all Spanish seemed impossible in practice. However, an ecclesiastical visit in 1560 to the town of Chucuito found that the curacas (Indigenous authorities) could recite the basic prayers, the commandments, and an abbreviated version of the catechism in Spanish and in Latin. This was a consequence of early missionary work, which required that Indians learn the fundaments of Christian faith in Spanish or Latin before being baptized. Learning, at that early stage of evangelization, meant memorizing rather than understanding, but repeating the doctrine in those languages secured the status of curacas.148 Using evangelization texts to teach Indigenous parishioners Christian doctrine and languages other than their own was one way to broaden the reach that alphabetic writing had in Indigenous society. Through these texts, they received a new interpretation of the world (and the afterlife) and the terms with which to refer to it. It also imposed a link between a particular interpretation and the authority embedded in the medium that conveyed it. This seems to underlie the emphasis that Ávila placed in stating that parishioners had to believe in the message that he conveyed, but on his terms and not on theirs. The problem was not intelligibility, for the priest mastered Quechua, but rather a concern about legibility. But how could he control how Andeans made sense of what they heard or what they read? In another sermon, Ávila acknowledged in an oblique way that indoctrination also involved the expansion of alphabetic literacy and readership: “First, look at all that is contained in that cartilla and small book, where the prayers of Our Father, Ave Maria, Credo, and all the rest, are to be found, with a brief catechism, with that cartilla the priests, fiscales and the teachers in the schools teach you the prayers: that is the sum of faith, and what we must learn to believe and live by, and to save ourselves and go to heaven with God.”149 In Peru as well as in New Spain, cartillas (small print books) were commonly used to introduce Indigenous peoples into alphabetic writing and Christian doctrine. The cartillas presented, side by side, the basic

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prayers, the commandments, the abbreviated catechism, a Latin-script alphabet, and a syllabary. The alphabet and syllabary were meant to familiarize Indigenous parishioners with the audiovisual dimension of alphabetic literacy, presenting to them the shape of letters of the alphabet and indicating the way to group them in syllables and how to pronounce them (figure 2). The contiguity of these disparate set of texts in the cartillas seems to suggest that texts with a sacred message like the Ave Maria and the Salve Regina could be used by Indigenous peoples as writings with which to practice their reading (and probably also writing) skills in Spanish and even Latin.150 Cartillas, however, could not guarantee that Andeans would understand what they read in the same ways as Europeans did or, more crucially, establish a connection of authority between writing and the message conveyed.151 Ávila’s concern suggests that there were two coexisting kinds of problems related to legibility in the colonial Andes. The first was about how to “read” Indians. Ávila and other Euro-descendants dealt with that with the help of written knowledge, as we saw. The second kind of legibility issue was how Indigenous peoples read, which was even more complicated as it seems to have been mostly tied to what they read but not to how they

FIGURE 2 Alphabet and syllabary (right) included with doctrinal materials (left). Doctrina Christiana, Lima, 1584, fol. 23v–24r. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.

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understood the social role of media. Concern for the former had been voiced long before Ávila wrote his sermons. King Phillip II attempted to tackle the potentially problematic issue of Indigenous interpretation by controlling what Indians read. In 1543, the King of Spain stated: Know ye that much harm results from taking to the Indies books in the vernacular of profane and imaginative character such as those about Amadis and others of this type of lying histories, because the Indians able to read turn to them, forsaking works of sound and proper doctrine; from these false tales they learn evil practices and vices. Moreover, since they do not know that those frivolous books were written about what did not happen, it is possible that the authenticity and authority of our Holy Scriptures and the writings of learned saints may suffer because, since they [the Indians] are not firmly grounded in the faith, they may regard all books of equal truth and authority.152

In the midst of the ideological strife brought about by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the Catholic Church and the Spanish monarchy worried about the effects of profane literature on readers on both sides of the Atlantic. They aimed to exert institutional control over how readers demarcated the frontier between fiction and nonfiction and, thus, how textual authority was constituted, a polemical issue in the early modern Christian schism. Profane literature, which included chivalric novels, was deemed dangerous because the customs of faraway lands that it portrayed and the language employed in the narrative captivated readers so entirely that they lost interest in religious literature that they ought to be reading instead.153 In the lands of Peru, faraway from Spain, the most paradigmatic parody of chivalric novels was received with much enthusiasm. It is not clear if Don Quijote de la Mancha was read as a parody, but this chivalric romance, published in Spain and Portugal in 1605, was the central theme for a lavish parade organized in 1607 to honor the recently arrived new viceroy of Peru, Juan de Mendoza y Luna. The celebration, of which written records remain, took place in the small town of Pausa (part of present-day Ayacucho), which by then was inhabited by around fifteen hundred Indigenous peoples and a dozen Spaniards. Don Quijote and Sancho Panza paraded alongside characters from other chivalric

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romances. Andeans, both commoners and caciques, took part in the parade dressed up in colorful clothes, as did a Spaniard dressed up as an Inca and another one dressed as a Moor.154 Owner of print copies of various examples of profane literature ranging from Ludovico Ariosto’s chivalric romance Orlando Furioso and Mateo Alemán’s picaresque novel Guzmán de Alfarache to Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quijote de la Mancha, Ávila was careful not to include in his sermons references to the faraway lands and fictitious characters of his profane readings.155 But how could he stop his Indigenous parishioners from believing that places like Rome, Jerusalem, and Spain, or people like the Pope and the king of Spain were fiction? Faith, of the Christian kind, was the key, according to the priest’s explanation: Listen carefully to me now. Remember that recently I told you that in order to understand it is necessary to believe, and to believe is [to have] faith. [ . . . ] Have you not heard before that there is in Castile a great lord, who is the King, and that he sends here the viceroys and the oidores? Have you not heard before that in Rome resides a Father, who commands all Christians, and who is the head of the Church? Have you seen this? No. Then how do you know this? Because you have heard it. Well it is like this with everything else. Did you know the Incas of the past? Did you know your [great] grandfathers? No. How do you know then that there were Incas? And how do you know that your [great] grandfathers were as your parents tell you they were? You believe what others tell you.156

Of course it was not just a matter of faith. It was also a matter of authority. Indians were not meant to believe all that others told them. They had to believe those who had authority to convey information on how the past or the present was. But even more important than the information itself about what did happen and what mattered to Ávila, to the church, and to the monarchy was how that information was understood. This was the driving force behind Ávila’s sermons: to present the only possible way to read the Christian world and Indigenous peoples’ place in it, their past, their present, and their future. Their parents and grandparents had no authority over the account of their own past. Their lack of authority resided, as Ávila explained in various sermons, in their not being Christians and in lacking a trustworthy medium such as alphabetic

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writing to preserve an account of the past. That was a key revelation in the history of Christianity that was preached to Andeans. This was not a new argument. To understand how Ávila’s sermons fit into a longer tradition, we can recall one of the earliest printed accounts of the Spanish conquest of Peru, the Verdadera relación de la conquista del Perú (Seville, 1534), which includes an illustration that conveys one of the most enduring portrayals about the Spanish conquest of Peru. The title page of Francisco de Xerez’s writing depicts the first encounter between ruling Inca, Atahualpa, Francisco Pizarro, to whom Xerez served as personal secretary, and Friar Vicente de Valverde in the town of Cajamarca on November 16, 1532. The illustration shows Atahualpa about to throw to the ground a book that Valverde had presented him with. Xerez explains that the text given to Atahualpa was the Bible. The Inca’s refusal to acknowledge the authority that a strange object symbolized took a central role in the historical narrative and providential

FIGURE 3 Title page of Verdadera relación de la conquista del Perú by Francisco de Xerez (Seville, 1534). On the right hand side, Atahualpa holds a book that was handed by Friar Valverde. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.

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interpretation of the first encounter between Incas and Spaniards and the ensuing end of the Inca’s reign.157 Fifty years after Xerez wrote his account about Peru for European readers, the Third Council of Lima deemed it still necessary to address the issue of the authority of alphabetic writing in the trilingual evangelization texts it sponsored. The authority of the relatively recently introduced European media was not self-evident in a context where quipu was being used by Andeans as a mode of inscription and had even gained some legitimacy as a medium that could be used in the Catholic confessional rites.158 The illustration to Xerez’s account assumed a self-explanatory power of writing that was not something colonial authorities in Peru took for granted. But in addressing that issue, the Peruvian Church produced an explanation of the symbolic and social roles of alphabetic writing that complicated the relation between authority, the sacred, and their materialization, issues that would become central in the radical approach to evangelization of the seventeenth century: the extirpation of idolatries. An example of this can be found in sermon XIX of the Tercero Catecismo, sponsored by the Council of Lima. It explains to Andeans that a colonial official such as the corregidor would usually kiss a royal decree and its seal, and hold it over his head as a ritual that acknowledged that those objects were symbols of the authority of the king. Spaniards, the sermon clarifies, did not believe that the paper or the wax of the seal (or the figures of saints) in and of themselves had authority or were sacred. In contrast, according to the same sermon, Andeans interpreted objects as what they represented, and this resulted in the idolatrous veneration of objects as if they were deities themselves.159 But how could objects such as written paper or a book then represent authority? When discussing in Quechua the episode of the royal decree and seal, the Tercero Catecismo translated it into “Reypa quellcanta,” which literally means “the King’s quillca.” “King” (Rey) was one of those terms that, as discussed before, the Council did not want translated into Quechua to avoid suggesting parallels between Andeans’ authorities (such as the Inca, for example) and the Spanish monarch. “Quillca” (also spelled quilca and quellca), however, was the Quechua term that Spaniards took to be equivalent to writing which, as was constantly noted by colonists, Indians “lacked.” But there was more than just the King’s quillca. When dealing with the Evangelios (Gospels), the sermons of the Tercero

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Catecismo translated the term to Quechua as “Evangelio quellcampim” and as “DIOSninchic quellcampi.”160 That is, there was a quilca of the King, a quilca of the Evangelios, and a quilca of Dios (God). Quilca, thus, could convey worldly and sacred authority. Quilca, however, is a term that Quispe-Agnoli has argued does not refer to a particular object or a system of notation but rather to a tangible process of producing and conveying meaning beyond the realm of the orality in which a variety of media could participate.161 Although colonizers were never really able to define quilca, paradoxically, as Brokaw has added, the broad spectrum of semiotic practices that it encompassed facilitated their application of it to notions of writing, painting, sculpture, and the like, for which there were no exact equivalents in Quechua or other Indigenous Andean languages.162 In the Quechua dictionary by Domingo de Santo Tomás (Valladolid, Spain, 1560), the term quellca or quilca has the following definitions: book, letter, and letter of the alphabet. In its verbal form (quellcani) it is defined as “to write, to draw, to embroider with colors, to dye.” The first dictionary of Quechua printed in Peru (Lima), the anonymous 1586 Arte y vocabulario en la lengua general del Peru llamada quichua, y en la lengua española, adds “to paint, and to sculpt.” Approximately two decades later, the widely circulated and consulted Vocabulario de la lengua general de todo el Peru (1608, Lima) by Diego González Holguín, defined quilca or quellcca as “paper to write (papel carta), letter or writing”; its derivatives include “to draw” and “to paint.”163 By the time Ávila published his books of sermons in mid-seventeenth century, the issue was not resolved. In the Spanish language part of his sermons, the term “Holy Gospel” (Santos Evangelios) is almost exclusively used. In the Quechua sermons he sticks to the term “Evangelios” without translating it. On the counted occasions in which he translates it, he offers the following equivalence: “Diospa quellccancunacta” (God’s quellccancunacta).164 Eventually quilca was associated with quipu. Andeans, however, linked quilca to paper as well as with quipu.165 But Ávila’s careful avoidance to establish a contiguity or even equivalence between quilca and alphabetic writing suggests that there was much more at stake than finding a way to translate and explain to Andeans what alphabetic writing was. From the 1580s, the use of Andean terms and cultural references to render

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legible the colonial administrative and religious order was not a neutral undertaking in bridging cultural difference. In the sermons by Ávila, we can see the various strategies still needed to establish colonial authority and legitimacy in the eyes and ears of Indigenous parishioners. By the time his book of sermons was printed, Andeans were already participants of written culture in colonial Peru while continuing to have access to Indigenous media such as quipu.166 With the Andean knotted cords legitimized by ecclesiastic and monarchy officials as a complementary instrument of colonialism, discussed in detail in the next chapter, it was harder to simply pretend that writing was the only way to convey authoritative information. The biblical story of the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of bodies was presented in one of Ávila’s sermons as an example of the hierarchy that Andean and non-Andean media had in colonial society: “I have never seen in the records of your elders, those called quipu, that there is any story about the resurrection of dead persons. But in the writings and books of the men that serve the true God, there you can find stories about those who resurrected by the power of God.”167 The inferiority of the quipu, for Ávila, was not related to the characteristics of the medium itself but rather to it not having taken part of the grand narrative of Christianity. That narrative was written by “men that serve the true God,” and it had to be believed, or else: “What I have said to you is a true thing, and it is mandatory that we believe it, and the one who does not the Holy Office of the Inquisition will burn him alive.”168 An intimidating but empty threat because Indigenous people were not under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition. Through his sermons Ávila imposed the authority of the divine word and reconfigured the legibility of the new social order. Catechesis, as Charles has stated, taught Indigenous peoples that writing was the prime “instrument of colonialism [ . . . ] whether they knew how to read or not.”169 But catechesis also gave Ávila the opportunity to establish his authority in the eyes of his parishioners. It is not clear when the priest started writing the sermons. But he finished writing them when he had already moved up the ecclesiastical hierarchy to become canon in the Cathedral of Lima and close to the end of his life, as confirmed by the reference in his sermons to events happening as late as 1643.170 A good number of his sermons cite his experience of preaching to Andean

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parishioners decades before, especially concerning his actions destroying the “idols” that they kept: “I talk to you from experience, because I know you, I have visited [your towns], and have undertaken since very young to figure out your errors, to know your misdeeds [ . . . ] and in that time, already more than thirty years ago, in this plaza [of Lima] your idols were burnt [ . . . ].”171 Yet missionary work in the Huarochirí area between 1597 and 1608 had also taught Ávila that writing could be an instrument used directly and indirectly by Andeans against him, as analyzed in the next chapter. .

CONCLUSIONS One of the most important figures of the reformation of the Catholic Church in Peru, the Jesuit José de Acosta, had asserted in the late 1580s that “the office of a priest of a native parish has to rely more on prudence and knowledge of the Indians’ condition and customs than in refined letters.”172 At that time, Francisco de Ávila was a young boy studying in the school that the Jesuits had established in the city where he was born, Cuzco. Later, on becoming priest, he seems to have realized how necessary written culture, including refined letters, would indeed become to understand the condition and customs of Indians as well as to articulate an effective evangelization strategy no matter what Acosta believed. Written culture, whether in print or manuscript form, introduced Ávila to the larger Christian world, the principles that organized the colonial order, and the hierarchies that encompassed both the sacred and the mundane world. That is why his ambitious two-volume book of sermons moved beyond doctrinal lessons to teach his Indigenous parishioners the ways in which past and recent history, political, and social organization were reconfigured by Christianity. Incorporating Indigenous peoples into the Christian world, as was quickly understood by ecclesiastics, involved much more than baptizing them. Cultural differences posed a challenge to missional strategies. Writing thus became a tool for colonizers to attempt a homogenous or standardized plan of action. It would allow priests, even those with the bare minimum literacy skills, to convey a unified message that could be repeated throughout the Andean territory. It would also allow them to

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establish, even if artificially, a homogenous idea of whom they were dealing with by turning them into Indians with an Inca past. Ávila’s learning went well beyond that of other Peruvian priests who were his contemporaries.173 The parish priest embraced the “refined letters” and his duty to learn as much as his pastoral duty and his duty to teach. The wide-ranging topics of the texts that Ávila read throughout his life can be taken as a measure of his intellectual curiosity. But it also points to the various levels in which written culture became central in shaping colonial order. Print culture turned him into a participant of a larger world of shared knowledge, even if only in the role of a reader in a geographically peripheral place. Manuscript culture allowed him to access the most important local debates and attune him to his contemporaries’ ways of thinking of and acting on the pressing issues in colonial Peru. European texts and his “Andean archive” of manuscripts taught him how to read Andeans. Written culture also opened for him the possibility to become an authority on one of the most urgent matters of his time: Indigenous evangelization. In the eyes of non-Indigenous society, Ávila’s authority was consolidated by his lengthy ecclesiastical career and the privilege of becoming the author of a print book which imposed a European legibility on Andeans. In the eyes of his parishioners, Ávila’s authority relied on his position as good shepherd who explained to them in their language, but on his ideological terms, how the world really was. Still, Ávila had enough experience to understand that no matter how carefully he translated his sermons and how much he stressed his own authority, in the end he could not control how Indigenous parishioners read. There were realms of written culture that the priest could not entirely control or claim authority over. Their legibility and his remained at least sometimes at odds. There was plenty of space in a two-volume book of sermons to convey an all-encompassing portrayal of society at large. However, as Andeans were introduced into written culture, they also began to challenge its authority through the legal avenues offered by colonial society. Ávila learned that the hard way, and his lessons are documented in a lengthy dossier that contain a series of accusations that his parishioners brought against him between 1607 and 1609, backed up by information inscribed in quipu. Not being able to control the production of legal documents that set into writing the voices of his parishioners, Ávila tried to defend

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himself by portraying his accusers as acting maliciously because “they claim that they are Indians and know little but they certainly have enough capacity to make false accusations and other misdeeds.”174 Ávila might still have told himself at the end of his life that it was impossible to explain to his Indigenous parishioners “things that are difficult or subtle,” but he was under no illusion that their alleged lack of knowledge of writing rendered them anything but helpless.175

CHAPTER 2 THE ABSENT KNOT Narrating and Counting in the Andes

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plaza of Lima was filled with an unaccounted number of Andeans, or rather their centuries-old mummified remains, which had been placed on a stage on Sunday, December 20, 1609. Tied to a post next to the mummies stood Hernando Paúcar, who was about to be flogged and have his hair cut as punishment for his role as main priest of Andeans’ “idolatrous religion.” On the stage also lay a never-before-seen display of hundreds of various kinds of Indigenous objects made of stone, clay, and wood set to be burned. Thousands of Spaniards, mestizos, and other inhabitants of Lima surrounded the stage. There was a designated area for the Indigenous inhabitants of the outskirts of the city, who had been required to attend. The most important colonial authorities, the archbishop and the viceroy among them, were also in attendance, sitting on steps built on one side of the stage. At the center of it all stood Francisco de Ávila, the parish priest who brought the objects, the mummified bodies, and Paúcar from his parish in the nearby province of Huarochirí.1 As dramatically as he delivered sermons in his parish, Ávila addressed the Indigenous people in attendance in Quechua. He called for their sincere repentance and true conversion to Christianity, and switched to Spanish and Latin to condemn the persistence of idolatrous practices and beliefs, materialized in the objects and the accused man on stage. HE MAIN

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Following Ávila’s speech, a notary climbed up the stage to read Paúcar’s sentence. After being physically punished, Paúcar was ordered into exile to the house of the Jesuit order in Santiago de Chile.2 In a display of his status as a man of letters, Ávila gave another sermon, this time in Latin, noting crudely how the survival of idolatry was a consequence of the failings of Indigenous evangelization in Peru. Among those in attendance was the newly appointed archbishop of Lima, Bartolomé Lobo Guerrero. Impressed with the priest’s sermon in Latin, he soon after created the office of juez visitador de idolatrías (visitor judge investigating idolatries) and named Ávila as the first office holder in Peru.3 He acquired the social recognition of “extirpator,” that is, a priest who specialized in discovering and uprooting pre-Hispanic beliefs, which usually also involved destroying Indigenous artifacts. This went in parallel with his incorporation into the lettered culture of colonial Peru. His Latin sermon was printed the following year.4 A few years later, a widely circulated practical guide for priests attempting to extirpate Indigenous idolatries lauded Ávila’s preaching skills, noting how instrumental they were in inducing Indigenous parishioners to self-denunciation and repentance from their idolatrous rituals.5 There was no subtlety in the direct link that the priest established between Andean idolatry, its material dimension, and the urgency to destroy it. All the Indigenous objects that had aroused the curiosity of spectators were consumed by flames.6 There was, however, something quite important missing from the extirpator’s pyre. Quipu, the knottedcord medium used by Andeans since pre-Hispanic times, were not counted among the things that Ávila displayed as proof of idolatry, even though some of his parishioners used them (figure 4).7 Quipu had been banned and ordered destroyed by the Third Ecclesiastical Council celebrated in the city of Lima in 1583. But two years later the same Council sponsored the printing of sermons that unambiguously encouraged Andeans to use quipu for their Christian confession: “So that your confession is good and that it pleases God, the first thing, my son, is that you have to think carefully about your sins and make a quipu of them: just like you make a quipu to keep an account of what is kept in your storehouse, an account of what you give and what is owed to you, you should also make a quipu of the offenses you have committed against God and your neighbor, and how many times, and if many or few times.”8

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Even though a number of modern scholars have assumed that the position agreed upon in 1583 was in effect a total ban of quipu, there is by now enough published evidence to the contrary. 9 In fact, more than fifty years later, Fernando de Avendaño would face no censorship for extending in his book of sermons the same invitation to include Andean knotted cord in the Catholic ritual, literally copying one of the 1585 sermons.10 Unlike the reports of widespread destruction of Indigenous records throughout New Spain, there is no record of a systematic quipu ban beyond 1583 or any concerted campaigns for their destruction during the lifetime of Ávila.11 Not even he, who built his reputation by destroying objects of idolatry, made any reference to destroying quipus.

FIGURE 4 Andean knotted cord or quipu, made of cotton, c. 1400–1532. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mrs. Eugene Schaefer.

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The Peruvian Catholic Church had an ambiguous stance towards quipus from the mid-sixteenth century to the mid-seventeenth century. But there was nothing equivocal about the role that quipus had in almost ruining Francisco de Ávila’s career. A significant number of Indigenous authorities and quipucamayoqs (specialists in handling quipu, and who were sometimes identified in colonial sources as “accountants”) of various towns of Huarochirí traveled to the tribunal of Lima to accuse their priest of a series of offenses. Information that they kept in quipus about Ávila had a central role in the statement of various accusing witnesses. But even then, Ávila did not argue that they should be destroyed. This chapter explores the colonial conditions that were set for the interaction between quipu and alphabetic writing. I focus first on the role that quipu played in the evangelization of Andeans in parallel to the Catholic Church’s growing concern about idolatry and its roots in the materiality of Indigenous culture. I argue that the Andean medium’s function as conveyor of narrative information was overshadowed and eventually delegitimized by the dangerous parallel established by European observers between quipu and books. In the second part of this chapter I present a close reading of the 144-folio dossier of accusations made by various Huarochirí communities against Father Francisco de Ávila starting in 1607. The case sheds light on how quipus’ function as records of quantitative or numeric information was legitimized by the practical needs of colonial administration. I show how this made it possible for Huarochirí inhabitants to use the numeric exactitude of quipus as evidence against their priest. But the case also reveals Andeans’ understanding of how both systems could be comparable and yet different in the roles they had in negotiating power in colonial society.

COUNT YOUR BLESSINGS (AND YOUR SINS) Some decades after the Spanish conquest of Peru, a few missionaries and other non-ecclesiastic observers discussed with differing levels of detail the communication capabilities of quipu, and the role that they thought the Andean medium had in the social dynamics in society. They noted how quipucamayoqs could encode quantities and narratives in the same medium. In the case of quantitative data, quipu was used to record

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information that was previously calculated in other material supports. Early Spanish chroniclers reported that Andeans made their calculations with small stones and grains of maize.12 Andeans also used an instrument called yupana—which functioned in a similar way to an abacus—to perform arithmetic calculations.13 The observers unanimously praised the remarkable precision of the numeric information conveyed by quipu, which included amounts of tribute payments. Those writers noted as well that quipu also recorded information about sacred places and objects, local deities or huacas, and the ceremonies associated to them.14 Non-Indigenous Christians considered all local gods and goddesses to be idols, thus, Brokaw concludes, it would not be surprising that “they condemned the quipu records associated with them [the idols].”15 But colonial sources are not very clear on why exactly those quipus, which Brokaw refers to as “idolatrous quipus,” would have been condemned. Was the medium and the message conceived as a unit that materialized in the form of knots and, thus, the quipu became another idolatrous object? Or was quipu only a concern as a medium that carried idolatrous information, that is, the message being the problem and not the medium? The perceived danger of interweaving knowledge and materiality was also noted by colonial observers who praised quipu. Mercedarian priest Cristóbal de Molina was one early authoritative source on the Andean medium, praised by the next generation of ecclesiastics as one who inquired about the intricacies of quipus and the ancestral memories that Andeans inscribed in them.16 Molina’s Relación de fábulas y ritos de los Incas (c.1575–1583), one of the manuscript books in Ávila’s library, is one of the few sixteenth century sources that explicitly addresses the relation between idolatry and quipus. Some quipus, according to Molina, were used to keep record of the amount and kind of ritual sacrifices made by Andeans in the former capital of the Inca empire: “[B]ecause in Cuzco there were quipucamayoq, who are like accountants of each of the territories and who kept the account and rationale of the sacrifices that were to be done in each province.”17 But his commentary focused only on the content of quipus and not on the materiality of the object per se (an object of idolatry). In another passage, Molina compared alphabetic writing to quipu, asserting that the latter could keep information that was passed from

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generation to generation with a precise record of even the smallest details: “[ . . . ] if they [had] used [writing], they would not have [had] such blind and obtuse and foolish errors and fables. Nevertheless, they used a very ingenious method of keeping account with strands of wool with two knots, using different-colored wool in the knots, which they call quipus.”18 The quotation points to the material dimension of religion, an issue he observed for the Andes as well as for Spain: “[Quipus] are almost like the cotton yarns that elderly women use to pray in our Spain, except that [quipus are] strands.”19 The comparison here is justified by the context of use of devices such as quipus and cotton yarns as practices related to religion. In the case of the old women in Spain using the cotton yarn, it seems to have been a sort of mnemonic device that helped their users remember their prayers. Rosaries come to mind, though it has to be stressed that Molina avoided the direct and possibly risky comparison between Christian rosaries and quipus.20 In pre-Hispanic times, quipus, as Molina described them, kept complex information that could date back hundreds of years. That information could be numeric or narrative and related to governance (resources) or religious rituals and was passed from generation to generation. That is, they were an Andean kind of mnemonic device. But in Molina’s evaluation neither the cotton yarn nor the quipu themselves had sacred qualities, otherwise he most likely would not have risked such a comparison. What, then, was the link between quipus and the “blind and obtuse and foolish errors and fables” noted by the priest? Nowhere in Molina’s text are quipus identified as the carriers of such errors and fables. That decried task fell to the other native medium that the priest comments on in different parts of his text, namely paintings. Paintings on boards or painted panels are mentioned quite a number of times in the Relación de fábulas as a medium that conveyed idolatrous information. Another of the texts from Ávila’s library takes us a little further. Polo Ondegardo, the royal official who toured through different parts of the Andes with viceroy Francisco de Toledo, observed how religion and governance intertwined in the Andes, and pondered whether they could be set apart. He also noted the important role that various coexisting Andean media had in sustaining the complex Inca organization. He mentioned quipus and paintings, usually referring indistinctively to these as “sus registros” (their records) but clarifying that there were Inca

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registros—apparently referring to centralized information—and local or provincial registros.21 Just like Molina, Ondegardo also explained that paintings or a sort of map of local deities or huacas (carta de las guacas) recorded very detailed information about objects of idolatry, the logic behind their geographical distribution (identified as ceque system), and their corresponding rituals and sacrifices.22 Though clearly condemning idolatry, he nonetheless expressed his admiration for the highly organized system of adoration of deities which he said was comparable to that of the ancient Romans.23 Quipus are never explicitly identified as carriers of idolatry or as being objects of idolatry in themselves. Ondegardo did establish an explicit comparison between the Andean medium and books, “their knots [quipus], which were the records of the region and their books.”24 Taking a cue from Ondegardo and even paraphrasing some of his arguments, a third author present in Ávila’s library, Jesuit José de Acosta, called for a concerted effort from colonial officials and priests in the task of temporal and spiritual governance of Indigenous people. Like Ondegardo, he also recommended keeping those Indigenous traditions or customs that did not go against Christianity or “against justice” in order to establish a juridical organization that would be in agreement with the dispositions of the Consejo de Indias.25 In that sense it seems understandable that Acosta, in his visits to towns around Cuzco and Juli, would observe with some delight how Andeans used quipus to remember Christian prayers and the doctrine: “[S]ome eighty- and ninety year-old men approached me crying and showing me strands, the knots with which they recorded what they had learned about doctrine in those days.”26 He also mentions what appears to be a secondhand report written in 1578 about an Andean of the province of Juli who approached a priest and, showing him a large number of quipus described as “memoriales [written summaries] of their sins,” asked for confession.27 Did the Andean from Juli identify as “sins” the information about the location and rituals to deities that had been recorded on quipus since pre-Hispanic times? Acosta seems to imply that the use of quipus as part of the evangelization process was the locals’ own initiative, and not prompted by priests: “In the morning the Indians came to a big square that is in front of the church, and there [ . . . ] they recited prayers and the doctrine, with one of them in the role of teacher, and they passed

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around quipus or records that they have, made of strands, with which they remember what they learnt, as we do with writing.”28 Acosta seemed to approve. Neither Molina, nor Ondegardo or Acosta, who were intensely read and quoted authors in their time, established an explicit link between quipu and idolatry. Why then did the church hold an ambiguous stance towards the quipu? It is worth reading the 1583 prohibition of the use of Andean medium in the sacrament of confession more closely. In chapter 37 of the proceedings corresponding to the third meeting of the Third Ecclesiastical Council of Lima it was agreed that the general population should be prohibited from reading books that went against faith, morals, and good customs, specifying for the Indigenous population that “because in place of books the Indians have used and use some [objects] as registers made of different threads, which they call quipos, and with those they preserve the memory of their old superstition and rites and ceremonies and perverse customs; the bishops shall make sure with diligence that all the memoriales and quipos, that serve for their superstition are taken away altogether from those Indians.”29 The Council of Lima established a parallel between books and quipus as media that recorded information, but distinguishing that not all quipus were considered bad.30 The targeted quipus were those that recorded “superstitions, rites, ceremonies and perverse customs,” which were as damaging as books containing “lascivious and obscene” narratives. The concern was about the content, not about the media used to inscribe it. The Council of Lima was not worried about the link between the materiality of the knotted cord and its social and symbolic function—as was the case with those Indigenous objects usually categorized as idolatrous. The uneasy stance towards quipus had to do, rather, with who had the legitimacy to produce knowledge and the authority to interpret (and impose an idea of ) what the sacred was supposed to be. A series of ordinances, decrees, and petitions from the time of Queen Isabel and King Fernando up until the reign of their grandson Philip II of Spain addressed the necessity to control or even prohibit the circulation and reading of chivalric novels or other similar types of “lying histories.”31 The focus of such regulatory moves in the Iberian peninsula and the Spanish American territories was not about the material carriers, books, but about their content, a crucial issue in the European wars of religion. The concern was that certain kinds of narratives that dealt with profane issues could lead

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naïve or uneducated readers such as young Spaniards (men and women) and neophyte Indigenous people to lose interest in the kind of religious literature they were expected to read. Or, even worse in the case of newly converted Indigenous people, that they “may regard all books of equal truth and authority,” granting the same status to the Holy Scriptures and to non-religious texts.32 The quoted proceedings also suggest that quipus that contained information other than that of “superstitions” were spared from the prohibition. Two years after the Third Council, the trilingual catechism (Spanish-Quechua-Aymara) printed in Lima included a sermon that encouraged Andeans to record their sins in quipus, suggesting an apparently unproblematic incorporation of this medium to a Christian sacrament. That sermon also acknowledged two different functions of quipu, its capacity to record numeric (how many sins) and narrative information (what kinds of sins, in what circumstances were they committed). This distinction can offer a clue into the circumstances that made the continued use of quipu possible well into the colonial period. Considering the various concerns conveyed previously by royal officials and ecclesiastics about the link between quipus and idolatry, the sermon seems to agree with the use of a neutered version of quipu, that is, those that only carried information that was agreeable to Catholic doctrine were acceptable. Although the proceedings of the Third Council pointed out that the knots could convey superstitions or information about perverse customs, quipus were not considered possible carriers of heresy, a charge far more serious than that of idolatry. This seems a blind spot in how the church conceived of the intersection between materiality and the sacred in Andean culture. Even if priests such as Ávila went as far as to accuse some parishioners of Huarochirí of being heretics, the accusation involved the rituals they practiced—in many cases examples of syncretism between Catholic and pre-Hispanic beliefs.33 But Indigenous “heresy” in the Andes was never about quipus. Thus, we find the limit to the parallel between books and quipus; could European lettered culture conceive a heretical message taking the material form of something so unlike a book? As has been noted in the quoted texts by Molina, Ondegardo and Acosta, the reference to quipus was usually accompanied by a clarification that those artifacts were “like” books. From the European perspective,

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that comparison already set quipus apart from other native media that were deemed so far from “civilized” modes of communication that they could not be brought into a comparative description. Yet regardless of the apparently benevolent comparison, quipus were not books and could not attain their social standing. The covert inequivalence between quipu and book was as clear for Europeans as it was for Andeans when the usual way to describe the Andean medium was “their [the Indians’] books.” Attitudes towards quipus changed over time. In the more than six decades since the backpedaled prohibition of the 1580s, there does not seem to have been an agreement regarding quipus among regular and secular members of the Peruvian church. In his book of sermons, Francisco de Ávila neither encouraged nor discouraged parishioners to use quipus for confession. He barely mentions quipus at all despite the quotidian presence of those artifacts in Huarochirí. The ambiguous and differing attitudes that the members of the Peruvian Catholic Church held regarding quipu during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reveal the difficulties non-Andeans had in understanding the capabilities of the Andean medium and how it articulated social relations. And this, I would suggest, played a role in the Peruvian church’s shift regarding Indigenous evangelization. The initial belief that the goals set for evangelization of Andeans could be smoothly achieved in a short period of time by incorporating local practices and objects. But a few decades later, as discussed in chapter 1, that optimism faded away into the fear that the eager ways in which Andeans appropriated Christian beliefs, rituals, and the materiality of that religion hid a dishonest purpose: to subvert Christianity and ensure the continuity of their pre-Hispanic belief system. Indigenous uses of media may have had a role to play in these concerns. Europeans progressively realized that Andeans could be agents of their own evangelization. In fact, it is not clear whether even the first initiative to use quipus as confession tools had come from Christian missionaries or from their Indigenous flock. Mercedarian friar Diego de Porras wrote that members of his religious order had been using the Andean medium since the 1580s for evangelization purposes, inscribing discourses about Christian behavior in those artifacts.34 Even though the earliest testimony of quipus as confession tools appears in a document written by a Jesuit, Estenssoro notes that the Company of Jesus never claimed to have introduced that use. He surmises that the early favorable

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attitude of Mercedarians and some Dominicans towards Indigenous confession—a much debated issue in evangelization practices for New World inhabitants—points to either of the orders as those likely to have introduced quipus as a tool for Christian rituals.35 However, it has to be underlined that there is no documentation to confirm such an assumption. The opposite case, that Andeans used their own initiative in the techniques of evangelization, is more often suggested in a number of colonial sources. Consider the following examples, one inscribed in the yet optimistic era of the first evangelization and the other a report of events taking place after idealism had turned into suspicion and mistrust. Jesuit José de Acosta reported in 1578 the case of an Andean on the Juli region who asked the priest to allow him to use a surplice (sobrepelliz), the white outer vestment worn by priests, so that he could preach to others in his community. The priest allowed the use of such garment with which the local gave a sermon asking his community to repent from their bad behavior as he had done.36 A crucial detail not mentioned by Acosta is that the Second Council of Lima (1567–1568) had prohibited the use of surplices by Andeans a few years before he wrote about the Juli case.37 Reading the prohibition between the lines, it seems Indigenous practices such as dressing up in a priest’s garment and performing his authority had become frequent enough to turn into cause for concern to the church. Acosta narrates the story with a hopeful tone for the sincere and exemplary conversion of Andens to Christianity. A few years later, he took part in the Third Council of Lima and in the writing down of its proceedings. By the 1630s Indigenous agency in their own evangelization became a source of indignation. In Ritual formulario e instrucción de curas (Lima, 1631), Juan Pérez Bocanegra provided the most extensive manual for the confession of Indigenous people to be produced in the Southern part of Spanish America. Pérez Bocanegra’s account of his visits to the city of Cuzco and other parts of the viceroyalty of Peru details how Andeans prepared for Christian confession. He found that some of them, mostly women, were known by their communities as “hermanos mayores” (elder siblings) because of the role they had in assisting and preparing others for Christian confession. The hermanos were de facto church assistants, an activity the church officially designated Indigenous people to perform.38

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But the hermanos went above what was expected of them: without being instructed to, they questioned extensively those who wanted to eventually confess with a priest and guided them in recording their sins in quipus, “which they bring to confess, like writings and their written records [ . . . ] which they have in various colors to differentiate kinds of sins and quantities of which they have committed.”39 Pérez Bocanegra identified the hermanos mayores as the inventors and teachers of this kind of practice of confession, pointing out that it was mostly Indigenous women who performed such role.40 The tone of the account is of indignation and even outrage when Pérez Bocanegra tells of how the hermanos were the ones who taught the Christian sacrament of confession, relegating priests to a secondary role. Even worse, some hermanos inspected and questioned the doctrinal knowledge that priests possessed and their suitability to perform the sacrament of confession. Encouraged by the hermanos, Andeans would regularly discuss theology, the sacraments of confession, communion, and the sermons that their priest delivered. It was, as Estenssoro aptly frames it, “an attack against the [priests’] monopoly of the administration of spiritual goods.”41 The use of the Andean knotted cords was central to this usurpation of authority. The hermanos did not operate clandestinely but in full view and, to a large extent, under the auspices of an initially optimistic Peruvian church that was progressively changing its stance towards the role that Andeans should have in their own evangelization.42 The indignation built not only against Indigenous agency but also on the so-called neophytes demands for higher standards in their indoctrination. Pérez Bocanegra could not cast them in the role of enemies of the church, but at the same time they had carved out a dangerous degree of independence from church bureaucracy (its authority was not challenged by the hermanos). The only way that he could think of curbing their pretenses was to focus on the material side of the problem: quipus. He denounced the misuse of the Andean medium, detailing how the followers of the hermanos acknowledged having used other people’s quipus, at times using the same quipus for more than one confession, and even inscribing in the knotted cords sins that they had not committed or that were not even sins.43 The solution he suggested was to burn confession quipus and to do so every time Andeans showed up to confession with them.44 There is no indication

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however that he destroyed quipus or that there was a concerted campaign at that time to eradicate them, as we have seen. Pérez Bocanegra did not consider that priests should reclaim their authority by learning how to use quipus. As far as we know, no Spanish overlords or other non-Andeans were able to decipher them. Nor did they seem interested in appropriating such medium, as Pérez Bocanegra’s text seems to confirm. Brokaw has argued that in the encounter between quipu and alphabetic writing the power differential of the colonial context forced quipucamayoqs to adapt “their khipu practices to record the type of information demanded by their new Spanish overlords.”45 The fact remained, however, that colonizers were not able to discern whether the information being read to them by quipucayoqs was all the information in fact contained in a quipu. A few colonizers expressed their doubts about the reliability of quipucamayoqs readings of quipus to nonAndeans, and this is indeed insinuated by Pérez Bocanegra.46 Andeans, on the other hand, understood soon enough the kind of information that Spaniards wanted to hear, and narratives about their ancestors, Incas, huacas, and “idolatry” rituals were certainly not in demand. In other words, the power differential most likely changed legibility practices rather than the use of quipus. Andeans learned the kind of information that they had to make legible, to decode, from quipus to their Spanish interlocutors, while omitting content that could have compromised them and their communities. The absence of a direct mention of idolatrous quipus in colonial sources might not be explained by their destruction. As we saw, Spaniards were worried about content not media. They were also spooked by Andeans taking evangelization into their own hands. But the legibility imposed by colonizers on quipus handed Andeans the opportunity to hide unwanted information in plain sight. If so, what was the point in destroying them? That would also explain why, as Brokaw notes, “idolatrous khipu” were mentioned in the early texts by Ondegardo and Molina but thereafter “disappeared, at least from the view of Spaniards.”47 What was in demand was information about Indigenous tribute, numbers of tributary Andeans, and any other kind of information that could help royal officials and ecclesiastical representatives keep control of the economic dynamics that shaped the colonial context. As discussed in the opening pages of this section, chroniclers and officials had no problem

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in praising the exactitude that could be achieved in the accounts kept in quipus. But the varying conditions under which quipus were considered in the process of Christian evangelization requires us to reconsider the ways in which Europeans understood the social functions that the Indigenous medium had, and how that did not necessarily coincide with the Andean conceptualization of quipu. In this section I have discussed the kind of information conveyed by quipus that Europeans considered more problematic: narrative information. I pointed out how certain kinds of narrative information were legitimized by the colonial order, while others—the “idolatrous” kind—“disappeared” or rather became illegible to non-Andean eyes. In the next section, I take another approach to the legitimacy differential, pointing out how the quantitative information conveyed by quipus became useful to colonial administration. And while this overshadowed the capability that knotted cords had to record narrative information, the quantitative side of quipus allowed its users to partake with them in the Spanish legal system.

OF KNOTS AND NUMBERS Aiming for a promotion, in May of 1607 Ávila requested an official report about his life and deeds. The document conveyed a glowing selfevaluation of the evangelization work he accomplished for the greater benefit of the monarchy and the church.48 From the beginning of September to early November of that same year, a significant number of Ávila’s parishioners made their way to Lima, the capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru, to reach the office of the procurador general de indios (attorney general for Indigenous cases), Francisco de Avendaño. He was presented with approximately 130 accusations against Father Francisco de Ávila. Secular and regular priests were under the legal jurisdiction of the Ecclesiastical Tribunal. It was Avendaño’s duty to defend Indigenous people who brought charges against their priests. Around thirty men who traveled from different communities of Huarochirí presented detailed accusations and grievances in the form of memoriales and peticiones (written summaries and petitions) in Spanish from the hands of indios principales—those who held important offices in their villages. Two quipucamayoqs, identified by Spanish officials as

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accountants, were among those who handed in the memoriales. Commoners were soon after called by the procurador to testify in Lima as witnesses to the accusations put forth by their town authorities.49 The whole process lasted two years. The majority of those hundred plus accusations against Ávila refer to abusive tribute charges and Indigenous labor that, his accusers claimed, had gone unpaid for fourteen years, the time the priest had been in Huarochirí.50 Most of the information referring to material debts incurred by the priest had been kept in the communities’ quipus, with thorough descriptions of the circumstances in which the debts were incurred and their current value in Spanish coins and units of account (real, patacón, peso, cuartillo, and tomín). The accusers were careful enough to convey their claims in terms that Spaniards would understand as units of measure and value. But they also reframed economic transactions as social relations tied to moral duties. The priest was also denounced for neglecting his doctrinal obligations, a physically violent treatment of some of his parishioners, and the immoral and scandalous sexual relationships he was said to have with some Indigenous women. One of the latter ran away from Huarochirí to Lima with the intention to denounce him, but fell ill and died. These latter kinds of accusations were framed as what we could call moral infractions, or debts to the community as a whole. Justice moved swiftly. The last recorded memoriales with accusations appear to have been presented on September 28, 1607. The procurador requested on November 23 of the same year that the diocesan judge don Pedro Muñiz order Ávila’s imprisonment and the seizure of all his possessions while the trial progressed. Muñiz obliged. Ávila found himself jailed in the prison of the Archbishopric of Lima. He was freed the next day, after being bailed out by one of his acquaintances, but the legal dispute went on until December of 1609. Midway through it, in May 1608, Ávila returned to his parish. A few months later, he accused his Huarochirí parishioners of surreptitiously continuing with pre-Hispanic beliefs and practices that, to the eyes of Christianity, constituted idolatry. The priest pressured some of his parishioners into self-denunciations of the rituals, objects, and places that were understood as carriers of idolatry. Some of these events are mentioned in the Huarochirí manuscript. The symbolic and material eradication of Indigenous practices that Ávila carried out in

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Huarochirí and surrounding areas gained him notoriety as an extirpator of idolatries. It also yielded an impressive collection of objects which, as mentioned before, the priest placed on public display and later burned in Lima, on December 20 of 1609. On December 31, the case against Ávila was finally closed, although he was not acquitted of all the initial charges. What may seem at first sight a straightforward case of imbalanced justice with a predictable outcome is in fact much more complex and rich than the final verdict suggests. The “curious and sensitive business” of reading trial testimony, as Burns remarked, together with the questionnaires, and counterarguments, can yield a far more interesting picture of how power had to be negotiated, and the roles that Andean and nonnative media had in those negotiations.51 The dossier shows many instances where oral and written testimonies, notarial documents, and quipus intertwined during this two-year long case. But it also insinuated that all of these were not necessarily understood or used in the same ways or for the same purposes by both sides of the dispute. Thus, I believe, this lawsuit can be considered a privileged source to reconstruct and analyze how Andean and European legibilities collided. This case sheds light onto a conflict that went beyond the frame of orality versus literacy and it can show us how legibility was connected to differing ideas of legitimacy. The lawsuit dossier, partially transcribed and published by Antonio Acosta (1979) and Gerald Taylor ([1985] 2000), has been studied for the valuable information it reveals about Indigenous communal organization, the economic relations between the church and Andeans, and how those relations shaped the negotiation of authority.52 Ávila’s campaign against idolatries has been considered the starting point of a new and more intransigent era of Indigenous evangelization in Peru.53 The divergent analytical approach offered in this chapter can also contribute to expand our understanding of how economic and social relations developed in a context of differing legibilities. The role that quipus had in colonial society as accounting records was less polemic but nonetheless complex. Already in the 1530s Spaniards noted how much quipus facilitated their search for information on Andean society that would allow them to reorganize and govern the new colonial space.54 Since the 1560s, high ranking royal officials acknowledged and even recommended that other official administrators take advantage of the information on Indigenous tribute contained in quipus.55

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The continued use of the pre-Hispanic medium, Assadourian argues, assured “an efficient apparatus of ‘statistical’ control deriving from an ancient social legitimacy, which contributed to the smooth functioning of the colonial administration.”56 It could be argued that the smooth functioning of the colonial administration was the higher aim of Andeans who used accounting quipus to litigate against their colonial authorities, be they royal or ecclesiastical officials. But the use of accounting quipus from colonial administrative instruments to legal tools could also be framed as an essentially overlapping and contradictory process: Indigenous knowledge being colonized, and that colonized knowledge becoming a way to challenge colonial authority. This is how quipus became evidence.57 On September 14, 1607, one of the caciques of the town of Santa Ana in Huarochirí, Don Lorenzo Colqueñaupa, along with four other indios principales begged the provisor don Pedro Muñiz in a memorial to do them and their community justice.58 They listed twenty-three accusations against Ávila, some of them framed as crime and negligence committed by their priest.59 On September 22, the indios principales of the repartimiento of Huarochirí and of the ayllu Huamasica followed suit, accusing the priest of “not paying for anything, and it [all that he took from Indians] should be appraised and its value agreed.” Along the twenty-nine accusations against Ávila, they noted that by forcing some in their community to dye large amounts of cloth for him, the men could not attend their own plots of land, key to the survival of the community.60 On September 28, the cacique and indios principales of the town of Santiago de Tumna claimed, in one of the forty-eight charges brought against Ávila, that he kept commoners busy sowing corn in his plots of land. This, they underlined, resulted in “much harm and loss” because that impeded them from paying their tribute which was meant to engross the monarchy’s treasury.61 Additionally, he had not paid them their wages for the services he had them do.62 The dossier suggests that most, if not all, of the accusations against Ávila were backed up by information recorded in quipus. These had been, for the legal process, transcribed into Latin script in the form of written memoriales and peticiones presented by the indios principales to the procurador. Other Andeans who lived in rural areas, as in the case of the inhabitants of Huarochirí, were legally under the jurisdiction of a royal official,

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the corregidor de indios (magistrate), and a representative of the church, a priest. Indigenous settlements, referred to in colonial sources as pueblos de indios, also had Andean authorities, with the curaca or cacique being at the top of the hierarchy. Curaca was the term that designated since pre-Hispanic times the ethnic lord who managed his community’s labor force and lands. Indigenous tribute, mainly in the form of goods from maize to cloth, was collected in June and December, and handed to regional treasury officials. Colonial regulations stipulated that curacas, priests, and other official provincial administrators received their salaries from that tribute.63 Besides tribute, mita was the other official levy of the state. Based on a pre-Hispanic system of rotational labor force, the colonial mita was meant mainly to assure supply of low-wage labor to the silver and mercury mines of Potosí and Huancavelica, also in the viceroyalty of Peru. The inhabitants of the province of Huarochirí were not subject to mining mita, but had instead to do other kinds of services—which Andeans also identified as mita—such as doing maintenance work to the road that connected Lima with Cuzco and Potosí.64 Those who did mita—men from ages eighteen to fifty-three—were to be paid according to a wage scale officially established. In her extensive study of economic and social relations in Huarochirí from Inca times to the late eighteenth century, Spalding noted that it was not unusual for colonial authorities such as the parish priest to impose additional legal and extralegal levies to extract goods and labor from the Indigenous population. Unless the level of extraction exceeded the limits tolerated by Indigenous communities, royal officials would just turn a blind eye to the situation, “aware that its only alternative to providing a salary that would attract people to such positions was to ignore the extra demands they laid upon the people under their authority.”65 But what the court case shows us is that Andeans used accounting quipus in a way that was not just a straightforward way of doing the numbers for tribute payments. The memoriales that contained information from quipus and that were handed in by the indios principales of Huarochirí were all about debts that Ávila had with different communities. How “debt” was understood and recorded, however, seems to go beyond tribute, mita, or a strict understanding of economic relations. The memoriales that they submitted as well as the testimonies of witnesses reveal

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a complex system of keeping checks and balances between communities and colonial officials, with a blurry frontier between individual and collective grievances. Debts referring to extralegal levies of tribute and mita were presented as exact quantities which, noted directly and indirectly by the accusers and witnesses, were recorded in quipus. The indios principales of the town of San Francisco, among which was Andrés Macacaxa, a contador, handed in a memorial with thirty charges against Ávila for total and partial debts. The first charge points out that the priest “took five carneros de castilla (sheep) for which he has a remaining debt of six patacones and two reales.” Then the memorial moves on to debts related to foodstuffs and fodder: “[F]ifty patacones for four thousand five hundred and thirty eggs, which come to pesos [sic] of nine reales” and “11486 arrobas of fodder valued in 161 patacones and 6 reales.” The charges also touch on unpaid jornales (legal daily wages): “and [he owes] the jornal of 195 Indians who carried said load [of fodder] to the town of San Damian, he owes for this 49 patacones.” On the left margin of the first folio with the itemized charges, someone, most likely the scribe who wrote down the accusers’ claims, attempted to translate the accusations into a sum on patacones and reales, but left it unsolved.66 By contrast, the accusers did not have any problem in making the addition and even volunteered to facilitate it for the colonial officials. Thus, when seven indios principales of the ayllu Concha of Huarochirí claimed that Ávila had forced some of them to give a pitcher of chicha (maize based drink) to the many men he had working in his house, they carefully noted each pitcher was worth one real, “and in five years [they] amounted to more than three thousand reales, of which he has not paid any part, and the very exact account made in their manner is kept by the Indians, which if necessary they will show.”67 The evident contrast between the acknowledged exactitude of their accounts and the imprecise amount of “more than three thousand reales” seems to come down to the carelessness or plain laziness of the person who wrote down the accusers’ claims. This seems to be confirmed in a different set of claims made a few days later by a different group of indios principales. On that occasion the caciques of Santiago de Tumna accused the priest of keeping ten beasts of burden in the stables of that town, compelling commoners “to bring each day fifteen loads of fodder, and this, by the end of

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the year, sums up to a big amount, and this calculation is kept in a quipu by the Indigenous accountant of these towns.”68 The large amount of the debt had already been calculated and kept in a quipu, but whosoever transcribed the claims decided to settle for the phrase “a big amount” and a reference to the quipus for more exact information. The payments requested from Ávila were exact amounts calculated with the current value of the goods that the accusers had handed to him as tribute.69 It is not surprising, then, that some of those who were paid by the priest expressed their displeasure with receiving less than expected: “each week he asks for maize and a fanega of potatoes and pays less than it is worth, half its value, and for maize he pays four reales for each fanega, and for wheat one patacón, while maize should be paid four pesos.”70 While most of the charges against Ávila, as noted before, had to do with economic damages suffered by the communities of the indios principales who accused the priest, a different kind of accusation, one that could be called a moral debt or moral infraction can also be found in the dossier. It involved the priest’s neglect of his pastoral obligations, physical violence against some of his male parishioners, and his sexual abuse of women. The first kind of infraction was presented as quantified information: Ávila’s parishioners detailed the amount of time he spent in Lima each year, while failing to deliver Mass and to care for the spiritual health of those under his charge in the villages of Huarochirí. But besides denouncing the priest’s absences, three of his parishioners also had tough criticism for the priest’s performance as their spiritual and moral guide.71 Just like the hermanos mayores that Pérez Bocanegra encountered in his visits to different parts of Peru, Ávila’s parishioners took it as their obligation to scrutinize his actions. Their required attendance to Mass delivered by the priest in other villages became an opportunity for them to gather information. One of them, don Diego Sacxayauri, stated unashamedly that he went from village to village, “enquiring about the life of said priest [Ávila] to know and help the poor Indians.”72 Don Diego was literate—that is, he knew at least how to sign his name—but only in Quechua. As will be discussed in chapter 5, the information that circulated on the roads that connected the different Indigenous villages in the Andes was crucial for the extensive chronicle written in Spanish by another contemporaneous literate Andean, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala.

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A second type of moral debt incurred by Ávila had to do with his mistreatment of some men. The indios notables of the town of San Francisco explained in a memorial that Ávila sent ten men to hunt for guanacos (an Andean camelid) and to cure and salt its meat. One who refused had his clothes torn off by an enraged Ávila, who “flogged him and mistreated him.”73 The memorial mentions three other cases where Ávila’s mistreatment was quantified in the implicit value of the fine shirts that the accusers wore. The abusive behavior of the priest towards women, which included non-sexual physical mistreatment and sexual abuse, was not quantified in the denunciations. It is clear, though, from how the situation of those women was presented and the language used for it, that as in the case of the mistreated male parishioners, the harm done to each individual was considered an affront to the community. The same can arguably be said for how the economic debts which Ávila had with each individual became communal forfeiture, and all of that, in turn, became recorded information in quipus. Physical mistreatment and sexual abuse, however, are not counted as the jornales and goods owed were, but presented rather as a kind of infraction. And it is particularly in this kind of denunciation that we can observe how those who denounced Father Ávila framed the conflict within a Christian worldview, tapping into Andean notions that had long been appropriated by the church for evangelization purposes. The notion of being at fault due to an unfulfilled obligation, a debt, or a transgression in a social relation of reciprocity was connected to the Quechua term hucha. It seems to have been used to refer to the relationship between huacas and their followers, with unresolved obligations, debts, or transgressions becoming hurdles for the completion of ritual cycles, which could lead to misfortunes as a way of punishment.74 Although hucha seems closer to the quantifiable aspect of the economy of a ritual action than to Christian sin, it was incorporated into Christian terminology presumably early on in the first stages of Catholic evangelization in Peru.75 This can be deduced from its presence as equivalent to sin in one of the earliest lexicons of the Quechua language to circulate in print (Santo Tomás, 1560) and the doctrinal texts sponsored by the Third Council of Lima. Indeed, the 1585 church-sponsored book of sermons encouraged Andeans to record their sins in quipus in the same fashion as they kept records “of what you give and what is owed to you.”76

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It should not be surprising then that, in the lawsuit, Andeans seem to have understood sin in both its dimensions of fault and debt, thus recording it in quipus. Whereas priests would have expected them to keep their own sins recorded in quipus, in this case it seems Andeans also kept a record of other peoples’ sins and debts. From the point of view of his Huarochirí parishioners, Ávila had incurred in many of both.

WITNESSING QUIPUS Colonial officials did not find it extraordinary for quipus to be consulted or even materially present during legal proceedings related to disputes between Andeans and colonizers.77 Lawsuits like the one against Ávila can yield information about the status of quipus in colonial legal procedure, that is, how and why quipus would be allowed into the Spanish legal process. As noted before, two quipucamayoqs, or Andean accountants, were present among the indios principales at the time the memoriales and peticiones were created and handed in. The lawsuit documentation does not provide information on whether quipus were materially present or not at the time the memoriales were written. But how exactly did quipus enter the lawsuit? How did knotted cord records become alphabetic evidence? It was indeed in the interest of the accusers to present an exact figure of the debts. Tellingly, in the Huarochirí case the exactitude of the debts is an issue explicitly addressed by the officials in charge of questioning witnesses. In the only questionnaire copied into the dossier, the ecclesiastic judge questions witnesses about the debt Ávila incurred with the churches and the funds of the towns of his parish after taking large amounts of silver coins, potatoes, maize and sheep. The witnesses were instructed to “answer what you know distinctly, what amount, so that it can be collected [from Ávila].”78 Joan Carhuaylluncu, from the town of Santa Ana, was questioned by the procurador in Lima. He answered that “having this witness seen the accounts and quipus of the Indian accountants of Santa Ana it seems that doctor Francisco de Ávila owes to the town eighty sheep that were mentioned in the accusation and that were sold for nine reales each, and of this [the witness] only knows what he heard from the Indian accountants and nothing else.”79

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While the questionnaire never pointed to quipus as a possible source of information, Joan and other witnesses summoned before and after him understood that the request for an exact answer meant they had to refer to the knotted cords. But the validation of the Andean medium as evidence followed a complex path in which elements such as voice and sight had a role in the construction of valid evidence in the Spanish legal system. This made possible, more as an unintended effect than by design, that knotted cords could be incorporated into the process just as books of account. The testimony of this witness thus became valid not because he knew how to decode quipus, but rather because he stated that he saw the knotted cords and heard the indios contadores mention the amounts owed by Ávila and recorded in the quipus. In other words, as long as a quipu, an accounting book, or a memorial were witnessed, they could be incorporated into a legal procedure.80 The witness was necessary to turn evidence into legal material. A written document such as a memorial and a quipu (which Spaniards called memoriales as well), were considered private documents. Any private document (i.e. not notarized), as opposed to a public document (i.e. notarized), had much lower evidentiary value, that is, the document could be challenged more easily. Regardless of the medium used to convey information contained in a private document, it would have to be supported by witness statements if contested. Those would usually be collected by a notary within the legal procedure, turning them into public documents. A witness testimony, a performance that involved sight and voice, was the basis for a new written document which carried more legal weight. In short, there was no difference in evidentiary value between a private document in alphabetic writing or a quipu, however, the highest evidentiary value was reserved for public documents which by definition were written in alphabetic or Latin script.81 Only a document witnessed by a notary was considered a public document; its truthfulness guaranteed by the textual (not necessarily physical) presence of the notary.82 Quipu was thus compatible with colonial legal processes and was a convenient accounting tool for colonial tribute collection.83 This latter function of quipu in colonial relations was, as noted before, what fostered fascination and respect in many Europeans. Indeed, I would argue that quipu fits in a larger, global context of overlapping numeracy traditions and crucial historical transition in accounting methods, which in

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turn brought changes to the boundaries between numeracy and literacy in European and Andean societies. The early modern pursuit towards precision in mathematical operations—or more precisely, arithmetical operations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division— was almost as important between rivaling European nations as the pursuit towards theological supremacy between the different branches of Christianity.84 It was possibly the Jesuit José de Acosta who in 1588 first placed the quipu system in a wider comparative perspective: “And they [native Andeans] overcame (it seems almost impossible) the lack of writing with such display of ingenuity, that they keep memory of their histories, rites, laws and, what is more, the trajectory of time and the account of numbers with some signs and memoriales invented by them which they call quipos, in such a way that our people, with all their writings, surrender to their skill. In calculations and divisions, I do not know, to tell the truth, if our writing gives mathematicians more confidence than those men [native Andeans] have from those signs of theirs.”85 The most relevant part of the quotation is not how Acosta discusses quipus or quipos, but rather what he tells the reader about mathematicians in Europe. He rhetorically wonders if “our writing gives mathematicians more confidence,” which I interpret as an implicit reference to the relation between alphabetic writing (Latin script) and mathematics. How are quipus relevant in that question? The official way of keeping accounts in Spain was by using Roman numerals—that is, the Latin script letters used as numbers—and this was known in Spain as the “cuenta castellana.” Since the 1520s the use of Roman numerals started coexisting with Arabic numerals both in official and private (merchants) accounting.86 In early sixteenth-century documents from Navarra, the official accounts in the front page (recto) were presented in Roman numerals but the calculations had been done in Arabic numerals in the back (verso). In other folios of the same accounts, the calculations are entirely in Roman numerals while the total shown in the lower part of the page was translated to Arabic numerals.87 By the mid-seventeenth century, the balance had shifted: account books of the Confraternity of Vera Cruz, also in Spain, show calculations done entirely in Arabic numerals, but the result was also presented in its equivalent in Roman numerals.88 The coexistence of different numeracy systems—or rather the transition from one

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to the other—is also registered in the archives of the viceroyalty of Peru. The 1591 accounts of the Caja Real of Cuzco were made mostly in Roman numerals, but in some folios the scribe wrote down the same account in Roman numerals in the left column and in Arabic numerals on the right, a translation of sorts.89 Small details in these accounts such as the incorporation of fractions in Arabic numerals hint at the reason behind the transition from one numeracy system to the other. Even the most basic equations of adding and subtracting are extremely difficult, imprecise, and often laden with errors when done with Roman numerals. The transition to Arabic numerals was an enormous improvement in Spanish and European accounting techniques. Placed in this larger context, the admiration for the numeric exactitude of quipus expressed by Acosta reveals a new dimension. There were three competing numeracy systems by the time he was writing, not two: quipu, Roman numerals, and Arabic numerals. Latin script was used to register narrative and numeric information (i.e. “five”; “V”). Quipus were also used to register both numeric and narrative information, although the calculations inscribed in it, as explained before, were not done on the knotted cords themselves. Latin script and quipu script allowed for a continuity between numeric and narrative information, numeracy and literacy were encoded in the same way. With the adoption of Arabic numerals, Latin script was limited mostly to its narrative function, while the role of accounting fell on Arabic numerals.90 Spaniards probably had no incentive to adopt the quipu system because they were already in the process of incorporating Arabic numerals, which solved the issue of precision.91 However, the adoption of Arabic numerals brought a rupture in the functions of the Latin script, which, most likely, also affected the ways in which Europeans conceived of quipus.

UNTYING THE KNOT? RECANTATIONS AND NEGOTIATIONS How could Ávila defend himself against the admirably precise information conveyed by the quipus held by his accusers? The priest followed a straightforward strategy: he never mentioned quipus to the officials doing

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the inquiry. Not even the “idolatrous” variety. In fact, he did not mention any kind of idolatries during the initial stages of the trial. Instead, he shifted the attention of the ecclesiastical judge to focus on alphabetic writing and the validity of the testimonies of his accusers and the witnesses. While imprisoned in Lima in November of 1607 for, at most, a day and a half, Ávila claimed that the accusers were uttering slander against him and that, in following due process, he should be allowed to go back to his parish to defend himself against his accusers. A visitador eclesiástico (ecclesiastic overseer) called Baltazar de Padilla was already on his way to the parish and Ávila requested permission to join him to continue with the investigation in situ. Asked to pay a bail to guarantee his later appearance in court, the priest complained that the amount of money that the accusers were demanding from him was so exorbitant “that [it] exceeded any rich man’s possibilities.” An acquaintance of Ávila paid the bail but the amount was not disclosed in the dossier.92 Back in Huarochirí in May of 1608, Ávila asked the visitador to require his accusers from the town of Santiago de Tumna to show the copy of the memoriales of the forty-eight accusations that they had presented months before in Lima and any other written documents related to the case. Quipus were not requested. The indios principales, led by don Martín Puypurossi, showed the memoriales and declared that all the accusations contained in the folios were “false and deceitful.” They added that persons from another town and one who lived in Lima had persuaded them to bring up the charges. Surrounded by five Spaniards who signed as witnesses, the principales asked Ávila to forgive their ingratitude, remarking that they, the principales, were the ones to blame for making the accusations and not the commoners of their town. Finally they declared that, two months before, they had asked another person from Huarochirí, Cristóbal Choque Casa, to write down a declaración (statement) acknowledging that Ávila did not owe them anything. They asked the visitador to add the statement to the process and to dismiss the charges. The document identified all those who recanted by their names and their offices except for the Indigenous accountant, Cristóbal Macañaupa, whose office was not specified, in spite of having been noted down in the original memoriales.93 It came down to paper versus paper. Or rather, memorial versus statement. But the indios principales’ new deposition, witnessed by five

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Spaniards and a notary who signed the new document, had acquired a higher evidentiary value. In legal terms, this new document was more valuable to Ávila’s defense than the statement that Choque Casa, Ávila’s local ally, managed to draw out of the accusers before the priest and the visitador arrived in town. The statement, in fact, was not altogether exculpatory.94 But more importantly, that document, and others that had a similar content, evince the awareness that the indios principales had that in the new scenario the power balance between quipu and alphabetic writing had shifted towards the latter, and precision was no longer useful.95 The statement mentioned by the indios principales of Santiago de Tumna was written on March 19, 1608, and it only contains the testimony of Martín Puypurocsi. He stated that, having been stricken by a disease and fearing death, he asked Choque Casa to write down his recantation. Of the most scandalous accusation against Ávila, the sexual abuse of Indigenous women, he stated that they were false because he did not know the women and he only mentioned the case because someone from another town told him to do so. Don Martín did not claim that Ávila never abused women; he claimed that he did not witness such actions. The hundred sheep that the priest took without paying for them “were really only a few, as was stated in the account books of the town.” And in regards to the priest’s unpaid money for the Andeans’ services or mita, don Martín stated that Ávila “has paid it all, except for some for which he gave cédulas (written bills).”96 Many others admitted to falsely accusing Ávila when questioned by the Spanish officials about the original charges; some of the accusers, like don Martín, turned the blame to persons of “other towns” who pressured them to accuse Ávila. The recantations, however, are not a blanket denial of all the initial accusations. Instead, they generally follow the same discursive pattern: the quantities owed were revised downwards and the unpaid labor restated as service done out of friendship toward Ávila. The indios principales of the ayllu Huamasica, for example, stated: “The sixth item that stated that he owes us for one million and eleven thousand three hundred fish [pejerreyes] given to him is false, because only every now and then we have sent a few fish to the said doctor [Ávila], and not expecting money in exchange because those were meant as gifts.”97 Their initial claim stated that the exact amount of tribute was recorded

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in quipus. The retractions not only omitted mentioning quipus, they replaced precise accounts (“one million and eleven thousand three hundred fish”) for vague amounts (“a few fish”). The dossier of the trial includes one recantation written in Quechua. The indios principales of the town of San Francisco de Sunicancha asked Choque Casa to write, on February 21, 1608, an apartamiento, or statement, desisting of the original accusations against Ávila and revising them claim by claim. The Quechua text is followed in the dossier by a translation into Spanish which, according to historian Antonio Acosta, was likely done by Francisco de Ávila.98 The apartamiento conveys various motives for the initial accusations which concentrate mainly on anger at rumors that Ávila was planning to make them do additional unpaid work. It also underlines the willingness of the accusers to reestablish good relations with their priest. But, inadvertently, instead of taking back all the moral, labor, and tribute accusations, the parishioners from Sunicancha restated the power dynamics with their priest. The order in which the recantations are presented—which do not coincide with that of the accusations—points to the main element that such power rested on. The recantation opens with the following statement: “In no way should it be believed that, before he [Ávila] came to these territories, we understood or knew God’s word. It was he [Ávila] who taught us how to live as Christians.”99 Taking into account the power negotiations involved in the relations between priests and their Indigenous parishioners, I consider that this passage points to what was really the biggest affront to Ávila: Huarochirí parishioners, like the hermanos mayores elsewhere, had indeed taken evangelization in their own hands. The first step for them to bring down hostilities was to reinstate him as their spiritual and moral guide. But not even at this point did Ávila discredit nor destroy quipus. The coexistence of quipus and alphabetic writing had already been going on for a long time. In the 1570s, Viceroy Toledo accepted the interface between Andean and non-native media as a pragmatic temporary solution; quipus registered the excesses committed by Spaniards regarding Indigenous tribute—which ended up having a negative effect for the royal treasury—while that information was usually kept out of documents written by officials in Peru. Additionally, at that time there were not yet enough literate Andeans in the towns to take charge of

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keeping tribute registries in Latin script.100 Things had changed when the Huarochirí parishioners denounced their priest. By then, there seems to have been many literate Andeans—also referred in colonial documents as indios ladinos—in towns of that province, but it is not entirely clear that they shared Viceroy Toledo’s approach to the interface between quipus and writing. For one, when Toledo discussed the issue of literacy in Indigenous towns he seems to have assumed literacy could only happen in Spanish language or Latin, implicitly outlining that the interaction was between alphabetic writing (in Spanish) and quipus (linked to the Andean language of its creators). Cristóbal Choque Casa, the Huarochirí local who wrote the document where the indios principales of Sunicancha recanted their original accusations, seems a perfect example of what an indio ladino was expected to be: “a devoted parish assistant and civil government administrator, exceptionally literate in both Quechua and Castilian, and well equipped to dissuade native congregants from their attachment to the traditional divinities.”101 Even if allowing for a more accommodating notion of indio ladino, one that designates Indigenous people familiarized—to differing degrees—with Spanish customs and language, it would still be difficult to think of some in Huarochirí as ladinos.102 Alonso Chacyallivia, of the town of Santiago de Tumna, had been among those who met with the procurador in Lima in 1607 to testify against Ávila. Chacyallivia’s testimony was signed by the notary and by an interpreter, don Diego Solsol, a native speaker of Quechua who worked for the Real Audiencia of Lima. Solsol translated all the questions to the witness and his replies to the notary.103 Two years later, when José de Carvajal visited the town of Tumna to officially question Chacyallivia as part of the continuing legal process, the latter stated that all the accusations he made against Ávila before were false. This time, however, the notary wrote down, “asked if he knew how to sign, he [Chacyallivia] said he did. When asked why he had not signed the document in which he accused Ávila, he replied that at that time he was not asked to do it. He signed with his name.”104 Would an Indigenous person who knew how to use alphabetic writing but only spoke Quechua be considered an indio ladino? Neither Chacyallivia nor Choque Casa were the only ones in Huarochirí who had become acquainted—most likely in different degrees—with

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Latin script, and most likely not all of those who could write were allies of Ávila.105 During the different stages of the trial against the priest, many of those who accused and those who testified as witnesses knew how to sign their names. The extent and degree of alphabetic literacy (in Spanish or in Quechua or both) amongst Andeans cannot be ascertained with this information. But these and other small details that emerge throughout the dossier do allow a glimpse into a scenario of a complex and subtle interaction between alphabetic writing and quipus and to their shifting roles in specific circumstances. When Ávila was first confronted with the accusations brought up by his parishioners back in November 1607, his main line of defense was to claim the falseness of all the charges and also to discredit the accusers and witnesses: “they claim that they are Indians and know little, but they certainly have enough capacity to make false accusations and other misdeeds.”106 Knowing little, as Ávila explained in the sermons discussed in the previous chapter, meant fundamental illiteracy. For a man of letters such as this priest, knowledge was above all tied to writing in the form of holy and secular texts. If he did not know it yet, the trial revealed to him that Andeans were very aware of the many uses that writing could have when it came to restating the balance of power. In the recantation of their original claims against Ávila, one of the indios principales of the ayllu Concha, don Diego Canchopayco, explained that he traveled to Lima and hired a Spaniard to write down a memorial of grievances in Spanish after being prompted by a billete (a brief text) that he received from another Indio, Cristóbal Quespiraycu. The billete notified don Diego that other indios principales had already gone to Lima to accuse Ávila of different charges with the intention of getting the priest removed from their parish. Quespiraycu asked don Diego to travel to Lima and follow suit.107 There is little doubt that don Diego, the recipient of the billete, knew how to read. But it is unclear whether he hired a Spaniard to write the memorial because he was only literate in Quechua. Even the account books of the villages that encompassed Ávila’s parish were used to challenge the priest’s defense in a veiled way: “In regards to the said doctor’s debt of thirty-five patacones and six tomines to the church, we say that he has the account of this in his book and that we only know that he bought a veil for the Christ of this town and said that after

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the purchase only four patacones were left, whatever is [written] there [in the book] must be the truth.”108 And even though Ávila never mentioned quipus throughout the inquiry, one of the witnesses stated that he heard the priest asking the Indian accountant of the village of Santa Ana to keep in quipus the debt he had for taking eighty lambs.109 As I explained before, the lawsuit against Ávila was finally closed by the end of 1609 without real negative consequences for the priest. He gained notoriety as a zealous extirpator of idolatries and was promoted to a higher rank. Did the accusers gain anything from this trial? The embattled priest vehemently denied in absolute terms every single accusation made against him by his parishioners. However, several marginal notes signed by a notary in different folios of the dossier attest that Ávila agreed to out-of-court settlements with a number of his accusers. More remarkable, the settlements were annotated in what is supposed to be the accusers’ recantation (figure 5). As noted before, the Sunicancha retraction is the only document written in Quechua included in the dossier, followed by a translation into Spanish. The Quechua text, written in February 1608, was revisited in May of that same year. This is attested by the marginal notes bearing the signature of the notary with the later date. Next to the main text that refers to the accusation made against Ávila of losing someone’s horse and not compensating him for it, a marginal note states that the owner of the animal was satisfied by being paid half of its value.110 Regarding the accusation that Ávila kept for himself part of the money that he collected from his parishioners to buy things for the church, a marginal note written by the notary in Spanish states that at a later date the accounting book of the church was revised and Ávila settled the debt. A marginal note added to the retraction of a different group of accusers of the ayllu Huamasica, originally dated March 1608 and revised in May of the same year, also notes an out-of-court settlement (figure 5).111 Platt has advanced an interesting way to understand how negotiations like these took place. In his analysis of the sixteenth century use of knotted cords in a tribute restitution trial by the Aymara-speaking Sakaka ethnic group in the province of Charcas (present day Bolivia), he suggests we contrast “the exactitude of pre-Hispanic Andean systems of reckoning with a European preference for compromise (at least when dealing with Indian claims for restitution).”112 The process of compromise implies,

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FIGURE 5 Folio from the legal process brought by Huarochirí locals against Father

Ávila. The main text contains some of his accusers’ recantations, but the detail of the marginal note (right) shows that the priest settled some of his debts. AAL, Causas, fol. 96r. Reproduced by permission of the Archivo Arzobispal de Lima.

at least for the Huarochirí case but probably also for the one analyzed by Platt, that it did not matter if Ávila or his accusers were distorting the actual events. The role of the written text was to allow space for negotiation and, eventually, compromise, which did not necessarily imply exactitude. Or rather, exactitude mattered and could be the necessary first step to open a negotiation, but was not decisive. Huarochirí parishioners seem to have understood the dynamics involved in the use of Latin script, paper, and ink. But it also seems they did not necessarily trust it or, more precisely, they did not think writing could take on all the practical and social functions that quipu and other Andean media and modes of communication had. Perhaps their lengthy involvement in the lawsuit also made them realize that “[t]he overall point [of judicial documents]

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was not transparency. Rather, the point was to prevail [ . . . ].”113 I discuss this assertion in depth in the following chapter, where I analyze the only book-length manuscript written in Quechua by Andeans, the Huarochirí manuscript. Were out-of-court settlements then the only thing gained by the people of Huarochirí in these textual negotiations? The use that Andeans made of the legal system was also a major concern for colonial authorities. A measure of this is the term “indio pleitista,” or litigious Indian, commonly used in colonial documents to negatively characterize those who started disputes or lawsuits against other Indigenous people, or, more commonly, to confront ecclesiastical and monarchy officials. And lawsuits brought on by Andeans could be surprisingly lengthy, but most likely not without a calculated reason.114 Diego León de Pinelo, protector general de indios (Protector General of Indians), reported that the cases he oversaw between 1655 and the beginning of 1661 made up a total of 9550 pages organized in twenty-five books.115 Some of the cases had to do with villages in Huarochirí, long after Ávila left his parish there. León de Pinelo presented the report to support measures that he thought had to be put in place to curb Indigenous peoples’ enthusiasm for travelling to Lima to start some kind of litigation. This concern, he acknowledged, was already conveyed by Viceroy Toledo back in the second half of the sixteenth century. Toledo wrote then that many Indians, mostly indios principales, left their towns with the excuse of being involved in a lawsuit and having to present themselves in a tribunal. Most importantly, those absences happened “especially in the six months of the mitas,” to such extent that towns were all of a sudden depopulated, with many of them staying in Lima.116 Toledo angrily added that Andeans were usually involved in cases of little importance and spent large amounts of money in having memoriales and peticiones written for them, which they then kept back in their towns and which he personally burned to prove to them how unimportant those documents were. Did Spaniards misunderstand the way in which Andeans used legal documents and the colonial legal system? Key to disentangling an apparently puzzling scene is the observation that Andeans mostly left their towns to engage in some litigation in Lima “especially” during the months of their mita or system of Indigenous draft labor. As explained

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before, mining mita was not imposed on Huarochirí Indigenous inhabitants, but instead they had to do other kinds of services which Andeans identified also with the term mita. This system was imposed by Viceroy Toledo based on a modified Inca institution for rotational labor. Andeans could not leave their towns without a formal excuse, otherwise they would be considered “forasteros” (outsiders) and left without access to land. Involvement in a lawsuit, including the act of presenting a memorial to the tribunal, counted as a formal excuse even if that lawsuit did not involve a sensible case in the eyes of authorities. Crucially, those who left their towns and villages could not be drafted for mita, or, in areas such as Huarochirí, they could be spared from other tribute and labor obligations. From the information conveyed in the dossier of the case against Ávila, it is not possible to determine whether those accusing the priest were after justice for their grievances or trying to game the colonial legal system. Or both. What we do know is that a significant number of Huarochirí people, and not just the indios principales, left their villages to travel to Lima to present their formal accusations against their priest or as witnesses of those accusations. That legal process, as probably many other of those later reviewed by León de Pinelo, illustrates how even when relations of power were asymmetrical, checks and balances still had to be negotiated. As the main characters of the conflict and negotiations, the interaction between quipus and writing brings an additional perspective on the bargaining of power within the Spanish colonial legal system. Remarkably, the community effort that made it possible to open the legal process against Ávila, echoes another community effort in Huarochirí that took place around the same time and that led to the creation of the unique document known as the Huarochirí manuscript.

CONCLUSIONS As a medium that recorded information about tribute, debts, or sins, quipu took part in the economic, political, and even spiritual relations between Andeans and colonizers. The asymmetry of those relations was crucially also linked to the legitimacy that the Andean medium had in the diverse spaces of interaction. Whether colonizers accepted the use

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of quipus—mediated by quipucamayoqs—depended on how they presumed the knotted cords worked and if they could be helpful for the administration of earthly and spiritual matters. Legibility, thus, made all the difference. Colonizers read quipus mainly in two ways: as artifacts close to Latin script texts containing narrative information, or as something closer to an accounting book—that is, with quantitative or numeric information. While the transition from Roman numerals (based on Latin script) to Arabic numerals made it possible for Europeans to establish a clear-cut frontier between letters (Latin script) and numbers (Arabic numerals), such differentiation of communicative roles does not seem to have been applicable to quipus. Thus, by paying close attention to the history of the colonizers’ ambivalent relation with quipus, we can glimpse into the historical construction of boundaries between literacy and numeracy. More importantly, the discontinuity of communicative functions made the narrative information contained in quipus illegible and, eventually, invisible to non-Andean eyes.117 This chapter also discussed Indigenous legibility of Latin script. The dossier of the legal process initiated against priest Francisco de Ávila by his Huarochirí parishioners reveals much more than an economic dispute. The different stages of the legal process offer insights into the various ways in which people of Huarochirí thought Latin script could or could not be used. Quipus materialized in the archive in the form of Latin script. But in the process of the knotted cord becoming legal evidence, writing was not the determinant factor. Sight and voice had a role equal or greater in importance to writing for the Spanish legal system. And while quipus were invoked initially for the power of their precision, Andeans understood that it was writing that had to be used as a tool for negotiation to reach a compromise with Ávila. Various degrees of literacy among Andeans does not seem to have been unusual in the villages of Huarochirí. But while Spanish officials such as Viceroy Toledo had assumed that Indigenous literacy would be linked to Spanish language, the Huarochirí dossier seems to suggest otherwise. The dossier only includes one document written in Quechua, but, as discussed in the next chapter, it was also people of Huarochirí who wrote down a book-length Quechua document around the same time as the legal dispute with their priest. But whether written in Spanish

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or Quechua language, a number of scholars wonder why there are so few extant texts produced by Andeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Perhaps our expectations are misplaced. Why would they be interested in adopting a communication technology that, comparatively speaking, had half the functions of their own medium, the quipu?

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early seventeenth century, Andeans from different villages in Huarochirí continued inscribing important information in quipu while also using alphabetic writing to confront their Catholic priest, to organize community action, to repent, and to negotiate. They wrote in Spanish and in Quechua. Their writing took different forms such as apartamientos and billetes, but none so enthralling and puzzling as the untitled, undated, and anonymous fifty-folio document known as the Huarochirí manuscript (HM). It is puzzling not just because of its anonymous and collective authorship, its daring use of Quechua, or its subtle but poignant critique of evangelization and colonialism. The HM has confounded its readers since the time of its creation up to the present because its narratives and the manuscript itself as an object suggest alternative practical, social, and symbolic dimensions to alphabetic writing that went far beyond an exclusive mediating capacity with the colonial order. The Huarochirí manuscript asks nothing of its reader. Neither does it give clear clues as to who was meant to read it. This is particularly notable because of the contextual elements surrounding its creation. Internal evidence and other documents suggest it was written sometime between 1598 and 1608, that is, around the time of the legal clash between Father Y THE

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Francisco de Ávila and his Huarochirí parishioners. Some of them were using writing as a tool to negotiate the colonial balance, whether against or on the side of their embattled priest.1 Also notable is the fact that at a time when Quechua had become appropriated by the Catholic Church to produce texts for Indigenous evangelization, anonymous Andean hands decided to steer Quechua away from religious indoctrination and instead to tell their own stories. What purpose could this Quechua manuscript have? How did this text fit in a multimedia context where quipu was still a functional medium for Huarochirí society? Who were the intended readers? Does authorship attribution matter? This chapter addresses these questions by demonstrating how literacy and legibility could imply different practices of using writing to interpret and to order the world. First, legibility as articulated in this chapter implies piecing together the internal logic of the text to understand the role that writing and the use of Quechua had in the process of producing meaning in an alphabetic text. The analysis of the content and structure of the manuscript reveals that the anonymous narrator’s nonlinear use of time, superimposing past and present, their way of addressing the term Indio (Indian), and the nonjudgmental deconstruction of so-called idolatry, propose a practice of literacy that diverged from the prescriptive colonial notion of it. Such divergence becomes evident when considering the historical context of the creation of the Huarochirí manuscript: the spatial, ideological, and linguistic processes of reducción (forced resettlement) that took place in the viceroyalty of Peru at this time. As we have seen in chapter 1, at the time, Catholic Church representatives were perfecting written Quechua as a way to convey Christian doctrine. It was used to persuade Indigenous peoples to repudiate their past beliefs, while there was an increased circulation of writings in Spanish by and for Eurodescendants about Andean cultural practices, which were redefined as idolatry.2 Second, this chapter focuses on a largely untapped characteristic of the Huarochirí manuscript: the traces left by two different readers of the Quechua text allow for the extraordinary possibility to reconstruct contemporaneous reading perspectives of the same text. The legibility of Andean texts lies in the eyes of the beholder. The chapter examines marginal notes left in Quechua by an anonymous Indigenous scribe and compares these to the marginal notes added to the manuscript in Spanish

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by Father Francisco de Ávila, along with his incomplete translation to Spanish of the first few chapters of the Quechua manuscript. The comparative analysis of these readings of the HM suggests that there were divergent coeval ideas of what Indigenous writing could be used for in colonial society. More importantly, Ávila’s notes in the HM and his partial translation of it demonstrate that the Indigenous appropriation of writing unwittingly subverted the colonizer’s expectations of legibility for written Quechua, turning the HM into an almost illegible text in the eyes of the priest. Third, this chapter turns to another overlooked aspect of the Huarochirí manuscript: its materiality. Ávila, among other priests, undertook the mission to extirpate idolatries in the villages of Huarochirí and elsewhere, as we have seen. The material destruction of Indigenous culture and the prohibition to perform rituals linked to ancient beliefs did not necessarily do away with them but did push them to the margins, relocated to covert spaces. The HM, I argue, can be read as an attempt to restore legitimacy to Andean culture by pulling it from the margins and making it visible in a new material form, that of ink, paper, and Latin script. The impossibility for someone like Ávila to understand the anonymous authors’ intent is attested by the fact that the HM was read by the priest but never destroyed, much like quipus, and unlike all other materializations of Andean culture. The last section addresses the unresolved issue of authorial attribution of the Huarochirí manuscript. A brief summary of the most important scholarly approaches of the past decades leads to a detailed discussion of a claim that identifies Cristóbal Choque Casa, the Huarochirí ally of Father Ávila, as author of the Quechua manuscript. However neatly Choque Casa may seem to fit into a modern reader’s expectations of authorship, I argue that the hypothesis becomes implausible if attention is placed on what the narrator carefully conveys specifically about Choque Casa and his relation with others in Huarochirí and, more broadly, in how his story plays out within the manuscript’s contemplation on Christianity and religious conversion. Given the uncertainty on the Huarochirí manuscript’s authorship, I refer to the anonymous author(s) in the plural or to a narrator or narrative voice. In both cases I use the pronouns “they” and “them” for two reasons. First, because I favor the hypothesis that the HM came into

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existence thanks to collective action and second, because even though I refer to a narrator in the singular, I do not assume a gender for it.

THE PEOPLE CALLED “INDIANS”: LANGUAGE AND SPACE The thirty-one numbered chapters and two unnumbered annexes of the manuscript give equal attention to the men and women of the various villages and settlements of Huarochirí and their gods and goddesses. While the narratives are set in undated “earlier times” and in the colonial context, all of them touch on sacred Indigenous beings and entities and their interactions with humans. The huacas or Andean deities known as Paria Caca (male) and Chaupi Ñamca (female) appear in the text as the most important of the sacred beings, surrounded by Cuni Raya Vira Cocha, Pacha Camac, Tutay Quiri, Maca Uisa, Chuqui Suso, Huallallo Caruincho, among others.3 Paria Caca and Chaupi Ñamca are introduced as genealogical points of reference, yet neither of these are set up as foundational figures within a linear history. Huacas and other cultural heroes and sacred entities mentioned in the narratives of the Huarochirí manuscript were linked to the origins and social structure of diverse Huarochirí ayllus—the smallest sociopolitical units in Andean society, involving a territorial and ritual unit.4 The stories about huacas are reminders of how the social rights and duties of humans who were considered part of their lineage were established, and these remained valid through colonial times and beyond. Social organization was sustained based on those rights and duties, which included allocation of land to each community, rotational use of water for irrigation, and the hierarchy to be observed by participants in rituals honoring the regional huacas. But the narratives about huacas are also stories about conquest and colonization of land and resources before the arrival of Spaniards and even before Inca expansion. This in part explains the parallels established between hierarchies of ayllus and huacas and the fluid boundaries between humans and supernatural beings. Male and female huacas manifest their existence and their power through local landscape features such as mountains, lakes, stones, and even weather-related phenomena such as rain, hail, and thunder. Landscape and nature thus have a central role in the

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narratives as well and they were crucial for the way the people of Huarochirí made sense of the past, social relations, and their identity. In spite of their symbolic power and importance, the stories about huacas are not wrapped in a grave narrative tone. There is humor in some of the narratives where huacas are portrayed as cunning, sexually explicit, and willing to play tricks on other huacas and humans. Other texts written at the time about Indigenous culture would most likely have labelled Andean deities as idols and thus condemn them. But the Huarochirí manuscript mostly avoids that term, as discussed later in this chapter. The various ayllus that inhabited Huarochirí, such as the Allauca, Yunca, Huanca, Yauyo, and Colli, but above all the Concha and Checa, get the most mentions in the Huarochirí manuscript chapters. The HM details their fears and shortcomings, their courage and their resilience through time. Time, though, is a complex construction in the manuscript, where characters from the pre-Hispanic past reappear in an active way in the present, defying linear chronology. The narrator offers a heartfelt portrait of notions of the sacred and related rituals, be they Christian or pagan, that had been and still were crucial in sustaining the social fabric that gave sense to the lives of the peoples of Huarochirí. These characteristics led an early twentieth-century translator to define the HM as “a small regional bible” of ancient peoples of Peru, comparable to the significance that the Popol Vuh has for the Maya.5 The Huarochirí manuscript is anything but a naïve collection of tales about an uncontaminated remote past.6 Its stories are about colonization.7 The aim, I would argue, was less to contemplate the past than to convey the locus of enunciation of those who took up writing in the context of Spanish colonization.8 The HM’s narratives are discreet pieces brought together to represent a new social order in historical terms. Formally, this is attempted with a neat organization of sequentially numbered chapters headed by the word “capítulo” (chapter), which is followed by a descriptive title in Quechua in most cases. The title of the first chapter was written in Spanish while chapters 2 to 6 have a Quechua and a Spanish title.9 Yet in terms of content, the use of alphabetic writing in a way that did not necessarily follow the European logic of the written word complicated the legibility of the text. Past and present overlap, narratively and conceptually, producing a subtle and complex critique of religious conversion and colonization, which also involves the colonization of language.

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FIGURE 6 Title of chapter 3 of the Huarochirí manuscript in Quechua with what looks like the later addition of a title in Spanish on top. A marginal note to the lower right side written in Spanish reads: “This is a mountain midway of huanri and surco.” BNE, MS 3169 fol. 66r. Courtesy of Biblioteca Nacional de España.

The Huarochirí manuscript is anonymous in that there is no information about the identity of the person or persons who decided to gather and possibly also put down in writing the information comprised in this manuscript.10 However, several stories seem to be told from a very specific point of view. The very favorable light in which the Checa ayllu are portrayed in contrast to other ayllus suggest that the author(s) may have belonged to that Huarochirí ethnic group.11 And while there is sufficient internal evidence to affirm that the HM was written by Andeans, it is not entirely clear whom it was written for. On a few occasions the narrative voice intervenes in the stories to offer their perspective by assuming the identity of “we Christians.” Texts written in Quechua that dealt with Christian religion were exclusively of pastoral content—the doctrine, sermons, and so on—and written by church representatives for Indians not by Indians.12 The HM is by no measure a doctrinal text, and its narrator does not label themselves “Indian.” Quechua grammar gives us a first, albeit more complex, route to identify the self and others. Quechua pronouns distinguish if the writer

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includes or excludes the receptor in the statement. Thus, as the narrator chooses a specific pronoun, they also frame themselves. In chapter 3 of the Huarochirí manuscript, the narrator intervenes directly for the first time to state, “[r]egarding this story, we Christians believe it refers to the time of the Flood. But they believe it was Villca Coto mountain that saved them.”13 In this instance of “we,” the pronoun chosen is “ñuqanchik,” which is a form used when the receptor of the message is being included as part of “we,” rather than “ñuqayku,” which excludes the receptor from the “we” established by the one who utters the message. The inclusive form is repeated elsewhere in the manuscript, while the exclusive form of the first-person plural is never used.14 “We” thus seems to be including the potential reader of the text. The quotation also suggests a distinction between “we” and “they,” marked by a different way to approach a story. In a later chapter it becomes clear that this frontier between pronouns is established by religion: “Remembering those meals for the dead, people who hadn’t yet sincerely converted to Christianity are known to have said, ‘The Spaniards also give food to their dead [ . . . ].’”15 Tellingly, the narrator also refers to non-Indigenous people in the third person (they), and does not in fact use the term “Spaniard”; this term was introduced to the English translation for clarification. The Quechua manuscript never employs the term “Spanish/Spaniard,” but rather “Huiracocha,” which is more encompassing of a variety of nonnative identities. Huiracocha was the name that identified one of the principal preColumbian deities in the Andean region. The term was used in colonial times by Andeans to identify Europeans, but Taylor has argued that Huiracocha was by then an ethnonym that conveyed acculturated values, that is, far from its pre-Hispanic sense related to a deity. Yet some European and Euro-descended chroniclers seemed inclined to take up the explanation that the use of the term implied that Andeans took Europeans for gods.16 While the Huarochirí manuscript includes some untranslated Spanish terms, it is remarkable that the narrator uses a Quechua word to designate Europeans instead of any of the terms used by Europeans and their descendants to identify themselves. The Spanish conquistadors generally referred to themselves as “Christians.”17 These examples might suggest a distancing between those who selfidentify as Christians and who had the power to write down stories about

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those who had different ways of understanding the world and “hadn’t yet sincerely converted.” However, in other chapters of the Huarochirí manuscript, language adds a layer of uncertainty. Observing the Milky Way and a constellation called Yacana in Quechua, the narrator states: “We native people can see it standing out as a black spot.”18 In the Quechua text the inclusive form of “we” reappears again, this time next to a hard to translate noun, “ñuqanchik runakunapas.” Runakuna is rendered as “native people” by Salomon and Urioste to make it clearer to the modern reader, but, as other scholars have noted, the Quechua term is closer to a more general term akin to “humans” or “people.”19 Runakuna is the term that Indigenous peoples would use to refer to themselves, a community that shared a culture and an understanding of the world. For the Christian narrator, runakuna seems to be a term that also includes those who had already converted to the religion of the colonizers. The significance of the inclusion of the term runa (singular form) in this manuscript cannot be sufficiently underlined, especially given that the Huarochirí manuscript starts with the following words: “If the ancestors of the people called Indians . . .” (“runa yndio ñiscap machonkuna”).20 From the outset, the narrator makes it clear that the term “Indians” is one externally imposed to “runa.” Linguistically and physically, Spaniards had progressively homogenized Andean communities under the term “Indians.” It became a handy legal category; it crystalized into a concept of colonial knowledge—along with the term “Inca”—and provided the rationale for the relocation of Indigenous communities. Colonial reorganization of Indigenous space was also linked to language. In the 1570s, a campaign known as the General Resettlement of Indians relocated more than a million Andeans into six hundred reducciones or pueblos de indios (Indian towns) in the viceroyalty of Peru.21 This was, in practice, the physical articulation of “Indianness;” lumping together different ethnic groups erased their cultural specificity and confirmed to the colonial gaze the homogeneity of Indigenous societies. In Huarochirí, a hundred settlements were reorganized into seventeen reducciones, some of which are mentioned in the manuscript.22 The enterprise was sustained by practical strategies to attain colonial hegemony over Indigenous populations. The demographic collapse that had decimated the American population since the first encounters with Europeans made the survival of many of the dispersed Andean settlements unviable due

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to population loss. Spaniards understood that recovery of Indigenous population was necessary for a colonial project that aimed to turn them into productive subjects for the monarchy and the church. The concentration of smaller settlements that were scattered throughout the Andean territory into a manageable number of reducciones was also meant to facilitate tax collection, Indigenous labor service (a form of tribute), and religious indoctrination. The broader goal was to turn Andeans “from savages to men and from barbarians to civilized people.”23 The relocation of Andeans also aimed to ensure religious conversion. It involved separating them from the sacred landscape that articulated their vital and ritual relation with their ancestors and from their pacarinas, or places of origin where human or divine founders of lineages had emerged originally. Pacarinas were places of adoration since preHispanic times.24 The Huarochirí manuscript shows the interdependence between humans, huacas, and their space of action as a series of vibrant stories that map out the distinct coastal, mountainous, and jungle regions of the Andes. In their fight to control territories for the settlement and resettlement of their “sons,” or human followers, deities carve out mountains, hills, irrigation canals, and agricultural terraces, leaving traces of their roaming even in lakes and the sea. The ancestors, whether human or superhuman, were protagonists of feats of conquest and colonization in the Andes well before the Spaniards showed up. Colonial officials were well aware of Andeans’ belief that the wellbeing of their ayllus depended on caring for the mummified bodies (mallquis) of their ancestors, who were carefully preserved as reminders of the communities’ lineage and place of origin.25 Mallquis were active members of their ayllus, consulted in the social and political decisions of their live descendants and standing as reminders of the social conventions and pacts that organized each ethnic group. Those who attained the status of mallquis continued to be visible after death, but they also established a bridge between past and present.26 The cult of mallquis was meant to honor the genealogical line of the ancestors up to the origin of each ayllu and this genealogy could include both human and divine entities known as huacas.27 Although the Huarochirí manuscript conveys information about rituals related to the deceased in two different chapters (chapters 27 and 28), it only refers obliquely to mallquis. Chapter 24 discusses the fate of a human

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being that, the narrator seems to imply, was transformed into a mallqui, which gave it the status of huaca by the name of Ñan Sapa. It captured the attention of the Inca, who took it away from its original community. Undeterred, the descendants of Ñan Sapa made a proxy of it. Yet, Ñan Sapa once again attracted the interest of a new group of conquerors and “[t]his [the proxy huaca] is the one that we know Señor Doctor Francisco de Ávila carried away.”28 As in the case of quipus, which are only mentioned in passing in two chapters, the Huarochirí manuscript narrator seems to avoid turning too much attention to mallquis.29 But unlike quipus, mallquis were taken from Huarochirí by Father Ávila to feed the fire of idolatrous objects described in chapter 2. Spanish officials and priests were aware that the mummified bodies of the ancestors were considered carriers and keepers of valuable symbolic meaning, perhaps with a similar role to books. Hence they had to burn. Indeed, Ávila’s burning of the mallquis tells us that these became legible to the priest as “texts” that preserved the memory of traditions and beliefs that the new political and religious order sought to delegitimize.30 But if mummies are not explicitly given much attention in the HM, the places that were directly connected to their presence and the space of their influence are central elements of the stories written down in the manuscript. It is “the horizon, not the cosmos, geography, not metaphysics,” as Salomon has asserted, which the narrator offers to the unidentified reader.31 But in a context where Andeans’ sense of identity and vital social networks were threatened by the confiscation and burning of the mummies of their ancestors and the forcible relocation away from their sacred spaces, the use that the anonymous narrator gave to writing is remarkable. Paper and ink became the new materialization of a human and divine geography recreated with Latin script. While people of Huarochirí had contested Inca attempts to take away their huacas by producing a proxy or double of the earlier huaca, Spanish colonialism was subverted by replacing the bond that mallquis established between geography and human lineages with a manuscript text that, going against the tide of colonial reducciones, reinstated the importance of the heterogeneity of Andean culture. The preservation of the bond to pre-Hispanic understandings of the world, whether through the rituals in honor of mallquis or the writing

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down of a text about it, was what kept communities and individuals alive. While depopulation was a concern shared by Viceroy Toledo and the inhabitants of Huarochirí, for the latter the problem was rooted in the viceroy’s and the Catholic Church’s prohibition of certain cultural practices. The Huarochirí manuscript explains how the Yunca, an ethnic group of Huarochirí, faced a dilemma over what would happen if they abandoned their worship of one of the most important regional huacas, Paria Caca: “Regarding this worship [of Paria Caca], it may be that the Yunca don’t practice it anymore, or that not all the Yunca do. But they do perform it away from their own places. When they don’t do it people speculate, saying, ‘It’s because of that [ritual] fault of theirs that the Yunca are becoming extinct.’”32 The actual term used in Spanish for the viceroy’s resettlement plans, “reducción,” merits close examination. Although its verbal form, reducir, can be literally translated into English as “to reduce,” with its implied meaning of making something smaller, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the term indicated the action of concentrating smaller things to turn them into a larger unit.33 In the case of Indigenous resettlements, reducir involved a process by which different ethnic groups were forced into cohabitation in a new larger space defined by colonial administrators. Whereas the number of inhabitants in those reducciones increased, the demands of colonial governance also involved a process of standardization, by which the identities and cultural practices of the distinct peoples that had been regrouped were reduced to the minimum common denominator, that of being “Indians.” This governance strategy was anything but a simplistic approach to Andean cultures. Instead it implied an important effort at gathering all the knowledge produced thus far about Andeans’ past and present and transforming it into colonial policy that could be imposed with a certain degree of success. The limited success almost four decades after the Spanish conquest was clear to Viceroy Toledo. It motivated him to embark on a four-year tour around the viceroyalty (1570–1574), inspecting the state of the land and its native and non-native inhabitants. He aimed to understand Andean social and political organization and how it interacted or clashed with colonial reorganization. Thus, Toledo paid attention to those who had acquired knowledge about the Andes, such as royal official Polo Ondegardo and Mercedarian priest Cristobal de

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Molina, whose writings we already encountered in Father Ávila’s library. Toledo, much like Ondegardo and Molina, was interested in gathering as much information on the heterogeneity of Andean cultures as possible in order to determine a common denominator that could be useful to design more appropriate governance policies.34 One common denominator that, to the eyes of these colonists, justified the imposition of Spanish colonial governance, was the absence of alphabetic writing in Andean society. The respected Jesuit Jose de Acosta, whom we encountered in chapter 2, believed that any society’s possibility to reach a social and political order depended on writing and the production of written laws.35 Toledo sought to remedy that absence commissioning the Spanish cosmographer Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa to write The History of the Incas (1572).36 The History presented a linear chronological sequence of biographies of past Inca lords, depicted in a way that the text became sufficient proof that all of them had reigned over the land as tyrants and never as natural lords.37 This was a piece of literature with an explicitly defined political agenda: it aimed to revise the Inca past and, thus, the legal standing of the Inca’s descendants in the present, taking away legitimacy from local authorities (curacas).38 But to win the ideological battle over the interpretation of the Inca past, the text was conceived not only as a narrative about Andeans but also for Andeans. Soon after the text was finished, it was read out loud to the forty-two surviving elder Inca nobles in the city of Cuzco who had been consulted as direct sources of information for Sarmiento’s text and who were expected to verify the “sum and substance” of the written account that was read to them through a translator.39 It was a double translation, from written to oral language and from Spanish to Quechua. The scene, narrated in the History, reveals the colonizers’ strategy of imposing a colonial legibility on Inca history. The elders were only read “the substance” of Sarmiento’s text, which Millones Figueroa suspects focused on issues of Inca lineage while omitting Sarmiento’s interpretation of the Incas as tyrants.40 Some two decades later, around the time when the Huarochirí manuscript was being written, the conditions had changed sufficiently for Andeans to be able to verify by themselves what was being written about them. Alphabetic literacy had spread enough throughout the Andean population—by design but also by chance—for them to be able to read

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and write their own texts.41 Though the first school for the Indigenous elite started functioning in Lima only in 1618, from at least the 1550s Andeans were introduced to Latin-script literacy along with basic doctrinal education in their parishes with the guidance of the materials brought from Spain and, from the 1580s, published by the church of Peru.42 Young Andeans usually had access to cartillas, small booklets that compiled basic prayers, commandments, and other Christian texts for neophytes, along with a syllabary, which usually consisted of a couple of folios with the letters of the Latin alphabet, differentiating vowels and syllables (figure 2). Cartillas circulated in manuscript form before the printing press was installed in Lima, and their contents were bilingual—Spanish and a native language, most often Quechua or Aymara.43 Texts in Quechua, however, were almost exclusively being written by non-Indigenous persons and for pastoral purposes. As discussed in chapter 1, the number of catechetical materials written and sometimes even printed in that language, along with the creation of a chair in Quechua language at the University of San Marcos in 1580, is evidence of how the Andean language had been repurposed as a tool for colonization. But it was an imperfect, and even dangerous, tool. Much to the frustration of colonizers, there were several varieties of Quechua—and other languages—spoken in the different regions of what used to be the Inca Empire. And though the church made the variety spoken in Cuzco its standard or “lengua general” to convey Christian doctrine in it, the control of the lexical and semantic aspects of the Indigenous language remained a challenge. How could Spaniards make sure that by using certain Quechua terms to explain concepts of Christian dogma they were not encouraging Andeans to think of their notions of the sacred as comparable to those of Christianity? Translation of Indigenous languages thus followed a similar path to that of reducciones. Quechua was relocated from its pre-Hispanic social role to a colonial role of Christian indoctrination.44 It could be better controlled once it entered the material realm of writing. The lengua general was meant to be a made-to-measure language that aimed to make Indigenous, non-Christian beliefs and Christian dogma commensurable worlds. Words thus turned into the units of measure. But could the knot that tied language to culture be untied? There are several passages of the Huarochirí manuscript that seem to underline the limits of the language

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reducción. I will focus on three pertinent examples to illustrate my point, starting with the central one: how to call the Christian deity. The trilingual catechetical texts crafted by a team of ecclesiastics that participated in the Third Provincial Council of Lima were explicitly meant to be taken as a guide to any future efforts to translate Christian dogma from Spanish to Quechua and Aymara. There were three volumes published between 1584 and 1585, including a book on Christian doctrine, catechisms, sermons, and a guide for confession. All ruled out decisively previous attempts at finding a Quechua or Aymara equivalent to the Spanish term for the Christian god (Dios). Thus, these texts included the Spanish loan word Dios in the Quechua and Aymara translations. The Huarochirí manuscript, written sometime between 1598 and 1608, shows the effect of those official policies of translation in the Andes, as well as their limitations. The manuscript is mostly written in the lengua general. But there are also traces of other varieties of Quechua and of the Aru language.45 And though the text incorporates some untranslated words in Spanish, the kinds of errors incurred in their use reveal that whoever penned the manuscript did not learn Spanish as a first language but was rather a native Quechua speaker. The Indigenous manuscript includes the term “Dios” without translation in several of its chapters and at first sight seems to follow the praxis the catechetical texts sought to establish. But the use of Dios diverges from the one desired by the church. In chapter 9 of the HM, the narration focuses on ancient times, when Paria Caca, identified as “father” of the runakuna, defeated his rival, Huallallo Caruincho. Though both were pre-Hispanic Andean deities, the victor is only referred to by his name, while the defeated deity is identified in two different instances as “dios.” Huallallo and his followers, the Huanca people, are scornfully portrayed: “And since he [Huallallo] their dios, fed on dogs, they [the followers] also ate them . . . we speak of them as ‘dog-eating Huanca’ to this day.” Later in the same chapter, the narrator explains what happened to another group of Huallallo Caruincho’s followers: “These Yunca groups, all the Yunca, once they forgot their former dios, began to worship Paria Caca.”46 Notably, dios is not used for Paria Caca, one of the most important deities of the Huarochirí region. It is either used for a defeated Indigenous god or, rather mischievously, to refer to the Christian god.47 The Spanish loan word dios is also

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used in chapter 5 to refer to Tamta Ñamca who, in ancient times, used his material wealth to deceive his community into believing he was a deity. He was eventually unmasked as a fake god. For Spaniards, reframing Andean deities as demons was not easier than imposing the Christian term “Dios.” From the first attempts at converting Andeans to Christianity, priests tried to rename the vast variety of pre-Hispanic deities under one term: “supay.”48 The term, which meant something close to “shadow” or the volatile aspect of a living being (though conceptually different, the Christian notion of soul would be the closest image) was chosen as the equivalent to “demon,” but its use created several complications.49 In his 1560 vocabulary of Quechua, Dominican priest Domingo de Santo Tomás defined “supay” as “good or bad angel,” “good or bad demon,” and “house goblin.”50 If that was not sufficiently unhelpful, Santo Tomás, who arrived in Peru a few years after the Spanish conquest, included the following examples of how the term supay should be used in its new meaning: “alli supay-good angel,” and “mana alli supay-bad angel.”51 The former literally translates from Quechua as “good supay” and the latter as “no-good supay.” The catechism published by the Third Council of Lima two decades later, which aimed to clarify translation problems, included supay as translation for demon, but surprisingly it also used mana alli angel (no good angel).52 The Huarochirí manuscript does make use of supay and mana alli supay to designate the pre-Hispanic deities. However, they are not used to condemn those entities as demons in every instance.53 For example, one story tells of how a courageous woman named Chuqui Suso dealt with the unwanted sexual advances of the powerful Paria Caca and saved her field of maize and her whole village from drought. After managing to trick Paria Caca into providing water for her field and building a water canal that benefited her community, she finally agreed to sleep with him. She then decided to stand permanently next to the canal and transformed into a stone that was worshipped by her descendants up until colonial times. Only after she turned into a superhuman entity is she referred to as “warmi supay” (woman supay). But far from giving a negative judgment of her, the narrator explains with a tone of respect how this woman acquired such an important role in the imaginary of her community.54 Whereas the HM narratives show how Andeans incorporated dios into their stories on their own terms, thwarting the church’s attempt to reduce

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the various meanings of supay to the notion of demon, the term and concept of reducción was framed from Andeans’ perspective. Considering that the Huarochirí manuscript was written by people who had directly or indirectly experienced the forced resettlements to reducciones, it is not surprising that the Spanish loan term reducción is included in the text. But its use and the occasions when it is avoided in the text suggest that, for the narrator, there was a crucial difference between the pre-Hispanic settlements and the Spanish-era settlements. In pre-Hispanic times, the narrator tells us in chapter 20, a huaca named Llocllay Huancupa arrived to where the Checa ayllu lived, saying “It was my father [deity Pacha Camac] who sent me here, saying ‘Go and protect that Checa llacta [village].’”55 The story then moves to the colonial present of the narrator, who states that the rituals in honor of Llocllay Huancupa stopped “when a certain father Cristóbal de Castilla was in this reducción.”56 Indeed, by that time the Checa ayllu had been forced to resettle in the reducción San Damian de Checa, created during Viceroy Toledo’s government.57 The choice of llacta, and its replacement later by reducción, marks a historical before and after in the settlement patterns of Andeans, calling attention to the changes on their social network. The link between a specific physical space and an understanding of the sacred had shaped social interactions among the Checa and consolidated the authority of Llocllay Huancupa, but that was erased by the forced resettlement. The kinds of Spanish loan words incorporated in Indigenous texts written in Quechua, Nahuatl, and Maya—which included verbs, nouns, adjectives, particles, phrases and proper names—can be taken as a measure of the cultural changes in the post-contact period.58 The changes in concepts and even the basic structure of these languages took place, according to Lockhart, in three stages. In the first stage, chronologically closer to European conquest, Indigenous texts include more neologisms than Spanish loan words. In the second stage, when colonialism was already well established, texts by Indigenous people present a large number of appropriations and loans of Spanish nouns that refer to objects, social and political roles, units of measure, and economic, political, and religious concepts that were new to Indigenous societies. The third stage, which starts at the end of the seventeenth century, is characterized by a context of extended bilingualism that appropriates verbs and particles

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from the Spanish language, translation of idiomatic expressions from Spanish to the native language, and the use of Spanish loan terms referring to family blood ties that had non-problematic (or exact) equivalents in native languages.59 The Huarochirí manuscript was created in what corresponds, chronologically, to the second stage. But it is notable, as Lockhart rightly points out, that the Quechua manuscript has many of the characteristics of the language expected for the third stage, especially concerning the large number of Spanish loan nouns and verbs. He interprets this as a sign that the HM, along with the very few other colonial mundane Quechua (not for evangelization) texts found so far, present “the real speech of native speakers and not some artificial idiom.”60 The quotidian or mundane Quechua spoken in everyday interactions by Andeans is what we observe in the HM, which differs from the standardized Quechua used in the books of sermons by Father Francisco de Ávila discussed in chapter 1. Varieties of Quechua spoken by native speakers were sometimes condemned as corrupt if they differed much from the lengua general and were thus not useful for colonial purposes.61 Ironically, it is thanks to writing, or rather to the anonymous creator of the HM, that this bifurcation of social roles of the language becomes evident. The HM’s use of written Quechua therefore exposes the process of colonization.62 There is a final point to be made regarding the Huarochirí manuscript’s take on the social role of language: the power of words to construct and destroy a world order. Though never explicitly stated as such, the narrator included a very brief story about deer that addresses that issue: “Now, in ancient times, brocket deer used to eat human beings. Later on, when brocket deer were very numerous, they danced, ritually chanting, ‘How shall we eat people?’ Then one of their little fawns made a mistake and said, ‘How shall people eat us?’ When the brocket deer heard this they scattered. From then on brocket deer became food for humans.”63 Language mattered. In a context where a variety of Quechua had been appropriated and transformed by non-Andeans into a tool of colonization, the Huarochirí manuscript conveys a powerful message through subtle choice of language and words, because choosing these carefully could prevent an outcome like the one endured by the deer in the narrator’s story. But who would be able to understand such a message? As I show in the following section, Father Ávila, who considered himself

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knowledgeable in the lengua general, struggled with the legibility of the Quechua manuscript. The policies of translation and the efforts to constrain written Quechua to a pastoral role contributed to making the HM’s written Quechua a difficult read.

NONSENSE: READING AN ANDEAN TEXT The Huarochirí manuscript does not guide the reader, nor does it make explicit the purpose of its creation. As a clue for the latter, it should be noted that the mostly admiring stance toward the gods and their followers in the past changes when the narrator has to address the continuity of some beliefs and rituals in the present. While those deities were mostly referred to as huacas in the past, in the narrator’s present they are sometimes addressed as “demons.” It is not hard to see how this kind of information could be useful for a priest who aimed to find those places and objects and destroy as many as possible in his zealous fight against idolatry, and this is why in modern scholarship the HM is usually linked to Father Ávila’s campaign to extirpate idolatries in Huarochirí.64 However, we should be careful not to equate the way in which Ávila read the HM with the purpose behind the creation of the Quechua manuscript. In short, that Ávila likely read this text with extirpation in mind does not mean that was the purpose of its author(s). The traces of this discrepancy were left in writing, in the form of marginal notes and a text written by Ávila. In this section I demonstrate how the marginal notes that the priest inscribed in the manuscript are valuable to understand the process of production of the Indigenous text and to discern what the priest was looking for when reading it. Ávila left notes in Spanish in the first chapters of the manuscript. There is also a set of marginalia in Quechua in a different handwriting. But perhaps the clearest path to the kind of legibility that Ávila articulated for the Huarochirí manuscript lays in his unfinished translation of the Quechua manuscript into Spanish. Entitled Tratado y relación (Treatise and Account), this fifteenfolio text written entirely in Spanish offers an edited version of the first seven chapters of the HM. Ávila left this text incomplete.65 The treatise was found in the Biblioteca Nacional of Spain, bound in the same volume contiguous to the anonymous Indigenous text. And just like the HM, it

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remained in manuscript form.66 The Tratado y relación also bears marginal notes, but these are only in Spanish and appear to have been done by Ávila himself.67 I argue that the priest’s marginal notes and his incomplete treatise establish a clear ideological distance between the priest’s reading of the HM and the HM’s author’s probable purpose in writing it.68 At first glance, the most evident elements that establish a distance between both texts are the title and authorship. The Huarochirí manuscript, as noted before, bears no title, no date of creation, and no explicit authorship. Ávila’s text bears in large letters the date 1608 and the lengthy and self-explanatory title of Tratado y relación de los errores, falsos Dioses, y otras supersticiones, y ritos diabolicos en que vivian antiguamente los yndios de las Provincias de Huarocheri, Mama, y Chaclla y oy tambien viuen engañados con gran perdicion de sus almas.69 Following the title

FIGURE 7 Title page of Francisco de Ávila’s incomplete

Tratado y relación de los errores (1608). BNE, MS 3169, fol. 115r. Courtesy of Biblioteca Nacional de España.

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there is an indication of how his new text should be read (figure 7): “It is an agreeable subject matter, worthy of being known so that there is notice of the great blindness of the souls that have not been illuminated by faith [ . . . ]. It does not refer to the present but [rather] to history; may God be served with said Doctor’s [Ávila] illustrating and adorning it with explanations and notes that will be pleasant, if God gives him [enough] life.” Ávila identifies himself not as the author, but as the one who gathered and commented on the information he received “from trustworthy persons who with notable diligence searched for the truth of everything, and even before God illuminated them, they lived in said errors and practiced their ceremonies.”70 This description of his sources confirms the “we Christians” identity of the anonymous narrator. But what unfolds—as suggested by the marginal notes and Ávila’s translation—is a struggle in the margins between two different ways to approach and understand Andean culture and Christianity. Catholic missionaries had already been teaching and preaching to Andeans the concept of providential history on a chronological basis for approximately seven decades, but what should have been an opening chapter about origins echoing Christian genesis turns out quite differently in the Huarochirí manuscript. The first chapter does not have a title in Quechua but an ex post facto title in Spanish that reads, “How the Idols of Old Were, and How they Warred among Themselves, and How the Natives Existed at that Time.”71 The opening story mentions first two huacas, Yana Ñamca and Tuta Ñamca, who were defeated by huaca Huallallo Caruincho. The story portrays a world in “very ancient times” in which an immortal humanity faced problems of overpopulation and scarcity of food.72 Huallallo Caruincho controlled the population growth by eating some humans. The narrator states that, some time after, another huaca called Paria Caca appeared and defeated Huallallo who was cast out to another region. The genealogy of the huacas is not clear, but there seems to be no anxiety about Paria Caca not being the first one to appear. Neither is there a sense of urgency to identify a creator god, originator of the world and humanity, similar to the Christian god.73 But by the end of this chapter, complying with an external demand, the narrator abruptly states, “Also, as we know, there was another huaca named Cuni Raya. Regarding him, we are not sure whether he existed before Paria Caca or maybe after him.”74

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The external demand I refer to is a marginal comment written in Spanish by Father Ávila, next to the first mention that the Quechua text makes of Cuni Raya: “Find out whether he says that it isn’t known if he was before or after Caruincho or Paria Caca.”75 Though the priority of the Huarochirí manuscript’s first chapter was not to present a linear genealogy of the Andean deities, nor to pin point a moment of genesis for humankind, Ávila’s note generated two different answers in other chapters. Chapter 14 has no title but starts with the following lines written in Quechua, in large letters: “In the first chapter we made some remarks about whether Cuni Raya’s existence came before or after Paria Caca’s.”76 The chapter, however, does not present a definitive answer to the matter: “They say Cuni Raya Viracocha did exist from very ancient times. Paria Caca and all the other huacas used to revere him exceedingly. In fact, some people even say, ‘Paria Caca is Cuni Raya’s son.’”77 The narrator makes a subtle reference to the existence of other versions of the genealogy of the Andean deities, complicating the possibility of establishing a parallel with Christian genesis. Indeed, the untitled chapter is not concerned with discussing genesis in Christian terms, rather it is a chapter about endings: the narrator tells of an encounter between huaca Cuni Raya and Inca Huayna Capac, and the former’s foretelling the end of the Inca Empire. The following chapter, notably, seems to be justified only as a definitive answer to Ávila’s demand for information about a linear genealogy of the sacred. Chapter 5 is entitled “Next We Shall Write about What Was Mentioned in the Second Chapter, Namely, Whether Cuni Raya Existed before or after Caruincho.” This chapter—one of the shortest of the whole Huarochirí manuscript—adopts the discourse of the universalizing Christian theology from the opening lines: “Cuni Raya Vira Cocha is said to have existed from very ancient times. Before he was, there was nothing at all in this world. It was he who first gave shape and force to the mountains, the forests, the rivers, and all sorts of animals, and to the fields for humankind’s subsistence as well. It’s for this reason that people in fact say of Cuni Raya, ‘He’s called Paria Caca’s father.’ ‘It was he who made and empowered Paria Caca.’”78 By the end of the chapter the narrator announces that the story of Cuni Raya’s deeds would be told in the following folios, but in fact there are no other stories about this huaca as the protagonist and he is only briefly mentioned again in chapters 16 and 31. Encouraged by Ávila, the

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Indigenous author provides a half chapter but clearly sees no reason to give a fully compatible genealogy. Ávila went a step further in his own translation and rewrote the story of the huacas just as he wanted to read it. The first chapter of his Tratado y relación bears the title “of the First and Most Ancient God or Idol of This People [ . . . ], and How Afterwards There Were Other Idols after the First One.”79 Ávila starts his version of the Indigenous narrative by stating that “at the beginning, and the first thing there is memory of, there were some huacas or idols [ . . . ] it should be presumed that they went about in the form of men.”80 Besides introducing a literal and figurative “beginning” that is absent in the first chapter of the Huarochirí manuscript, Ávila’s approach to Andean huacas as, by necessity, being anthropomorphic deities also marks a contrast to the Quechua text he read and translated. In the HM, gods, goddesses and, in general, superhuman entities assume various forms. Paria Caca, for example, is presented as a snow peaked mountain, as an entity born from five eggs, and as a huaca in the form of a man. And while huacas are the protagonists of the HM’s first chapter, in Ávila’s account the story is about idols. He uses “idol” as synonym for “huaca” in several passages of his translation of the Quechua manuscript. But there are only two instances in all of the HM where the Spanish loan word “ídolo” (idol) appears: once in the title of chapter 1 (“How the Idols of Old Were”) and then in a marginal note in Ávila’s handwriting. The Spanish loan word “ídolo” is in fact absent from the main narrative in Quechua. It could be argued that the Huarochirí manuscript’s narrator does not make an explicit link between huaca and idol because, having identified himself as “we Christians,” from a Christian point of view a huaca would implicitly be an idol. Besides Ávila’s treatise, in chronicles and ecclesiastical reports written before and after the HM, the words “idol” and “huaca” usually appear as synonyms. But that was not just a word choice, or a language choice. The priest’s use of the term “idol” as well as his eagerness to determine a linear genealogy of the Andean deities hint at the ideological frame that shaped and constricted the HM’s legibility for him. His reading of Indigenous beliefs and practices was filtered by the notion of idolatry. This became such a powerful and almost self-explanatory tool of interpretation that Ávila and his non-Andean contemporaries used unproblematically the terms “idol,” “huaca,” “supay,” “demon,” and even

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“dios,” interchangeably when referring to the divine entities of Andean societies. But whereas Ávila also refers to the Andean deities as “dioses” (gods), the anonymous narrator of the Quechua text only uses it to refer to a defeated huaca and to the Christian god. As discussed above, the Indigenous author(s) placed the Christian “dios” in line with those deities that had been beaten by more powerful huacas. In trying to understand and combat idolatry in America, Ávila and other ecclesiastical authors such as Acosta strategically employed similes, figures of speech that effectively disavowed—at least in a text—any Indigenous belief or practice that resembled those of Christianity.81 Ávila’s interest in pinpointing the genealogy of the huacas, identifying an Andean creator god, and establishing a linear narrative about humankind’s genesis was likely an attempt to construct a narrative that could be condemned as a demonic imitation of the history of Christianity. But Ávila’s strategy did not work. It is true that in chapter 15 of the Huarochirí manuscript, the narrator, as noted before, finally yields to the priest’s pressure, identifying Cuni Raya Vira Cocha as a creator god similar to the Christian god. In previous chapters some stories deal with Cuni Raya as a regional huaca. But in chapter 15, he appears assimilated to an Inca deity, Vira Cocha. The latter was portrayed as the creator god of the Incas in many of the texts written about Peru that circulated by the end of the sixteenth century and beginning of the seventeenth century.82 This includes Garcilaso de la Vega’s Royal Commentaries of the Incas (Lisbon, 1609), which Ávila had in his library and about which he wrote three folios of notes, focusing on the origin and succession of the Incas.83 Based on Ávila’s own writings and the manuscript texts that he owned, it appears that his understanding of the religious system of the people of Huarochirí rested in large measure on the transposition of the Inca system, with Vira Cocha or Cuni Raya Viracocha as key characters. Unfortunately for Ávila, the Huarochirí manuscript makes it very clear that the Inca state in pre-Hispanic times was not determinant to how the people of Huarochirí structured their beliefs, though it acknowledges the relation between them and the Incas. The stories of the HM refer to Cuni Raya as a local huaca and characterize him as a trickster whose cunning and ploys were constantly modifying the world. This is suggested in the closing lines of the lengthy chapter 2 of the HM, where the narrator states that Cuni Raya traveled around the area tricking other local

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huacas and people. But the mention of his tricks is not meant to carry an implicit moral judgment, as would usually be the case in pastoral texts that focused on idolatry and the devil. Cuni Raya’s tricks are witty ways out of complicated situations that are narrated in a comical tone: he went around disguised as a poor man, ridiculed other huacas, blessed and cursed animals that helped him or refused to do so, inadvertently filled the ocean with fish while running away from a furious female huaca, etc. This is probably why the forced and ineffective parallel between the Christian god and Cuni Raya is restricted to a few passages. As a trickster, the huaca’s range of behaviors could not be contained in the Christian dichotomy of good and evil, making Cuni Raya unsuitable for Ávila’s purpose. What may have seemed more suitable to Ávila’s eyes were the narratives in the Huarochirí manuscript that echo biblical stories of the Old and New Testament. Stories about the genesis of the world, the universal deluge, the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary, and so on were included in the catechetical materials geared towards the education of Indigenous neophytes. Unsurprisingly, some of those tropes emerge in the HM’s stories of ancient times. But to Ávila’s frustration, rather than confirming inroads of Christian indoctrination, the stories are vessels for Indigenous interpretation of the world and an unyielding sense of humor. Even in times of an increasingly inflexible approach to evangelization, people of Huarochirí were still retelling their own version of the Immaculate Conception. In it Caui Llaca, a female huaca described with the Spanish loan word “doncella” (virgin), became impregnated by huaca Cuni Raya.84 The huaca transformed into a bird to introduce his semen into ripened fruit, then dropped it next to Caui Llaca, who ate it and became pregnant. Two other stories with clearer biblical echoes follow the one of Cuni Raya. In chapter 3 of the Huarochirí manuscript, the narrator tells how a llama, an Andean camelid, warned its owner that in five days’ time the ocean would overflow, bringing the world to an end. The llama revealed that they could both be saved by climbing to Villca Coto mountain, and so they did. The narrator then asserts: “Regarding this story, we Christians believe it refers to the time of the Flood. But they believe it was Villca Coto mountain that saved them.”85 The following chapter recounts the story “about the Death of the Sun,” in which the sun disappears for

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five days leaving the world in darkness.86 During this time rocks banged against each other, and objects of daily use, as well as domestic animals, chased and ate people. The narrator ends this story by stating: “Here’s what we Christians think about it: We think these stories tell of the darkness following the death of our Lord Jesus Christ. [But they say ‘we understand it like this’]. Maybe that’s what it was.”87 Ávila’s rendition of these two stories of the Huarochirí manuscript offer the clearest picture of how much the priest’s and the anonymous Indigenous author’s intentions differed. The HM’s narrator includes a point of view that is not Christian and, while underlining the difference between “them” (the non-Christians) and “us” (the Christians), refrains from judging it. In his version of these two chapters, Ávila states that these Indigenous stories were “notable nonsense,” produced by “the authors of lies amongst this people” or by “deceptions of the demon.”88 Ávila disagreed as well with the chronology established in the chapters of the HM, which presented first the deluge and then the eclipse of the sun. In his Tratado y relación, Ávila inverted the order of the chapters and started the story of the eclipse stating. “in all these stories and fables I have not been able to find out the order and sequence [of events . . .].”89 He stated that he would eventually add a more plausible version, but that did not happen. His comments throughout the two chapters make it clear that the priest was far from accepting that Andeans’ stories could have any plausibility. What moved the anonymous author(s) and Father Ávila to write their respective texts? For the anonymous narrator, the manuscript was a way to provide legitimacy through writing, making legible the worldview of those Andeans that were partially or not yet Christian. For Ávila, translating, editing, and commenting on the Indigenous manuscript was a contribution to the project started by Viceroy Toledo and his appointed chronicler of the Inca past, Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa. The Tratado y relación was one more way to delegitimize a social and political order that was sustained by beliefs and practices that were condemned as idolatrous at best and demonic at worst. It was meant to replace those beliefs and practices with a rewriting of the past that became legible within Christian history and Spanish colonialism. Nevertheless, making Andean worldviews legible was not an easy task for the Huarochirí manuscript’s author either. After narrating the story of the female huaca Chuqui Suso, the narrator notes that the heroic past

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was retraced in the colonial present by some locals who performed rituals commemorating their female huaca’s deeds. The narrator intervenes in the story to lament that “even now”—that is, when most Huarochirí inhabitants had been converted to Christianity—some people continued performing those rituals and “neither the alcalde nor anybody would ever try to stop them by asking, ‘Why do you do these things?’”90 This question seems to guide a process of self-reflection by the Christian narrator about the transformation—forced or voluntary—of understandings of the sacred and its effects on social relations. This is evinced, on the one hand, in the inclusion of non-Christian interpretations that shed light on the perceived similarities between Christian and non-Christian beliefs and practices. And on the other hand, this self-reflection also surfaces in the amount of details that the narrator gives of the names and kinds of deities, rituals and sacrifices in their honor, the time of year when these were performed, the places of adoration, and the objects that were linked with those rites. Some scholars have read this as confirmation that the Huarochirí manuscript was created to denounce the continuation of idolatries in the colonial present. I think the manuscript was written to reconstruct sensemaking. The anonymous author(s) did not outright condemn the stories or even the continued rituals as nonsense. Gathering that information and organizing it into 31 chapters was, more likely, a way to comprehend why and how the things portrayed in the text made sense to Indigenous peoples, and why they kept on doing what they did, in spite of the obvious danger posed by the colonial context. As the narrator stated, nobody dared ask the crucial question, “Why do you do these things?”—not even their priest. Ávila read the text with an answer, not a question, in his mind. It was all about idolatry, which gave him a wonderful opportunity to confirm his place in the colonial hierarchy of knowledge. He did not let the opportunity go by, as evinced by the elaborate comments that he added to the Spanish translation of chapters 3 and 4 of the Quechua manuscript. On the story of the eclipse of the sun that the anonymous narrator interpreted as the day in which Jesus Christ died, Ávila asserts that the eclipse could not have happened in the Andes nor would Andeans have known how much time it lasted. The priest explains that it was daytime when Christ died in that hemisphere “and therefore the eclipse would have happened at night time in this [other hemisphere].”91 He finishes off his refutation of the Andean

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story, noting that “not having clocks, they could not have known that the sun went missing for five days.”92 Ávila’s claims were backed up by the authority of the books he possessed, as well as by the clock that he owned, an instrument that was required of those who, like him, studied at the University of San Marcos.93 He studiously ignored the details provided in the Huarochirí manuscript about how Andeans measured time.94 But even if “an Indian contradicted me,” Ávila notes regarding the story of the universal deluge, he would respond that all those stories were nothing but inventions of the devil, as already suggested, he claims, by book 15 of Saint Augustin’s The City of God.95 Their stories were wrong, and many of the books in Ávila’s library could prove it. Just as his Tratado y relación, so the marginal notes that he left in the Quechua manuscript attest to the kind of legibility that the Huarochirí manuscript had for the priest.96 He read it as a denunciation of places, objects, rituals, and idols. What is outstanding is that, for someone who invested energy and time destroying the material embodiment of idolatry, a text that contained so many so-called idolatrous stories was not considered dangerous. Ávila was so concerned with idolatrous objects and how they perpetuated the memory of the past that it is hard to understand why he did not destroy the HM, unlike his burning of mallquis and destruction of stone figurines. Despite the complexity of the narratives and the effort placed by its anonymous author(s) in organizing the contents into a sequence of numbered chapters, Ávila only viewed it as information, not as creation. Were the creators of the HM not aware of Ávila’s destruction of Indigenous objects? They were, indeed, and mentioned it in the HM. But it seems that one of the reasons HM may have escaped destruction has to do with differing understandings of what writing could be used for, and what writing could symbolize in its materialization in paper and ink. This I elaborate on in the next section.

MATERIALITY AND TEXT From the early stages of European colonization of Peru, Spaniards, from priests to soldiers, and monarchy officials repeated the tagline that alphabetic writing was the only possible mode to keep an accurate record of the past and the present, and thus an indicator of civilization, or lack of

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it. The argument, unsurprisingly, is also present in Sarmiento de Gamboa’s History of the Incas, a text that set the ideological guidelines on how to read and write chronicles, treatises, legislation, and so forth about Andeans: “Since these barbarous Indian nations always lacked writing, they had no means to preserve the monuments and memories of their times, ages, and ancestors in a truthful and organized manner. And since the devil, who always endeavors to harm the human race, saw that these unfortunates were easily fooled and timid in obedience, he introduced many illusions, lies, and frauds to them.”97 Claims like this one have been debated and deconstructed, and have fostered valuable research about Indigenous media. An epistemological drive to reevaluate alternative modes of inscription such as quipu in the Andes, pictograms in Mesoamerica, and wampum in North America has opened a productive discussion about methodologies that could help decolonize western notions of knowledge and civilization that, for centuries, were used to demean the value of Native American cultures.98 This has, nonetheless, distracted us from a complementary but relevant question: what did Indigenous people use writing for? The Huarochirí runakuna, whose stories were inscribed in ink and paper, may as well have asked the anonymous creators of the Huarochirí manuscript concerning their use of writing: “Why do you do these things?” The opening lines of the Quechua manuscript, written by way of introduction, seem to address that question (figure 8): If the ancestors of the people called Indians had known writing in earlier times, then the lives they lived would not have faded from view until now. As the mighty past of the Spanish Vira Cochas is visible until now, so too, would theirs be. But things are as they are, and since nothing has been written until now, I set forth here the lives of the ancestors of the Huaro Cheri people, who all descend from one forefather. What faith they held, how they live up until now, those things and more; village by village it will be written down: how they lived from their dawning age onward.99

These lines have been interpreted as a straightforward embrace of the communicative technology introduced in the Andes by Europeans, and its power to prevent oblivion. But as I have discussed previously,

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FIGURE 8 Opening folio (untitled) of the Huarochirí manuscript BNE, MS 3169 fol. 64r. Courtesy of Biblioteca Nacional de España.

since pre-Hispanic times and well into the colonial era, Andeans had other modes of inscription and of preserving memories of things. The HM acknowledges that the various versions of the stories they narrate were conveyed by other Andeans. It is not entirely clear, however, if the process of communication was oral or mediated, for example, by quipus. As we saw in the lawsuit against Ávila, the knotted cords were a source of information widely used in Huarochirí around the time the HM was created. Quipus are only mentioned in two chapters of the HM. In chapter 22, the narrator asserts that the Incas kept information about the kind and presumably also the quantity of gifts that people had to offer in their worship of huacas, in other words, religious tribute.100 Almost by the end of the manuscript, the narrator also reveals the use of the Andean medium closer to home. Chapter 31 indicates that the Concha, one of the

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ayllus from the province of Huarochirí, but not the one that the narrator seemed to have belonged to, “took a quipu account of all the people who were absent” from their annual worship of Yansa lake.101 However, thanks to the ethnographic work of Salomon we know that the narrator’s Checa ayllu own and use quipu up to the present day.102 In addition to quipu, a technology that amazed Europeans so much that they equaled them to books, Indigenous peoples used their bodies—in mummified remains and in ritual performances by live persons—as ways to inscribe memory of their culture. With these alternatives at hand, what function would alphabetic writing have in their society? The introductory lines to the Huarochirí manuscript quoted before offer some clues. The ancestors and “the lives they lived” had not been forgotten, rather they had “faded from view.”103 As the HM and many other official documents written at the time note, mummies of the ancestors were being burned by priests or hidden by Indigenous people to prevent their destruction. The narrator adopted a different strategy, relocating mummies from their original sacred places to the space of ink and paper, and that was the new “here” of the resettled mummies. Writing was not meant to be used to fight oblivion but rather, to give the ancestors a new visibility, the same one that the “mighty past” of the Spaniards had. Indeed, the HM presents the readers’ eyes with stories of the mighty past of the huacas and other ancestors of the people called “Indians.” Writing was, as asserted in Sarmiento de Gamboa’s quoted passage, the legitimate medium to inscribe, organize, and keep memory of past things. On paper and ink, all things related to the material and symbolic aspects of Andean culture could have a legitimizing visibility. How one read and interpreted that kind of information was a different matter, as Ávila demonstrated in the marginal notes he left in the HM and in his treatise. Visibility and the medium chosen to convey it could be taken as denunciation or as legitimation. The Huarochirí manuscript was a text with a specific function, but that function should not be taken as intrinsic to the technology of writing. In colonial society, writing had a political and cultural legitimacy that was curtailed or denied to Indigenous media. In the previous chapter, I analyzed the ways in which Huarochirí people used quipus and writing to access and navigate through the colonial legal system. Nowhere in the HM is there any indication that the text was conceived to be used as a

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legal instrument. Rather, given the content, its use of Quechua language, the way in which the narrator identifies themself and those surrounding them, and the historical backdrop in which it was created, it can be argued that the HM was meant to create a space of legitimacy to the changing notions of the sacred. The Huarochirí manuscript is, as Arguedas pointed out in the 1960s, something of a sacred book. But while he saw the HM as a text that conveyed an uncontaminated worldview of past gods and goddesses, I argue that the Quechua manuscript is very much about the colonial present and about Christianity from an Indigenous point of view. It is a text conceived and/or written in a collective third person who identified themselves as Christian, who, in telling the stories of pre-Hispanic deities and how they interacted with the peoples of Huarochirí in the past and in the colonial present, outline a history of the changing notions of the sacred. The HM should be considered a sacred text, but not because it was imbued with metaphysical attributes. On the contrary, it has a mundane connection to the sacred that resembles how some pre-Hispanic crafts were conceived of in Andean societies. The narrators of the HM explain that whenever someone in the past began a complex task such as weaving fine textiles (cumbi or cumbe), he or she would offer coca leaves and recite the following prayers in honor of Cuni Raya Vira Cocha to overcome the challenges of the craft: “Help me remember how, help me work it out, Cuni Raya Vira Cocha!”104 Although the narrator ends the first chapter of the HM without elaborating further on the prayer, various other chapters refer to the role that the deities of the past had in educating their human followers in various tasks such as constructing elevated agricultural platforms (andenes) and maintaining irrigation systems. In the colonial era, writing became another craft that Andeans could perform. Much like weaving fine textiles, the craft of writing required skills. Writing was serious business in colonial Peru. The Spanish obsession with producing paper trails of everyday interactions and transactions turned notaries, officials in charge of legitimizing documents, into power brokers both in Spain and its Spanish American territories.105 But paper trails were also encouraged, if not required, of parishes. Priests were expected to keep written records about their parishioners (number of births, deaths, marriages) and accounts of the expenses related to

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running the local church.106 Neither notaries nor priests dealt with the responsibility of producing those records on their own. Behind the certifying signature of a notary and the parish accounting books hid a small army of assistants—scribes and copyists—some of whom were Andeans sometimes referred to as indios ladinos, as discussed in a previous chapter. While the suitability of formal education for Indigenous people was still being debated and the plans to open schools went on and off, the bureaucratic machinery in colonial Peru cleared the way for Andeans to access literacy. Those in the lower ranks of the business of writing, the scribes, had to demonstrate their ability to use ink and quill to produce well-formed letters. Legibility in its very literal sense was one of the required skills for this job. It is not surprising then to find scribes recycling documents to practice their handwriting, decorating different kinds of manuscripts with their scribbles and doodles.107 What does stand out, however, is the way in which an anonymous scribe portrayed the skill required of writing not merely as something attainable through practice but rather as a divine gift. In an incomplete petition that seems to refer to a commercial transaction of the year 1662, an anonymous scribe added in the last lines of the folio the following: “Lord Santiago, only patron . . . [illegible] of wars of the king, my lord. Lord Santiago, only patron that carries the flag of the king, my lord. Jesus, Mary, light of day, you guide my hand so that I become a good scribe of small and medium [sized letters]. Amen Jesus.”108 The scribble can be a valuable if small clue to better understand the two texts between which this anonymous scribe left his writing practice. Occupying folio 114v of manuscript 3169, it sits between the end of the Huarochirí manuscript and the beginning of Francisco de Ávila’s incomplete Tratado y relación.109 This note suggests a link between writing and the sacred that was not uncommon in the Andes nor in Spanish authored texts. The relation between text and the sacred was a cornerstone of Christendom and a key divisive issue between Catholics and Protestants. Crucially, though, there is a key distinction between Andean and European references to writing and the sacred. In the latter, it is the message which is divine. In the former, it was the medium and the practice of writing that are conceived as something of divine gifts, comparable to the skills of Andean weavers.110 Writing, therefore, could be in itself a practice

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that brought the individual closer to the sacred. If so, writing the HM was a means for its Indigenous author(s) to become better Christians. All of the Huarochirí manuscript’s chapters touch on the sacred, from the non-Christian and Christian point of view. More importantly, the former is presented sometimes as unmediated information. For example, chapter 13 opens with the following line: “When the people of Mama are questioned today about the huaca Chaupi Ñamca, they tell a different story.”111 This sentence also seems to imply that a questionnaire was used to gather information from the people of Mama as well as information included in other chapters, much in the same way as information was gathered from witnesses involved in the legal dispute against Father Ávila.112 But there is a crucial difference in how questionnaires were used in legal cases and how it appears to have been used in the Quechua manuscript. In the former, the questions aimed to determine facts and whether those involved in the events lied or were truthful. The HM incorporates information obtained through questionnaires not to determine fact from lie, but rather to establish the wide range of possible versions on the same topic. Another possible model of questionnaire is that of the catechism, which was meant to convey and clarify doctrinal issues in the format of questions asked by a priest and answered by the parishioner who was being quizzed. The Christian Doctrine printed in Lima in 1584, which Father Ávila had in his private library, contained two different catechisms. The “Catecismo breve,” as stated in its front page, was aimed at those who were old, slow to learn, or busy with obligatory labor.113 It reviewed doctrine with a list of questions and answers that proceeded in the following way: “Q. How many gods are there? A. Only one, no more.”114 The “Catecismo mayor,” in contrast, was aimed at “those who are more capable” and, while maintaining the question and answer format, provided a more detailed and extensive review of the doctrine, sacraments, commandments, and pater noster.115 Both catechisms, as well as some sermons addressed to Andean parishioners, show an illusory dialogical process in which they are hypothetically given the opportunity to express their doubts and ask for a more accessible explanation from their priests. But the space for uncertainty was limited and the kinds of doubts restricted to those that could be easily clarified. If the creators of the Huarochirí manuscript were

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inspired by the aforementioned methodology, it is clear that the Quechua text quickly veered into a truly dialogical text. The narrator’s questions welcome a diversity of answers that are not necessarily in tune with the Christian point of view of the narrator. Why would those Indigenous authors who self-identified as Christians be interested in establishing a dialogue with non-Christians about beliefs and rituals that were condemned by their priest? One of the sections of The Christian Doctrine printed in Lima in 1584 is a “cartilla” that presents brief lessons of different aspects of Christianity. One such lesson is concerned with “Las obras de misericordia” (Deeds of Compassion), which consisted of corporeal and spiritual acts of compassion. The first spiritual deed is “to teach the simple-minded, [the one] who does not know.”116 From the second half of the sixteenth century, Jesuit priests who had done missional work in the province of Huarochirí had encouraged those deemed “more capable” to be the agents of the indoctrination of other people in their communities.117 The Huarochirí manuscript suggests that those Indigenous, selfidentified Christians were indeed trying to understand why there were people still clinging to past beliefs and rituals, while noting that some priests were encouraging them, or at least turning a blind eye to the continuation of outlawed practices. That was the case for a dance that people from various villages of Huarochirí still performed in honor of Paria Caca: “On account of this dance, the Catholic priests in their villages exact collections of chickens, maize, and all sorts of other things. The people hand these things over more than cheerfully.”118 Without giving the name of those priests, the same chapter also remarks on the delight felt by villagers whenever their priest went away to Lima, which gave them the opportunity to carry on with their non-Christian rituals.119 Similar concerns were raised by a few of the Indigenous witnesses whose testimonies were included in the legal dispute against Ávila, analyzed in the previous chapter. Required to follow their priest to the village where he went to deliver Mass, Martin de Astoyauri, Cristobal Llacxaguaringa, and don Diego Sacxayauri had the chance to gather valuable information about Ávila and his other parishioners. They explicitly state that they went from village to village “enquiring about the life of said priest [Ávila] to know and help the poor Indians,” not only because they had heard of the abuses committed by the priest but also out of concern

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for the state of the indoctrination of locals. Don Martin pointed out that he knew that Ávila traveled to Lima in different moments of the year and stayed there each time for about three to four months, “leaving them [his parishioners] without anyone to preach to them.”120 What were they to do in the absence of their priest? They could not themselves become priests because that had been emphatically forbidden by the church.121 But they could find their own ways to carry on being good Christians. Some years before Ávila arrived to Huarochirí, locals had positively surprised a group of Jesuits who organized the celebration of Corpus Christi among the newly or not yet fully converted Andeans. A group of young people sang songs that had been adapted by the priests to convey Christian content in Quechua while keeping the original lyrical genre, a strategy of appropriation and adaptation that was commonly used by the order elsewhere.122 Yet another group of locals danced to a song that puzzled the Jesuits because the lyrics conveyed very positive things about the Christian god. “Asked [to the Indians] where they took these [lyrics] from, they said that the same [positive things] that in the past they said to the Sun and to their King, they had [now] converted in honor of Jesus Christ taking note of the things they had heard from the preachers.”123 From composing songs to writing down a manuscript, Huarochirí people found alternative ways to understand and practice Christianity but, more importantly, to convey the transition from past notions of the sacred to their Christian present. And while Jesuits had used Andean lyrical genres to convey a persuasive message of conversion, some Huarochirí locals took elements from different written genres to convey their own message about what Christianity meant in Huarochirí. Those appropriations and adaptations went beyond the dialogical model of the catechisms or the biblical stories of the deluge and the eclipse that followed the death of Christ. Those who created the Huarochirí manuscript organized its contents into thirty-one numbered and mostly titled chapters. An equal number of sermons is contained in the Tercero Catecismo, which explains in Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara the Christian doctrine to Andeans in an accessible way, recurring to comparisons and analogies. The Huarochirí manuscript is not a book of sermons, nor a catechism. But neither is it a report to denounce idolatries. The narratives and the organization of the text are too complex for the simple task of identifying places, objects, and rituals. Quechua, the language in which it was

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written, would not have been the most effective way to convey the kind of information that priests needed to extirpate idolatries. Spanish, the language in which Ávila wrote down the marginal notes in the HM asking for more details, would have sufficed for that end. Ávila, it seems, could not make out what the HM was exactly either. Thus, in order to make it legible, he translated it to Spanish, edited its content, rearranged the order of events, and refuted the stories he read. The result was a new text that bears a title that the Quechua manuscript did not have. It was also classified into a narrative genre that was familiar to the priest, a treatise, which gave the priest a frame of legibility that was in tune with the kinds of texts that he had in his library.

ON AUTHORSHIP The authorial attribution of the Huarochirí manuscript continues to be a matter of debate to this day. This final section focuses on the most important hypotheses proposed by scholars in the past decades, and stops to discuss the most recent claim that identifies Cristóbal Choque Casa, an Indigenous ally of Father Ávila, as the author of the Quechua manuscript. However neatly Choque Casa may seem to fit into our modern expectations of authorship, I argue that the hypothesis becomes implausible once we pay attention to what the anonymous narrator carefully conveys about Choque Casa, and how Ávila referred to their collaboration. A marginal note in Spanish that states, “By the hand and quill of Thomas,” seems to solve quite easily the issue of the Huarochirí manuscript’s authorship.124 But this seems to have been added well after the creation of the manuscript by a scribe that was practicing his handwriting, much like the case of the anonymous prayer-like note left between the end of the HM and the beginning of Ávila’s Tratado y relación, discussed previously. Whereas the authorship of the Huarochirí manuscript remains an open question, scholars do agree that Father Ávila was not the author. I will briefly outline the three main paths that scholars have followed regarding the HM’s authorship and the plausible processes of its writing and editing.125 The first line of argumentation posits that an unidentified person of the Checa ethnic group of Huarochirí authored the

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manuscript, imprinting his point of view as a hint. The differences in size and regularity of the handwriting throughout the thirty-one numbered chapters and the two supplements could indicate that the writing of the manuscript was done in various stages. Whoever penned its chapters did not know Spanish as a first language. The spelling and grammatical errors reveal that this person was more familiar with Quechua than with Spanish.126 A second approach points to marginal notes in the manuscript as evidence that the same person compiled and edited information.127 The third position identifies Cristobal Choque Casa, named in two chapters of the manuscript, as the author.128 Father Ávila mentioned him in his book of sermons as an ally in the uprooting of idolatrous practices, but we know from the legal dossier discussed in chapter 2 that Choque Casa also intervened in defense of the embattled priest. I agree with the first two approaches, which are complementary, but not with the last one. The attribution of authorship to Choque Casa is based fundamentally on elements that are not entirely convincing: handwriting and a particular interpretation of the chapters of the HM where he is mentioned. Choque Casa, as discussed before, wrote down a document that compiled recantations from some Huarochirí parishioners that had originally accused Ávila of a series of offenses. Durston points out that there are enough similarities between the handwriting of that text, the so-called Sunicancha document, and the Huarochirí manuscript to assert that the same person wrote down both. Yet by Durston’s own account, there are as many similarities as variations between the handwriting of the two texts.129 Attempts to apply some kind of graphology test to colonial era documents and tie handwriting to authorship can yield misleading results for at least two reasons. First, the extant copy of the Huarochirí manuscript is clearly not a first draft. The care invested in keeping the handwriting regular (both in size and style) in most of its folios, the numbering of successive chapters that in many cases bear a title, and the internal referencing to previous and upcoming chapters seem to suggest that this is not a first version. The point here is that an elaborated and revised version of a text might actually betray less individual handwriting traits given that the polished handwriting was meant to look more like the learned model of writing. It might be worth bearing in mind that Ávila had other Andean scribes

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writing down copies of texts authored by Molina and Ondegardo, discussed in chapter 1. Second, because writing was a pillar for imperial and colonial administration, official writing tended to be standardized writing. The importance of standardizing the way in which letters should be drawn was already a concern in late fifteenth-century Spanish court.130 From the sixteenth century onwards, print shops in the Iberian peninsula produced manuals that guided future scribes on the art of giving shape to letters according to specific types of writing (cortesana, procesal, humanística, etc.).131 In Spanish American territories, Indigenous assistants to notaries had to follow regulated models for the shape of letters as well as for the format of the documents they were writing.132 Whether Indigenous people learned how to read and write from their parish priests or, starting in 1618, in the schools for Indigenous nobility, they learned specific styles. Individual writing traits would, to a degree, be homogenized by such styles. In that sense, I side with Charles’s observation that graduates of schools for Indigenous people produced texts that could hardly be distinguished in form or style from those by Spanish notaries.133 This could be said for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century documents, in which, according to Burns, “the handwriting looks strikingly similar from Madrid and Seville to Lima and Cuzco.”134 Back in Huarochirí, various documents reveal that Choque Casa was not the only literate person, and there is a probability that he, along with others, learned from similar or the same source how to draw letters. Why does it matter who wrote the Huarochirí manuscript? The goal of this chapter, and of the book, is to make a case for the various ways in which Andeans used writing and how they understood the role of this medium. I take the anonymity of the HM as a privilege that allows scholars to focus on the ways in which Andeans articulated legibility through writing without succumbing to the romantic notion of the authorial function.135 The way in which the search for an author of the HM has been laid out by some scholars seems to be guided towards identifying a Andean that “fits the bill.”136 The bill here is one of an indio ladino who, given his proximity to Ávila, would produce a useful text for him, much like the document of Sunicancha, and useful for the indio ladino himself as proof of his Christianity. The move from informant to writer, according to Adorno, foregrounds the relationship between the Spanish clergy

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and the indio ladino, as attested by the texts authored by two Andean authors discusses in the next chapter, Joan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti and Felipe Guaman Poma.137 Yet, both in Ávila’s and in the HM’s view, Choque Casa remained only an informant, as we will see. The narrator inserts the story about Cristóbal Choque Casa only after having described the hierarchies of regional and local huacas and the various beliefs and rituals that were practiced in their honor from times immemorial, all of which often clashed with Christian evangelization. It is within stories about huacas and their bonds to humans that the reader is presented with the narration about Choque Casa’s conflicts with his conscience and with other people of Huarochirí. Choque Casa was an ally of Father Francisco de Ávila. The Huarochirí local attempted to counter the accusations levelled against the priest in 1607 by visiting some of the accusers and writing down in Quechua their recantations of their original accusations. Ávila translated these to Spanish and submitted them as evidence in the judicial process. Thanks in part to these retractions, Ávila was allowed to go back to his parish in Huarochirí and carry on his own investigation. Several years later, the priest’s gratitude to Choque Casa materialized in the lines he dedicated to his Huarochirí ally in the preface to his two-volume book of sermons (Lima, 1648). But there Ávila also revealed another important detail that had already been hinted at in the Huarochirí manuscript: there was a conflict between Choque Casa and an unspecified number of Huarochirí people who considered themselves Christians. This can be inferred from a passage in which the priest reminisces about the effect that one of his anti-idolatry sermons had on his Huarochirí parishioners. After the sermon, some of them told him “we are all Christians, and none of us knows anyone that engages in those misdeeds. Therefore do not preach any more about idolatry, because it is a big affront [to us] and [Indigenous people] from neighboring doctrinas have noticed it and have told us so.”138 A few months later, however, on his way to celebrate a religious festivity outside his doctrina of San Damian, “an indio principal, very religious, who lives to this day, named Don Cristóbal Choque Casa, from San Damian” told him that his sermons were very much needed because many parishioners still worshipped Paria Caca and Chaupi Ñamca.139 Choque Casa also asked the priest not to reveal that he was the source of such information, otherwise

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“they [other Huarochirí persons] will kill me when they have a chance.” Ávila did reveal, however, the informant’s name in his book of sermons.140 The anonymous narrator of the Huarochirí manuscript designates chapters 20 and 21 of their carefully organized text to the story of Choque Casa. Yet their story occurs within another more significant story about pre-Hispanic deity Llocllay Huancupa, which develops in three stages. The first part of chapter 20 focuses on pre-Hispanic times, and it is explained how that deity arrived to the Checa ayllu, the huaca’s lineage as a son of coastal deity Pachacamac, the mission that brought him to Huarochirí, and the rituals established in his honor.141 This first stage of the huaca’s story ends with a breakdown in the ritual order caused by people’s neglect of their obligations towards the deity, and their subsequent efforts to win back his favor. The second stage of Llocllay Huancupa’s story is set in the context of Spanish colonization. A Christian priest arrives to the Checa ayllu, and roots out the worship of the huaca with the help of curaca Gerónimo Cancho Huaman, father of Cristóbal Choque Casa. An epidemic of measles leads the curaca to believe that the illness was Llocllay Huancupa’s way of punishing them, so he allowed people to go back to the worship of the pre-Hispanic deity. On his deathbed, the curaca admitted that he too had relapsed into huaca worship. With an ambiguous tone that Salomon and Urioste interpret as having “a shade of satirical intent, or perhaps said in pity,” the narrator’s last words about Choque Casa’s father are: “As for that fellow, God only knows where he is now!”142 The third stage in Llocllay Huancupa’s story is set off by the arrival of a new priest, Francisco de Ávila, seemingly pointing to the definitive end of the huaca’s worship. And yet the narrator leaves space for doubts: “Nowadays, due to the preaching of Doctor Ávila, some people have converted back to God and forbidden all these practices.”143 Not even Ávila, who is favorably mentioned on four different occasions in the Huarochirí manuscript, could apparently convince all people to convert. In the remaining folios of that chapter, the narrator tells vividly of how Llocllay Huancupa harassed Choque Casa, who had been raised as a Christian rejecting preHispanic deities but, like his father, the deceased curaca, had also eventually joined the worship of the huaca. Finally, Choque Casa confronted the Andean deity by praying for help from the Virgin Mary, and then recited the Salve Regina Mater Misericordiae in Latin. Choque Casa then addressed all

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his community, claiming victory over Llocllay Huancupa and threatening to denounce to the priest anyone who entered the huaca’s site of worship. Yet, in the following chapter, the narrative elaborates on further victories achieved by Choque Casa against Llocllay Huancupa, with a very brief mention to his victories over Paria Caca and Chaupi Ñamca. The son of the curaca went around Huarochirí “telling the people all about it over and over again, saying ‘They are demons!’”144 The only caveat to these victories is that most of them happened in Choque Casa’s dreams. Notably, the chapter does not end with that story, but rather goes on to describe the ritual celebrations that people performed in ancient times to honor the arrival of Llocllay Huancupa to their community. Llocllay Huancupa’s genealogy becomes the focus of chapter 22, when the narrative turns to Pacha Camac, identified as the deity’s father. Pacha Camac was a pre-Inca deity especially important in the central coast region of Peru, whose cult was sponsored, revitalized, and expanded by the Incas.145 In sum, despite Cristóbal Choque Casa’s best and repeated efforts to convince his community of the importance of his victories, all he was granted in the Huarochirí manuscript was a secondary role in a story that has Llocllay Huancupa as its main protagonist. I would argue that chapters 20 and 21 do not weave a story of an exemplary Christian Andean. First, Choque Casa’s Christianity and his authority in the community are cast into doubt by his actions and by his father’s credentials. Choque Casa is not introduced with any marker of social standing other than being the son of a curaca that died in disgrace as an idolater. Additionally, the structure of the story seems to play down Choque Casa’s relevance. Although the story in which he takes part occupies two consecutive chapters, it is but one of the many stories told throughout the 31 chapters of the HM. It is the geography, the deities, their worshipers, and the transformation of sacred rituals that make up the main narrative. Second, to the extent that he did defeat the huaca, the Huarochirí manuscript makes it clear that this was a second-rank deity whose cult the Incas sponsored—or imposed. The huacas that had been identified in previous chapters of the HM as father and mother of the peoples of Huarochirí, Paria Caca and Chaupi Ñamca, are barely mentioned. Third, the way in which the story is told reveals the status that Choque Casa had in the eyes of the narrator. The story is never told in the first person by Choque Casa, rather his part in the story about Llocllay Huancupa only

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begins after having the priest’s ally swear an oath. The narrator opens up a generous space to a polyphony of voices that range from those of huacas of the past and non-Christian Andeans of the present to a troubled Christian who cannot stop dreaming about huacas. In some chapters, as noted before, the human voices are summoned by what appears to be a questionnaire. Yet it is only in the case of Choque Casa that the narrator feels compelled to make him swear an oath: “The story is like this. To tell it Don Cristóbal first swore an oath by saying ‘This is the cross.’”146 This transforms the narration into a scene of confession, with an ending that presents Choque Casa’s redemption less as the release from torment and more as being sentenced to parrot doctrine indefinitely. Fourth, the narrator seems to discredit the second part of the story before telling it. Chapter 21, which appears to be intended to bring closure to the troubled Christian’s confrontation with Llocllay Huancupa, bears the following title in Quechua: “Although a Dream Is Not Valid, We Shall Speak about That Demon’s Frightful Deeds and Also about the Way in Which Don Cristóbal Defeated Him.” The title echoes the church’s official stance on Indigenous dreams, which interpreted them as omens.147 To put an end to the use of dreams as foretelling, the Tercero Catecismo (1585) explicitly stated in one of its sermons, “you shall not believe dreams, nor ask others to tell them to you, because dreams are vanity.”148 In spite of the manuscript’s disclaimer in the title, Choque Casa went on narrating his dreams to the people of his community: “From that exact time on, right up to the present he defeated various huacas in his dreams the same way.”149 However, and this is my last point, the troubled Christian had good reason to insist on the repetition of the dreams and the public narration of them. The Peruvian church (Second Council of Lima, 1567) attributed the continuity of idolatry mainly to baptized Andeans, like Choque Casa, and less to those who remained non-Christian. Why would the Huarochirí manuscript narrator put this Christian in such an awkward narrative spot? The details given about Choque Casa seem to parallel those about unnamed non-Christian Andeans whose rituals, beliefs, and suffering are also recounted in several passages of the HM. But while some scholars have interpreted the details about Choque Casa as flattering references to a model convert, the second set of stories have been read as denunciations of idolatries. As I have shown, the way

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in which Choque Casa’s story is framed and the details about his father’s and his own relapse into idolatry suggest that the narrator of the HM was unimpressed by him. Judging by other contemporaneous sources, Choque Casa also failed to impress his community at large. Unlike his father, who held the lifelong post of curaca, Choque Casa remained a minor Indigenous official; he was, in fact, the assistant to a more important local authority.150 Communal authority, in the sense of a figure legitimized by the support of the community, is precisely what made possible both the HM and the lawsuit against Ávila. The latter, as Acosta Rodríguez pointed out, was a clear display of organization of several Indigenous actors joining forces against the priest.151 The stories conveyed in the HM, similarly, depended on other anonymous Andeans who supplied the information to those they acknowledged as figures of authority in their communities. It is therefore not surprising that the narrator would deem it fitting to use a plural voice, “we Christians,” to convey the stories of the diverse peoples of Huarochirí. The focus on attributing individual authorship to a text that avoided it hinders the possibility of making sense of the Quechua manuscript. I would argue that the narrator of the HM had no intention of denouncing those non-Christians portrayed in the text, or even the embattled Christian Choque Casa. Rather, the anonymous author(s) put down to ink and paper their efforts to understand the meaning and continuity of so-called idolatrous acts. The creators of the Huarochirí manuscript will probably remain anonymous. They seem to have had in mind a larger investigation into the transformations of the sacred and its effects on the social order in their communities. The claims made by three of the Huarochirí locals interrogated as part of the legal fight against Father Ávila, analyzed in the previous chapter, seem to point in that direction. Asked on different occasions to testify about Ávila’s relations with his parishioners, they pointed out that they went around various villages to listen to the preacher but also to inquire about his life and “to know and help the poor Indians.”152 One way of knowing and helping Indians was to ask them “Why do you do these things?,” a question that is indeed formulated by the narrator of the HM.153 Choque Casa, by contrast, was keen on making others abandon their beliefs and practices. His strategy of persuasion, as the story shows, was to threaten to denounce them to their priest if they did not change their ways, a threat that he fulfilled, as Ávila confirmed.

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CONCLUSIONS Arguably, what makes the untitled text known as the Huarochirí manuscript exceptional is its survival. Francisco de Ávila, a priest reputed for eradicating the material and immaterial aspects of Indigenous cultural practices, read and kept in his library a manuscript written by people of Huarochirí that described for posterity the practices he so abhorred. The anonymous manuscript was a one of a kind text in Father Francisco de Ávila’s rich private library which also held other texts written in Quechua, such as the trilingual Quechua-Aymara-Spanish catechetical materials sponsored by the Peruvian church and printed in Lima (1584– 1585).154 Yet the legibility that the text had for the priest, who boasted about his command of Quechua language, was hindered precisely because of the priest’s familiarity with so-called pastoral Quechua, the standardized version that was used as a tool for evangelization. While the analysis of Ávila’s library allowed for a reconstruction of the ideological frame that shaped the priest’s particular reading of Indigenous peoples, this chapter explained how that ideological frame could hinder the legibility of an Indigenous narrative inscribed in a medium and a language that were in principle familiar to the priest. By the time the Huarochirí manuscript was written down, Quechua— and particularly the variety known as the “lengua general”—had been appropriated by the Peruvian church as one of the languages of Catholic evangelization. The much debated policies of translation attempted to achieve a linguistic standardization and control of how and what to convey of Christian doctrine to Indigenous peoples. But the way in which Quechua language and some Spanish loan words are deployed in the HM, and the topics and organization of the narratives, reveal a process of bifurcation of the social role of language. On the one hand, the pastoral texts produced by the church and read to (and probably also read by) Indigenous peoples redefined and sought to homogenize terms that referred to key elements of the social and political structures of Andean societies. On the other hand, sermons for the neophytes presented doctrinal teachings along with revisionist retellings of the Indigenous past—though mostly focused on the Inca—which aimed to delegitimize the latter to assert the authority of the former. While the two-volume book of sermons written by Father Ávila attests

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to that mission, it also hints at how the legibility of a text and of Quechua language was so intrinsically linked to the social role conceived for that language and for the uses that Andeans could give to writing. It is notable how the narrator of the Huarochirí manuscript, identified only as “we Christians,” carefully and almost proudly conveys stories of peoples and pre-Hispanic deities of various Huarochirí villages. Having identified as Christians, it is unsurprising that a few passages reveal the narrator’s discomfort with the prolongation of some of the beliefs and rites of the past into the colonial present. Yet the narrator mostly avoids imposing a moral judgment on those who were not yet fully Christian, instead trying to understand them. Thus their respect for the internal logic of the stories, while attempting to map out how they made sense to those who still recounted them. This defied Father Ávila’s attempts at wrapping up Indigenous peoples’ stories in the kind of linear notion of history that was taught to them through Christian catechesis. The attention given in this chapter to the marginal notes left by the priest in the Quechua manuscript, as well as his unfinished translation into Spanish, presents an additional angle to the discussion of colonial legibility. While both the anonymous narrator of the Huarochirí manuscript and Ávila identified as Christians, their notions of Christianity, and how it was meant to be performed, shaped differing ways to read and interact with Andeans. The HM attempted to make legible the world-view of those that were partially or not yet Christian, which was summed up in a question asked by narrator: “Why do you do these things?” While for Ávila, his reading, commenting, translating, and editing of the Quechua manuscript led to a simple assertion: it all amounted to nonsense. Still, Ávila found some of the nonsense useful, picking up information conveyed in the Quechua manuscript to carry on his campaign of extirpation of idolatries. But as I argued in this chapter, we should not disregard the discrepancies between what the text conveyed and what its reader wanted to find. The purpose of creation of the HM is not determined by how it was read (and rewritten) by Ávila.

CHAPTER 4 “WE CHRISTIANS” Andeans Rewriting Christianity

TYING THE (TEXTUAL) KNOT

T

HE HUAROCHIRÍ manuscript was the only Indigenous-authored text written entirely in Quechua, but it was not the only lengthy manuscript to be created by Andeans at the turn of the seventeenth century. By then, the roots of alphabetic literacy had grown strong enough that Joan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua and Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala also penned their own views about Christianity in paper and ink. Like the anonymous author(s) of the HM, they were born in the Christian era in the Andes, a few decades after the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire, to a society reorganized by alphabetic writing. Andeans, as explained previously, had already been participating directly in lettered culture feeding the colonial bureaucracy machine with various kinds of administrative and legal documents. But the three Andean authors went beyond the roles of informants or scribes to create texts that are not explicitly conceived as legal documents, are lengthier than what would be expected of those, do not fit into a single writing genre and, in the case of Pachacuti’s and Guaman Poma’s manuscripts, even include illustrations. Contemporaneity is one of the links between these three texts. Pachacuti’s Relación de antigüedades deste reyno del Pirú (Account of Antiquities of this Kingdom of Peru) was most likely written between 1613

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and the 1620s.1 According to Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, it took him several decades to complete his El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (First New Chronicle and Good Government), which may have happened around 1615. The Huarochirí manuscript seems to have been written between 1598 and 1608. Although the exact year of creation remains uncertain, it seems the Andean authors were Christianized and introduced into literacy before the first school for the education of Indigenous elites opened in Peru (Lima, 1618). Only Guaman Poma informs the reader of how he became literate, identifying a priest— who was his mestizo half-brother—as the one who taught him to read and write.2 It would not be too far-fetched to presume that Pachacuti and the anonymous author(s) of Huarochirí followed a similar path to literacy. Alphabetic writing, as discussed in chapter 1, had a central role in Catholic evangelization. Its mechanization with the installment of a printing press in the viceroyalty of Peru (1583, Lima) opened the opportunity for the church to produce and disseminate a homogenous Christian message in texts that were meant to facilitate secular and regular priests’ mission amongst Indigenous people. Printing also advanced the standardization of native languages that were to be used for catechetical materials. But these attempts to bring uniformity to the content and the language of evangelization and to define a role in it for natives seem to have come about after the three Andean texts were conceived, which may account for the remarkable formal and content differences in the three texts and might shed some light on the authors’ language choices. The creation of the three texts, additionally, may have taken place during the first evangelization period (1532 to the 1580s) or in the transition to the second evangelization (1580s onward). I argued in chapter 1 that Andeans were legitimized as agents of their own evangelization in both periods. However, agency took fundamentally opposite directions. The strategies of cultural adaptation—both in social practices and language—favored by the church during the first evangelization seem to have encouraged Andeans to become instruments of their own and their communities’ conversion to Christianity. The second evangelization seems to have conceived of agency as the act of denouncing cultural adaptation, by then labeled as idolatry.

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Given that plausible context of creation, it is not particularly remarkable that the narrators of the Andean texts self-identify as Christians. But while the narrative voice of the Huarochirí manuscript chose plural anonymity in “we Christians” and Quechua as its main language, Pachacuti and Guaman Poma chose a first-person narrative mostly in Spanish that starts off by stating their Christianized Andean names. In the second section of this chapter, I elaborate on how the articulation of individual and collective narrative voices in these texts is entangled with lineages, the legitimation of ancestors, the transition from past to present, and the location of idolatry and Christianity in that chronology. The three texts, I argue, aim to disentangle Christianity from alphabetic writing and from the Spanish conquest of Peru. But the HM, as I discuss in the last section, takes a distinctly different approach in comparison to Pachacuti and Guaman Poma’s texts. These manuscripts were only printed in the twentieth century, but the Huarochirí manuscript and the Relación de antigüedades were read close to their time of creation. The reader, Father Francisco de Ávila, left handwritten notes in the two manuscripts and kept them as part of his personal library. As explained in the previous chapter, the HM mentions Ávila’s missional work in Huarochirí. Pachacuti does not include any reference to the priest in his narrative. Guaman Poma’s Corónica includes information provided to him by others about Ávila’s campaign of extirpation of idolatries. There is no evidence that the two ever met, but Guaman Poma denounced the violence of Ávila’s zeal and even echoed some accusations that Huarochirí locals brought against the priest in the legal case discussed previously.3 More importantly, the links between Ávila and the three Andean manuscripts underscore how a shared social, political, and historical context could lead to quite different understandings of Christianity. The texts by the anonymous Huarochirí author(s), Pachacuti, and Guaman Poma, I argue, were their way to materialize, to put in practice, to display, and to reflect on their Christianity. But what did being a Christian mean for these Andeans? Why did they put it down in writing? The comparison of the three texts emphasizes how the written demonstration of their Christian status necessitated a revision of the frontier between past and present that could give legitimacy to their individual or collective genealogies. Crucially, it also entailed rewriting the

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history of Christianity and of the introduction of writing in the Andes from an Andean point of view.

REWRITING THE PAST By the time the Huarochirí manuscript was completed and Poma and Pachacuti finished their manuscripts, Jesuit José de Acosta’s Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590) had circulated widely in Christian Europe and had been translated into several languages. In Peru, even Father Ávila had a copy of it in his library.4 In the Historia, the well-respected Jesuit who had done missionary work in Peru and Mexico stated, “It is no matter of any great importance to know what the Indians themselves report of their beginning, being more like unto dreams, then to true Histories.”5 The statement reflects the frustration also found in Father Ávila’s marginal notes in the HM that Europeans and Euro-descendants experienced when trying to understand how Indigenous people conceived of and accounted for their origins. In the Historia, Acosta elaborates on the impossibility of trusting Andeans’ diverse unwritten histories that went back more than four hundred years and their stubborn claim to having their own explanation about their origins. With relief, Acosta put the matter of the origin of the Andeans to rest by asserting: “But we have freed them of this error by our faith, which teacheth us that all men came from the first man.”6 Pachacuti and Guaman Poma leave no doubt that they learned that lesson. Soon after introducing himself and his ancestors and stating his profound Christianity, Pachacuti recites the doctrine with an Andean twist: “I believe in God, three and one [the holy Trinity], who is [the] powerful God that created the sky and the earth [ . . . ] and then created the first man Adam Eve [sic] to his image and semblance, progenitor of human kind, etc., whose progeny are all [of us] the naturales [native peoples] of Tahuantinsuyo, just like every other nation that inhabits all the universe world.”7 Although the first pages of Guaman Poma’s Corónica focus on the text itself—its purpose and its intended readers—he professes his Christianity in the illustration that occupies most of the title page, which portrays the Andean chronicler kneeling next to the king of Spain before the pope.

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Another drawing, with the heading “God created the world,” portrays God surrounded by Adam and Eve.8 The author introduces himself in the initial pages in the following way: “not being a man of letters, nor a doctor, nor a Latin scholar; yet as the first chronicler of this kingdom, with an opportunity to serve Your Majesty, I decided to write of the origins, famous acts of the first kings [ . . . ] and the nobles and their generations and descendants from the first Indian called Vari Viracocha [ . . . ]who descended from Noah after the Flood.”9 By contrast, the only chronological references in the first two chapters of the HM are phrases such as “in very ancient times,” “a long, long time ago” and “in the old days.”10 There is no moment of genesis but rather a story in media res of a time when humans and some of the most important regional huacas, such as Paria Caca and Cuni Raya, coexisted. It is only in the third chapter that the first Christian references appear. As discussed previously, the main character of that chapter is an unnamed man who was saved by his llama’s warning that the world was about to be flooded. Father Ávila intervened through marginal notes in that story and another one about the eclipse that followed the death of Christ. He eventually redirected the HM narrator’s chronological organization of the stories to, at least provisionally and belatedly in chapter 15, clarify that in Andean stories of ancient times there was a moment of creation comparable to Christian genesis. It becomes clear though that the goal of the Huarochirí manuscript was not to narrate the story of the origins of the inhabitants of Tahuantinsuyu—the territories under Inca control—as stated by Pachacuti, or of the “Kingdom of Peru,” as declared by Poma. Both of these terms refer to the geographic extension of the former Inca Empire, but it is important to remember that for Father Francisco de Ávila as well as other church and monarchy officials, Inca culture was also a central reference to interpret and homogenize Andean cultures.11 The Quechua manuscript does not worry about the Inca genealogy that occupies a good part of the Relación de antigüedades and the Nueva corónica, with their respective authors describing their ancestry in terms of its political and genealogical relations with Inca rulers. The HM fundamentally conveys the stories of ethnic groups that inhabited the Huarochirí province, mapping the development of local human and sacred geopolitics, while the Incas figure marginally in a few chapters.

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Even though each of the Andean manuscripts is preoccupied to various degrees with narratives about the past, its authors follow different strategies to make that past legible in the Christian present. The anonymous narrator of the Huarochirí manuscript mostly avoids judging the non-Christian beliefs and rituals tied into Indigenous stories of the “very ancient times,” going as far as suggesting a parallel with the biblical narratives of the Flood and the death of Jesus Christ. Pachacuti and Guaman Poma, by contrast, reject and condemn Andean idolatries of the past, yet their stance was less unforgiving of those practices than the one adopted by the church since the Third Council of Lima and put in practice by father Ávila. The forty-three folios of Pachacuti’s Relación de antigüedades are organized by a Christian chronology that moves from the genesis of the world to the Andean region’s history, with the account coming to a close in the colonial era, but with little detail about the author’s direct context. Biblical allusions and ecclesiastical rhetoric shape the narrative, though it does not identify an intended reader or explain the purpose behind its creation.12 The first-person narrative was written in Spanish but includes six untranslated prayers or songs in Quechua related to pre-Hispanic Inca rituals. Pachacuti’s linear historical narrative includes a “time of the gentiles” with descriptions of pre-Hispanic Andean deities and the rituals associated with them. Of this period, Pachacuti tells how, as a young boy, he heard “very old information and the histories, barbarisms and fables,” echoing some of the adjectives with which Father Ávila described the stories of the Huarochirí manuscript that he translated to Spanish.13 The most extensive part of the Relación de antigüedades is dedicated to the origin of the Inca rulers and the expansion of their empire. Pachacuti comments on the Incas’ intuitive proximity to Christianity, suggesting that they were thus prepared to understand and embrace the ultimate revelation of this religion brought about later with the arrival of Spaniards. Though not descended from Incas, his noble ancestors loyally served the Andean rulers and swiftly followed their path of conversion, expanding their loyalty to the Spanish monarch. To underscore the argument that the Incas had an intuitive knowledge of the Christian God as creator of all things before the arrival of the Spaniards, Pachacuti embedded in his text a drawing that supposedly reproduced one of the interior walls of an Inca temple, the Qorikancha in Cuzco.

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FIGURE 9 Qorikancha wall drawn in the Relación de antigüedades by Joan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti. BNE, MS 3169, fol. 144v. Courtesy of Biblioteca Nacional de España.

This wall bore a drawing that represented God and his creations— humans, stars, sun, moon, the earth—to which Pachacuti added their names. There are three additional drawings embedded in other parts of the text that aim to illustrate elements of Inca cosmovision. But the drawings offer such a challenge to European notions of visual narrative and Christian symbolism that scholars still debate the cosmological drawing’s meaning and the cultural sources of its visual references.14 However, even if the drawing conveys an obscure message about a pre-Hispanic intuitive knowledge of Christianity, Pachacuti’s text, as Salomon has rightly noted, created a verbal image that “insisted ostentatiously on his own Catholic credentials.”15 Pachacuti states that his ancestors had been precursors of extirpation of idolatries—akin to Father Ávila’s undertaking—and underlines that his grandfathers converted to Christianity very soon after first contact with Europeans, promptly rejecting “all the falsehood and rites

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and ceremonies of the time of gentiles.”16 The emphasis on the religious aspect of his lineage has led some modern scholars to classify the Relación de antigüedades as a petition to the Crown. This particular genre of legal writing would have required that the petitioner describe his or her social status, as Pachacuti did with his noble lineage, as a preamble to petitioning a reward for a service to the king. The service, in the case of this Andean author, was the Christian example that he and his ancestors set in the Andes. But the formal elements of Relación de antigüedades are at odds with what would be needed of a document that was meant to persuade the reader to grant a favor. It has no page numbers and no chapters nor subtitles to help the reader transition from one topic to the next. More importantly, Pachacuti’s Spanish is not very fluent, which, as I will discuss later, obscures the intention of this text. The title of Guaman Poma’s El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno announces a straightforward organization of the contents of this 1,189 page-long text. The first part, the Nueva corónica (New Chronicle), touches on the Christian creation of the world, from Adam and Eve to different stages of humanity that are described in connection to episodes of the history of the Andes. The ancient Andean past is described in a chapter entitled, “The first age of the Indians, Vari Viracocha Runa,” and progresses into Inca times, to which he dedicates several chapters. Guaman Poma offers a detailed genealogical account of all the governing Incas and their coyas (queens)—the rulers of the land—their deeds and misfortunes, all of it inscribed into the larger frame of Christian biblical chronology. This first part also refers to the text itself. In a composite prologue made of letters addressed to the Pope, to the King of Spain, and to Christian readers including Andeans and Spaniards of all ranks and social standing, Guaman Poma identifies as an author who offers his manuscript as a humble service to Christianity. But the lengthy manuscript also had a purpose closer to the author’s personal interest, though this is revealed through the narrative voice of his father. The composite prologue that opens the Nueva Coronica includes a copy of what was supposedly a letter by don Martín Guaman Mallque de Ayala addressed to the King of Spain. In it, Guaman Poma’s father introduces himself as descendant of a noble Andean lineage whose members served the Inca rulers in high ranking positions.17 He goes on to state that it has taken his son approximately twenty years to write a history

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that deserved to be printed, “celebrating and immortalizing the memory and names of the great lords of the past, our grandfathers, whose glorious deeds deserve recognition.”18 I discussed in the previous chapter that, as in the first pages of Guaman Poma’s text, the Huarochirí manuscript’s initial sentences signal the utility of alphabetic writing to honor the ancestral past. But while the HM emphasizes the visibility—and thus legitimacy—that writing gave to that past without placing the European introduced medium in opposition to the role of quipu, Guaman Poma elaborates a justification that seems to place quipu and Andean languages in a lower hierarchy to writing and Spanish: “[I]n order to make sense out of these stories I had to put out so much effort because I had no written records at all; rather I had to rely on quipo [sic] records, accounts in many languages besides Spanish . . . all Indian languages. I did all this work as a service to God Our Lord and your Holy Catholic Majesty, King Philip III.”19 The last part of the quotation, as well as the content of the whole preface, clarify that the explanation about medium and language choice is directly tied to the stated purpose of the Nueva Coronica. In the absence of a need to explain a purpose for the creation of the HM, its narrator does not seem compelled to go into such explanations to articulate legibility through the use of writing. The second part of Guaman Poma’s manuscript, the “Good Government,” deals with colonial Andean society from the Spanish conquest until 1610, including mentions of the conflicts between conquistadors that complicated the first decades of Spanish colonization. In the vein of a political treatise, this part of the manuscript details the injustices committed by the monarchy and ecclesiastical authorities against Indigenous people of the viceroyalty of Peru, presenting King Philip III with a series of reforms needed to remedy the situation. Guaman Poma even writes down an imagined dialogue between the king and himself, where the former asks for more details about the situation in the viceroyalty of Peru and gets information and advice from the Andean chronicler. Formally, Guaman Poma’s manuscript seems to be the most polished of the three under analysis in this chapter. Each page is numbered, if sometimes in an unconventional way and with sequencing errors, the text is organized in titled sections and chapters, which are not numbered. It even includes a table of contents, though not all the chapters are listed in it.20 The manuscript includes 398 drawings that, according to its

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author, would make the king of Spain’s reading of the text easier.21 Most of the text is written in Spanish, but there are also some passages, phrases, and terms in Quechua that are not followed by a Spanish translation. Whereas the first part of the book prioritizes the telling of an Andean history that notes the exemplary and the not-so-exemplary aspects of society in the past, there is a shift from narration to oratory in the second part, the Buen Gobierno (Good Government). Guaman Poma’s urgency to persuade the Spanish king (and the many others whom he identifies as intended readers of his text) about the need for reforms to colonial society is then channeled through the language of the sermon.22 The Andean author’s embrace of religious rhetoric and his framing of the social and political problems and their potential solutions within the realm of the spiritual and transcendental, reveals, according to Adorno, “the lack of any real legal or political threat on his part; it constitutes an admission of the lack of effective means with which he can defend his people.”23 Guaman Poma’s recounting of the past conveys a “notion of harmony between ancient pagan and modern Christian experience,” in which a form of proto-Christianity shaped the beliefs and ways of Andeans of the past, who intuitively worshiped the true God.24 Idolatry is not denied, but it is fundamentally located in pre-Hispanic Inca times. The “Chapter of the Idols” presents a matter-of-fact account of the role that some Inca rulers had in facilitating or imposing idolatrous rituals, which included human sacrifices, amongst non-Inca ethnic groups.25 However, the author is careful to note that some held moral values similar to those of Christians, even if they did engage in idolatry. That is the case of the tenth Inca ruler, Topa Inga Yupanqui, whom Guaman Poma identifies as his direct ancestor.26 Topa Inga is portrayed as wise, an enemy of lies, respectful of noble Andean men and women, a skillful warrior who preferred peace, and responsible for organizing Inca administration and ordering the construction of roads and bridges to connect the territories under Inca control. Nevertheless, the Andean chronicler adds, “he spoke to all the idols huacas each year. And thanks to the devil he knew everything about Castille and Rome and Jerusalem and Turkey.”27 The Christian chronology that structures Guaman Poma’s and Pachacuti’s telling of the past and the present goes arguably beyond their intention to make their narratives legible. The incorporation of their individual genealogies within that broader Christian frame responded to

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cultural and legal changes that eventually consolidated colonial rule and that were still setting the conditions under which Andeans could appeal to the new order. The narrative that the church tried to consolidate and impose through the catechetical texts sponsored by the Third Council of Lima paralleled the new legal notions of genealogical descent, lineage, and history that underpinned the colonial reorganization of social hierarchies, rights, and privileges. From the second half of the sixteenth century onward, colonial governance started defining the legal criteria that would legitimize the status of Indigenous nobility and the rights of succession for curacas or caciques.28 The political legitimation of Indigenous offices depended on demonstrated fidelity to the Spanish monarchy and to the Catholic Church. Some scholars have pointed out that these changes in the legal and religious spheres were part of a larger process of acculturation that eventually established colonial domination.29 Lineage became “a sanctioned discursive tool” used by Indigenous peoples to negotiate with Spanish colonial administration.30 However, it has to be underlined that it was in legal documents that lineages could acquire the capacity to be tools for negotiation. As noted before, both Guaman Poma and a group of Huarochirí authorities had taken the legal path with mixed results. The way in which lineages are presented in the three Andean manuscripts suggest older genealogical traditions coming into contact with the colonial legal notion of lineage.31 And yet, given the complexity of the content of the three Andean texts, and the language and formal choices taken by their creators to convey their messages, it would be infelicitous to reduce them to tools for negotiation with colonial authorities. Pachacuti and Guaman Poma revised pre-Hispanic history to incorporate a portrayal of their direct ancestors sporting Christian virtues and notions of the sacred, which could narratively flow into their own unquestionable Christian present. To legitimize their interpretations of history and of themselves they deployed references that they considered legible for non-Andeans. More so, their writings placed them in the role of witnesses giving testimony about their lineage and thus, about themselves. In legal matters pertaining to the jurisdiction of the church, the legitimacy of an Indigenous witness was something that required proof. It was a matter of debate whether to allow the testimony of an Indigenous person in a legal procedure, especially in cases where Andeans had

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accused their priests of offences. The Third Council of Lima suggested that for the testimony of an Indigenous person to be a legitimate source, an ecclesiastical judge had to perform a “visual examination” of the potential witness to determine if their testimony was worthy of credit.32 The drawings included in the Corónica suggest that Guaman Poma took seriously the visual examination required to give validity to his written voice. The Andean chronicler portrays objects and images that symbolize Christianity, and draws himself as a devout Christian (figure 10). The drawings, as noted before, follow a western model of representation that would have made it easily legible for a non-Andean who saw them.33

FIGURE 10 Title page of Nueva corónica y buen gobierno

by Guaman Poma. Reproduced by permission of the Danish Royal Library (Det Kongelige Bibliotek).

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The Huarochirí manuscript has no drawings, except for a meaningful small cross drawn within the text of one of its folios. Crucially, this cross indicates the beginning of the story of don Cristóbal Choque Casa. The HM’s narrator makes don Cristóbal swear an oath before he can tell the story of how the gods of the past harassed him and put his Christianity to test. Thus, the connection between the legitimacy of Indigenous voice and a “visual examination” was also a point of consideration for the HM’s anonymous author(s). Additionally, the introductory lines to the Quechua manuscript as discussed in chapter 3 has the question of visibility at its core. The narrator justifies taking up paper and ink to make the stories of the peoples of

FIGURE 11 Huarochirí manuscript, detail of cross drawn at the beginning of

Choque Casa’s story. BNE, MS 3169, fol. 86. Courtesy of Biblioteca Nacional de España.

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Huarochirí, from past to present, equally visible and legitimate. Only through alphabetic writing, the anonymous author(s) seems to imply, could the people of Huarochirí attain the same visibility and legitimacy that European and their descendants derived from text. The anonymous author(s), like Pachacuti and Guaman Poma, also sets off to describe the genealogies of the ethnic groups that inhabited Huarochirí and “what faith they [their ancestors] held.” Despite the fact that such “faith” was not Christian, the narrator uses the Spanish loan word “fe” (faith) to announce that the content of the manuscript will veer into the territory of the sacred. However, unlike the other Andean authors, the narrator of the Huarochirí manuscript does not attempt to Christianize the past of the peoples of Huarochirí, nor is there an urgency to start out by condemning the rituals and beliefs of the past. It seems that, for the anonymous author(s), the identification as “we Christians” in writing was proof enough of their Christianity, even if most of what they wrote about would have been considered non-Christian or even idolatrous from the point of view of the church. Notably, Guaman Poma at one point embraced a similar locus of speech to that of the HM’s “we Christians.” By the end of his lengthy text, discussing the Christianity of Andeans and all the abuses that they were suffering, Guaman Poma stated “I am all of you.”34 Though his narrative embraced the new colonial legibility more readily than the HM, the fractures that this produced with regard to the Christian Indigenous “we” remain visible. The Andean authors used writing to address their “faith” and that of less Christian others. The writing and discursive models with which all of them were familiar—that is, mostly the ecclesiastical rhetoric and Christian notions of linear history—lent legitimacy to their narratives. However, as analyzed in the next section, writing their own stories to demonstrate their Christian status also involved rewriting the history of Christianity and of the introduction of writing in the Andes.

ANDEAN HISTORIES OF THE BOOK The Spanish conquest of Peru was defined from very early on by one image, that of the meeting between ruling Inca Atahualpa and an extraneous object to the Andes: a book. Less than two years after the fall of the

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Inca Empire, news about the events were already circulating in Spain in print. In spite of the differences between the accounts by direct witnesses Cristóbal de Mena and Francisco de Xerez, the same woodcut illustrates the title page of their respective texts, both printed in Seville in 1534. The woodcut in Mena’s La conquista del Perú (The Conquest of Peru) and in Xerez’s Verdadera relación de la conquista del Perú (True Account of the Conquest of Peru) focuses on the first encounter between the Spaniards, represented by conquistador Francisco Pizarro and Friar Vicente de Valverde as well as ruling Inca Atahualpa and his men. As mentioned in chapter 1, this is not a scene of military confrontation but a deceitfully simple portrayal of an encounter of two different groups. The salient details of the image (figure 1) are Valverde’s hand gesture indicating the act of confronting the Inca, while Atahualpa holds a book as if about to throw it away. That first woodcut underscored not only the centrality of the book in the moment of contact but also places it as sign of the spiritual and material conquest that is about to unfold. This message, with some variations, was reiterated in different versions written by Spaniards about the encounter that took place in Cajamarca. Neither the contemporary sources nor the later versions agree on what kind of book Friar Valverde handed to Atahualpa. While some sources claim it was a breviary and others state it was the Bible, they mostly suggest it was some kind of Christian text.35 When giving him the book, Valverde expected the Inca to recognize and submit to the authority of the Christian God and of the king of Spain. Unable to gather what to do with the book, an object that he had never seen before, Atahualpa threw it to the ground. For Spanish chroniclers, the Inca’s failure to recognize the authority and message of the book was an affront that justified attacking him and his people.36 When the day was over, Atahualpa had been imprisoned and thousands of Andeans had been massacred by the newcomers. Atahualpa’s action also became a moment of revelation. Europeans argued that Andeans’ lack of letters could only mean that there was no godly nor human law and thus no state of civilization in that land. Even when, soon after, Spaniards wrote with fascination about the quipu as a medium that was used throughout the Andes, the lack of letters would remain as strong a mark as if it were the original sin of Andeans. Born a generation after the encounter at Cajamarca, Guaman Poma and

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Pachacuti revisited the scene to reframe the role of writing. Their narratives convey a painful consciousness of the political consequences of the encounter at Cajamarca, but they also echoed what one of the early chroniclers had reported almost unwittingly about Atahualpa. The notary who was part of Pizarro’s entourage in the expedition to Peru described with irritation how the Inca inspected the book that was handed to him: “He stubbornly persisted in opening it, which he did, and not marveling at the letters or the paper, like other Indians, he threw it five or six paces from him.”37 As Seed has observed, the “failure to marvel” reported by Xerez speaks volumes of the frustrated expectations that the Spaniard had of seeing the Inca recognize writing as a symbol of Spanish superiority.38 I would argue that, along with the anonymous author(s) of the Huarochirí manuscript, Pachacuti and Guaman Poma continued to be unimpressed with writing, each in their own way. To Pachacuti, writing was not introduced to the Andes by the conquering Spaniards in 1532, nor did it have a fateful role on the defeat in 1533 of ruling Inca Atahualpa. For the Andean author, writing, in the form of a book, first arrived to the Andes long before the Spaniards and even before Inca times. A middleaged man with long hair and a beard, known as Tonapa, traveled around the Andes dressed in a long tunic, carrying only a blanket and a book, preaching to Andeans in all languages. Old men who were contemporaries of Pachacuti’s father claimed that what was preached “was very very close to the 10 commandments of God,” and the only thing missing from those teachings were the name of the Christian God and of his son, Jesus Christ.39 Pachacuti, echoing the notion of a pre-Hispanic evangelization that was promoted by some priests of the Augustinian order, wondered if Tonapa may have actually been apostle Saint Thomas.40 Tonapa, though, only managed to persuade some people, while others attacked him, forcing him to flee towards the sea and disappear forever. Pachacuti does not portray Tonapa’s book as carrier of Christian doctrine. Instead, a bundle of sticks identified as a bordón, also used by the apostle as a staff, seems to have been used as the medium to inscribe Christian teachings. The complicated grammar and syntax of Pachacuti’s text does not provide clarity on how those sticks were used to convey information. A hint appears in a story about curaca Apo Tampo, the only one to heed the apostle’s preaching and treat him with kindness.41 Acknowledging this, Tonapa “gave one stick of his bordón to the said Apo Tampo.”42 The

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curaca subsequently went around carrying the stick and transmitting the apostle’s teachings to others.43 The book is not mentioned again in the story of Tonapa, nor is it identified as carrier of divine law. The absence of an explanation as to how the staff was meant to convey information indicates, according to Brokaw, “that such objects were familiar and required no explanation for a Native audience.”44 I fully agree with Brokaw but would add that this same reason could explain why quipu, an Andean medium still in use by the time that Pachacuti wrote his Relación de antigüedades, is not mentioned at all in his text. This is surprising considering that one of the Augustinian priests who wrote about Tonapa’s passage through the Andes suggested that Andeans kept an account of this event in their quipus.45 For Pachacuti, the book remained one medium among many. In Relación de antigüedades, the history of alphabetic writing in the Andes reached a rather anticlimactic moment upon the arrival of Spaniards to Peru. The book—be it the Gospel or just a book—is absent from his account of the first encounter between Inca Atahualpa and conquistador Francisco Pizarro in Cajamarca. Priest Valverde attempts to preach among Andeans, but unlike Tonapa, he was not carrying a book. The Gospel, as an object, will be mentioned only afterward, when Pachacuti narrates the entrance of Pizarro, Valverde, and Mango Ynga Yupangui (the successor to the executed Atahualpa) to Cuzco: “and the marquis [Pizarro] with the Inca, accompanied by the Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ our Lord, entered [the city] with great pomp.”46 Pachacuti’s account seems to resist a direct relation between the introduction of writing and conquest. Even more, in establishing the antecedent of Tunapa’s visit to the Andes he had already suggested that the transmission of Christian teachings did not depend on the book or alphabetic writing. However, he also seems to suggest that Christianity could not entirely take root because Andeans did not quite understand the role of alphabetic writing. Thus, even though the Incas had reached a notion of the Christian God by intuition, they were still easy prey of the demon “because then the demons and devils, to this people without letters [writing] and simpletons, ignorant, idiots, took control [of the Incas] and became absolute rulers.”47 In other words, different media could convey the message of Christianity, but alphabetic writing had the specific function to enact the message.

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According to Guaman Poma’s Corónica, the first arrival of Christianity to the Andes happened in Inca times before Spanish conquest. The author briefly recounts the travails of apostle St. Bartholomew, hermits, and Franciscan friars who conveyed the message of the Christian God in Inca territories, but also inquired whether the virtue of charity was practiced amongst Andeans. The text does not mention the apostle carrying a book but that section of the Corónica opens with a drawing of St. Bartholomew holding a book, standing next to a large wooden cross and baptizing an Andean.48 The author explains that there were no written accounts left of these visits, yet traces of God’s “miracles and punishments” in the pre-Hispanic Andes were inscribed in the landscape in the form of landslides and fallen rocks.49 St. Bartholomew left behind a wooden cross in the town of Carabuco. The apostle is identified as being the “first Spanish from Castille” to encounter Andeans.50 No native media is mentioned as possible conveyor of Christian teachings. Quipus are mentioned but they are not linked to a Christian message. However, and in contrast to Pachacuti’s account, the absence of alphabetic writing did not hinder ancient Andeans from living a life of Christin virtues. Quipu, according to Guaman Poma, was used to keep accounts of population, tribute, stored goods, and “everything that happened in this Kingdom [of the Incas].”51 Although he does not explain how Andeans encoded or decoded quantitative and narrative information in the knotted cords, he does stress how important they were in keeping good governance in Inca times. Referring to royal clerks who visited different provinces to witness and record events and information in quipus “as if it were written,” he praises the officials “who kept accurate records and took no bribes. They were true Christians.”52 Quipus reemerge in an illustration of colonial times in which Guaman Poma seems to equate quipu to books for its capability to record quantitative accounts (figure 12). Guaman Poma’s recounting of pre-Hispanic evangelization follows more conventionally the versions sponsored by Catholic orders than the path chosen by Pachacuti. I agree with MacCormack that the former’s subtle reorganization of the events surrounding the Cajamarca encounter and the fall of the Inca Empire resets the political implications of these.53 The chronology set by Guaman Poma insinuates that the authority of Christians was not established by the presence of their sacred book or the words of Friar Valverde. Rather, their authority was

FIGURE 12 An Andean administrator of resources holding a quipu and a book.

Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, fol. 800 [814]. Reproduced by permission of the Danish Royal Library (Det Kongelige Bibliotek).

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sustained by the fear that was built by a series of events that took place before the encounter between Atahualpa and Francisco Pizarro and Friar Valverde. Before meeting them, the Inca had received alarming reports that described Christians as people who ate silver and gold, who did not sleep, and who spent day and night “talking to their papers.”54 The first meeting between Andeans and Spaniards alarmed the former even more. While visiting the thermal baths in Cajamarca, the Inca and his men were confronted by Hernando Pizarro, brother of Francisco, and Sebastián de Balcázar, who rode their horses in a way that meant to intimidate the Inca and his party. Having never seen horses before, the Andeans were so disturbed that some who were carrying Atahualpa in a litter let it fall down while running away from the animals. Guaman Poma points out that Spaniards read this fear as an advantage.55 Unlike the first woodcut that illustrated the encounter at Cajamarca, the Andean chronicler’s drawing of the event portrays Friar Valverde as the one holding an open book, while the Inca looks on. Valverde and Pizarro had presented themselves as messengers of almighty lords, the king of Spain and the Christian God. Valverde, holding a cross and a breviary, commanded the Inca to worship the cross, to believe in the Gospel, and to stop worshiping anything else. Atahualpa asked for the breviary, flipped through its pages, and exclaiming that the book did not tell him the things claimed by the friar, threw it away from him.56 From a European point of view, Atahualpa’s gesture was one of ignorance and of cultural inferiority. Yet, if we read that gesture in connection to the events that Guaman Poma noted that happened a bit further back in time, what crystalizes, as Seed argued, is a narrative that challenged the Spaniards’ confidence in the transparency of culture.57 The Inca could not deliver the expected reverence to the symbolic authority of writing simply because nobody bothered to explain to him what writing was. Guaman Poma, thus, seems to underline that the Spaniards bore the responsibility for the communication failure between the two sides. Failure to acknowledge how relevant it was to explain to Andeans how the book worked suggests, in MacCormack’s view, that Spaniards considered that no explanation was needed because reading and writing were almost natural activities.58 This mirrors Pachacuti’s omission to explain bordones, as discussed previously.

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While alphabetic writing and Christian virtues were separately located by Guaman Poma in the pre-Hispanic past, the chronicler brought the fusion of writing and Christianity in the Andes closer in time. It was not the encounter at Cajamarca but rather in the context of his own household that the reader is shown how those elements came together. He praises the Christian life led by his parents, but emphasizes that his half-brother, Martín de Ayala, a mestizo priest, taught the young Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala the precepts of the Christian faith, as well as how to read and write, facilitating his writing endeavor.59 Guaman Poma took up Martin de Ayala’s Christianizing mission from the secular side and, by his own account, taught other Andeans how to read and write. When the anonymous author of the Huarochirí manuscript mentions for the first time the arrival of Europeans, in chapter 9, what is foreshadowed is neither a spiritual nor a cultural conquest of the Andes. The narrator simply states that after “the Spaniards had emerged,” Andeans established several new places for worship of pre-Hispanic deity Paria Caca.60 The frontier between past and present, though, remains vague, and the Spanish conquest is definitely not presented as an event that radically changed or reconfigured history. The scarce mentions of the Spaniards and their arrival frame a series of examples of how Andeans adapted to the newcomers, by hiding their objects of worship and those made out of silver and gold, and changing their ritual calendar to make their pre-Hispanic festivities coincide with Christian ones such as Corpus Christi.61 The Spaniards’ greed for silver and gold and their violent acts towards Andeans also feature in a couple of chapters.62 The narrator of the HM only makes a quick reference to the Spanish presence in Cajamarca within a story about the last meeting between huaca Cuni Raya and Inca Huayna Capac at Lake Titicaca. The meeting, in which the huaca tells the Inca that they would never see each other again, was followed by conflicts of power between Huayna Capac’s descendants, prompting the narrator to state: “It was while they were carrying on this way that the Spanish Vira Cochas appeared in Caxa Marca [Cajamarca].”63 However, there is no reference to the first encounter between the Inca and the Spaniards. Instead, the narrator carries on with stories about Cuni Raya’s feats in the past, while Cajamarca is not mentioned again. A few chapters later, the narrator confirms that Andeans knew Spaniards were coming. While reading llama entrails to foretell the future, one

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of the Indigenous priests of huaca Paria Caca announced, “Alas, brothers, the world is not good! In coming times our father Paria Caca will be abandoned.”64 The other priests reacted with skepticism to the message, but a few days later “they heard someone say, ‘Vira Cochas have appeared in Caxa Marca!’”65 The first scene of contact in the Huarochirí manuscript was not one that featured the arrival of the Christian faith in the Andes. Rather, it involves the priests of huaca Paria Caca and the Spaniards who showed up at the deity’s shrine. The newcomers demanded that the priests hand over the huaca’s adoration objects made of silver and related ritual garments made of fine textiles, and when the priests refused to comply, the Spaniards tried to burn one of the Andeans alive. There is no mention of Spaniards attempting at any point to persuade Indigenous peoples to convert to Christianity and leave their own rituals behind. As for stories of pre-Hispanic evangelization, there is no mention of a visit of a Christian apostle. What the HM does narrate are stories of Indigenous deities’ conquests and religious conversion of men to their rituals. One of them features Paria Caca, who, after conquering new territories, “began to lay down the rules for his worship,” a strategy that managed to turn all the inhabitants of those territories into the huaca’s worshippers.66 In contrast to Pachacuti and Guaman Poma, the Huarochirí manuscript’s narrator neither retells the encounter at Cajamarca nor the history of the introduction of Christianity and alphabetic writing. The manuscript starts and ends its numbered chapters featuring pre-Hispanic deities and peoples, whose stories explain the genealogies of communities and individuals who lived in the colonial present. Those genealogies were the basis for the privileges and obligations related to land possession and access to natural resources, and a full demonstration of Christianity did not seem to be necessary. The main concern of the HM is not to (re)tell a history of Christianity in the Andes, which, as Pachacuti and Guaman Poma’s narratives attest, was already established in the minds of literate Andeans even if each one had a different interpretation for it. The HM focuses on how the relations between people—the runakuna— and their space was shaped and determined by the changing notions and practices of the sacred. In this pursuit, the narrator stops at particular stories that detail how the bonds between humans and sacred entities were established. Some of those bonds, the narrator shows, turned into dilemmas in the colonial context.

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READING CHRISTIAN AUTHORS Similarly to the Andean witnesses that walked from village to village in the Huarochirí province looking over Father Francisco de Ávila’s interactions with his Indigenous parishioners, Guaman Poma traveled throughout the Andes gathering information. At some point during his journey, he came across three elderly Indigenous women who were fleeing from their village because of Father Ávila’s violent actions. The women, in tears, explained that Ávila had accused all of being idolaters and witches, imposing physical punishment not to turn them into good Christians but rather to extract from them false confessions. Candidly, they recognized that idolatry was part of their past, but their present, they asserted, was a Christian one: “Sir, I say that my grandfathers and ancestors must have been idolaters as gentiles [ . . . ] In this life we are Christian and baptized. And now, because of the doctor [Ávila] we will worship the mountains or, if not, we will all run away to the hills because there is no justice for us in the world. Nobody pities us.”67 Before leaving the women, the Andean chronicler gave them Christian images so that they could find comfort commending themselves to God and the Virgin. Guaman Poma was familiar with zealous priests hunting down idolatries. He had been an assistant to a Mercedarian friar, and also to a priest who prosecuted the nativist movement known as Taki Unquy which, as reported by ecclesiastical sources, aimed to overpower Christians and their Andean allies in the 1560s.68 But while in his text Guaman Poma condemns the persistence of non-Christian practices, he also bluntly denounced the poor pastoral work of some priests who abused their position. The encounter with the runaway women was not a story about idolatry but rather about the destructive consequences when priests placed their interests ahead of those of their parishioners. And while he brought up Francisco de Ávila as an example of this, the Andean author’s critique also went straight to the link between Christianity and lettered culture. This may be inferred from the poignant commentary with which the author brings the episode to a close: “Oh, what a good doctor! Where is your good soul?”69 That Ávila cared more about his status and prestige as a lettered man than the welfare of his parishioners is suggested by the allusion to him as a “doctor.” The priest had earned the title in connection to

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his degree in canon law from the University of San Marcos. The title marked him as a letrado, or man of letters, a social distinction reserved for those who knew Latin and had obtained a law degree.70 But from the insistence with which his parishioners referred to him as “doctor” in the lawsuit against him and even in the Huarochirí manuscript, it could be inferred that he made his parishioners refer to him with that title rather than calling him “father.”71 Guaman Poma’s criticism, I would argue, was not about lettered culture per se and the status it endowed to those who were part of it, but rather what one could do with those letters. And him, “not being a man of letters, nor a doctor, nor a Latin scholar,” decided instead to right and write the wrongs of the viceroyalty of Peru as an author.72 That Christian status would give Andeans the authority to use literacy to articulate their own point of view seems to be an understanding shared by Guaman Poma, Pachacuti, and the anonymous Huarochirí author(s). Interestingly, the annotations left by Father Ávila in the Huarochirí manuscript and in Pachacuti’s text point to a different way of conceiving Indigenous literacy. The opening folios of the Relación de antigüedades quoted before seem to portray a perfect example of what had initially been the church’s goal of introducing Andeans to alphabetic literacy. Teaching them to read and write would enable them to at least memorize the essential parts of catechism. This was the encompassing aim of the cartillas (booklets), discussed in chapter 1, which presented to Andeans the Latin-script alphabet and a syllabary side by side with the basic prayers, the commandments, and an abbreviated catechism. Some members of the church were content with Indigenous peoples mechanically repeating the doctrine, like “parrots,” but many others doubted the depth of such a strategy for conversion.73 Yet, the Relación de antigüedades goes beyond parroting doctrine. It narrates and interprets Inca past in a Christian key, allowing for a portrayal of Incas as monotheistic philosophers and even extirpators of idolatry. This strategy, Duviols asserts, was promoted by Jesuits, and makes of Pachacuti’s manuscript a “tool of the spiritual conquest of the [Andean] past.”74 Pachacuti’s six untranslated prayers or songs in Quechua dedicated to pre-Hispanic deities reveal such an extent of “missionary manipulation” in the semantic content that Itier concludes that there is no doubt of the “absolute Indigenous inauthenticity” of such prayers.75

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While I agree that tracing the sources that shaped these texts helps us avoid an anachronistic approach to them as conveyors of unmediated pre-Hispanic culture, the issue of authenticity is debatable. To call these texts inauthenticly Indigenous is a reiteration of essentialist ideas of what the past was, and of how Indigeneity was historically defined, and redefined, by non-natives and by natives themselves. Pachacuti’s appropriation of the semantically and ideologically colonized notions of the sacred, I would argue, is no less Indigenous. If we agree that Indigenous literacy was tied to Christian evangelization, how else could Andeans conceive of making their texts legible if not through Christian discourse? It may be pertinent to go deeper into the discussion of cartillas, and particularly their circulation in colonial Peru, and who got their hands on them. More than ten years before a printing press started operating in the viceroyalty, the Inquisition felt compelled to act on the circulation of books, manuscript copies, and images. After a two-day raid in the city of Cuzco in 1571, the Inquisition confiscated around 3200 hand-written cartillas that were being sold in the market, according to Estenssoro.76 There is no information in the Inquisition archives as to who exactly were the buyers of those cartillas, but we might get a hint from the official authorization given to Andeans to buy them. To the dismay of ecclesiastical authorities, many of those hand-copied cartillas were full of orthographical and syntactical errors that contributed to conveying peculiar renderings of passages of the doctrine in Spanish and in Quechua that bordered on heresy. The number of Inquisition reports denouncing manuscript copies of the cartillas written down by Andeans and being sold indicates that the offer of the printed texts does not seem to have covered the demand.77 The cartillas, as noted previously, usually also contained the key to those doctrinal texts: an alphabet, which could also serve as a tool for autodidactic literacy. In light of this information, Estenssoro rightly suggests that we should reconsider Indigenous literacy in the Andes as a much less exceptional phenomenon than usually understood. He also notes that the mysterious ways of Andean literacy most likely shaped Andeans’ “savage exegesis” of pastoral texts.78 There was little that colonial authorities could do about it. Writing, as argued in previous chapters, was central both to administrative and evangelization purposes in the viceroyalty of Peru, and by necessity Andeans were given access both to the production and

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consumption of writing. But did access to writing grant them a legitimacy to write? Indigenous people were authorized as informants to colonial writers about the Andean past. The first stage encouraged priests to gather information about Indigenous rituals to understand them, interpret them, and change them. But Indigenous people were not, by extension, authorized to interpret their own past and much less to offer their interpretation of the colonial present. But they did, some of them explicitly and in a very organized way, as in Guaman Poma’s Nueva corónica, others in a subtle way as in the Huarochirí manuscript, and yet others under a more obscure form, as is the case with Pachacuti’s text. The first folios of Pachacuti’s text, as noted before, are a recitation, if not parroting, of the lessons learned about genesis, the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary, the birth of Christ, and other key scenes of Christian history.79 The text then moves on to describe the pre-Inca history of the Andes, identified as the “time of the gentiles,” devoting then most of its folios to the Inca period before the arrival of Spaniards.80 Up to that point, most of the Relación de antigüedades does seem dedicated to recounting the past. It is only when reaching the end of the manuscript that the final sentences raise doubts as to whether Pachacuti’s narrative is really about the antigüedades (antiquities) announced in the title and if it can even be reduced to the genre of a relación (account). Almost mischievously, the self-proclaimed exemplary Christian smuggles in a final sentence about the shortcomings of evangelization and the blind avarice of Spaniards. Referring to the work of Christian preachers right after the Spanish conquest, he praises the seriousness and intensity of their mission, lamenting only that they did not speak native languages. In the final lines of his text he compares them to present-day priests: “They were not indolent, like priests of present day, nor did Spaniards back then concern themselves with their own interests, as they do now. Regarding God, there was much devotion among Spaniards, and natives were exhorted by good examples.”81 This would not be the kind of parroting back that priests expected of Andean parishioners. If the visual and textual discourses of Pachacuti hardly fulfill what is promised by the title, the author should not be held responsible for it. It was Father Ávila who gave the text a title and a genre to guide the reading of the text. Pachacuti’s manuscript seems to have reached Ávila’s hands at some point during the fourteen years that the priest spent in the

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Archbishopric of La Plata (present day Bolivia).82 He seems to have been the only contemporary reader of the text, which was found among his possessions along with the Huarochirí manuscript and other manuscript texts discussed in chapter 1. Reading the Relación de antigüedades produced a very different effect on Ávila than reading the Huarochirí manuscript. Next to the title that he gave to Pachacuti’s text he commented, “it is notable.”83 This suggests that the priest was favorably impressed with the content of the text, probably because it seemed to prove how well Andeans could memorize Christian doctrine and adopt the Christianized version of their own past. But it would also be notable to the eyes of the priest because the text, as a whole, tells the story of an exemplary Christian Andean who repudiated idolatries, the kind of story that he valued so much that he even included one—the story about don Cristóbal Choque Casa of Huarochirí—in his book of sermons. In contrast, Ávila’s displeasure with how the story of Choque Casa was narrated in the HM and with the whole HM narrative is attested by the marginal notes that he left in the Quechua text discussed in the previous chapter. The priest did not even bother giving a title to it. Instead, he rewrote it to satisfy his expectations as reader, translating the Quechua manuscript to Spanish, adding a title and a narrative genre. Ávila considered his version of the HM, like Pachacuti’s text, as being a relación as well as a treatise. The priest also left an abundance of marginal notes in the Relación de antigüedades though there are none written next to the final sentences. His notes explain or translate into Spanish some Quechua terms used by Pachacuti, at times adding contextual information to clarify the Andean author’s text. Unlike the notes that Ávila left in the HM, his notes to Pachacuti’s text never contradict the main text nor suggest a reorganization of the narrative.84 It seems puzzling though that the priest intervened the HM more intensively than Pachacuti’s text. In formal terms, the latter poses a bigger challenge to the reader. As already noted, the content of Pachacuti’s text appears as a single text without chapters, with very scant guidance for the reader, with the notable exception of the two marginal notes where he warns the reader that the stories narrated were “fables.”85 Pachacuti’s handwriting is obscure, as is his use of Spanish, which produces some awkward sentences that reveal how literacy, in this case the

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ability to use the Latin-script alphabet and the Spanish language, did not necessarily entail access to the process by which meaning was construed in that language. A similar situation was discussed in chapter 1 in the case of a text owned by Ávila and copied by what appears to have been a non-native Spanish speaker whose sentences are grammatically correct but make no sense. In Pachacuti’s text, when referring to the death of the father of an Inca, for example, he writes “And the rotten old father of his dies.”86 The unintendedly funny effect also emerges on occasions in which he uses idiomatic phrases that he was not familiar with, as in his constant misuse of the phrase “with little ease” when the context suggests the opposite meaning. I would argue that Ávila was able to overcome the hurdles posed by Pachacuti’s handwriting and his use of Spanish because the priest could anticipate what he was going to read in that text. That is, he was already familiar with the plot, even before actually going through all of Pachacuti’s text. The narrative of an Indigenous pre-Hispanic history, inscribed and interpreted from a Christian teleology, had circulated with some variations for several decades by then in manuscript and print form both in Spain and in the Empire’s Andean possessions. One fine example was Inca Garcilaso’s Comentarios Reales (Lisbon, 1609), which Ávila also owned and annotated, as noted in chapter 1.87 Ávila could thus make sense of Pachacuti’s text, even of nonsensical sentences, because he found in it ideological and rhetorical signposts—a Christian chronology, the opposition of the demonic to the saintly, and so forth—that structured his reading. This was hardly the case for his reading of the Huarochirí manuscript, and thus his need to rewrite the Quechua text with the elements that allowed him to construct sense. If one agrees with Brooks that the plot of narratives is also shaped by the reader’s “competence,” we may be able to better understand Ávila’s written responses to the two Andean texts he possessed and the titles that he imposed on them.88 It is thus important to ascertain the kind of competence that non-Indigenous literates like Ávila had, and how this informed what they expected from Indigenous writing, as discussed in chapter 1. In essence, it was a one-sided process because the competence and expectations of literates like Father Ávila was shaped by the discursive and writing models that they had also made available to Andeans, perhaps expecting them to parrot them back.

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The Catholic Church was the earliest and main agent of literacy for Indigenous people in the Andes and elsewhere in Spanish America.89 Indigenous parishioners who learned how to write with syllabaries had as direct examples of the uses of writing the other texts that were included next to them: catechisms, the Christian doctrine, and sermons. The rhetorical characteristics of these ecclesiastical texts are precisely what a number of scholars have identified as models that shaped subtly or explicitly Guaman Poma’s and Pachacuti’s texts, and even to a degree the Huarochirí manuscript. But along with those, there were also other types of writing that Andeans had access to often beyond colonizers’ wishes. For example, the shoemaker Juan Chapa had his own modest private library made of six devotional books. Pedro Milachami, a curaca, had a couple of devotional texts, one of them of prayers, in his private library. But his collection extended to several books of comedies (plays), two of these by Spanish author Lope de Vega, and two books of history about Charles V and Philip II, former Kings of Spain. There is no information on whether Pachacuti, Guaman Poma, or the anonymous author(s) of the Huarochirí manuscript possessed books. We do know that books were not unfamiliar objects to them. In the trial against Ávila, his Huarochirí parishioners mention the accounting books that he kept in the parish. Whether they had access to their priest’s private library remains unknown. Guaman Poma, however, included various drawings of himself and other Andeans holding books and even portrayed a scene of one of them busy writing with a library as backdrop. We can make inroads into the question of Indigenous legibility by paying attention to the texts that Andeans produced outside the regulated forms of writing. Those texts that lay within the boundaries of more strictly defined forms of writing—such as records of birth penned by fiscales, the literate Andean assistants to priests, or documents such as wills written by assistants to notaries that conform to preexisting templates—have enlightened our understanding of the extent and role of literacy among Indigenous peoples. However, in the texts that go beyond the template of the aforementioned genres of writing, a clearer picture emerges of how those literacy skills were used by Andeans not only to create an interpretative frame for cultural transformation but also the role that they conceived for alphabetic writing in colonial society.

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CONCLUSIONS “What language will the messengers speak so as to be understood by the Indians? Latin, Greek, Spanish? Arabic?” asked Bartolomé de Las Casas in the 1550–1551 debate in Valladolid about the material and moral subjugation of Indigenous peoples in Spanish American territories.90 The legitimacy of the Spanish enterprise, the friar noted, was contingent on effective communication: “The Indians know none of these languages [ . . . ]. No law, constitution, or precepts is binding on anyone unless the words of the language in which it is proposed are clearly understood.”91 By the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the legality of conquest had receded as an issue of debate, with monarchy and ecclesiastic institutions already well established as instruments of colonization. Yet, from within colonial society and employing some of the elements that sustained it, the three different texts analyzed in this chapter show that Andeans had become the messengers themselves. The anonymous author(s) of the Huarochirí manuscript, as well as Pachacuti and Guaman Poma, used the languages of empire and evangelization to convey their messages, they appropriated the ideological frames and rhetorical models that underpinned the legal and political colonial dynamics, and they did it in writing. The limits of colonial hegemony and the revelation that imperial designs remained in the realm of unfulfilled desires, became visible in the paper and ink used by these Andeans. It may be obvious that the binary of acculturation or resistance is an insufficient frame to approach these texts; still, it is important to underline how it crumbles when confronted by the particular notions of legibility constructed in those texts. Guaman Poma identified a purpose for his writing in Spanish but chose to include some information in an Indigenous language that would clearly not have helped put his message through to his main intended reader. Pachacuti wrote in Spanish but did not indicate the reason behind his writing nor the imagined reader. The anonymous Huarochirí manuscript, while written in a language that had become a vessel for Catholic evangelization and following many formal Spanish conventions of writing, diverges widely from the models, messages, and purpose of pastoral texts, and does not stop to identify a reader. In outlining the common contextual and internal aspects of

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the three texts, this chapter underscored the significance of the different choices made by its writers. These choices, I argued, reveal their particular notions of the social role of writing in a society where the European medium still coexisted with the Andean one. Although literacy had become accessible to a larger number of Indigenous Andeans, more by necessity of the colonial administration than by design, that did not grant them automatic legitimacy to write, much less in the first person, whether singular or plural. This chapter also focused on some of the strategies that the three authors followed to consolidate their authority and legitimacy, the most salient being the explicit identification of the narrators as Christians. However, the reference (or lack of ) to a Christian notion of history, the reconstruction of Indigenous genealogies intertwined (or not) with a linear chronology that eventually arrives at a Christian present, and the use of pastoral terminology does not lead to a shared definition of Christianity. This chapter also highlighted the crucial ways in which these three texts reframe the relation between Christianity and writing. Whether placing the introduction of writing in the pre-Hispanic past (Pachacuti) or at the time of contact with Spaniards (Guaman Poma) or not even addressing how or when the European medium was introduced in the Andes (Huarochirí manuscript), the three texts dismantle the link between writing and the Spanish conquest. Writing emerges in the three texts as a tool that allowed Indians to be the agents of Christianity and its success in the Andes. Writing was a constitutive part of being a Christian Andean, and a way to achieve a virtuous Christian life in spite of the failures of evangelization. This, however, was not necessarily a message that could be legible to the likes of Ávila, even if it was one conveyed in alphabetic writing and languages that he thought he knew.

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book I have laid out on an imaginary table a number of texts from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century Peru for us modern readers. The notarial documents describing the library of a parish priest would typically be studied by historians of the book. I have invited the reader to read them against judicial sources preserved in church archives that document the conflicts between the priest and his Andean parishioners in the province of Huarochirí. These sources have previously been consulted mostly by anthropologists and historians of the campaigns of extirpation of idolatries in the Andes. Both sets of documents helped me to contextualize one of the most complex texts produced by the parishioners of the priest at the same time, the Huarochirí manuscript, which has in turn generally been the purview of anthropologists and ethnolinguists. Finally, a close comparative reading of the HM together with the two better known and studied texts by Guaman Poma and Pachacuti has helped us to rethink the latter two going beyond a comparative literary analysis. I have consciously overstepped disciplinary boundaries and read alphabetic sources from very different archives in order to distinguish practices of literacy from those of legibility. Reading this corpus of related documents between the lines and across the margins (quite literally) offered a privileged route towards understanding N THIS

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what was at stake when colonizers and colonized strove to make themselves legible within and across the new boundaries of hegemony. Colonial hegemony and alphabetic writing undoubtedly went hand in hand to fulfill the designs of colonizers. But those designs, I have shown, were hampered by the limits that the European notion of literacy imposed on the role of writing in the dynamics between Andeans and non-natives. The appropriation of Indigenous languages such as Quechua, transformed into a written language for evangelization purposes, became a tool to enable colonization as much as a problem towards that goal. This is evident, on the one hand, from the repeated denunciation by the Peruvian Catholic Church of the precarious education of those priests who had the responsibility to evangelize Andeans. On the other hand, those priests who, like Father Ávila, had achieved mastery of Quechua, struggled because the many varieties spoken by their parishioners, and the unpredictable way in which they understood what their priests told them, meant missionaries could not guarantee the desired effects of the appropriation of the Andean language. As we progressed along our imaginary table full of documents, Father Ávila’s book of sermons served as a privileged source to explore different aspects of the construction of sense from the perspective of written culture and Christianity and its imposition on Andean parishioners. His sermons, written in Quechua and Spanish and adorned by some untranslated quotations in Latin, revealed the struggles between his direct experience with Andean parishioners and the lettered culture embodied in his private library. These sermons convey the anxiety of a man of letters who could not trust that his parishioners, who were still using other media such as quipu, would easily accept the unquestionable authority of writing. His frustration with what he thought of as the obstinacy of his flock was palpable. Next in line we found on our table pieces of paper that spoke of knotted cords. Colonial officials allowed the continued use of quipus in administrative and even evangelization practices. Ávila was well aware of this, as the legal case brought against him by his own parishioners demonstrates. Many of the accusations leveled against the priest were backed up by quipus, which were presented as evidence of recorded economic transactions between people of Huarochirí and the priest. The analysis of the legal dossier reveals much more than an economic dispute. The way

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in which it developed offers insights into the parallel uses of Andean and non-native media. Crucially, the instances in which Andeans recurred to writing or to quipus revealed how they conceived of the relations of knowledge and power that shaped the different social roles of media. Remarkably, not even Ávila questioned the exactitude of quipu, while literate Andeans put little stock in their literacy. Colonial hegemony was not that easily imposed when Andeans were arguably better at numbers and nonchalantly unimpressed by alphabetic writing. The testimonies of the various Indigenous parishioners that intervened in the legal case suggest that literacy was not unusual among Andeans in the villages of Huarochirí. Our next document was crafted by an unknown number of them, identified only as “we Christians.” They decided to put down in paper and ink a book-length text in Quechua about the beliefs, rituals, and lives of the various ethnic groups that had inhabited the province of Huarochirí for centuries just as Ávila fought his parishioners in court. The priest read, annotated, and kept the manuscript. He did not destroy it as one of the many objects that he condemned as idolatrous. It is precisely because of his marginal notes in the Quechua manuscript and his incomplete translation of it into Spanish that we can observe how the anonymous author(s) and the priest attributed differing social roles to writing. Thus the limited legibility that the Quechua text had for the priest, who articulated his own legibility by rewriting and translating the Indigenous text. As I have shown, even though the anonymous narrator identified as Christian (“we Christians”), used the variety of Quechua that would have been familiar to Ávila, and conveyed concern for the continuity of pre-Hispanic religious practices and beliefs, the message and purpose of the text were not evident for the priest. A close reading of the text, suggests in fact that it is unlikely it was the work of Ávila’s Indigenous ally Choque Casa. Instead, I argue, it was more likely a collaborative undertaking by a number of literate and Christian people of Huarochirí. At last, we got to the other two contemporaneous texts written by Andeans at the end of the imaginary table. Placing the Huarochirí manuscript in line with Guaman Poma’s and Pachacuti’s texts shows how writing could become almost unfamiliar for non-natives when Indigenous peoples appropriated it. The three manuscripts, following to various degrees European rhetorical strategies and some conventions for

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written texts, constructed different interpretations of what it meant to be Christian and the role that writing had had in colonization and evangelization. Using the media and the languages of empire—including pastoral Quechua—they crafted texts that, more than their own personal or their communities’ stories, tell of the limits of colonial hegemony. Even Guaman Poma’s text, arguably the closest to a European legibility, reveals its distance from hegemonic uses of writing when placed in the context of Pachacuti’s text and the HM. Colonial Andeans were part of the production of alphabetic texts that underpinned Spanish colonial hegemony as scribes and assistants from the earliest days of colonization. Yet, there are preciously few texts that break out of the mold of legal, administrative, and religious documents as we have seen. In this book I have suggested to read those as the exceptional normal. Rather than trying to unlock the meaning of the HM, I have suggested that it shows us different legibilities that were constructed when Andeans appropriated the European medium. Once Andeans learned to use ink and paper there was little religious and secular authorities could do to stop them from endowing them with their own meaning. Turning the lettered city into an unmistakable tool of domination took centuries and meant that some Indigenous texts had to be made illegible.

NOTES

I N T RODUC T ION 1. 2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

Biblioteca Nacional de España (BNE), MS 3169, fol. 64r–114r. Juan Carlos Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo a la santidad la incorporación de los indios del Perú al catolicismo, 1532–1750, trans. Gabriela Ramos, Travaux de l’Institut Français d’Études Andines (Lima: IFEA Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos; Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú Instituto Riva-Agüero, 2003), 261. Alan Durston, “Native-Language Literacy in Colonial Peru: The Question of Mundane Quechua Writing Revisited,” Hispanic American Historical Review 88, no. 1 (2008); César Itier, “Les textes quechuas coloniaux: Une source privilégiée pour l’histoire culturelle andine,” Histoire et sociétés de l’Amérique latine, no. 3 (1995). Durston, “Native-Language Literacy.” Gabriela Ramos, “Language and Society in Early Colonial Peru,” in History and Language in the Andes, ed. Paul Heggarty and Adrian J. Pearce (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), 30. Carlo Ginzburg, “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It,” in Threads and Traces: True False Fictive (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 152; Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, [1976] 2013). Carlo Ginzburg, “Witches and Shamans,” in Threads and Traces: True False Fictive (Berkeley: University of California, 2012), 167. For the differences between

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8. 9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

NOTES TO PAGES 3–8

Italian microstoria and Anglophone microhistory, see Francesca Trivellato, “Is There a Future for Italian Microhistory in the Age of Global History?,” California Italian Studies 2, no. 1 (2011). Edoardo Grendi quoted in Ginzburg, “Microhistory,” 160. Discussing the most recent scholarship on the making of Indigenous identities in the viceroyalties of Peru and Mexico, Yannakakis concedes that although that process relies almost exclusively on Spanish-language writing in the Andes, the Huarochirí manuscript sticks out “as an exception.” See Yanna Yannakakis, afterword to To Be Indio in Colonial Spanish America, ed. Mónica Díaz (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017). Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques, trans. John Russell (New York: Criterion Books, 1961), 286–97. The episode of the interaction between the French anthropologist and the Nambikwara has been revisited by numerous scholars, perhaps most notably by Derrida who portrayed it as an instance of violence mediated by writing; see Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 101–40. Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter D. Mignolo, eds., Writing Without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994); Matthew Cohen and Jeffrey Glover, eds., Colonial Mediascapes. Sensory Worlds of the Early Americas (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014). Boone and Mignolo, Writing Without Words; Cohen and Glover, Colonial Mediascapes. Carlos Radicati di Primeglio, Estudios sobre los quipus (Lima: Fondo Ed. Univ. Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, [c.1949] 2006); Jeffrey Quilter and Gary Urton, Narrative Threads: Accounting and Recounting in Andean Khipu (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002); Gary Urton, Inka History in Knots: Reading Khipus as Primary Sources (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017). Angel Rama, The Lettered City, trans. John Charles Chasteen (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, [1984] 1996), 24. Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). For a more focused discussion on how the “denial of coevalness” manifested in Renaissance Europe and how it changed post-Enlightenment see Walter Mignolo, “The Enduring Enchantment (Or the Epistemic Privilege of Modernity and Where to Go from Here),” The South Atlantic quarterly 101, 4 (2002): 933–934. Kathryn Burns, Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010); Kathryn Burns, “Making Indigenous Archives: The Quilcaycamayoq in Colonial Cuzco,” in Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes, ed. Gabriela Ramos and Yanna Yannakakis (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014); John Charles, Allies at Odds: The Andean Church and its Indigenous Agents, 1583–1671 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010); John Charles,

NOTES TO PAGES 8–10

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

183

“Trained by Jesuits. Indigenous Letrados in Seventeenth-Century Peru,” in Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes, ed. Gabriela Ramos and Yanna Yannakakis (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014); Joanne Rappaport, “Object and Alphabet: Andean Indians and Documents in the Colonial Period,” in Writing Without Words. Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica & the Andes, ed. Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter Mignolo (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994); Joanne Rappaport and Tom Cummins, Beyond the Lettered City: Indigenous Literacies in the Andes (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012). Gabriela Ramos and Yanna Yannakakis, Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014); Mónica Díaz, ed., To Be Indio in Colonial Spanish America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017). Boone and Mignolo, Writing Without Words. Boone’s introduction to the edited volume presents an insightful critique to the ethnocentric, logocentric, and evolutionary assumptions that underlie many definitions of “true writing,” that is, Latin-script writing. This introduction has been crucial for the reevaluation of interdisciplinary debates on writing in the Americas. Specifically on the Andean quipu, see Urton, Inka History in Knots. These edited volumes present a comparative approach to Indigenous media across the Americas: Cohen and Glover, Colonial Mediascapes, Boone and Mignolo, Writing Without Words. Germaine Warkentin, “Dead Metaphor or Working Model? ‘The Book’ in Native America,” in Colonial Mediascapes: Sensory Worlds of the Early Americas, ed. Matt Cohen and Jeffrey Glover (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014). Boone and Mignolo, Writing Without Words; Martin Lienhard, La voz y su huella: Escritura y conflicto etnico-social en America Latina 1942–1988 (Hanover, N.H.: Ediciones del Norte, 1992). Warkentin, “Dead Metaphor,” 51. Tom Cummings, “Inka Art,” in The Inka Empire. A Multidisciplinary Approach, ed. Izumi Shimada (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015), 182. Margarita Zamora, Language, Authority, and Indigenous History in the Comentarios reales de los Incas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 44. Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: The New world, Islam, and European identities (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010), 64–98; Patricia Seed, “‘Failing to Marvel’: Atahualpa’s Encounter with the Word,” Latin American Research Review 26, no. 1 (1991): 25. A more nuanced interpretation of Garcilaso’s textual relation with Andean culture in José Antonio Mazzotti, Incan Insights: El Inca Garcilaso’s Hints to Andean Readers, trans. Barbara M. Corbett (Madrid: Iberoamericana; Vervuert, 2008). The earliest published studies of these Indigenous manuscripts appear in Marcos Jiménez de la Espada, Tres relaciones de antigüedades peruanas (Madrid:

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28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

NOTES TO PAGES 10–11

Imprenta de M. Tello, 1879); Richard A Pietschmann, “Nueva corónica y buen gobierno des don Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, eine peruanische Bilderhandschrift,” Nachrichten von der königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. Philologisch-historische Klasse (1908); Hermann Trimborn, Dämonen und Zauber im Inkareich (Leipzig: K.F. Koehler, 1939). For a genealogical tracing of Garcilaso’s influence on identity debates see José Antonio Mazzotti, “Garcilaso y los orígenes del garcilasismo: El papel de los ‘Comentarios reales’ en el desarrollo del imaginario nacional peruano,” Fronteras. Revista del Instituto Colombiano de Cultura Hispánica 3, no. 3 (1998). See e.g. Polo Ondegardo and Gonzalo Lamana Ferrario, Pensamiento colonial crítico: Textos y actos de Polo Ondegardo, ed. Gonzalo Lamana Ferrario (Cuzco: Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos, 2012). Rolena Adorno, “The Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. A Lost Chapter in the History of Latin American Letters” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1974); Mercedes López-Baralt, Icono y conquista: Guaman Poma de Ayala (Madrid: Hiperion, 1988); Rocío Quispe-Agnoli, La fe andina en la escritura: Resistencia e identidad en la obra de Guamán Poma de Ayala (Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 2006); Pierre Duviols, “Estudio y comentario etnohistórico,” in Relación de antigüedades deste reyno del Piru, ed. Pierre Duviols and César Itier (Lima: Institut Français d’Études Andines; Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos “Bartolomé de Las Casas,” 1993); Regina Harrison, “Modes of Discourse: The Relación de antiguedades deste reyno del Pirú,” in From Oral to Written Expression: Native Andean Chronicles of the Early Colonial Period, ed. Rolena Adorno (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University, 1982) ; Gerald Taylor, Rites et traditions de Huarochirí Manuscrit quechua du debut du 17e siecle (Paris: Éd. L’Harmattan, 1980); Frank Salomon, Introduction to The Huarochirí Manuscript. A Testament of Ancient and Colonial Andean Region, ed. Frank Salomon and Jorge Urioste (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991). Rolena Adorno, “Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala: An Andean View of the Peruvian Viceroyality,” Journal de la Société des Américanistes 65 (1978): 123; John Charles, “‘More Ladino than Necessary’: Indigenous Litigants and the Language Policy Debate in Mid-Colonial Peru,” Colonial Latin American Review 16, no. 1 (2007). BNE, MS 3169, fol. 120r–121r. Chapter 3 offers a detailed discussion of Ávila’s reading, translating, and editing of the HM. “Su Nueva crónica y buen gobierno no sólo trata de revivir épocas remotas, casi perdidas para la propia tradición oral en los fondos milenarios de la raza, sino que es también por la confusión y el embrollo de sus ideas y noticias, y por el desorden y barbarie del estilo y de la sintaxis, pura behetría mental.” Raúl Porras Barrenechea, “El cronista indio Felipe Huaman Poma de Ayala (¿1534–1615?),” in El legado quechua (Lima: Universidad Nacional de San Marcos, Fondo editorial, [1948] 1999).

NOTES TO PAGES 11–12

33. 34. 35.

36.

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Adorno, “Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala: An Andean View of the Peruvian Viceroyality,” 123. Carlo Ginzburg, Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance, trans. Martin H. Ryle and Kate Soper (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 25. Jose Maria Arguedas and Pierre Duviols, Dioses y hombres de Huarochirí: Narración quechua (Lima: Museo Nacional de Historia; Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1966); Gerald Taylor, Ritos y tradiciones de Huarochirí (Lima: Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos; Banco Central de Reserva del Perú; Universidad Particular Ricardo Palma, 1999); Gerald Taylor, Camac, camay y camasca y otros ensayos sobre Huarochirí y Yauyos (Lima: Institut Français d’Études Andines, Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos “Bartolomé de Las Casas,” 2000); Sabine Dedenbach-Salazar Sáenz, El Tratado de los errores de Francisco de Ávila en comparación con el Manuscrito quechua de Huarochirí. Estudio analítico y transcripción comparativa, no. 34 (St. Andrews: University of St. Andrews, 2016); Pierre Duviols et al., Procesos y visitas de idolatrías: Cajatambo, siglo XVI: Con documentos anexos (Lima: Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos; Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2003); Alan Durston, “Notes on the Authorship of the Huarochirí Manuscript,” Colonial Latin American Review 16, no. 2 (December 2007); Alan Durston, “Cristóbal Choquecasa and the Making of the Huarochirí Manuscript,” in Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes, ed. Gabriela Ramos and Yanna Yannakakis (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014); Frank Salomon, “Chronicles of the Impossible: Notes on Three Peruvian Indigenous Historians,” in From Oral to Written Expression: Native Andean Chronicles of the Early Colonial Period, ed. Rolena Adorno (Syracuse, NY: Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, 1982); Frank Salomon, Nightmare Victory: The Meanings of Conversion Among Peruvian Indians (Huarochirí, 1608?), vol. 7 (College Park: University of Maryland, 1990); Salomon, introduction; Karen Spalding, Huarochirí, an Andean Society under Inca and Spanish Rule (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1984). Ávila’s biography (except for his years in La Plata) has been thoroughly documented. The portrayal I present here and in the following pages is based on these publications: Antonio Acosta Rodríguez, “Francisco de Ávila. Cusco 1573(?)–Lima 1647,” in Ritos y tradiciones de Huarochirí del siglo XVII, ed. Gerald Taylor, Travaux de l’Institut Français d’Études Andines (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos; Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos, 1987); Pierre Duviols, “Estudio biobibliográfico de Francisco de Ávila,” in Dioses y Hombres de Huarochirí; narración quechua recogida por Francisco de Ávila (¿1598?) (Lima: Museo Nacional de Historia y el Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1966); José Toribio Polo, “Un quechuista,” Revista Histórica 1 (1906). Ávila also wrote a biographical text in the preface to his book of sermons (1648), but Acosta and Duviols have questioned the accuracy of the events depicted.

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37.

38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

43. 44.

45.

46. 47.

48. 49.

50.

NOTES TO PAGES 12–16

A thorough description of what the first Spaniards saw when arriving to Cusco can be found in Kathryn Burns, Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 18. and Carolyn Dean, Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ: Corpus Christi in Colonial Cuzco, Peru (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999). Carolyn Dean, A Culture of Stone: Inka Perspectives on Rock (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010). Acosta Rodríguez, “Ávila,” 559. The viceroyalty of Peru comprised the territories of the present-day republics of Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and southern Venezuela. In the early eighteenth century this viceroyalty lost some territories in order to create new viceroyalties. Alejandra B. Osorio, Inventing Lima: Baroque Modernity in Peru’s South Sea Metropolis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Established by a royal decree from Charles V in 1551. It was founded by the order of Dominican friars. Classes of Theology, Arts, and Law began in 1553. See Luis Antonio Eguiguren, Historia de la Universidad (Lima: Impr. Santa Maria, 1951), vol.1, 31–53; Duviols, “Estudio biobibliográfico de Francisco de Ávila,” 219–22. Acosta Rodríguez, “Ávila,” 559. Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo, 170–71, 247–61; Alan Durston, Pastoral Quechua: The History of Christian Translation in Colonial Peru, 1550–1650 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 28–30. The New Laws of the Indies (1542) decreed the establishment of reducciones, which meant the forced resettlement of Indigenous inhabitants into Europeandesigned and controlled towns. I discuss reducciones in more detail in chapter 3. The province of Huarochirí was at the time divided in eight curates or parishes. Acosta Rodríguez, “Ávila,” 562; Duviols, “Estudio biobibliográfico de Francisco de Ávila,” 216; Spalding, An Andean Society, 136–80. Francisco de Ávila, Tratado y relacion de los errores, falsos Dioses, y otras supersticiones, y ritos diabolicos en que vivian antiguamente los yndios de las Provincias de Huarocheri, Mama, y Chaclla y oy tambien viuen engañados con gran perdicion de sus almas, 1608, MS 3169, Biblioteca Nacional de España. All the references in English to Ávila’s Tratado y relación correspond to my translation of the original manuscript in Spanish. Clements R. Markham, introduction to Narratives of the Rites and Laws of the Yncas, ed. Clements R. Markham (London: Hakluyt Society, 1873), xviii. There is still an open debate about whether or not and for what purpose Ávila manipulated the dates of the events he recounted in the prefación. See e.g. Juan Carlos García, “Francisco de Ávila y la extirpación en el Perú” Idolátrica, n.d., http://www.idolatrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Avila-garcia.pdf. Francisco de Ávila, Tratado de los evangelios que nuestra madre la Iglesia propone en todo el año desde la primera dominica de Aduiento, hasta la ultima

NOTES TO PAGES 16–21

51.

52.

53.

54.

55.

56. 57.

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missa de difuntos, 2 vols. (Lima: Imprenta de Pedro de Cabrera, 1648), vol. 1, prefación, unnumbered page. For the latest interventions of the debate about the authorial attribution, which summarize the various scholarly perspectives on it, see: Durston, “Notes on the Authorship”; Durston, “Choquecasa and the Making.” I am borrowing the label from Weismantel’s insightful and decolonizing reading of Moche sex pots. See Mary Weismantel, “Obstinate things,” in The Archaeology of Colonialism, ed. Barbara L. Voss and Eleanor Conlin Casella (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Teodoro Hampe Martínez, Bibliotecas privadas en el mundo colonial: La difusión de libros e ideas en el virreinato del Perú: Siglos XVI-XVII (Frankfurt: Vervuert; Iberoamericana, 1996). Carmen Arellano Hoffmann, “Los quipus de Cahacay de 1636. Repensando el uso de quipus y las etnocategorías Incas para la colonia,” Revista Histórica XLVI (2013); Galen Brokaw, A History of the Khipu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Quilter and Urton, Narrative Threads: Accounting and Recounting in Andean Khipu. Taylor, Camac; Gerald Taylor, Ritos y tradiciones de Huarochirí (Lima: Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos; Instituto de Estudios Peruanos; Fondo Editorial Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 2008). Salomon, introduction; Spalding, An Andean Society. Rolena Adorno, Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru, 2nd ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, [1986] 2000); Charles, Allies at Odds; Durston, “Notes on the Authorship”; Rappaport and Cummins, Beyond the Lettered City.

CH A P T ER 1 1.

2. 3.

4. 5.

In his Comentarios Reales de los Incas (Royal Commentaries of the Incas, 1609) Garcilaso de la Vega gives a very detailed portrayal of this encounter with European illiteracy. Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru, trans. Harold V. Livermore, ed. Karen Spalding (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co, 2006), book 1, ch. 38, 2. For a recent interpretation of the scene, see Gonzalo Lamana, Domination without dominance: Inca-Spanish Encounters in Early Colonial Peru (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008). Rama, The Lettered City. Monique Alaperrine-Bouyer, La educación de las elites indígenas en el Perú colonial (Lima: Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos; Instituto Riva-Agüero; Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2007), 13. In some colonial era documents he was also named as Francisco Dávila. Ávila, Tratado de los Evangelios, vol 1, 163. All translations to English are mine.

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7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

NOTES TO PAGES 22–23

The contract between Ávila and the printer, Pedro de Cabrera (October 23, 1646), who agreed to produce six hundred copies of the book of sermons, reveals the extent to which Ávila intervened in all the steps of that process in spite of his poor health. A transcript of the contract in Guillermo Lohmann Villena, “Documentos para la historia de la imprenta en Lima (1584–1796),” Revista del Archivo General de la Nación 6 (1984): 121–23. Besides 1532 as a start date for the stages of evangelization, there are variations in the dates that historians consider markers of the end and beginning of the following stages. I follow Estenssoro’s chronology. Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo. Egaña’s foundational study identified three stages in the process of evangelization in Spanish America at large: the first one from 1509 to 1556, the second period from 1556 to 1700 and the third from 1700 to 1833. While in the first one the expansion of the church was in the hands of ecclesiastics of regular orders who followed the conquistadors, in the second period the task was taken mainly by secular clergy who devoted much energy into establishing an administrative order and a coordinated pastoral work (thus the calling of councils, writing constitutions and establishing seminaries). Antonio de Egaña, Historia de la Iglesia en la América Española. Desde el descubrimiento hasta comienzos del siglo XIX. Hemisferio sur, Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos (Madrid: La Editorial Católica, 1966). The 1537–1554 period covers the wars between the Pizarro and Almagro factions; the colonizers rebellion against the Crown’s order to eliminate the encomienda system; and the rebellion of Spanish encomendero Francisco Hernández Girón against colonial authorities. On the parallel Inca state of Vilcabamba, see Brian S. Bauer, Madeleine Halac-Higashimori, and Gabriel E. Cantarutti, Voices from Vilcabamba: Accounts Chronicling the Fall of the Inca Empire (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2016). Fernando de Armas Medina, Cristianización del Perú, 1532–1600 (Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla, 1953). María Concepción Bravo Guerreira, “El clero secular en las doctrinas de indios del virreinato del Perú. Siglo XVI” (paper presented at the Evangelización y teología en América [siglo XVI]: X Simposio Internacional de Teología de la Universidad de Navarra, 1989). Pierre Duviols, La destrucción de las religiones andinas: Conquista y colonia (México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1977). Kenneth Mills, Idolatry and Its Enemies: Colonial Andean Religion and Extirpation, 1640–1750 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 18. Sara Tilghman Nalle, God in La Mancha: Religious Reform and the People of Cuenca, 1500–1650 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). The Reformation, also referred to by historians as the “Protestant Reformation” is usually considered to have started in 1517, when Martin Luther published his Ninety-five Theses. The beginning of the Counter-Reformation, also known as the “Catholic Reformation,” is linked to the start of the Council of Trent in 1545.

NOTES TO PAGES 24–26

13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

189

Quoted in Pedro Guibovich Pérez, El edificio de letras: Jesuitas, educación y sociedad en el Perú colonial (Lima: Universidad del Pacífico, 2014), 13. Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth. The Origins of the Modern Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2017), 129–30; Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005). Nalle, God in La Mancha; Antonella Romano, “Accommodating America: Renaissance Missionaries between the Ancient and the New World,” in Global Goods and the Spanish Empire, 1492–1824. Circulation, Resistance and Diversity, ed. Bethany Aram and Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014). Nalle, God in La Mancha, 89–103. Nalle, God in La Mancha, 92. James Lockhart, Spanish Peru 1532–1560: A Colonial Society (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), 240. Lockhart also estimated that in this period 122 women and 98 artisans arrived in Peru. In the three decades after the conquest, a total of 4682 Spaniards set foot in Peru. This number is an aggregate based on the figures published in Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz, Historia mínima de la población de América Latina desde los tiempos precolombinos al año 2025 (Madrid: Turner; Pedregal de Santa Teresa El Colegio de México, 2014), 86. Sánchez-Albornoz (based on data published by Boyd-Bowman) calculated that in the period 1520–1539 a total of 1434 Spaniards emigrated to Peru, while between 1540–1559 there was a total of 3248 arrivals. The acts of both councils were written and printed in Latin. I have consulted these translations to Spanish: Francisco Leonardo Lisi, El tercer concilio limense y la aculturación de los indígenas sudamericanos: Estudio crítico con ed., trad. Y comentario de las actas del Concilio Provincial celebrado en Lima entre 1582 y 1583 (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1990); Primitivo Tineo, Los concilios limenses en la evangelización latinoamericana. Labor organizativa y pastoral del Tercer Concilio Limense (Pamplona: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, 1990). Guibovich Pérez, El edificio de letras, 35–36. Guibovich Pérez, El edificio de letras, 15–16. Burns, Into the Archive, 3. “El número de los estudiantes se ba cada día acrecentando, porque ban gustando de las letras, que asta agora no hera fructa desta tierra; y agora tenemos en nuestros estudios hasta cien estudiantes, antes más que menos; y tenemos entendido que antes de un año abrá 200.” Carta de Padre Juan Gómez a Padre Francisco Borgia, 1571. Antonio de Egaña, Monumenta Peruana, 8 vols. (Rome: Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu, 1954–1986), vol. 1, 425. Guibovich Pérez, El edificio de letras, 24–53. Alaperrine-Bouyer, Educación; Charles, “Trained by Jesuits.” Juan Guillermo Durán, El catecismo del III Concilio Provincial de Lima y sus complementos pastorales (1584–1585) (Buenos Aires: Ed. “El Derecho,” 1982),

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27. 28.

29.

30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

NOTES TO PAGES 26–29

67–68; Tineo, Los concilios limenses en la evangelización latinoamericana. Labor organizativa y pastoral del Tercer Concilio Limense. Tineo, Los concilios limenses en la evangelización latinoamericana. Labor organizativa y pastoral del Tercer Concilio Limense, 143–51. Juan Guillermo Durán, “La refutación de la idolatría incaica en el sermonario del III Concilio Provincial de Lima (1585),” Teología, revista de la facultad de teología de la Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina, no. 42 (1983), 100. Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo, 245–55; Lisi, Tercer Concilio Limense y la aculturación; Tineo, Los concilios limenses en la evangelización latinoamericana. Labor organizativa y pastoral del Tercer Concilio Limense. Romano, “Global Goods,” 56. Romano, “Global Goods.” Jaime Marroquín Arredondo and Ralph Bauer, eds., Translating Nature: CrossCultural Histories of Early Modern Science (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). Durán, “La refutación de la idolatría,” 100. My translation. Alaperrine-Bouyer, Educación, 13. Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo, 56–57, 87–93; Gerald Taylor, El sol, la luna y las estrellas no son Dios. La evangelización en quechua, siglo XVI. (Lima: Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos; Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2003), 20. Carmen Bernand and Serge Gruzinski, De la idolatría: Una arqueología de las ciencias religiosas (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1992), 139. Durston, Pastoral Quechua; Bruce Mannheim, The Language of the Inka since the European Invasion (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991). Archbishop Jerónimo de Loayza championed the teaching of Quechua in Lima, leaving instructions in his will (1561) to fund a permanent teaching position for the language. See Rubén Vargas Ugarte, Historia de la iglesia en el Perú: 1511– 1900 (Lima: Burgos, 1953); Guibovich Pérez, El edificio de letras, 33. Vargas Ugarte, Historia de la iglesia. Bravo Guerreira, “Evangelización y teología en América,” 635–36. Acosta Rodríguez, “Ávila,” 559. Regina Harrison, Signs, Songs, and Memory in the Andes: Translating Quechua Language and Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989), 15–16. Alfredo Torero, El quechua y la historia social andina (Lima: Universidad Ricardo Palma, 1974); Alfredo Torero, Idiomas de los Andes. Lingüística e historia (Lima: Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos; Editorial Horizonte, 2005). Durston, Pastoral Quechua, 121. The debate between modern linguists about what exactly defined the lengua general is ongoing. For a survey on the different scholarly approaches to its study, see César Itier, “What was the Lengua General of Colonial Peru?” in History and Language in the Andes, ed. Paul Heggarty and Adrian J. Pearce (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011).

NOTES TO PAGES 29–31

45.

46.

47.

48.

49.

50. 51.

52. 53. 54.

191

Doctrina christiana y catecismo para instruccion de los indios . . . con un confesionario (Lima, 1584); Tercero cathecismo y exposicion de la doctrina christiana por sermones (Lima, 1585); and Confessionario para los curas de indios. Con la instrucción contra sus ritos (Lima, 1585). On the reevaluation of the uses of Quechua language for pastoral purposes and the relevance of its standardization, see Durston, Pastoral Quechua, 83–86; Bruce Mannheim, “La memoria y el olvido en la política lingüística colonial,” Lexis. Revista de linguistica y literatura, no. 13 (1989). From the first half of the sixteenth century to the late seventeenth century only four printing presses were established in Spanish America: Mexico City in 1539, Lima in 1583, Puebla in 1642, and Guatemala in 1660. In 1633 two Indians were included along with a lay Spaniard as language examiners for applicants to the parish of San Martin de Reque, on the northern coast of Peru. Durston, Pastoral Quechua, 125. Fernando de Avendaño, “Prólogo al lector,” Sermones de los misterios de Nuestra Santa Fe Catolica, en lengua castellana, y la general del Inca: Impugnanse los errores particulares que los Indios han tenido, 2 vols, (Lima: Jorge Lopez de Herrera, 1649), unnumbered page; Durston, Pastoral Quechua, 123, 28–29. “Porque para el bien y utilidad de los indios importa mucho que no sólo en la substancia y sentencia haya conformidad, sino también en el mismo lenguaje y palabras. Por tanto, prohíbe y veda que nadie haga y use otra interpretación o traducción en las lenguas del Cuzco y Aymara, así en la Cartilla o Doctrina Cristiana como en el Catecismo, fuera de la traducción que con su autoridad se ha hecho y aprobado [ . . . ].” Tineo, Los concilios limenses en la evangelización latinoamericana. Labor organizativa y pastoral del Tercer Concilio Limense, 381. My translation. Durston, Pastoral Quechua, 29–30, 101–03. On how religious sentiment fostered demand for print media in Reformation Europe, see Jeremiah E. Dittmar, “Information Technology and Economic Change: The Impact of The Printing Press,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 126, no. 3 (2011): 13, 24. Durston, Pastoral Quechua, 100. Lexicón o vocabulario de la lengua general del Perú and Gramática o arte de la lengua general de los Indios de los Reynos del Perú. The texts arrived to Peru in 1563. Santo Tomás’ grammar included the “Platica para todos los indios,” a text approved by the previous Council of Lima and the only print text in Quechua for twenty-five years available for preaching. Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo, 59–60. At least one work on Quechua language preceded Santo Tomás’s texts: the Arte, vocabulario, sermons by Pedro Aparicio (1540), long since lost. Paul Rivet and Georges de Créqui-Montfort, Bibliographie des langues Aymará et Kichua. Vol. 1 (1540–1875) (Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie, 1951), v.1.

192

55.

56. 57.

58.

59.

60.

61.

62. 63.

64. 65.

66. 67.

68. 69.

NOTES TO PAGES 31–33

Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino, “Estudio introductorio,” in Grammática o arte de la lengua general de los indios de los reynos del Perú por el maestro fray Domingo de Santo Tomás, ed. Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino (Cuzco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos “Bartolomé de Las Casas,” 1995); Domingo de Santo Tomás, Lexicón, o Vocabulario de la lengua general del Perú (Valladolid: Francisco Fernández de Córdoba, 1560), unnumbered page. Nataly Cancino Cabello, “Los paratextos de artes y gramáticas misioneras americanas,” Nueva revista de filología hispánica LXV, no. 2 (2017): 412–14. This seems to have also been the case for Jesuit Alonso Barzana’s catechism, vocabulary and confessionary written in Quechua and Aymara (1576). The texts were to be printed in Madrid, but Guibovich argues that they were never printed possibly because there was no one qualified to censor and approve texts in those languages. Guibovich Pérez, El edificio de letras, 119–20. Though there is no clear indication of who authored the Spanish originals of the Third Council’s pastoral texts, the Jesuit José de Acosta has long been considered the main suspect. The team of translators and evaluators of the texts included secular clerics, Jesuits, and friars. Durston, Pastoral Quechua, 97–101. Durston, Pastoral Quechua; José Toribio Medina, La imprenta en Lima (1584– 1824), 4 vols. (Santiago de Chile: printed by the author, 1904–1907); Rivet and Créqui-Montfort, Bibliographie. This number does not include reprints. There were also four plays written in Quechua, with the oldest ones, the “autos sacramentales,” El hijo pródigo and El rapto de Proserpina, written no earlier than 1650. Itier, “Les textes quechuas coloniaux: une source privilégiée pour l’histoire culturelle andine.” Durston uses the term “mundane Quechua” for the non-pastoral written uses of Quechua. These texts go from legal administrative documents to private correspondence and so far twelve of these have been found. See Durston, “NativeLanguage Literacy.” The Huarochirí manuscript, analyzed in chapters 3 and 4, fits neither in the pastoral nor in the “mundane” category of Quechua texts. Durston, Pastoral Quechua. Durston, “Native-Language Literacy”; Ramos and Yannakakis, Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes, 10–11. Ramos, “Language and Society in Early Colonial Peru,” 30. Ramos, “Language and Society in Early Colonial Peru,” 30–31. A notable exception is the case studied by Mannheim of a notarial document written in Quechua. Mannheim, Language of the Inka, 143–44. Romano, “Global Goods,” 59. Romano, “Global Goods,” 60. The Historia was translated into various European languages, edited several times and cited extensively throughout Catholic and Protestant Europe in the early modern period. Romano, “Global Goods,” 63. Guibovich Pérez, El edificio de letras, 150.

NOTES TO PAGES 33–35

70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77.

78.

79.

80. 81.

193

Guibovich Pérez, El edificio de letras, 17. Archivo General de la Nación, Protocolo notarial de Antonio Fernández de la Cruz, 1648 (no. 468), fol. 1027–1126. Hampe published a partial transcript of the inventory of possessions of Ávila, focusing only on the collection of books. In this section and in other chapters of the book, I refer to other objects listed in the inventory. I follow Hampe’s suggestions for book titles that are not clear in the notarial document. See Teodoro Hampe Martínez, Cultura barroca y extirpation de idolatrias: La biblioteca de Francisco de Avila, 1648 (Cusco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos, 1996). AGN, Protocolo notarial, fol. 1027–1126. See also Hampe Martínez, Cultura barroca, 16. It is not clear from the inventory if the Third Council’s publications are the pastoral texts or the acts of its sessions. See AGN, Protocolo notarial, fol. 1061r. See AGN, Protocolo notarial, fol. 1064v AGN, Protocolo notarial, fol. 1052v This is the average for New Spain in the early seventeenth century. Ignacio Osorio Romero, Historia de las bibliotecas novohispanas (México: SEP; Dir. General de Bibliotecas, 1986), 51. I have not found any average for the viceroyalty of Peru. The lower number is according to Hampe. Hampe Martínez, Cultura barroca. Osorio Romero claims that it had around eight thousand volumes thanks to a generous donation by bishop of Puebla, Palafox. Osorio Romero, Historia de las bibliotecas novohispanas 52. For example: “Obras de san gregorio biexas y apolilladas folio y pergamino en dos tomos” and “un libro ytaliano biejo sin prinçipio 8 y pergamino.” AGN, Protocolo notarial, fol. 1029v, f. 1073v. Hortensia Calvo, “The Politics of Print. The Historiography of the Book in Early Spanish America,” in Book History (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 279; Teodoro Hampe Martínez, “La difusión de libros e ideas en el Perú colonial,” Bulletin Hispanique LXXXIX, no. 1–4 (1987): 59; Medina, La imprenta en Lima, v.1, LXXVIII-LXXX. Guibovich Pérez, El edificio de letras, 148. On circulation of books in Spanish America and its readers, see Hampe Martínez, Bibliotecas privadas; Pedro Guibovich Pérez, “Libros para ser vendidos en el virreinato del Perú a fines del siglo XVI,” Boletín del Instituto Riva-Agüero, no. 13 (1984); Guibovich Pérez, El edificio de letras; Irving A. Leonard, Baroque Times in Old Mexico (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959); Irving Albert Leonard and Rolena Adorno, Books of the Brave: Being an Account of Books and of Men in the Spanish Conquest and Settlement of the Sixteenth-Century New World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Osorio Romero, Historia de las bibliotecas novohispanas. The story of the free mulata in Diego de Córdova Salinas and Lino Gómez Canedo, Crónica Franciscana de las provincias del Perú (Washington: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1957), 950–52. For the readings of

194

82. 83. 84.

85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

92. 93.

94.

NOTES TO PAGES 35–38

Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, the self-appointed chronicler, see Adorno, Writing and Resistance. The first one is listed as “Directorio de la lengua de prado” and the second one as “Arte de la lengua de torres.” AGN, Protocolo notarial, fol. 1064v; fol. 1073v. Alicia de Colombí-Monguió, Petrarquismo peruano: Diego Dávalos y Figueroa y la poesía de la “Miscelánea austral” (London: Tamesis Books, 1985). On this topics, the inventory lists a “Historia de Mexico,” “Poetica mexicana,” and “Sitio de Mexico de Cisneros.” The last one, according to Hampe, is most likely the 1618 book by Diego Cisneros “Sitio, naturaleza y propiedades de la ciudad de Mexico.” Hampe Martínez, Bibliotecas privadas, 181. Hampe Martínez, Bibliotecas privadas, 181. AGN, Protocolo notarial. Calvo, “Politics of Print,” 296. Medina, La imprenta en Lima, vol.1. Hampe Martínez, Cultura barroca. For a comparison of Avila’s library to those of the Portuguese merchant and slave trader resident in Lima Manuel Bautista Pérez and of Melchor Pérez de Soto, chief mason of Mexico’s cathedral, contemporaries to the priest that ended up prosecuted and sentenced by the Inquisition, see Laura León Llerena, “Lecturas y lectores: La construcción de una hegemonía cultural en Perú y Nueva España” in Libros en movimiento. Nueva España y Perú, siglos XVI-XVIII, ed. Agnes Gehbald and Norah Edith Jiménez (México: Colegio de Michoacán, 2021), 239–259. See for example the inventories of libraries published in Hampe Martínez, Bibliotecas privadas. Here I am following Rappaport and Cummins’ illuminating critique to the notion of literacy in the colonial context Rappaport and Cummins, Beyond the Lettered City. Yet as I have discussed in the introduction, instead of following the authors in arguing for a differentiation between European literacy and Indigenous literacy, I assert that the term “legibility” allows for a clearer understanding that the same media (or objects) could be assigned different roles in a multimedia society such as the colonial Andes. “Considerad y discurrid, cuántos pueblos habrá en toda la redondez de la tierra, vosotros los indios no sabéis cosa de esto, yo os lo diré ahora [ . . . ]. Empecemos por Panamá, y siguiendo el mar hacia acá hay muchísimos pueblos, y viniendo siguiendo por el Darién venimos a dar hacia Quito, y de Quito damos en Chimú, que es Trujillo, y venimos hacia acá, y de aquí vamos hacia Chile, y de Chile al estrecho de Magallanes, y luego va dando vuelta al Brasil, y por la misma costa al río de las Amazonas, y vamos dando vuelta a Cartagena, y venimos otra vez a Panamá; todo es costa del mar de estas tierras, y está lleno de gentes y pueblos. Pues dejando ahora la costa del mar, lleguemos a los medios, y en ellos está Quito, Popayán, el Reyno [¿del Peru?], el Cuzco, el Collao, Omasuyo,

NOTES TO PAGES 39–40

195

Qquechhua, Ccana, Ccanchi, Aymará, Sora, Rucana, Guamanga, Huanca; y dando un salto vamos a Potosí, Tucumán, Paraguay; todo esto hay, y mucho más. Y todo esto es en estas partes. Luego está de las otras partes, la tierra de México, que tiene innumerable gente, y luego tras esto las islas, archipiélago, Malucas, y luego la India, la China, Japón, Persia, Tartaria, Constantinopla, Italia, Alemania, Francia, España, África, todo esto, y mucho más indecible y sin número, y aquí son los hombres unos blancos, otros pardos, otros negros, infinitos.” Ávila, Tratado de los Evangelios, vol. 1, 289–90. My translation. 95. Thomas Harriot traveled to North America once, in a 1585 expedition to Roanoke Island funded by Sir Walther Raleigh. Harriot first published a report about the journey in 1588, entitled A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. De Bry’s illustrated version, which Ávila owned, was first printed in 1590. 96. For the first case, see Natalia Maillard, “Estrategias de los profesionales del libro sevillanos ante el Santo Oficio: Entre la evasión y la colaboración,” in El libro en circulación en el mundo moderno en España y Latinoamérica, ed. Pedro Rueda Ramírez (Madrid: Calambur, 2012), 34–35. For the revolt of the book sellers, see Pedro Rueda Ramírez, “Los libreros Juan López Román y Antonio de Toro en la Carrera de Indias,” in El libro en circulación en el mundo moderno en España y Latinoamérica, ed. Pedro Rueda Ramírez (Madrid: Calambur, 2012), 54–55. 97. John Milton, Areopagitica: Order of the Long Parliament for the Regulating of Printing, 14 June, 1643. A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, 3 (New York: Bartleby.com, 2001), 19. 98. This argument is fully developed in León Llerena, “Lecturas y lectores: La construcción de una hegemonía cultural en Perú y Nueva España.” 99. Pablo F. Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017). 100. The manuscripts were handed to Friar Miguel de Aguirre. AGN, Protocolo notarial, fol. 1075r. 101. It is a matter of debate among scholars whether the texts contained in MS 3169 were bound together when Ávila owned them or if that happened later. Paloma Cuenca Muñoz, “Análisis paleográfico y codicológico del manuscrito,” in Cristóbal de Molina. Relación de las fábulas y ritos de los incas, ed. Paloma Jiménez del Campo, Paloma Cuenca Muñoz, and Esperanza López Parada (Madrid; Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2010). For a hypothesis of how the manuscripts ended up in the Biblioteca Nacional, see Paloma Jiménez del Campo, “Los lectores de Cristóbal de Molina el Cuzqueño, sus editores y esta edición,” in Cristóbal de Molina. Relación de las fábulas y ritos de los incas, ed. Paloma Jiménez del Campo and Esperanza López Parada (Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2010), 16–20. 102. This Cristóbal de Molina is known by historians as “el cuzqueño” (from Cuzco) to avoid confusions given that there was a contemporaneous chronicler with

196

103.

104. 105.

106.

107.

108.

109.

110. 111.

112. 113.

NOTES TO PAGES 40–42

the same name but known as “el chileno” (from Chile). Both Molinas were ecclesiastics born in Spain. There was also a contemporaneous Spanish poet by the name of Garcilaso de la Vega. One of the most debated issues concerning MS 3169 is the number of scribes that intervened in the production of the texts and their identities. Scholars disagree as to which texts can be attributed to Ávila’s handwriting, except for his unfinished Tratado y relación. See Duviols, “Estudio y comentario etnohistórico,” 16; Cuenca Muñoz, “Análisis paleográfico,” 224. Roger Chartier, Inscribir y borrar. Cultura escrita y literatura, siglos XI-XVIII, trans. Víctor Goldstein (Buenos Aires: Katz Editores, 2006), 138. Rolena Adorno, “Images of Indios Ladinos in Early Colonial Peru,” in Transatlantic Encounters: Europeans and Andeans in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Kenneth J. Andrien and Rolena Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). Chartier, Inscribir y borrar, 115–48; Harold Love, “The Manuscript After the Coming of Print,” in The Book: A Global History, ed. Michael F. Suarez and H. R. Woudhuysen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 199–200. The copy that Ávila owned coincides in good measure with another text by Ondegardo, entitled “Las razones que movieron a sacar esta relación y notable daño que resulta de no guardar a estos indios sus fueros,” known as MS 2821 (1571). Lamana argues that each text is a copy of a different original now lost. Ondegardo and Lamana Ferrario, Pensamiento colonial, 26. Molina wrote his text on request of Sebastián de Lartaún, then Bishop of Cuzco (1573–1583). The information included in the text though was the product of an inspection tour that viceroy Toledo ordered Molina to carry in the province of Cuzco. Roberto Levillier, Don Francisco de Toledo, supremo organizador del Perú: su vida, su obra (1515–1582), 3 vols. (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1935–1940); Evangelina Soltero Sánchez, “Génesis, contenido y forma de la Relación de las fábulas y ritos de los incas,” in Cristóbal de Molina. Relación de las fábulas y ritos de los incas, ed. Paloma Jiménez del Campo and Esperanza López Parada (Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2010), 114–16. Ondegardo and Lamana Ferrario, Pensamiento colonial. Among the most recent studies of Polo Ondegardo’s writings. For recent critical editions of Molina’s text, see Cristóbal de Molina, Relación de las fábulas y ritos de los incas, ed. Paloma Jiménez del Campo, Paloma Cuenca Muñoz, and Esperanza López Parada (Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2010); Cristóbal de Molina, Account of the Fables and Rites of the Incas, ed. Brian S. Bauer, Vania Smith-Oka, and Gabriel E. Cantarutti (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011). Stephanie Merrim, The Spectacular City, Mexico, and Colonial Hispanic Literary Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 38. The “Inca-Andean fusion,” as termed by Mills, has been debated at length by various scholars. MacCormack and Mills have underlined that the Incas and

NOTES TO PAGES 42–46

114. 115.

116. 117.

118. 119.

120.

121. 122.

123. 124.

125. 126.

197

the ethnic groups they subjected before the Spanish conquest shared similar environments and historical contexts which shaped their belief systems. Yet, as Salomon has noted, “the equation between Inca religion and Andean religion is an ideological sleight” present in colonial texts as much as in modern scholarship. Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991). Mills, Idolatry and Its Enemies; Salomon, introduction, 4. Ondegardo and Lamana Ferrario, Pensamiento colonial, 243–45. Molina states he worked as translator for the Third Council of Lima in the Información de servicios (Cuzco, 1584). For a copy of Información, see Luis Millones, ed., El retorno de las huacas: estudios y documentos sobre el taki onqoy, siglo XVI (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos; Sociedad Peruana de Psicoanálisis, 1990), 227. BNE, MS 3169, fol. 36v. My translation. Brokaw dates the creation of this text to sometime between 1570 and 1574. Brokaw, A History of the Khipu. Rolena Adorno, “Literary production and suppression: Reading and writing about Amerindians in colonial Spanish America,” Dispositio 11, no. 28/29 (1986); Rolena Adorno, Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 193–94. Adorno, Polemics of Possession, 194. “Y esto acabo aqui assi yndecissamente.” BNE, MS 3169, fol. 36v. My translation. Del Campo and Cuenca note that this phrase marks the end of the copy, but not necessarily the end of Molina’s original manuscript. Molina, Relación de las fábulas, 100, note 267. “Traslado de un cartapacio a manera de borrador que quedó en los papeles de el Licenciado Polo de Ondegardo cerca de el Linaje de los Ingas y como conquistaron.” BNE, MS 3169, fol. 37r. BNE, MS 3169, fol. 61–63v. Zamora, Language, Authority; MacCormack, Religion in the Andes. In 1590 Garcilaso published a translation of the Diálogos de Amor de León Hebreo, then he published and account on the Spanish exploration of Florida, La Florida del Inca (1605). A second part of the Comentarios Reales, the Historia General del Perú was published posthumously, in 1616. Esperanza López Parada, Marta Ortiz Canseco, and Paul Phillip Firbas, La biblioteca del Inca Garcilaso de la Vega [1616–2016]: Exposición del 29 de enero al 2 de mayo de 2016 (Madrid: Biblioteca Nacional de España, 2016). Ávila, Tratado de los Evangelios. Joan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua, Relación de antigüedades deste reyno del Piru, ed. Pierre Duviols and César Itier (Lima: Institut Français d’Études Andines; Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos “Bartolomé de Las Casas,” 1993), 131. Ondegardo and Lamana Ferrario, Pensamiento colonial, 30–32. Molina, Relación de las fábulas, 224–26.

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NOTES TO PAGES 46–48

127. Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino, “Escribas semiletrados o iniciadores del castellano bilingüe andino: El caso del copista de Cristóbal de Molina,” Lexis. Revista de linguistica y literatura XL, no. 2 (2016). 128. AGN, Protocolo notarial, fol. 1078r. 129. “Dos libros blancos uno de folio y otro chico,” “una escrivania de evano y marfil,” “un escritorio guarneçido de oro y marfil,” “otro escritorio de madera tosca pintado de colores y oro con todos sus papeles,” “otro escritorio biejo aforrado en cordovan,” “çinco sillas de asentar mui viejas,” “una messa larga de madera,” “un bufete grande con su cajon y llaves,” “un escaño biejo y quebrado,” “una mesa grande rredonda para el estudio,” “otro bufete de rroble,” “quatro messas toscas de madera,” “un bufete con dos cajonsillos chiquitos,” “dies y seis rresmas de papel quebrado,” “una cuchilla de cortar plumas,” “unas tijeras de cortar papel.” AGN, Protocolo notarial, fol. 1058r–1080v. 130. For the first two meanings of “papel quebrado,” see Guillermo Lohmann Villena, “Nuevos datos sobre Fray Antonio de la Calancha y la impresión de la Corónica moralizada,” Revista peruana de historia eclesiástica 2 (1992); Guillermo Lohmann Villena, “Más documentos para la historia de la imprenta en Lima (1602–1690),” Revista del Archivo general de la nación 12 (1995).“Papel quebrado” as ruled paper in RAE.es. 131. This probable case of collaborative production of manuscripts was not an isolated one in the Andes. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, self-appointed Andean chronicler whose text is analyzed in chapter 4, worked as informant and artist in the production of Mercedarian priest Martín de Murúa’s manuscript, the so-called “Galvin manuscript” (c.1590). For the most recent studies see Thomas B.F Cummins et al., Manuscript Cultures of Colonial Mexico and Peru: New Questions and Approaches (Los Angeles, Calif.: Getty Research Institute, 2014). 132. Duviols suggested the connection between Pachacuti’s Relación de antigüedades and Ávila’s time in La Plata. Duviols, “Estudio biobibliográfico de Francisco de Ávila,” 227; Duviols, “Estudio y comentario etnohistórico,” 93. 133. Among the limited published information about the years that Ávila spent in the Archbishopric of La Plata: Josep M. Barnadas, “Fray Bernardino de Cárdenas, extirpador de la idolatría en Charcas,” Anuario de la Academia Boliviana de Historia Eclesiástica, no. 3 (1997); Josep M. Barnadas, “Extirpación de la idolatría en Charcas: legislación y acción de la Iglesia (siglos XVI-XIX),” 10 (2004); Lincoln A. Draper, Arzobispos, canónigos y sacerdotes: Interacción entre valores religiosos y sociales en el clero de Charcas del siglo XVII, vol. 7, Publicaciones del Archivo-Biblioteca Arquidiocesanos “Monseñor Taborga” (Sucre: Archivo-Biblioteca Arquidiocesanos “Monseñor Taborga,” 2000); Julio García Quintanilla, Historia de la Iglesia en La Plata, Obispado de los Charcas, 1553– 1609, Arzobispado de La Plata, 1609–1825, 4 vols. (Sucre: Talleres Gráficos “Don Bosco,” 1964), vol.1, vol.4. I consulted the following archival materials: Archivo Biblioteca Nacional de Bolivia (ABNB), Audiencia de Charcas, Libros de méritos y servicios, XIII; ABNB Audiencia de Charcas, Diversos Colonia, Votos

NOTES TO PAGES 49–53

134. 135.

136.

137. 138. 139.

140. 141. 142.

143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149.

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1622–1630; Archivo y Biblioteca Arquidiocesanos de Sucre, Archivo Capitular de Sucre, Primer Concilio Provincial de La Plata (1622–1629). Frank Salomon and Sabine P. Hyland, “Guest Editors’ Introduction,” Ethnohistory 57, no. 1 (2010): 3–4. On the doctrinal content of Ávila’s book of sermons, see Georges Dumezil, “The Good Shepherd Francisco Davila’s Sermon to the Indians of Peru (1646),” Diogenes 5, no. 20 (1957); Duviols, La destrucción; Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo. The full title of Ávila’s book is Tratado de los Euangelios que Nuestra Madre la Iglesia propone en todo el año, desde la primera dominica de Aduiento hasta la ultima Missa de Difuntos, Santos de Espana, y añadidos en el nuevo rezado. Esplicase el Euangelio, y se pone un sermon en cada uno en las lenguas Castellana, y General de los Indios deste Reyno del Peru, y en ellos donde da lugar la materia, se refutan los errores de la Gentilidad de dichos Indios. All translations from the Tratado de los Evangelios are mine. Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo, 250–51. Duviols, “Estudio biobibliográfico de Francisco de Ávila,” 227–28. Kenneth Mills, William B. Taylor, and Sandra Lauderdale Graham, Colonial Latin America: a documentary history (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2002), 250–54. Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo, 261–63. Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo, 258–59. This is the case for Fernando de Avendaño’s Sermones de los misterios de Nuestra Santa Fe Católica (Sermons about the Mysteries of our Holy Catholic Faith) printed in Lima in 1649. It recycles some of the Third Council’s sermons in its Quechua and Spanish versions. Ávila and Avendaño’s books of sermons have received considerable attention in the study of the history of Catholic evangelization in Spanish America and particularly for the role they had in the consolidation and dissemination of a so-called pastoral Quechua. See Durston, Pastoral Quechua; Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo; Mannheim, Language of the Inka; César Itier, “La littérature quechua d’evangelisation (XVIe et XVIIe siecles) comme source ethnolinguistique,” Amerindia, no. 20 (1995); Gerald Taylor, Sermones y ejemplos: Antología bilingüe castellano-quechua—siglo XVII (Lima: Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos, 2002); Dumezil, “The Good Shepherd.” Ávila, Tratado de los Evangelios, vol 2, 99. My translation. Ávila, Tratado de los Evangelios, vol 1, prefación, 7. Ávila, Tratado de los Evangelios, vol 1, 6. Ávila, Tratado de los Evangelios, vol 1, “Aprobación del Padre Francisco de Contreras,” unnumbered page. Quoted in Leonard and Adorno, Books of the Brave, 82. Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo, 50–54. “Mirad primero, todo lo que se contiene en aquella cartilla y librito, donde están las oraciones del Padre nuestro, Ave María, y Credo, y todo lo demás, con un

200

150. 151. 152.

153. 154.

155. 156. 157.

158. 159. 160. 161.

162.

163.

164. 165. 166. 167. 168.

NOTES TO PAGES 54–60

Catecismo breve, por la cual cartilla os enseñan las oraciones los padres y los fiscales y los maestros en las escuelas: aquello es la Suma de la Fe y de lo que debemos saber para creer y obrar y para salvarnos e ir al cielo a gozar de Dios.” Ávila, Tratado de los Evangelios. My translation. Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo. A more detailed analysis of cartillas, their circulation, and their role in the spread of Indigenous literacy in the Andes appears in chapter 4. My underlining. The King of Spain addressed the Casa de Contratación in Seville in this terms and later, in similar terms, the Audiencia of Lima and of Santo Domingo. Quoted in Leonard, Baroque Times, 82. Leonard and Adorno, Books of the Brave, 76–77. José Manuel Lucía Megías and Aurelio Vargas Díaz-Toledo, “Don Quijote en América: Pausa, 1607 (facsímil y edición),” Literatura: teoría, historia, crítica, no. 7 (2005): 228–42. AGN, Protocolo notarial fol. 1071r, 1053v, 1058r. Ávila, Tratado de los Evangelios, v.2, 22. Francisco de Xerez, Verdadera relación de la conquista y provincia del Cuzco llamada la Nueva Castilla (Sevilla: Bartholomé Pérez, 1534). The same woodcut illustrates Cristóbal de Mena’s La conquista del Perú printed in the same city and year as Xerez’s. In chapter 4 I engage in more depth with the scholarship that has focused on the role that writing had in that first encounter and the following events, according to Spanish and Indigenous chroniclers. A more detailed discussion of the uses of quipu in early colonial Peru appears in chapter 2. Concilio Provincial de Lima, Tercero cathecismo y exposicion de la doctrina christiana, por sermones (Lima: Antonio Ricardo, 1585), fol.115v-16r. Lima, Tercero cathecismo, fol. 175v, f.10. Rocío Quispe-Agnoli, “Cuando Occidente y los Andes se encuentran: Qellqay, escritura alfabética, y tohkapu en el siglo XVI,” Colonial Latin American Review 14 (2005). Galen Brokaw, “Semiotics, Aesthetics, and the Quechua Concept of Quilca,” in Colonial Mediascapes. Sensory Worlds of the Early Americas, ed. Matthew Cohen and Jeffrey Glover (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 169, 75. For an extended discussion of “quillca” in González Holguín, see Joanne Rappaport and Tom Cummings, “Between Images and Writing: The Ritual of the King’s Quillca,” Colonial Latin American Review 7, no. 1 (1998): 20. Ávila, Tratado de los Evangelios, vol. 1, 463. Brokaw warns that it is not clear if that association developed before or after contact with Spaniards, “Semiotics, Aesthetics,” 174–75. Charles, Allies at Odds; Ramos and Yannakakis, Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes. Ávila, Tratado de los Evangelios, vol. 1, 312–13. Ávila, Tratado de los Evangelios, 312.

NOTES TO PAGES 60–66

201

169. 170. 171. 172.

Charles, Allies at Odds, 24. Ávila, Tratado de los Evangelios, vol. 1, 98. Ávila, Tratado de los Evangelios, vol. 2, fol. 74. José de Acosta, De procuranda Indorum salute, ed. Luciano Pereña, 2 vols., Corpus Hispanorum de Pace (Madrid: Consejo superior de investigaciones científicas, [1588] 1984), v.2, 87. 173. Fernando de Avendaño, also a well-read and notable figure in seventeenth century colonial Peru, would be an obvious point of comparison. See Pedro Guibovich Pérez, “La Carrera de un visitador de idolatrías en el siglo XVII: Fernando de Avendaño (1580?-1655),” in Catolicismo y extirpación de idolatrías, ed. Gabriela Ramos and Henrique Urbano (Cusco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos “Bartolome de Las Casas,” 1993). 174. Archivo Arzobispal de Lima, Causas de Capítulos, legajo 1, fol. 41r 175. Ávila, Tratado de los Evangelios, vol 1, 163.

CH A P T ER 2 1. 2. 3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Ávila, Tratado de los Evangelios, prefación, unnumbered page. Santiago de Chile, modern-day capital city of Chile, was at that time part of the viceroyalty of Peru. The juez visitador de idolatrías had the authority to question witnesses, to pass judgement, and to execute the sentence. The holder of this office also had the authority to check the linguistic knowledge of priests and to remove priests of Indigenous parishes from their offices. Nicholas Griffiths, “Inquisition of the Indians?: The Inquisitorial Model and the Repression of Andean Religion in Seventeenth-Century Peru,” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 3, no. 1 (1994). “Oratio habita in Ecclesia cathedrale Limensi ad Dom. B. Lupum Guerrerum” in Medina, La imprenta en Lima, vol 1, p.115–16. Ávila included a copy of the Latin sermon in the introductory pages to the first volume of his book of sermons (1648). Pablo José de Arriaga, Extirpacion de la idolatria del Piru (Lima: Gerónimo de Contreras, 1621), 4–5. Ávila, Tratado de los Evangelios, prefación, unnumbered page. In colonial sources it is also spelled quipo. Some present-day scholars prefer khipu. Lima, Tercero cathecismo, fol. 67v–fol. 68r. My translation. Brokaw offers a very insightful review of the scholarship that not only assumes that the ban indeed was enacted but, more worryingly, the interpretations and arguments regarding Indigenous evangelization and media that have been assembled based on inexact readings of colonial documents, see Brokaw, A History of the Khipu, 210–11, 23–24.

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10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

NOTES TO PAGES 66–70

Avendaño, Sermones de los misterios, part 2, fol. 8r. The reports are so isolated that the same examples are always quoted in studies of colonial Andes. The most quoted is Diego Ávalos y Figueroa’s account of a Spanish official who confiscated and burned the quipu of an old man, who was then physically punished. The official acted after asking for the content of the quipu, to which the Andean replied that it contained a record of all that had happened in Jauja since the arrival of the Spaniards. Diego Dávalos y Figueroa, Primera parte de la Miscelanea austral (Lima: Antonio Ricardo, 1602–1603), 152. Marco Curátola and José Carlos De la Puente Luna, “Contar concertando: Quipus, piedritas y escritura en los Andes coloniales,” in El quipu colonial. Estudios y materiales, ed. Marco Curátola and José Carlos De la Puente Luna (Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2013). However, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega asserted in his Comentarios reales de los Incas, that Andeans used the knotted cords to make additions, subtraction, and multiplication, (1991), vol. 1, book 2, chapter 26, 128. Radicati di Primeglio, Estudios sobre los quipus. Brokaw, A History of the Khipu, 220–21. Brokaw, A History of the Khipu, 221. Vasco de Contreras y Valverde, Relación de la ciudad del Cusco, 1649, 2nd ed., ed. María del Carmen Martín Rubio (Cusco: Comité de Servicios Integrados Turístico-Culturales del Cusco, [1984] 2009), 71. BNE, MS 3169, fol. 30r, my translation. Molina, Account of the Fables, 14; BNE MS 3168, fol. 5v Molina, Account of the Fables, 14; BNE, MS 3168, fol. 5v–f.6 Regina Harrison, “Perez Bocanegra’s Ritual formulario: Khipu Knots and Confession,” in Narrative Threads. Accounting and Recounting in Andean Khipu, ed. Jeffrey Quilter and Gary Urton (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 267; Brokaw, A History of the Khipu, 227, note 9. For example, in fol. 3v; Ondegardo and Lamana Ferrario, Pensamiento colonial, 223. BNE, MS 3169, fol. 6. For studies of the ceque system, see Reinier Tom Zuidema, The Ceque System of Cuzco: The Social Organization of the Capital of the Inca (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1964); Brian S. Bauer, The Sacred Landscape of the Inca: The Cusco Ceque System (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998). BNE, MS 3169, fol. 23v. Ondegardo and Lamana Ferrario, Pensamiento colonial, 289. Acosta, Procuranda, vol. 1, 587. José de Acosta, “Misiones hechas desde el Colegio del Cuzco” in Escritos menores; estudio preliminar y edicón del P. Francisco Mateos (Madrid: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, 1954). “Annua de la provincia del Pirú del año 1578” in Acosta, Escritos menores; estudio preliminar y edicón del P. Francisco Mateos.

NOTES TO PAGES 71–74

28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

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Acosta, “Fundación de la doctrina del Juli” in Escritos menores; estudio preliminar y edicón del P. Francisco Mateos. “[Y] porque en lugar de los libros los yndios han usado y usan unos como registros hechos de diferentes hilos, que ellos llaman quipos, y con estos conservan la memoria de su antigua supersticción [sic] y ritos y ceremonias y costumbres perversas; procuren con diligencia los obispos que todos los memoriales o quipos, que sirven para su superstición se les quiten totalmente a los indios.” My translation to English follows the original Spanish text reproduced in Francisco Leonardo Lisi, “El Tercer Concilio de Lima y su significación en la aculturación de las poblaciones indígenas de la América del Sur,” Guaraguao 12, no. 28 (2008): 117–18. The proceedings were only published in 1591, in Madrid, in Latin and in Spanish. An alternative translation can be found in Brokaw, A History of the Khipu, 222. The Latin and the Spanish text, though published simultaneously, seem to convey important differences. The relevant details for this chapter are two. The Latin text does not make clear whether the condemned quipus are only those that contain superstitions or if all quipus are to be condemned, regardless of their content. Additionally, the Latin text uses the term “pernitus aboleri” which can mean to be taken away or to be destroyed. In the Third Council’s own translation into Spanish, the text is much clearer as to which quipus are to be condemned, “all those which are useful for their superstitions,” and restricts the order to “taking them away” from Indians. I pay attention to the Spanish version of the Third Council because, as I argued in chapter 1, many priests in Peru did not know Latin, thus the need to publish a translation next to the original in Latin so that they could read what was agreed in the proceedings. Leonard and Adorno, Books of the brave, 82. Leonard and Adorno, Books of the brave, 82. Indigenous people were not under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition. The Spanish Inquisition prosecuted heretics, who by definition were Catholics that questioned church dogma. The Inquisition did not prosecute non-Christians; Muslims and Jews were not under their jurisdiction either. On syncretism being labeled as idolatry, see Duviols, La destrucción; Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo. Diego de Porras, “Instrucciones que escribió el P. Fr. Diego de Porras para los sacerdotes que se ocuparon en la doctrina y conversión de los indios” [c.1583] cited in Sabine P. Hyland, “Woven Words: The Royal Khipu of Blas Valera,” in Narrative Threads, ed. Jeffrey Quilter and Gary Urton (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 160. Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo, 219–20. Acosta, “Annua de la provincial del Pirú del año de 1578” in Escritos menores; estudio preliminar y edicón del P. Francisco Mateos. Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo, 220. Charles, Allies at Odds, 13–21.

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39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

49.

50. 51. 52.

53.

54.

NOTES TO PAGES 75–79

Juan Pérez Bocanegra, Ritual formulario, e institucion de curas, para administrar a los naturales de este reyno, los santos sacramentos del baptismo, confirmacion, eucaristia, y viatico, penitencia, extremauncion, y matrimonio: Con aduertencias muy necessarias (Lima: Geronymo de Contreras, 1631), 111. My translation. Pérez Bocanegra, Ritual formulario, 111. Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo, 224. Durston, Pastoral Quechua, 284–85. Pérez Bocanegra, Ritual formulario, 112. Pérez Bocanegra, Ritual formulario, 112. Brokaw, A History of the Khipu, 220. For example, Martín de Murúa in Historia General del Pirú (1616) and Juan de Solórzano in Política Indiana (1646), quoted in Tristan Platt, “‘Without Deceit or Lies’: Variable ‘Chinu’ Readings during a Sixteenth-Century TributeRestitution Trial,” in Narrative Threads: Accounting and Recounting in Andean Khipu, ed. Jeffrey Quilter and Gary Urton (Austin: Texas University Press, 2002), 238–39. Brokaw, A History of the Khipu, 220. Horacio Urteaga, “Doctor Francisco de Ávila. Información de vita et moribus del [ . . . ], fecha el año de 1607” en Revista del Archivo Nacional del Peru, Lima, 1936, 170. Quoted in Acosta Rodríguez, “Ávila,” 563. Archivo Arzobispal de Lima, Causas de Capítulos, legajo 1, fol. 1r–141r. The dossier, as many others dealing with legal matters, is not complete nor organized in strict chronological order. The numbers for the total of charges and of the accusers are a minimum from what can be reconstructed of the information given in the dossier. Some of the folios are undated. There is no English translation of it. The quotations in the following pages are my own translations based on the transcription made by José Miguel Escribano of the original folios. AAL, Causas, fol. 3r, fol. 48r, 108r. Burns, Into the Archive, 138. Acosta Rodríguez, “Ávila.” Though not directly analyzing the lawsuit, Spalding provided an insightful and detailed contextualization of economic relations in the Andes, with specific examples from Huarochirí before Ávila’s arrival. Spalding, An Andean Society, 121–35. Duviols, La destrucción; Duviols et al., Procesos; García, “Ávila y la extirpación.” The debate is still open regarding the timing and motivation of the accusations and Ávila’s anti-idolatry campaign. Galen Brokaw, “La recepción del quipu en el siglo XVI,” in El quipu colonial. Estudios y materiales, ed. Marco Curátola and José Carlos De la Puente Luna (Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2013); Beatriz Loza, “El uso de los quipus contra la administración colonial española (1550–1600),” Nueva Síntesis, no. 7–8 (2001): 65–73; Gary Urton, “An Overview of Spanish Colonial Commentary on Andean Knotted-String Records,” in Nar-

NOTES TO PAGES 79–83

55.

56.

57.

58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69.

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rative Threads: Accounting and Recounting in Andean Khipu, ed. Jeffrey Quilter and Gary Urton (Austin: Texas University Press, 2002). These recommendations were made in El gobierno del Perú (1567) by Juan de Matienzo, president of the Real Audiencia of Lima and Charcas since 1561. A similar opinion was given by Francisco de Toledo, viceroy of Peru from 1569 to 1581, in his governing rules and laws, see Francisco de Toledo, Francisco de Toledo: Disposiciones gubernativas para el virreinato del Peru, 1569–1574, ed. Guillermo Lohmann Villena, 2 vols. (Sevilla: Escuela de Estudios HispanoAmericanos de Sevilla, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones, Científicas, 1986–1989). Carlos Sempat Assadourian, “String Registries: Native Accounting and Memory According to the Colonial Sources,” in Narrative Threads: Accounting and Recounting in Andean Khipu, ed. Jeffrey Quilter and Gary Urton (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 136. Gary Urton, “From Knots to Narratives: Reconstructing the Art of Historical Record Keeping in the Andes from Spanish Transcriptions of Inka Khipus,” Ethnohistory 45, no. 3 (1998). Cacique is an Arawak word that Spaniards used to refer to Indigenous lords from the Caribbean to the Andes. The Andean term for the main Indigenous authority was curaca, but usually in the documentation the terms curaca and cacique are used as synonyms. AAL, Causas, fol. 46r–48r. All quotations in English are my translations, unless otherwise noted. AAL, Causas, fol. 108r–109v. AAL, Causas, fol. 3r. AAL, Causas, fol. 3r–3v. Spalding, An Andean Society, 161–67. The distribution of collected Indigenous tribute to different colonial authorities varied in all districts and provinces. For a specific analysis of Huarochirí province and the interaction between curaca, the corregidor de indios, and the encomendero, see Spalding, An Andean Society, 124–35. Spalding, An Andean Society, 164. Spalding, An Andean Society, 166. AAL, Causas, fol. 110r–111r. AAL, Causas, fol. 108r. Information contained in the dossier related to this petición or memorial seems to point to the claims having been made originally on September 22, 1607. AAL, Causas, fol. 3r. These claims were made on September 28, 1607 but an incomplete copy of it was placed at the beginning of the dossier. Since the 1550s royal officials favored keeping records of tribute in its monetary value rather than in quantities of goods and services. By the end of the sixteenth century tribute in money was generalized, see Mónica Medelius, “El descargo en las cuentas de quipucamayos en un pleito entre encomenderos (Huamanga,

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70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81. 82.

83. 84. 85. 86.

87.

NOTES TO PAGES 83–87

1572),” in El quipu colonial. Estudios y materiales, ed. Marco Curátola and José Carlos De la Puente Luna (Lima: Fondo Ed., Pontificia Univ. Católica del Perú, 2013), 246–47. But in Huarochirí, as the lawsuit shows, locals still found it pertinent to complain at their priest’s preference to receive tribute in money rather than in goods. AAL, Causas, fol. 46v. AAL, Causas, fol. 4r. AAL, Causas, fol. 9v-16v; 16v–fol. 28v; 31v-37v AAL, Causas, fol. 9v. AAL, Causas, fol. 110v. Gregory Haimovich, “Linguistic Consequences of Evangelization in Colonial Peru: Analyzing the Quechua Corpus of the Doctrina Christiana y Catecismo,” Journal of Language Contact 10, no. 2 (May 2017): 204–05; Taylor, Ritos y tradiciones, xxvi-xxvii. Durston, Pastoral Quechua, 208, 11; Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo, 217. Lima, Tercero cathecismo, fol. 67v–68r. Donato Amado Gonzales, “Los quipucamayos contadores de hacienda y de los mitayos de plaza y de tambos del Cuzco,” in El quipu colonial. Estudios y materiales, ed. Marco Curátola and José Carlos De la Puente Luna (Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2013); Luis Miguel Glave, “El quipu que los indios de Parinacocha presentaron al licenciado Polo,” in El quipu colonial. Estudios y materiales, ed. Marco Curátola and José Carlos De la Puente Luna (Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2013). AAL, Causas, fol. 134v. AAL, Causas, fol. 69r–v. The number of the question and of the answer does not coincide but they both refer to the same accusation. Brokaw, “La recepción del quipu,” 122–23. My thanks to historian Ana Belem Fernández de Castro (EUI) for helping me understand the complexities of the early modern Spanish legal system. K. Burns has labelled this “truth by template,” referring to the regular use of formulaic phrases in documents such as contracts and wills produced by notaries. Such templates created the textual illusion of the notary being physically present at the moment the text was written when, in fact, he would most likely be absent and sign it beforehand or afterward. Burns, Into the Archive, 37–39. Assadourian, “String Registries,” 135. Mokyr, Culture of Growth, 129–31. Acosta, Procuranda, 63–65. My underlining. The use of Hindu-Arabic or Arabic numerals in Europe started around the 10th century AD. Its introduction to Spain is discussed in Javier Docampo Rey, “Reading Luca Pacioli’s Summa in Catalonia: An Early 16th-Century Catalan Manuscript on Algebra and Arithmetic,” Historia Mathematica, no. 33 (2006). The documents are held in the Archivo Real y General de Navarra (AGN), Comptos (CO), Papeles Sueltos (PS), 1ª serie, Legajo 172. José Miguel Escribano kindly shared these documents with me, which are analyzed in José Miguel

NOTES TO PAGES 87–92

88.

89. 90. 91.

92. 93. 94.

95.

96. 97. 98. 99.

100. 101. 102.

103.

207

Escribano-Paez, Juan Rena and the Frontiers of Spanish Empire, 1500–1540, Early Modern Iberian History in Global Contexts: Connexions (New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2020). My thanks to Julia McClure, who shared with me the images of the accounts she found in the Archive of Seville. Hermandad Vera Cruz Sevilla, AHVCS, “Quentas de capilla desde 1640–1650.” The account of the Caja Real is held at the Newberry Library, Ayer Collection, MS 1878. I elaborate on the role of quipu in colonial numeracy from a translatlantic perspective in a forthcoming article. According to Ascher & Ascher, quipus reveal that Andeans were familiar with, at least, addition, division into equal parts, division into simple unequal fractional parts, multiplication by integers and by fractions. Marcia Ascher and Robert Ascher, Mathematics of the Incas: Code of the Quipu (Mineola, NY: Dover Publ., 1997), 151–52. See also Gary Urton and Primitivo Nina Llanos, The Social Life of Numbers: A Quechua Ontology of Numbers and Philosophy of Arithmetic (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997). AAL, Causas, fol. 40r–44r. AAL, Causas, fol. 89r–91r. This was also pointed out by Antonio Acosta Rodríguez, “El pleito de los indios de San Damián (Huarochirí) contra Francisco de Ávila, 1607,” Historiograf ía y bibliograf ía americanistas, no. 23 (1979). The role of Choque Casa in the legal process and his portrayal in the Huarochirí manuscript have been discussed in Durston, “Notes on the Authorship”; Durston, “Choquecasa and the Making”; José Carlos De la Puente Luna, “Choquecasa va a la audiencia: Cronistas, litigantes y el debate sobre la autoría del manuscrito quechua de Huarochirí,” Histórica 39, no. 1 (2015). I discuss Choque Casa and his connection to the HM in the next chapter. AAL, Causas, fol. 92r–v. The account books in this case refer to “los libros de visita y hospital.” AAL, Causas, fol. 96v. Acosta Rodríguez, “El pleito,” 21. AAL, Causas, fol. 100r. My translation is based on G. Taylor’s Spanish translation of the Quechua text. Taylor, Camac, 51. It differs subtly but in important ways from Ávila’s Spanish version. AAL, Causas, fol. 102r. Brokaw, “La recepción del quipu,” 130–31. Charles, “More Ladino,” 23. Rolena Adorno, “The Indigenous Ethnographer: The ‘Indio Ladino’ as Historian and Cultural Mediation” in Implicit understandings: Observing, reporting, and reflecting on the encounters between Europeans and other peoples in the early modern era, ed. Stuart B. Schwartz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 379–81. AAL, Causas, fol. 55r–63v.

208

NOTES TO PAGES 92–103

104. AAL, Causas, fol. 130v–131r. 105. For example, the son of a cacique described as “ladino,” who did not know Spanish but knew how to sign. AAL, Causas, fol. 5r–16v; 136r–v. 106. AAL, Causas, fol. 41r. 107. AAL, Causas, fol. 93v. 108. AAL, Causas, fol. 102v. 109. AAL, Causas, fol. 56v–57r. 110. AAL, Causas, fol. 100v. 111. AAL, Causas, fol. 96r. 112. Platt, “‘Without Deceit,” 261, note 26. 113. Burns, Into the Archive, 124. 114. On Indigenous litigation as “legal activism” in early colonial Peru, see José Carlos De la Puente Luna, “‘That Which Belongs to All’: Khipus, Community, and Indigenous Legal Activism in the Early Colonial Andes,” The Americas 72, no. 1 (2015). For a fascinating analysis of eighteenth-century Indigenous use of colonial legal system in Peru, see Alcira Dueñas, “The Lima Indian Letrados: Remaking the República de Indios in the Bourbon Andes,” The Americas 72, no. 1 (2015). 115. Leon de Pinelo, fol. 56r-56v. On protectores de índios and León de Pinelo, see: Mauricio Novoa, The Protectors of Indians in the Royal Audience of Lima: History, Careers and Legal culture, 1575–1775 (Leiden: Brill Nijhoff, 2016). 116. Leon de Pinelo fol. 34r. 117. Which is not to say that quipus disappeared. For a study of the continuity of use of quipus well into the twentieth century, see Frank Salomon, The Cord Keepers: Khipus and Cultural Life in a Peruvian Village (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004).

CH A P T ER 3 1.

2. 3.

This use of writing was becoming widespread among Andeans as the colonial period progressed. See for example Charles, Allies at Odds; Alcira Dueñas, Indians and Mestizos in the “Lettered City”: Reshaping Justice, Social Hierarchy, and Political Culture in Colonial Peru (Boulder: Univ. Press of Colorado, 2010); Rappaport and Cummins, Beyond the Lettered City, 114–51. Lydia Fossa, “The Discourse of History in Andean America: Europeans Writing for Europeans” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1996). In this chapter and throughout the rest of the book I adhere to Salomon and Urioste George’s (1991) spelling of names of huacas and human characters mentioned in the HM. Except where indicated, all quotes from the Huraochirí manuscript in English have been taken from Salomon and Urioste’s English edition. To aid the reader, when quoting from that edition I use their modern pagination and include the chapter number for reference.

NOTES TO PAGES 103–107

4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

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The Quechua term ayllu usually appears as synonym for community. James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz, Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 173–74. However, Salomon notes that ayllu in the HM should not be taken as the minimal or the only unit of descent. Salomon, introduction, 22. Arguedas and Duviols, introduction to Dioses y hombres de Huarochirí: Narración quechua, 9. Arguedas and Duviols, Dioses y hombres de Huarochirí: Narración quechua, 9–11; Zenón Depaz Toledo, La cosmo-visión andina en el manuscrito de Huarochirí, Estudios Filosóficos. Colección Martín Adán (Lima: Vicio Perpetuo, 2015), 17–18; María Rostworowski, “Presentación,” in Ritos y tradiciones de Huarochirí: Manuscrito quechua de comienzos del siglo XVII, ed. Gerald Taylor (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos; Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos, 1987), 10. Discussing how the corpus of Latin American literature is defined, Lienhard argued that those texts that are labelled as authentic “Amerindian” literature cannot be read as pre-Hispanic Indigenous discourses, given that the use of writing for their creation already inscribes them in the history of European colonization. Lienhard, La voz y su huella, 121 I am echoing Catherine Julien’s interpretation of Inca history based on the accounts of the Inca dynastic past. Catherine J. Julien, Reading Inca History (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002), 8. All titles for the first six chapters appear to be ex post facto insertions to the Quechua text as indicated by the quality of the ink and the tight space they occupy in the folio. A comprehensive discussion of authorship of the HM is addressed in chapter 4 of this book. Arguedas and Duviols, Dioses y hombres de Huarochirí: Narración quechua, 234; Taylor, Ritos y tradiciones, xv; Salomon, introduction, 6–8. Durston, Pastoral Quechua. Frank Salomon and L. Urioste George, eds., The Huarochirí Manuscript: A Testament of Ancient and Colonial Andean Religion (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 52. My underlining. “[Ñ]uqanchik christianokuna” is also used in chapter 4 of the HM. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 130 [ch. 28]. The colonial era texts by Spanish soldier Cieza de León and mestizo writer Garcilaso de la Vega discuss the use that Andeans made of the term huiracocha in their interactions with non-Indigenous. Taylor, Ritos y tradiciones, 484. According to Pease (1995: 137–160) the notion that Andeans took Spaniards for gods was a much later invention. Quoted in Lamana, Domination without dominance, 28. Lamana, Domination without dominance, 31. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 132 [ch. 29].

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19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29. 30.

NOTES TO PAGES 107–109

Taylor, Ritos y tradiciones, 3. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 41. My underlining. Jeremy Ravi Mumford, Vertical Empire: The General Resettlement of Indians in the Colonial Andes (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012), 79. Lockhart and Schwartz note that the resettlements taking place throughout Huarochirí were not all on new sites, and the number of settlements rose again, with Andeans moving back in the direction of their previous dwelling patterns. Lockhart and Schwartz, Early Latin America, 173. Duviols, La destrucción, 310–24; Lockhart and Schwartz, Early Latin America, 173–75. There had been two previous failed attempts to resettle the Andean populations before Toledo’s. The resettling of Indigenous peoples in Spanish American territories has a longer history though, starting in the island of Hispaniola and extending to central Mexico. But it was in sixteenth-century Peru that it became a large-scale policy. Duviols, La destrucción, 317–20; Salomon, introduction, 18–21. Duviols, La destrucción, 317–20. Peter Gose, Invaders as Ancestors: On the Intercultural Making and Unmaking of Spanish Colonialism in the Andes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008); William H. Isbell, Mummies and Mortuary Monuments. A Postprocessual Prehistory of Central Andean Social Organization (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), 15–16; Susan E. Ramírez, To Feed and Be Fed: The Cosmological Bases of Authority and Identity in the Andes (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005); Frank Salomon, “‘The Beautiful Grandparents’: Andean Ancestor Shrines and Mortuary Ritual as Seen Through Colonial Records,” in Tombs for the Living: Andean Mortuary Practices. A symposium at Dumbarton Oaks 12th and 13th October 1991, ed. Tom D. Dillehay (Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks research Library, 1995). Though huaca is usually translated to English as “deity,” this Andean notion does not fully overlap with the dualism of matter and spirit implied in the Christian terms “god” and “divine.” Salomon asserts that in the world conveyed by the people of Huarochirí, “huacas are made of energized matter, like everything else, and they act within nature, not over and outside it as Western supernaturals do.” Salomon, introduction, 19. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 120. On Andean doubling or proxies see Frank Salomon, “Turbulent Tombs,” in Living with the Dead in the Andes, ed. James L. Fitzsimmons and Izumi Shimada (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2015). These are chapters 22 and 31. Geertz has discussed cultural objects as “texts.” Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973). In the field of Andean studies, Ramos made a subtle but interesting suggestion to expand our reading of archives when discussing notions of death in the Andes. She makes the case for the relevance of reading the archive of pre-Hispanic burial artifacts

NOTES TO PAGES 109–113

31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44. 45. 46.

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such as mummies, along with reading the textual archive of wills written in the colonial period. Gabriela Ramos, Muerte y conversión en los Andes: Lima y Cuzco, 1532–1670 (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos: Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos, 2010), 25–28. Salomon, introduction, 16. Salomon and Urioste George. Huarochirí Manuscript, 75–76 [ch. 9]. It ought to be stressed that the program of reducciones of the second half of the sixteenth century (or “mature colonial period,” according to Lockhart and Schwartz) differs from nineteenth century policies regarding Indigenous populations in settler colonial states throughout the Americas (e.g. “reservations” in North America). The latter aimed to literally reduce Indigenous populations, whereas the earlier reducciones in Peru and elsewhere of the Spanish American territories aimed to increase the subject population. The actual outcome of Toledo’s project was less successful in terms of its own stated goals than what is suggested by the body of legislation he produced. Gose, Invaders as Ancestors, 119–22, 61–64; Mumford, Vertical Empire, 119–59. Acosta, Procuranda, 59–69. The text remained in manuscript form until the nineteenth century, when it was printed for the first time. Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, Brian S. Bauer, and Vania Smith-Oka, The History of the Incas [1572] (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007); Luis Millones Figueroa, “Colonial Andean Texts in English Translation,” Latin American Research Review 44, no. 2 (2009). The larger goal of Sarmiento’s and Toledo’s enterprise at reinterpreting Inca past was to counter Bartolome de Las Casas campaign to restore sovereignty to Indigenous lords of the Andes. Sarmiento de Gamboa, Bauer, and Smith-Oka, The History of the Incas [1572], 210–11. Millones Figueroa, “Colonial Andean Texts in English Translation,” 186. Alaperrine-Bouyer, Educación. By 1572 priest Michael de la Torre reported that Andeans in Quito were paying others to teach them “language and music,” which in the first case meant Spanish language and in the second presumably musical notation. Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo, 120. A similar school opened in Cuzco in 1619 but was closed and reopened in several occasions due to political clashes between royal and church officials. The creation of the schools in La Plata and Quito in 1621 experienced the same problems. Alaperrine-Bouyer, Educación, 72–77, 80–109. Durston, Pastoral Quechua, 72–73; Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo, 116. Regina Harrison has called this process “semantic relocation.” Harrison, Signs, Songs, and Memory. Taylor, Ritos y tradiciones, xv. I have restored the term dios in Spanish—as it appears in the original Quechua manuscript—to Salomon and Urioste’s translation of both passages, which

212

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

54.

55.

56. 57. 58.

59. 60.

61. 62.

NOTES TO PAGES 113–116

incorporate the English term “god.” Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 70–71 [ch. 9]. In chapters 20, 21, and in the first supplement, dios is used to refer to the Christian god. Duviols, La destrucción, 39–40. A more detailed discussion of possible definitions of supay and the history of its translation in Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo, 104–12; Taylor, Camac, 19–34. Domingo de Santo Tomás, Lexicón o Vocabulario de la lengua general del Perú [1560], ed. Jan Szemiñski (Lima: El Santo Oficio, Códice Ed., 2006), 713. Santo Tomás, Lexicón o Vocabulario de la lengua general del Perú [1560], 713. My translation to English. Concilio Provincial de Lima, Doctrina christiana y catecismo para instruccion de los indios y de las de mas personas que han de ser enseñadas en Nuestra Sancta Fé (Lima: Antonio Ricardo, 1584), fol. 33r. Catecismo mayor. Quispe-Agnoli has pointed out a similar ambivalent stance regarding “supay” in Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Primer Nueva Coronica. Rocío Quispe-Agnoli, “The Indigenous Sacred as Evil Otherness in Early Colonial Andes,” in To Be Indio in Colonial Spanish America, ed. Mónica Díaz (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017). Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 62–65 [ch. 7–9]. Harrison analyzes modern-day gendered uses of “supay” among Indigenous women in Ecuador. Harrison, Signs, Songs, and Memory, 20–24. I have restored the term llacta in Quechua—as it appears in the original manuscript—to Salomon and Urioste George’s translation, which incorporated the English term “village.” Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 102 [ch. 20]. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 103 [ch. 20]. Spalding, An Andean Society. For a detailed list of the Spanish loan words that appear in the HM, see James Lockhart, “Three Experiences of Culture Contact: Nahua, Maya and Quechua,” in Native Traditions in the Postconquest World, ed. Elizabeth Hill Boone and Tom Cummings (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1998), 52; Taylor, Ritos y tradiciones, 484–502. Lockhart, “Three Experiences,” 35–37. Lockhart, “Three Experiences,” 45. The other colonial mundane Quechua texts written by Andeans—which cover a personal letter, and brief texts meant to be used in legal procedures—have been analyzed as a corpus more recently in Durston, “Native-Language Literacy”; Itier, “Les textes quechuas coloniaux: Une source privilégiée pour l’histoire culturelle andine.” “[E]l modo tosco y corrupto de hablar [Quechua] que hay en algunas privincias.” Lima, Doctrina christiana, fol. 83r Rafael has analyzed the process and effects of colonization of native languages in the Philipines, where the use of Tagalog as language of evangelization alien-

NOTES TO PAGES 116–122

63.

64. 65. 66.

67. 68.

69.

70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

213

ated the native speakers from their own language. Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 35–39. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 59 [ch. 5]. Salomon interprets this “myth-within-myth” as a conveying the theme of overpopulation and hunger. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 59, note 133. Taylor considers it a story of how the mispronunciation of a “magical formula” brings bad luck to deer. Taylor, Ritos y tradiciones, 73, note 113. Taylor, Ritos y tradiciones, 3, note 1. In the introduction to his book of sermons, Ávila mentions that he wrote a treatise on these matters. To this date only two full transcriptions of the complete Tratado y relación have been published. See Arguedas and Duviols, Dioses y hombres de Huarochirí: Narración quechua, 198–217; Dedenbach-Salazar Sáenz, Estudio analítico, 34. A detailed paleographic analysis of MS 3160 (BNE) is available in Cuenca Muñoz, “Análisis paleográfico.” This argument was developed in a shorter version in Laura León Llerena, “Narrating Conversion: Idolatry, the Sacred, and the Ambivalences of Christian Evangelization in Colonial Peru,” in Coloniality, Religion, and the Law in the Early Iberian World, ed. Santa Arias and Raúl Marrero-Fente, Hispanic Issues (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2013). Ávila, Tratado y relacion de los errores. All the references in English to Ávila’s Tratado y relación correspond to my translation of the original manuscript in Spanish. Ávila, Tratado y relacion de los errores, fol. 115. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 43 [ch. 1]. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 43 [ch. 1]. Huacas do not create ex nihilo, as the Christian God, but rather bring other entities into being (Salomon) or “energize” them (Taylor). The Quechua term used in the HM is “camay,” while the notion of creation or the act, “to create,” would be expressed with the Quechua verb “ruray” (to make). Salomon, introduction, 16; Taylor, Camac. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 44 [ch. 1]. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 44 [ch. 1]. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 88 [ch. 14]. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 88 [ch. 14]. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 91 [ch. 15]. Ávila, Tratado y relacion de los errores, fol.116r. Ávila, Tratado y relacion de los errores, fol. 116r. My underlining. Duviols et al., Procesos, 21–52; Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo, 194–205. A comparative study of notions of idolatry that fueled campaigns of extirpation of idolatry in New Spain and Peru in Bernand and Gruzinski, De la idolatría, 129–71.

214

82. 83.

NOTES TO PAGES 122–128

MacCormack, Religion in the Andes, 349–82. BNE, MS 3169, fol. 61r–63v. The summary of Garcilaso’s text was, according to a note at the end of it, “written on June 1st of 1613.” Garcilaso’s book, however, may have entered Ávila’s library well before that date. 84. BNE, MS 3169, fol. 64v. 85. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 52 [ch. 3]. 86. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 53 [ch. 4]. 87. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 53 [ch.4]. The sentence added in brackets has not been translated in the Salomon and Urioste George edition. I am translating from Dedenbach-Salazar’s rendering in Spanish of this chapter. Dedenbach-Salazar Sáenz, Estudio analítico, 99. 88. BNE, MS 3169, fol. 120r–121r. 89. BNE, MS 3169, fol. 120r. 90. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 65 [ch. 7]. The Spanish loan word “alcalde” (mayor) used in the HM probably refers to the Indigenous official in charge of the general administration of his village, as stipulated by Viceroy Toledo’s legislation. The alcalde had legal authority over distribution of village lands and was tasked with supervising the conduct of the villagers. Spalding, An Andean Society, 216. 91. BNE, MS 3169, fol. 120v. 92. BNE, MS 3169, fol. 120v. 93. Ávila owned books about cartography, time zones, and time measurement; these included three volumes of writings by “Gerardo Mercator” and two books by Abraham Hortelius (AGN, Protocolo notarial, fol. 1036v, 1058v). The priest also owned a wooden sun-clock, a “reloj de pesas y despertador,” and two “ampolletas de arena” (fol. 1079v). The latter was required from students at San Marcos, see Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Constitución CXXVII in Constituciones y ordenanças de la Vniuersidad, y Studio General de la Ciudad de los Reyes del Piru. (Ciudad de los Reyes: Antonio Ricardo, 1602), fol. 22r. 94. Chapters 9 and 10 of the HM offer details of how Andeans used the Sun to measure time. 95. BNE, MS 3169, fol. 121r–v. 96. Some of those marginal requests for more information read “ask the name of this spring and where it is”; “ask why they put this coca [leaves].” Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 57, 59 [ch. 9]. 97. Sarmiento de Gamboa, Bauer, and Smith-Oka, The History of the Incas [1572], 45. My underlining. 98. Cohen and Glover, Colonial Mediascapes; Boone and Mignolo, Writing Without Words; Rappaport and Cummins, Beyond the Lettered City. 99. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 41–42. The Quechua manuscript does not include the term “Spanish.” 100. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 112–13 [ch. 22].

NOTES TO PAGES 129–133

215

101. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 142 [ch. 31]. 102. Salomon, The Cord Keepers. 103. “To fade from view” is conveyed in the Quechua manuscript as “chinkaykuq” (root chincani). According to Gonzalez Holguin’s dictionary this Quechua term can mean to be lost, to disappear, to be absent, and even to run away or to escape, but crucially, it does not mean to forget. The Quechua term for “to forget” is “cconccani.” Diego González Holguín, Vocabulario de la lengua general de todo el Peru lamada lengua qquichua o del Inca [1608]. Prólogo de Raúl Porras Barrenechea. (Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 1989), 110; Ávila, Tratado y relacion de los errores. 104. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 45 [ch. 1]. Textiles of different qualities were given as tribute to the Inka state in pre-Hispanic times. The production of those was organized by age and gender, with women having an important role in textile production. Denise Y. Arnold, El textil y la documentación del tributo en los Andes: Los significados del tejido en contextos tributarios (Lima: Fondo editorial de la Asamblea Nacional de Rectores del Perú, 2012), 203–13. 105. Lockhart, Spanish Peru 1532–1560: A Colonial Society, 76–82; Tamar Herzog, Mediación, archivos y ejercicio: Los escribanos de Quito (siglo XVII) (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1996). 106. The Primer Concilio Provincial of Mexico decreed in 1555 that parish priests had to keep written accounts of baptisms and deaths. The Council of Trent would later include a similar requirement for parishes beyond those of New Spain. Sánchez-Albornoz, Historia mínima de la población de América Latina desde los tiempos precolombinos al año 2025, 25. 107. Burns, Into the Archive, 3; Carolyn Dean, “Beyond prescription: notarial doodles and other marks,” Word & Image. 25, no. 3 (2009). 108. “Señor Santiago único patrón Br [?] de guerras del rey mi señor. Señor Santiago único patrón que lleva la bandera del rey mi señor. Jesús, María, luz del día, tú me guías a mi mano para que yo salga muy buen escribano de menudo y de mediano. Amén Jesus.” BNE, MS 3169, fol. 114v. 109. The scribble has only been noted as a point of reference to the unresolved issue of the HM’s attribution of authorship, which is discussed in the next chapter of this book. 110. Ancient Egyptians and the Maya had also identified a deity who gave humans the sacred gift of writing. 111. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 84 [ch. 13]. 112. Taylor, Ritos y tradiciones, 179. 113. Lima, Doctrina christiana, fol.12–13. 114. Lima, Doctrina christiana, fol. 13. My translation. 115. Lima, Doctrina christiana, fol. 25. My translation. 116. “[E]nseñar al simple, que no sabe,” Lima, Doctrina christiana, fol. 8v–9r. My translation.

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NOTES TO PAGES 133–137

117. In a letter written in 1571, Jesuit Juan Gómez describes how instrumental smart young and older locals were in persuading the rest of their communities in Huarochirí to convert wholeheartedly to Christianity and renounce to their old beliefs. Arguedas and Duviols, Dioses y hombres de Huarochirí: Narración quechua, “Documentos. Los jesuitas en Huarochirí, 1571,” 241–244. 118. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 73, [ch.9]. 119. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 75 [ch. 9]. 120. AAL, Causas, fol. 9v–28v; 31r–34v. 121. The creation of schools for Indigenous peoples in New Spain and Peru was initially considered a first step towards preparing the neophytes to eventually become ordained priests. Plans of Indigenous ordination were soon abandoned, with an explicit prohibition decreed in Peru in 1582. Alaperrine-Bouyer, Educación, 15–16. 122. José de Acosta, Historia natural y moral de las Indias: En que se tratan de las cosas notables del cielo, elementos, metales, plantas y animales dellas, y los ritos, y ceremonias, leyes y gobierno, de los Indios (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1962). Specifically for Jesuit missionary strategies in Brazil, see João Adolfo Hansen, “Anchieta: Poesía em tupi e produção da alma,” in Moderno de Nascença. Figurações críticas do Brasil, ed. Benjamin Abdala and Cara Salete de Almeida (São Paulo: Boitempo editorial, 2006). 123. “[P]orque en la letra dezían epitetos muy buenos a Nuestro Señor. Y preguntado de donde lo sacaban, dezían que los mismos que antiguamente daban al sol y a su Rey, ésos conbertían en loor de Jesuchristo tomando matheria de lo que oían predicar.” Arguedas and Duviols, “Documentos. Los jesuitas en Huarochirí, 1571” in Dioses y hombres de Huarochirí: Narración quechua, 243. 124. “De la mano y pluma de Thomas,” BNE MS 3169, fol. 91r. 125. Claudette Kemper Columbus, “Curious Confessions: Cristóbal Choquecaxa, Informant and Actor of Huarochirí,” in Andean Oral Traditions: Discourse and Literature/Tradiciones Orales Andinas: Discurso y Literatura, ed. Beyersdorff Margot and Dedenbach-Salazar Sabine, Bonner Amerikanistische Studien (Bonn: Holos, 1994); Durston, “Notes on the Authorship.”; Durston, “Choquecasa and the Making.” Salomon, Nightmare victory: The meanings of conversion among Peruvian indians (Huarochirí, 1608), 7. 126. Arguedas and Duviols, Dioses y hombres de Huarochirí: Narración quechua; Salomon, introduction, 24–27. 127. Taylor, Ritos y tradiciones, xiii-xv. 128. Durston, “Choquecasa and the Making”; Durston, “Notes on the Authorship”; John Rowe Taylor, “Introducción a la edición de 1987” in Ritos y tradiciones, xiv. 129. Durston, “Notes on the Authorship,” 233–34. 130. Juan Carlos Galende Díaz and Manuel Salamanca López, Una escritura para la modernidad: La letra cortesana (Cagliari: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Istituto di Storia dell’Europa Mediterranea, 2012).

NOTES TO PAGES 137–141

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131. Juan de Yciar, Orthographia pratica (Zaragoza: Bartholome de Nagera, 1548). Yciar’s was the first printed calligraphy manual in Spain, earlier ones were printed in Italy. On Yciar, see Jessica Berenbeim, “Script after Print: Juan de Yciar and the Art of Writing,” Word & Image 26, no. 3 (June 2010). 132. Burns, “Making Indigenous Archives.” 133. Charles, “Trained by Jesuits,” 66. 134. Burns, Into the Archive, 68, 141, 82, note 2. 135. Michel Foucault, The Foucault reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), 101–20. 136. Durston, “Notes on the Authorship,” 239. 137. Adorno, “Images of Indios Ladinos in Early Colonial Peru.” 138. “[T]odos somos Christianos, y ninguno sabemos que trate desta maldad. Por tanto no nos prediqueys mas de Idolatrias, porque es grande afrenta y que de las Dotrinas [sic] vezinas lo an notado, y nos lo an dicho.” Ávila, Tratado de los Evangelios, vol.1, “Prefación,” unnumbered page. 139. “[U]n Indio principal afecto a la religion, que oy viue, y se dize Don Christobal Choquueccaca, natural de San Damian.” Ávila, Tratado de los Evangelios, vol. 1, “Prefación,” unnumbered page. 140. “[M]e matarán como pudieren.” Ávila, Tratado de los Evangelios, vol.1, “Prefación,” unnumbered page. 141. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 102, note 473 [ch. 20]. 142. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 104, note 494 [ch. 20]. 143. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 103 [ch. 20]. My underlining. 144. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 110 [ch. 21]. 145. The importance of Pacha Camac and the expansion of his cult have been studied, among others, by Luis Millones, Historia y poder en los Andes centrales: Desde los orígenes hasta el siglo XVII (Madrid: Alianza America, 1987); María Rostworowski, Estructuras Andinas del Poder. Ideología religiosa y política (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1983). 146. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 104 [ch. 20]. “This is the cross” has been added by Salomon and Urioste George. In the Quechua manuscript there is only a drawing of a small cross in this passage of the text (figure 11). BNE, MS 3169, fol. 86r. 147. Dreams as omens or harbingers of things to come are also a recurrence in many other cultures. For a study of dreams in Andean culture, see Bruce Mannheim, “A Semiotic of Andean Dreams,” in Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations, ed. Barbara Tedlock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 148. “No aveys de dar credito a sueños, ni pedir q[ue] os los declaren, porque los sueños son vanidad.” Lima, Tercero cathecismo, fol. 113v, sermon xix. 149. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 110 [ch. 21].

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NOTES TO PAGES 142–150

150. De la Puente Luna, “Choquecasa va a la Audiencia.”; Taylor, Camac, 36, note 6; Salomon, introduction, 28. 151. Acosta Rodríguez, “Ávila,” 571. 152. “[P]ara sabello y ayudar a los yndios pobres de ellos” AAL, Causas, fol. 9v. 153. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 65 [ch. 7]. 154. AGN, Protocolo notarial, fol. 1061r.

CH A P T ER 4 1.

2.

3.

4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

This text is usually attributed the year of 1613 as date of its creation, but historian Pierre Duviols has argued convincingly for the revision of such dating. Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua, Relación, 18–20. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno, ed. John V. Murra, Rolena Adorno, and Jorge Urioste (Mexico, D. F.: Siglo Veintiuno, [c.1615] 2006), fol.18 [18]. Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica, fol. 1121 [1131]. He also mentions a lawsuit that involved curacas of Huarochirí before the conflict with Ávila, Frank Salomon, “Testimonios en triangulo: Personajes de la Nueva cronica de Guaman Poma y del manucscrito quechua de Huarochirí en el pleito sobre el cacicazgo principal de Mama (1588–1590),” (2003). AAL, Protocolo notarial, fol. 1069v. José de Acosta, The Natural and Moral History of the Indies, by Father Joseph de Acosta: Reprinted from the English Translated Edition of Edward Grimeston, 1604 Volume I: The Natural History (Books I, II, III and IV), trans. Edward Grimeston, ed. Clements R. Markham (Farnham, UK: Taylor and Francis, 2010), book 1, 70. Acosta, Natural and Moral History, book 1, 72. “[C]reo en Dios trino y uno, el qual es poderoso dios que crió al çielo y tierra [ . . . ] y luego crió al primer hombre Adan Eba a su imagen y simijansa, progenitor del género humano etc. cuya desendençia somos los naturales de Tauantinsuyo, como los demás naciones questán poblados en todo el universo mundo.” Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua, Relación, 186. “Crió Dios al mundo.” Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica, fol. 12. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, First New Chronicle and Good Government: On the History of the World and the Incas up To 1615. Edited by Roland Hamilton, trans. Roland Hamilton (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), fol. 7. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 43 [ch. 1], 46, 49 [ch. 2]. This is discussed in detail in chapter 1. The extent to which ecclesiastical discourse informed the Relación de antigüedades is discussed in detail in Harrison, “Modes of Discourse”; Duviols, “Estudio y comentario etnohistórico.”

NOTES TO PAGES 150–154

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

219

“[N]otiçias antiquísimos y las historias, barbarismos y fábulas del tiempo de las gentilidades.” Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua, Relación, 187. A very productive debate regarding Pachacuti’s drawings between Pierre Duviols and Tom Zuidema can be found in Thérèse Bouysse-Cassagne and Thierry Saignes, eds., Saberes y memorias en los Andes (Lima: Institut Français d’Etudes Andines, 1997). For other important sources on the issue, see Cummings, “Inka Art,” 183; Carolyn Dean, “Andean Androginy and the Making of Men,” in Gender in Pre-Hispanic America. A symposium at Dumbarton Oaks, ed. Cecelia F. Klein and Jeffrey Quilter (Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, 2001), 148–51; Duviols, “Estudio y comentario etnohistórico,” 30–61; Harrison, “Modes of Discourse,” 74–78. Salomon, “Chronicles of the Impossible,” 17. “[T]odas las falsedades y rritos y cerimonias del tiempo de la gentilidad.” Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua, Relación, 183. Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica, fol. 5. Guaman Poma de Ayala, First New Chronicle and Good Government, 6. “[H] azer ynmortal la memoria y nombre de los grandes señores antepasados nuestros agüelos como lo merecieron sus hazañas.” Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica, fol. 6 [6]–7 [7]. Guaman Poma de Ayala, First New Chronicle and Good Government, 8–9. “[P] ara sacar en linpio estas dichas historias ube tanto trabajo por ser cin escrito ni letra alguna, cino no más de quipos y rrelaciones de muchas lenguaxes ajuntando con la lengua de la castellana [ . . . ] todos los bocablos de yndios, que pasé tanto trauajo por ser serbicio de Dios Nuestro Señor y de su Sacra Católica Magestad, rrey don Phelipe el tercero.” Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica, fol. 11. A detailed analysis of the formal organization of the Corónica appears in Rolena Adorno and Ivan Boserup, New studies of the autograph manuscript of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2003), 10–11. Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica, fol. 10. There is a long list of publications concerning the drawings in Poma’s text and its Andean and European aesthetic references. Among them are Thomas B.F. Cummins, “The Uncomfortable Image: Pictures and Words in the Nueva corónica i buen gobierno,” in Guaman Poma de Ayala: The Colonial Art of an Andean Author, ed. Rolena Adorno and Mercedes López-Baralt (New York: Americas Society Art Gallery, 1992); López-Baralt, Icono y conquista. Adorno, Writing and Resistance, 78–79; Quispe-Agnoli, La fe andina en la escritura: Resistencia e identidad en la obra de Guamán Poma de Ayala, 39–94. Adorno, Writing and Resistance, 79. Adorno, Writing and Resistance, 60. Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica, 261 [263]–273 [27]5.

220

26.

27.

28.

29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

36.

37.

38.

NOTES TO PAGES 154–160

Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica, fol. 973 [991] It has not been possible so far to verify this genealogical claim by Poma. But his presence as witness, interpreter and assistant to colonial officials strongly suggest that he belonged to the Andean nobility. Adorno, Writing and Resistance, xi–lv. “[H]ablaua con todos los ýdolos uacas cada año. Y por suerte del demonio sauía todo Castilla y Roma y Jerusalén y Turquía.” Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica, fol. 111 [111]. My translation. Tamar Herzog, “Struggling over Indians: Territorial Conflict and Alliance Making in the Heartland of South America (Seventeenth to Eighteenth Centuries),” in Empire by Treaty: Negotiating European expansion, 1600–1900, ed. Saliha Belmessous (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); María Elena Martínez, “Indigenous Genealogies: Lineage, History, and the Colonial Pact in Central Mexico and Peru,” in Indigenous Intellectuals. Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes, ed. Gabriela Ramos and Yanna Yannakakis (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014). Specifically for the Andean case, see the classic study of Duviols, La destrucción. For a study of comparative colonialism, see Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization. Martínez, “Indigenous Genealogies,” 179. Martínez, “Indigenous Genealogies,” 179. This was the topic of debate of one of the sessions of the Third Council of Lima. Lisi, Tercer Concilio Limense y la aculturación, 205. Indeed similar drawings are found in the two manuscript chronicles of Inca history written by Mercedarian friar Martín de Murúa (1590, 1616), with whom Guaman Poma collaborated. Tom Cummins and Barbara Anderson, eds., The Getty Murúa: Essays on the Making of Martín de Murúa’s “Historia general del Piru,” J. Paul Getty Museum MS Ludwig XIII 16 (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008). “[S]oy todos bosotros” Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica, 950 [964]. My translation. Cristóbal de Mena, “La conquista del Perú llamada Nueva Castilla,” in Las relaciones primitivas de la conquista del Perú, ed. Raúl Porras Barrenechea (Paris: Impr. les Presses modernes, 1937), 85. MacCormack has studied how the reports of that encounter changed through time, emphasizing that the immediacy of the first accounts does not amount to truthfulness. Rather, the narrators telling and later retelling of the encounter should be taken as a sign of the fluctuating political context and the role they thought this story had in it. Sabine MacCormack, “Atahualpa and the Book,” Dispositio 14, no. 36/38 (1989). Francisco de Xerez, Verdadera relación de la conquista del Perú y provincia del Cuzco llamada la Nueva Castilla (Sevilla: Bartholomé Pérez, 1534). Seed’s translation, in Seed, “Failing to Marvel,” 17. Seed, “Failing to Marvel.”

NOTES TO PAGES 160–164

39. 40.

41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46.

47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57.

221

“[C]açi caçi era 10 mandamientos de Dios.” Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua, Relación, 189. The story of Tonapa or Tunapa as pre-Hispanic apostle preaching in the Andes appears in Alonso Ramos Gavilán, Historia del celebre santuario de Nuestra Señora de Copacabana (Lima: Geronymo de Contreras, 1621) and Antonio de la Calancha, Coronica moralizada del orden de San Augustin en el Peru, vol. II (Barcelona: Pedro Lacavalleria, 1638). Pachacuti uses the terms “cacique” and “curaca” as synonyms to refer to a Indigenous authority. “[D]io un palo de su bordón al dicho Apo Tampo.” Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua, Relación, 188–93. Brokaw gives a similar interpretation to the staff as containing Tonapa’s teachings, noting that other colonial sources mention the use of a colored-striped staff as “an indigenous semiotic medium.” Brokaw, “Semiotics, Aesthetics,” 190–91. Brokaw, “Semiotics, Aesthetics,” 191. See volume 1, book two, chapter I–IV in Calancha, Coronica moralizada, 309–340. “[Y] el marqués con el ynga, en compañía del Santo Ebangelio de Jesu Xpo Nuestro Señor, entraron con gran aparato real y pompa de gran magestad.” Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua, Relación, 268. “[P]or que entonces los demonios y diablos, como a gente sin letras y simples, ignorantes, ydiotas, con poca facilidad, se apoderaron haziéndose señor absoluto.” Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua, Relación, 211. Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica, fol. 92. Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica, fol. 93–95. “[Y] primer español de Castilla” Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica, fol.368 [370]. “De todo lo que pasan en este rreyno lo acienta.” Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica, fol. 361 [363]. Guaman Poma de Ayala, First New Chronicle and Good Government, fol. 359 [361]. MacCormack, “Atahualpa and the Book,” 149. “[H]ablauan cada uno con sus papeles, quilca.” Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica, 381 [383]. Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica, 381 [383]–383 [385]. On fear as tool for negotiation in colonial encounters, see Rolena Adorno, “The negotiation of fear in Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios,” in New World Encounters, ed. Stephen Greenblat (Berkely: University of California Press, 2000) and Lamana, Domination without Dominance, 46–48. Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica, 384 [386]–385 [387]. Seed, “Failing to Marvel,” 29. I am also echoing here Lamana’s assertion that the scene of the encounter in Cajamarca “does not stand on its own as a form

222

58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67.

68.

69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

NOTES TO PAGES 164–168

of encounter” and that attention has to be paid to the ongoing contact process, that is, the other events that coexisted and that can give us clues. Ginzburg and De Certau call them “indices” to the unfolding and parallel processes of sensemaking. Lamana, Domination without Dominance, 29. MacCormack, “Atahualpa and the Book,” 157. Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica, 15. On the role that Poma’s family played in his Christianity and the writing of his book, see Quispe-Agnoli, La fe andina en la escritura: Resistencia e identidad en la obra de Guamán Poma de Ayala, 121–26. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 74–75 [ch. 9]. These examples appear in chapter 10, 13, and 22 of the HM Chapters 18 and 19 of the HM. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 90 [ch. 14]. The word “Spanish” does not appear in the original manuscript; it has been added by Salomon and Urioste George for clarification. Vira Cocha or Huiracocha is the name of one of the most important pre-Hispanic Andean deities. Some colonial sources claim that Indigenous peoples used the same term to refer to Europeans, and the HM uses the term several times in that sense. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 96–97 [ch. 18]. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 97 [ch. 18]. Salomon and Urioste George, Huarochirí Manuscript, 70–71 [ch. 9]. “Señor, digo que mis agüelos antepasados deuen de ser ydúlatras como xentiles [ . . . ]. En esta uida somos cristianos y bautizados. Y ancí agora a culpa del dotor [Ávila] adoraremos a los serros o ci no, todos yremos al monte hoýdos pues que no ay justicia en nosotros en el mundo. No tenemos quién se duela.” Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica, fol.1112 [1122]. Gose, Invaders as Ancestors, 82–105; Millones, El retorno de las huacas; Gabriela Ramos and Henrique Urbano, Catolicismo y extirpación de idolatrías, siglos XVI–XVIII: Charcas, Chile, México, Perú, vol. 5, Cuadernos para la historia de la evangelización en América Latina (Cusco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos “Bartolomé de Las Casas,” 1993). “¡O, qué buen dotor!, ¿adónde está buestra ánima?” Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica, fol. 1111 [1121]. This is discussed in more detail in chapter 1. See chapters 2 and 3 for specific passages in the lawsuit dossier and the HM where “doctor” is used to refer to Ávila. Guaman Poma de Ayala, First New Chronicle and Good Government, fol. 7 [7]. The concern regarding Indigenous people repeating doctrine like “parrots” was conveyed by missionaries in New Spain and Peru as analyzed in Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru, Historia de la educación en la época colonial. El mundo indígena (México, D.F.: El Colegio de México, 1990), 94–96. and Tineo, Los concilios limenses en la evangelización latinoamericana. Labor organizativa y pastoral del Tercer Concilio Limense, 394.

NOTES TO PAGES 168–172

74. 75.

76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81.

82.

83.

84.

85.

86.

87.

88.

223

Duviols, “Estudio y comentario etnohistórico,” 92. My translation. César Itier, “Estudio y comentario linguístico,” in Relación de antigüedades deste reyno del Piru, ed. Pierre Duviols (Lima: Institut Français d’Études Andines; Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos “Bartolomé de Las Casas,” 1993), 129. My translation. Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo, 117. Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo, 117–19. In the 1650s, the problem with the cartillas and pastoral materials in translation resurfaced. Durston showed that the Dominican provincial Francisco de la Cruz denounced the 1580s pastoral texts sponsored by the Third Council of Lima as containing errors and heresies. Durston, Pastoral Quechua, 173–74. Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo, 120, 15. BNE, MS 3169, fol. 2r–3r. “tiempo de las gentilidades ,” BNE, MS 3169, fol. 1, 3r. “No estava desocupado, como los saçerdotes de agora, ni los españoles por aquel año se aplicavan a la sujeçion de interés, como agora. Lo que es llamar a Dios abía mucha diboción en los españoles, y los naturales eran exhortados de buenos exemplos” BNE, MS 3169, fol. 43v. Duviols suggested the connection between Pachacuti’s Relación and Ávila’s time in La Plata in Duviols, “Estudio biobibliográfico de Francisco de Ávila,” 227; Duviols, “Estudio y comentario etnohistórico,” 93. “Es notable.” BNE, MS 3169, fol. 1r. Pachacuti’s text occupies folios 131 to 174 of MS 3169, but the numbering of folios is subject of debate. I follow the folio organization proposed by Duviols and Itier (1993). All the translations are mine. An example for the first kind of note appears in fol. 25v, where Ávila wrote: “[E]ste caçir capac quiere dezir un señor principal desta tierra y gente como virrey” (“This caçir capac means a principal lord of the land and people, like [a] viceroy”). The second kind of note is usually lengthy as in fol. 36v, where in neat handwriting Ávila adds information about Inca Cusi Huallpa, who is the subject of the narrative in the main text. These warning notes are in folio 19v. There are also a few marginal notes where Pachacuti briefly states what the topic or subject of the narrative in the main text is. “Y el podrido viejo su padre falleçe [ . . . ].” BNE, MS 3169, fol. 22. It has to be noted though, that in Andean and other societies that practiced mummification, the rotting body was treated as “the mere shedding of temporary qualities that inhere in soft flesh [ . . . ]. What remains is a permanent being made of harder or purer stuff.” Salomon, “Beautiful Grandparents,” 325. The analysis of Garcilaso’s use of Christian discourse and renaissance models to shape his own interpretation of the Inca past appears in MacCormack, Religion in the Andes and Zamora, Language, Authority. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 37.

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89. 90.

91.

NOTES TO PAGES 173–174

One of the most comprehensive studies of this issue remains Charles, Allies at Odds. Bartolomé de Las Casas, In Defense of the Indians: The Defense of the Most Reverend Lord, Don Fray Bartholomé de Las Casas, of the Order of Preachers, Late Bishof of Chiapa, against the Persecutors and Slanders of the Peoples of the New World Discovered across the Seas, ed. and trans. Stafford Poole (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992), 217. Las Casas, In Defense of the Indians, 218.

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INDEX

Note: Page numbers followed by f indicate figures.

acculturation, 155, 174 Acosta, José de, 61, 74; alphabetic writing and, 111; Historia natural y moral de las Indias, 33, 148; idolatry and, 122; on quipus, 70–72, 87–88; Third Council’s pastoral texts and, 32, 192n58 Acosta Rodríguez, Antonio, 142, 207n94 Adorno, Rolena, 11, 43, 137, 154 alphabetic writing, 5–7, 15, 19, 59, 111, 126, 129, 145, 173, 175; authority of, 22, 49–50, 56, 58; Ávila’s accusers and, 89, 100; Christianity and, 21, 147; colonial hegemony and, 177–78; evangelization and, 13, 53, 146; Garcilaso and, 10; Huarochirí manuscript and, 153, 158; Indigenous appropriation of, 8, 13; Indigenous presence in, 40; indios ladinos and, 11, 92; legibility of, 6, 12, 17, 37, 49–50, 104; Nueva corónica (Guaman Poma) and, 162, 165; Quechua and, 4; quipus and, 7, 67–68, 76, 86–87, 90–93, 100; Relación de antigüedades (Pachacuti) and, 161

Andean languages, 13, 31, 50, 59, 153; appropriation of, 177; experts in, 28. See also Aymara; Quechua apartamientos, 91, 100 Arabic numerals, 5, 87–88, 98, 206n86 Archdiocese of Lima, 14, 27 Atahualpa, 19, 44, 57, 158–61, 164 Avedaño, Fernando de, 66, 199n142, 201n173 Ávila, Francisco de, 12–14, 16, 25–26, 83, 96, 139, 193n71, 198n133, 214n93; accusations against, 62, 67, 77–78, 80, 82, 88–93, 95, 97, 136, 138, 147, 177, 204n53; Acosta’s Historia and, 33, 148; alphabetic writing and, 61, 175; Andean archive of, 22, 62; Andean idolatry and, 65, 109, 117, 121–22, 125– 26, 138, 150, 167, 204n53; authority of, 51; book of sermons by, 16, 20, 22, 50, 52, 60–62, 73, 84, 116, 136, 138–39, 143, 171, 177, 185n36, 188n6, 199n135, 199n142, 201n4, 213n65; Comentarios reales (Garcilaso) and, 44–45,

244

122, 172; debts of, 81–82, 84–86, 94; discursive tactics employed by, 42; eradication of Indigenous practices in Huarochirí, 78–79, 143; false accusations against, 63, 90, 92–93; Guaman Poma and, 167, 218n3; handwriting of, 40, 45, 121, 196n103; Huarochirí manuscript and, 5, 11–12, 15, 20, 48, 102, 116–17, 120–22, 124–25, 129, 135, 137– 38, 143–44, 147, 149–50, 168, 223n84; Indigenous evangelization and, 22; legibility and, 18, 54; library of, 16, 21, 33–39, 41, 126, 132, 135, 143, 194n91, 195n95; literacy and, 53; litigation/ lawsuit against, 17, 94, 97–98, 101, 128, 132–33, 142, 177–78, 222n71; manuscript culture for Andean scribes and, 41; manuscripts owned by, 40, 43, 45–47, 195n101, 196n107; Quechua sermons by, 22, 33, 59, 62, 64, 116, 177; quipus and, 60, 66–67, 73, 88, 91, 94, 178; Relaciones de antigüedades (Pachacuti) and, 48–49, 170–72; sermons of, 21–22, 37, 45, 49–52, 55, 56–57, 59–60, 93; written culture and, 61. See also Choque Casa, Cristóbale; Tratado y relación de los errores, falsos dioses y otras supersticiones (Ávila) ayllus, 103–5, 108, 129, 209n4 Aymara, 28–30, 50, 72, 94, 113, 192n57; cartillas, 112; Tercero Catecismo and, 134, 143 bilingualism, 46, 115 billetes, 93, 100 Brokaw, Galen, 59, 68, 76, 161, 197n116, 200n165, 201n9, 203n30, 221n43 caciques, 55, 80, 82, 155 Cajamarca, 57, 159–62, 164–66, 221n57 cartillas, 30, 53–54, 112, 168–69, 200n151, 223n77 catechesis, 60, 144

INDEX

catechism, 29–30, 50, 53–54, 132; alphabetic literacy and, 168; Baranza’s, 192n57; trilingual (Spanish-Quechua-Aymara), 72, 114 Catholic Church, 27, 39, 55; evangelization and, 14, 20, 23, 29; higher education and, 24; Indigenous offices and, 155; language and, 28; Lima and, 13, 25; literacy and, 173; Peruvian, 26, 50, 58, 61, 177; printing press and, 30; prohibition of cultural practices, 110; Quechua and, 3–4, 17, 101; quipus and, 67, 73. See also Acosta, José de; Council of Trent Catholicism, 14, 21 ceque system, 43, 70, 202n22 Charles, John, 8, 60, 137, 208n1, 224n89 Charles V, 26, 173, 186n42 Checa ayllu, 105, 115, 139 chivalric novels, 35, 55–56, 71 Choque Casa, Cristóbal, 171 Christian doctrine, 28, 160; cartillas and, 53; evangelization texts and, 53; Indigenous languages and, 30, 32; Indigenous literacy and, 173; memorization of, 171; Quechua and, 101, 112–13, 143 (see also lengua general); Tercero Catecismo and, 134 Christianity, 87, 133, 175; alphabetic writing and, 21, 147, 165–66, 175; Ávila and, 60–61, 64, 144; Choque Casa’s, 140, 157; conversion to, 28–29, 64, 74, 106, 114, 125, 146, 166, 216n117; Guaman Poma and, 145, 148, 152, 154, 156, 162, 222n59; history of, 56, 122, 148, 166; Huarochirí manuscript and, 102, 106, 130, 134, 144, 158; Indigenous heterodox interpretations of, 50; indios ladinos and, 137; lettered culture and, 157; lineage and, 147; literacy and, 23; Pachacuti and, 145, 148, 150–51, 161; subversion of, 73; translation and, 112, 114, 119; written culture and, 177

INDEX

Christianization, 14, 23, 28, 50 colonial administration, 31, 42, 44, 155; literacy and, 175; quipus and, 7, 67, 77, 80; writing and, 137 colonial hegemony, 5, 7, 107, 174, 177–79 colonialism, 115; alphabetic writing and, 7; comparative, 220n29; Huarochirí manuscript’s critique of, 100; quipus and, 60; Spanish, 109, 124 colonization, 35, 174; alphabetic writing and, 13, 15; European, 6, 126, 209n7; evangelization and, 13, 20; Huarochirí manuscript and, 103–4; literacy and, 8, 16; of native languages, 212n62; Quechua as tool of, 112, 116, 177; Spanish, 10, 29, 139, 153; writing and, 179 Concha ayllu, 93, 104 confession, 50, 113, 141; quipus and, 65, 70–71, 73–75. See also hermanos mayores conversion, 14, 19, 21, 23, 64, 74, 134, 146, 150; cartillas and, 168; cultural, 13; Huarochirí manuscript and, 102, 104, 166; reducciones and, 108; writing and, 20 Council of Trent, 24, 26, 188n12 Counter-Reformation, 8, 14, 21, 23–24, 34, 55, 188n12. See also Council of Trent Cuenca, Paloma, 46, 197n119 Cummins, Tom, 8–9, 194n93 curacas, 35, 53, 81, 111, 155, 205n58, 205n63, 218n3, 221n41. See also caciques Cuzco, 13, 26, 38, 68, 81, 137, 161, 211n42; Acosta’s visits to, 70; Caja Real of, 88; Inquisition and, 169; lengua general and, 112; Pérez Bocanegra’s visits to, 74; Quechua and, 29. See also Molina, Cristóbal de Don Quijote de la Mancha (Cervantes), 55–56 Durston, Alan, 31, 136, 192n61, 223n77 Duviols, Pierre, 11, 168, 185n36, 198n132, 218n1, 219n14, 223nn82–83

245

Estenssoro, Juan Carlos, 51, 73, 75, 169, 188n7, 212n49 evangelization, 13–14, 20, 27, 58, 123, 138, 188n7, 212n62; alphabetic writing and, 19, 146; critique of, 100; first, 14, 21, 28, 74, 146; Huarochirí manuscript and, 12, 16; hucha and, 84; Indigenous, 22, 30, 37, 62, 65, 73–74, 79, 101, 201n9; Indigenous languages and, 29; Indigenous literacy and, 169; Pachacuti on, 170; pre-Hispanic, 160, 162, 166 (see also Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe); Quechua and, 3, 52–53, 143, 174, 177, 199n42 (see also Huarochirí manuscript (HM); lengua general); quipus and, 67, 70, 73–74, 76–77, 91, 177; second, 21, 26, 28, 30, 33, 146; strategy, 42, 61; writing and, 53, 169, 175, 179. See also hermanos mayores exceptional normal, 4, 179 Garcilaso de la Vega, Inca, 40, 183n25, 197n122, 223n87; Comentarios Reales de los Incas (Royal Commentaries of the Incas), 9–11, 44–45, 122, 172, 187n1, 202n12, 214n83; on huiracocha, 209n16; identity debates and, 184n27 Ginzburg, Carlo, 4, 222n57 gold, 164–65 González Holguín, Diego, 59, 200n163, 215n103 governance, 70; colonial, 110–11, 155; Inca, 43; quipus and, 162; religion and, 36, 69 Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe, 12, 83, 138, 145, 150, 155, 158–60, 165–68, 174; family of, 222n59; genealogical claims of, 220n26; on the Inca Empire, 149; Murúa and, 198n131, 220n33; readings of, 194n81; writing and, 175. See also El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno/Nueva Coronica Guamasica ayllu. See Huamasica ayllu

246

Hampe Martínez, Teodoro, 35, 193n71, 193n77, 194n84 handwriting, 45, 117, 137; Huarochirí manuscript and, 135–36 Harrison, Regina, 11, 211n44, 212n54, 218n12 hegemony, 7, 177; of writing, 18. See also colonial hegemony hermanos mayores, 74–75, 83, 91 huacas, 68, 70, 109, 208n3, 210n27, 213n73; Ávila and, 121–22; Guaman Poma on, 154; Huarochirí manuscript and, 103–4, 108, 110, 117, 119–21, 123, 128–29, 138, 140–41, 149; hucha and, 84. See also ceque system Huamasica ayllu, 80, 82, 90, 94 Huarochirí, 14–17, 37, 64, 167, 178, 186n45, 205n63; allyus, 103–4, 129; anonymous writers from, 40–41; authorities, 155; Choque Casa and, 137–38; conversion to Christianity in, 216n117; curacas of, 218n3; economic relations in, 204n52; huacas of, 109, 139; indios principales of, 77, 80–83, 85, 89–93, 97; inhabitants of, 80–81, 97, 110; literacy in, 98; mallquis in, 109; missionary work in, 61, 133; peoples of, 12, 48, 104, 130, 134, 140, 142, 158; quipucamayocs from, 67, 77; quipus in, 72–73, 100, 106, 128–29, 177; religious system of the peoples of, 122. See also Ávila, Francisco de Huarochirí manuscript (HM), 3–6, 10–12, 17–20, 96–97, 100–122; Ávila’s incomplete translation of, 12, 15, 48, 102, 117, 119, 121, 125, 144, 178 idolatry, 64, 76, 78, 141, 147, 213n81; Ávila and, 117, 121–22, 125–26, 138, 167, 204n53; Choque Casa and, 142; cultural adaptation as, 146; deconstruction of, 101; Guaman Poma on, 154; Huarochirí manuscript and, 123; materiality of, 15; objects of, 66; quipus

INDEX

and, 65, 67–68, 71–72; in Relación de antigüedades (Pachacuti), 168; syncretism as, 203n33. See also Ávila, Francisco de Inca Empire, 9, 13, 68, 112; fall of, 120, 159, 162; geographic extension of, 149; Spanish conquest of, 19, 23, 145 Incas, 57, 76, 196n113; Ávila on, 45, 56; Garcilaso on, 44; Guaman Poma on, 152, 162; Huarochirí manuscript and, 122, 128, 140, 149; Molina on, 43; Ondegardo on, 44; Pachacuti on, 150, 161, 168; Sarmiento’s interpretation of, 111; territories governed by, 42 Indigenous languages, 14, 21, 25; appropriation of, 174, 177; books about, 32; colonization of, 8; evangelization and, 29; translation of, 112. See also Aymara; lengua general; Quechua Indigenous peoples, 32, 72, 168, 170, 174; in Acosta’s Historia, 148; Avendaño and, 77; cartillas and, 53–54; Christian world and, 56, 61; cultural context of, 51; evangelization of, 3, 20–21, 23–24, 27, 29–30, 37 (see also lengua general; Quechua); formal education of, 131, 216n121; Huarochirí manuscript and, 125, 129; Inquisition and, 60, 203n33; legibility and, 6, 40, 54, 143; lineage and, 155; literacy and, 40, 137, 173 (see also Ávila, Francisco de); litigation and, 96; resettlement of, 14, 210n23 (see also reducciones (pueblos de indios)); runakuna, 107; syncretic beliefs among, 25; temporal and spiritual governance of, 70; texts written by, 4, 115 (see also Huarochirí manuscript); writing and, 9, 11, 60, 127, 178; written culture and, 45. See also hermanos mayores; indios ladinos Indigenous practices, 30, 74; eradication of, 78 (see also Ávila, Francisco de) indios ladinos, 11, 92, 131, 137–38, 208n105

INDEX

Inquisition, 39, 60, 169, 194n91; Index of Prohibited Books, 34; Indigenous people and, 203n33 Jesuit order (Society of Jesus), 23, 25, 27, 65, 74 Jesuits, 14, 33, 134, 192n58; idolatry and, 168; libraries of, 34; schools founded by, 13, 61; writing and, 21, 24 Lamana, Gonzalo, 45, 196n107, 221n57 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 44, 174, 211n38 Latin, 5, 7, 53, 174; alphabet, 112; Ávila and, 13, 50, 64–65, 177, 201n4; books in, 35; Catholic Church and, 24; letrados and, 25, 78; Third Council of Lima and, 189n19, 203n30 Latin American studies, 7, 9 Latin script, 5, 22, 28, 88, 93, 98, 109; accusations against Ávila and, 80, 95; alphabet, 45, 54, 112, 168, 172; cartillas and, 54, 168; Huarochirí manuscript and, 102; literacy, 112; mathematics and, 87; public documents and, 86; as true writing, 183n18. See also alphabetic writing legibility, 5–7, 18, 22, 43, 46, 101–2, 131, 137, 174, 194n93; alphabetic writing and, 5, 12, 17; Ávila and, 53–54, 60, 62, 135; colonial, 40, 111, 144, 158; European, 37, 49, 62, 179; of the Huarochirí manuscript, 104, 117, 121, 126, 143–44, 153, 178; Indigenous, 173; of Latin script, 98; legitimacy and, 79; practices of, 176; quipus and, 76, 98; of writing, 12 lengua general, 29–30, 112, 116–17, 143, 190n44; Huarochirí manuscript and, 113 letrados, 7–8, 25, 78 lettered culture, 13, 145, 167–68, 177; European, 21, 72; in Peru, 25, 65 libraries: inventories of, 194n92; Jesuit, 33–34; private, 20, 34, 36, 132, 143, 173, 177; Spanish American, 16, 34

247

lineage, 109, 155; huacas and, 103, 139; Huarochirí manuscript and, 147; Inca, 44, 111; pacarinas and, 108; Pachacuti’s, 152 literacy, 5–8, 10–12, 20–25, 46, 61, 79, 87–88, 176–78; alphabetic, 53–54, 93, 111, 145; colonial notion of, 16–18, 194n93; Indigenous, 15, 92, 98, 146, 168–69, 173, 175, 194n93, 200n151 (see also Catholic Church); Latin-script, 112, 171; in Quechua, 13; quipus and, 98; writing and, 101 Lockhart, James, 115–16, 189n18, 210n22, 211n33 MacCormack, Sabine, 162, 164, 196n113, 220n36, 223n87 mallquis, 108–9, 126 manuscript culture, 41, 62 materiality: of Christianity, 73; of the Huarochirí manuscript, 102; of idolatry, 15; of Indigenous culture, 67; knowledge and, 68; of media, 6; of quipus, 8, 68, 71; the sacred and, 72; of written documents, 5 memoriales, 70–71, 77–78, 80–81, 85–87, 89, 96 Mena, Cristóbal de: La conquista del Perú, 159, 200n157 mestizos, 9, 25, 44, 64 Mexico, 38, 194n84; conquest of, 35; Indigenous appropriation of alphabetic writing in, 8, 182n9; printed texts from, 40; resettlement of Indigenous populations in, 210n23 missionaries, 23, 222n73; Andean languages and, 31; duty of knowledge and, 27; evangelization and, 28; Indigenous Christianization and, 14; Jesuit, 32; providential history and, 119; Quechua and, 177; quipus and, 67, 73; Spanish-speaking, 20 mita, 81–82, 90, 96–97

248

Molina, Cristóbal de, 41–42, 70, 195n102; manuscript copies of texts by, 44–47, 49, 137, 197n119 (see also Ávila, Francisco de); on quipus, 68–69, 71–72, 76; Relación de fábulas y ritos de los Incas, 42–43, 68, 196n111, 197n119; Third Council of Lima and, 197n115; Toledo and, 110–11, 196n108 New Spain, 23, 33, 215n106, 222n73; cartillas in, 53; destruction of Indigenous records in, 66; extirpation of idolatry in, 213n81; printing presses in, 34–36; schools for Indigenous people in, 216n121 numeracy, 15, 25, 86–88, 98, 207n90 Ondegardo, Polo, 40–47, 49, 69–72, 76, 110–11, 137, 196n107, 196n110 Pachacuti, Joan de Santa Cruz, 12, 41, 138, 173–75; drawings by, 219n14; handwriting of, 171–72; literacy and, 146; role of writing and, 160; the sacred and, 169. See also Relación de antigüedades (Pachacuti) Pérez Bocanegra, Juan, 74–76, 83 Philip II of Spain, 26, 71, 153, 173 Pinelo, Léon de, 96–97, 208n115 Pizarro, Francisco, 19, 57, 159–61, 164, 188n8 Potosí, 26, 38, 81, 195n94 El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno/ Nueva Coronica (Guaman Poma), 10–11, 18, 47f, 146–48, 152–54, 164, 170, 173, 176; on arrival of Christianity, 162; drawings in, 156, 219n21; European legibility and, 178–79; supay in, 212n53 print culture, 36, 43, 62 Quechua, 3–5, 15, 21, 31, 99–100, 111–12, 116–17, 143–44, 191n54, 192n60; appropriation of, 177; Ávila and, 13, 18, 22, 33, 35, 50, 53, 59, 64, 138, 143; cartillas

INDEX

in, 112, 169; colonial administration and, 29; evangelization and, 30, 52–53, 101, 105; Garcilaso and, 9; Indigenous texts written in, 115; legibility and, 102; Molina and, 43, 46; mundane, 192n61, 212n60; in Nueva Corónica (Guaman Poma), 154; pastoral, 179, 191n45, 199n42; in Relación de antigüedades (Pachacuti), 48, 150, 168, 171; second evangelization and, 28; social role of, 4, 17, 32, 144; teaching of, 28; Tercero Catecismo and, 58, 134; Third Council of Lima and, 113, 199n42. See also Huarochirí manuscript; lengua general quipucamayocs, 67–68, 76–77, 85, 98 quipus, 4–9, 15, 58–60, 65–95, 97–102, 109, 127–29, 153, 159, 177–78, 203n30, 208n117; Guaman Poma on, 162–63; legitimacy of, 17, 22; Pachacuti and, 161. See also numeracy Quispe-Agnoli, Rocío, 11, 59, 212n53 Rama, Angel, 7–8 Ramos, Gabriela, 32, 210n30 reducciones (pueblos de indios), 81, 107–10, 112, 115, 186n45, 211n33 Reformation, 8, 21, 23–24, 26, 55, 188n12, 191n51 Relación de antigüedades (Pachacuti), 10, 18, 48–49, 145, 147–52, 154, 160–62, 166, 168, 170–73, 176; Ávila’s time and, 198n32, 223n82; ecclesiastical discourse and, 218n12; writing and, 178–79 rituals: Andean, 14, 33, 76; Christian, 14, 73–74; honoring regional huacas, 103, 138–39; Huarochirí manuscript and, 104, 108–9, 115, 117, 125–26, 133–34, 138–41, 150, 158, 166, 178; Inca, 48, 150, 154; Indigenous, 29, 42, 45, 51, 65, 70, 72, 78, 170; Native North American, 38; prohibition of, 102; quipus and, 69–70, 74 Roman numerals, 5, 87–88, 98

INDEX

sacred, the, 125, 142; alphabetic writing and, 58; Andean notions of, 28, 112; Christianity and, 134, 155; Huarochirí manuscript and, 130, 132, 158, 166; Inca cosmovision and, 13; linear genealogy of, 120 (see also Ávila, Francisco de); materiality and, 72; Pachacuti and, 169; physical space and, 115; quipus and, 71; writing and, 131–32; written culture and, 61 Salomon, Frank, 11, 107, 109, 139, 197n113, 213n63; on huacas, 208n3, 210n27, 213n73; on Pachacuti, 151; Quechua translations by, 107, 208–9nn3–4, 211n46, 212n55, 214n87, 217n146, 222n63 (see also Urioste George, L.); quipus and, 129 Santo Tomás, Domingo de, 31, 43, 59, 114, 191n54 Sarmiento de Gamboa, Pedro, 111, 124, 129; History of the Incas, 111, 127 Schwartz, Stuart B., 210n22, 211n33 Seed, Patricia, 160, 164 sermons, 75, 105, 132; literacy and, 173; in the Tercero Catecismo, 134, 141; Third Council and, 29, 51, 65, 113. See also Ávila, Francisco de, sermons of silver, 164–66; coins, 85; mines, 81 Spalding, Karen, 81, 204n52 Spanish language (Castilian), 5, 7, 15, 52–54, 116, 135, 153, 211n41; colonial administration and, 31–32; construction of meaning in, 45; literacy and, 24, 92–93, 98, 172; loan words, 113, 115–16, 121, 123, 143, 158, 212n58, 214n90; Third Council of Lima and, 29; writing in, 4, 9–11, 18, 174, 182n9 supay, 114–15, 121, 212n49, 212nn53–54 Taylor, Gerald, 11, 79, 106, 207n99, 213n63, 213n73 Third Council of Lima, 26–28, 220n32; Acosta and, 74; alphabetic writing

249

and, 58; idolatry and, 150; Indigenous testimony and, 156; lengua general and, 29–30; Molina and, 43, 197n115; pastoral texts of, 31–32, 192n58, 223n77; publications by, 34, 50, 114, 155, 193n73; quipus and, 72, 84, 203n30; sermons of, 51, 199n142 Toledo, Franciso de, 42, 69, 110–11, 115, 205n55, 211n34; Ávila and, 124; Huarochirí manuscript and, 214n90; Indigenous literacy and, 98; Indigenous litigation and, 96; mita and, 97; Molina and, 196n108; quipus and, 91–92; reinterpretation of Inca past and, 211n38; resettling of Indigenous peoples and, 210n23; University of San Marcos and, 25 translation: of accusations against Ávila, 91, 94; bilingualism and, 116; double, 111; evangelization and, 14, 29; of Garcilaso, 45; Huarochirí manuscript and, 113, 117; of Indigenous languages, 112; of manuscripts of Ondegardo and Molina, 46; policies of, 113, 117, 143; of Roman numerals to Arabic numerals, 88; Third Council of Lima and, 29–30, 50, 114, 203n30, 223n77 Tratado y relación de los errores, falsos dioses y otras supersticiones (Ávila), 48, 117–18, 121, 124, 126, 131, 135, 213n66, 213n69 tribute, 81, 205n63; Ávila and, 78, 80, 83, 90–91; Inca organization of, 42; Indigenous labor service as form of, 108; involvement in lawsuits and, 97; Latin script and, 92; in money, 205–6n69; quipus and, 62, 68, 76, 79, 81–82, 86, 90–91, 94, 97, 162; religious, 128 (see also huacas); textiles as, 215n104. See also mita University of San Marcos, 13, 25, 214n93; Ávila and, 25–26, 126, 168; Quechua and, 28, 112

250

Urioste George, L., 139, 217n46, 222n63; Quechua translations by, 107, 208n3, 211n46, 212n55, 214n87 Valverde, Vicente de, 57, 159, 161–62, 164 written culture, 16, 26, 177; alphabetic, 30; Ávila and, 20, 61–62; colonial, 49;

INDEX

European, 8, 39; Indigenous peoples and, 32, 37, 41, 45, 60 (see also Huarochirí manuscript) Xeres, Francisco de, 57–58, 159–60, 200n157

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Laura Leon Llerena is an associate professor at Durham University (UK). Her research concentrates on the circulation of knowledge produced by and about Indigenous peoples from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. She has published on translation and colonization of Indigenous languages, on the coexistence of Indigenous and European media, and on how material culture and notions of the sacred redefined social and cultural interactions. Her research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Volkswagen Stiftung, and John Carter Brown Library.