the various individuals who wrote outside of the circle and who, for reasons of their own, resisted and opposed the ideological thrust of imperial history. The Toledo Circle encompasses the chroniclers, jurists, translators, notaries public, priests, and other letrados and scholars engaged by the viceroy to continue the Spanish imperial school of history and provide the crown with the necessary information and arguments to denigrate and deauthorize Inca rule and culture. In this group one can easily place the letrados hired by the viceroy himself: Juan de Matienzo (1520–79), Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa (1530?–92), Juan Polo de Ondegardo (–1575), and others who, like the Jesuit José de Acosta (1540–1600), had views of their own and were weary of the viceroy but did nevertheless confirm the normative and “superior” sense of European modes of cognition. They produced a harsh interpretation of Inca history, one in which they basically characterized the Incas as vicious rulers to whom Plato’s definition of the tyrant – a man ruled by the desires of the lower organs of the body – applied fully (Castro–Klaren, 2001).
Although very different among themselves and writing at a good distance from one another, the men who contested, in different ways, the discourse of the imperial historians were the mestizo Jesuit Blas Valera (1545–97; Varner; 1968), the Indian Guamán Poma de Ayala and the mestizo humanist Garcilaso de la Vega, Inca, the latter writing from Spain. Cieza de Leon, although holding onto the view of providential history and the superiority of Spanish culture, cannot be aligned with either group as he wrote with great admiration of the Inca empire. Although considered “reliable chroniclers,” their information needs to be corroborated with other sources. Cieza de Leon, for instance, is noted for his more or less objective descriptions of Andean culture and Inca rule. However, in this respect, his work cannot compare with Betanzos, who knew more Quechua and had direct access to the memory of one of the royal panacas (patrilineal descent groups in charge of preserving specific noble Inca houses). Cieza de Leon never failed to subscribe to the notion that Inca religion was inspired by the Devil, a “fact” that he did not try to reconcile with his extensive reports on and admiration for the exemplary laws and wise statecraft with which the Incas governed the immense Historia del Tahuantinsuyo (Pease, 1978).
Although hired by viceroy Antonio de Mendoza and with probably only an elementary education, Betanzos wrote quite a reliable history of the Incas. He had the great benefit of having learned Quechua in the field. This gave him an unusually great power to understand what was being reported to him and to attempt feats of cultural translation. His marriage to Doña Evangelina, one of Huayna Capac’s granddaughters, gave him unparalleled access to the Cuzco elite whose khipu and oral memory clearly informs both the contents and the shape of his narrative. In fact there are times when the Summa y narración de los Incas (1557) reads as if Betanzos were both transcribing and translating directly from the narrative of a Quechua speaker. It could be that one of his chief sources is Doña Evangelina herself, and certainly a good number of members of her family.
Gómez Suárez de Figueroa was born in Cuzco in 1539 and died in Spain in 1616. His mother was the Inca princess Chimpu Ocllo, later baptized as Isabel Suárez, and his father was the captain and nobleman Sebastian Garcilaso de la Vega. How Gómez Suárez de Figueroa became a canonical “author” in the Spanish language and better known as Garcilaso de la Vega, Inca, is a fascinating story of self–fashioning that involves the most amazing journey through personal and collective memory, the Renaissance, with its revival of Greco–Roman culture, and the will to recover the Inca past for posterity. Garcilaso has been fortunate with his critics. With the exception of a nineteenth–century Spanish critic who failed to appreciate Garcilaso’s ethnographic presentation of the Inca empire, and the ethnohistorian María Rostworowski, most of his biographers and analysts have described and brought out the complexity, subtle maneuverings, and intelligence of the Inca’s task with satisfied admiration.
His attempt, well into the sixteenth century, to write an account of the Inca empire that corrected and contradicted official Spanish historiography, was a monumental project for one man alone. El Inca: Life and Times of Garcilaso de la Vega by John Grier Varner (1968) still stands as the best biography and overall study of the political and intellectual milieu in which Garcilaso had to move in order to safeguard his person, arrange for conditions favorable to becoming an intellectual, and see to the possibility of writing and being published. He changed his name several times and each time the changes coincided with a new stage of consciousness and self–assurance. From the time of his birth the rights and the social and economic standing of mestizos had diminished rapidly. Officers of the crown considered them dangerous rivals, treacherous allies, and racially inferior (Mazzotti, 1996: 22–3). Mestizos did not fare any better with the Indians. In fact Guamán Poma, for a set of very complicated reasons that included wanting to stop the sexual practices that engendered mestizos, almost always illegally, recommended that the existing mestizos move to the Spanish towns. Garcilaso wrote to suture the split and the trauma that the conquest brought about. But he never rejected his father. Instead he sought to clear his name of accusations made about his conduct in one of the many battles of the civil war in which Spaniards changed sides easily.
For Garcilaso, mestizaje did not mean hybridity, as some recent commentators have wanted to label his efforts. Neither did it mean syncretism. Nor did it mean writing in between two worlds as if dangling from the edges that separated them. One of the purposes of his writing was to bring the two worlds together, in a dynamic of double valence, to create an epistemological and aesthetic space where double voicing was possible. The Inca in Spain practiced a doubled consciousness of wholeness rather than hybridity of dismemberment and paranoia (Castro–Klaren, 1999). From an Andean perspective, in love with the concept of duality, he sought complimentary and reciprocity. The binary of the duality of the khipu can also be seen to inspire the Inca’s efforts to find a harmonious “new world.” Each of the parts was to remain whole, with a logic of its own, and come together in a dance of complementarity. In a telling gesture of his Andean search for complementarity and reciprocity he translated from the Italian (1590) the Dialoghi di Amore by Leon Hebreo (1535), for in this piece from the “Old World” he found not so much inspiration as confirmation for the development of his capacities as a Andean writer and for his philosophical and aesthetic of complementarity.
As an illegitimate mestizo in Spain and despite his Jesuit connections, Garcilaso needed to authorize himself as a subject of knowledge in order to intervene in the ongoing discourse on the Indies. Any cursory reading of the Royal Commentaries yields an ample list of the many contemporary and ancient authors that Garcilaso read in order to prepare for his work. Further confirmation of his firm grasp of issues and debates came to light when in 1948 José Durand found the Inca’s last will. It included a list of the books he owned, which was considerable, given the size of private libraries at the time (Durand, 1963). The Inca had clearly immersed himself in the Italian Renaissance, the Christian theological and philosophical tradition, the rediscovery of Greek and Roman culture, and the literature and political thought of his Spanish contemporaries. He had difficulties in assembling an equally rich bank of sources for his writing on the Incas. Garcilaso relied chiefly on his memory, the memory of friends in Peru who responded to his letters and answered his queries, the chronicle authored by Cieza de Leon, and the great book that the Jesuit Blas Valera was writing in Latin on Inca history. The Inca seems to have incorporated this massive treatise wholesale into his commentaries. Beyond the efforts to recover the memory of the Inca world, the chief move that Garcilaso made was to claim greater and better authority over all Spanish theologians and historians, based on his knowledge of Quechua, his free access to the amautas on his mother’s side of the family, and his persistent demonstration of errors incurred by the Spaniards owing to their ignorance of Quechua and their misunderstanding of Andean concepts which only a thorough knowledge of the language could prevent. With one single move, Garcilaso authorized himself and deauthorized most of the detractors of the Indians, something that Las Casas would have dearly loved to do, but could not do because he never learned any Indian languages. Garcilaso slyly argued that not knowing Quechua and wanting to understand Andean culture was like not knowing Hebrew and wanting to understand the Bible.
Margarita Zamora (1988) has written
