literary canon. They are also the only ones who have studied the text as a whole. Most literary studies, however, have been overly concerned with El carnero’s typological nature and with elucidating its place in that discursive formation called (European) literature. Conversely they have paid less attention to the cultural milieu in which the author lived and wrote his text, a propensity which has allowed them to overlook, for instance, the significance of the indigenous population among which the author lived and its impact in the composition and assessment of his work.
Even though scholarly approaches to colonial texts during the last quarter of a century have been altered, often with interesting results, by postmodern cultural theories (particularly cultural studies, postcolonial studies, feminism, queer theory, and subaltern studies), most studies of El carnero have not been affected by these changes. They have been faithful to the parameters of literary appreciation and have overlooked the “colonial situation” in which the text was produced, that is, the condition under which an invading European and Christian minority controlled and profited from a non-European, non-Christian majority (as Walter Mignolo explains in the Preamble to this volume). With this prevailing literary approach, the presence of the indigenous people and the author’s relation to them are missed; also missed is the regimen of colonial servitude to which the former were subjected.
Despite the visibility of the indigenous in Rodríguez Freile’s daily life and society, he managed to define El carnero exclusively as a history of Europeans and Euro- Americans: “I wanted, as best as I could, to inform others about the conquest of this New Kingdom, about what happened between the time when its first Conquistadors settled it until the present time of writing, the year 1636” (Chapter 1); he then marginalized the indigenous subjectivity by means of a controlled and denigrating representation of it: “I have wanted to say all of this so that it would be understood that the Indians are capable of committing any evil act, that they kill men to rob them … I say all of this lest you let your guard down with them” (Chapter 16).
El carnero makes frequent references to the indigenous as servants throughout the text, or as a precious commodity (workforce), whose demographic decline threatens the material well-being of Spaniards and criollos. From the start, Rodríguez Freile laments the fact that there are still huge quantities of precious metals to be unearthed and taken to Spain, but there are not enough Indians to do it: “Many more and greater treasures could have been taken, as was necessary, had it not been for the lack of natives” (“Prologue to the reader”). Rodríguez Freile also gives the indigenous ample narrative space on five occasions. However, in all of them they are presented as either a flawed culture that needs to live under Spanish rule, as a people unworthy of good treatment by Spaniards or criollos, as individuals who hold riches they do not need or deserve, or as a threat to the security and development of colonial society.
Those first two (of five) instances are: (1) his account of the pre-Hispanic Muisca culture and civil wars (Chapters 2 through 7), in which the indigenous are represented as incapable of self-government and unable to manage their accumulated resources, including the fertile land they occupied; and (2) the resistance of the Pijao groups (a “perverse pestilence,” as the author calls them) and the military campaign against them led by Juan de Borja with the purpose of securing the commercial routes between the New Kingdom of Granada and Peru (Chapter 19). The theme of the plunder and theft of gold allows Rodríguez Freile to elaborate two main stories. In the first one (3) a defiant shaman, who persists in his native religious rituals, is tricked, and his golden idols are taken by a Catholic priest who specializes in stealing the natives’ riches on the pretext of evangelization. He “took from him 4,000 pesos in gold which the shaman had as offering in an altar” (Chapter 5). In the second story (4), a “thieving Indian” already integrated into colonial society as a servant of a priest named Reales (who treats him well by allowing him to dress in silk and carry a blade) takes advantage of his master’s trust and snatches gold from the royal offices, among many other thefts. After being caught, “he confessed his crimes and was condemned to being burned alive, a sentence that was carried out in the central plaza” (Chapter 16).
The final story (5) deals with the threat of indigenous subversion. Don Diego de Torres, cacique (chief) of Turmequé, is falsely accused of sedition against the Spanish rule in the context of conflicts between rival Spanish political factions; however, the white population take the accusation seriously and react in panic, demonstrating with such reaction not only the presence of a large indigenous population among the Spanish and criollos but also the ever-present fear of their rebellion against subjugation. All five of these instances take place during 1536 and 1605, a significant detail because it underscores Rodríguez Freile’s view of the indigenous as an essentially wretched representation of humanity that plagues his kingdom for at least an entire century.
Histories of Latin American literature often isolate El carnero as a privileged, unique, and wonderfully ambivalent instance of a referential narrative gone astray due to what is perceived as a lack of historical rigor that results in an outburst of literary imagination. Such discursive deterioration, according to these critics, accounts for the seemingly indecisive position of El carnero inside a recognizable literary genre, which becomes a sign of its historical objectivity compromised by a supposedly negligent historian. According to this widely held belief, colonial literary narratives are not only the deliberate product of fiction writers, but also the unforeseen end result of history irresponsibly written. Such frivolity, as assigned to the historian from Santafé de Bogotá, is embraced as a fortunate mistake that brings about the modern, prestigious Latin American literary narratives. Guiseppe Bellini’s history of Latin America literature, one of the most widely available, states that Rodríguez Freile started with the sincere intention of being a historical chronicler but soon got carried away with fiction: “El carnero is precisely the product of the author’s defiance of his original plans.” Or, as literary historians Eduardo Camacho Guizado and José Miguel Oviedo have respectively put it, this is the case of “a book full of literary possibilities, of novelistic virtuosities, which does not go beyond historiography” and a “disintegration of history into tales.”
All of these efforts to place El carnero inside the realm of a discursive literary formation have, of course, more to do with the epistemological and ideological framework that informs late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century literary critics than with the ones that informed Rodríguez Freile. As Walter Mignolo clarified as early as 1982, such framework has allowed literary critics and literary historians to retrieve from the past those texts which show, from the perspective of their reception, certain properties deemed today as literary, even though such properties were not present in the production of those discourses. Literary critics’ choice to consider a historical text of the past as literary today is, certainly, a legitimate decision, especially if their interest is improving the quantity and complexity of the Latin American literary canon. However, such choice, by virtue of its exclusive attention to a literary discursive formation (that in turn requires an exclusive competence in European literacy), has called excessive attention to the Spanish or Euro-American perspective and has left aside the standpoint of other subjectivities (such as the native Americans, poor mestizos, and people of African descent).
The still-dominant tendency in the study of El carnero has been to embrace the notion of the unquestionable ascendancy of Castilian language and culture in a territory that, still today, shows the cultural, social, and political clashes brewed in the colonial period. El carnero, as a text that intends to memorialize the first hundred years of the Spanish and criollo presence in the Muisca territory, and which was written in a language that only the Spanish and Euro-American elite was able to read and enjoy, it is a cultural artifact whose
