histories, as the Spanish letrados traveled side by side with the soldiers and priests in search of treasure and free labor.
In examining this palimpsestic corpus of materials, often written in the immediate aftermath of battle in America or in the midst of the endless struggle over the Spanish rights of possession and authority over the new lands and the Indians, it is clear that the polemic over the humanity of the Indians, and the issue of just war, permeated every page. Had the extinction of the Indian populations not become part of the generalized understanding of the conquest, this debate might not have reached the dominant tone that it acquired at the time and the force with which it thunders through the ages. The writing of the memory of the Spanish invasion, conquest, and colonization of America as available in the texts written by Christopher Columbus (ca. 1451–1506), Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478–1557), Francisco López de Gómora (1511–66), Hernán Cortes (1484–1547), Bernal Diaz del Castillo (1495–1584), Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474–1566), Pedro Cieza de León (1520–54), Juan de Betanzos (–1576), José de Acosta (1540–1600), Garcilaso de la Vega, Inca (1539–1616), and Guamán Poma de Ayala (–1615?), among many others, may vary a great deal in the practice of history that animates them, the kinds of rhetoric that they deploy, and their possible philosophical sources in Spain, but they all drip with blood, and to that extent the idea of reading them as an extended practice of writing violence, as José Rabasa has recently done (see Chapter 2 in this volume), does indeed go to the core of these texts. For reasons that cannot be taken up here, this heterogeneous corpus constitutes what Latin American literary critics and historians refer to as letras coloniales, or “colonial literature.” Despite the fact that the great majority of these texts were not intended by their authors as literature, nor were they read by their contemporaries as such (a good number of them were not published until the nineteenth century), critics have studied them under the lenses of literary analysis and have produced more complex interpretations than the first readings accorded to them by social scientists in search of “facts.”
However, as the distinction between literary and nonliterary texts has become less theoretically sustainable, and the interpretative power of this distinction has waned under the more general idea of “text,” these “letras coloniales” are often now accorded an interdisciplinary approach. Conceived as a cultural object, a text is a highly priced verbal act that plays a significant role in the organization of a given culture. Although most literary corpuses are articulated within the confines of a single language, in the case of the colonial corpus, it is the referent – America – that confers upon them a certain “unity,” despite the fact that some of these texts were written in Latin and even in Quechua. Walter Mignolo (1982) has classified this corpus into three major components: (1) cartas relatorias, or letters that tell of some event in some detail often provided by the eyewitness; (2) relaciones, or reports generally, but not always, requested by the crown in order to obtain extensive and detailed information not intended for publication or book form; (3) crónicas, or chronicles that generally narrate a series of events. However, the cronistas de Indias generally did not write crónicas in the medieval tradition of annals. Inasmuch as they tried to recover the past in texts that exhibit certain literary or historiographic characteristics and emphasized discursive organization, the cronistas wrote historia (Mignolo, 1982: 59). These histories are centered on heroic and even exemplary lives (76). Cronistas such as Las Casas and Garcilaso de la Vega, Inca were much influenced by Roman historians, Cicero above all.
The consensus of the time held that the writing of history should be in the hands of the lettered (letrados) class and not in the hands of soldiers like Bernal Diaz del Castillo or Indians such as Guamán Poma. History writing was itself divided into several kinds: divine, human, natural, moral, and general (Mignolo, 1982: 78). History writing during the period of the conquest was practiced by men who were both soldiers and letrados. Fernández de Oviedo, who had spent some time in Italy before coming to America and was thus acquainted with Italian humanism, is the first to attempt one of these new histories with his long Historia general y natural de las Indias (1535). Oviedo wrote also as an official crown historian. He wanted to be remembered as the Pliny of the Indies. His idea of historia natural was to pull away from the medieval bestiaries and offer instead descriptions and interpretations based on eyewitness observations made in the new lands. The conqueror–historian thought that history should deal with big and important subjects. Like other cronistas, Oviedo was also trying to follow Cicero when he fashioned his historia moral in a temporal frame that organized the reporting of worthwhile events from various sources. The influence of Pliny in the arrangement of nature would determine a hierarchical model with which to view America. Thus from the start, the idea of an historia natural allowed for the classification, not just of plants and animals, but also of peoples and civilizations in an ascending ladder in which Europe would figure at the top and the Amerindians somewhere at the bottom. This classification would blend the natural with the moral and infuse all reports, letters, histories, and polemics about the new world from Oviedo to Ginés de Sepúlveda (1490–1573), to Las Casas and Acosta in Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590).
The conquest of this continent brought about a profusion of texts beyond those identified above. Tracts, learned treatises, and even poems found an avid audience in both Europe and the colonial administrative centers. It gave rise to fierce debates about the nature of the Indians, colonial policy, and the right to wage war on civilian populations. Lawyers, jurists, academic intellectuals, crown officials, evangelizing and colonizing priests, official historians, and even Charles V himself participated. The early, prelapsarian image of the Indians created by the Italian humanists, who either worked in Spain or for the Spanish crown, soon came under attack by Spanish warriors and colonists in the Caribbean who painted their enemies as fierce, anthropophagic societies (Hulme, 1986).
The implicit critique of the conquest imbedded in the characterization of Indian societies as fresh versions of Ovid’s world by the Italians (Peter Martyr d’Anghera, Amerigo Vespucci) was not lost on the Spanish letrados or the crown. Despite the fact that by 1530 the demographic catastrophe was universally acknowledged, and despite the evidence that the Indians were exhausted by famine, slave labor conditions, and disease, Oviedo and Sepúlveda wrote stinging attacks on Indian societies. For these two members of the imperial school of cronistas, the Indians were lazy, vicious, lying, traitorous, half–witted beings given to melancholy, anthropophagy, and sodomy, among other things. The list of phobias remained expandable, as can be seen in Acosta’s rehearsal of the Indian portrait in 1590 and especially in his De procurandam indorum salute (1557), a manual for the evangelization of the Indians printed in Lima and quickly disseminated throughout the rest of the empire. Both Garcilaso and Guamán Poma would spend considerable ink and paper in responding to Acosta (Castro–Klaren, 2001).
Oviedo began making his cunning views public in various polemics and short publications. He arrived for the first time in the New World in 1514 as a notary public, and soon after participated in the bloody conquest of El Darien (Panama) in 1517. There he proudly took his booty in human flesh and himself branded the Indians to be enslaved. In 1532, after having gone to Spain to publish his Sumario de la natural historia de la Indias (1524) and to ask for royal favors, he returned to the New World. He then accepted the lifelong appointment as constable of the royal fortress of Santo Domingo and royal chronicler of the Indies (Brading, 1991: 33). Oviedo is regarded as one of the principal advocates of Spain’s imperial power. His arguments were fundamental to the cynical deployment of the idea of providential history in which Spain figures as the nation chosen by God to be universally triumphant. Along with the Spanish Neoplatonist theologians, Oviedo believed that the Emperor Charles V was indeed the new sun.
Subscribing to the same doctrine of providential history, Las Casas, a colonist and also slaveowner, suffered in 1514 a crisis of conscience. This crisis was due in part to his daily witnessing of the Caribbean holocaust, and in part to the preaching of Franciscan monks in Cuba who realized that the conquest ran contrary to almost every Christian principle. In 1531 Las Casas wrote a memorial to the Council of the Indies. There he warned
