Llama herders and urban elites: Interdisciplinary readings of early colonial narratives in the Americas

Highlighting disciplinary-specific approaches

It would be easy to essentialize our respective disciplinary approaches to Latin American indigeneity and the major texts produced during and about the encounters of Europe and the Americas. There is a body of accessible narratives that have survived the passage of time and that offer an indigenous perspective on the process of conquest, resistance, and colonization. Some of these were authored by individuals labeled indio, though members of the social elite, such as Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. Others were ethnically mestizo, such as Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, the son of an indigenous mother and Spanish father, but treated as indios. Both used a variety of literary tools to build their authority into their texts, so that their audiences would take them seriously. These tools included, among others, gross exaggerations of their personal circumstances, their families’ social positions, and distortions of the events about which they wrote. But the question of historical authenticity has limited utility. Those texts, and the circumstances of their production, help us to understand colonial life; but an IREC pedagogy also provides a rich opportunity to discuss academic disciplinary foci.

Bringing in an archaeological or anthropological perspective to discussions of Garcilaso’s writings as literature serves as both a corrective to generalizations about an indigenous perspective, and provides a valuable opportunity for students to compare disciplinary approaches to the conquest and early Colonial Period. In anthropology, texts produced by indigenous and mestizo authors that have survived the test of time (just like those written by Spaniards), are treated differently because they offer, at best, a limited perspective on indigenous peoples. While it is true that the conquest and colonization of the “New World” by Spain was devastating to the indigenous populations of the Americas, it is also important to take into account the personal biases and agendas of those authors and their readers.

Both of us provide this context when discussing excerpts of texts like the Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (commonly known as the Florentine Codex) with our students. The Florentine Codex is a set of bilingual Spanish and Nahuatl (Aztec) manuscripts produced by Nahuatl authors directly supervised by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún. Sahagún’s purpose was to better understand Nahua culture and religious cosmology to facilitate conversion to Catholicism and stamp out idolatry. Technically, the Florentine Codex is authored by indigenous people. But its status as an indigenous account can be problematized on two fronts. First, the Nahuatl authors’ literacy and supervision by Sahagún made them atypical of indigenous inhabitants, and awareness of their privileged status adds a valuable perspective to discussions of their identity as authors, as indigenous persons, and as Christian converts. Second, contrasting their social status with the farmers, craftsmen, and menial laborers who made up the vast majority of the (illiterate) indigenous population during the Colonial era enriches the discussion of both the archaeological record of those groups as well as the texts produced by their privileged brethren under Sahagún. Thus, reading excerpts from or secondary sources about the Florentine Codex allows us to consciously apply both literary and anthropological perspectives in ways that illustrate disciplinarity for our students. This is a core feature of an IREC pedagogy. The disciplines whose research foci and methodologies might be contrasted can, of course, include many other fields such as art history and second language (translation) studies. We aim to illustrate how an IREC approach has worked for us in our classrooms, but hope that the broad transferability of this approach is apparent to the reader.

In his Colonial Period literature class, Quintana asks students to think about these indigenous authors as offering a much needed alternative to Spaniards’ perspective on the deep impact of the conquest. He emphasizes that these are exceptional figures, and that not everything we know about Latin American indigenous peoples comes through the conquerors’ writings. He presents Guaman Poma and Garcilaso de la Vega as two people who offer a different perspective on their indigenous cultures, while acknowledging that it was highly unusual for them to be educated and literate. Quintana also problematizes the Colonial Period codices because they too were produced well after the conquest; such early Colonial texts were produced by authors and artists classified as indio by their societies, but they are heavily analyzed by literary and historical scholars today because so little original material survived. Nonetheless, texts purported to offer an indigenous perspective on the Spanish conquest were produced by Hispanized, Christianized informants, often under the guidance of Spaniards. Quintana talks about these works as representing “mediated voices” rather than indigenous voices; doing so means asking students to critically analyze texts as products of indigenous persons in highly unusual and volatile sociopolitical circumstances, rather than falling into the trap of seeing them as representing the voice of precontact peoples.

Framing authors’ identities around the concept of a mediated voice is similar to what many humanities scholars do when they provide historical context to an author’s or artist’s work in the classroom. In this case, the “mediation” can refer to political hegemony, coercion, cultural influences, or internal social developments in Latin America. The introduction of a mediated voice, especially through such famous texts as the Florentine Codex, opens the door to discussions about a discipline’s approach to heterogeneity, uncertainty, and differences of interpretation. Contrary to some students’ desire for simple, straightforward information about a topic, academic research usually means working with others in a field’s collective process of addressing complex questions without simple solutions. Thus, Quintana uses class discussions of Guaman Poma and the Florentine Codex to talk too about problematizing “the indigenous voice” in Colonial Period Latin American literature.

In contrast, archaeologist Beaule spends a lot of time at the start of her colonial history course talking about Prehispanic cultural variability. Readings and discussions focus on the political, social, and economic organization of the Aztecs, how their culture differed from the earlier Toltecs and various Mayan groups from Tikal to Copan; but equally important are studies of some of the tiny villages, hamlets, and homesteads where the majority of both Prehispanic and Colonial Period indigenous peoples lived. These settlements do not fall within the named states and empires that were the focus of conquerors’ and indigenous authors’ work. Thus, in talking about the impact of the conquest and colonial reorganization on indigenous populations, Beaule directs students’ attention toward the indigenous farmers, fishermen, and herders of the vast countryside. An archaeological approach seeks to reconstruct regional-level settlement patterns, demographic levels, and communities’ sociopolitical and economic organization. But, it cannot offer us a fine grained chronology of these long-term changes, nor can it reveal what people thought about what was happening to them as letters, journals, pamphlets, plays, official documents, and other texts can. When reading excerpts of indigenous texts and codices, Beaule asks students to think critically about how authors’ individual circumstances (their social status, occupation, travels, etc.) bias their texts. This underpins discussions about identity formation processes, such as the emerging racial category of indio and how that label obscured or erased the linguistic, political, and social boundaries between polities, communities, villages, and lineages that gave Prehispanic peoples their group identities.

Because we have worked and taught together, Quintana and Beaule are comfortable talking about how each of us uses these texts in the classroom, and of the different kinds of discussions that our respective students are having about indigenous peoples before and after the conquest. We take time to talk about those differences with students in class as well—to make them cognizant of how the approaches Quintana uses and questions he asks them to think about are specific to literary scholarship, but how an archaeologist or historian would ask different questions and think about issues and actors from the Colonial Period differently. We offer a variety of practical applications of the IREC approach in the final section of this article. Here, though we would like to briefly relate how we think this discipline-conscious approach to questions about indigeneity, identity formation, and Colonialism offers something valuable to students. This is a different way of thinking about interdisciplinarity than the discussion of readings from different fields of student side-by-side. Rather, an IREC pedagogical approach requires disciplinary self-reflexivity alongside some knowledge about other disciplines’ foci and methods. An important goal in doing so is to get students to think critically about the research process itself, and to foster awareness of why Beaule excavates ancient houses while Quintana digs through piles of manuscripts in various archives. Given their different sources of evidence and the different questions each asks about these events and time period, how do historians, archaeologists, literary scholars, women’s studies professors, and other colleagues construct academic arguments? An IREC pedagogy seeks to simultaneously foster: (a) critical thinking about a particular issue, (b) awareness of disciplinary differences around that issue, and (c) an interdisciplinarity understanding of something that is both different from and greater than the sum of its individual fields.

Applying this pedagogical approach specifically to issues of indigeneity, moreover, may be seen as threatening to broader political processes of identity formation and struggles for indigenous rights. Sánchez-Prado (2005: 48, 50–51), for example, writes about how this literary scholarship plays a role in monumentalizing the indigenous past that, in turn, forms one half of a Mexican mestizo national identity. In thinking of the idealized Mexican (or Peruvian or Ecuadorian) as mestizo, politicized cultural constructions deliberately draw on essentializing components of an indigenous past as well as select elements of Spanish heritage. Thus, “the importance of these books rests not so much on their rigor in recovering the indigenous textualities, but on the very gesture of recovering those textualities and presenting them as voices silenced by the colonial process” (48). Literary scholarship’s noble pursuit is coupled to state identity formation and nationalism.

Our purpose here is not to take a position in these debates about the authenticity of the indigeneity of the authors of the limited corpus of texts, but rather to illustrate how problematizing these and related issues benefits from interdisciplinary scholarship. Perhaps the most important component of an IREC pedagogy is to make these interdisciplinary points of tension visible to students. Thus, discussions about indigeneity, national identity formation, and the texts themselves are developed alongside issues of disciplinary conventions, research questions, evidentiary support, and knowledge construction.

Personal biases

In general terms, Guaman Poma’s own economic motivations placed him in an unusual position within the emerging colonial society. Adorno (2000) recounts that Guaman Poma went from loyally working within the colonial regime to loudly and prolifically denouncing its abuses in El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno. Perhaps the event most responsible for this transformation was when his family lost lands in the Chupas valley claimed by both the Tingo-Guaman clan and local Chacapoyas people. The Chacapoyas won their suit in 1600 by successfully asserting that Felipe Guaman Poma was just “a humble Andean named Lázaro” (Adorno, 2002: 141). Far from relying on the native elite aristocracy for protection or leniency, he was sentenced to 200 lashes and a two-year exile from Chupas. His manuscript thus also bears the heavy burden of his bitter disillusionment with Spanish rule. These circumstances make his text neither literary fiction nor descriptive history. It is fair to say that neither his expectations of good treatment by the Spanish courts, nor his response to the loss of his family’s case, were typical of Andean indigenous peoples. Even his literacy was atypical for an indigenous person—or a Spanish one, for that matter. These personal circumstances are, we believe, a necessary part of contextualizing his writing alongside the history of the conquest and Spanish efforts to organize a new Colonial Period society and bureaucracy. Sharing such details with students also challenges them to look beyond binary categories of indigenous and colonist, thus provoking a critical examination of the implications of the invention of indio as a racial category.

The Nueva corónica provides material for discussions about the consequences of cultural contact, productively informed by cultural studies theorists such as Pratt (1992). Utilizing the new mode of communication, Guaman Poma inserts his family in the history of the conquest and Inka past to increase his lineage’s prestige and bolster his land claim. Some of the specific claims he makes in his manuscript—that members of his family were present at the Inkan Emperor Atahualpa’s execution and that he descends from a line of princes—are demonstrably false. But their very inclusion in his treatise gives us a fascinating example of the volatility of social hierarchies early in the Colonial Period, as well as the kinds of manipulations of supposedly rigid political categories that individuals were employing. An awareness of these kinds of manipulations gives students rich examples in their discussions about identity formation processes and indigeneity that puts literary and archaeological studies side-by-side.

El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega is another writer whose work helps us to problematize indigeneity from literary and anthropological perspectives. Unlike Guaman Poma, the Inca Garcilaso does not claim privileged access to crucial events of the conquest nor the Inkan inner circles of power. Garcilaso recalls stories he heard as a boy from his relatives about the origins of the Inka kings, but does not claim to have personally met those monarchs (Garcilaso de la Vega, [1609] 1990: 28–29). His uncle “the Inca” described what we now know was the Inkan origin myth about the first kings emerging from Lake Titicaca to the south, sent by “Nuestro Padre el Sol” (Our Father the Sun) to bring civilization to pre-Inkan peoples who lived like beasts in the field, practicing human sacrifice and cannibalism (29–30). The Spanish, of course, also claimed to bring Christian salvation and civilization to the New World’s indigenous peoples.

The social rejection faced by Garcilaso by his Spanish relatives and the court was certainly as much cause for disillusionment as Guaman Poma’s lost land claim. Garcilaso’s self-imposed exile in Spain put him in the unique position of being an Amerindian writer living and working in the political vipers’ nest that was 17th-century Europe. Brading (1986: 3) recognizes that his work is “a carefully meditated, sustained rebuttal of the imperial tradition of conquest history.” His main project was to criticize the heavily exploitative nature of the Colonial regime, not the initial conquest. However, he himself experienced little of that early colonial enterprise, relying instead on published accounts of the New World’s peoples as he penned his works from Spain. He drew heavily on the boyhood stories of the Inka his relatives told to him, but as the son of a conqueror, a privileged member of Cuzco’s Spanish elite, and a resident of Europe for his entire adult life, he knew little about indigenous cultures and experiences. This problematizes the extent to which his texts can be read as reflections of a broad indigenous experience of conquest and colonialism. Is he considered indigenous because he was born to an indigenous mother? Does indigeneity stem from a particular way of life (e.g. farmer-herder in the Andes), speaking a language, subscribing to a particular religious ideology, or simply having indigenous descendants in one’s lineage? Again, contrasting anthropological and literary theorists’ conceptions of indigeneity provides a rich application of interdisciplinary pedagogy that challenges students to critically assess both disciplines’ limitations and assumptions. Garcilaso claims to speak for indigenous peoples in the Andes, and was certainly not accepted as Spanish by the people around him in Spain, despite his socioeconomic privileged background. Was he mestizo or indio then? These are questions with which students can engage on different levels. Many of our undergraduate students at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa are personally invested in questions about indigeneity and personal identity, and so even those without a personal interest in Latin American Studies tend to be very interested in these discussions.

Indigenous llama herders or urban elites?

With an archaeological complement to these literary texts, we can better teach our students about the variability in indigenous experiences of conquest and early colonization. Beaule argues that to do so, we must consider what it meant to be under the Inka before the Spanish arrived. The Inka (like the Mexica Triple Alliance and other indigenous states) usually chose efficient taxation over cultural conversion, as the archaeological record bears clear witness. In Peru’s Upper Mantaro Valley, for instance, pre-Inkan Wanka chiefdoms were conquered and forcibly moved from hilltop fortresses to the irrigable valley bottoms to facilitate the production of taxable agricultural surpluses. The Inkan presence lessened the economic differences between local elites and commoners, with the latter enjoying increased access to both culturally preferred foods (maize and meat) and prestige goods (imported pottery, silver cloak pins, etc.). Yet, we see little change in household architecture or socioeconomic organization beyond this; indeed, greater access to prestige goods may very well have been part of an imperial administrative strategy of bribing cooperative populations with a demonstrably better quality of life (Costin and Earle, 1989; D’Altroy et al., 1985). And of course, there were populations like the powerful Chimú kingdoms of Peru’s north coast, or the famously independent Mapuche of Chile, who remained stubbornly unconquered. Similarly, Spanish efforts at cultural and religious conversion had mixed results at best.

Sociopolitical reorganization variably followed massive population losses from epidemics in the 16th century of up to 90–95% (Lovell, 1992), causing severe stresses on the agricultural system as well as reciprocal kinship bonds. In the Andean region, much of the adult population was dead, permanently separated from their ayllus (kinship-based communities) as forasteros (individuals separated from their ayllus), or captured and forced into mining enterprises. Thus, indigenous subsistence systems suffered unbelievably damaging interruptions and neglect, contributing to starvation in rural villages and towns, even before (or in addition to) epidemics and political conscription under the Spanish. Of those ayllus who managed to overcome these obstacles—and there certainly were communities who did so, since indigenous cultures were never fully extinguished or conquered—many would have been under tremendous pressure to help or take in their kin from elsewhere. Reciprocity (ayni) and ayllu membership were fundamental principles of social organization in the Andes, and would have been critical coping tools. The reducciónes, encomenderos, and forasteros are, therefore, only part of the picture. Even if rural ayllus and towns or villages were not directly touched by Spanish efforts at more efficient tax collection, social and economic stresses burdened extant communities. Such upheaval was not, of course, experienced in the same ways by everyone. Geographic barriers softened the blows dealt by disease and colonial taxation on some communities, just as the Inka before them failed to have much impact on populations in the eastern lowlands. Similarly, greater distance from Cuzco and secondary administrative centers meant either indirect or little control over local economies, political organization, or resources. We know that—even in heavy population centers like the Valley of Mexico—relatively small numbers of colonists meant that indigenous communities were afforded a greater degree of autonomy than the Spanish might have liked to admit (Restall et al., 2005).

From an archaeological perspective, the “typical” Andean was an agropastoralist scraping out a meager existence on the slopes of the sierras, cold high mountain plains, or desiccated coastal deserts and valleys. These farmer-herders usually paid some labor taxes to support the Moche, Chimú, Tiwanaku, Huari, Colla, Inka, or other states, but otherwise had lives that were pretty isolated from the main centers of power. Typical indigenous persons did not witness historic cultural encounters, meet Inkan royalty, or even speak Quechua (the language of the Inka). The same can be said of the “typical” indigenous Mesoamerican in the decades preceding and during the conquest of Mexico. The political intrigues, flowery wars (guerra florida), human sacrificial ceremonies and ballgames of Mesoamerican elites in Mexico-Tenochtitlan, its allies and rivals, and in the lowland centers of the Post-Classic Period, were actually only relevant to a small proportion of the population. This is not to say that the conquest and early tumultuous years of Colonialism had little impact on poor, rural farmers and herders, but it is certainly the case that conquest by both native states and the Spanish did not necessarily mean total cultural upheaval, religious conversion, economic destitution, or social reorganization. Even in the Valley of Mexico and central Peruvian heartlands, many indigenous families continued to speak local languages, grow and eat their own food, and practice their religious rituals (albeit often behind a cloak of superficial Christianity acceptable to the authorities). As Díaz (2010: 31) recognizes, the degree of acculturation correlated strongly with the intensity of contact. Thus, one might challenge students to consider authors such as Guaman Poma and Garcilaso as urban dwelling social elites instead of representative of indigenous peoples.

In fact, Guaman Poma and Garcilaso probably had more in common with low-level Spanish bureaucrats than an Aymara llama herder. So what did it mean that they were labeled indio? If the racial category of indio was not equated with specific blood quotas, social class, prestige, wealth or poverty, language, or customs, then what exactly did it signify? We provide additional examples of Colonial Period social categories in flux to students. Individuals could purchase a cédula (certificate establishing one’s white race), and a couple’s eventual intention to marry could, after the death of one party, be used to apply for retroactive legitimacy for a couple’s children. Together these examples of the construction and manipulation of seemingly fixed categories such as indio, white, and bastard, are rich material for student discussions. They are, after all, what so many of us Colonial Period scholars in different fields engage with in our own research.

The combination of archaeological and literary approaches problematizes indigeneity by contrasting these 16th-century authors’ experiences with their poorer indigenous brethren. We assign selections from the texts and authors we have cited in this section in our Colonial Period literature and archaeology/history classes to promote critical interdisciplinary discussions about that period and about the social category of indigeneity more generally. But, we also use it to talk about the limitations, research foci, methodologies, and interpretive biases of each discipline with our students.

Adding archaeological, anthropological, and historical sources to literary ones can enrich students’ understanding of the conquest and colonization of the Americas. But, the IREC approach we advocate in this essay involves more than the cumulative addition of disciplinary sources. Rather, one should use a specific discipline’s perspectives on the encounters (or similar research problems) to critically analyze the conceptual breadth and depth of arguments produced within a different discipline.