4
THE EUROPEAN BACKGROUND OF ANDEAN SCHOLARSHIP
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COLONIAL ANDEAN WRITING REMAINS A KEY EXAMPLE of the trans-culturation of early-modern European forms of communication, areas of knowledge, and categories of thought that made their way to the Americas with the Spanish invasion, which became transformed during the process of colonialization. This chapter builds on the notion of trans-culturation, which Cuban sociologist Fernando Ortiz first introduced in 1940, to counteract oversimplified and racist notions of the “acculturation” and “de-culturation” of indigenous peoples under Spanish colonialism. In the transition from one culture to another, Ortiz maintained, a process of cultural creation occurs that expresses not only the acquisition of the new culture but also the loss of the previous one. The new culture that emerges is unique, incorporating something of both cultures while remaining a new creation that is different from the previous two.¹ This notion of trans-culturation was later redefined as the ways subordinated groups in colonial settings chose and reworked the cultural messages implanted by the predominant culture, an idea that describes even more precisely the nature of colonial Andean writing.² Inasmuch as the colonizers imposed values and practices on the colonized, however, they could not control Andeans’ ability to make “something else out of them,” not necessarily by rejecting the colonial culture but by “subverting it from within.”³

The identification of the intellectual roots of, and theoretical justifications for, Andean discourses of protest and power constitutes the purpose of this chapter. In building a scholarly interpretation of the post-conquest state of the indigenous peoples and formulating a theoretical legitimation of ethnic autonomy, Andean writers used European philosophies and political theologies in ways that questioned the primacy of Spanish authority over Andean self-rule. Andean scholarly production in mid- and late-colonial Peru thus bore witness to the ongoing trans-culturation of European intellectual currents from the late-medieval and early- modern periods into colonial Andean worldviews.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Andean intellectuals participated in political and theological discussions that revealed their awareness of the major intellectual trends of the day on both sides of the Atlantic. This chapter begins by outlining these contemporary intellectual currents and demonstrating their influence on the construction of Andean texts. The subsequent sections examine the most salient discussions in which European intellectual roots are visible and show the ways Andean authors modified their sources. Andean scholars discussed the nature of the Spanish empire in Peru and the relationships between the king and his Amerindian subjects through renewed debates over the legitimacy of the Spanish conquest and colonial rule. They also discussed at length their legitimate right to self-rule as their political structures were challenged during the Toledan era.

PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL THEOLOGY

As representatives of various religious orders arrived in the Americas, they brought philosophies and political theories prevalent in early-modern Spain. Missionaries also introduced a Christian theology of justice to sustain their mission of evangelization. These principles were diffused from pulpits and classrooms attended by children of the native elite. Educated in this European tradition, native and mestizo intellectuals in colonial Peru drew upon streams of European thought that reached back to the Scholastic tenets of Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century and their reformulation by Renaissance Spanish scholars in the sixteenth century.⁴ Aquinas’s understanding of a ruler’s political legitimacy underlies most of the memoriales and representaciones the Andean native scholars discussed in this study brought to the king. According to Aquinas, the king’s authority comes from his subjects, as do the powers of justice and the law: “The multitude or the public persona has this coercive power, which pertains to the exacting of punishments. . . . Therefore, it pertains to it alone to make laws.” Aquinas advocated incorporating reforms to limit the king’s power. He believed the people should rise in rebellion to depose their king only as a last resort against persistent tyranny and obstruction of the common good; even then, rebellion should be initiated only through public consent.⁵

A recurring interest in Andean scholarship, from Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala onward, was to propose changes that would limit the power of the king’s representatives in Peru. After Guamán Poma, Andean leaders addressed these suggestions in their writings and followed them up with trans-Atlantic visits to the king, which became almost a ceremonial act of delivering the manuscripts in person to the Council of the Indies—the last instance of justice that advised the king—and eventually to the king himself.

The notion of natural law constituted a cornerstone of medieval Augustinian and late-medieval Thomist Scholasticism. Saint Augustine reformulated the traditional Greek and Roman definitions of natural law as reason or the law of nature, proposing instead that natural law was a set of moral principles based on the “divine will” and “divine law” that govern social life. In the view of late-medieval Christian philosophers, such as Aquinas, natural law fundamentally defines all social relationships and aims for the common good; “felicity and happiness are the ultimate end of human life. Hence . . . it is necessary that law properly looks to the order of the common happiness.”⁶ Natural law was a key concept in medieval Christianity, used to lay a foundation of what was morally right and wrong and to establish standards of ethics that defined who belonged in a community and how interactions between communities or nations should be conducted.

Aquinas defined human laws as laws that derive from divine laws and are understood by human reason: “From the precepts of natural law, as from some common and non-demonstrable principles, human reason must proceed to dispose of more particular matters . . . discovered by human reason, [which] are called human laws.”⁷ This is an important step because, later, Neo-Scholastic scholars would separate the two forms of law and allow for human capability to undo human laws, thus opening the possibility for political action and social change. This principle would empower Andean scholars, such as Fray Calixto de San José Túpac Inca, who were convinced that useless royal decrees could and should be changed. Their proposals for social reform showed they were aware of the people’s ability to make and change laws or at least to engage rulers’ power through reform.

Dominican and Jesuit theologians in Spain undertook a revival of Scholasticism in the sixteenth century. They incorporated the new political and legal concepts of tyrannicide and the right to depose a ruler, initiating what came to be known as Neo-Scholasticism. To be sure, this was just one aspect of a new trend of conservative thought that enabled the Catholic Church to contest the Reformation and the more humanist emphasis of the Renaissance.⁸

In Spanish America, some of the best-known exponents of Neo-Scholasticism were Francisco de Vitoria, an Aristotelian from the University of Salamanca; his disciple, Francisco Suárez; and Juan de Mariana. These Jesuit scholars took a leading role in preserving the dominance of the Catholic Church in the face of the Reformation and the humanist challenge of Renaissance scholars, who diverted from theological explanations of phenomena and events and focused more on the study of the individual. However, the introduction of these scholars’ rethinking of Thomist political theories of law and society, themselves reformulations of Aristotelian notions of society, laid out the theoretical groundwork that would evolve into more radical theories of social and political change. In this sense, Spanish Neo-Scholasticism played a mediating role between medieval theology and modern ideas of the state and society.

In the debate over the legitimacy of Spanish rule in America and the new legal status of indigenous peoples, Vitoria’s ideas carried significant weight in colonial Andean writings. Vitoria defended non-Christian natives as rational people who he thought were “infidels” only because they had not been instructed in the colonizers’ new religion.⁹ He also supported the property rights of indigenous subjects, comparing their status to that of Hebrews and Muslims who had traditionally been allowed to keep their property while subjected to foreign rule. Following Vitoria, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas and Domingo de Soto defended the rights of native Andeans to own possessions and to retain the señorío (lordship) of their communities.

In line with the Thomist notion of civil societies, in the mid-eighteenth century Fray Calixto struggled to prove that Andeans were rational people, or gente de razón, and to assert that they had natural rights and were fully capable of governing themselves, which amounted to questioning Indians’ legal definition as perpetual minors.¹⁰ To support late-colonial Andeans’ advocacy of Indian priesthood, education, and civil service, he maintained that Indian subjects were “rational” and “old Christians,” no longer subject to royal or spiritual tutelage. Fray Calixto constructed native Andeans as gente de razón “[b]ecause what, otherwise, prevents [these] reduced Indians and old Christians, inhabitants of cities, villages and places in the mountains, who live urban political lives, from becoming competent to serve in the religious priesthood, and in honorable positions, both secular and ecclesiastical?”¹¹

Both Fray Calixto and Juan de Cuevas Herrera contested accusations of native idolatry by, in turn, accusing the Spaniards of inducing idolatrous behavior in Indians through their unjust and negligent actions. They sought to shake off the negative connotations of the term “barbarian,” which had become synonymous with the terms “idolater” and “infidel” in sixteenth-century Scholastic debates. Being labeled infidels, idolaters, or barbarians automatically excluded Amerindian societies from the Aristotelian and Thomist category of civil societies. Such a construction accorded indigenous societies a pre-social status and therefore made them legally subject to foreign rule and thus to political and social disenfranchisement.

In one of his main reformulations of Thomism, Francisco Suárez disputed the idea that civil law was derived from natural law. Suárez postulated that positive law was added for the government of humankind and was not derived from natural law. Thus, he de-emphasized the normative character of natural law in civil matters, separating human law from divine law. Suárez also defined the perfect community or potential state, regulated by civil law, as a community capable of possessing an independent political government, following Aristotle. Concomitantly, Suárez shared the Thomist idea that kings derive their power from the people, based on a general pact by which society subjects itself to a ruler. Since this is a human compact and not a divine design, this pact belongs to the realm of human law, and the ruler has no natural or divine right to rule. Subjects can withdraw their allegiance to kings according to the conditions of the compact. Suárez defined tyrannical rule as existing either when power is seized without just title or when a legitimate ruler abuses power and allows corruption, thereby neglecting the common good. In either case, the right to rebel or to depose a tyrannical king would be legitimate. The decision to dethrone or to kill a king, even a foreign king, could be taken by the council of the commonwealth.¹²

Perhaps one of the most consistent patterns in colonial Andean writings was the denunciation of the fact that royal laws favoring indigenous peoples had remained systematically unenforced for most of the colonial era, largely because of the neglect of church and state officials. Andeans tried to make the king aware of infringements of his laws by colonial officials. After their attempts failed, not surprisingly, the rebels in Huarochirí in 1750 and Túpac Amaru in 1781, among others, spoke openly and identified tyrannical rulers who ignored just laws as factors that triggered their rebellions.

The corpus of Scholastic and Neo-Scholastic ideas outlined earlier underlies Andean texts in several ways. A common theme in these texts is that the king allowed corruption and obstruction of the common good; then, the colonial system is construed as exemplifying tyrannical rule. The notions of common good and tyrannical rule appeared explicitly in the writings of the Jauja noble Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla, in the “Cinco memoriales” of the cura doctrinero Juan de Cuevas Herrera, and in the “Representación verdadera.” These Andean scholars reformulated the idea of the common good as a form of social justice, an end to Andeans’ marginalized position in colonial society, which they defined as the restitution of cacicazgos and lands to their original owners and relief from the mita in their seventeenth-century texts. Placing greater emphasis on noble Andeans’ access to religious, political, and social institutions, writings in the eighteenth century saw justice in relief from the repartimiento de comercio, the abolition of corregidores, and reform of the justice system itself (see Chapter 6).

With the exception of the discourses of power articulated by Túpac Amaru and Juan Santos Atahualpa, the right to rebel or to depose the king was not explicitly formulated in the other Andean texts under study—although Amerindian thinkers were widely invested in substantiating tyranny at the level of colonial everyday life, expressing their desire to put an end to such tyranny. They felt entitled to participate in certain levels of government and assumed they had the right to seek the replacement of corrupt and negligent officials and to change laws they considered harmful or useless. More than direct rebellion, Andean writing advocated reform of the colonial justice system. Some Andean scholars, however, not only clandestinely supported specific rebellions but also spurred rebellion by others through their writings. Their overall goal was to attain a measure of ethnic autonomy in the face of their people’s irretrievable loss of political authority. Within this framework, some core discussions gravitated around the justice and legitimacy of the first act of Spanish presence: the conquest and Spanish rule. To understand the ways Andeans partook in this discussion by utilizing and reformulating Scholastic and Neo-Scholastic tenets, a review of the debate on this matter, initiated by Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, is offered subsequently.

Beginning in the second half of the sixteenth century, the ideas of Vitoria, Suárez, and Casas were taught in the theology classes at Lima’s University of San Marcos, mainly by Jesuits and Dominicans. Also at that university, Fray Domingo de Santo Tomás was an enthusiastic disseminator of Casas’s ideas, while the Franciscan Jerónimo Valera from Chapapoyas introduced the Scholastic philosophy of Duns Scotus when he held the first chair of theology at San Marcos starting in 1701. Thus, the various positions within the Scholastic debate over the Spanish conquest were represented both at the University of San Marcos and in the colegios mayores. The Suaristas and Thomist approaches ultimately prevailed, as the Jesuits and Dominicans dominated the academic colonial environment.¹³ At the same time, members of the indigenous and mestizo nobility were exposed to these teachings, as described in Chapter 1.

THE LEGITIMACY OF SPANISH RULE: THE
DEBATE AMONG SPANISH THEOLOGIANS

Since the conquest years, the Spanish crown had been concerned with asserting and legitimizing its sovereignty in America, particularly after Casas’s campaign against the encomienda system began. For the Catholic kings and many Spanish clerics and jurists in the conquest era, the legitimacy of the Spanish presence in the Americas rested on the 1493 bull by Pope Alexander VI, which granted the newly “discovered” territories to Spain and authorized the crown to conduct and control the evangelization effort.

Along with Father Antonio de Montesinos, Casas raised an indictment of the early colonizers’ cruel exploitation of native Andeans, aware of the threat these practices represented for the success of evangelization. Casas’s challenge stirred a trans-Atlantic debate over the crown’s right to take over Indians’ lands, resources, and political structures.¹⁴ Sharing a view that gained support among some Spanish scholars in the late fourteenth century, medieval political philosophers believed “barbarians” (the “other”) who did not live in “civil societies” were subject to the dominium, or señorío, of foreign rulers, who could make claims to sovereignty and property rights over their lands and other assets. Furthermore, a Christian sovereign could legitimately wage a “just war” if the subjects refused to acknowledge Christ or the papal authority.

Despite challenging Spanish conquistadors and advocating for the protection of Indians, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas was one of the first Europeans to introduce the discriminatory term “barbarian” to the New World and to apply it to indigenous peoples. In fact, in his Apologética Historia Sumaria, Casas classified barbarians into five categories: (1) those who demonstrated irrational behavior, unclear thinking, and degenerate customs; (2) those who could not articulate in their own languages theological or intellectual categories that existed in Latin; (3) those who lacked forms of government based on states and laws; (4) those who did not possess any of these qualifications but who were not Christian (infidels); and (5) those who, though not falling into any or all of the previous four categories, were invested in destroying Christianity (barbarie contraria). He decided that Amerindians belonged in the fourth category.¹⁵ As a result, their freedom should be preserved and protected through “persuasive” methods of evangelization so they would become fully civilized and true Christians. According to the sixteenth-century Scholastics, dominium, as a right of possession, referred not only to property rights but also to control over people’s actions, bodies, and liberty.¹⁶ When it became clear that the Incas and the Aztecs had actually developed complex political societies, the Spanish right to dominium began to fall under scrutiny—although not until forty-seven years after the 1493 papal bull granted Spain rights of dominium over indigenous lands and polities and entrusted the crown with the conversion enterprise.

The situation took an interesting turn with the interjections of Francisco de Vitoria, who questioned the pope’s authority to rule in temporal matters, raising doubts about the power of the 1493 bull to grant Spain sovereignty and property rights in America. Furthermore, according to Vitoria, even if native peoples refused to accept Christ and ignored the pope’s authority, it was illegal to wage war on them and seize their property.¹⁷ As long as Europeans viewed natives as irrational, the notion that only rational individuals and societies were entitled to the right of dominium defined the debate in favor of Spain’s right of dominium. Rational beings were defined as those with full mental capacity to understand and do practical things, but Vitoria conceded that Native Americans, although “semi-animal,” had “certain” rational characteristics. They were able to live in cities (polities), marry, and organize their own form of government. Because Amerindians had the rudiments of rationality, Vitoria maintained, all they needed was education to become “fully rational.” They were not “natural slaves” but more like minors who, although totally entitled to dominium, were unable to exercise it fully for the time being. Therefore, the crown could legitimately exercise tutelage of native Andeans until they metaphorically came of age and attained their full status as rational beings. As part of its protective role, then, the crown would be entitled to retain them as subjects and to retain their assets in its possession.¹⁸ Before the arrival of the Spaniards, Vitoria argued, Indians had been the true lords of the land and owners of their assets, both public and private. He concluded that even if the emperor had power over the entire world, he did not have the power to occupy the barbarians’ territory, depose their lords, impose new ones, and subject them to tribute.¹⁹

The fact remained, however, that tutelage could not be preceded by conquest because tutelage is an act of charity, inconsistent with coercion. On the other hand, Vitoria defended Spaniards’ right to travel overseas and to teach their religion; if not allowed to do so, he acknowledged, they were entitled to wage a just war against a tyrant to avenge the offense and defend innocents. Although it remained to be proven that Amerindians had offended the Spaniards and that the Spaniards had come in peace, Vitoria argued that waging war was illegal, that Native Americans were free subjects, and that the crown had rights of tutelage and sovereignty over them but no property rights whatsoever.²⁰

Jerónimo de Mendieta, the Franciscan missionary and mystic who was convinced that the Americas were the place where the millennial kingdom of God would take place, was one of the foundational thinkers and writers in favor of justice for Indians. He most greatly influenced the thoughts of the Franciscan missionaries in Mexico, but he had great influence in Peru as well. Mendieta was a visceral critic of the repartimiento in Mexico, which violated precepts of both divine law and natural law, since native Andeans had surrendered peacefully to the “yoke” of Christianity. He defended the rights of Indians to hold private property and to succeed their ancestors in their cacicazgos.²¹ Others, including Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, maintained that the right of dominium only applied to those who had one king and a structured political organization, as well as to those who did not worship many gods and were familiar with natural laws. For them, native Andeans were “barbarians” and “natural slaves” who had been justly defeated in the conquest war. Sepúlveda in particular held that native Andeans’ organizations were not truly political but only represented a blind adhesion to tyrants and, as such, were far from true republics. Therefore, it was legitimate to depose such rulers as Atahualpa and the Aztec emperor Montezuma, who allegedly did not seek the common good but rather only their personal good, thus losing their right to dominium. Their lands and resources, therefore, were lawfully seizable.²² Among those who shared and disseminated Francisco de Vitoria’s ideas in Peru were Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, Fray Domingo de Santo Tomás, and the Spanish lawyer Francisco Falcón.

Casas was best known for his critical views of conquistadors and his engagement in a debate with Sepúlveda over Indian slavery, which he advanced by pressing the crown to create the necessary laws to establish justice for Indians and restrain the power of encomenderos in America. The New Laws of 1542, forbidding Indian slavery and curtailing encomenderos’ privileges, sought to progressively end the encomienda system. Although not completely effective, the New Laws were the king’s response to the Lascasian indictments. Casas supported Vitoria’s idea that even infidels had the right to possess land and other assets and the right to señorío over their own peoples. For Casas, both divine law and natural law entitled Amerindians to keep their property and natural lords. He was adamant that the Spaniards’ inhumane behavior set a wrong example of Christianity, one native peoples would come to abhor and that would go against his approach of a gentle method of evangelization and teaching by example.

Licenciado Francisco Falcón, a Spanish scholar who wrote the “Representación de los daños y molestias que se hacen a los Indios”—an important treatise for the second Limeño Council of the Church in 1567—followed Casas by denying that a true conquest had ever taken place. Amerindians had willingly subjected themselves to Spanish rule. They did not understand the meaning of the requerimiento (a customary admonition of invaders, in Spanish, prompting Indians to surrender to Christianity) because of the language barrier. Instead of the requerimiento, native peoples witnessed conquistadors’ violent invasion: “And, to the contrary, what they [Indians] saw was that [Spaniards] entered killing, stealing, and committing other crimes.”²³ As a result, Falcón proposed that native Andeans were neither warned to abandon “idolatry” nor advised that Spaniards had come to put an end to it. Likewise, Garcilaso de la Vega, in his Comentarios reales de los Incas (1609), proposed that Andeans had surrendered peacefully to Pizarro and willingly accepted Spanish rule and Christianity. Guamán Poma de Ayala, Garcilaso’s contemporary, also denied that any true Spanish conquest had taken place.²⁴ For Falcón, Pope Alexander VI’s bull gave the crown the religious responsibility for converting Indians but no rights to expropriate their lands and exert political power. Because the Spanish crown had no legitimate right of señorío, the restitution of native Andeans’ lands, resources, and political power was in order. Falcón went into great detail to demonstrate that the foundation of colonialism was illegal, and he implicitly proposed a negotiation with the king. Native Andeans would accept Spanish rule as long as the tribute and mita systems were adjusted to closely resemble the preexisting Inca systems. While he used the Scholastic debate to turn against the legitimacy of Spanish rule, he sought to reestablish the Inca forms of social organization, which he considered fair.

The debate over the legitimacy of Spanish rule lost most of its impetus with Casas’s death in 1566, the Indians’ demographic decline, and the end of the missionary dream. The Spanish jurist Juan de Solórzano mediated and seemingly closed the debate in the seventeenth century, asserting that the 1493 bull gave Spain no rights of dominion. But since the Catholic kings were unaware of this ruling and acted in “good faith,” assuming their invasion of America was legitimate, then it was so. According to Roman law, it was ultimately Spain’s consistent presence in America over such a long period that in fact came to bestow the right of dominium.²⁵ Thus, Solórzano finally upheld legal Roman precepts over the 1493 papal bull.

THE DEBATE AMONG ANDEAN SCHOLARS

The historiography of the debates over just titles and Spain’s right to remain in the Americas and rule the people there focused on the Spanish scholars’ side of the debate. Some scholars even assumed that after the Toledan reforms the Spanish right of dominium was no longer questioned and that even those who supported Indian rights accepted the “just titles.”²⁶ However, Andean scholars from the time of Guamán Poma de Ayala continued to dispute the legitimacy of Spanish rule as a result of implementation of the Toledan reforms. This section examines Andean scholarly discussions of the legitimacy of Spanish rule in the years following the Toledan reforms and throughout the eighteenth-century Bourbon reforms. As native structures of authority and the Indians’ social condition were challenged in specific ways by both sets of reforms, Indian and mestizo writers revisited the debate over just titles to reinterpret and redefine their place in society.

Almost a century after Bartolomé de las Casas’s campaign had gained momentum and while Viceroy Toledo’s political and social reforms were still in full sway, a group of native and mestizo writers revived the dispute over Spain’s right to conquer and colonize, particularly its right to displace Amerindian authorities from their positions of power and to appropriate lands, community labor, and other communal assets crucial for Amerindians’ sustenance.²⁷ Andean intellectuals understood that their positions as the natural rulers of their indigenous constituencies would be most persuasively validated through Europeans’ own notions of political legitimacy. In other words, they deliberately selected ideas and terms such as just war, natural law, divine law, and common good to validate their rights before the Spanish king. In the process, however, they displaced these concepts to a critical territory that not only de-legitimized the Spanish conquest and its aftermath but also undermined the political purposes of the Toledan reforms.

Garcilaso de la Vega was probably the first Andean scholar to use the notion of natural law to legitimize the rule of the Inca, along with the argument that the Inca had been monotheistic before the Spanish arrival.²⁸ After Garcilaso, Don Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, in his Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, elaborated on divine law and natural law. He stated that the whole world belonged to God, but, within it, Castile belonged to Castilians as much as the Indies belonged to Indians and Guinea, in Africa, to blacks. In the Indies, Guamán Poma maintained, Castilians were foreigners, or mitmaqs in Quechua, and only the Indians were the “natural owners of this kingdom” (propietarios naturales de este reino). Guamán Poma developed his rationale by proposing that it was not the mandates of the king or the pope’s bull that legitimized this design:

Each one in his/her own kingdom is the legitimate proprietor, possessor, not by the king but by God and for the justice of God. . . . Thus, even if [the king] grants merced [awards] to the priest or a Spaniard who obtains composiciones [amended land titles], he is not the right proprietor[s]. Thus, they must pay obedience to the principal lords and justices who are the legitimate proprietors of the lands, be they lords or ladies. And all Spaniards, mestizos and mulattoes should honor them. . . . Thus, consider this, once for all: There is no [encomendero] or lord of the land but only us; we are the legitimate proprietors of the land by the law of God and by justice and laws.²⁹

Guamán Poma masterfully maneuvered the issue of evangelization to delegitimize the plundering of Andean wealth and the abuses of encomenderos and miners. He denied that a conquest had taken place because Atahualpa did not resist the Spanish invasion and accepted Pizarro peacefully; therefore, native Andeans were not subjects because they had never been made subject to any conquest: “Atahualpa and Chalco Chima Quizo Yupanki died in the hands of the Christians of Don Francisco Pizarro . . . the ambassadors . . . of the conquest, sent by your majesty Don Carlos, and so, in the right time, the Christians charged, and the Indians did not defend themselves, and then they gave themselves in to your Majesty.”³⁰ In other words, Andeans had obeyed the customary “Requerimiento.” Guamán Poma reiterated the same point in different forms according to the various themes he addressed. When elaborating on the encomenderos, for example, he stated: “The said [encomenderos] should not be called [encomenderos] of Indians or conquistadors by a just right because they did not conquer the Indians. Rather, the Indians willingly and peacefully yielded to the crown.”³¹ Before Guamán Poma, both Casas and Mendieta had argued along the same lines in favor of the restitution of Indian señoríos and property.

In another instance, Guamán Poma maintained that when the Spanish “ambassadors” of the king (Pizarro and Almagro) arrived in Tumbes, Huascar sent Guamán Poma’s grandfather, Guamán Malque de Ayala, to make peace with them.³² These ideas are consistent with his point that the discoverer of America was Saint Bartolomé, one of the apostles, who came from Jerusalem, had been preaching in the Andes before the Spaniards arrived, and returned during the time of Synchi Roca’s rule over Cusco and Collao.³³ Thus, the Andeans already knew Christianity, since they had converted well in advance of Pizarro’s arrival; therefore, they offered no resistance to Pizarro, and there was no need for conquest. Without questioning the king’s right to rule, he charged that conquistadors had no right to subject Andeans to their control and that, therefore, the restitution of their stolen property was in order. Guamán Poma not only used a unique rendition of “divine law” to defend restitution, but he also denied the medieval principle of “just war” as applied to Andeans and categorized them as “old Christians,” thus debunking the stereotype of Andeans as heathens. Sometime around 1667, Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla offered a similar rendition: “[B]ecause [the Indians] converted freely and spontaneously and without violence, they received willingly the faith.”³⁴

In the late seventeenth century, the mestizo and cura doctrinero Juan de Cuevas Herrera supported Guamán Poma’s idea that there had been no conquest by reinterpreting the history of the Spanish conquest to empower the Inca religious tradition. Cuevas Herrera argued that rather than Pope Alexander VI’s 1493 bull, there was a more solid foundation that legitimized Spain’s just titles in the Americas. In an interesting adaptation of the Quetzalcoatl myth, he argued that through a revelation to the “Inca Viracocha,” Pachacamac, the demiurge, prophesied the coming of the bearded, white, and blond people. Because they were allegedly bringing the “true religion,” Pachacamac prompted the Andeans to surrender. Thus, the new kingdom of Peru was given to Castile by the “divine will” of Pachacamac: “The Inca left saying that doubtless it was the will of Pachacamac that these kingdoms were passed on to the Spaniards, and instructed his people to adjust to heaven’s design.”³⁵ By equating the “will of Pachacamac” with the “will of God,” the writer ended up legitimizing Spanish rule in the Andes, saying it was God himself who gave the Spaniards these kingdoms “from [his] own hands.”³⁶ At the same time, Cuevas Herrera tried to uplift Inca mythical stories and give them as much power as Christianity possessed. His narrative implicitly gives Pachacamac, the world maker, the same status as the Christian God, in spite of his Christian training as a doctrinero.

While these Andean intellectuals disputed the Spanish stories of just war and the legitimacy of Spain’s takeover of the New World by denying that a conquest had taken place, others reelaborated the concept of natural law or natural rights to fight for the restitution of cacicazgos lost as a result of the conquest and consolidation of Spanish rule. The discussion that follows explicates the tenets of this debate, which gave theoretical strength to the formation of Andean discourses of ethnic autonomy under colonial rule.

THE “NATURAL RIGHT” TO ANDEAN SELF-GOVERNMENT

Perhaps the most developed contestation of Spanish rule is the thorough exposé of political autonomy that constitutes the core of the Andean Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla’s texts. In his 1667 “Representación,” late-medieval theological discourses were turned into rhetorical tools to reset the limits on native authority imposed by Toledo and to neutralize the wider effects of his reforms. This use of medieval theology as a salient feature of colonial Andean scholarship also informed the “Cinco memoriales” of Juan de Cuevas Herrera and served as the theoretical grounds of the “Representación verdadera” in 1749–1750. Even the edicts of Túpac Amaru in 1780–1781 and letters by caciques principales from different areas who struggled to validate their authority in the new era resorted frequently to such categories to legitimize their claims, as I have established. Each of the writers, however, used these tenets to promote different agendas that responded to the different times in which they lived.

Through a discussion of both natural and divine law, Limaylla intended to demonstrate that during the seventeenth century, the disenfranchisement of Indian authorities and the political subordination of native Andeans more generally were illicit. Following Francisco de Vitoria, Limaylla maintained that God created all people (not just Christians) in his image, giving them the power to rule over all other creatures who lacked reason; in this, God makes no distinction between believers and infidels. Therefore, all people have a “natural right” to all things on earth that emanated from “divine power”—including the right to rule, the ultimate expression of justice. Limaylla redefined this natural right as “a divine gift given to all men, both believer and infidel, because God did not distinguish between them. Thus, it is illicit to take away this natural right from anyone, even from the infidel, without just cause. . . . No ruler with a good sense of power and political authority may commit such injustice, breaking neither natural nor [d]ivine law without incurring in a crime and sin opposed to the virtue of justice.”³⁷ By unproblematically equating Andeans with infidels, Limaylla implied that in taking away the Andeans’ cacicazgos, Spaniards were committing a double transgression: they were infringing on human law and committing a sin against divine law. Therefore, in this estimation the conquest becomes both illegal and sinful.³⁸

Limaylla “taught” the king a lesson in Scholastic political theology on the origin and legitimacy of rule. For him, government emanated from natural rights, an organizing principle that, through laws, moves everyone to prioritize the bien común (common good) over private interests. Displacing the notion of the natural right to rule from the original European context to the Andean peoples’ struggles against the Toledan reforms, the writer directly empowered Andean natural lords: “Thus, both infidels and believers have jurisdiction over their subjects and peoples . . . because both of them naturally formed congregations and cities. Therefore, just as it is natural for the believers to subject themselves to their superiors, it is the natural right of the infidel[s] to constitute, uphold, and give jurisdiction to their rectors, kings, and caciques to govern them, directing their actions to the common good. Because the natural right is common . . . the rights of the people are universal for all [n]ations.”³⁹ By extending the natural law to the “republic” of the Indians, Limaylla invalidated the political displacement of the Andean lords, which intensified in the Toledan era: “Naturally, God has given Andeans the right to rule and freedom: All [n]ations and peoples, even the infidels, who possess lands and kingdoms . . . have the right to their freedom, and their kings and princes have the power given by their subjects . . . and their princes and lords are also free to govern them, preserving the precious immunity of their subjects’ freedom and also their assets.”⁴⁰ Andean kurakas, like European princes and infidel lords, had a legitimate right to rule their own communities. This natural right of Andeans to self-rule and to retain their assets offered further justification for the many petitions for restitution of community lands and cacicazgos and abolition of the mita that flooded the Council of the Indies, particularly during the seventeenth century.

To demonstrate that Andean lords were fully entitled to their señorío, it was also necessary to establish that they were not barbarians—namely, that reason guided their actions according to medieval Scholastic tenets. Entitlement to lordship within the confines of the Spanish empire was only accorded to Christian rulers; Limaylla understood the link between reason and Christianity at the time as extending this natural right:

[Andeans] are rational men who have rational souls redeemed with Christ’s blood; and God created them with special providence so that [they] may achieve this [spiritual] principal goal and thus be governed at the temporal and political level[s], directing the regime to their benefit. Because these [n]ations are free and they did not recognize lords and superior authorities other than those that, as lords, governed them, and because they converted freely and spontaneously without violence . . . [t]herefore, it is the obligation of the Spanish kings to seek the well-being of those who recognized them as kings, treating them as they would do with the rest of their vassals, preserving their life and freedom, without taking away their chiefdoms and their communal and personal property.⁴¹

Andeans were rational and Christian by their own free will, not by conquest. This rationality not only validated Andean lords’ right to self-rule but also sustained their condition as free subjects and contested the harshness of the mita, an important issue in Limaylla’s texts. The “peaceful and spontaneous conversion”—a recurrent argument in Casas, Guamán Poma, and other Andean writings—reappears here, denying the conquest and Andeans’ condition as “colonized” and suggesting a subtext of Andean elites’ political autonomy in their own social and territorial spaces.

In the colonial situation in the Andes in the late seventeenth century, conversion to Christianity appears in Limaylla’s texts as a case of negotiated reciprocal benefits—a colonial resignification of the Andean mañay—between the Spanish colonizers and Andean lords that would guarantee the latter the possibility of continuing to rule their ethnic communities, the chance to recover their lands and communal assets, and access to prestigious organizations in return for their acceptance of Christianity. More specifically, the notion of reciprocity that Andeans advanced in colonial times, although within a hierarchical framework, accepted colonial obligations in exchange for access to certain basic rights that secured an expected level of cultural and social community reproduction through increased population and other factors, as well as access to the legal system that protected those rights. The unevenness of the reciprocal arrangement was not the key issue because Andeans had been used to such an arrangement since Inca times.⁴² For Limaylla, the abusive intrusion of Spanish officials and priests, who took over Indian labor and lands and attempted to replace ethnic chiefs with handpicked ones, was a violation of this reciprocal agreement by the Spaniards. The ultimate rhetorical strategy in the “Representación” was to stress the effects of such violations by persuading the king of the threat runaways, or relapsos, posed to the success of the religious and social control of Andeans:

The kings of Spain are obligated to preserve [the Indians’] natural lordships and property so that they [the Indians] don’t feel the Christian faith and religion to be burdensome, ominous, and horrible, which, in any case, would be the fault of those who turned a law that was based on love and charity into a strenuous law. Therefore, the king should defend them from the extortion, vexations, and humiliations they suffer, by applying justice so that [the Indians] do not slip back into idolatry, out of desperation and for distrust of the remedy, feeling that worshipping false Gods would be better than losing their souls’ salvation, thus wasting the purpose of evangelization.⁴³

Political displacement would cause the Andeans to revert back to idolatry, putting the entire evangelization effort at risk. Thus, the call was for the king to reestablish balance through justice.

Andean perceptions of colonialism and the relationships between the king and his native subjects in Peru were also informed by European history and political culture. Fray Calixto de San José Túpac Inca and his coauthors in 1749–1750 discussed at length the discrimination against Andeans in the major colonial institutions. They uncovered the workings of colonial discriminatory attitudes toward Andeans by casting Spanish rule as an essentially Machiavellian, exclusionary regime: “Is this not a practice of Machiavellianism, this policy that the Spanish Catholic government has insensibly introduced, whose slogan is ‘the [s]overeigns who pretend the absolute rule of their domains should exclude the original dwellers from offices, titles, and power positions,’ and if they show sentiments for this affront, the sovereigns must destroy them and sweep them all away?”⁴⁴ The Andean friar infers here that Machiavelli’s practice of fomenting factionalism within the Roman Empire inspired Spaniards to introduce odious distinctions among Spaniards, creoles, native Andeans, and mestizos—thus promoting enmity, disunity, and social inequality. Behind using allegories to Machiavelli to represent Spanish rule is an understanding of that rule as tyranny, a disruption of the kingdom’s natural order of social balance. Such a rendition of social harmony between the king and his subjects was usually represented by the Aristotelian idea, further developed in medieval times, that the state is an “organic” corpus politicum mysticum. By naturalizing the social order and sustaining the status quo, the idea of the organic body politic is that, as with the human body, the kingdom is an integrated whole in which all the parts are equally necessary and naturally bonded; the ruler (the head) and the subjects (the limbs) are bound together by nature because without any of them the kingdom is neither healthy nor functional. Likewise, when problems emerge, the body of the kingdom needs a “medico,” usually the ruler, who can cure the malaise.

In colonial Andean writing, however, the metaphor of the body politic was reframed to represent the fracture of reciprocity and the social disharmony within the kingdom and to subtly point to the responsibility of the king:

The oldest disease of the body politic has occurred when the truth does not find its way to the head. [In this case, the head] rarely knows even the basics . . . and this piece of the gigantic body of the empire . . . is so in pain, that I think it is sick and in grave danger, and if prompt and effective remedy is not applied, chances are the malaise will become incurable. . . . [Ultimately] this body is so sick that it is imperative to sever and cut off its individual pieces to cure it, reform it, and heal it.⁴⁵

Limaylla’s “Representación” echoes Cuevas Herrera’s claim, prompting the king: “It is not possible that as they represent the disease to you, you fail to cure it, as the medico that you are; and as a father, you are supposed to defend their rights. . . . [I]t is worthless to know the power of the medicine . . . if it is not applied individually to the sick. Thus, the sick lose their lives and he who was supposed to be the medico and to heal the sick body . . . himself turns out to be the murderer.”⁴⁶ This language subtly merges a critique of the colonial officials with a critique of the king himself as the “head” of the kingdom and the authority ultimately responsible for the situation of Andean subjects, the sick “limbs” of the empire.

The “Machiavellian” officials constituted the tyrannical anomaly of the body politic. The representation of Spanish rule as tyranny is one of the connecting threads in all of the Andean discursive production beginning in the 1600s with Guamán Poma, Cuevas Herrera, and Limaylla and extending through Vélez de Córdoba, Fray Calixto, Atahualpa, and Túpac Amaru II in the eighteenth century. As a generic image of Spanish rule, tyranny was directed by Andeans—in different ways according to the different conjunctures of each period—against curas, prelates, officials, and Spanish elites as violators of accepted norms of reciprocity, which measured their notion of justice.

CONCLUSION

Andean discussions of the nature of Spanish rule and their relationship with the king and his representatives were rooted in late-medieval political theologies. They further developed such theories to strengthen the political and moral foundations of an Andean discourse of justice. However, Andean scholars framed these principles in terms of their traditional notions of reciprocity, which guaranteed them access to certain rights and opportunities as they adopted the notions of European culture. By defining that Andeans had natural rights to self-rule and to own property, by prompting the king to enforce these universal principles to maintain the common good, by constructing Andeans as people of reason and rationality, and by translating divine law as revelations to “the” Inca god, an implicit cultural negotiation is presented in which European theologies and notions of rule are used to support Andean agendas of self-rule. This construction allowed the intellectuals under study to question the foundational acts of Spanish rule in America and its religious and juridical justification. Thus, the reworking of these Scholastic and Neo-Scholastic tenets also gave theological, ethical, and political force to Indian authorities’ struggles for the restoration of cacicazgos and community property, which would secure the survival of their world. In employing such concepts, these colonial Andean writers argued that Spanish rule in the Andes was illegitimate and that the Toledan reforms were illicit because they violated fundamental natural rights that should be restored by the king to remedy the tyrannical nature of his rule. Such rights were the reciprocal benefit Andeans deserved for having accepted the rule of Christian kings and officials along with their religious demands, a kind of reformulated, pre-colonial mañay in colonial times.

The redeployment of European theological and legal ideas by these Andean intellectuals renders their scholarship an intriguing form of trans-culturation that reflects the productive trans-Atlantic and cultural interaction of which Indian and mestizo ladinos from Peru were part and parcel during the mid- and late-colonial years. Beyond their contribution to the development of Scholastic ideas from an Andean point of view, these thinkers destabilized (“subverted them from within”) such concepts even as they used them to unveil the illegitimacy of the Spanish practices of rule that challenged Andeans’ condition as free subjects of the empire and sought to strip from them their traditional political authority. As represented in Andean writings, these practices excluded or “severed” native Andeans from the kingdom’s “body” and left them outside the colonial “reciprocal” bond between the king and his subjects.

As Andean intellectuals contested the obliteration of Andean power and community organization by the Toledan policies, the scholarly elaboration discussed in this chapter also contributed to the formation of an Andean discourse of ethnic autonomy. This elaboration also sought to legitimate the recurrent critiques of colonial injustice that enriched a preexisting tradition of protest in colonial Peru. To grasp the richness and cultural agency of Andean protest discourses, the motives, rhetorical strategies, and intertextuality behind the critiques of the colonial legal system are discussed in Chapter 5.

NOTES

1. Ortiz, “Contrapunto cubano del tabaco y el azúcar.”

2. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 6.

3. Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 31–32.

4. The general review of ideas that follows is by no means an in-depth rendition or discussion of the ideological corpus in question or the debates in which such theories were embedded, nor does it attempt to present a history of those schools of thought. In this brief introduction to the tenets of these philosophies, only the concepts relevant to the discussions of the colonial Andean texts under consideration will be outlined.

5. Aquinas, “On Law and Natural Law,” 616. Aquinas believed, however, that toleration of tyranny was less dangerous than opposition or rebellion. Reijo, Social and Political Theory of Francisco Suárez, 12.

6. Aquinas, “On Law and Natural Law,” 614–615.

7. Ibid., 621.

8. Reijo, Social and Political Theory of Francisco Suárez, 7–18, 29.

9. Barreda Laos, Vida Intelectual del Perú, 89.

10. On the social and cultural implications of the colonial definition of indigenous individuals as minors of age within Spanish patriarchal relationships in colonial Peru, see Premo, Children of the Father King, 19–42, 92–97.

11. “Representación verdadera,” 157. In Roman law, the foundation of Spanish laws, “reason” was the basis of natural rights, and only civilized people were defined as people of reason. Thus, only civilized peoples were entitled to political and social rights.

12. Barreda Laos, Vida Intelectual del Perú, 14, 18, 37–38, 52, 80–86.

13. Ibid., 95.

14. The contours of this debate are described here following Pagden, El imperialismo español y la imaginación política, chapter 1, “Desposeer al bárbaro: Derechos y propiedad en la América española.” The work of Vitoria is also interspersed; Vitoria, Reflecciones sobre los indios.

15. Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America, 17–20.

16. Pagden, El imperialismo español y la imaginación política, 36.

17. Vitoria, Reflecciones sobre los indios, 80.

18. Pagden, El imperialismo español y la imaginación política, 42.

19. Vitoria, Reflecciones sobre los indios, 73.

20. Pagden, El imperialismo español y la imaginación política, 44.

21. Phelan, Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World, 98–100. Mendieta was probably one of the first writers to compare the image of the Jews’ slavery under the Egyptians with the oppression of Indians, an image that permeated virtually all of the Andean texts studied in this book.

22. Pagden, El imperialismo español y la imaginación política, 50.

23. BNM [ca. 1567], Falcón, “Representación de los daños y molestias que se hacen a los Indios,” 220–237v.

24. “Unlike the first Spaniards . . . [they were] conquered neither with weapons nor with bloodshed or effort.” Guamán Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, 167, 395[397]; also in 358, 386[388].

25. Pagden, El imperialismo español y la imaginación política, 62.

26. Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo a la santidad, 463.

27. Adorno’s assertion that Guamán Poma was one of the few Andeans who took part in the debates about the conquest and colonization and left a written record (Adorno, “Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala,” 86) should be reconsidered. As discussed in this chapter, several known Andean intellectuals, including Cuevas Herrera and Limaylla in the 1650s–1660s and Fray Calixto de San José Túpac Inca in 1749–1750, among others, engaged in written discussions of the “just titles” and questioned the legitimacy of the Spanish presence in the Americas.

28. Vega, Comentarios reales de los Incas, 60–62.

29. Guamán Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, 857–858, 894, 915[929], 958[972].

30. Ibid., 141, 162[164].

31. Ibid., 520–521, 550[564].

32. Ibid., 894, 957[971].

33. Ibid., 342, 368[370].

34. Limaylla, “Representación,” 224.

35. Cuevas Herrera, “Cinco memoriales,” 219–219v.

36. Ibid.

37. Limaylla, “Representación,” 214v–215.

38. Similar elaboration of these “natural rights” to self-rule appeared in letters from caciques principales from La Paz, contemporaries of Limaylla, who confronted the functionaries of the Audiencia of La Plata and the provincial government in 1650 over the dispossession of Andeans through dubious composiciones de tierras. Caciques and gobernadores Don Cristóbal Nina, Don Pedro Santos, and Don Juan Quispe claimed that their rights to dominium were part of the natural rights pertaining to “all men of the world, either the believers or the infidel, friends or enemies, vassals of Christian princes or pagan ones, Catholics or otherwise.” AGI, “Escrito de los Indios de la Paz,” Marzo 30, 1650.

39. Limaylla, “Representación,” 217–218.

40. Ibid., 219v–220.

41. Ibid., 223v.

42. Stavig, The World of Túpac Amaru, xxvii.

43. Limaylla, “Representación,” 225.

44. “Representación verdadera,” 164.

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

46. Limaylla, “Representación,” 238v–239.