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Inca Garcilaso: Migrancy and Modernity

2009; Routledge; Volume: 42; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/08905760903247326

1743-0666

José Antonio Mazzotti,

Cultural and Social Studies in Latin America

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1The bibliography on immigration studies is vast. This article shares the general psychoanalytical approach employed by Grinberg and Grinberg, and also makes use of Chambers's concept of migrancy. For the Hispanic world in general, this essay is informed by the works of Solanes, Trigo, and others on exile, migration, and migrancy. For the specifics of migration in the Latin American colonial period, Robinson's compilation is an important point of departure. As he states in his “Introduction,” “migration was an essential feature of colonial Spanish America” (Robinson 1990, 17). Mira Caballos's study on Indians and mestizos in sixteenth-century Spanish society offers some critical historical context for the world in which Inca Garcilaso lived; however, not much has been written on the particulars of Garcilaso's life from the perspective of migration studies. 2After the birth of his son Gómez Suárez in Cuzco on April 12, 1539, Captain Garcilaso de la Vega traveled extensively to visit his possessions in Charcas (current Bolivia) and to participate in the civil wars between the conquistadors. It is very unlikely that he brought his young family with him. Several documents show that Gómez Suárez's father did not actually live with his Andean family until the Gonzalo Pizarro rebellion of 1544–48. Even then, the continuing chaos of Peru's political situation dictated that the young Gómez Suárez spend more time with his Quechua-speaking relatives, who taught him the qhapaq runa simi or royal Cuzco dialect. He was definitely a native Quechua speaker before becoming a Spanish speaker, and only began to receive tutoring in Spanish at the age of five or six, and this from a servant of his father's named Diego de Alcobaza (see Miró Quesada 1994, 25–57). Cerrón Palomino (1991) analyzes the importance of Garcilaso's knowledge of the Cuzco variant of Quechua and explains that Garcilaso's linguistic corrections of other chroniclers regarding Quechua were based on his own regional limitations. Most other chroniclers like Cieza de León and José de Acosta gave preference to the coastal variant, the Chinchay dialect. 3Although before his father's burial Gómez Suárez had asked for and received official authorization to travel back to Peru with the next departing Spanish fleet, he ultimately decided to stay in Spain after finding out that he would have to travel back with Governor Lope García de Castro. This was the very same bureaucrat who had scornfully denied Gómez Suárez the right to any compensation or reward for the services his father Captain Garcilaso de la Vega had rendered the Crown while in Peru (Miró Quesada 1994, 108–109). Moreover, Gómez Suárez received word that many of his mestizo classmates in Cuzco had either been imprisoned or sent into exile following a series of attempted rebellions. The most significant of these occurred in 1562, but there were others as well during the 1560s, all aimed at eliminating the Spanish authorities (the 1566 and 1567 rebellions targeted governor Lope García de Castro himself), establishing an alliance with the rebel Inca Titu Cusi Yupanqui at Vilcabamba, and the parceling out of lands to the triumphant rebels (see López Martínez 1971, 21–45, and Lisi 1990, 24). Two of the leaders of the conspiracy of 1567, a multi-regional plot which ended up being aborted before any large-scale uprising could take place, were Juan Arias Maldonado and Pedro del Barco, mestizos both and former schoolmates of Garcilaso's in Cuzco. The mestizo writer would recall this shared past many years later in the Second Part of his Comentarios (Book 8, Ch. 17). Another likely reason for Gómez Suárez's not returning to Peru in the 1560s or thereafter was that colonial legislation designated mestizos for the artisan professions and effectively blocked them from public office. Laws in Peru also prohibited mestizos from bearing arms, possessing authority over Indians through repartimientos, or making use of Indian labor for purposes of transporting cargo (see Rosenblat 1945, 160–190, Konetzke 1946, 230–231, López Martínez 1971, 15–21 and Hemming [1970] 1982, Ch. 17). Simply put, there was no promising future for Gómez Suárez in Peru, and no reason for him to return, especially after the death of his mother in 1571. 4Critics have traditionally attributed the name change to the tremendous admiration that Inca Garcilaso supposedly felt for his great-uncle, the poet Garcilaso de la Vega (see, for example, Avalle-Arce 1964 and González Echevarría 2005). For a refutation of this hypothesis, see Mazzotti 2005. In that article, I demonstrate that Inca Garcilaso actually professed much greater admiration for the pre-Renaissance poet Garci Sánchez de Badajoz than he did for Garcilaso de la Vega. Furthermore, I argue that the Peruvian Garcilaso made clear his political and cultural ties to his Andean peers by adding the title “Inca” to his name for his 1590 translation of León Hebreo's Dialogues of Love. 5Unfortunately, the Eurocentric tendencies of traditional literary criticism basically preclude such an endeavor, thereby revealing a more general and problematic inability to interpret texts from the so-called “colonial” field of Latin American literature. 6Raquel Chang-Rodríguez has also elaborated on Inca Garcilaso's “duality of vision that marked his life” (2006, 26) in relation to the coat of arms. 7For the implicit political program of a “Holy Incan Empire” embedded in the Royal Commentaries, see Brading 1986. 8For a study of the semantic couplet as a distinctive feature of Quechua poetry, see Husson 1993. 9“The earliest piece of evidence that I have found as to the reception of the Comentarios in the Andean territory is a manuscript located in the National Library of Madrid and belonging to a larger volume catalogued as No. 3169. Along with other valuable documents (such as ‘Relaciones’ by Cristóbal de Molina and Pachacuti Yamqui, as well as the much-celebrated Huarochirí Manuscript), this volume contains a manuscript of a ‘summary of the Comentarios reales.’ Duviols (1993, 15) has identified the handwriting of this manuscript as belonging to Francisco de Ávila, the infamous extirpator of idolatries. Even if there is as yet no evidence that the curacas from Cuzco, or any other part of the Andean region, actually heard of Garcilaso's work in the immediate years after its publication, the early date of the Madrid manuscript (c. 1613) suggests that the work did indeed arrive in Peru shortly after its publication in Europe” (Mazzotti 2008, 289, n. 3). The first registered copy of the Royal Commentaries sent to Peru appears in documents from the Spanish fleet of 1612. That copy was addressed to the fiscal Cristóbal Cacho de Santillana in Lima (González Sánchez 2009). For more information on the reception of the Royal Commentaries in Peru during colonial times, see Guíbovich 1991 and Mazzotti 1998b. 10See also Cornejo Polar's 1993 seminal article on Inca Garcilaso, “El discurso de la armonía imposible (El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega: discurso y recepción social).”