2
FOUNDATIONS OF SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ANDEAN SCHOLARSHIP
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THE PRODUCTION OF CRITICAL REPRESENTATIONS of the social state of affairs in the seventeenth century was embedded in the major transformations Spanish colonialism brought to the Andes.1 This chapter offers an overview of Andean scholarship, introducing the most critical issues of the time, the writers, their texts, and the social practices associated with Andean writing during that century. The production of fairly complex social critiques and reform programs by literate mestizos and Indians was part and parcel of a wider complex of political and cultural practices developed during, and prompted by, the cycles of social unrest brought about by the implementation of the Toledan reforms. The composers of these tracts/texts created informal networks of Indian authorities and supporters to advance their struggles against the impact of the reforms and used writing as a strategy for negotiating social change with viceregal and royal authorities on both sides of the Atlantic.
The key issues affecting indigenous communities in the seventeenth century and their links to Andean writing introduce the chapter. The social background and political roles of the period’s writers guide the reader through the circumstances that led these figures to engage in the practices that characterized their scholarly culture.2 Their texts are introduced next, highlighting their genesis, thrust, and impact. Since some Andean texts raised ongoing issues that prompted more radical responses, the relevant insurrectionary contexts and the place of the writings in those contexts are presented as well, when pertinent. The group of writers identified here includes a by no means exhaustive list of the numerous kurakas, their mestizo relatives, sympathetic clergy, and others who likely intervened in the texts’ composition and whose names went unrecorded.
NETWORKS OF ANDEAN CONTESTATION:
CAMPAIGNING AGAINST THE TOLEDAN REFORMS
The imposition of colonial institutions in the Andes following the Spanish conquest brought tremendous social upheaval to the native communities. Indian authorities moved in different ways to address the initial and subsequent shocks as early colonial impositions were more systematically attempted after implementation of the reforms of Viceroy Francisco de Toledo (1569–1582).3 The most destabilizing changes for indigenous groups included demographic devastation and the encomienda system, coupled with the loss of communal lands and the obliterating effects of the later compulsory mining draft. The harshness of the mita obligation forced Andeans to flee their communities, making it increasingly difficult for caciques to comply with the colonial state’s mita quotas and tribute demands. Adding to these pressing factors, Andeans from the large jurisdiction of the Archdioceses of Lima underwent various cycles of ecclesiastical campaigns known as the extirpation of idolatry (1609–1626, 1641–1671, 1724–1730). The campaigns not only obliterated the cultural texture of Andean communities but also left them impoverished and divided; in addition, they created an opportunity for further abuse of native women and men by corrupt and incompetent clerics. Widespread official corruption and the unchecked power of local elites in the seventeenth century increasingly undermined the possibilities of justice for Andeans.4 All of these circumstances reverberate in the background of the Andean writings introduced later in this chapter, whose antecedents can be traced back to the earliest campaigns against the institutions of colonial rule.
In one of the earliest efforts to address the havoc created by the Spanish colonizers, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas proposed eliminating the encomiendas in his 1542 writings and advocated the end of Indian slavery, the restitution of Indian lands to their legitimate owners, and consideration of Indians as free subjects under the protection of the king.5 In 1582, twenty-four caciques from the Province of Charcas (Qaraqaras, Chichas, Chuyes, and Charkas Indian nations), led by the kuraka Don Fernando Ayavire from the Sacacas repartimiento (Province of Chayanta), engaged in a campaign to abolish the mita—advancing memoriales and signing powers of attorney to have Ayavire represent their greater number of grievances and demands before the king in Spain. In a memorial known as the “Memorial de Charcas” (the Charcas memorial), they indicted Viceroy Francisco de Toledo for the dispossession of the ethnic lords of the four Indian nations, the imposition of the mita, the reassessment of tribute quotas, and sequels of his reforms in the Province of Charcas more generally. The caciques offered suggestions to the king, similar in nature to some of those made by Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla, about how to deal with this legacy and condensed the major aspects of the Andean political and social crisis in the early seventeenth century into fifty-two short chapters.6 The “Memorial de Charcas” became a sort of model of writing and social activism by kurakas and their social networks to confront the impact of Toledo’s reforms, which also relied on groups of lawyers, judges, and clergy for support and likely for help in crafting the memoriales to the king.
In the aftermath of the epidemics in the late sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth century, the composiciones de tierras gave new impetus to the movement for restitution. In his El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno, Andean scholar Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala supported the restitution of Amerindian lands, defending Andeans’ “natural right” to their lands and denouncing the composiciones de tierras endorsed by the king because he was not the rightful owner of those lands.7 Guamán Poma de Ayala questioned the overexploitation of Indians in the mines of Huancavelica, Potosí, and others and attributed these abuses to a lack of royal control over the miners. He recommended a series of institutionalized checks and balances designed to monitor the activities of miners and azogueros (owner of a silver mine, a silver amalgamation mill, or both) through periodic visitas (inspections).8
During the seventeenth century, as the mita system increasingly replaced the encomiendas, Indian authorities and groups of relatives and supporters responded to these challenges with a combination of judicial, political, and intellectual strategies. Caciques organized social networks to campaign against the mita system in the Audiencias of Lima and Charcas and the royal court in Spain and continued to advance the movement for land restitution. Judges and clergy also participated in the efforts, which occasionally were led by viceroys such as Conde de Lemos in the 1660s. Dozens of caciques crossed the Atlantic during the seventeenth century to defend their causes in Madrid, where they also helped advance the petitions of other Andeans from different regions of Peru, acting as their legally empowered representatives in Madrid. Writing, usually in the form of critical representaciones accompanied by concrete petitions, was central to empower the negotiations of Indian authorities and representatives with the top authorities of the realm. In the seventeenth century these leaders sought to ease the burden of the mita and ultimately called for its abolition. They also fought for invalidation of fraudulent composiciones and the corresponding restitution of lands.9
As kurakas from different Andean areas systematically complained about the agravios y vejaciones (abuses and vexations), they created a trope of protest grounded in the injustice and suffering of Indians under the mita and denounced the hardships of personal service that continued to be forced upon them in the seventeenth century, long after the crown had prohibited such service.10 Their efforts to fight the mita system through incipient networks of writing and social activism were exemplified early by the “Memorial de Charcas,” backed by the action and signatures of the twenty-four kurakas in the Province of Charcas, and the “Memorial Dado a la Majestad del Sr. Rey Don Carlos Segundo” (ca. 1677) and “Representación hecha al Sr. Rey Don Carlos Segundo” (ca. 1667) by Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla, supported by his Franciscan mentors in Jauja, among other writings.
A clearer legal and social activism developed during this conjuncture that surrounded the fight for abolition of the mita. Indian authorities also pursued negotiations with the audiencias and the king to temporarily waive the draft so they could attain a renumeración, or a new assessment of the Indian population (also known as a revisita), that reflected the demographic change following the major epidemics of the 1620s and 1630s—years before Viceroy Conde de Lemos proposed doing so in 1669.11 In addition, the campaigners demanded restoration of the lands communities had lost as a result of the growing number of composiciones de tierrras, as many Indian lands were quickly assumed to be available or abandoned. Kurakas thus presented petitions to the audiencias to control the local corregidores’ and hacendados’ (estate owners’) power. Corregidores were accused of retaining Indians in their private businesses, thereby obstructing the fulfillment of the mita.12 Indian campaigners also filed lawsuits against individual azogueros and miners in an effort to explore every legal possibility to circumvent forced labor policies in the Andes. When these efforts proved insufficient, Indian insurrections were attempted as an extreme tactic in the search for justice.
Since the early seventeenth century, the Andean campaign against the mita system and for the restitution of lands had prompted Indian authorities to cross the Atlantic systematically in pursuit of a solution to these protracted social crises. Either directly or through the protectores de naturales, caciques and gobernadores desperately petitioned for government action—including one from the communities of the Angaraes repartimiento, in the central highlands, in 1625. They petitioned for the first time for exemption of the mita service in the Huancavelica mines, which the crown granted for a renewed ten-year period. Later, in 1646, Don Christobal Cuycapusca, Don Pedro Cuycapusca, and Don Juan de Yanamisa—caciques principales from the same repartimiento—sent memoriales to the king explaining the new crisis created by a recent earthquake and asked for a ten-year prorogation of the exemption to mita service in the Huancavelica mines. They were granted a new eight-year extension of the waiver as a result of the last petition.13
That same year, the court received a visit and a memorial from yet another Andean who identified himself as Don Juan Lorenzo Ayllón, “Indian from the Provinces of Peru,” who claimed to be a noble descendant of the caciques of Luringuanca in Jauja Province. Ayllón had traveled clandestinely to meet the king and denounce the fact that, since the beginning of the colonial mita, about 1 million Indians had perished as a result of the lethal dust they inhaled, combined with mortal diseases, in the mines. After reminding the king of the Jauja Indians’ financial and military cooperation with Spain in earlier times of Inca rebellion, Ayllón demanded that the Indians working in Huancavelica be exempt from the mita for a period of twenty or thirty years so they could rest, return to the Indian towns they had abandoned, and resume their indoctrination.14 In 1666 the cacique principal from San Pedro Pillao (Tarma), Don Diego Sánchez Macario, traveled to Madrid to ask for an exemption of his repartimiento Indians from mitas and personal service, which had caused many tributaries to abandon their towns and made his duty as tax collector and organizer of the mita impossible to fulfill.15
Kurakas from the coastal zones subject to the Huancavelica and Potosí mines were also among the Andean leaders who traveled to meet with the king and the Council of the Indies to negotiate alleviation of the mita burden for their communities.16 On March 14, 1647, King Philip IV received a visit from Don Andrés de Ortega Lluncón, cacique and pachaca (local native lord of 100 households) principal of Lambayeque in the Saña corregimiento, who demanded resolution of several lawsuits he had filed years before that had remained stuck in Madrid. Don Andrés complained bitterly of the agravios y vejaciones inflicted on his Indians by Viceroy Marqués de Mancera, who had disregarded previous calls for justice from the kuraka. Don Andrés’s previous memoriales had been sitting in the viceroy’s office since the early years of his predecessor, Conde de Chinchón. Don Andrés voiced his frustration with the current viceroy’s political influence, which slowed the resolution of his petitions. As a result, he went to the court to ask explicitly that Viceroy Marqués de Mancera be removed.17
Another Indian noble visitor to the court in Madrid, Don Carlos Chimo, also from the town of Lambayeque (Saña corregimiento), addressed the king in 1647 to denounce additional agravios concerning his Indians, particularly conflicts resulting from the composiciones de tierras and the abuses by judges in charge of them. Don Carlos produced a memorial with support letters written by other caciques from the area, voicing general discontent regarding the illegal behavior of the corregidores from Saña and Chiclayo and of an audiencia judge, Pedro de Meneses, who had sold community lands and struck a composición de tierras that had harmed the communities. When he first approached the Council of the Indies, Don Carlos Chimo had been prompted to leave Spain, but he disobeyed and searched for the king in Zaragoza, where he ultimately found him. Carlos Chimo obtained a copy of the 1646 royal mandates to Viceroy Marqués de Mancera for the creation of a junta (in this case, a committee of judges and clerics) to investigate and resolve these and similar complaints previously leveled by others. As was usually the response in such cases, the king remitted the case to the Council of the Indies for consultation, and the process of justice stagnated as the council prompted the petitioner to leave Madrid so his behavior would not be imitated.18 The investigation took nearly two years, at the end of which the alcalde del crimen (audiencia judge who specialized in criminal cases) from the Lima Real Audiencia, Don Bernardo de Iturrizarra, exonerated his fellow audiencia judge Pedro de Meneses, stating that he had sold no lands in the town of Lambayeque.19
The campaigns incorporated petitions for the restitution of communal lands, the number of which had increased by the 1660s. The petitioners described different modalities of what they considered fraudulent composiciones de tierras and mismanagement by judges colluding with corregidores, escribanos, encomenderos, curas, and protectores de naturales. The caciques principales from the bishopric of La Paz—Don Cristóbal Nina, Don Juan Quispe, and Don Pedro Larua, members of a large social network of native authorities in southern Peru—exposed the minutia of the illegal composiciones, providing the names of the colluding officials and details about the location and magnitude of their mismanagement, as well as the violence involved in the process. They presented their allegations to the real audiencia’s fiscal, Don Pedro Vásquez de Velazco, also the judge in the previous viceroy Marqués de Mancera’s residencia (review), which was being conducted at the time. The caciques denounced judges and other petty judicial officials for confiscating the original land titles exhibited by Indian litigants to prevent continuation of due process and thus prevent the restitution of lands to their legitimate owners.20
One of the most actively engaged Indian authorities in Upper Peru during this period, the cacique and gobernador principal of Jesús de Machaca (Pacajes Province), Don Gabriel Fernández Guarache, filed a comprehensive set of capítulos (accusations) that emphasized the decadence within the region, the detrimental effects of escapism,21 and the necessity of a revisita; he also asked the audiencia to put an end to the corruption and injustice. Another prominent cacique, Don Bartolomé Topa Hallicalla from Asillo (Azángaro), also stood out during the campaigns. A writer of memoriales and a relentless litigant, he, along with Fernández Guarache, devoted handsome amounts of money to advance litigation against the region’s mine owners. The two men led a network of caciques that operated in the region southwest of Lake Titicaca. Hallicalla held several noble titles and allied with the colonial authorities, when necessary, to suppress the Laicacota uprising and diminish the power of mine owners. He was a principal campaigner against the mita in the Peruvian Andes, fighting for laws against the mita de faltriquera (mita rendered in cash) during the time of Conde de Lemos; he was also an active entrepreneur in the areas of mining, estancias (ranches), mills, and trade for many years.22 These two diligent kurakas offered Conde de Lemos persuasive evidence to pursue the abolition of the mita system. Fernández Guarache explained in his memoriales that he had to assume financial responsibility for the missing mitayos of Pacajes and petitioned the viceroy to reduce the number of mitayos from his area and suspend the practice of holding kurakas responsible for the mita of an entire province. Fernández Guarache was vocal in demanding substantial reforms to the mita; he advocated a system of two break weeks combined with one work-week and the suspension of day and night shifts.23
Although the mita was not formally abolished in their time, the kurakas’ campaign was partially successful, since ordinances prohibiting the mita de faltriquera were issued in 1657. Hallicalla obtained generous noble privileges in compensation for his support of the viceregal army in the uprising in Laicacota against local miners and azogueros. Fernández Guarache and Hallicalla helped persuade Viceroy Conde de Lemos to call for the abolition of the mita.24 Fernández Guarache’s petitions and allegations in particular were discussed by the interim viceregal government of the Audiencia of Lima and later reached the Council of the Indies, which decided in 1668 to command Conde de Lemos to act against the abuses denounced in Fernández Guarache’s memoriales.25
As denunciations increased, the king received multiple visits from Indian ambassadors, each of whom represented a regional network of Andean authorities in Peru. In 1664, as a final example, the Cajamarca cacique Don Antonio Collatopa, who claimed to be a descendant of the Incan ruler Huayna Capac, personally delivered his memorial to King Philip IV, in which he leveled accusations of abuses and mistreatment against governors and parish priests in the northern sierra. The grievances were associated with the hardships Indians experienced in the Huancavelica and Potosí mitas. His denunciations were supported by the Augustinian Fray Juan de la Madre de Dios.26 Don Antonio appeared to lead one of the networks of caciques from different regions of Peru who sent petitions against the mita system to the royal court and their own memoriales and Indian representatives to the king. Among those supporting Don Antonio Collatopa’s actions in Madrid were Don Joséph Mayta Capac Tito Atauche, Don Nicolás Noyo Chumbi, Don Francisco Pilco Guaraz, Don Melchor Atauche Túpacusi Rimache Inga, Don Francisco Rodríguez Pilco, Don Bartolomé Xulca Poma, Don Juan Curi, and Don Francisco Nina Lingon.27
These cases of Indian legal activism demonstrate that Indian authorities were at the forefront of the struggles against the mita, in which the writing of memoriales asking for reform of the system and the collective effort of informal Indian networks played a significant role. These Andeans’ endeavors were fostered by the search for a direct dialogue and negotiation of policies with the king and his advisory council in Madrid. They expressed the fact that seventeenth-century Andean writing and activism were another facet of the larger trans-Atlantic exchange derived from the colonial relationship, which was prompted and shaped by the disruption Spanish colonialism generated in the Andes. The countless memoriales from groups of caciques seeking justice and denouncing the ineffectiveness of the early royal policies issued to alleviate the burden of the mita and the factual dispossession of Indian communal lands attest to the internal contradictions of a colonial system that used Christianity and social harmony at the level of colonial discourse but could only deliver non-enforced protective laws. Even the 1660 royal decree—put in place after a long campaign by Andeans, ecclesiastics, colonial judges, and viceroys—remained ineffective as of 1622, making evident the depth of the general crisis of the colonial state in the Viceroyalty of Peru.28 The active responses to such crisis are more vividly expressed in the social practices and texts of the Andean intellectuals introduced in the sections that follow.
JUAN DE CUEVAS HERRERA
One of the most striking features of Andean critical scholarship is the fact that some of the writers were members of the church and made the ecclesiastical institution the target of their criticism (Figure 2.1). For more than twenty years, the Andean Juan de Cuevas Herrera was a cura doctrinero in Carancas and other Indian towns in the Province of Charcas. Born in Chuquisaca (or La Plata, Charcas) sometime around 1590, Cuevas presented himself as a mestizo descendant of the Inca Cristobal Paullu, son of Huayna Capac and brother of Huascar. Cuevas joined the Jesuit seminary in Lima as a brother of the order on November 21, 1610. He studied arts and law for a year before taking vows as a priest.29 In 1616, the young Cuevas Herrera was working for the Cusco bishop Dr. Fernando de Mendoza, apparently helping him sort out books for censorship.30 As did Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, Cuevas assisted the Jesuits in the extirpation campaigns in the Province of Huarochirí in 1620.31
Cuevas Herrera’s long career as a traveling parish priest allowed him to witness firsthand the relationships between Andean Indians and parish priests, corregidores, their lieutenants, miners, and caciques; he learned the minutia of everyday life in small parishes, where he mediated in conflicts between indigenous commoners and Spaniards as Andeans called on him for help. Cuevas Herrera traveled extensively throughout the Viceroyalty of Peru before he wrote to the king, likely at an advanced age, while he was a cura beneficiado (curate) in the parish of Andamarca and Hurinoca (Carangas, west of Lake Titicaca). He incorporated his experiential knowledge in his memoriales to the king, “reporting” on the religious state and social ills of rural areas in Upper Peru (Bolivia). Cuevas Herrera’s narrative was empowered by the fact that he had witnessed the events he questioned, and he presented himself as an honest priest: “A priest I am . . . and I will speak as a witness, since I have been a curate for twenty years and today I am poorer than the first day.”32
Figure 2.1 “Cinco memoriales” by Juan de Cuevas Herrera. BRP, Sign. II/2819, folio 218.
Cuevas Herrera addressed the king with his extensive manuscript entitled “Cinco memoriales,”33 a testimonial rendition of the erroneous practices of colonial functionaries and priests, which the writer claimed to have experienced directly or known from someone who had witnessed them firsthand. Rhetorically speaking, Cuevas Herrera crafted his “Cinco memoriales” in the format of pastoral visitation reports, which provided full accounts of the state of religious, social, and personal matters in the provinces. Even though substantially less extensive than Guamán Poma’s Nueva corónica, the “Cinco memoriales” follows a similar model of pastoral rhetoric and devastating criticism of colonial officials’ corruption, which included priests, prelates, and caciques. Both men, however, purportedly supported the evangelization process. As a Jesuit cura doctrinero, Cuevas must have been exposed to the ecclesiastical literature available for training preachers. A large genre of pastoral letters, manuals, sermons, and treaties was produced during the formative period of the Peruvian church (1548–1585) that was available for instructing doctrineros in matters of faith and that also assessed the spiritual state of the Indians and the obstacles to their full conversion. Juan de Cuevas Herrera partook in the rhetoric of the pastoral genre in his “Cinco memoriales,” as he set out to render an account in which he “briefly and succinctly made known the major impediments for the complete entrance of these Indians from Peru to the Christian law and customs.”34
In the aftermath of the extirpation campaigns in the Archbishopric of Lima, which proved unable to eradicate native religious practices, Cuevas Herrera represented the view of those who believed Indians were poorly indoctrinated as a result of the incompetence of the secular clergy. Moreover, natives ran away from mission towns because of the violent treatment parish priests inflicted upon them. More specifically, the “Cinco memoriales” focused on the obstacles that prevented the full conversion of Andeans to Christianity in the seventeenth century, after more than a century of missionary activity in the Province of Charcas. He presented a detailed discussion of the parish priests’ failure to reach out to indigenous communities and provided firsthand accounts of the wide variety of abuses curas doctrineros committed against poor Andean women, men, and children. The Andean doctrinero was vocal in describing the incompetence of curas beneficiados in the Aymara language and critically exposed the larger realities of evangelization in his region.35 For him, the overall obliteration of Andean societies by Spaniards was what prompted Andeans to run away to the mountains where they could live on the margins of Christianity, a major hurdle to the success of evangelization. He also denounced the corrupt practices of corregidores at all levels and the actions of abusive and illegitimate caciques. Cuevas Herrera concluded each memorial with proposed policies to alleviate the situations he discussed.
The “Cinco memoriales” also offers a testimonial account of life in the mines. The author claims to have lived for a time as a miner in Potosí, where he witnessed the plight of Andean mitayos from the sixteen provinces ascribed to the mine—an experience he felt enabled him to write an authoritative, critical account of the mita system. He also documented different forms of personal service Andeans were forced to perform for Spanish colonists in haciendas and Spanish towns.
Juan de Cuevas Herrera’s memoriales, however, also reveal his deep admiration for the Jesuits and his endorsement of their missionary agenda.36 Echoing a similar sentiment in Guamán Poma’s work, Cuevas Herrera advocates a more central role for Jesuits in evangelization, asking that all Indian towns in the Province of Charcas be given to the Jesuits. In this, he also echoed similar proposals made by other members of the civil government, such as the Audiencia of Lima’s judge Juan de Padilla in 1657 when he raised his own memorial to the king, denouncing the poor state of evangelization in Peru as an alternative to the extirpation campaigns.37 More likely, however, the text echoed the debates of the mid-seventeenth century that began to question the effectiveness of the extirpation campaign.38
Prior to his “Cinco memoriales,” Cuevas Herrera had apparently written several similar manuscripts, which he sent to the real audiencia of Charcas’s minister Don Juan de Palacio to deliver to the king. Palacio died before he could accomplish the task. Cuevas Herrera found inspiration for his writings in a treatise by the Franciscan father Juan de Silir and in those of other ecclesiastics who had written in favor of justice for Andeans.39 Following his previous unsuccessful attempts to reach the king through Spanish officials, Cuevas composed his “Cinco memoriales” sometime in the second half of the seventeenth century. Although there is no clear indication that Cuevas Herrera traveled to the royal court, the document must have reached the king at some point, since it rests today in the library of the royal palace in Madrid.
Like other Andean scholars of the colonial period, Juan de Cuevas Herrera found himself in an ambiguous position. As a Catholic cura doctrinero, his role was to advance Indian Christianization and support the state policies of colonialism, while as a mestizo of Incan descent, he may have been more sensitive to the social plight of his fellow Andeans. In the “Cinco memoriales,” the parish priest constantly negotiates his roles between endorsing evangelization and condemning the behavior of colonial authorities and colonialists vis-à-vis Andeans. His memoriales represent both a reformulation of colonial Christianity and a frontal attack on the church for failing to fulfill the promise of full inclusion of Andeans after more than a century of evangelization in the Charcas Province. The Andean parish priest’s text bears witness to the conflicting perceptions of religion by colonizers and the colonized and the ways Andean intellectuals managed to explain idolatry while struggling to reconcile their roles with the goals of colonial indoctrination.40 Cuevas Herrera wrote this memorial in his later years, when he was seeking to obtain a prelateship as ecclesiastical visitador (pastoral inspector) in his province in the hope of overcoming poverty at the end of his life. By then, other indigenous scholars from central Peru were using writing and litigation in search of their own place within their native political sphere.
DON JERÓNIMO LORENZO LIMAYLLA
The efforts of Andean scholars such as Cuevas Herrera within the church lead us to those of his counterparts who also struggled for power positions of a different kind, namely, the cacicazgos of the Indian communities. Originally from the Luringuanca repartimiento (encomienda district) of the Mantaro Valley (Jauja Province), the elite Andean Don Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla belonged to one of the valley’s oldest and most powerful kuraka lineages. The Limayllas’ ability to dominate the cacicazgo over the centuries and their matrimonial alliances with members of other prominent Mantaro Valley families allowed them to amass a considerable fortune. They managed community lands and labor and participated in the local spiritual economy through the management of cofradías’ assets, generous donations, and other obras pías (pious works). They also developed a close relationship with the Franciscans of the local parishes and with local colonial administrators.41
The Mantaro Valley was perhaps the wealthiest area in the central highlands of Peru, where one of the first Spanish settlements was established in the town of Jauja sometime around 1533. The location was privileged, close to the Pacific and at the crossroads of Cusco Province and the central rainforest. The Indian population of Jauja, around 100,000, was among the largest in Peru at the time of the Spanish conquest. The region experienced major deterioration under Spanish rule, as Jauja became one of the fourteen provinces within the orbit of the Huancavelica mita. The Indian population, including the seven repartimientos of the Jauja corregimiento, quickly declined; by 1570 it only amounted to 50,000.42
Internal rifts and lengthy legal disputes over the newly imposed caciques plagued the indigenous communities of the Mantaro Valley following implementation of the Toledan reforms, as traditional norms of succession were replaced by Spanish ones. Ambiguity involving succession methods was common, however, leaving space for negotiation. Starting in the 1580s, kurakas from Jauja Province had been engaged in legal disputes over their right to area chiefdoms. The Guacra Paucars (Felipe Guacra Paucar, his brother Francisco Guacra Paucar, and Francisco Tisy Canga Guacra) and the Limayllas were allies at times, but they also became rival lineages as they disputed in court over their right to succession of the Luringuanca kurakazgo (cacicazgo, or chiefdom).43
The struggle to access this kurakazgo in the mid-seventeenth century generated a lengthy lawsuit (1655–1671) that pitted Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla against his distant cousin Bernardino Mangoguala Limaylla, after the latter had been officially recognized as the successor of the last legitimate kuraka, Don Jerónimo Valentin Limaylla. Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla was an illegitimate child of Don Jerónimo Valentin Limaylla, a condition that proved detrimental to his aspirations to power in the Luringuanca kurakazgo. Both Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla and his cousin had enrolled in the Colegio de Caciques, El Príncipe, in El Cercado, the Indian town of Lima, in 1648.44 Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla was also mentored by Franciscan curas doctrineros from Jauja, who likely immersed him in Christian teachings and taught him to write in Castilian.
In 1655, the year the audiencia confirmed his cousin in the Luringuanca cacicazgo, Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla initiated the lawsuit but still introduced himself as an Indian cacique principal and gobernador of the Luringuanca cacicazgo, a direct heir of the region’s main ethnic lords, and a descendant of the Inca Pachacuti (the ninth Inca king), a grandson of Viracocha (the eighth Inca king), and a great-grandson of Yaguarhuacas (the seventh Inca king). To advance his pleito, the Jauja noble traveled frequently to Lima and the Spanish court in Madrid, where he busied himself writing letters and petitions. His two major pieces of writing come from the lawsuit and stand out as rather sophisticated renditions of native identity and anticolonial critiques (Figures 2.2 and 2.3), which played an important role in his entire campaign to be recognized as a noble political authority. In his “Representación,” he also presented himself as a legitimate representative of the Jauja native lords, who allegedly entrusted him to advance their petitions to the king.45
Limaylla’s texts incorporated elements of the discourses of social justice, common in the writings that had sustained the campaign against the mita service in Andean Peru since the early seventeenth century, and were part and parcel of the long-standing tradition of collective protest and action exemplified in the “Memorial de Charcas,” introduced earlier. Limaylla seized every possible opportunity to retain his lineage’s hold over the political and social structures within the Mantaro Valley. He was a Christian Andean who had a solid knowledge of Spanish law and theology. In addition, he had experience dealing with the Audiencia of Lima, and later in the 1660s he was exposed to the workings of the Council of the Indies in Spain. His strategy to become head of the Luringuanca kurakazgo entailed a combination of advancing lawsuits against kurakas he perceived as illegitimate, writing representations and petitions to the king in search of noble recognition and related privileges, traveling to the royal court to advance his and other caciques’ petitions, and, ultimately, joining most kurakas of the Andean provinces liable to the mita service and the region’s Franciscan missionaries in denouncing violations of colonial laws and the excesses of officials in the mitas and obrajes.46
Figure 2.2 “Memorial” by Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla. AGI, Indiferente, 640, folios 1–4.
Figure 2.3 “Representación” by Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla. BRP, Sign. II/2848, folio 211.
These practices reflect the negotiation of multiple roles by Andean elites, which must be considered within the wider context of kurakas’ social activism as a whole.47 Limaylla’s representations unveil a political practice that superseded the mere concern for noble privilege and reached the level of cultural resistance through a lettered critique of colonial practices of justice. Limaylla’s texts disputed the fabricated identities of Indian subjects as “irrational beings” in the colonial discourse and, in turn, constructed the colonizers as “anti-Christian.”48 The language used in his “Memorial” and the “Representación” also bears witness to the extirpation campaigns in the Jauja area, as reiterations and contestations of Andeans’ “idolatrous” behavior resonate in the background of Limaylla’s writings.
Limaylla reformulated colonial hierarchies by proposing social equality for Amerindian elites and noble Spaniards, thereby validating Andean elites’ rights to privileges. On this basis, he requested the creation of a knightly order for noble Andeans and proposed that Spaniards pay tribute and render personal service as well. While he appeared to endorse both pureza de sangre as the basis of the Andean elite’s nobility and Indian authorities’ duty to render “good service” to the crown, he criticized Andeans’ social and moral debasement at length to highlight the king’s failure to fulfill his reciprocal duties to his indigenous subjects.
Most of the complaints and denunciations in the texts relate to the oppressive conditions of work in the Potosí silver mines and the Huancavelica mercury mines and to the tax pressures on native communities that ensued as a result of the demographic decline. The manuscripts discuss the negligence of colonial officials in enforcing the pope’s and the king’s mandates on the mita service, a long-lasting “anomaly” that spoke to the poor state of justice and the legal rights of Andeans as free subjects under colonial rule. The “Representación” recounted unenforced royal mandates since the time of the conquest and discussed “natural” and “divine law” to demonstrate Spanish rule’s lack of legitimacy in the colonial Andes. Limaylla argued for the Andean right of self-rule by reformulating Scholastic notions of “common good” and “natural right” (see Chapter 4). The link between social harmony and social justice for the Amerindian subjects of the Spanish empire appears natural for Limaylla. The two manuscripts share similarities with the narrative style of Guamán Poma’s Nueva corónica, with its run-on sentences, little or no punctuation, and inconsistent spellings and sentence construction. The style does resemble the textual features of many archival documents of the seventeenth century and, less frequently, the eighteenth century—documents such as administrative reports, letters, accounts, representaciones, and memoriales such as Fray Calixto’s “Representación verdadera.”49 Limaylla’s writings appear less mediated, perhaps reflecting a transitory stage in the process of accommodating Andean oral traditions with the demands of Spanish administrative and legal writing.
The royal authorities largely dismissed Limaylla’s petition and underestimated his ability to compose complex texts. The petition Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla raised to King Charles II in his “Memorial” from around 1677 was denied because the Council of the Indies considered a knightly order for Indian nobles “inconvenient,” since it would encourage the preservation of Inca and Aztec memories and thereby instill in them an undesirable sense of nobility that would divert them from work and provoke them to riot and flee to the “mountains.” More clearly, the royal councilors believed Limaylla was incapable of producing the kind of writing he submitted. They presumed that a clergyman must have written the “Representación” and simply reiterated the previous decrees ordering investigations of denounced abuses.50 Even today, Limaylla’s ability to compose such texts has been questioned anew, albeit in a different form.
Historian José Carlos de la Puente Luna has challenged Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla’s identity as the subject behind the long dispute over the Luringuanca cacicazgo (1655–1671), thereby opening the door to questions about the authorship of the two texts traditionally ascribed to Limaylla. Following the line of argument advanced by the appointed cacique Bernardino Mangoguala Limaylla, Puente Luna argues that the true claimant of the cacicazgo was not the actual Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla but an impostor. An Indian commoner from Reque (Trujillo) named Lorenzo Ayún Chifo allegedly passed himself off as Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla, who Bernardino claimed had died at age eight (no death certificate available). Ayún Chifo was an Indio ladino and a Christian who, according to Puente Luna, emulated the Franciscan ideal of sanctity and also coveted the Luringuanca cacicazgo.
Puente Luna did not study the documents under discussion, but he dismissed the possibility that the memoriales addressed to the king were written by kurakas or, more concretely, by Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla.51 Several historians have hitherto acknowledged Limaylla as the author of the “Representación” and the “Memorial.”52 Monique Allaperrine-Bouyer rejected the hypothesis of the “impostor” introduced by Bernardino, basing her discussion on the proceedings of the legal case, focusing on the background information of the two parties involved in the lawsuit, and assessing their arguments against each other. She concluded that Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla was the most legitimate candidate to inherit the cacicazgo but was displaced by an unworthy individual more suitable to the Spanish authorities; for her, Limaylla represents the plight of curacas without a chiefdom.53 Allaperrine-Bouyer, however, did not analyze Limaylla’s texts in detail and did not discuss authorship.
Whereas Puente Luna regarded Ayún Chifo as a typical “social climber” and an Indian emulate of the Franciscans, the actual memoriales to the king with which I am concerned in this book reveal the Andean writers as agents of intellectual resistance.54 As opposed to simply “acculturated” Indians and “emulates” of Franciscan Christianity, the individual(s) behind these texts criticized colonial practices and contributed to a vision of social change for Andeans using their own redefinitions of Christianity. To understand fully the notion of authorship in these texts, one must account for the relationship of mentorship between Andean nobles and the clergy, which usually took place in the schools for caciques, seminary schools, or individually.
At an early age, Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla was entrusted to the Franciscan Fray Andrés de la Cuesta for mentorship,55 and in 1648 Jerónimo Lorenzo enrolled in the Jesuit school of caciques, El Príncipe, in El Cercado, Lima.56 Andeans mentored individually by religious men were probably exposed to much the same literature as those who attended more formal seminary schools, where the Jesuits exposed students to the teachings of Spanish theologians such as Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suárez, the latter of whom questioned the legitimacy of Spanish rule in the Americas. A true seventeenth-century heir of Lascasian discourses of social justice, the Jesuit Diego de Avendaño’s Thesaurus indicum circulated widely among Andeans mentored by clerics. Avendaño wrote in favor of natives and condemned abusive Spanish officials and black and Indian slavery in colonial Peru. In the first volume of the Thesaurus, he listed forty-two accusations against miners and the mining system in Peru, some of which underlie Limaylla’s texts. Against Aristotle’s justification of slavery, Avendaño argued that the true natural law was freedom and the right to life.57
Andeans mentored by Franciscans must have been familiar with critical works by other influential Franciscans, such as Fray Jerónimo de Mendieta (1526–1604), a mystic missionary who saw in the Americas the advent of the “millennial kingdom” and counteracted Aristotelian justifications of native slavery with the Christian principle of equality of all men before God.58 Inspired by Mendieta, Fray Buenaventura de Salinas y Córdoba led the criticism of the Potosí mita system and advocated Indian causes in colonial Peru.59 These are just a few works within a wider genre of non-Andean discourse that supported Indian interests and criticized colonial justice in Peru throughout the colonial period.60
To what extent the clergymen intervened in the writing of Limaylla’s memoriales to the king is difficult to ascertain. What is more relevant is that the Andean texts under discussion are infused with the Scholastic and Neo-Scholastic political theologies contained in the ecclesiastical discourses of the Franciscans and the Jesuits as much as they speak to the Andean experience of colonial subordination. Texts such as Jerónimo Lorenzo’s formed part of a larger Andean political strategy to gain access to indigenous power positions at a time when Spanish norms of political succession and other colonial demands on Indian labor were being imposed on Andean peoples by the Toledan reforms, beginning in the 1560s.
Along with their writing, Andean ladinos like Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla combined extensive litigation with trans-Atlantic travel to meet the king and present their demands and with occasional participation in rebellions when other means failed.61 The Franciscans supported Limaylla’s trans-Atlantic endeavors. A 1667 letter from the Franciscan Fray Alonso Zurbano, a preacher in the town of Mataguasi (Jauja Valley), that elaborated on the suffering of natives at the hands of the Jauja corregidores—the “false Christians”—was filed along with Limaylla’s two main manuscripts.62 In letters written in 1656 to the rebel Bartolomé Mendoza from Huancavelica, Limaylla appears to acknowledge his collaboration with the Franciscans.63 Limaylla thus interacted not only with native lords, Franciscan missionaries, and Jesuit teachers—from whom he learned Christian notions of justice—but perhaps also with local leaders such as Mendoza, who were engaged in insurrectionary approaches. Limaylla’s texts in a way legitimated struggles against the mita and for the cacicazgo by appealing to theologies of common good, the natural right, and the legitimacy of fighting tyranny. This principle is the link between Andean intellectuals and the rebels of the time, since Limaylla felt struggles against the injustice of the mita were legitimate forms of fighting tyranny within the highly tense atmosphere that prevailed.
Parallel to the peaceful attempts to reverse the problematic mita system, social unrest and plans for massive insurrections were made in the face of delayed legal solutions. Aside from the general unrest generated by the mita, the first six decades of the seventeenth century saw scattered uprisings against Spanish obrajes and increasing tributes in different regions of the Viceroyalty of Peru.64 A pan-Andean insurrectionary conspiracy led by kurakas from Charcas, Cusco, Moquegua, the Mantaro Valley, Huancavelica, Cajamarca, and Trujillo—regions liable to the mita system—was under way in 1666. Although the rebels attacked the mita system, obrajes, and tributes in their incendiary papers, it seems that Indian nobles’ early claims for access to the priesthood were also raised in this insurrectionary conjuncture.65
Kurakas such as Don Antonio Collatopa and members of his network from Cajamarca, along with Gabriel Fernández Guarache and Bartolomé Topa Hallicalla and their network from Charcas, were involved in the conspiracy, which spread out from the viceregal capital on December 17, 1666. Diego Lobo, a Cajamarca leader, apparently wrote a document that contained the rebels’ propositions, and the 1664 memorial Collatopa took to Spain to negotiate mita exemptions was attributed to Don Carlos Apoalaya.66 Two Indian captains of the Lima Compañía de Naturales (Indian militia) who participated, Don Juan Ordoñez and the Indian cobbler and captain Don Andrés de Arenas, wrote papers documenting the proceedings of meetings they had held. Two leaders who had been executed were actively engaged in writing memoriales to the king and had sent two other Indians to the royal court along with Don Juan Cornejo, royal visitador from the Audiencia of Lima.67 Although the texts of these writings did not survive, it seems they raised similar issues to those contested in the legal battles of the kuraka leadership, delineated previously.68
Don Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla, like Hallicalla, advocated justice for mitayos and sought noble privileges for himself and other Indian authorities. Simultaneously, he was being investigated in connection with the 1666 rebellion as an associate of one of the apprehended Andean leaders. As indicated earlier, authorities had intercepted letters from 1656 that Limaylla wrote to Bartolomé de Mendoza, alcalde of the Huancavelica parish and a main leader of the rebellion, in which Limaylla also indicated his close alliance with the Franciscans to attain his political objectives.69 Limaylla’s “Representación” was also written to contribute to the kurakas’ overarching struggle against abusive personal service. The text was written around 1667, when rumors about a possible increase in the demands of personal service spread to the Jauja area, prompting kurakas to hasten their petitions and reiterate their demands for the abolition of the mita system. Limaylla’s “Representación” echoes this concern, as the author traced the history of royal decrees prohibiting Indian slavery back to 1501 in an effort to persuade the king of the need to eliminate the mita service.70
Limaylla’s legal activism in Peru and Madrid and his use of Christian theology were only incipient antecedents to the roles of other Andeans such as Juan Núñez Vela de Rivera, who at the end of the seventeenth century developed these techniques to attain a more comprehensive set of privileges for nobles of a redefined “Indian nation” of elite Indians and mestizos.
JUAN NÚÑEZ VELA DE RIVERA
The world of noble Indians and that of their mestizo relatives and acquaintances in Peru were at times indistinguishable. This cultural and social proximity was embodied in the mestizo presbyter and racionero (prebendary) from the Arequipa cathedral, Juan Núñez Vela de Rivera, another Andean writer, lobbyist, and trans-Atlantic traveler in the late seventeenth century. He was probably best known in Spain for his campaign in support of noble recognition and social inclusion for elite Andeans and their mestizo descendants. Núñez resided in Madrid from 1691 through 1695, where he elevated petitions in conjunction with caciques from Peru who had been working collectively to advance the admission of Andeans to secular positions and ecclesiastical institutions and to allow them to partake in symbolic practices of sanctity—including the canonization of the mestizo Don Nicolás Ayllón, best known as Nicolás de Dios.71 This social and cultural movement strove to redefine Andeans as full Christians, reworking old Iberian notions of pureza de sangre to access spheres of social privilege to which they felt entitled as nobles of the Indian republic.72
As a result of Núñez’s writings and leadership in Spain, the king issued a real cédula on April 16, 1693, making Indians and mestizos eligible for positions in the Holy Office Tribunal.73 For Andean activists fighting for social inclusion within the church, this cédula represented a step forward in overcoming their long-standing exclusionary status as “neophytes”—commonly held against them when they applied for ecclesiastical positions—and an advancement of their recognition as full Christians. In response to the 1693 cédula, Núñez suggested to the caciques from Lima that they adorn the Copacabana Chapel with a “good painting as a token of our gratitude and duty,”74 specifying details that later allowed for the creation of iconographic expressions by others who supported Núñez’s agenda. Thus, it seems plausible that, aside from writing and social activism in Peru and Spain, the intellectual Andean movement studied in this book also involved deployments of iconographic representations of Inca nobility related “ethnically” to the king. These representations empowered Indian and mestizo elites and could possibly constitute an expression of the newly self-fashioned “Indian nation.”
Núñez’s best-known writing is a memorial written in 1691 to King Charles II, requesting that the king grant honors to elite Indians and mestizos, as well as eligibility to serve in secular and ecclesiastical positions. He petitioned the king for a canonship for himself in the Lima Cathedral as well.75 In 1695 Núñez returned to Lima, where he continued his activism in the proceedings for canonization of Nicolás Ayllón; he was also appointed chaplain of the Copacabana Chapel and beaterio (house of beatas, or religious women not bound by vows) in the Indian town of El Cercado.76 In response to Núñez’s 1691 memorial, King Charles II finally issued a royal decree in 1697, commonly known as the cédula de honores, according nobility and privileges—access to ecclesiastical and secular positions—to elite Indians and their descendants equal to those granted to noble Spaniards, which usually required proof of pureza de sangre. The decree extended to mestizo women the right to profess as nuns and join monasteries.77 This ruling proved instrumental in Andeans’ subsequent legal campaigns for racial equality and ethnic autonomy in Peru.
CONCLUSION
The seventeenth-century manuscripts by Juan de Cuevas Herrera, Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla, Juan Núñez Vela de Rivera, and dozens of kurakas who included complaints and petitions in their letters and memoriales were instrumental in social and political activism to fight the social distress unleashed by the Toledan effort to consolidate Spanish rule in the Andes. The writings prominently featured the erosion of ethnic lords’ political power, the oppressive conditions of work in the silver mines, and the tax pressures on native communities—all of which worsened both the impact of the Indian demographic decline initiated in the preceding century and the failure of evangelization after the campaigns of extirpation.78 In the midst of this social crisis, however, Andean authors and activists sought to intervene positively to restore social balance and justice by networking and writing critical tracts, proposing new legislation, demanding new social spaces, and, ultimately, coming together as a collective of Indian authorities and ecclesiastical mestizo allies to denounce and negotiate the colonial impositions. In the process, they became a more cosmopolitan elite of trans-Atlantic travelers and lobbyists seeking the enforcement of justice directly from the king.
In the eighteenth century, the Indian struggles against colonial oppression would continue and intensify as the Bourbons attempted to regain control and revitalize the trans-Atlantic economy, thereby exacerbating preexisting social and political tensions. The work of the Indian networks based in Lima and southern Peru became more visible as the campaign against the mita system continued. Andeans also expanded their agenda for justice into other, larger social and political arenas, in which their overall agenda for ethnic autonomy took on new ramifications. The social and economic realities of the eighteenth century presented new challenges and opportunities for Andean scholars, in the forms described in Chapter 3.
NOTES
1. The chronological division of Chapter 2 (writers from the seventeenth century) and Chapter 3 (writers from the eighteenth century) is only a practical one and does not reflect a clear-cut historical difference.
2. For the seventeenth century the focus is on writings produced after the appearance of Andeans’ major works, such as Vega, Comentarios reales de los Incas, and Guamán Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica. In Chapters 2 and 3, disparities in the amount of background information provided for the Andean writers under study reflect the current state of archival information available. For that reason, in Chapter 3 a more complete context is provided for Fray Calixto de San José Túpac Inca and the “Representación verdadera” than for the other writers and texts.
4. For comprehensive studies of the impact of Spanish colonialism on Andean life, see Stern, Peru’s Indian Peoples; Spalding, Huarochirí; Pease, Kurakas, Reciprocidad y Riqueza; Glave, Trajinantes; Ramírez, World Upside Down. For studies of the campaigns of extirpation, see Mills, Idolatry and Its Enemies, “An Evil Lost to View,” and “Bad Christians in Colonial Peru”; Duviols, La destrucción. On the problem of official corruption, see Andrien, Crisis and Decline.
5. Casas, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias.
6. Among others, the caciques and signatories demanded a new retasa (reassessment of tribute rates, or tasas) and revisita to adjust tribute rates and mita quotas to reflect the demographic decline in their areas, to recognize the status of hidalgos and privileges for caciques and principales but especially for the natural lords who ruled over lordships of 10,000 vassals during Inca times, and to put an end to the composiciones de tierras in Charcas. AGI, Charcas, 45, Ayavire et al., ca. 1582, 1v–12. Waldemar Espinosa Serrano published this document and dated the memorial in 1582, based on accompanying documents dated in November of that year. Espinosa Serrano, “El memorial de Charcas,” 1. In chapter 52, however, the text mentions the Cercado school for caciques in Lima, which was founded in 1618, suggesting that the document or parts of it were written later in the seventeenth century. In a 2006 reproduction of “El memorial de Charcas,” revised by John V. Murra, there is indication that the document was either written or filed in 1600. Platt, Bouysse-Cassagne, and Harris, Qaraqara-Charka, 828. A wide variety of Andean letters written since the sixteenth century in the Province of Charcas are also reproduced in this compilation.
7. Guamán Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva corónica, 858, 915[929].
8. Ibid., 489–491, 526[530]–528[532].
9. For studies of the mita system in Peru, see Brading and Cross, Colonial Silver Mining; Bakewell, Miners of the Red Mountain; Cole, “Abolitionism Born of Frustration” and Potosí Mita. For a legal perspective, see Zavala, El servicio personal de los indios en el Perú.
10. Recopilación de leyes de las Indias, Libro VI, Título VI, “Del Servicio Personal.”
11. Cole, “Abolitionism Born of Frustration,” 320.
12. Such cases had begun to occur soon after implementation of the Toledan reforms. Those who addressed the Audiencia of La Plata in search of government control included Don Francisco de Michaca from Porco, in 1608; Don Pedro Uychu from Porco, 1610; and Don Gabriel Fernández Guarache from Pacajes, in 1634. Ibid., 307–333, 310.
13. AGI, Lima, 7, Madrid, Septiembre 1, 1646. Reproduced in Konetzke, Colección de documentos, vol. 2, 407–409.
14. AGI, Lima, 15, Abril 4, 1646.
15. AGI, Lima, 10, Madrid, September 18, 1666.
16. The impact of epidemics and demographic decline in the coastal zones of Peru seemed to have been harsher than it was in the highlands, and even Spaniards complained about the decimation of the Indian coastal population. As a result, a large proportion of Indians from the coast migrated to Lima or became forasteros (ayllus resident aliens, liable to lower tribute than originary residents) in other regions. Cook, Demographic Collapse, 154, 210.
17. Reproduced in Konetzke, Colección de documentos, vol. 2, 415–416.
18. AGI, Lima, 15, Madrid, Junio 13, 1647; Madrid, Julio 23, 1647. Transcribed in ibid., 420–422.
19. AGI, Indiferente General, 1660, Lima, Marzo 8, 1649.
20. AGI, Indiferente General, Marzo 30, 1650.
21. AGI, Charcas, 56, Escribanía 868a.
22. Glave, Trajinantes, 202–203.
23. Cole, “Abolitionism Born of Frustration,” 321.
24. Glave, Trajinantes, 209–212, 296; AGI, Charcas, 463, Cuaderno no. 13.
25. Cole, “Abolitionism Born of Frustration,” 322.
26. AGI, Lima, 15, Junio 27, 1663. Fray Juan sent his own memoriales to the royal court, exposing the realities of Indian exploitation by priests in obrajes, and he was astonished when he traveled to entire areas where “idolatry” was widely practiced and few spoke Castilian. He joined those asking for prohibition of obrajes and supported severe punishments for corregidores, curas, and caciques who did not speak both Castilian and Quechua—which for him was the cause of Indians’ rampant ignorance of Christianity. Such assessments echoed Juan de Cuevas Herrera’s contemporary critique of the poor state of evangelization in Charcas Province.
27. The king reiterated his command that the special junta he had designated in 1660 should meet more frequently and hear and address the problems Indians raised. AGI, Lima, 574, Libro 26, f. 243. In Konetzke, Colección de documentos, vol. 2, 519–523; AGI, Lima, 17, Mayo 17, 1663.
28. AGI, Lima, 15, Noviembre 29, 1662.
29. ARSI, Catálogo Público de la Provincia del Perú, No. 89, Enero 1, 1613, page 9.
30. Cuevas Herrera, “Cinco memoriales,” 222v.
31. Eguiguren, Diccionario histórico cronológico, 523.
32. Cuevas Herrera, “Cinco memoriales,” 221.
33. The full title of the manuscript is “Five memorials, informing briefly and summarily about the major impediments for the Peruvian Indians to fully Enter the Evangelical Law and Customs. They are directed to the King Our Lord by the Licenciado Juan de Cuevas Herrera, Parish Priest from the Andamarca and Huarinoca Towns in the Carangas Province, and a native from La Plata City in the [Charcas].” Cuevas Herrera [ca. 1650], BPR, Sign. II/2819, 218–269v. See the original Spanish titles of this and the other Andean manuscripts under study in the Bibliography.
34. Ibid., 218v. The phrase corresponds to the first part of the manuscript’s subtitle. Among other important writings of the pastoral genre in Spanish, these were the best-known: the Jesuit José de Acosta’s De procuranda Indorum salute; parish priest Pedro de Quiroga’s Coloquios de la verdad; Joseph de Arriaga’s La extirpación de la idolatría en el Pirú; Archbishop Pedro de Villagómez’s Carta pastoral de instrucción y exhortación; and Alonso de la Peña Montenegro’s Itinerario para párrocos de indios.
35. Cuevas Herrera, “Cinco memoriales,” 220v, 222v.
36. Ibid., 220v, 222v, 239, 252, 255.
37. Ibid., 222v, 255; García Cabrera, Ofensas a Dios pleitos e injurias, 57–59: “May God put in the heart of Y.M. the desire to fill this kingdom and its churches with the pastors of the Company of Jesus, and this new Christendom, which is Y.M.’s responsibility, would have a different face.”
38. García Cabrera, Ofensas a Dios pleitos e injurias.
39. Cuevas Herrera, “Cinco memoriales,” 118v.
40. Such perceptions and strategies are addressed in Chapter 7.
41. Lorandi, De quimeras rebeliones y utopías, 94.
42. Cook, Demographic Collapse, 200–201. Cook discusses the disparity of the figures in different sources and seems to accept the estimates of the Relaciones Geográficas (1582), which recognized a total of only 27,000 war Indians. The demographic decline was serious in the Luringuanca repartimiento, the birthplace of Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla: from 3,374 Indians in 1575, the tributary population shrank to 799 in 1630, with the rate of decline accelerating more rapidly from 1617 to 1630.
43. Latin American Manuscripts, Peru, Box 5, Noviembre 18–Enero 22, 1600, Lilly Library, Bloomington, Indiana.
44. Inca, “Colegio de Caciques,” 805.
45. In 1670 the cacique Rodrigo Rupaychagua and others from the Arequipa, Angaraes, Canta, Pillaos and Chinchero, Huamalies, and Guayaquil repartimientos entrusted Limaylla to deliver to the king and the Council of the Indies a letter in support of Viceroy Conde de Lemos. Alaperrine-Bouyer, “Enseignements et Enjeux,” 115.
46. AGI, Lima, 15, Noviembre 28, 1662. Jerónimo Limaylla appears signing a collective petition to the king and supporting the actions of Don Juan de Padilla against injustice and the Andeans’ poor indoctrination. Other caciques of this network who signed the petition include Don Carlos Apoalaya from Jauja, Don Joséph Mayta from Omasuyo, Don Cristóbal Yamke from Vilcashuaman, Don Melchor Atauche Topacusi Rimauche Inga from Arequipa, Don Jacinto Ninagualpa from Vilcashuaman, and a cacique from the town of Oropesa (Cusco). Franciscan Buenaventura de Salinas y Córdoba had been active in the Jauja region in the 1640s along with other Franciscan doctrineros who joined him in the campaigns against the mita.
47. For discussions of the multiple roles played by Andean kurakas, see Glave, Trajinantes, 281; Pease, Kurakas, Reciprocidad y Riqueza and Perú Hombre e Historia.
48. See Chapter 7 for analyses of identity in Limaylla’s texts.
49. A discursive analysis of these themes in Limaylla’s texts is presented in Chapters 4, 5, and 7.
50. AGI, Lima, 12. According to Konetzke, Colección de documentos, vol. 2, 656–657, “[I]t is obvious that such a memorial could not be written by Don Jerónimo (even though it is printed in his name) but by a clergyman that took the voice of this Indian to digress at length on this matter.”
51. Puente Luna, What’s in a Name. Two pieces of evidence Puente Luna used, however, beg for further discussion, as they question his own argument. First, Bernardino sent two letters (in 1660 and 1661, respectively) to Jerónimo, who was in Lima at the time, immediately after the audiencia had denied his claims and reconfirmed Bernardino in the cacicazgo. Puente Luna, What’s in a Name, 133. Those letters make it clear that Bernardino is using Jerónimo Lorenzo as his legal representative in Lima; he calls him “nephew” and “relative” and thanks him for his support because “in the end, as the saying goes, blood ties are stronger and make one acknowledge one’s relatives” (ibid.). Although the motives of the letter are unclear and the incoming letters from Jerónimo Lorenzo are not available, one wonders why Bernardino would entrust his personal businesses in Lima to an “impostor” who had long been his political rival. If Jerónimo Lorenzo had died at an early age, and if Ayún was an impostor, as Bernardino claimed and Puente Luna agrees, why would Bernardino address letters to a Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla in 1660? Second, according to the rosters of the Cercado school for caciques, both Jerónimo Lorenzo and his cousin Bernardino were enrolled in 1648, which implies that Jerónimo Lorenzo must have been alive at least at age twelve or older, seven years before the start of the dispute in 1655. Inca, “Colegio de Caciques,” 779–883. Puente Luna has yet to make a convincing case concerning the identity of the claimant of the Luringuanca cacicazgo and the authorship of the manuscripts in question. Nevertheless, both Ayún and Jerónimo Lorenzo responded to a similar category of Indios ladinos seeking to advance their social positions in colonial society. For the practical purpose of designating authorship of the texts in this book, I continue to use the name Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla as it appears on the cover page of the manuscript copies in the Biblioteca Real del Palacio in Madrid and in the documents of the lawsuit extant in AGI, Escribanía, 514C, unless new research sheds more indisputable light on the issue.
52. Pease, Kurakas, Reciprocidad y Riqueza; Lorandi, Spanish King of the Incas; Alaperrine-Bouyer, “Enseignements et Enjeux,” 114–116.
53. Alperrine-Bouyer, “Enseignements et Enjeux.”
54. For studies of Andeans as “social climbers,” see Spalding, Huarochirí, 209–238, and “Social Climbers”; Stern, Peru’s Indian Peoples, 158–183.
55. Alaperrine-Bouyer, “Enseignements et Enjeux,” 114.
56. Inca, “Colegio de Caciques,” 865.
57. Avendaño and García, Thesaurus indicum.
58. Mendieta, Izcabalceta, and García, Historia eclesiástica Indiana.
59. Salinas y Córdoba, Memorial de las historias del Nuevo Mundo Pirú.
60. Other creole writers who supported Indian causes were Don Juan de Padilla (“Memorial de Julio,” 1657); Don Diego León Pinelo, judge of the Audiencia of Lima and protector de naturales in the late 1650s; and Juan Vélez de Córdoba, rebel leader and author of the Oruro “Manifiesto” in 1739, whose textual analysis is developed in Chapter 5.
61. For the Andean combination of judicial strategies and rebellion in the late eighteenth century, see Serulnikov, Subverting Colonial Authority.
62. AGI, Indiferente General, 640, Fray Alonso Zurbano, Febrero 1667. Zurbano’s letter was apparently requested by another Franciscan supporter of Limaylla’s in Spain.
63. Pease, Kurakas, Reciprocidad y Riqueza, 165.
64. Saignes, “Algún día todo se andará,” 431–432; Pease, Perú Hombre e Historia, 318; Glave, Trajinantes.
65. Alaperrine-Bouyer, “Enseignements et Enjeux,” 122.
66. AGI, Lima, 15, Carta de Don Cristóbal Laredo a la Reina regente Mariana de Austria, Lima, Febrero 16, 1667. Colonial authorities deliberately minimized the importance of this movement, but, in reality, the Indian leaders had been preparing the insurrection for five years, and the Audiencia of Lima was aware of some happenings in the years preceding 1666. Glave, Trajinantes, 200. The audiencia recognized in its report to the regent Queen Mariana that the contentions raised by the conspirators had been reiterated in previous years. In 1663, Indians from Cajactambo had set fires to local obrajes and attacked the audiencia’s alcalde del crimen Fernando de Velasco y Gamboa, in charge of investigations in the area. The accused declared that they had serious plans for a general insurrection in various provinces. The audiencia recognized the depth of exploitation and mistreatment of Indians by corregidores, azogueros, and curas. AGI, Lima, 15, Reporte de la Real Audiencia de Lima a la Reina Regente Mariana de Austria sobre la conspiración de 1666. Lima, Febrero 16, 1667.
67. AGI, Lima, 15, Carta de Don Cristóbal Laredo a la Reina Regente Mariana de Austria, Lima, Febrero 16, 1667.
68. One of the more likely links between legal and rebellious struggles at that time was Don Bartolomé Topa Hallicalla, the wealthy kuraka from the town of Asillo (Azángaro corregimiento), introduced earlier. During the years 1647–1678, while engaged in legal battles against the mita, he wove multifarious alliances with local authorities according to his personal interests. As a result of the investigations into the 1666 Lima conspiracy, he was summoned to court, but his participation could not be clearly established at that time. Testimonies implicating Hallicalla came to be known at a later date, however. Glave, Trajinantes, 297–298. Glave cites testimony by Hallicalla’s nephew and the town’s scribe that implicated the cacique as one of the organizers of the frustrated 1666 Lima rebellion.
69. Pease, Kurakas, Reciprocidad y Riqueza, 165.
70. The Calchaquíes, indigenous peoples from the southeastern frontier area, Tucuman Province, also rose up in rebellion in 1658; in 1659 they proclaimed the Spanish wanderer Don Pedro Bohorques as their “inga.” Bohorques was later condemned to prison in Lima. But when the 1666 conspiracy was discovered, the audiencia became wary about rumors that the Lima rebels also intended to proclaim him as their inga; he was sentenced to death and decapitated in 1667. AGI, Lima, 16, 1666. For a comprehensive history of the rebellion of the Calchaquíes and Don Pedro Bohorques, see Lorandi, De quimeras rebeliones y utopías.
71. Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo a la santidad, 468–498.
72. In the early sixteenth century the Iberian notion of “purity of blood” was based on the assumption that only those descending from “old Christians” on both maternal and paternal lines of ancestors were considered “pure” and therefore entitled to privileges and opportunities denied to converts with either Jewish or Muslim mixed blood. Martínez, Genealogical Fictions.
73. Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo a la santidad, 495. Estenssoro Fuchs stressed the importance of this disposition for advancement of the Indian struggles for recognition as full Christians of “pure blood,” part of which was intended to question the inquisitorial fueros (immunity) for Indians—a tacit reaffirmation of their neophytism.
74. Buntix and Wufffarden, “Incas y reyes españoles,” 165–167. Seeking legitimacy from Spanish and Andean perspectives, Núñez was adamant that the Spanish kings in the painting should be designated as “ingas” and be added subsequently to the list of the “Ingas gentiles, natural lords of the bountiful Peruvian Kingdom,” which he also provided in the letter. Likewise, Núñez specified that the names of the inquisitors who supported the ruling be listed under that of “our Inga,” Charles II. According to Buntix and Wufffarden, the iconographic project of the creole cleric from Lima, Fray Alonso de la Cueva, was based on the political ideas expressed in the 1690s’ textual work of Núñez. Alonso de la Cueva is considered the intellectual author of an engraving from around 1725 featuring effigies of a genealogical “succession” of Inca and Spanish rulers up to the second rule of Philip V. Pictorial copies of this engraving circulated in Lima and El Cercado in the 1720s and, later, elsewhere in Peru and Upper Peru. Gisbert, Iconografía y mitos indígenas en el arte, 130.
75. Buntix and Wufffarden, “Incas y reyes españoles,” 164.
76. Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo a la santidad, 497.
77. AGI, Madrid, Real cédula, 26 de Marzo de 1697. In Konetzke, Colección de documentos, vol. 3, part 1, 66–69. A comprehensive analysis of this cédula and its significance for Andean social movements is developed in Chapter 6.
78. For a comprehensive understanding of this social and economic crisis, see Cole, Potosí Mita; Bakewell, Miners of the Red Mountain; Cook, Demographic Collapse; Andrien, Crisis and Decline; Glave, Trajinantes.