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Indians and Mestizos in the “Lettered City”: Reshaping Justice, Social Hierarchy, and Political Culture in Colonial Peru

2011; Duke University Press; Volume: 91; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-1416774

1527-1900

Emily Berquist,

Early Modern Women Writers

While historians of colonial Peru are well acquainted with native authors Felipe Guaman Poma and Inca Garcilasco de la Vega, Alcira Dueñas’s new work brings together a larger body of similar texts in order to outline a critical mass of indigenous Peruvians who brought formal written complaints about their mistreatment to the courts in Lima and Madrid. Dueñas argues that these men used their literacy skills to gain access to the “lettered city” inhabited by elites, ecclesiastics, and bureaucrats. In so doing, they relied on transatlantic networks of information, support, and legislation that brought some of them all the way to the Royal Court in Madrid. The book shows that Andean protests against Spanish rule were far from silent in the years between the defeat of the Inca at Vilcabamba in 1572 and the Túpac Amaru and Túpac Katari Rebellions of the early 1780s.As a group, Dueñas’s Andean authors sought to prove that Spanish abuse of defenseless Indians caused disorder in the viceroyalty. They charged that corrupt priests incited natives to run away from Spanish towns, that corregidores overcharged for tribute, and that Spaniards seized native land. To combat such misdeeds, the authors in question argued that the Indians were in fact gente de razón, or human beings endowed with the same capacity for reason that Europeans enjoyed, so that the Spanish had no rightful basis from which to exploit them.Like Guaman Poma himself, many of Dueñas’s Andean writers attained their literacy skills under the supervision of the Catholic Church. Juan de Cuevas Herrera, an indigenous priest from Charcas, wrote his report on priestly misdoings based on what he himself witnessed during the extirpation campaigns of the early 1600s. Fray Calixto Túpac Inca’s “Representación Verdadera” (printed in Lima in 1749) drew on the Bible’s Book of Lamentations in order to compare the destruction of the Inca state with that of Jerusalem.A key issue these men fought for was equality in the Catholic Church. Though Rome and Madrid endorsed Andean participation in the priesthood, Dueñas shows that in Peru, church officials repeatedly blocked indigenous access to all but the most subjugated clerical positions. She convincingly argues that this was the result of a colonizer’s quandary: in the early stages of Spanish colonization, the church needed neophytes in order to legitimize its mission of conversion. But once it had made sufficient inroads in America, Indians had to be reclassified as permanent neophytes in order to secure the church’s position of dominance.Although the transatlantic networks these authors utilized were central to their cases, Dueñas provides frustratingly little detail about who actually belonged to them or how they operated. The reader learns about Don Vicente Morachimo, an elite Indian from Lambayeque, whose “Manifiesto de agravios y vejaciónes” was printed under the auspices of the crown and widely circulated in Madrid as further evidence of why admin istrative reform was necessary in eighteenth-century Peru. Yet, we hear nothing of where the copies were sold, who purchased them, or whether Morachimo supported the crown’s co-optation of his work. With the notable exception of Juan de Padilla, a creole member of Lima’s audiencia who wrote a treatise on Indian exploitation, the vast majority of the legal advisers, ecclesiastics, and notaries who assisted these men remain nameless, and the author fails to speculate about how they might have participated in the process of filing grievances. Presumably, research in national, departmental, or municipal archives in Peru could have helped to develop this line of inquiry.Dueñas admirably addresses the complex problem of the colonial politics of identity. However, her insistence on discovering “trans-culturation” and “ethnogenesis” in her subjects’ writings creates methodological challenges. Although her Andean authors were elites who were educated by and lived among Europeans, Dueñas fails to consider how, as such, they were also familiar with Spanish intellectual culture. She readily links their treatises to the work of Guaman Poma and other sixteenth-century indigenous authors but fails to locate this genre in the arbitrista tradition of seventeenth-century Spain. Likewise, Dueñas might have discussed how the informal circulation of the tracts in question was part of a much larger Spanish tradition of having important political commentaries corre manuscrito, or circulate in a manuscript form that contemporaries thought to be more verifiable.In sum, this book brings to light these indigenous intellectuals’ dynamic efforts to shape their own social and political status in the Spanish Empire. For the historian of colonial Spanish America or Peru, it provides an enticing overview of a transatlantic political discourse and suggests interesting avenues for future research.