language of knowledge comparable only to Latin or even Hebrew in the Christian tradition of exegesis. Antonio Mazzotti and other critics have pointed out that the majority of studies on the Inca concentrate on the humanist aspects that allow for the configuration of his works, an emphasis which does not allow for an analysis of the many features of both content and style that resist the European colored lenses. In Coros Mestizos del Inca Garcilaso (1996) he seeks to remedy the situation. He posits a reading of Garcilaso in which Quechua narrative modes and understanding of the past, concepts of time and subject, operate as a kind of subtext (28–9). Mazzotti brings out in Garcilaso the presence of the conventions of Quechua oral narrative and especially the discursive tradition of the Cuzco court and all the symbolism that such choral tradition implies (31–2). This kind of interdisciplinary study surpasses the more narrowly conceived literary and philological analysis. It brings to bear the information and methods made available by iconography, archeology, and ethnohistory in order to detect in the Inca’s text more than sheer information conveyed by the Cuzco arts of memory. Studies of post–conquest textualization of Andean memory in alphabetic texts and iconographic structures show that Garcilaso’s change of names owes as much to Spanish costumes of the time as to Andean practices of naming according to life stages. Christian Fernández (2004) analyses in detail Garcilaso’s coat of arms and shows how Garcilaso redeploys the European conventions of fields and arrangement of totems in order to represent his filiations with the Andean Amaru (97–111), the symbol of his panaca (37).
Garcilaso wrote at the time when the erasure of Amerindian memory and knowledges was already advanced. He wanted to stem the wave of forgetting that the claims of alphabetic writing, as the only site of memory, had already spread over the Amerindians’ sense of the meaning of their cultures. Drawing on the organizing principles of Roman historians, in chapter after chapter, peppered with seemingly arbitrary digressions, Garcilaso places the stones that together amount to the rebuilding of the Inca empire and way of life. He systematically moves from the location of the Andes in a world that is one and a human kind that is one, to the particulars of the Andean landscape, the agricultural system, social organization, war, legal, religious, and communications systems. Garcilaso stages his narrative rhetoric in order to assure his reader of the veracity of the facts and events presented and to distinguish his history from fables and fictions (Fernández, 2004: 32; Mignolo, 1982). Mignolo has pointed out that the Inca makes clear that he is in charge of writing history, that is to say, he organizes and gives meaning to the materials while his sources simply tell the story (relato) as best they remember (90).
The fact that he entitled his book “commentaries” and not history has always puzzled his readers. It has been said that he took Caesar’s commentaries as his model (Fernández, 2004: 26–8). It has also been argued that the Inca had in mind the genre of the philological biblical commentary prevalent at the time (Durand, 1963: 322–32 in Fernández, 2004: 29). Fernández shows that the commentary genre was widely practiced during the Middle Ages, establishing a heterogeneous legacy (41) of which Garcilaso was well aware (41–7). It would seem that the Inca chose the tradition of the critical commentary as practiced by St. Jerome in his Contra Rufino because this practice allowed him to gloss, expand, clarify, criticize, correct, and dispute, in collaboration with the subtle reader. For Fernández, the reader in Garcilaso, as in St. Jerome, is the necessary counterpart who will bring to full fruition the half–sentences, digressions, allusions, and invitations to draw the appropriate conclusions sprinkled throughout the text (48–55). This thesis is quite persuasive, for it fits Garcilaso’s rhetoric.
The richness and complexity of Garcilaso’s endeavor – to take on the entire panoply of imperial history that denigrated the Inca and, by extension, other Amerindian civilizations – has not yet been properly assessed. Although the chief villain of his history, the viceroy Toledo, was dead by the time the Commentaries appeared, readers understood that this was not a chronicle, but a formidable rebuttal that showed the refined intelligence of the Incas and the creative capacity of Andean culture. The influence that the Inca’s work had in shaping the European and American imaginary with respect to Inca society as sort of a utopia can never be underestimated. The Royal Commentaries rejoiced and influenced contemporary audiences in Peru and inspired many eighteenth–century encyclopedists and playwrights. It has been reprinted many times and its many and rapid translations into all the major European languages made it a bestseller. It accompanied Tupac Amaru II in dreaming of a more ordered and just world. Despite the fact that the circulation of the book was forbidden by the Spanish authorities, it was always to be found in Bolivar’s tents and San Martín’s luggage. Its readers recognized a monumental recovery of memory and epistemological potential essential to the maintenance of the community of mankind.
By the 1550s it was clear throughout the Spanish–American empire that the idea of evangelizing the Indians had failed rapidly. Between 1567 and 1582 the church held a council in Lima to discuss many matters, including the arrival of the new order: the Jesuits. Among other things it was decided to deny the Indians admission to holy orders and to forbid them from taking communion. The Indians were basically disenfranchised as Catholics. Toledo had put his ordinances in place and the whole Andean world was near collapse, with the demographic catastrophe in full swing. It is conservatively estimated that the population went down from 16 million to 3 million. Exhausted, resistance was no longer possible. Confusion and grief reigned everywhere. People fled their villages and abandoned their families in search of work in the Spanish towns. Guamán Poma seems to have paid very close attention to the proceedings of the Council as well as to all other matters in Peru.
In 1614, when he is about to hand his manuscript to the person who will take it to Spain and hand it either to Philip III or some trusted advisor, Guamán Poma claims to be 80 years old. Most of what we know about him is gleaned from his own auto-biographical presentation as “author” of the Primer Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1516). He claims to be from Lucanas, to be the son of a curaca, or “prince,” as he translates the term into Spanish. He casts himself as servant of the king, a noble Andean Christian who has sought to serve the cause of the king and justice, as a defender of poor Indians in court, as translator and advocate of true Christian causes. For such dedication to the king’s interests he has only received scorn and unjust treatment from the Spaniards, especially the priests, whose main interest is the spoliation of Indian labor and property, not to mention their compulsive desire for Indian women.
Guamán Poma, not unlike Garcilaso, knew Toledo’s work very well. He was surely familiar with Toledo’s Ordenanzas – the viceroy’s legislation over every aspect of human life in the Andes (Castro–Klaren, 2001). In fact his familiarity with the events of the extirpation of idolatries as well as the format of the informaciones – the canvassing of the Andean territory for information useful to the crown – suggests that Guamán Poma may have been a translator for Spanish extirpators, magistrates, priests, and other letrados. His familiarity with Christian doctrine is firm and well grounded. There is no doubt that Guamán Poma was endowed with a powerful mind and an indefatigable thirst for knowledge, for he seems to have heard of every argument and piece of information animating the polemic of the American Indian and his political and intellectual right to rule the land of his ancestors.
His Corónica or extended letter to the king (of 908 pages) is surprisingly critical of the Incas. He would agree with the Toledo Circle in claiming that the Incas were only recent rulers who, through conquest and tyranny, expanded their original Cuzco holdings into the huge territory of the Tahuantinsuyo. Guamán Poma even denies that the Incas were originally from Cuzco. But in a crafty redeployment of Las Casas, Guamán Poma proposes that the land and government of Peru be given back – restituted–to the Indians, that is to say to the curacas or ethnic lords, like his family, not the descendants of the Incas. On this other matter he was squarely against the Toledo Circle, and that included Acosta.
Guamán Poma’s account of universal time is even more surprising, as he not only tries to find the point to link Amerindian time to biblical unilinear time, but pushes back Andean time deeply into four pre–Inca epochs. New research into the differences that account for the passage of time in the
