5
ANDEAN DISCOURSES OF JUSTICE
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The Colonial Judicial System under Scrutiny

FOR MODERN SCHOLARS, the work of Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala and the increasing amount of Indian litigation in the royal courts initiated the tradition of social criticism by colonized subjects in the Andes. This tradition continued and was developed beyond Guamán Poma’s time by the mid- and late-colonial scholars studied in this book. The textual work of these later Andean authors is permeated by recurrent critiques of key aspects of Spanish rule, which express their understanding of the colonial crisis in the seventeenth century and the impact of the changes introduced in the eighteenth century to resolve it. The critiques appear in their texts often as a prelude to the enunciation of specific changes or reforms they deemed necessary to restore social balance, a format similar to the memoriales of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas in the first half of the sixteenth century.¹ The critical approaches of these writers delve into the continued ineffectiveness of the justice system and provide a record of the conflicting relationships of Indians vis-à-vis colonial authorities and the church from the perspective of Andeans themselves.

This chapter focuses on the discursive construction of Andean critiques of the colonial system, from approximately 1650 to the 1780s, which centered in the institution of corregidores, the mita system, and the colonial church.² Since Andean scholarship did not exist in an isolated discursive circuit but instead formed part of a wider, usually subtle intellectual dialogue (intertextuality) among creole, clerical, and enlightened discourses in the Viceroyalty of Peru, the chapter’s last section reviews the main lines along which such dialogue occurred. Andean scholars selected models of criticism embedded in the writings of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas and missional narratives, which used biblical images and, most commonly, the “Lamentations” of the prophet Jeremiah as persuasive rhetoric to prompt the king to reverse the social imbalance in the Andes. The trope of agravios y vejaciones (offenses and hardships) inflicted upon “defenseless” Indians thus became a staple in the narratives used to criticize the colonial justice system. Andean intellectuals, however, used such models to support an agenda that diverged from that of Casas, the ecclesiastical missionaries, and Guamán Poma, stressing instead the need to empower Andean nobles socially. During the colonial period, creoles, “enlightened” officials, and ecclesiastic letrados criticized the state with a similar rhetoric while seeking to revamp the evangelization project, support state reform, and, most important, strengthen the empire. As this almost inadvertent dialogue took place, the letrados occasionally appropriated Andean knowledge and experience to construct discourses in support of societal reforms that differed from Andeans’ goals, thus partaking in the subtle relationships of power that took place in the “lettered city,” a space intellectual Andeans accessed in rather contentious ways. A sector of local creoles did occasionally support Andean agendas and ally with Andeans politically. Thus, their texts are more closely linked to Andean scholarship.

CRITIQUE OF THE CORREGIDOR

One of the major transformative events in the relationship between Spaniards and Indians occurred with the introduction of the corregidor in the second half of the sixteenth century, a royal effort to curtail the power of encomenderos. The relationship between Spanish corregidores and Andeans was the epitome of the multifarious conflicts arising from the everyday reenactment of colonialism. The networks of colonial power that linked corregidores, lieutenant corregidores, miners, hacendados, merchants, obraje owners, priests, and even caciques and protectores de naturales appeared within the field of Andean political awareness and became the target of criticism in Andeans’ texts.³

A few decades after Guamán Poma’s work and more concerned with the failure of evangelization in Charcas, Juan de Cuevas Herrera carried on this critical tradition toward the mid- and late seventeenth century, representing abusive and corrupt corregidores as “non-Christian” and “enemies of God,” the king, and the royal treasury. But most important, he regarded these officials as a plague who threatened the stability of the empire:

Corregidores are a pest that consume Indians and won’t stop until they finish them all . . . and Y. M. [Your Majesty] sustains these kind of judges at the expense of thousands of your royal treasury. They are declared enemies of God, Y. M., disguised as ministers, [enemies of] your royal treasury, and the preservation of this kingdom. . . . They are people who enter their posts through the door of sacrilege and exit through that of [a]theism.⁴

The mestizo parish priest directly questioned the king about wasting money on sustaining “anti-Christian” corregidores. Cuevas Herrera devoted one of his five memoriales to a description of the malfeasance of corregidores, emphasizing defrauds of the royal treasury, violence against Indians in the collection of tribute, and, most important, the illegal introduction of repartos in Chuquisaca in the late seventeenth century and the series of abuses that accompanied it—all of which gave Andeans an inaccurate image of Christians and their religious ways.⁵

The practice of repartos was consolidated in the Andes in the eighteenth century, and another Andean scholar from Lambayeque, the cacique and procurador de naturales Don Vicente Morachimo, directed the thrust of his reports toward the evils of the corregidores and their repartos. He asserted that corregidores charged excessive fees for goods detrimental to the Indians’ health. He also denounced the practices of corregidores and their lieutenants from the Province of Collao in the 1730s—who compelled caciques to pay overdue fees for the repartos, confiscated their property, and jailed them—while forcing numerous Indians to transport merchandise long distances without paying the appropriate costs.⁶ During the extirpation campaigns, Cuevas Herrera accused corregidores of being indirectly responsible for the failure of evangelization, whereas Morachimo associated the weakness of Indians’ conversion to Catholicism with the violence of the system of repartos in the first decades of the 1700s:

I consider that the Indians are annihilated because of the harsh treatment of corregidores. Without exception, all [c]orregidores put out at the very least between a hundred thousand to two hundred thousand pesos in repartos in the small provinces every two years. . . . From this, one infers, Lord, this is the end for the Indians. They [the Indians] get inebriated . . . and do other things and even if they do not lack knowledge of our holy Catholic faith, they can always quit it because they are not treated like fellow-creatures and they experience the opposite to what is taught to them, and all goes here against the holy commands, laws and ordinances on this matter.⁷

The corroboration of the manifold corruption among corregidores in different periods substantiated the Andean critique of colonial institutions of justice more generally. The focus on the ways official corruption often resulted in violence, defrauding the royal treasury and causing Indians to escape to the mountains and relapse to idolatry, strengthened Andeans’ claim that the position of corregidor should be abolished. Corregidores were accused of transferring tribute funds to cover unpaid repartos, and the Andean authorities who denounced these crimes lost their chiefdoms, as corregidores replaced them or even sent them to jail. For example, Morachimo denounced the imprisonment of the kuraka Joseph Chuquiguanca, from the Azángaro repartimiento, for opposing abuses by the local corregidor and the imprisonment of Marcos Javier Copacondori, cacique from the town of Asillo, and a cacique from Carabaya Province for similar reasons.⁸

Andean writers indicated that corregidores directed their violence toward the more vulnerable social groups, such as indigenous women, elders, widows, young girls, and particularly the poor. They explained how women were forced to work in obrajes and Spanish households, which prevented them from taking care of their own households and plots. Juan de Cuevas Herrera in particular provided abundant denunciations regarding women forced into concubinage by corregidores and lieutenant corregidores, who took advantage of their position to sexually abuse and deprive these women of their small assets and resources. When widows and other poor women appealed for justice, corregidores often deceived and mistreated them because they were mostly illiterate, poor, and perceived as weak.⁹

The writers understood that official corruption undermined the social and economic interests of Andean communities, attacking the collusion among judges, visitadores, corregidores, viceroys, and other elite Spaniards. According to Morachimo’s accusations, for example, these networks covered up violations of royal laws mandating the good treatment of Indians and obstructed the upper levels of justice by oidores (audiencia judges) and viceroys in the 1730s. Morachimo explained in detail the various transgressions of individual laws by these officials and substantiated them with concrete cases he knew from regions such as the Chicama Valley (Trujillo), Guacho (Chancay), El Cercado (Lima), Potosí (Charcas), Chiclayo (Piura), Asillo (Azángaro), Langasica (Huarochirí), Carabaya, Chachapoyas, and Huancavelica.¹⁰ Thus, given the nature of his job as procurador de naturales and his concern with the plight of Indians, Morachimo had a wider view of the anomalies within the colonial justice system.

The increasing replacement of hereditary lords with caciques who more readily acquiesced to the corregidores’ demands led to a deterioration of ethnic authority and was still a critical issue in the late seventeenth century. By then, critiques of these colonial caciques, perceived as little more than members of the colonial state, showed up frequently in Andean texts. Juan de Cuevas Herrera’s “Cinco memoriales” launched the harshest critiques against nonhereditary caciques in Charcas Province. They were invariably represented as “a necessary evil.”¹¹ Caciques and kurakas added to the Indians’ agravios y vejaciones: “Kurakas are the domestic enemies from the day the Indian is born until he dies: they are one enemy that comprises three: world, devil, and flesh.”¹² This description followed the general tone of the critique of corregidores and delved into a series of similar accusations. To highlight the decadence of the caciques of his time, Cuevas Herrera exalted the virtues of the old native chieftains: “The old caciques were men of authority, capacity and Christianity . . . versed in the Spanish language and Latin, beautiful musicians, escribanos, and accountants . . . and above all they were very zealous of the [d]ivine [c]ult.”¹³ The mestizo scholar constructed the Indian past as a seamless, harmonic time, with no conflicts between Indian authorities and their constituencies. These disparate images of Indian authorities attest to the changes Spanish colonialism introduced in the Andean communities in the Province of Charcas, where Cuevas Herrera served as a doctrinero, and also speak to Cuevas Herrera’s internalization of colonial culture, as well as his longing for peaceful coexistence between Spaniards and Andeans.

In the first decades of the eighteenth century, as litigation against the abusive repartimiento de comercio increased, attacks on the colonial judicial system focused on the inefficiency of the crown’s mechanisms to oversee the conduct of the judges and corregidores most responsible for the failure of law enforcement. Morachimo explained, for example, that the 1722 royal decree, intended to end such abuses by corregidores, in reality only submitted them to a formal residencia (review of office), itself plagued by corruption in the form of a colluding alliance of inspectors and corregidores.¹⁴ To substantiate his indictment of the justice system, Morachimo cited each law violated as supporting evidence of the social unrest generated by abusive colonial officials, especially judges and visitadores.¹⁵

The list of law violations that generated violence and protest, according to Morachimo’s “Manifiesto,” was rather long, but only a few instances suffice to give a sense of the range of issues he chose to illustrate the ineffectual nature of colonial justice for Andeans. An ordinance of the real audiencia from May 20, 1722, approved the free use of the main square by Indians so they could participate in Lima’s market. According to the Andean procurador, since 1730, Andeans had been forced to pay two silver reales a day to use those spaces.¹⁶ The following decade problems reached a critical point as the Bourbons sought to rationalize and regulate the use of urban public spaces; as a result, Indian vendors were banned from such spaces.¹⁷ Morachimo also denounced a second ordenanza (ordinance), contained in Book 2[6], Title 18[12] on personal service (from the “Recopilación”), that prohibited the use of Indian labor in sugar mills and textile workshops and also went unenforced: “In spite of the prohibition, the corregidores pressure caciques to send Indians to the obrajes where they are paid in food and cloth, thus the Indians remain in a status of perpetual slavery.”¹⁸

Morachimo and Fray Calixto de San José Túpac Inca denounced the same alleged violations of laws by corregidores, including the exemption of Andeans from the alcabala, payment of travel expenses for those serving the mining mita, the prohibition against assigning mita workers to corregidores and other ministers, legislation outlawing physical punishment and torture in obrajes, and legal enforcement of the arancel (legal wage for mita workers). Exhaustive discussions of the failure of the colonial judicial system and the inefficacy of government authorities eventually led to attacks on the king for his “tyranny” and negligence. As explained in Chapter 3, the social critique of Spanish government in the “Representación verdadera” appears enveloped in the sophisticated rhetoric of the prophet Jeremiah’s “Lamentations,” clearly conveyed in this passage:

But, what a disgrace!, my lord, that the doors of justice are closed for us, and we find your justice neither in you or your ministers nor in your bishops or pastors, who are there only to impede that our lamentations and complaints reach you. . . . The crown has fallen down from our heads. . . . Jeremiah cried as though saying: for our sins we are in such devastation that it seems we do not have a king. And your vassals the Indians cry the same thing, lord, because even though we have a pious, Spanish and Christian Catholic king, we are treated as though we had none, and [as though] there was no king for them [the Indians] because they cannot see him, neither talk to him. . . . Therefore, what we experience is a violent, hard, cruel and tyrant government, which the king’s ministers have invented, and very different from what has been practiced in all Catholic kingdoms and from the honest intention of the king.¹⁹

The use of Jeremiah here softens the criticism of the monarch for overlooking the plight of his Indian subjects. Since the king and his officials failed to provide the expected protection to Andean subjects, they behaved as tyrants. Andean writers, however, were usually cautious and launched subtle attacks against a distant crown, only to follow them with anxious insistence that he was not responsible for the “tyranny” of his representatives in Peru. In the face of officials’ protracted negligence and the inefficient system of law, Andean scholars presented themselves as the true guardians of justice in the kingdom by reclaiming the freedom to travel to Spain to inform the king about the state of law enforcement.²⁰ This concern is consistent with the previously mentioned efforts to have Indians appointed as protectores de naturales and escribanos.

The social crisis generated by the repartos escalated with the reforms of Charles III in the 1760s, particularly the fiscal reforms, making the limits of colonial justice for Andean subjects abundantly clear. Thus, the boundaries between peace and war in the Andes became rather thin. When peaceful efforts fell short of obtaining justice, upheavals erupted in pursuit of aims virtually identical to those Andean scholars attempted through petitions and critiques. Several times during the seventeenth century, Andeans attempted rebellions to put an end to the mita system, and more consistent rebellions in the late eighteenth century were focused on rejecting the reparto system and the Bourbon reform efforts. In the midst of the most violent challenge to Spanish rule, in 1780–1781, José Gabriel Condorcanqui Túpac Amaru II’s discourses of social justice (protest against the agravios y vejaciones inflicted upon Andeans) drew upon the social and political subordination of common Andeans to advance a wider program of Andean power. His Inca messianism served as a rallying ideology that helped create a multi-ethnic alliance for rebellion. The fact that other Andeans had voiced most of Túpac Amaru’s ideas prior to 1780 does not undermine the importance of his discourses of anti-colonial rebellion. The rebel leader and scholar placed previous Andean discourses within the framework of open rebellion against colonial injustice—a textual synthesis conveyed in the language of force that encompassed not only the 1781 upheaval but also the wave of localized uprisings, conspiracies, and rebellions that preceded it.

The opposition to corregidores and the textual representation of these colonial officials’ evil nature were unanimous among leaders of the Great Rebellion, who used canonical texts to advance their social critiques and views of change. Túpac Amaru’s brother Diego Cristóbal, for example, reiterated in his letters that corregidores abused Indians, forcing upon them the repartimiento of useless items at exorbitant prices. Repartos never did conform to the official rates or to the correct quantity or quality. Diego Cristóbal announced that “the covetousness of corregidores and other mandones [imposed caciques, amenable to corregidores’ will] was so blind and disproportionate that they had no other interest than their personal benefit, thus forfeiting entirely the conversion, conservation, and good treatment of the naturales.” He proposed instead that the best strategy for social justice, “the spiritual and temporal conservation of the subjects,” was a “pacific and gentle treatment,” which had been advised since the times of Roman figures such as Tito Libio and Seneca. According to Diego Cristóbal, Saint Paul had also warned that “covetousness was the devil’s lure, which unleashes harmful desires and is the root of all evil. . . . The main harvest that should be collected from Indians must be their conversion, teaching, and conservation, since that is why the special providence of God entrusted Indians to the protection of the faithful, Christian, and Catholic monarchs from Spain.”²¹

Thus, in moments of deep social unrest, scholars and rebels shared similar views of the colonial establishment and seem to have been grounded in similar rhetorical strategies. The use of canonical literature and legal discourses and the rejection of abusive colonial practices help us understand the links between Andean scholarship and rebellion in the eighteenth-century conjunctures of social crisis. It then becomes understandable why political aims that most believe were first voiced during the Túpac Amaru Rebellion, such as the abolition of Spanish corregidores and their replacement by Indian judges, originated much earlier, as will be explained in more detail in Chapter 6.

ANDEAN CRITIQUES OF THE COLONIAL CHURCH

The fact that most of the Andean writers under study were members of the lower church in different capacities makes the pattern of textual critiques of such an institution more striking or perhaps most understandable. One of the most intriguing features of these critical narratives is the coexistence of Christian and anti-clerical discourses and these scholars’ ability to question the evangelization strategy without compromising their claim for inclusion in the church. The purpose of this criticism was to expose how the behavior of corrupt and abusive church members contradicted their spiritual mission. The writers sought to prove that deviant doctrineros’ and prelates’ wrongdoings further perpetuated the subordination and degradation of Andean women and men. The critique of colonial Christianity explained later foregrounds the racial issues underlying the social practices of ecclesiastic members in the New World, as seen by colonial Andean writers. In their eyes, the Roman Catholic Church became a colonial institution rather than one that truly promoted spirituality and equality for Andeans. In the end, Andean scholars defined the decadence of church officials in Peru as the major cause of the evangelization project’s failure: Indians’ running away to the “montaña,” at the margins of the Christian world, to get away from social injustice is a common theme in Andean writings throughout the colonial period and across different regions of the Viceroyalty of Peru.

Among the leading scholars who articulated the most thorough and complex criticism of the church, Juan de Cuevas Herrera composed his works primarily in Charcas Province toward the end of his long service as a doctrinero, in the years following the major extirpation campaigns of the seventeenth century in the Archbishopric of Lima, when the failure of these campaigns to uproot Andean “idolatry” was more apparent. Cuevas Herrara called attention to the relaxation of moral behavior within the church and warned about the impending danger this represented for sustaining the program to Christianize Indians.

In discussing the extirpation officials’ misbehavior, church historian Kenneth Mills described how the moral orientation of the Council of Trent found expression in the process of extirpation of idolatries in the Lima archdiocese. He argued that ecclesiastic officials’ questionable morality debilitated the structure of a purification program whose foundations lay in the moral superiority of the church ideology and ministers. Mills highlighted the fact that prominent church figures were aware of this misbehavior and the problems it posed for the success of Indian conversion.²² Juan de Cuevas Herrera, a lower church figure, seems to have been well aware of this anomaly, as he partook in the criticism of curas doctrineros’ and extirpation officials’ misconduct. As opposed to Mills’s thesis, however, Cuevas Herrera, a cura doctrinero himself, did not ultimately place the blame on Andeans’ “errors.” In Cuevas Herrera’s narrative, the actual “bad Christians” were the Spanish priests and officials rather than Andeans; his “Cinco memoriales” endeavored to demonstrate that responsibility for the hurdles in the evangelization process in seventeenth-century Charcas lay in the ways of the church itself. In line with Mills’s thesis, nevertheless, this section demonstrates that Cuevas Herrera’s texts represent the conscious effort of Andeans from within the lower church to fight back against the Lima church’s moralizing campaign by “redeploying” Christian morality. Cuevas Herrera essentially put the magistrates of the sacred in front of their own “mirrors” of morality, which the Tridentine church had deployed upon them and the faithful.²³ He recast curas doctrineros and inspectors of idolatry as “sinners” in need of reformation and, in turn, called for a figurative purification campaign against them to regenerate the kingdom: “[Ultimately], this body [kingdom] is so sick that it is imperative to sever and cut its individual pieces to cure it, reform it, and heal it.”²⁴ As opposed to the corrupt church officials, Cuevas Herrera presented himself as the true model of virtue and restraint; overall, he upheld Andeans as morally superior to Spanish clerics and other officials.

Cuevas Herrera’s work discusses the crisis of evangelization, which he referred to as the “mortal accidents of this kingdom” or the “impediments for the full conversion of Indians” in the subtitle of “Cinco memoriales.”²⁵ The doctrinero argued that the conversion program was doomed by its own structural weaknesses and those of the colonial system more generally: the negligence and inefficiency of the high prelates in charge of overseeing conversion, coupled with the ineptitude of curas doctrineros, the excesses of corregidores, and the overexploitation of mitayos, yielded a thin “harvest” of true Christian souls among Andeans.

The first of his five memoriales was intended to demonstrate that most curas doctrineros had not met the qualifications required or fulfilled their duties correctly as “fathers, pastors, masters, tutors, and defenders.” He was adamant that doctrineros must be primarily men of letters and proficient in the language of the Indians.²⁶ Cuevas Herrera questioned the irregular methods used in the selection of curas doctrineros and linked the “bad administration of the gospel” to the damage caused to the Indians’ souls and salvation. He tried to move the king to action: “Oh great lord! Oh Catholic monarch! Oh pious king! How harmful it is for the good administration of the gospel in these kingdoms the great distance that there is from those [the king’s] eyes to these abated feet.” Cuevas Herrera proposed that curas who did not know the Indian language should not be paid and should be forced to return the salary they had unjustifiably earned to the royal treasury.²⁷

Cuevas Herrera used this criticism not only to question the church’s management but also to empower Andeans as more apt candidates for the priesthood.²⁸ But he also advocated for the replacement of secular doctrineros by Jesuit priests, whom he portrayed as champions of the cause of Indian justice and true missionaries who were “born in this world to illuminate it, carrying the sun’s light of Christ’s justice all around it.”²⁹ Cuevas Herrera’s claim that the Jesuits should take over the Indian parishes echoed a similar, wider campaign in the mid-seventeenth century, launched by different authorities who proposed that a few or at least one parish in each province should be reassigned to the Jesuits.³⁰ In 1649 Archbishop Pedro de Villagómez launched the second major extirpation-of-idolatry campaign in the Archbishopric of Lima, which was opposed by caciques and commoners alike because of the ineffectiveness of the previous campaigns and the many complaints of excesses committed by the secular clergy.

Cuevas Herrera contributed to these denunciations, stressing church ministers’ departure from spiritual aims in favor of more worldly business interests. Colonial priests and prelates, according to him, busied themselves conducting and managing commerce, obrajes, and estates. Presenting himself as a witness to the abuses he denounced, he provided examples of the moral turpitude of visitadores de idolatrías (inspectors of idolatry) who allegedly obtained money from curas under extortion and were far more concerned with collecting curas’ dues than with the spiritual care of their parishioners. The Andean doctrinero opposed this practice, arguing that the state of poverty in the Province of Charcas made it difficult, if not impossible, for poor parishes to pay the customary fees to ecclesiastical inspectors; he rejected the methods for collecting curas’ dues employed by these visitadores. In reference to abuses by the inspectors of idolatry, Cuevas Herrera declared: “To send out one of these inspectors amounts to release [of] one of the four devils, who are tied up in the Eufrates. Because they are men whose only God is money. This prompts them to honor the rich and unworthy, while they affront the virtuous for being poor.”³¹ Cuevas Herrera charged that bishops and archbishops, with their retainers, overburdened parish priests with excessive demands that were ultimately paid by the poor parishioners who provided the labor and products demanded for prelates’ prolonged visits to Indian towns.³²

During the first decades of the eighteenth century, in the Provinces of Lima, Huarochirí, Trujillo, and Piura, the results of evangelization and the behavior of doctrineros seemed to have improved little, according to the reports of Indian officials. Introducing complaints similar to those articulated by Cuevas Herrera, Procurador and Diputado General de Naturales Vicente Morachimo documented thoroughly his own critique of the church. But as opposed to Cuevas Herrera, whose charges were barely substantiated with proper names and locations, Morachimo denounced the curas doctrineros’ lack of commitment and their ambition and covetousness. He also pointed to curas’ mismanagement of Indian communal and cofradía assets, overcharges of tithes and other ecclesiastical fees to Indians, and disobedience of royal laws mandating the foundation of schools in doctrinas.³³ Both Cuevas Herrera and Morachimo stressed that curas doctrineros forced Indian women to perform domestic service, weaving, and carrying wood and water, among other activities, in which they underpaid them or did not pay them at all. In addition, the two scholars denounced doctrineros for seizing properties of deceased Indians and widows and sexually abusing Indian women, as Guamán Poma had questioned earlier, in approximately 1615.³⁴

This set of writings constitutes a rich record of Andean scholars’ views of Indian subordination by the church. Even though infused by the writers’ political interests and biases, the accounts offer a rare glimpse into the conflicting relationships of Andean peoples with the colonial ecclesiastical institution, through Andeans’ own words.³⁵ Cuevas Herrera in particular represented a critical voice from within the lower echelons of the church and offered a rendition of the practices that eroded the church’s legitimacy as a spiritual force among Indians and mestizos in the post-extirpation period of the seventeenth century. As a writer, a cura doctrinero, and a mestizo descended from the Inca, Cuevas Herrera offered a view of church politics at the local level and endeavored to find experiential common ground with the impoverished, women, and the illiterate—subjects relegated to the margins of the colonial world. To be sure, his proposals reinforced the ecclesiastical discourse that supported the aims of evangelization and the legitimacy of the king as the purveyor of justice for Indians.

Morachimo, a solitary voice within the judicial system advocating for Indian justice in the 1730s, viewed these irregularities as a reflection of the crisis of the colonial legal system, from which the church did not escape; he used the force of legal discourse to underscore the social disorder that stemmed from the consistent violation of laws. Like Cuevas Herrera, Morachimo believed Indians’ running away from the church to resume their idolatrous practices and the losses to the royal treasury as a result of the decreased tributary population in Indian towns were just some expressions of this crisis of justice. His petitions reinforced the role of law in social order, the aims of evangelization, the legitimacy of the king as the supreme purveyor of justice for Indians, and, thereby, the hegemony of the Spanish empire. He expected the king to issue “the prompt mandates he deems appropriate to curtail such prominent harms.”³⁶

Perhaps the most powerful indictment against the church in the eighteenth century is found in the “Representación verdadera,” in which Fray Calixto and other Andeans discussed the exclusionary approach of the church vis-à-vis Indians in the priesthood. The key argument was that the church had systematically denied Indians full membership in the Catholic Church as priests and higher ecclesiastical authorities, even after centuries of conversion to Christianity. In addressing the king on the subject, the “Representación verdadera” stated:

Our and your churches in America are like widows because they do not have even one natural Indian of theirs as a pastor, a vicar of a parish, or a prelate, in spite of the many laws of the Holy Mother and Roman Catholic Church, mandating that Indians be chosen among the capable ones. The Church is a widow because Spanish men have taken most of its dignities. They have separated from us and don’t see us as pastors. They use those positions as renters who join them for pure temporal convenience and benefit. The Church is a widow and we, her children, are starving without the spiritual bread. . . . Oh Lord, Oh King, Oh father of ours, in what a nation is this happening?³⁷

In the friar’s eyes, the American church was incomplete (like widows), as it was in his time. The statement reframes the Catholic theology that represented the priesthood as a mystical marriage of the priest to the church or of nuns to Christ. Andeans would marry the church if they were not prevented from performing as ecclesiastical authorities and functionaries. The conflicting relationship between Indians and the church is represented as a marriage truncated by the Spanish, who monopolized the ecclesiastical positions of power in the church and considered Christian Indians unable to perform as priests—thereby denying them the opportunities and recognition they would otherwise enjoy as priests, prelates, or missionaries. Indian women were equally excluded from opportunities for social ascent and spiritual improvement. Fray Calixto stressed the obstacles for Indian women in the church and in society:

In the ecclesiastical and religious state and in the secular nobility, Indian and mestizo women, even though they have sharp minds, face the same unhappy death [as] Indian men, and even more so for them since they are a weaker and less robust sex. Because it is hard to see our daughters being made servants and slaves of Spanish women, who are arrogant, haughty, and disdainful. They all believe they are far superior [to] the miserable Indian woman who serves them humbly. . . . And they have nowhere to advance themselves spiritually. Is there any [worse] oppression than ours, Lord, that in more than 200 years there has not been even one nunnery founded for Indian women, because the Spaniards have usurped all the existent ones?³⁸

This passage makes evident not only Andean scholars’ conscious effort to emphasize the colonial church’s discriminatory policies against Indian women but also their perception of the power dynamics among women across ethnic lines. The intellectual Andeans speaking in this text also appeared to have internalized colonial gender views, perceiving Indian women as more fragile than men and stressing the subordination of Indian women in Spanish convents:

Lord, the women and virgins in Sion and Judá are humiliated, affronted, and lost. [How is it possible] that Indian and mestizo women are not admitted in the convents as nuns or even as lay nuns but only as donadas, like black, mulatto, and zambo women are usually received, [that is], as servants of the Spanish nuns? [How is it possible] that Spaniards have created such a third state of donadas for Indian, mestizo and zambo women without the approval of the church, or any council or the king?³⁹

Here, the status of Indian women is symbolized anew by the oppression of the Hebrews under Egyptian rule, while the writers regret the degradation of Indian women in convents as donadas—a status that puts them closer to castas, looked down upon by Andean nobles. The corollary to Fray Calixto’s critique of the church is that Indians were not treated as true members of the church, and their conversion to Christianity was a historical error. The abusive and corrupt practices of members of the upper church, parish priests, and colonial officials more generally created moral devastation and hopelessness that prompted Indians to escape the control of the church and the state. This expedient ultimately explained the failure of Franciscan missionary work following the rebellion of Juan Santos Atahualpa in the Franciscan mission areas of Cerro de la Sal in 1742, which continued later in other frontiers of the viceroyalty. The Huarochirí rebellion in 1750 also articulated the lack of opportunities for recognition of Andean nobles in the priesthood as one of its motives (see Chapter 3).

Even though writers like Cuevas Herrera, Morachimo, and Fray Calixto came from regions as disparate as the Provinces of Charcas, Saña, Tarma, and Lima and wrote at different times, their critical discourses against the church reflect a long pattern of tension and unrest between curates and their Indian parishioners. Their discourses capitalized on the inconsistency between the religious rhetoric of ecclesiastical officials and preachers of the Gospel and the non-Christian behavior of Spanish Christians, which harmed the church’s credibility as a spiritual institution among Indians. The incisive criticism of Andean churchmen against the misbehavior of clerical officials was also grounded in awareness of the moral expectations of the church by agents of religious purification, with which these Andeans, as doctrineros and mission aides, were well acquainted. Their discussions stressed the failure of curas, judges of idolatry, and other prelates to comply with the canonical prescriptive formulas of the post-Tridentine church (after 1563), which admonished ecclesiastics to teach morality by example and to remain “mirrors” of virtue for the Indian parishioners while constantly monitoring themselves for necessary self-correction—all of which was crucial for preservation of the church’s religious and social authority.⁴⁰ Along with others within the church and the state, those scholars acknowledged that evangelization was far from a successful undertaking. They posed that Andeans found no solace or social justice in the church, and, in response, they opted to run away to the “montaña” (wilderness), a place of refuge in the frontiers of Christianity and civilization where they would be lost to the evangelization enterprise and to institutional mechanisms of social control.⁴¹

Like Cuevas in the late seventeenth century and Fray Calixto in the mid-eighteenth century, Morachimo led readers to believe that ultimately the very functioning of the colonial society undermined the spiritual justification of the Spanish conquest and settlement of the Andes. He was particularly concerned that the Andeans’ abandonment of towns and flight to the montaña constituted the “loss of [both] the spiritual . . . and temporal fruit,” which posed a threat to the system: “[P]eople [who become] rooted out from their towns became God’s worst enemies. This is harmful for the royal treasury and the well-being of the ones who remain.”⁴² Instead of placing responsibility for the general failure of evangelization on Andeans’ idolatry or superstitions, as most missionaries and extirpators of idolatries had done in the past, Morachimo held corrupt curas doctrineros, corregidores, and judges accountable for the failure of the spiritual project of colonialism. Starting in the late seventeenth century, Juan de Cuevas Herrera had proposed that parishioners should not provide for the priest’s material needs at the expense of their own spiritual well-being and that no parishes should be assigned to priests who did not meet the language requirements. He demanded the recall of those who enjoyed doctrinas without fulfilling the mandatory qualifications and urged the king to have visitadores selected by merit as opposed to collusion, as had been the case with Cuevas himself.⁴³

In the eighteenth century, when Andean representatives had been struggling for five decades for enforcement of the privileges legally granted by the king in 1697, Morachimo and Fray Calixto insisted that the king should make the enforcement of laws regarding Indian matters a priority and that laws that were no longer effective should be replaced with new, more effective ones. Along with Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla around 1677, Morachimo and Fray Calixto favored the creation of a body of Indian priests who, familiar with native languages and cultures, would be in a better position to successfully persuade their fellow Andeans to embrace Christianity. To a large extent, the struggles of Andean elites for access to the priesthood were rooted in a common understanding of the inefficiency of parish priests and their alignment with colonial networks of corruption. Efforts to gain access to positions of power and knowledge within colonial establishments would become the primary goal of a lengthy Andean movement for social inclusion, which started roughly in the late seventeenth century (see Chapter 6).

The tradition of Andean critiques of the church dates back to the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (ca. 1615). In this text, Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala questioned curas doctrineros’ behavior, detailing a wide variety of types of mistreatment of Indians—including sexual abuses of native women, exploitation of Indian men and women, and widespread exploitation of indigenous children in ways unknown in the Andes prior to the Spanish invasion.⁴⁴ As Cuevas Herrera had tried to state the true duties of curas and prelates by illustrating their irregular conduct, Guamán Poma acutely developed his discussion of priests’ systematic disregard of the mandates of the Lima provincial councils of the late sixteenth century, even claiming that such abuses deserved scrutiny by the Inquisition. Guamán Poma was one of the earliest Andean scholars to state that priests were responsible for Indians’ escaping from the towns and parishes and to construct mestizos in a negative light.⁴⁵

The critique of the church in both the Nueva corónica and the later Andean texts under examination accurately represents the tension between a harsh indictment of the secular clergy in rural parishes and overt support of the Jesuit order and, eventually, of members of the high secular clergy. Guamán Poma showed respect for the work of Bishop Cristóbal de Albornoz at the beginning of his journey.⁴⁶ Even though Cuevas Herrera also supported and praised the work of the Jesuits—his own mentors—his “Cinco memoriales” seem to have been devised to provide public support for the Jesuits for revamping the evangelization enterprise after the extirpation of idolatry campaigns failed to uproot Andean religious cultures.⁴⁷ Unlike Guamán Poma, the Andean mestizo scholars Cuevas Herrera and Fray Calixto spoke from within the lower echelons of the church, and their calls for social change were based on the view that an Indian priesthood would correct the anomalies of church practices in the Andes. The Andean critique did not question the church as a social institution but instead stressed the anti-Christian practices of corrupt and abusive prelates, the debasement of Indians by priests, and the exclusion of native Andeans from the priesthood by the secular church and religious orders—all of which called for an overhaul of the colonial church.

CRITIQUE OF THE POTOSÍ MITA SYSTEM

The mita system was perhaps the most controversial institution of Spanish colonialism in Peru. Its very existence raised questions about the status of Indians as free subjects. The strain this compulsory draft added to the Indians’ demographic decline and to the social and cultural reproduction of Indian communities more generally challenged the legitimacy of Spanish rule and put into question the effectiveness of colonial justice. Intellectual Andeans—including the mestizo and licenciado Francisco Falcón, a scholar who partook in the initial discussions of this institution in the late sixteenth century;⁴⁸ the Jauja elite Indian Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla; and the mestizo curate Juan de Cuevas Herrera—lived in an age and a place where the Potosí and Huancavelica mitas loomed large over Indians’ social life. Their writings mirrored these realities and offered the harshest critiques of the evils of European colonialism from Andeans’ points of view.

Cuevas Herrera in particular offered a firsthand account of the Indians’ mining experience in Potosí, where he claimed to have been a miner for a time. His memoriales formed part of the ongoing debate over the abolition of the mining mita in the seventeenth century, a debate that included the unacknowledged participation of Andean scholars.⁴⁹ Cuevas Herrera delved into a description of the types of exhausting labor natives performed in the fields, mines, obrajes, estates, and long-distance trade.

The writer set out to deconstruct stereotypes of Indian miners’ “laziness,” which contributed to justifications for the compulsory mita: “Let’s destroy once and for all this diabolic argument and reassert that Indians are a working people.”⁵⁰ Elaborating on Inca traditions of work for the state, Cuevas Herrera argued that in Inca times, idleness was not tolerated and that in Inca societies, even the handicapped were occupied in productive activities.⁵¹ He pointed to the political use of the stereotype: “Indians are hard-working people; what they refuse is to work for free, which is what miners really want them to do.”⁵² Cuevas Herrera reversed the stereotype against the Spaniards: “They are the real enemies of work because they came to America escaping from it and they never got used to it.”⁵³ Along with corregidores, azogueros were the main targets of Cuevas Herrera’s attacks. He described them as “sinners” who not only committed “injustices and sacrileges” but also engaged in fraudulent activities, such as redeeming the widespread mita de faltriquera, which reduced the royal fifth and silver production.

The critique of the strenuous work Indians faced in the mines provided the foundation for Cuevas Herrera’s discourse of social justice, which highlighted forced labor as an illegal practice that destroyed indigenous social networks and pre-established forms of reciprocity. Cuevas Herrera stressed that the mita imposed travel expenses on mitayos, forced them to abandon the household economy, and propitiated the abuse of the absentees’ wives by corregidores, priests, and other males. He went to great lengths to emphasize the fragile position of native authorities who had to render (enterar) the mita even when the number of tributary escapees increased. Failure to fulfill the mita obligation in its entirety, according to Cuevas Herrera, made these chiefs subject to severe punishment and even execution. The writer highlighted the violent nature of the mita and its devastating social effect, indicating that mine workers resorted to suicide as an ultimate, desperate escape when they could tolerate no further oppression by Potosí silver mine owners.⁵⁴ This rhetorical strategy also plays out in his discussion of Indians’ personal service in Spanish households and haciendas. He charged that not only did they receive no payment for this forced work, but most of the Indians ended up indebted to their “employers” for the value of lost items or because they were victims of deceit or robbery while taking care of Spanish property. In sum, Cuevas Herrera concluded that while they were away rendering personal service, Indians left their homes and possessions unattended, worked for free, lost their freedom, inherited labor debts, and were ultimately subjected to outright slavery.⁵⁵

The corollary concerning the social situation of mitayos is that the mita system constituted an additional impediment to indigenous Andeans’ full Christianization: “While rendering the mita service, they [Indians] don’t attend mass, neither [do] they confess themselves, nor [do] they hear sermons or remember God.”⁵⁶ Thus, Cuevas Herrera pointed to another key contradiction of the colonial system: the need to generate wealth for the empire versus the religious justification of its colonial mission. As a doctrinero, he professed to have taken the side of faith in opposition to colonial demands. Along the discursive lines of the biblical “Lamentations” of Jeremiah, in around 1650 Cuevas Herrera compared the situation of Indian workers in the Potosí silver mines, whom he considered to be slaves, to that of the ancient Hebrews under Egyptian rule. Whereas the Hebrews were able to keep their property and live with their families, Indian slaves endured far worse conditions: “They are treated worse than black slaves themselves, because even the lowest of them [blacks] can come and kick a poor Indian a hundred times, and, as Jeremiah predicted, for Indians to eat even black slaves’ leftovers should be a great thing.”⁵⁷

Although the general tone of the critique is one of bitterness and lamentation, toward the end of his text the author proposed—albeit somewhat pessimistically—new strategies to ameliorate the Andeans’ plight. The mita should be extended to idle Spaniards, who allegedly introduced robberies and other criminal elements into Indian villages; idle Spaniards should be sent back to Spain, and further Spanish immigration to Peru should be stopped.⁵⁸ Although somewhat timidly, Cuevas Herrera suggested that the mita system should be abolished and endorsed the incorporation of African slavery into silver mining in Potosí instead, in support of a previous royal decree by Philip III. While rejecting Amerindian slavery as a “sin,” an “injustice,” and a “sacrilege” by azogueros, Cuevas Herrera did not hesitate to endorse the use of African slaves, whom he relegated to the lowest position in colonial society.

In closing his discussion of the social disorder created by the mita, the writer’s images strikingly resemble those of earlier Andean scholars. The trope of “the world upside down” (mundo al revés), found in the Nueva corónica and the Spanish literature of the Golden Age, appears here as a metaphorical means of summation to elucidate the corollaries in Cuevas Herrera’s text: “Everything collapsed, everything is turned upside down: desolation of Indian towns, destruction of provinces and decimation of Indians. . . . There is no remedy. I do not know what the remedy is for all these ills.”⁵⁹ Indeed, the pessimistic feeling that there was no future for Andeans permeated the text and sought to move the king to deliver justice for Indians.

Overall, the colonial critique of justice, the church, and the Potosí mita by Andean scholars speaks to both the experience of social hardship by Andean commoners and the exclusion of Andean elites under Spanish rule but also to the political imaginary of Amerindian elites in the mature colonial period. The reiteration of the general ineffectiveness of the system, the overt lack of colonial justice, the social degradation of Indian women and men, and the imminent collapse of Indian authority made evident the deep sense of distrust and frustration among survivors of Andean societies, mostly in the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century, although these critiques recurred, the discursive and political emphasis seemed to be on how such a state of disorder would and should come to an end through the participation of capable, literate, legitimate, and noble Indians and mestizos in the institutions of government in the colonial society. They engaged in a changing political discourse of justice that revealed their willingness for social change and their ability to manipulate the weapons of the system, including literacy, Christian rhetoric, writing, and litigation, to de-legitimize it—a form of agency one can only perceive through a painstaking textual and discursive analysis of their texts. Thus, Andean critical interpretations of colonialism allow us to question the role of literacy and religious education as weapons of social control by the church and the state. The fact that virtually all the Andean writers studied in this book proclaimed their Catholic affiliation and nearly all were members of the lower church in various capacities makes their criticism of the state and ecclesiastical institutions even more striking.

The Andean scholarly critique of colonialism as a genre was also an intertextual field in which various discursive streams met through a textual dialogue. Yet the voices that questioned the colonial order came from different camps of the Peruvian lettered world and society. As much as Andean scholarship was engaged in a dialogue with European Scholasticism and Neo-Scholasticism, it was also in a dialogical relationship with local creole renditions of the trope agravios y vejaciones and critical discourses of reform from enlightened Bourbons. To understand the tone of this dialogue and the disparate agendas it supported, the next section synthesizes other forms of critical narratives of Spanish colonialism and discusses their convergence with, and departure from, the Andean writings with which this study is concerned.

ANDEAN CRITICAL WRITING IN DIALOGUE WITH OTHER COLONIAL DISCOURSES

The genre of colonial criticism in the Viceroyalty of Peru was not only the province of indigenous and mestizo intellectuals. Members of the colonial non-Indian elites wrote critical tracts in which they seemed to share the grievances and indictments raised by Andean intellectuals. Such tracts are found occasionally in the 1650s (peak years of the mita abolition movement) and more clearly in the reformist Bourbon era, from the 1730s onward. Either acknowledged or not, a rich dialogue (intertextuality) among critical discourses of protest and reform in creole, peninsular, and Andean writings can be traced. An intertextual exploration is in order to illuminate the dynamics of such a dialogue so we can establish the elements of an intellectual colonial culture of protest and reform in which the discourses of the educated elites of the Spanish and Indian “republics” intertwined, contended, and attempted to affect the order of things for native Andeans. This interaction also exposes the trans-cultural and cross-ethnic nature of the “lettered city” in Peru that at certain conjunctures became an unstated common ground for the social construction of discourses of protest, an important feature of the colonial intellectual culture.⁶⁰

The early sermons of the conquest era brought together two streams of discourse that would become foundational in the formation and transformation of Andean discourses for years to come: religion and justice. Bernardino de Sahagún, Bartolomé de las Casas, and other early missionaries provided the foundations for this discursive confluence in the Americas. But elite Andean scholars moved Casas’s discourse to a different arena, advancing an agenda somewhat removed from the ecclesiastical aims of evangelization. They consistently employed the trope of agravios y vejaciones as a tool of political and cultural negotiation. Their long narratives describing an array of abuses and affronts eventually became grounds for reclaiming redress in the form of social reforms and noble privileges, and they ultimately fostered the agenda for ethnic autonomy as they—at times directly, at times indirectly—ultimately placed the blame for social injustice on the king himself. This section also highlights the rarely acknowledged contribution of Andean scholars, through letters and memoriales, to public debates taking place in royal courts on both sides of the Atlantic regarding the troubling issue of the mita system and the campaign for its abolition.

CREOLE WRITINGS AND ANDEAN SCHOLARSHIP

The changing social relations among creole, mestizo, and Indian subjects took place on an everyday basis in Indian villages, rural areas, and colonial cities as indoctrination, racial mixing, market and work relations, and efforts at social control advanced. In rural areas and small towns, it was sometimes difficult to distinguish ethnic boundaries between these groups because creoles also spoke native languages, many Indians and mestizo ladinos spoke Spanish, and color lines tended to blur across the social landscape. Because they often shared a common hostility toward the corregidor and other Spanish authorities, it was not uncommon for creoles to seek recognition of leadership among Indian and mestizo peoples. Some creoles sought matrimonial alliances with members of Inca elites to access their wealth, or they rallied Indians for allegiance and support for their own political struggles.⁶¹ As a result of a degree of commonality in their grievances and oppressors or perhaps seeking political dividends, creole lawyers, judges, scribes, priests, petty officials, and some landowners shared sympathy for the Andeans’ cause, as they needed their alliance to confront the power of the Spanish authorities or to play off of the rivalry between elite factions. A group of creole advocates of Andeans’ causes thus emerged in colonial Peru who engaged in crafting petitions, representing Indian Andeans in litigation, and writing scores of protest discourses that help us understand the formation of a colonial culture of protest as a cross-ethnic and cross-class field.

Juan de Padilla’s “Parecer.”

The oppressive nature of the mita system in colonial Peru engendered an unintended cross-ethnic and cross-class movement for its abolition in the Audiencia of Charcas in the seventeenth century, with its most critical moments in 1656–1666, which involved a legal campaign, Andean activism, and ultimately rebellion. The legal campaign generated a wealth of protest writing by creoles and native Andeans alike. Andean agendas for justice, however, differed from the more institutional aims of the creoles, who cared more about political control and feared Indian rebellion and the relaxation of Catholic values and practices among Andeans.

Juan de Padilla, the prominent creole and alcalde del crimen in the Audiencia of Lima introduced in Chapter 2, wrote his incisive “Parecer”⁶² on the state of Indian affairs in mid–seventeenth-century Peru, including the mita, personal service, and religious indoctrination. Although he advocated redress for the “hard work, affronts, and injustices that native Peruvians suffer at the spiritual and temporal levels”⁶³ and attacked the behavior of colonial miners, officials, parish priests, and the religious orders, his writing diverges from the tradition of Andean scholarship. Padilla primarily endorsed the imperial project of spiritual conquest, the productivity of mines, and the overall moralization of society through the rule of law.

Among the “temporal” problems, Padilla emphasized the injustices committed within the Potosí mita and particularly questioned the mita de faltriquera.⁶⁴ Padilla stressed that demographic decline redoubled the workload of the surviving indigenous peoples and proposed abolishing the mita de faltriquera and maintaining the mita only to supply workers for mines that were still active. He also supported the prohibition of Indian forced labor in obrajes, particularly child labor in agriculture areas far removed from their homes and shepherding in remote areas. In general, he denounced the excessive tributes and low wages for Indians, as well as the corruption of viceroys and their retainers.⁶⁵

Among the spiritual problems, Padilla was concerned with the poor quality of Indians’ indoctrination, the condemnation of many souls that resulted from a lack of ministers, the resilience of “idolatry,” curas doctrineros’ overcharges for religious services, the mistreatment of Andeans, and their abjection in obrajes run by priests. Denunciations of curas doctrineros’ business practices and negligence, as well as the lack of supervision by the prelates of the church, were staples of Padilla’s “Parecer.” Padilla was clearly voicing the kinds of complaints that were staples of the many capítulos Andeans filed against curas in the ecclesiastical courts.

Padilla proposed the enforcement of ecclesiastical inspections by able and incorruptible inspectors and the removal of curas who did not teach the doctrine, as well as those who ran private businesses in their doctrinas. One of the most detrimental evils inflicted upon indigenous peoples, Padilla maintained, was the expropriation of their lands by Spaniards and the religious orders.⁶⁶ Padilla asked for enforcement of previous royal decrees that mandated the restitution of these lands and sufficient information and legal assistance for Andeans to ensure the success of their litigation in this matter:

We can see the justice of God when those treasures get lost in the sea, or when they are enjoyed by the enemies of the faith, or when Indian uprisings jeopardize these kingdoms infested of enemies and earthquakes. . . . Y. M. [Your Majesty], have pity on your poor and miserable vassals and put remedy to their hardships. But, make your decrees be enforced, and don’t content yourself with just issuing commands. I heard the opinion of a kuraka, which I hope won’t become true. He said to a cura doctrinero: “See father, how costly it is for us this our [g]ospel; it wouldn’t be so if we were to obtain that He, God Our Lord, who sees and doesn’t forget their [the Spaniards’] persecutions, raised the lash against the [m]onarchy and restituted it to its old peace and grandeur.⁶⁷

His indictment of the colonial system, prompting the king to take immediate action, made clear Padilla’s fear of Indian rebellion. Padilla concluded his “Parecer” by reminding the king that Indian Andeans were the backbone of the kingdom and the ultimate producers of Spain’s wealth, for which they had suffered all kinds of agravios y vejaciones.

Although evidence of a direct influence in either direction between Padilla and Cuevas Herrera is not available, Padilla’s “Parecer” addressed social issues in the Potosí area that Cuevas Herrera had probably voiced earlier and chosen to criticize systematically in his “Cinco memoriales.” Cuevas Herrera’s critique, as opposed to Padilla’s, was supported by his testimonial account based on twenty years of experience as a doctrinero. The two texts were produced roughly in the mid-seventeenth century, however, and they reflect the social unrest of those times and the heated debates over the mita system in the Audiencia of Charcas (see Chapter 2). Strikingly, they also have a similar structure, with thematic sections that correspond to subdivisions of the text, which Cuevas Herrera designated as “memorial” and Padilla called “punto.” Padilla’s “Parecer” drew more public attention than the Andean texts at the time and inspired a heated debate in 1657. As a judge in the Audiencia de Lima, he could be more easily heard by the king; as miners and colonial authorities felt their interests threatened, they also reacted to his accusations and proposals.

Diego de León Pinelo, a Jewish converso (convert from Judaism to Christianity) and lawyer who was the protector de naturales in Lima in 1657, wrote an extensive response to Padilla—basically restating the existing reales cédulas and viceregal decrees issued to remedy each of the irregular situations Padilla denounced. León Pinelo had little to say, however, about the reasons for the long-lasting official disregard for those decrees. Although Padilla appeared to defend Indians’ interests, he was more concerned with institutional disorder, such as the corruption of priests and prelates, and with the fiscal impact of the withdrawal of silver mines from production, which the mita de faltriquera encouraged. To strengthen the evangelization of Indians at a time when a major extirpation campaign led by Archbishop Pedro de Villagómez of Lima was under way, Padilla strongly recommended assigning one doctrina in each corregimiento to the Jesuits, as he believed they would render more effective indoctrination. This endorsement was shared by Cuevas Herrera, as documented in the first section of this chapter.

Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla’s “Representación” was part of Andean kurakas’ larger effort to end the mita imposition in around 1667. His manuscript validated Padilla’s “Parecer,” as he cited extensively the 1660s royal decree issued in response to it. Limaylla regarded Padilla as “a scrupulous minister.”⁶⁸ In turn, Padilla’s writings used the subordinated condition of indigenous peoples to reinforce his own agenda. The details of the colonial Andean experience listed in Padilla’s “Parecer” were widely known to members of the Audiencia of Lima. As an audiencia judge, Padilla must have drawn from numerous complaints and appeals kurakas and other Andean representatives had brought to the Audiencia of Lima and to the king since the late sixteenth century. Padilla sought to strengthen evangelization through Jesuit missionaries and to oppose the extirpation campaigns of Archbishop Villagómez, which, as indicated earlier, were highly unpopular among caciques and other Indians.⁶⁹

In addition to Juan de Cuevas Herrera and Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, groups of caciques from different areas of Peru—members of the Indian networks who championed the campaigns against the mita system—understood the political value of the pronouncement against the mita by a prominent creole member of the audiencia. They, in turn, used Padilla’s “Parecer” to empower their own demands against the mita and overtly expressed support for the alcalde del crimen. In a memorial they sent to the king on November 28, 1662, they voiced their trust of Don Juan de Padilla for his great generosity, expressed as “divine majesty,” and for his support of the conservation and well-being of Indian vassals, referred to as “human majesty.” They recognized Padilla’s actions in favor of the Indians—namely, the “pious letter” or “memorial” that caused the king to order, on October 21, 1660, the creation of an ad hoc junta to redress Andeans for the hardships endured in mitas and obrajes and for the eviction from their lands. Simultaneously, they made clear that two years after the royal order the junta had still not met, in spite of the caciques’ efforts to bring their grievances to such a committee. In 1662, Don Jerónimo Limaylla was among the signatories supporting Padilla, along with six other Indian authorities from Arequipa, Cusco, Jauja, Vilcashuaman, and Omasuyo.⁷⁰ As mentioned in Chapter 2, Don Juan Guaynapiric from Jarama Province was among other caciques who formally declared their support for Padilla’s memorial and actions and his request for the prohibition of the obrajes set up by clerics from the Mercedarian orders in his town.⁷¹

The Oruro “manifiesto”: Creole/Andean Alliance.

As Andean and official efforts—including the viceroy’s—to abolish the mita largely failed in the 1650s and 1660s, another important critical stream of writing appeared in the 1730s as mounting social unrest led to the beginning of an era of rebellions. We can consider this stream an extension of the tradition of Andean scholarship under discussion. The eighteenth-century rebellions generated a fair amount of writing, which appeared to begin with Juan Vélez de Córdoba, usually identified as creole.⁷²

Vélez de Córdoba was one of the most visible leaders of an aborted Indian, mestizo, and creole rebellion against repartos, mitas, and tributes that took place in the mining town of Oruro in 1739 and protested royal attempts to exact tribute from creoles and mestizos.⁷³ Originally from Moquegua, Vélez de Córdoba claimed to be the grandson of an “Inca king.” The anonymous “Manifiesto,” found in the possession of the mestizo leader Miguel de Castro but attributed to Juan Vélez de Córdoba, bears a striking resemblance in rhetorical style and philosophical background to other Andean texts from that era. The Oruro “Manifiesto” created common ground for a creole-Inca-mestizo alliance within the Oruro movement; these groups were described as the legitimate “lords of the land” and victims of the same “tyranny.” Concomitantly, the Oruro “Manifiesto” called for an alternative way out of the “captivity” suffered by Andeans and explored the reasons the participants should “force the will to shake off the yoke of our cervixes.”⁷⁴

As a record of a common political culture shared locally by noble Indians, mestizos, and creoles, this is one of the earliest eighteenth-century texts to articulate a utopian discourse in the Andes—an attempt to restore the Inca empire, which promised freedom to creoles, noble Andeans, and their native subjects: “[This is] an heroic act to restore that which is ours [lo propio] and liberate the fatherland, purging it from the tyranny of the guampos [Spaniards] who devour us as our ruin grows by the day. . . . My only intention is to reestablish the great empire and monarchy for our ancient kings.”⁷⁵ The version of the “Inca empire” Vélez de Córdoba envisioned was, in fact, a monarchy headed by an Incan descendant, in keeping with the colonial governing tradition of viceroys and corregidores. It was, however, a cross-ethnic project that united Peruvian-born commoner Indians, creoles, caciques, and mestizos of the “fatherland,” who would “live together like brothers and congregate in a single body, destroying the Europeans.”⁷⁶

An alliance had been made with the Incan nobility through the Indian governor Eugenio Pachacnina, whom Vélez de Córdoba presented as the Incan leader representative of the movement: “[He is] one of the royal blood from our Incas of the great Cusco, descendant of the Inca in fifth degree, and with desires to restore his own kingdom and reestablish that monarchy.” Speaking on behalf of Pachacnina, Vélez continued: “He implores creoles and caciques and all natives to give him a hand to support this heroic action.”⁷⁷ This is likely the first rebellion with a clear anti-colonial platform, since the rebels demanded total abolition of tributes, mitas, and repartimientos and advocated the abolition of corregidores, “whose tyrant figure we will try to erase from this republic.”⁷⁸ The manifesto offered to employ creoles in the offices of the kingdom according to their loyalty to the caciques and to honor them as the “Lords of the land.” In the new order of things, Andeans would be relieved from tribute and mita obligations, and their lands and autonomy would be restored. The Oruro “Manifiesto” ends with a cry of rebellion that stresses the cross-ethnic alliance and the religious identity of its leadership: “Thus, fellow creole brothers, dear caciques, and my beloved natives, hands on to our plan, since we have justice and God Our Lord on our side, and, thus it will protect us in such a just undertaking. May God protect you and give the success and the effort needed.”⁷⁹

As with the tradition of Andean writing, the Oruro “Manifiesto” shares the Neo-Scholastic thesis that tyrannical regimes could be legitimately overthrown through rebellion. This served as a moral and theological justification for Andean cross-ethnic rebellion, not only in 1739 Oruro but in the “Great Rebellion” as well. The characterization of the Spanish regime in Peru as a “tyranny” was widely shared among Andean scholars throughout the colonial period, as established in Chapter 4. In the late seventeenth century, Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla and Juan de Cuevas Herrera focused on the hardships of the mita system in Potosí and Huancavelica as a series of abuses perpetuated by unchecked miners and colonial judicial authorities. Juan Vélez de Córdoba, Fray Calixto de San José Túpac Inca, and Túpac Amaru II, in the eighteenth century, viewed the abusive repartos by corregidores and the furthering of colonial demands—such as the increasing taxation by the Bourbons and the mita itself—as signifying the imbalanced relationship between the rulers and the ruled, which essentially configured a tyranny. Vélez de Córdoba framed the Spanish conquest and its aftermath as the early signs of a tyrannical regime and Spanish encroachment on Indian lands as a destabilizing factor in the effort to Christianize the Indians: “When Spaniards came to America they acted tyrannically, beheading the kings and natural lords of this land. Spaniards usurped their lives, all their assets, and the lands with all their yields and benefits.”⁸⁰ Vélez de Córdoba demanded the total restitution of chiefdoms and community assets to native lords as a necessary step in the process of evangelization. As opposed to Padilla’s “Parecer,” the Oruro “Manifiesto” and the rebellion are examples of creole advocacy of Indian causes and cross-ethnic political alliances. In the “Manifiesto,” one thus appreciates a stream of creole critical tradition that is inextricably connected to the Andean scholarship analyzed in this book.

Justifying rebellion and defiant actions to put an end to Spanish tyranny seems to have operated not only as a rhetorical tool but also as a political strategy in the mid- and late-colonial Andean rebellions. In the 1730 Cochabamba rebellion, for example, curas who supported the movement advised the rebels, who had seized items from Spaniards’ shops, that they were not obligated to return anything because their actions were part of a “just war” to defend their freedom.⁸¹ In the same vein, Vélez de Córdoba encouraged natives to “get away with the repartimiento items” (no pagar el repartimiento), since corregidores had “robbed” and “sucked” Indians’ labor.⁸²

The Oruro “Manifiesto” reached beyond its time, stirring Andean rebellions elsewhere. A copy of the blueprint was confiscated from a rebel participant in the 1750 Huarochirí uprising eleven years later.⁸³ The mestizo participants Tomás Agudelo and Ramón de Castro distributed the “Manifiesto” in Chayanta and Cochabamba during rebellions in 1780.⁸⁴ The circulation of Andean writing followed the regional pattern of the mining economy in Upper Peru—which activated a series of sub-regional economies, markets, and rebellions, linking them with those of Lower Peru in both economic and political terms. Creole and Andean discourses of protest intersected as local creoles and Andeans developed collaborative projects of rebellion and combative writing. These projects were possible in part because the Bourbon attempts to regain political and economic control of Peru in the eighteenth century increasingly separated creoles from opportunities for political, economic, and social advancement, only to push them closer to Andeans than to peninsulars. The fact that the dividing lines between Inca nobles and local creoles were increasingly blurred in rural areas of Upper Peru also facilitated the political alliances.⁸⁵

CLERICAL NARRATIVES AND THE ANDEAN WRITING CULTURE

Starting in the 1540s, cross-currents of native and clerical discourses began to emerge in the colonial world of Peru stemming from the pedagogical relationship between Indian nobility and religious mentors, either individually or in the schools for caciques, seminary schools, and mission towns and also in day-to-day contact in churches, cofradías, congregations, and other interstitial spaces where trans-culturation took place. Andean discourses borrowed heavily from the literary imagery and narrative styles of the missional epistolary genre to which the writers were exposed, a corpus of writing that emerged from the religious orders’ practices of spiritual colonization.

The Franciscan missionary authority Fray Buenaventura de Salinas y Córdoba and other lesser doctrineros provided inspiration to the Andean writings of Don Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla, the Andean noble from Jauja Province (see Chapter 2),⁸⁶ as the Franciscans had been expanding their missions in the Mantaro Valley since 1548.⁸⁷ One good example, exhibiting the negative representations of Spaniards also common in Andean texts, came from the town of Mataguasi (Jauja Province) in 1667, written by its cura doctrinero Fray Alonso Zurbano, who wrote in support of Limaylla’s petitions to the king. Zurbano considered the Indians predestined for heaven because of the suffering they had endured with “saintly” patience. He condemned the questionable behavior of Spaniards, regarding them as “worse than pagans who are Christians only in name; because even though they have been educated in politics [política] and with Christian milk, they become cruel scourges of these poor Indians’ innocence.”⁸⁸ He praised the kings for the great decrees they issued to protect Indians but found that the negligence and carelessness of corregidores rendered those laws useless.

Having spent nearly a decade as a Franciscan mission aide in Tarma and Cusco (mid-1720s–mid-1730s), Fray Calixto de San José Túpac Inca’s “Representación verdadera” amply expressed this discursive influence in 1749. The letters and reports to his superiors by Fray Juan de San Antonio, the Franciscan vice commissary of the Cerro de la Sal missions during Juan Santos Atahualpa’s rebellion in 1742, reveal a rhetorical model similar to that of the “Representación verdadera.” In the biblical style of the “Lamentations,” Fray San Antonio bewailed that Indians were “the children that claim, as the prophet Jeremiah, for the bread of doctrine and die hungry because there is none who impart it to them.”⁸⁹ Fray Calixto paraphrased San Antonio’s wish for more indoctrination, but he subtly slipped in a demand for education in science and letters for Andean elites, a more secular and modern view: “Lord, as our Father, you disposed that the bread of the Doctrine in science and Letters was imparted to us. . . . Thus, your ancestors commanded that we were admitted in Schools and Literary Lecture Halls. But we are fasting from this bread, because our father the king does not know whether it is imparted to us.”⁹⁰ Fray San Antonio, along with the authors of the “Representación verdadera” in 1749–1750 and those of the “Planctus indorum” in around 1751, shared a similar understanding of Andeans’ relapse into “idolatry.” Fray Juan José de San Antonio explained the failure of the Franciscan missions during the Juan Santos Atahualpa rebellion to his superior Fray José Gil Muñoz:

[B]ecause of the excessive and infernal covetousness, tyranny, cruelty, scandals against Indians, mestizos, and helpless Spaniards in the obrajes, mines, sugar mills, haciendas and cane fields . . . and to free themselves from so much affront and tyranny, they run away to the mountain[s], preferring to join the infidel rather than tolerating the burdens that Spaniards place on them. . . . Tyrannies, cruelties, and idolatries are deeply rooted and the faith is very distorted in many parts of the kingdom . . . because Indians see that what Spaniards do to them is against God’s law. Then, they do not believe the doctrine we predicate.⁹¹

This Scholastic elaboration of “tyranny” and “cruelty” at the hands of Franciscan mission authorities in 1750 explained the destruction of their mission towns and justified the Franciscans’ applications for royal funds to rebuild their missions in the Cerro de la Sal area. The redefinition of “tyranny” was introduced during the post-conquest period by Fray Bartolomé de las Casas to strengthen his indictment against Spanish conquistadors and support the abolition of the encomienda system.⁹² In the mid-eighteenth century, however, intellectual Andeans adopted the same expedient to stress the monopoly of power by Spaniards and to pose a political and moral objection to colonialism (tyrannical Spaniards were not truly Christian).

Fray Calixto’s and Juan de San Antonio’s approaches differ more clearly. For Fray San Antonio, the solution to the social chaos created by the Spaniards was to reinforce evangelization. For Fray Calixto, the remedy was education for Andean elites in “sciences and letters” and representation in the ecclesiastical and civil positions of government, which, in turn, would effectively free Andeans from colonial tyranny. However, the commonality of language and representations of colonial officials in both the Franciscan and Andean writings reveal a shared religious background, a common missional culture, and the tension between religious orders and the colonial government. Fray Calixto de San José Túpac Inca’s style resembles the Franciscan narratives that questioned the cruelty of colonial officials. His use of biblical rhetoric, such as the template of Jeremiah’s “Lamentations,” and the baroque method of a hypothetical question-and-answer discussion were rhetorical staples of the Franciscan writings of bishops and high missionary officials as well.

Among the papers confiscated from Fray Calixto in his cell the night he was detained in 1756, the authorities found interesting writing material, including a compilation of notes from different writers such as the Franciscan bishop of Quito, Don Alonso de la Peña Montenegro, from 1731. The notes included indictments against colonial abuses and opinions in favor of the admittance of Indians and mestizos into the Catholic priesthood.⁹³ The manuscript also contained segments of juridical statements in Latin by the well-known Spanish jurist Don Juan de Solórzano regarding the admission of Indians to the priesthood and included other scholars’ statements in favor of justice for Indians, probably composed by clerics who also wrote in Latin. A second section was a transcription of a portion of the book El secular religioso (The Secular Priest) by Don Juan Bautista del Toro, printed in Madrid in 1721, about the oppression of Indians in New Granada. A question-and-answer section on the central theme of Indian priesthood follows, with new interjections from Bishop Montenegro and Solórzano, introduced by an editor as “Mr. Montenegro asks, in Book 3, Treatise 8, Session 2, Folio 368, if Indians may be ordained without special dispensation. And there he says the following.”⁹⁴ The “Representación verdadera” incorporated a reworked format of similar question-and-answer discussions of Indian priesthood, the representation of Indian oppression as “slaves of slaves,” racist representations of blacks and mulattos as “vile people,” and the reiteration of the many laws that supported the Indian cause.⁹⁵

The clerical writings circulated among Andeans as they engaged in missionary work, as they were mentored as curas or lay brothers by other ecclesiastics, or as they prepared manuscripts in collaboration with other priests. But from all these texts, Andeans selected the rhetorical elements they deemed useful to buttress the criticism of Spaniards, such as the “Lamentations,” notions of Christian justice, and the ecclesiastical epistolary style. Rather than unconditionally endorse the missionary goals and ecclesiastical agendas of the clerical narratives, they fostered their own agenda for a more secularized education and social participation in religious, social, and political offices.

ANDEAN SCHOLARSHIP AND BOURBON IDEOLOGIES

As the Bourbons set out to rationalize and reform the imperial administration, a layer of criticism of the old Habsburg administrative style emerged that incorporated the trope of agravios y vejaciones inflicted upon Andeans, together with a critique of the apparent malaise of the empire as evidenced by protracted administrative corruption. Jorge Juan y Santacilia and Antonio de Ulloa’s “Discurso y reflexiones políticos sobre el estado presente de los reinos del Perú” exemplifies this trend.⁹⁶ Juan and Ulloa were two professional Spanish sailors who traveled to Peru on a scientific expedition in 1736 to work on astronomical measures of the equator and prepare a report. In the “Discurso,” they presented an indictment of the state of affairs in Peru that focused on military security in the colony, contraband, the irregular conduct of corregidores and the clergy, a general evaluation of colonial functionaries, the rift between creoles and peninsulars, and an assessment of the potential for the Kingdom of Peru’s natural resources to increase royal revenue. The policies proposed to solve the perceived irregularities had apparently been in preparation before the sailors even composed the reports, which therefore became “useful” tools to lend credence to the reforms the Bourbon administration had considered beforehand.⁹⁷

Juan and Ulloa incorporated the Andeans’ rhetoric of agravios y vejaciones and depicted the misbehavior of corregidores as “tyranny” by attempting to make a case for extreme administrative disorder.⁹⁸ They appeared to be condemning the illegal practices of repartimiento de comercio that corregidores and their associates conducted against natives and linking them with the causes of Juan Santos Atahualpa’s insurrection.⁹⁹ The Spanish expeditioners proposed improving the methods of selecting corregidores by choosing honest, capable individuals willing and able to treat indigenous peoples respectfully. Among the most salient policies they proposed was the prohibition of all forms of repartimiento de comercio and extending indefinitely corregidores’ terms in office with a salary of no less than 2,000 pesos.¹⁰⁰ As noted, in 1732 the Bourbon court supported the printing and distribution of the Indian procurador Vicente Morachimo’s “Manifiesto de agravios y vejaciones,” which circulated in the royal court of Madrid for more than a decade before the critical reports of Juan and Ulloa were prepared.¹⁰¹

Regardless of whether such claims were based on reliable evidence, Juan and Ulloa’s text exhibited the anti-clerical stand of the Bourbon era, particularly because of the agravios y vejaciones clerics inflicted upon Indians, which allegedly resulted in their lack of interest in religion and the poor quality of indoctrination. One of the more sensitive issues raised was that of complicity between curas and corregidores—specifically, the allegations that curas conducted businesses that diverted them from their indoctrination duties. Juan and Ulloa attacked lay brotherhoods and their fiestas de hermandad (community festivals), which the authors considered harmful to indigenous communities’ finances.¹⁰² The sailors admonished the secular and the regular clergy overall but were particularly harsh toward the regular clergy assigned to doctrines. These clergymen were accused of forcing Andeans to work in their farms and obrajes on holidays and during Lent, forcing concubinage upon indigenous women, and having children with them.¹⁰³ In examining the impact of these transgressions by priests, Juan and Ulloa reiterated an argument already present in Andeans’ writings: that misrule and injustice by curas had prompted Indians to run away to the mountains and join the “infidel,” thus rendering evangelization a failure.¹⁰⁴

Most of these accusations had been raised and substantiated in writings since the seventeenth century, including Juan de Cuevas Herrera’s memoriales and Juan de Padilla’s “Parecer,” and in the eighteenth century in Andean texts of Vicente Morachimo and Fray Calixto de San José. The use of these arguments and examples of Andean experience under Spanish rule to advance a modernizing agenda of imperial reform by the Bourbons makes evident the political appropriation of Andean writing by crown officials, who contributed to build Bourbon hegemonic ideologies with the purpose of regaining political power and legitimacy.¹⁰⁵

CONCLUSION

Colonial Andean scholarly efforts to produce critiques prompt a reconsideration of the Uruguayan Angel Rama’s notion of the ciudad letrada as an intellectual and political space exclusive of creole and peninsular officials and ecclesiastics, who had privileged access to legal information and its channels of circulation within the empire. Intellectual Andeans’ knowledge, concretized in complex tracts, fed the circuits of the written word—which, however inadvertently, entered the colonial ciudad letrada. Their writings partook in current debates over justice for Andeans, challenged the legitimacy of Spanish rule, questioned the church’s lack of moral authority, campaigned against the mita system, and proposed reforms of the empire before and during the Bourbon era of imperial reform. Their participation in the colonial realm of the written word also contributed to the early formation of the public sphere in Spanish America, which, even though in a contentious fashion, allowed for the presence of Andean elites’ ideas and texts in the royal courts, however narrow those canonical niches may have been.

Andean scholarship contributed to the formation of a colonial culture in the cross-ethnic interstices of the ciudad letrada, a trans-cultural contribution that produced a rich written record of colonial critiques by Andean elites in search of social change and by others seeking to sustain or reform the status quo. Educated Andeans endeavored to discern Spanish colonialism, discussed its impact on the lives of Indians and mestizos, selected and reformulated European tenets, and employed existing rhetorical traditions from the ecclesiastical and secular discourses to make their voices heard in the restricted colonial world of letters underlying the justice system. The unstated textual dialogue between Andean and creole writings aligned with Andean agendas reflects their relationship of collaboration. Conversely, a similar dialogue between Andean and “enlightened” creole and peninsular discourses unveils the relationships of power and knowledge that rendered Andean scholarship invisible and mute in official writings, as such discourses utilized Andeans’ criticism and the experience of Indian oppression and injustice to empower their own agendas of reform and political control of the empire.

Andean discourses of social justice reinforced the long-standing trope of agravios y vejaciones, which was reelaborated throughout the colonial period. It was originally a rhetorical device of Lascasian manufacture in the sixteenth century, which sought to stir up remorse in abusive Spanish Christians and fear that their souls would be condemned as inducements for immediate action by the monarch. Andean scholars resignified the trope during the social crisis of the mita in the 1600s to advocate that the institution be abolished and as a “service to the crown” so they would deserve social privileges. This strategy continued throughout the 1700s, when Andean scholars also used the trope in times of social crisis and rebellion—such as 1739, 1750, and 1780–1783—to question the colonial order of things and to carve spaces of Indian autonomy within that order.

As used by “enlightened” Spanish advisers such as Juan and Ulloa, in 1749, the trope evolved into a rhetorical stratagem used to support imperial agendas of reform aimed at restoring social order, economic recovery, and political control. Furthermore, the rhetoric of agravios y vejaciones inflicted upon Andeans in the Bourbon discourses discussed here created a power schema that eventually translated into policies that further obliterated the social fabric of Indian societies in the Andes, which, in the end, prompted them to take a radical stand embodied by rebellions in the late eighteenth century.

Various creole and peninsular writings also utilized Amerindian subordination and its textual description to further political agendas that in one way or another diverged from the purposes that had led Andean intellectuals to write their own discourses of social justice. We can trace the pattern of appropriation of Andeans’ social circumstances and discourses of protest by members of the colonial establishment back to the founders of the controlling leitmotiv of agravios y vejaciones de los indios—such as Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, Antonio de Montesinos, Domingo de Santo Tomás, and Pedro de Gante, among others—in the early days of Spanish colonialism in the Americas. In their discourses, virtually all of these scholars articulated the oppression of Amerindians in encomiendas and mines to justify an imperial project of evangelization that sought to uproot indigenous religions rather than to achieve Andeans’ general well-being.

Within Andean discussions of justice in a colonial situation, a pattern of argumentation appeared along an axis that extended from Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Juan de Cuevas Herrera, Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla, Juan Núñez Vela de Rivera, Vicente Morachimo, and Fray Calixto de San José Túpac Inca to the Túpac Amaru writings. The specific political and social conjunctures each of these writers confronted varied throughout the colonial period, and their interpretations of social justice changed accordingly. But the continuity in rhetorical style and the convergence of discursive streams are remarkable. The rhetoric of agravios y vejaciones, the description of Spanish rule as a form of “tyranny,” the denunciation of social injustice within mitas, and the abusive corregidores and curas seemed to emerge on a recurrent basis whenever Andeans’ political, cultural, and social survival appeared highly compromised. As opposed to their early Andean counterparts, such as Guamán Poma de Ayala and Garcilaso de la Vega, among others, Andean intellectuals of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries integrated their scholarship into a wider practice of ethnic activism for social change—undertaken through collective networks of writing, trans-Atlantic travel, and political action in Spain to produce legislation in favor of Indians. When those efforts proved insufficient, the later intellectuals supported massive rebellion, at times less visibly than at others.

The critical voices of Andean intellectuals show that they were aware of the limited ability of colonial justice to include Andeans in the empire effectively, in spite of the legal discourse of the crown contained in the many royal decrees—issued but seldom enforced—to castigate abuse and protect the kingdom’s “labor force.” This failure, in turn, made it possible for Andean officials and lettered subjects to create a legal counter-discourse that substantiated the king’s continued negligence in enforcing his own laws, thus allowing Andean leaders to project themselves as the grantors of justice for Indians and to continue to fight for that justice. By calling for the election of Indian judges and protectores de naturales, Andeans were subverting the racialized nature of colonial justice from within—an unintended aim of colonial rule and the use of its own discourse in a different register.¹⁰⁶

Finally, the discourses of social justice by intellectual eighteenth-century Andeans reveal their adherence to colonial legal codes and their recognition of the king as the supreme legal authority. Why did Andean scholars and authorities vehemently stick to colonial laws even when judicial authorities, the king included, appeared perpetually and systematically unwilling to enforce them? How did Andean elites understand their places in society, and what were their long-term goals to alter the social confines to which they were relegated? A close analysis of Andean struggles for social inclusion as part of their impetus for social autonomy allows us to approach initial answers to such questions.

NOTES

1. Casas, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias.

2. The exposé of Andean scholarship in this and the remaining chapters follows the chronology of the texts under study, indicated earlier, although occasional references to relevant sixteenth- and early–seventeenth-century antecedents are introduced as necessary.

3. The pattern of Andean criticism of corregidores, and of the system of justice more generally, began to take shape in the work of Guamán de Poma de Ayala in approximately 1615. Aware of the effect of Toledo’s policies, Guamán Poma devoted many pages to the corregidores’ detrimental effect on the lives of Indian women and men. He attacked the colonial networks of collusion and enrichment that bound colonial officials and other prominent Spaniards. A few of the many examples of this pattern are found in Guamán Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica, 487[491]–518[522].

4. Cuevas Herrera, “Cinco memoriales,” 238, 239v.

5. Ibid., 238–251v.

6. AGI, Lima, 422, Morachimo, “Manifiesto de los Agravios,” 2–3v.

7. Ibid., 1–1v.

8. Ibid., 2–3v.

9. Cuevas Herrera, “Cinco memoriales,” 242–243, 245–245v, 259–260. Similar criticisms had been advanced in Guamán Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica, 564[578]–569[583].

10. Morachimo, “Manifiesto de los Agravios,” 5v–11v. Morachimo lists, for example, abuses in the collection of the alcabala; delayed and underpaid salaries, as well as poor working conditions, in obrajes, haciendas, and mines; assaults of Amerindian traders on the road by those who worked for corregidores; underpayment for Indian products in the markets by Spaniards and lay priests; encomenderos’ and curas doctrineros’ encroachments on Indian lands, followed by composiciones de tierras, which eventually turned into expropriation; excessive demands for gratuitous Indian labor; and mismanagement of cofradías’ assets by priests, as well as their poor ecclesiastical service and ambition—all of which, Morachimo claimed, caused Indians to abandon their towns and relapse into idolatry.

11. Cuevas Herrera, “Cinco memoriales,” 251v.

12. Ibid., 252.

13. Ibid. Other characterizations of caciques as “alcoholics,” “anti-Christian,” “corrupt,” and ultimately the worst exploiters of their communities are listed in ibid., 252–255.

14. “Sir, this measure would be great if only the ministries in charge of the residencia were honest, conscious, and zealous of God’s and Y. M.’s [Your Majesty’s] work. But, what has been seen here is that most appointed judges are the servants of the same corregidores and what they seek is two hundred or three hundred pesos. Then, Y. M., what kind of review could they conduct? . . . It is frequent that, bribing the [residencia] judge with six hundred or seven hundred pesos, they give a good review, and the crimes the official committed go unpunished, and justice for Indians is not served.” Morachimo, “Manifiesto de los Agravios,” 2.

15. One case serves to emblematize the ways indigenous peoples had to finance judges’ salaries: “Law 46, Book 11, Title 33 and 34 of visitadores, folio 299 [from the Recopilación de leyes de las Indias], establishes that the salaries of the judges appointed for settling tax issues be paid from the funds of acaldías mayores [highest local government office]; and that such judges pay for their personal expenses, so that this burden does not fall onto Indians. . . . However, Sir, Indians have always paid at least four hundred and fifty pesos for the judges’ and their servants’ salaries and expenses. And if they do not do that, they are imprisoned and mistreated. To avoid such pain, these miserable Indians have to do whatever the judges want.” Morachimo, “Manifiesto de los Agravios,” 4.

16. Ibid.

17. In approximately 1749–1750, Fray Calixto denounced the violence of Lima’s alcalde ordinario, who evicted an Indian noblewoman from the central plaza. “Representación verdadera,” 125.

18. Morachimo, “Manifiesto de los Agravios,” 5v.

19. “Representación verdadera,” 126–127.

20. Ibid., 128v–130v.

21. Diego Túpac Amaru, “Copia de la carta que el rebelde Diego Túpac Amaru respondió a la que le escribió el señor obispo del Cusco,” 150–151.

22. Mills, “Bad Christians in Colonial Peru,” 185–190.

23. Ibid., 186.

24. Cuevas Herrera, “Cinco memoriales,” 267, 269.

25. Ibid., 218, 220v.

26. Ibid., 221–221v.

27. Ibid., 221–224, 238. Starting in the sixteenth century, criticism of the doctrineros’ lack of language skills had been raised even by the Jesuit José de Acosta; it was criticized by Guamán Poma and others in the seventeenth century.

28. Ibid., 222v–224, 238.

29. To illustrate the “exceptional” cases of virtuous prelates and missionaries he claimed to know, he praised “exemplary” Jesuits such as the Cusco bishop Fernando de Mendoza (1609–1618) and the missionary Juan de Arroyo. Ibid., 220v (quotation), 222–222v, 225v. Cuevas Herrera offers further apologetic representations of the Jesuits and support for their missionary work in 222v, 227v, 239, 252, 255.

30. Among others, these authorities were the Viceroy Principe Don Francisco de Borja y Aragón Principe de Esquilache, Viceroy Conde de Alba de Aliste, Fiscal Protector de Naturales Francisco Valenzuela in 1654, Audiencia of Lima judges Don Juan de Padilla and Bernardo Iturrizarra along with Protector de Naturales Diego León Pinelo in 1657, and in 1663 Viceroy Conde de Santiesteban. García Cabrera, Ofensas a Dios, 55–63. García Cabrera argued that this proposal was an alternative to, and a rejection of, the extirpation of idolatries by Villagómez. The Jesuits did not accept this role since they supported Villagómez, although apparently lukewarmly.

31. Cuevas Herrera, “Cinco memoriales,” 233v–235.

32. Ibid., 234v. Visitadores remained in the towns longer than necessary, since their expenses were paid by the Indian towns. This practice led to frequent complaints and discontent. García Cabrera, Ofensas a Dios, 61.

33. Morachimo, “Manifiesto de Agravios,” 9v–13. Complaints about excessive ecclesiastical fees continued well through the late eighteenth century. See Stavig, The World of Túpac Amaru, 191; O’Phelan, Rebellions and Revolts, 144–148.

34. Cuevas Herrera, “Cinco memoriales,” 223–224v, 226v–227, 232v–233; Morachimo, “Manifiesto de los Agravios,” 9v, 10, 10v–13v. Guamán Poma at times blamed the Indian women for such abuses, calling them “putas”; for the most part, though, he acknowledged that they were forced into such acts by oppressive curas, encomenderos, corregidores, and others. Guamán Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, 529[543], 539[553], 541[555], 563[577], 824[838], among others.

35. Cuevas Herrera hoped to be rewarded at the end of his life with a prelateship as ecclesiastical visitador or inspector. After Cuevas Herrera, Juan Núñez Vela de Rivera petitioned and successfully obtained a post as the racionero of the Arequipa cathedral. For an assessment of conflicts between the church and the Indians during late-colonial rebellions in Upper Peru, see Robins, Priest-Indian Conflict in Upper Peru.

36. Morachimo, “Manifiesto de los Agravios,” 13v.

37. “Representación verdadera,” 120. A more systematic discussion of the defense of Andeans’ right to the priesthood is developed in Chapter 6.

38. Ibid., 122.

39. Ibid., 122v–123.

40. Mills, “Bad Christians in Colonial Peru,” 183.

41. Cuevas Herrera, “Cinco memoriales,” 240; Morachimo, “Manifiesto de los Agravios,” 8v; “Representación verdadera,” 124.

42. Morachimo, “Manifiesto de los Agravios,” 3.

43. “Visitadores [should not be chosen from among] the relatives of prelates . . . or the favorites of judges and other prominent characters.” Cuevas Herrera, “Cinco memoriales,” 238.

44. The critique of the padres (fathers) is only a portion (approximately 100 folios long) of a complete section Guamán Poma devoted to criticizing the entire structure of the church and to offering his “remedies.” Guamán Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, 561[575]–657[671].

45. Ibid., 560[575]–570[584]. Guamán Poma argued that the sexual abuse of indigenous women by priests was producing a growing number of mestizos and recommended that Indian men and women avoid attending the doctrine: “It is very just, and in the honor of God, that children and adults don’t go to the doctrine and neither [that] women go to his house [the priest’s]. Thus, Indians’ [population] in this realm will augment and the towns won’t be deserted” (575[589]).

46. Ibid., 676[690].

47. Cuevas Herrera, “Cinco memoriales,” 220v–221.

48. Falcón, “Representación de los daños y molestias que se hacen a los Indios,” 220–237v.

49. “To be able to speak satisfactorily on this matter, without adding anything . . . I became a miner in Potosí for some time. The abundance of what has to be said is such that it impoverishes my discourse.” Cuevas Herrera, “Cinco memoriales,” 255v. For a more detailed presentation of the contours of the debate on the mita system, see Cole, Potosí Mita, 46–61.

50. Cuevas Herrera, “Cinco memoriales,” 257.

51. Ibid., 256. “In Inca times . . . even the blind, the limpy, the one-handed, and the handicapped worked in whatever they could.”

52. Ibid., 257.

53. Ibid., 256v.

54. Ibid., 225–264.

55. Ibid., 265.

56. Ibid., 262v.

57. Ibid., 263. See other quotes from Jeremiah’s “Lamentations” in ibid., 231.

58. Ibid., 256v, 268v.

59. Ibid., 252–254.

60. In presenting these ideas, only the main lines of non-Andean discourses that underlay Andean protest scholarship in mid- and late-colonial Peru will be identified; the exposition of such ideas, therefore, is by no means exhaustive.

61. O’Phelan, “El mito de la independencia concedida,” 67, 73. In the Andes, even wandering peninsulars were proclaiming themselves Inca descendants and leading rebellions against Spanish rule. One of the more striking examples is Pedro Bohorques, a poor Andalucian conquistador in search of the elusive El Dorado in the mythical Paititi in the 1630s. He eventually proclaimed himself to be Apo Inka and led the rebellion of the Colchaquies, only to be executed because he was accused of instigating the Lima rebellion by the kurakas in 1666. Lorandi, Spanish King of the Incas. For a discussion of interracial relationships between creole and Inca elites in late-colonial Cusco, see O’Phelan, Rebellions and Revolts; Garrett, Shadows of Empire; Cahill, “Liminal Nobility.”

62. Pareceres were common in colonial administrative writing. They were part of officials’ duty to inform the king about the state of affairs; on critical issues, the king would also request opinions from specialists and suggestions of possible lines of action. Padilla sent his “Parecer” to the king on July 20, 1657.

63. Torre Villar, Los pareceres de Don Juan de Padilla, 107.

64. Prior to this arrangement, Padilla continued, Indians had only received wages worth twenty reales per week (a peso was typically worth eight reales). Miners profited from the low risk and the quick cash they received from Indian captains of the mita and the caciques through the mita de faltriquera; mine owners were paid seven pesos for each Indian’s week of work. Ibid., 113.

65. Ibid., 113–114, 119–125.

66. Ibid., 115–116. Encroachments on Indian lands and the corresponding lawsuits would continue well through the late eighteenth century. See Stavig, The World of Túpac Amaru, 111–128.

67. Ibid., 125.

68. Limaylla, “Representación,” 239–240.

69. García Cabrera, Ofensas a Dios pleitos e injurias, 55–63.

70. AGI, Lima, 15, Noviembre 28, 1662. Limaylla was preparing to visit the royal court for the second time that same year and was requesting permission to travel to Spain, which the king granted.

71. AGI, Lima, 17, Don Juan Guaynapiric, Lima, Noviembre 29, 1662.

72. Rowe, “Movimiento Nacional Inca del siglo XVIII,” 18. Rowe identified Vélez de Córdoba as a mestizo.

73. For analyses of this conspiracy, see O’Phelan, Rebellions and Revolts, 86–97; Thomson, We Alone Rule, 163, 170, 177–178, 325–326.

74. AGI, Charcas, 363, “Manifiesto,” 9v.

75. Ibid., 10, 11–11v.

76. Cited in Thomson, We Alone Rule, 170–171. Vélez de Córdoba apparently coordinated efforts with caciques from coastal Peru and Cochabamba. Ibid., 325.

77. AGI, Charcas, 363, “Manifiesto,” 11.

78. Ibid.

79. Ibid., 12v.

80. Ibid.

81. O’Phelan, Un siglo de rebeliones anticoloniales, 96.

82. AGI, Charcas, 363, 11.

83. O’Phelan, Rebellions and Revolts, 96. The “Manifiesto” must have circulated during the Huarochirí rebellion along with the “Representación verdadera,” among other Andean texts.

84. AGI, Lima, 363, 9v–11v.

85. O’Phelan, “El mito de la independencia concedida,” 67, 73; Thomson, We Alone Rule; Stern, Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness; Cahill, “Liminal Nobility.”

86. Salinas Córdoba wrote the Memorial de las historias del Nuevo Mundo Pirú in 1653, a model of Franciscan missionary writing and criticism of the abuse of Indians under colonial rule. Salinas y Córdoba, Memorial de las historias.

87. Heras, Aporte de los franciscanos, 51.

88. AGI, Indiferente General, 640, Fray Alonso Zurbano, “Carta del R. P. Predicador,” Mataguaci, Febrero 12, 1667.

89. AGI, Lima, 541, Fray Juan de San Antonio, July 11, 1750, 8.

90. “Representación verdadera,” 119v.

91. AGI, Lima, 541, Letter from Fray Juan de San Antonio to Fray José Gil Muñoz, 1750, 9v.

92. Casas, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias.

93. AGI, Lima, 988, Bishop Alonso de la Peña Montenegro, “Agravios que continuamente se hacen a los indios” (ca. 1731), 1–12. The notes from Montenegro include quotations from the Bishop of Chiapas, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, about the decimation of the Caribbean Indian population at the hands of cruel conquistadors in the 1490s.

94. Ibid., 10.

95. Ibid., 1v, 4v.

96. Juan and Ulloa’s report was embedded within the larger discourse of the criticista and proyectista literature of the time, which also utilized the trope of agravios y vejaciones coupled with extensive critiques of official corruption and urged that the empire be overhauled to curtail the power of local administrators and strengthen the economy according to the needs of eighteenth-century European capitalism. Partaking in the principles of English liberalism, the two men attacked the unproductive work of the clergy, called for the formation of industries, and demanded an end to the Catholic Church’s monopoly over economic resources. Examples of criticista literature in colonial Peru were Viceroy Marquéz de Castelfuerte’s “Relación de gobierno” (1724–1736) and the creole Victorino Montero’s “Estado político del Peru” (1742).

97. Juan and Ulloa, Noticias secretas de América, 85.

98. Ibid., 232, 236–237.

99. Ibid., 244–250. The evidence the sailors used, however, has been questioned as consisting of exaggerated, sweeping statements, some of which the expeditioners could not possibly have witnessed as they claimed. Andrien, “Noticias secretas de América,” 178–179.

100. Juan and Ulloa, Noticias secretas de América, 254–259.

101. Andrien, “Noticias secretas de América.”

102. Juan and Ulloa, Noticias secretas de América, 265–266, 284–286.

103. Ibid., 272–274, 279–281.

104. Ibid., 274–275.

105. Andrien, “Noticias secretas de América,” 186. Along with Andean discourses of protest, Andrien identifies the conflicting discourses of reform by colonial elites and the approaches to imperial reform rooted in the Spanish Enlightenment proper. Ibid., 177.

106. Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 31–32.