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INTRODUCTION
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THE WORLD OF LETTERS in colonial Spanish America was a terrain of cultural interaction and contention. With important antecedents in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Peruvian indigenous and mestizo writers continued to make inroads into the world of the literate while attempting to achieve social change during the mid- and late colonial period. During these years, literate Andeans crossed the Atlantic, showing up in metropolitan seats of power with their writings, their demands, and their representatives and fundamentally complicating our reflections on the nature and variety of responses to Spanish colonial impositions.

This book tells the story of a group of Andean writers and their scholarly works rarely acknowledged in studies of political or cultural resistance to colonial rule in the Andes. It shows that the production of Andean critical renditions of colonialism and efforts to reform society continued and developed broadly from the mid-1600s through the late 1700s, far beyond the well-known pioneering works of writers such as Santacruz Pachacuti Yamki Salcamaigua, Titu Cusi Yupanqui, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, and Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala. Later writers developed intellectual and social activism, engaging themselves and their fellow collaborators in political projects that revealed their continually evolving consciousness and unstated effort to challenge the definition of Andeans as “Indians.”¹

Andean scholars and activists contributed a significant colonial critique and carried out lengthy campaigns to reposition themselves as an autonomous “Indian nation” in an increasingly demeaning colonial world. They expressed their wish for ethnic autonomy in their struggles to have native and mestizo Andean women and men admitted to religious orders, to allow Andean men to enroll in schools and universities and to hold positions of power in ecclesiastic and civil administrations, and to create their own honorific symbols and organizations.

The reconstruction of this intellectual and political history is crucial for contemporary understanding of the major late-colonial upheavals in Cusco and La Paz, since the Andean writings under question reveal that issues such as the elimination of the mita (labor draft) system and the abolition of corregidores—raised by leaders of the Great Rebellion in 1780–1783—had been articulated earlier by the scholars under examination. This points to a preexisting discursive tradition of scholarly resistance to Spanish rule by Andeans. The notion that Spanish colonialism remained essentially unchallenged for over two centuries following the military defeat of the Inca at Vilcabamba (1572) has been widely accepted in narratives of Andean history. Studies of resistance to Spanish rule in the Peruvian Andes have remained focused largely on the dramatic political upheavals that swept through the area in the eighteenth century, with even greater concentration on the major pan-Andean rebellions led by Tomás Katari in Chayanta, Túpac Amaru in Cusco, and Túpac Katari in the area of La Paz (contemporary Bolivia) (1780–1783).² The complex texture of resistance in any colonial situation, however, can involve layers of thought, action, and negotiation far more subtle than the armed confrontation of a political regime.

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Peru, educated indigenous and mestizo subjects utilized the discursive strategies and theological knowledge available to them to question the legal and religious grounds of colonial power. The impetus for their oppositional politics was rooted in their changing daily experiences as colonized ethnic elites and their exposure to new European forms of knowledge and communication. As Andeans attempted to negotiate rights with the Spanish monarchs, they also resignified the preexisting Andean tradition of mañay. This age-old tradition, crucial during the formation of the Inca empire, sought a political and religious compromise through reciprocal agreements—not necessarily equal agreements—between victors (who demanded “favors”) and the colonized (who “cooperated,” expecting to secure the conditions for their social and cultural reproduction). The religious compromise replicated the one between humans and the supernatural to secure continual renewal of the life force.³

From the mid-1600s through the 1700s, a strong thematic pattern in Andean writing becomes increasingly apparent: discussions of the legal and imagined relationship between the king and his Indian subjects to foreground the inconsistency between the legal discourses of the crown and the everyday practices of its representatives in the Indian villages, rural areas, and colonial cities of the viceroyalty. Such discrepancies were particularly evident in the practices of provincial magistrates (corregidores), the regular and secular churches, and the regional high courts (audiencias)—especially during the social crises that ensued after the major overhauls of the Toledan reforms and during the Bourbon era, the two major social and political conjunctures demarcating the time span of this study.

The presence of Andean writers and their associated texts and discourses⁴ in the audiencias and the royal court in Spain prompts a reconsideration of Angel Rama’s notion of the “lettered city,” or ciudad letrada, as the exclusive province of an elite class of state and ecclesiastic functionaries who both controlled the written word and wielded their power to define the terms of order within the empire.⁵ The realm of the colonial lettered world, however, was hardly an uncon-tested space in which only the state and the church functionaries, or letrados, found expression. The Andeans studied in this work and dozens of other Indian authorities and their representatives who visited the royal courts in Spain and the Americas, bringing petitions (memoriales) and critical renditions of the state of things (representaciones), fought their way into the ciudad letrada; their texts were produced in contentious loci and originated from colonial cities and rural areas alike before making their way to centers of imperial power and discourse. As Rolena Adorno has pointed out, Andean voices of protest unveil the flexibility and power of writing as a sign and reveal the ciudad letrada to be not only a field of power relationships but also one of internal and external collaborations.⁶ Andean scholars worked in collaboration, and their texts and activism circulated through trans-Atlantic networks of diverse supporters.

In this book I use the term “Andean” in a broader cultural sense rather than a strictly geographic one.⁷ I use the term to refer to the entire group of natives and their mestizo descendants, with whom they shared a common pre-Columbian past and a colonial present of similar subordinate status; the term also encompasses those generations of mestizos who shared with their indigenous kin spaces, linguistic and social practices, and scholarly and social activism in both the colonial urban centers and the countryside. Rather than remain semantically confined to the geographic area of the mountains and valleys of the Peruvian Andes, the term “Andean” refers to a shared and changing culture that predated Spanish colonialism—a culture composed of the peoples native to those coastal and rainforest regions where pre-colonial civilizations had expanded and the region that constituted the geopolitical space that came to be known as the Viceroyalty of Peru in the sixteenth century. Following Alberto Flores Galindo’s understanding of the word, I also think “Andean” is a useful term to avoid the racist connotations of the Spanish-imposed “Indian.”⁸ In a more political sense, the term “Andean” can also be applied to creoles who shared common local cultures with, and supported agendas favorable to, Andeans. The Oruro rebellion is a case in point (Chapter 5).

For more than two decades, Andeanists have accepted in one way or another the idea that Andean protest writing under colonial rule disappeared after the well-known works by indigenous and mestizo chroniclers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.⁹ Even though scholars have yet to “discover” texts similar in length and linguistic complexity, it has been readily assumed that this literary and political tradition virtually disappeared from the Andes soon thereafter.¹⁰ The present study holds that this intellectual Andean tradition continued in a new guise during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly during periods of social unrest and upheaval. In their writings, later Andean authors articulated the mental state of a collective of scholars and supporters of the cause for Indian justice, which complicated and expanded the meaning of writing in the earlier texts. The later native and mestizo intellectuals developed a sustained and somewhat coordinated legal activism and attempted systematically to directly negotiate their demands with the Spanish king, a practice that had appeared incipiently even earlier than the Andean chroniclers at the turn of the seventeenth century. Following the early Andean chroniclers, writing became a locus of sustained power contestation broader than the texts themselves. As such, it involved collective action, trans-Atlantic travel, and networking by Indian agents and supporters, as well as discursive construction and lobbying and negotiating with authorities—from the local and viceregal levels to the royal court in Spain.

This book examines the mid- and late-colonial scholarly practices of educated Andeans and explores the roles these intellectuals played in social movements and the emerging public life of the mature colonial period. Andean scholarship under Spanish rule was inherently a political practice that sought to free Andeans from the constraints of the colonial society. As ethnic Andeans were turned into “Indians” by colonial legal definitions and social and political practices, Andean intellectuals attempted systematically to reshape their identities as free and mature subjects, thereby undoing the stereotypes of minors, neophytes, and the culturally inferior built by colonial law, the church, and the colonialists themselves.

A painstaking textual analysis is conducted to establish the nature of Andean discourses of justice and power, which both resembled and departed from earlier analogous traditions. By focusing on Andean writings as cultural texts, we are able to discern the political culture of the writers involved, the historical and social production of their narratives, their strategies for reshaping identities, and the politics of Andean religion—all of which mirror the struggles to redefine Andean scholars’ cultural and political positions in a colonial situation.¹¹

The discourse analysis of Andean texts reveals the historical deconstruction of the category “Indian” by colonial Andean intellectuals themselves as they utilized knowledge from their own religious education, cultural experience, long travels, and critical reflections to write political tracts that reframed their identities as mature and progressive subjects willing to move away from the subordinate positions to which colonialism relegated them. They did this not necessarily by rebelling against the king but instead by writing, negotiating diplomatically, and advocating justice for themselves. The texts under study make apparent early notions of “Indian nation” in the mid-colonial Andes as a political construct aimed at erasing social and cultural differences among Andean elites so they could present themselves as a “united front” in an effort to respond to the systematic loss of political authority and growing disregard for the status of the Indian nobility during the late colonial period. Thus, this book contributes to a more refined understanding of the intellectual world of Andeans at the outset of a postcolonial era not easily seen in studies of the rebellions themselves.¹²

During the period of study, the tradition of Andean scholarship was interrelated with other forms of thought and political discourse that circulated simultaneously in Peru. Andean scholars voiced a critique against Spanish “tyranny” and mistreatment of Indians, also found in creole patriotic discourses.¹³ But unlike creole patriots, who ultimately struggled for their own political power, Andeans advocated an agenda of ethnic autonomy that challenged colonial hierarchies and ethnic discrimination. Such a sense of autonomy overlaps with the tone and chronology of the “Andean utopian” and Inca messianic projects of the late 1600s and the 1700s.¹⁴ Unlike these projects, however, the Andean scholarship under examination renounced association with the Inca past and the return to Inca ways and only claimed Inca descent to access noble privileges important within colonial society as validation of political authority.

Most of the writers studied here were comparatively obscure figures in Andean history who went unnoticed by most colonial officials, although probably less so by members of the local church. These scholars and their texts exemplify a political culture grounded in the discursive history of intellectual Andean resistance to colonial power that inflects the more familiar narratives of political resistance and violence. These educated Andeans emerged from a segment of colonial society that formed shortly after the Spanish conquest, commonly designated indios ladinos,¹⁵ individuals who stood at the threshold between the indigenous and Spanish societies and played crucial roles as Indian representatives before the colonial authorities. These figures functioned as cultural brokers who learned to manipulate and negotiate the signs and symbols of Spanish and Andean cultures. While attempting to translate one culture in terms of the other, they maintained a difficult balance at best, striving to convey Andean views and concerns to an interlocutor who remained distantly, almost unreachably, located at the top of the colonial body politic and the Catholic Church.

These cultural brokers challenge the idea that mestizos sought to distinguish themselves from their Indian ancestors and that Indian and mestizo worlds tended to separate as colonialism progressed. Their scholarship forces us to reconceptualize the relationships between Indians and mestizos. Particularly from the late seventeenth century onward, intellectual Andeans appeared to advocate for the rights of both groups together; even more intriguing, the mestizo relatives of the Indian nobility appear to have been included as important members of the “Indian nation,” to whom the broad opportunities demanded also applied. Thus, Andean texts contribute to the problematization of the ethnic ascriptions of the colonial society beyond legally established definitions to the actual resignification of such categories by Andeans themselves.

Among the earliest and most significant Andean intellectuals in mid-colonial times to engage in this practice was the Indian noble Don Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla, who claimed to be a chieftain, or cacique, from the Luringuanca repartimiento in Jauja Province. Among other writings, Limaylla presented the king with the “Memorial Dado a la Majestad del Sr. Don Carlos II” (ca. 1677) and the “Representación hecha al Sr. Rey Dn. Carlos Segundo” (ca. 1667).¹⁶ Contemporary with Limaylla’s influential work, Juan de Cuevas Herrera, a mestizo parish priest from the province of Charcas, wrote the extensive “Cinco memoriales” (ca. 1650) to the king.¹⁷ In 1691, Juan Núñez Vela de Rivera, a mestizo presbyter and prebendary (racionero) from the Arequipa cathedral, composed an important memorial to King Charles II in which he defended a range of comprehensive rights of indigenous and mestizo nobles.¹⁸ This group of writers responded in different ways to the devastating impact of the Toledan reforms in Peru and to the collateral effects of the campaign of extirpation of idolatry.

In the eighteenth century, the newly imposed repartimiento de comercio (forced distribution of goods among native communities, also known as repartos), attempts by the Bourbons to assign mestizos to the status of tributaries, new exactions to the population across the board, and increasing attempts by the Bourbons to limit Indian authority exacerbated the preexisting unrest and prompted further development of the Andean tradition of writing to protest injustice. Efforts emerged to substantiate abuses and resort to more systematic legal expedients to criticize colonial law and justice, as well as to develop a more elaborate and comprehensive set of reforms. Vicente Morachimo, the legal representative of Indians, or procurador de naturales and kuraka (Andean lord) from Chica y Chimo, Saña Province, presented the king with his “Manifiesto de agravios y vejaciones” (1732),¹⁹ as well as numerous letters that contained allegations involving a variety of local community issues during the 1720s and 1730s. Slightly better known than his predecessors, Fray Calixto de San José Túpac Inca, a mestizo and Franciscan lay brother from Tarma Province, was the leading figure behind the lengthy and perhaps most important late-colonial Andean text, the “Representación verdadera” (ca. 1749–1750), which he delivered to the king in 1750.²⁰ A very similar anonymous text entitled “Planctus indorum” was written around 1751 and was addressed to the pope.²¹ As with many other shorter pieces of writing from a larger group of caciques and other Indian authorities filing complaints and petitions, these Andean authors addressed their manuscripts to the king; some delivered them in person to either the monarch or the Council of the Indies in Spain.

At the close of the eighteenth century, the views of elite Andeans became intriguingly juxtaposed in the writings of members of the Inca and Cusco elites, prompted by the Great Rebellion of 1780–1783. An array of Túpac Amaru’s edicts and letters (1780–1781) and the eighty-seven-page panegyric “Estado del Perú,” dedicated to the bishop of Cusco, Juan Manuel Moscoso, by the Inca noble José Rafael Sahuaraura (1784), give intriguing nuances to, and new understanding of, the mental state of intellectual Andeans in the late years of colonial rule in Peru.

This varied group of Andean thinkers and social leaders expressed a unique and complex Andean political culture that highlighted engagement to achieve justice and redefine ethnicity as a collective, seamless “Indian nation.” The work of these seventeenth- and eighteenth-century authors brings to light a more subtle struggle for ethnic autonomy in the face of increasing colonial discrimination against Andeans, a struggle they advanced at times in which their cultural and social differences were increasingly blurred by the institutional efforts to incorporate them into the colonial apparatus as “Indians.”

ANDEAN TRADITION OF TEXTUAL PRODUCTION

Andeans’ discursive production in written texts is nearly as old as Spanish colonialism in Peru itself. Alphabetical writing made its way to the New World as Europeans and their institutions arrived in Peru in 1532. The cultural and political world of Indian officials and other native elites almost immediately began to incorporate European forms of communication, mostly as a result of the new functions assigned to Indian authorities as intermediaries between the Spanish government and Amerindian commoners. Oral tradition, as a form of communicating ideas, experiences, and feelings—itself predating the advent of alphabetic writing in the Andes—continued to permeate Andean written texts, in some cases more visibly than others.²² The writing tradition of the Andean scholars studied in this book retains subtle traits of orality—such as narration in the first person, plural voice, and the circular reiteration of subjects that appears in texts such as the “Representación verdadera” and the “Cinco memoriales.”²³

Writing by kurakas and Inca lords appeared early as a response to the drastic changes that ensued with the Spanish conquest and, more particularly, following implementation of the Toledan reforms, which gave more definite form to a colonial system in the Andes.²⁴ In an attempt to counter colonial control over cacicazgos (office of the cacique), Andean authors systematically criticized the system’s failure to enforce early royal decrees that endorsed Indian authorities’ hereditary rights to nobility and political office. In so doing, kurakas from different Andean regions also produced writing that appeared to incorporate colonial values and Christian discourses to argue for their own recognition as both nobles and legitimate Indian authorities in the new society.²⁵ They not only wrote to the king to challenge the Toledan imposition of alien methods of succession on native chiefdoms, but they also fought the encomienda system (grants of Indian labor and taxes awarded to Spanish conquistadors). In 1560, in the midst of the movement to abolish the encomienda, Dominicans such as Fray Bartolomé de las Casas (Bishop of Chiapas) and Fray Domingo de Santo Tomás (Bishop of Charcas), representing a group of kurakas from the Huarochirí and Titicaca areas at the court of Madrid, conveyed the kurakas’ offer to purchase encomiendas in perpetuity.²⁶ While hoping to get rid of abuses by encomenderos (encomienda holders), these kurakas were also trying to avoid colonial intermediaries by rendering their tribute directly to the crown.²⁷

These were only some of the pioneers who developed distinctly Andean writing practices in the post-conquest years. They began with meetings of kurakas, credible ecclesiastics, and prominent judges, in which kurakas provided input on the composition of particular pieces of writing, discussed their problems and petitions, and gave signed powers of attorney to clergymen and judges who would represent Amerindian elites before the king. These authorized representatives eventually drafted documents on behalf of Andean lords to negotiate with higher authorities the terms of their mutual relationships. As Andeans tried to adjust to the new colonial demands and simultaneously maintain their political power, social organizations, and cultures, this practice continued and expanded in various forms throughout the nearly three centuries of colonial rule in the Andes.

The prolific Indian and mestizo literary production that followed in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is well documented in the field of Andean studies.²⁸ The intellectual expression of colonized peoples in the Andes left an impressive body of texts that not only recorded valuable information on pre-colonial Andean religion, societies, and cultures but also revealed the emerging Andean writing tradition that ensued from the trans-cultural encounter between Europe and the Amerindian worlds. Rather than representing a brief phenomenon of protest, however, this discursive culture continued to develop—particularly during the social upheavals provoked by the mita and the composiciones de tierras (amendments of land titles for a fee) in the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries and later in the eighteenth century as preexisting conflicts became exacerbated by the repartimiento de comercio and the Bourbon reforms, as explained in Chapter 2.

Mid- and late-colonial Andean writing continued the cultural legacy of Don Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, not only in his view of the Spanish conquest and his critique of colonial rule but also in his belief in writing as a means of denouncing social injustice and finding relief from colonial chaos and injustice.²⁹ While Andean litigants and petitioners won a number of significant legal battles, enforcement of those achievements proved difficult and gave Andeans a motive for subsequent petitions and criticism of the colonial judicial system, a history reconstructed in Chapter 6. More clearly, the writers under study also show how Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s work was received by his mid- and late-colonial Andean counterparts. Both Juan de Cuevas Herrera and Fray Calixto de San José Túpac Inca drew on de la Vega’s Comentarios reales to defend the “Christian” nature of Inca religion and to reassert their own claims to Indian nobility. More generally, his work contributed largely to the creation and re-creation of memories of the Inca past among posterior Andean intellectuals.

The Andean practice of composing memoriales and representaciones had its roots in the institutionalized practice of reporting on the state of the colonies, as Spanish rule began to consolidate in the Andes in the late sixteenth century.³⁰ As tools of imperial hegemony, representaciones and probanzas de méritos (proofs of merit that were prerequisites for royal rewards) were templates of Spanish administrative writing designed to verify the imperial subjects’ compliance with colonial mandates and goals and to build political legitimacy through a system of rewards, or mercedes, given by the crown in return for its subjects’ loyalty. The texts examined here conform in various ways to this genre of Spanish administrative writing. Although representaciones and probanzas were mostly at the disposition of nobles and government functionaries, whose writings usually legitimized colonial royal policies, Andean writers seized these discursive spaces to “inform” the king about matters in Peru, questioning colonial justice and state administrators to emphasize the need for their own political participation in social change.

In colonial times, alphabetically written texts utilized European theological and rhetorical devices and were usually discussed and diffused through oral and written means among Andeans’ social networks. Thus, they are complex, trans-cultural, and political in nature. They emerged from a kind of cultural “contact zone,”³¹ a space in which colonial impositions and Andeans’ expectations of reciprocity and justice clashed; and they generated textual, legal, and social battles over the redefinition of Andeans’ place in the colonial world. Their scholarship appropriated the terms of colonial political and religious discourses to produce Andeans’ own truths. Overall, Andean intellectuals demonstrated the practical impossibility of achieving social harmony as promised by and imagined in the Habsburg legal discourse of the first two centuries of colonialism in America, as well as the fallacies inherent in Christian discourses of spiritual equality as preached and implemented by the colonial church. Andean scholars selected tenets from European theologies to convey to the crown and eventually to the church in Peru the urgent need for social change to forestall political upheaval and social unrest. An important part of this scholarly work by Andeans was the construction of new discourses of social justice and reform, which enabled these writers to create and sustain a systematic critique of the colonial system in the Andes and argue for a kind of social change that would ultimately secure ethnic autonomy.

Andeans’ mid- and late-colonial writing bridged the intellectual, social, and cultural gaps that set them outside the exclusionary world of the ciudad letrada. For Angel Rama, the judicial and political space of the ciudad letrada was inhabited exclusively by powerful peninsular and creole officials, who controlled literacy, information, and knowledge central to the implementation of the Spanish imperial project.³² In reality, the colonial ciudad letrada was also populated by voices from nonwhite “neighborhoods,” where thinkers of indigenous, mestizo, and African descent contested dominant views and articulated their own.³³ In so doing, the Andeans’ scholarship and activism also bridged the world of the Spanish and Indian republics, contributing to the demise of this concept and its functionality as an analytical category for historians. Instead, this book demonstrates the ways Andean intellectuals were significant actors in the creation and transformation of the colonial culture, which emerged as Spaniards, Indians, and their mestizo descendants contended for the creation of cultural and social meaning in the narrow streets of the ciudad letrada.

In their texts, educated Andeans endeavored to move beyond being characterized by their official status as “Indians.” To deliver their arguments to the power spheres of the colonial world, they sought to place themselves in social and political spaces usually reserved for Spanish subjects, becoming both transAtlantic and provincial travelers. While acting as lobbyists and advocates for Andean causes in the royal courts, they generated an informal trans-Atlantic network of Indian nobles and non-Indian collaborators who worked together from Peru to Spain to advance petitions, lawsuits, and a broader platform for Andean autonomy in the royal court. In a secular guise, they became advocates for a project aimed at a rather modernizing education for Andeans (in “sciences and letters”), which, in their eyes, was consistent with their reclaimed status as noble subjects of an imperial king.

To grasp the complexity of the political and scholarly culture of mid- and late-colonial Andeans, it is necessary to look back to alternative forms of political expression by the colonized through their writings and anti-colonial discourse, which are more subtle than mass protest and armed resistance. Andean critical writing did, however, remain linked in some form to social protest and eventually to widespread rebellion. This became another pattern of Indian political culture under Spanish rule: the use of combined patterns of writing and judicial action as the primary means to attain justice, but also the willingness to resort to rebellion when legal struggles proved ineffective.

The history of late-colonial protest and rebellions exemplifies the combination of legal and violent means to attain justice.³⁴ The consolidation of writing as a political practice by elite Indian and mestizo ladinos was grounded in a longstanding tradition of legal action by Indian authorities, who seized opportunities created by law to obtain justice.³⁵ Royal legislation defined the limits of colonial officials’ authority and enabled caciques to address the audiencias directly with their grievances, while corregidores were expected to provide justice for Indians at the provincial level and Andeans were to be represented by protectores de naturales. In his discussion of Andeans’ use of the colonial justice system, Steve Stern argued that they consistently utilized the judicial system and won some valuable small victories in the courts. Instances in which justice was obtained within the parameters of colonial law helped soften the blow of colonial restructurings and probably slowed their pace, but they inevitably strengthened the colonial juridical system, the perception of the king as the supreme authority, and Spanish institutions as a whole. Andeans came to depend on the king and his courts to settle not only their internal disputes but also legal disputes that introduced rifts within their communities. Ultimately, Andeans’ resort to the colonial justice system strengthened the hegemony of both the crown and the colonial system.³⁶ Andean scholars from the mid-seventeenth century onward pursued legal action through critical writings that discussed the contradictions inherent in the legal system and used them as a reason to support and further their agenda for social autonomy.

THE QUESTION OF ANDEAN AUTHORSHIP

For native Andean intellectuals and other Indian leaders, writing was one point within a spectrum of political resources deployed to contest detrimental colonial policies. Andeans wrote in the midst of conflicts between community and state, but they were not professional writers in the modern sense of the word and did not compose their texts as intellectuals detached from the realities of their fellow Indians. Their writings emerged from their daily experiences as subordinate colonial subjects, and their scholarship was embedded within the context of their efforts to negotiate the terms of colonial rules that were imposed upon them and that regulated relationships between Indian subjects and the empire. Their textual production combined diverse elements, ranging from knowledge and discussion of colonial law, utilization of material from religious education, literacy, and acquaintance with the colonial administrative and legal culture to social and political activism that flowed through more institutional channels, such as the local Indian cabildos (town councils) and the intervention of protectores de naturales.³⁷

Because some of the more complex Andean writings emerged in times of social unrest or impending rebellion, when activists feared persecution, some writers filed their manuscripts anonymously for protection. Contemporary historians must confront this practice as one of many issues that complicate the idea of authorship and textual production by colonial subordinate subjects. Although Andean texts such as the seventeenth-century “Representación hecha al Sr. Rey Dn. Carlos Segundo” and the “Memorial Dado a la Majestad” were filed and claimed by the Jauja Indian noble Don Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla, supporting the idea that he was the author, the origin of these texts is being challenged (Chapter 2). The eighteenth-century “Representación verdadera,” more commonly associated with Fray Calixto de San José Túpac Inca, seems also to have been filed anonymously—copies extant in the archival repositories bear no signatures or self-attribution (Chapter 3). The choice of anonymity seems to make sense, given the harsh criticism of the church and the Spanish elites’ exclusionary policies and attitudes toward Andean elites leveled by a mestizo member of the lower clergy.

I argue that given the cross-ethnic and cross-cultural interaction that took place in the colonial environment, Andean writing usually surpassed the boundaries of individual expression and literary creation and became a collective undertaking. The line separating the individual composer of final drafts from those whose ideas, aspirations, grievances, and struggles formed the core of the manuscripts became increasingly diffused. The texts at hand not only reflect the collective nature of the issues at stake, the concerns and interests of Indian authorities and intellectuals who began to speak on behalf of the “Indian nation,” but they also mirror more clearly the cross-cultural collaboration that transpired in the writing of memoriales and representaciones bound to the Spanish king. Andean leaders certainly provided input to identify the issues at stake and the necessary proposals; perhaps clerical supporters, judges, lawyers,³⁸ or educated Andeans drafted and edited the manuscripts. As social activists, both Indians and mestizos participated in different capacities (e.g., messengers, escribanos, printers) in the wider political project of achieving social inclusion and redress for the injustice of the mita, restitution of cacicazgos, repartimiento de comercio, composiciones de tierras, and others. Their texts became a form of collective, “combative scholarship”—a trans-cultural expression in itself—that Andean intellectuals developed over decades of colonial rule and exposure to religious education, European literature, and interaction with Spanish subjects.³⁹

Today’s notions of individual authorship seem inadequate to understand Andeans’ roles in the colonial lettered world. The notion of collective authorship more appropriately defines the scholarly interaction among educated Andeans, their clerical mentors and supporters, caciques, and other Indian authorities who worked together to produce texts within the trans-cultural space of the “contact zones.” In the process of conceiving, composing, and circulating their texts, members of the Indian elite made inroads into the colonial world of letters.

The world of elite Indians was also closely connected to the ecclesiastical realm of parish priests, missionaries, and clerical teachers who mentored virtually all of the Andean scholars considered in this book. While these groups of individuals were drawn together and linked by complex power relationships, a vibrant process of trans-culturation transpired. Pastoral writings (sermons, manuals, epistles, prayers) aimed at fostering conversion circulated among clerics and the literate Indian and mestizo elites, shaping their writings in unexpected ways. Through this literature and preaching, clerics urged caciques to instill Catholic values in their constituencies; priests intervened in conflict resolutions and also contributed to creating political tension in Indian communities. Yet mid- and late-colonial Andean writers further expanded such cultural and political “contact zones,” as—by becoming new actors in the colonial “republic of letters”—they also redefined and negotiated cultural identity, notions of Christianity, and political participation with Spanish authorities (Chapters 7, 8).⁴⁰

Paradoxically, although these writings used Christian discourses to construct Andean identity, an anti-clerical and anti-colonial tone generally underlies them, as the writers also criticized the colonial practices of the church and state authorities. Priests and members of religious orders, either genuine supporters of Indian causes or with other stakes in helping to mobilize indigenous and mestizo groups against the colonial authorities, may have collaborated with Andeans in composing the texts. The Franciscans who supported both Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla and Fray Calixto de San José, for example, were instrumental in helping them cross the Atlantic clandestinely and also offered them shelter and support in Spain, as the Andeans remained in the Iberian Peninsula for long periods. Ecclesiastics, in their role as protectors and mentors of Andeans, as well as other mestizo and creole agents immersed in the colonial literate world, likely intervened in unanticipated and untraceable ways in the final versions of Andean texts.⁴¹

Nevertheless, the texts remain Andean insofar as Andean scholars brought to bear their own experiential knowledge and criticism as colonial subordinates. The crisis of their societies lay at the center of these texts, and lettered Andeans made their own choices in selecting and rethinking the specific theological frameworks they deemed most effective to persuasively convey their political views and authorize their demands. Collective authorship becomes apparent in the contributions of the social networks of Indian authorities and mestizo supporters that were behind each single petition or more complex treaty, as spelled out in Chapters 2 and 3. Thus, in attempting to ascribe the texts solely to one or even a few individual authors, we lose the full cultural complexity and literary richness of Andean texts and scholarship. Seeing the texts as collectively authored allows us to identify the frequently overlooked bridges between the Indian and Spanish republics, as well as the inroads Andeans had been making in the streets of the ciudad letrada. Viewing these texts as isolated pieces, detached from the context of the collective political and intellectual projects of which they were a part, drastically simplifies them. The texts must be understood fully within the social, cultural, and political contexts behind their production and later reception.

In discussing the discursive production of Andean elites in the colonial context, Peruvian literary critic Carlos García-Bedoya has maintained that it was the organic relationship between the writing and the social group of the indigenous nobility who sponsored and consumed it, rather than the ethnic ascription of its authors, that characterized Andean discursive production. Such a group becomes a single emergent “social subject,” whose links to a common ancestry allowed it to represent the “republic of Indians” and whose cohesion stemmed from shared ideas about the pre-Hispanic past, the Spanish conquest, and the colonial order.⁴²

A neat cohesiveness of Andean thinking and the homogeneousness of Andean elites as a “social subject” are difficult to establish. In accounting for their different time periods and specific social roles, however, the few writers studied in this book reflect somewhat similar criticisms of the colonial authorities; a general concern with justice, reciprocity, and political autonomy under colonial rule; and a shared view of Spanish colonialism as an inherently unfair, corrupt, and anti-Christian system (Chapters 5, 6). For García-Bedoya, the texts could have been written by elite Indians, creole priests, or mestizos. The point of this book is, instead, to argue that members of all three groups contributed in different capacities to the preparation, composition, and dissemination of the writings. These practices were inextricably connected with both social activism among Indian authorities and communities and the negotiation of proposals directly with the king and the Council of the Indies in Spain.

This intellectual interaction has been represented as the relationship between Indian communities and a kind of specialized intellectual external to those communities. Literary critic Martin Lienhard has maintained that the first Andean written testimonies were produced by literate outsiders, non-community members, who would compose texts on behalf of the común when the community had no literate member. He added that “some testimonial texts seem to be the result of a more or less authentic cooperation between a group of Indians and an external literate agent.”⁴³ What Lienhard means by “authentic cooperation” between two such parties is unclear, but in the texts analyzed in the present book there is no clear-cut line of separation among the writers, the writing itself, and the intellectual and social activism that accompanied it, since a variety of actors participated in the discussion, composition, and distribution of the texts. These roles will become clearer in Chapters 2 and 3 in the particular contexts that preceded the discussion of authorship for Limaylla’s texts and for the “Representación verdadera,” respectively. The individuals who functioned as composers were connected in a variety of ways with the community of kurakas who sought to negotiate privileges and a softening of colonial demands with the king; possible contributors included educated Indians and their mestizo descendants, priests, lawyers, Indian escribanos, and other sympathizers. The kurakas were ambassadors to the crown and played active roles as mediators between the communities and local authorities as well.⁴⁴

MENTORSHIP AND EDUCATION OF INDIGENOUS ELITES

We can ask, how did Andeans become writers and scholars, and what factors influenced their thought and their texts? Soon after the Spanish conquest, the church and the crown endeavored to incorporate indigenous authorities in advancing the spiritual conquest. These institutions collaborated in a pedagogical strategy for indigenous religious transformation, establishing Jesuit-led colegios de caciques (schools for caciques). While the colegios were somewhat unstable, members of the Andean elite—including most of the writers considered in this book—also developed scholarly skills through direct, individual mentorship by Franciscans, Jesuits, and other clergy.

Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala was likely one of the earliest and best-known Andeans educated in this fashion by a mestizo religious man, Martin de Ayala, also apparently his half-brother.⁴⁵ The Andean mestizo Juan de Cuevas Herrera from La Plata received his education at the Lima Jesuit seminary school starting in 1610. Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla from Jauja joined the school of caciques in El Cercado in 1648 and was also mentored by the Franciscan missionaries of the Jauja area. Fray Calixto de San José Túpac Inca from Tarma received most of his religious education at the Franciscan seminary in Valencia (Spain) in 1750–1753, having also been mentored by Franciscan missionaries in Tarma, Lima, and Cusco in the period 1727–1749. Juan Santos Atahualpa and Túpac Amaru II are said to have studied at the San Borja Jesuit school in Cusco.⁴⁶ Typically, clergymen would “adopt” indigenous boys as protégés, servants, or both and would endeavor to teach them the Castilian language and Christian doctrine and to change their customs while using them for household labor. Occasionally, noble Indians also had access to the seminary schools of religious orders (colegios mayores), such as the Jesuit college of San Pablo.⁴⁷

During the post-conquest years, the church targeted native authorities as key agents for religious conversion, with the goals of transforming Andean cultures at large according to the European model of Christianity, implementing a civilizing agenda, and instilling “good customs” into Amerindians’ behavior.⁴⁸ Over time, however, the educated Andeans who were mentored in this way and with whom this study is concerned challenged these functions of literacy and religious education through critical writing and activism.

The project of native schooling was consistent with the goals of religious purification campaigns known as the “extirpation of idolatry,” centered in the Archbishopric of Lima in roughly 1608–1629, 1641–1671, and 1724–1730.⁴⁹ A champion of the early 1609 campaigns, the Jesuit Francisco de Avila, recommended the creation of colegios for caciques as the best strategy for destroying native religions.⁵⁰ Up to 1552, the goal of this pedagogical policy was to mentor a group of native preachers who would supply the needs of curas doctrineros (parish priests), by then very scarce.⁵¹ They would lead the religious transformation of indigenous societies from the top, down to the ayllus (communities of common-ancestry and blood-related members). At the inception of the project, the crown even seemed to believe that following this schooling, Andean elites should attend a university.⁵² These purposes seemed to have changed by 1576, however, when Viceroy Francisco de Toledo promoted the foundation of the schools only to indoctrinate caciques and change their customs.⁵³

A long history of tension between Viceroy Toledo and both the Lima archbishop and the Jesuits, combined with systematic opposition by other colonial elites, explains the delay in enforcing existing rulings for the foundation of the colegios.⁵⁴ The Cusco Inca lords, aware of the potential of the existing legislation, began to petition in 1601 for the creation of colegios “for the Ingas principales [Inca authorities] from Cusco and other kurakas of this kingdom, where they may learn the things of our faith and all policia [urbanity] and Christianity so that our children and descendants can teach it to their subjects”⁵⁵ (emphasis added). The Ingas principales of Cusco were aware of these early mandates and pressured the colonial state to enforce them, seeing an opportunity to better their lot in society. While they seemed to share the spirit of such royal decrees, they also made clear a desire to install native teachers to educate Andean generations to come.

It was not until July 1618 that King Philip III founded the first school of caciques, the Colegio de Caciques El Cercado, called “El Principe,” in the indigenous town of El Cercado on the outskirts of Lima. Concomitantly, a jail for Indian dogmatizers, known as the “Casa de Santacruz,” a house of sorcerers and idolaters (casa de hechiceros e idólatras), was founded in an adjacent building. Inmates were confined for religious “reeducation” through physical punishment, torture, and systematic indoctrination. A second seminary school for caciques, San Francisco de Borja (known as San Borja), was founded in Cusco in 1621. The colegios in Lima and Cusco functioned somewhat intermittently for most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a period in which more than 500 children of curacas were enrolled, although many only briefly. Among those enrolled in this school in 1648 were Jauja Andean noble Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla and his political rival from the Luringuanca repartimiento in Jauja, Don Bernardino Mangoguala Limaylla.⁵⁶ Late-colonial Inca rebels such as Juan Santos Atahualpa and Túpac Amaru are also said to have enrolled in San Borja. The expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 deepened the schools’ decline. As part of the Bourbons’ systematic attack against the Cusco Indian nobility in the aftermath of the Great Rebellion, a royal decree eliminated San Borja in 1785.⁵⁷

Some uncertainty surrounds the philosophical teachings imparted in the colegios. In 1583 the Jesuits planned to teach “science, grammar, rhetoric, philosophy, and logic.”⁵⁸ The colegios functioned as a tool for the indoctrination and linguistic change of Andean authorities under colonial rule; consequently, faculty emphasized Castilian grammar, alphabetic writing, and reading. In addition, the colegios sought to instill Christian practices and beliefs in native elite students through daily scheduled sermons and the reading of catechisms in Castilian. Apparently, the colegios also contributed to the dissemination of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s Comentarios reales de los Incas in the classrooms.⁵⁹ Evidence suggests that paintings of Inca nobles covered the walls of San Borja, while theatrical representations of the Inca past and other visual images strengthened the native students’ sense of Inca identity.⁶⁰ This exposure to the culture and symbols of the Inca past would have defined San Borja and El Cercado as centers that recast the variety of ethnic identities of the native students, who came from various regions under the homogenizing symbols of “Inca” and “Christian.”⁶¹

Literacy, however, proved a highly controversial tool for empire building and social control within these schools. Although Spanish literacy enabled missionaries to promote Indian conversion and Hispanicization, native students used that literacy in unanticipated ways. The educated Andeans studied in this work, aside from other caciques mentored individually or in religious colleges and schools for caciques, directed their literate skills to compose manuscripts that spoke in opposition to the crown. Literacy would soon be perceived as a dangerous tool in the hands of colonized Andeans, who quickly learned how to sue unjust officials and engaged in litigation and critiques of corregidores and other Spaniards—to the point that missionaries and government officials came to fear and distrust lettered Andeans.

Perhaps one of the earliest examples of Indios ladinos who acted as representatives of other Andeans was Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, who endeavored to teach other Andeans literacy and how to craft and file pleitos (lawsuits) against corregidores. He was aware of the consequences this use of literacy posed for Indians in small towns such as Lucanas, where one of his disciples, Don Cristobal de León, was put to the gallows for suing the corregidor. Nevertheless, among his many recommendations for “good government,” Ayala deemed it necessary to have at least one lettered functionary and two protectors, two procuradores, one interpreter, and another bilingual person who knew how to draft memoriales and file them with the lettered functionary so Indians could attain justice.⁶² Spaniards perceived litigating caciques as traitors and “spies” who pretended to have no knowledge of the Spanish language so they could gather valuable information to be used against Spaniards.⁶³ Andeans’ skills as litigants and negotiators of new royal decrees required knowledge of Spanish law and the ability to craft petitions and properly file complaints. Such legal knowledge came from contact with lawyers, study of Spanish laws, and access to juridical literature—particularly Juan de Solórzano’s Política Indiana. Andean authorities also learned from interaction with escribanos and their manuals, such as Gabriel Monterroso y Alvarado’s Práctica Civil y Criminal e Instrucción de Escribanos, known among Andeans as “the Monterroso.”⁶⁴

Colonial efforts to mentor Andean elites seem to have produced mixed and often ambiguous results, and colonial officials continued to see a relationship among educated Indians, litigants, and rebels. The Andean writers under discussion denounced overexploitation, challenged mita quotas against Indians in the Potosí mines and the corruption of curas doctrineros, and pursued long-lasting lawsuits for the retention of cacicazgos while in Madrid seeking resolution of their petitions. Historian Alaperrine-Bouyer established that alumnae caciques of El Cercado school were persecuted for suing abusive curas (priests) and officials and for signing letters defending their communities and protesting injustice. For essentially the same reasons, a number of other students were later accused of idolatry and occasionally singled out as instigators of uprisings. Among those in the first group were alumnae Don Rodrigo Flores Guainamallque from Santo Domingo de Ocros (Cajatambo), who enrolled in El Cercado in 1621; Don Juan Picho from the Luringuanca repartimiento (Jauja), enrolled in 1650; and Don Rodrigo Rupaychagua from Guamantanga, enrolled in 1634. Specifically accused of instigating protests against obrajes (textile workshops) and practicing idolatry was Francisco Gamarra (1653). Listed as filing capítulos (demands) against ecclesiastical authorities in particular were Gabriel Camaguacho (1627), Francisco Chavín Palpa (1638), and Cristóbal Pariona (1645). Among those accused of idolatry were Don Sebastián Quispe Nina (1651), Gómez Poma Chagua (1656), Juan de los Ríos (1621), and Francisco Pizarro (1627).⁶⁵

In different political conjunctures of indigenous unrest and upheaval during the eighteenth century, colonial officials grumbled bitterly about the failure of the native schools. Perhaps the most intriguing pattern that emerged is the involvement of several educated Indian leaders in the century’s major anti-colonial upheavals. Even if only a few cases of educated rebels can be documented, the initial goal of turning native elites into good Christians and loyal subjects was seriously undermined, as even the few leaders involved were sufficient to pose a serious threat to the colonial order. Juan Santos Atahualpa and José Gabriel Condorcanqui Túpac Amaru II, the leaders of two rebellions to challenge the missionary project and the political stability of Spanish colonialism, are said to have emerged from the San Borja school for caciques in Cusco.⁶⁶ Juan Santos Atahualpa openly praised the Jesuits as educators and included them in his future plans to rule the Andes. A group of Christian kurakas educated in the Franciscan mission schools of Santa Rosa de Ocopa (Jauja Province) supported him and played leading roles in the rebellion.⁶⁷ Túpac Amaru II also attended classes in arts and theology at the University of San Marcos in Lima. His brothers and young supporters were classmates at San Borja, years before the rebellion.⁶⁸

But a similar pattern of educated Indians who backed the status quo was also found. Former students at San Borja were also among the Inca elite who actively opposed the Túpac Amaru Rebellion. Among them was a powerful kuraka from Chincheros (Cusco area), Mateo García Pumacahua, who later became lieutenant general of the national army and fought Spain in the 1814 Peruvian campaign for independence. García Pumacahua had fought fiercely against Túpac Amaru II’s insurrectional forces in 1781 and was instrumental in their defeat, as a result of which he received a royal appointment with a handsome salary.⁶⁹ Another alumnus of San Borja, José Rafael Sahuaraura, wrote a panegyrical defense of the Cusco bishop Juan Manuel Moscoso in 1784, reviewed in Chapter 3.⁷⁰ Members of the two Inca lineages were rewarded with the few posts granted to Andeans as curas doctrineros after the upheaval, and several members of their families successfully joined the priesthood. Furthermore, according to some accounts, the Cercado school for caciques “produced many Indians famous in the pulpit and in the forum,” like Francisco Patiño, who became a Jesuit priest and was instrumental in the foundation of the cofradia (brotherhood) of Indian oficiales (city workers) in Cusco circa 1690.⁷¹

This study demonstrates, however, that educated Andeans could also question Spanish rule in ways less visible than leading and opposing armed struggles. By using literacy, rhetoric, Latin, and political theology, along with their experiential knowledge as subordinated colonial subjects, they constructed critical views of the colonial order to empower their own political agendas, reformulating the religious philosophical tenets they learned as part of their education. Ultimately, the Scholastic and Neo-Scholastic ideas taught in the seminary schools of Jesuits, Franciscans, and Dominicans and perhaps also disseminated through individual mentorship of the Indian nobility actually legitimized Andean rebellions, as the discourses of Túpac Amaru II as well as rebels in Huarochirí, Oruro, and other areas demonstrated. Perhaps the most salient impact of Andeans’ exposure to education was the formation of a group of intellectuals who functioned as significant political actors and cultural mediators between the Indian and Spanish worlds. Some of them became critical anti-colonial thinkers and writers who left an important paper trail that allows contemporary historians to understand their political culture, their use of identity and religion, their relationships with the church and the state, and their understanding of, and place within, colonialism.

The selection of Andean texts studied in this book broadly reflects the regional patterns of social unrest and rebellion that swept through the Andean world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.⁷² These regional patterns largely followed the colonial economic geography, with its central focus on mining (Potosí) and its gravitating orbits of regional commerce, haciendas, and obrajes along the Potosí-Lima axis: Potosí, La Paz, Cusco, Huancavelica, and Lima. Linked to this extensive economic axis and participating in market activities to a lesser degree were smaller agricultural and manufacturing areas such as Chuquisaca, Arequipa, Cochabamba, Oruro, Puno, Huamanga, Jauja, Huarochirí, and provinces to the north of Lima such as Trujillo and Saña. The binding force of the colonial mita from Potosí and Huancavelica linked these areas and largely accounted for regional patterns of protest and unrest. Even the rebellion of Juan Santos Atahualpa, which erupted in the Amazon frontiers of the Viceroyalty of Peru, was largely a protest against mitas and obrajes. The growing pressure of the repartimiento de comercio and the fiscal policies of the Bourbons added motive for the rebellions and turmoil in the specified regions, as well as in other Andean areas farther north into the Province of Quito and the Viceroyalty of New Granada (discussed in Chapter 3).

Rather than proceed strictly from every region of the viceroyalty, the texts in this study tend to reflect the social conflicts and political concerns of Andean representatives from only some of the indicated regions. The additional supportive documents of Indian activism come from kurakas from different areas, who also had the opportunity to meet and interact in Lima when they traveled to advance their business interests in the audiencia capital. The texts considered in this book circulated primarily in the royal courts of Madrid, Lima, and surrounding provinces; and this urban environment of consultations, discussions, and negotiation shaped the form and discourse of the documents. A large number of kurakas and other educated Amerindian elites gathered in Lima, the viceregal capital and seat of the audiencia, to advance their cases in court, which facilitated the emergence of networks for social and legal activism.⁷³ Cusco was another crucial point of Andean discourse production because the province likely contained the largest concentration of literate Inca descendants who had validated their nobility status through writing, painting, and performance of nobility. The book’s core documentary basis reflects this regionalism and consists of texts that members of the Andean elite from the Provinces of Charcas, Jauja, Tarma, Trujillo, La Paz, Arequipa, and Cusco composed during times of social unrest, open rebellion, or both and that currently rest in major colonial archives in Spain, since most of the documents were originally directed to the Spanish king.

This book also relies on archival documentation pertaining to social movements from regional and local archives in Peru to capture issues of identity formation, as well as the religious and political views of elite and a few non-elite members of Andean societies. Extensive documentation from the Jesuit archives and the Peruvian national and regional archives has provided evidence for discussions of Amerindian education, rebellions, church mandates, viceregal policies, Indians in the church, and similar topics.

The corpus of Andean scholarship in mid- and late-colonial Peru is introduced in Chapters 2 and 3, respectively. These chapters conceptualize the times and present the writers’ backgrounds and writings, with links to social and political issues. The reception of the texts and their political implications are also discussed.

The chapters that follow develop a discursive analysis of the major Andean texts, guided by their more salient themes. In Chapter 4 I discuss the European background of Andean discourses. I reveal the extent to which the writers drew on medieval political theologies of “natural right,” “common good,” and “tyranny” to justify the rights of Indian lords to retain their chiefdoms and seek redress for the dispossession of their lands and resources by the Spanish invaders. I argue that intellectual Andeans altered the purpose of these notions by attempting to adapt them to a colonial situation, highlighting the chaos introduced by the arrival of the Spanish and their institutions in the Andes.

In Chapter 5 I review Andean critiques of Spanish colonialism, which focused on its judicial institutions, the Catholic Church, and the Potosí mita. I argue that Andean narratives of social justice were a reformulation of early Lascasian and Franciscan models of criticism, which Andean elites selected and redeployed to legitimize their claims for inclusion in the state and the church. Cross-referencing Andean scholarship with other non-Andean critiques of colonialism in Peru, I demonstrate that prominent creoles, “enlightened” officials, and ecclesiastics likewise used critiques of colonial justice to strengthen other disparate agendas of evangelization, state reform, and militarization of the empire.

In Chapter 6 I reconstruct the history of Andean intellectuals’ advocacy for the admission of indigenous elites into prestigious social institutions, from the 1650s through the 1780s. This is a rarely acknowledged history within colonial Andean political culture, in which these lettered Andeans sought full membership in the church for their noble counterparts—asserting their ability to perform as priests, missionaries, bishops, and officers of the state while also demanding access to a kind of secular education in schools and universities and pursuing social distinctions as a way out of their historical subordination. Thus, while seeking avenues of social inclusion, Andean intellectuals challenged the power relationships between the two “republics” and redefined their own place within the changing world of colonial Peru. Their critical discourses capitalized on the gap between the potentially favorable mandates of the monarch and the systematic disregard of such laws by the colonial church and Peruvian authorities. Over time, the campaigns for social inclusion yielded a more comprehensive social and political platform, which took shape in mid–eighteenth-century Lima amid an insurrectionary conjuncture. Later in the chapter I examine these approaches to reform informed by aspirations of ethnic autonomy. The mental state of the late-colonial Andean writers reveals them to have been incipient modern subjects, carving out spaces in which to intervene in the changes to the justice system so they could resolve the protracted unenforcement of laws fought for by other Andean scholars since the late seventeenth century.

The cultural changes in Andeans’ views of themselves and their colonial others, as well as changes in their religiosity at the outset of the modern era, are discussed in Chapter 7. How did Andean intellectuals question their identity as “Indians,” and, as a result, how did they describe themselves? In addition, how did they view the Spanish and other subordinated groups? Andeans constructed their own identities in a relational and oppositional manner, which inadvertently conveyed the politics of identity formation. While presenting themselves as true Christians, they constructed the identity of the colonizers as non-Christian; while they perceived themselves as noble subjects, they critically demanded from the Spanish nobility the payment of tribute usually expected from commoners. Even as they advocated strategically for their own rights, Andean elites contributed to the formation of identities of other subordinated subjects through internalized colonial prejudices, and they exhibited ambivalent views toward Christianity and the role of the church.

The religious identities and views of Andean scholars and their use of Christian rhetoric stand out as central issues of identity formation in their writing. I problematize Andeans’ Christian identity based on their own language and self-proclamations. While intellectual Andeans were invested in outward expressions of piety and devotional language, their religious discourse reveals a highly political interpretation of Christianity. Their redefinition of notions such as “divine justice,” “sin,” “love,” and “Christian behavior” de-legitimized Spanish authorities by portraying them as immoral rulers and, more broadly, by questioning the power relationships between the “republic of Indians” and the “republic of Spaniards.” Christian love became a political tool that condemned exclusionary divisions among equals and qualified colonialism as a “sin.” Elite Andeans’ desire and willingness to become priests were supported largely on political and social grounds. They viewed obtaining positions in the church as a means to break Spaniards’ monopoly within the religious institution that controlled the sanctioned forms of spirituality in colonial society rather than seeing it as a path to spiritual perfection.

NOTES

1. In the twenty-first century, increasing scholarly interest has emerged regarding the study of Indians and mestizos, or ladinos, as transformative agents in colonial culture, from different perspectives: as lower church officials, interpreters of law and canonical texts, and creators of meaning (Charles, Indios Ladinos; Durston, Pastoral Quechua); as trans-Atlantic activists and writers (Dueñas, Andean Scholarship and Rebellion); as Indian town officials strategizing to defend local self-rule (Yannanakis, The Art of Being In-Between); and as fighters for chiefdom power (Alaperrine-Bouyer, “Enseignements et Enjeux”; Puente Luna, What’s in a Name).

2. For comprehensive studies of late-colonial Andean rebellions, see O’Phelan, La gran rebelión; Cornblit, Power and Violence; Stern, ed., Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness; Stavig, The World of Túpac Amaru; Robins, Genocide and Millennialism in Upper Peru; Serulnikov, Subverting Colonial Authority; Thomson, We Alone Rule; Glave, “The ‘Republic of Indians’ in Revolt.”

3. Millones, Historia y poder en los Andes, 134–135; Pease, Perú Hombre e Historia; Stavig, The World of Túpac Amaru.

4. In this book I use the term “discourse” to stress the ways institutions, individuals, and groups use language to construct ideas, identities, and agendas in a particular social and cultural milieu, mostly with regard to the Andeans under study and other related colonial institutions and subjects. The notion of discourse, however, supersedes the boundaries of written texts and includes all nonverbal expression. Institutional discourses in particular shape people’s thinking and put limits on what can be expressed. I assume, however, that looking at Andean discourses also allows one to identify their creative power and intellectual agency. For more specific definitions of discourse, see Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge.

5. Rama, La ciudad letrada.

6. Adorno, “La ‘ciudad letrada’ y los discursos coloniales,” 23.

7. It is important to clarify, however, that in this work I only include Andeans from what was known as the Viceroyalty of Peru. In general usage, the term “Andean” cannot be restricted to this region, since a vast array of Andean groups and cultures existed north and south of the viceroyalty’s colonial limits.

8. Flores Galindo, Buscando un Inca, 15–16.

9. The most important works of this period include Don Diego de Castro Titu Cusi Yupanqui, Instrucción al licenciado Don Lope García de Castro; the Huarochirí Manuscript, anonymous text compiled and edited by Jesuit Father Francisco de Avila; Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Comentarios reales de los Incas; Juan de Santacruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua, Relación de antigüedades deste reyno del Piru; Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica y buen gobierno. For comprehensive studies of these works, see Adorno, From Oral to Written Expression and Cronista y príncipe; Chang-Rodríguez, “Peruvian History and the Relación of Titu Cussi Yupanki”; Castro-Klaren, “El orden del sujeto en Guaman Poma”; Zamora, Language and Authority; Salomon, “Chronicles of the Impossible”; Brading, “The Inca and the Renaissance”; Spalding, Royal Commentaries of the Incas; Yupanqui, History of How the Spaniards Arrived in Peru.

10. Adorno, Cronista y príncipe, 229; also in “La ‘ciudad letrada’ y los discursos coloniales,” 7–8. Following Lienhard, Adorno maintains that the growing obliteration of Indian elites contributed to the end of Indian and mestizo writing production after 1620. The Andean critical writings studied here appeared in the following decades and continued through the late-colonial years and even to the present (see Epilogue).

11. In its attempt to understand the overall impact of colonial Andean writing on the transformation of Andean and colonial culture, this book has benefited from the postcolonial studies discussion and scholarly production of the past twenty years, which have foregrounded the crucial role of language and textual analysis in the study of subordinate groups in colonial societies that otherwise would be invisible in the historical record. Equally important is the recognition that these subjects produced knowledge that empowered them to intervene in the shaping of their own destiny, a trans-cultural way of thinking produced in contentious loci. Among other pertinent contributions, see Seed, “Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse”; Mignolo, “Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse” and Local Histories/Global Designs; Rappaport, Politics of Memory and “Object and Alphabet,” 271–292.

12. This study also builds upon foundational works in Andean ethnohistory, which focus on indigenous peoples under Spanish rule and particularly on the roles of kurakas and their cultural, political, and religious responses to colonialism, as well as upon those that have problematized existent interpretations of Andean religion, political culture, and native identity. Among others, these studies include Stern, Peru’s Indian Peoples; Spalding, Huarochirí; Pease, Kurakas, Reciprocidad y Riqueza; Glave, Trajinantes; Ramírez, The World Upside Down; Mills, Idolatry and Its Enemies; McCormack, Religion in the Andes; Thomson, We Alone Rule; Serulnikov, Subverting Colonial Authority.

13. Brading, First America, chapters 14–15.

14. Flores Galindo, Buscando un Inca and “La nación como utopía”; Burga, El nacimiento de un autopía; Szemiński, La utopía tupamarista and “The Last Time the Inca Came Back.”

15. The figure of the indio ladino (a converted Amerindian proficient in Spanish, who had adopted Spanish customs) was established in the Andes and Spanish America as cultural interaction between the Spanish and Amerindian worlds increased in the colonial society. Rolena Adorno has studied the images, experiences, and roles of indios ladinos as they emerged in colonial Peru during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. By becoming literate in Castilian, Adorno maintains, indios ladinos functioned as cultural intermediaries, serving in various capacities as lenguas (translators, interpreters, scribes), church officers, alguaciles (policemen), and fiscales (overseers of Indian converts’ behavior, sacristans, and coadjutors) and playing such roles as messianic leaders, litigants, and, ultimately, writers. Adorno, “Nosotros somos los kurakakuna.” In this book, I include lettered mestizos in the category of ladinos, particularly when dealing with the mestizo relatives of Indian-elite ladinos.

16. BRP, Sign. II/2848, 204–210v, hereafter cited as Limaylla, “Memorial,” and BRP, Sign. II/2848, 211–247v, hereafter cited as Limaylla, “Representación.”

17. BRP, Sign. II/2819, 218–269v, hereafter cited as Cuevas, “Cinco memoriales.”

18. AGI, Indiferente General, 648.

19. AGI, Lima, 422, 1–13v, hereafter cited as Morachimo, “Manifiesto.”

20. BRP, Madrid, Sign. II/2823, 118–169v, hereafter cited as “Representación verdadera.”

21. Navarro, Una denuncia profética desde el Perú a mediados del siglo XVIII. The full title of the manuscript is “Planctus indorum christianorum in America peruntina.”

22. For an examination of the role of oral tradition in early Andean texts of the colonial period, see Adorno, From Oral to Written Expression.

23. Although the subject remains almost unexplored in Andean history, the figure and tradition of the Andean intellectual seem to have existed in ancient Andean and Inca societies. Szemiński, “The Last Time the Inca Came Back,” 281. Szemiński holds that this tradition became diffused and simplified with the homogenizing efforts of evangelization in the colonial period. If this is the case, then the intellectual complexities embodied by colonial Andean scholars may, in fact, be an analog for an ancient tradition in the Andes.

24. Inspired by the vision of jurist and entrepreneur Juan de Matienzo in 1567, the Toledan reforms (1569–1582) aimed to establish political stability and secure a steady flow of wealth from Peru to Spain. They included these central policies: a large-scale relocation of Andeans to tighten control over their labor and political structures and to facilitate evangelization; such resettlement of otherwise scattered and dangerously autonomous Indian communities (ayllus) into Indian towns (reducciones, or reservations) included a parallel structure of Indian government; a reassessment of tribute, mita, and other labor quotas; redistribution of lands; and the subordination of indigenous communities and authorities to the political control of the colonial state through Spanish corregidores and cabildos. Indigenous cabildos would be staffed by Indian officials, such as alcaldes (top cabildo authorities) and regidores (aldermen). Indians would be appointed to lower church offices as fiscales and cantors. Stern, Peru’s Indian Peoples, 72–73. See the corresponding laws in Lohmann Villena and Sarabia Viejo, Francisco de Toledo, 1: 1–120.

25. The Guacra Paucar, kurakas from Jauja during the years 1555–1570, for example, claimed to have supplied Pizarro’s soldiers with goods during the battles against the Inca and petitioned for noble privileges, using the Iberian principles of pureza de sangre (purity of blood) and “good services” rendered to enhance Spanish imperial goals. In 1555 they expected to be reimbursed for expenses and losses they had incurred in these early conflicts, a practice also interpreted as an Andean approach to the colonizers on the basis of reciprocity. Pease, Perú Hombre e Historia, 311. Simultaneously, though, they also seem to have been implicated in subversive activities that were part of a larger pan-Andean insurrection against the Spanish conquest of the Andes. Ibid. Later in the 1580s, Felipe Guacra Paucar, his brother Francisco Guacra Paucar, and Francisco Tisy Canga Guacra—members of a noble Indian family from the Jauja Valley—disputed in court what they saw as a denial of their legitimate right to succession to the Luringuanca kurakazgo (chiefdom) of the Jauja Valley, challenging the legitimacy of the Limaylla lineage to the chiefdom’s succession. Box 5, Peru, Noviembre 18–Enero 22, 1600, Lilly Library, Bloomington, Indiana. Andean probanzas de nobleza can be counted by the thousands in colonial archives. This practice continued throughout the colonial period until the Bourbons launched their attack on the Cusco Inca nobility in the aftermath of the Túpac Amaru Rebellion.

26. Pease, Perú Hombre e Historia, 312. Both ecclesiastics championed the campaigns against the encomienda system in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Peru. Las Casas in particular had been denouncing abuses by Spanish conquistadors since the early years of the conquest and was instrumental in the promulgation of the New Laws in 1542, which curtailed the power of encomenderos.

27. One of the signers of these powers of attorney was Carlos Limaylla, cacique principal from Luringuanca (Jauja Valley) and grandfather of Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla, one of the Andean writers discussed in this book. Pease, Kurakas, Reciprocidad y Riqueza, 152–153, 155–156.

28. See some of the most important texts of this period and the most comprehensive studies about them in note 9.

29. Quispe-Agnoli, La fé andina en la escritura.

30. Initially an obligation of protectores de naturales and most other government officials, sending reports on the general state of things in the colonies with suggested remedies for existing problems, became part of these officials’ administrative duties. In Spanish America, this tradition began almost with the conquest itself. Andean representatives, procuradores de indios, intellectuals, caciques, and native priests—who had been exposed to colonial administrative culture in a variety of capacities—seized this institutional opportunity to question the everyday functioning of colonialism and to participate in shaping and reforming society.

31. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 4. Mary Louise Pratt defined “contact zones” as contentious spaces created in colonial situations where struggles between cultures take place, often in the context of power relationships between colonizers and the colonized. The well-known work of Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala (Nueva corónica y buen gobierno) exemplifies an early type of Andean writing from within a “contact zone.”

32. Rama, La ciudad letrada.

33. On the participation of African descendants in the lettered culture of mid-colonial Lima, see Jouve Martín, Esclavos de la ciudad letrada. For the first decades of the 1800s in Uruguay, see Acree, “Jacinto Ventura de Molina.”

34. See Rowe, “Movimiento Nacional Inca del siglo XVIII,” 2; Serulnikov, Subverting Colonial Authority.

35. This tradition started in the Andes around the 1540s, when Andean kurakas engaged in the campaigns against the encomienda system referred to earlier and supported the actions of Fray Domingo de Santo Tomás and Fray Bartolomé de las Casas to obtain laws that curtailed the power of encomenderos.

36. Stern, Peru’s Indian Peoples, 114–138.

37. Concomitant with these forms of communication, kurakas apparently used quipus (Andean knotted cords) to communicate with each other, particularly in preparation for insurrections. Szemiński, “The Last Time the Inca Came Back,” 291. Even though quipus had been burned and prohibited after the extirpation of idolatries, they survived probably unnoticed by colonial authorities and circulated restrictively among native authorities. AGN, Lima, Escribanía, Siglo XVIII. Protocolo no. 187, Años 1790–1818, 213, 396, 298v.

38. Individual Spanish judges and procuradores de naturales occasionally supported the cause of social justice for Indians. For an examination of a few significant cases from the late sixteenth century, see Glave, De Rosa y espinas, 27–68.

39. Dueñas, Andean Scholarship and Rebellion, 140.

40. An intriguing case of cross-cultural collaboration and perhaps an alternative approximation of the idea of collective authorship, however unacknowledged, emerged in the late-eighteenth-century natural history and political economy conceived by the enlightened Bishop of Trujillo, Baltazar Martínez Compañón. Emily Berquist has demonstrated that the bishop convoked anonymous Indian and mestizo teams of painters, artisans, and informants, who not only provided artistic skills for 1,327 drawings but also rendered crucial observations and local knowledge for the bishop’s intellectual and enlightened project of creating an orderly and prosperous Trujillo. Through this “collaboration with Indigenous informants,” the “Hispanic science of empire” expanded botanical knowledge in the New World. See Berquist, Science of Empire, 117–127.

41. Letters and representaciones that judges presented to higher authorities on behalf of Andeans, for example, had been preceded by letters, visits, and petitions by Andean authorities and writers to these prominent members of the state. Before composing his “Cinco memoriales,” Juan de Cuevas Herrera had sent an extensive memorial to the minister of the Audiencia de Charcas, Juan de Palacios, who died before he could deliver his promise to forward it to the king and the pope. Cuevas, “Cinco memoriales,” 220v.

42. García-Bedoya, “Discurso criollo y discurso andino en la literatura peruana colonial,” 190–192.

43. Lienhard, La voz y su huella, xxvi. Lienhard transcribed and commented briefly on a series of writings by or about indigenous intellectuals from the Spanish conquest to the twentieth century. His introduction focuses on the communicative process of the epistolary genre, which unveils a kind of “Indian textuality” (written, dictated, and uttered texts) oriented mostly toward negotiation with colonial authorities, a kind of “diplomatic” text.

44. For the practical needs of this book, individual names of authors are used, given that the names of those who contributed in different capacities went unrecorded. It is to be understood, however, that these individuals were only the more visible end of a collective supporting the writings and the causes they articulated.

45. Adorno, “Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala,” 146.

46. Eguiguren, Diccionario histórico cronológico, 41, 874.

47. Martín, Intellectual Conquest of Peru, 17, 36.

48. Duviols, La destrucción de las religiones andinas. In 1512–1513, the Laws of Burgos ordered encomenderos to teach Castilian literacy to Amerindians. In 1535, another real cédula (royal decree) made the education of elite Indians mandatory. In 1540 and 1563, King Charles I commanded friars to teach “good customs” to native elites, whereas in reales cédulas from 1569 and 1573, King Philip II had commanded Viceroy Francisco de Toledo to establish seminary schools for Indian nobles in all cities of Peru. Recopilación de Leyes de Indias (Libro VI, Título 1, 1.18; Libro 1, Título 13, 1.5), at http://www.congreso.gob.pe/ntley/LeyIndiaP.htm.

49. The extirpation campaigns were well under way in 1565, following the Taki Onkoy (dance sickness)—a public demonstration of Amerindian rejection of Catholicism through endless dancing and display of ancestral huacas, or holy objects—and a general call to return to ancestral worship (1564–1565). The campaigns attempted to purify Catholicism and to uproot all vestiges of native religious traditions. The extirpating efforts also sought to discipline and civilize Indians who had relapsed into their former religious practices after being baptized and ostensibly converted. Following a judicial process that involved denunciation, investigation, sentence, and chastisement, Andean “dogmatists” were rendered powerless, and their traditional ability to mediate between the human and supernatural worlds was seriously compromised. Griffiths, The Cross and the Serpent; Mills, Idolatry and Its Enemies.

50. Even as late as 1660, Don Diego León Pinelo, the legal defender of Indians, or protector de naturales, in Lima, maintained that the main reason to maintain the Cercado school of caciques was to uproot Indian idolatry. Marzal, La transformación religiosa peruana, 141.

51. Alaperrine-Bouyer, La educación de las élites, 47.

52. Morachimo, “Manifesto,” 337.

53. The new goals become clear in the words of a Jesuit mentor, cited without proper name or date in Eguiguren, Diccionario histórico cronológico, 523: “to instill in natives good customs and to separate them from their parents, so that they do not replicate the bad example their parents set with the superstition of their old religion. Later on, when they return to their towns, they will teach their subjects what they learned. And it will be of great avail, because Indios principales command great authority among their subjects” (original emphasis). From a vacant encomienda, Toledo designated 1,000 pesos for the Lima school of caciques and 800 for the one to be founded in Cusco, but none of the schools was founded during his term in office. Inca, “Colegio de Caciques,” 780; Alaperrine-Bouyer, La educación de las élites, 48–49.

54. In explaining the reasons for this delay, Monique Alaperrine-Bouyer argued that the Jesuits were initially reluctant to support the schools for caciques. Allied with the majority of members of the Audiencia of Lima, the Jesuits managed to redirect the funds available from both donations and the endowment set up by Toledo for founding schools for creoles. Alaperrine-Bouyer, La educación de las élites, 50–71. The reader may find useful Alaperrine-Bouyer’s detailed discussion of the politics of the creation of the schools for caciques, including the financing and the ensuing political tensions among encomenderos, the crown, and the Jesuits, as well as the local alliances against the schools. Alaperrine-Bouyer, “Esbozo de una historia del Colegio de San Francisco de Borja de Cuzco,” 44–53; O’Phelan, La gran rebelión, 53.

55. AGI, Patronato, 171.

56. Inca, “Colegio de Caciques,” 800–829. For a history of some of the caciques who studied in El Cercado and San Borja and for details on the limitations of the rosters published in Inca, see Alaperrine-Bouyer, La educación de las élites, chapters 5 and 7: 123–178, 207–222.

57. Alaperrine-Bouyer, “Esbozo de una historia del Colegio de San Francisco de Borja de Cuzco,” 54.

58. Osorio, Clamor de los Indios Americanos, 29.

59. Lorandi, De quimeras rebeliones y utopías, 109.

60. Flores Galindo, Buscando un Inca, 69.

61. Dean, Inca Bodies and the Body of Christ, 112–113. Dean argues that in the rebirth of the Inca past through the efforts of Indian nobles, the Jesuits were a sort of “midwife.” They strengthened the native students’ sense of nobility; in fact, they “joined” the Inca nobility, as Martin de Loyola, Ignacio de Loyola’s nephew, married Ñusta Beatriz. Dean also considers the Jesuit educational project a work of comprehensive trans-culturation of the Inca elite.

62. Guamán Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica, 460–463, 495[499]-498[502], 453, 484[488]. A 1683 royal decree prohibited the teaching of Latin, rhetoric, and logic to native students for fear they would arrive at heretic conclusions; the measure was temporary, however. Duviols, La destrucción de las religiones andinas, 335. Following Guamán Poma’s advocacy of Indian authorities’ command of Spanish, Bruce Mannheim has maintained that Spanish literacy was crucial for a colonial cacique to be able to defend his charges in court. While the colonial government encouraged caciques to learn Spanish, attacks on the Jesuit schools of caciques for turning Indians into litigants came from different fronts. Mannheim, Language of the Inca since the European Invasion, 65, 76.

63. Bartolomé Alvarez denounced Indios ladinos for having visited the English captain Francis Drake following his clandestine arrival at the southern Pacific coast of the Viceroyalty of Peru in 1579. He also accused kurakas from the Province of Pacasas of having sent Drake a letter addressed to “the Magnificent Lutheran Lords” and supposedly of having killed Spaniards in the Machaca repartimiento (Charcas). Alvarez, De las costumbres, 267–268.

64. Ibid., 268. On the interaction between escribanos and Indian nobles in the production of notarial documents and truth more generally, see Burns, “Notaries, Truth, and Consequences.”

65. Alaperrine-Bouyer, La educación de las élites, 207—222.

66. Although the San Borja school records extant today are rather scant and fragmentary and no direct evidence is available that documents the enrollment of Juan Santos Atahualpa and Túpac Amaru II, historians claim they did attend the school. Eguiguren, Diccionario histórico cronológico, 41, 874. For comprehensive studies of eighteenth-century rebellions, see sources cited in note 2.

67. According to Fray Bernardino de Izaguirre’s account of the rebellion, Juan Santos gained the support of kurakas from the area, including Santabangori from the town of Quisopongo in the Central Sierra; Siabar, the kuraka of the Cunibo nation, who headed an insurrection in 1737; Mateo de Assia, a Christian cacique from Metraro, who was a lieutenant in the service of Juan Santos; and an Indian captain of the Cunibo nation named Perote, who contributed to the mythical accounts around Juan Santos’s disappearance, declaring that his body vanished in smoke in front of the Indians. Izaguirre, Historia de las misiones Franciscanas.

68. Eguiguren, Diccionario histórico cronológico, 41, 874.

69. García Pumacahua was an outstanding entrepreneur, well-known in the Cusco area for his wealth and lavish demonstrations of loyalty to the king. Stavig, The World of Túpac Amaru, 251, 259.

70. Sahuaraura Tito Arauchi, “Estado del Perú.”

71. Figuera, La formación del clero indígena, 384 (quotation); ARSI, Peru 17, ca. 1690, 130; Saignes, “Algún día todo se andará,” 438.

72. O’Phelan, Un siglo de rebeliones anticoloniales, 110–111. For the eighteenth century, O’Phelan found that both the rebellions from the Castelfuerte era (1724–1736) and those that erupted later, in the 1750s and 1780s, took place along the colonial economic axis that extended from Potosí to Lima. These areas proved more prone to social protest, with the commercial and economic circuit from Potosí playing a transitional or articulating role between Upper and Lower Peruvian provinces, both politically and economically.

73. In 1996, Nuria Sala I Vila noticed aspects of a network from Lima, which she identified as dating from 1783. Sala I Vila, “La rebelion de Huarochirí en 1783.” She briefly described this network as a group of middlemen residents of Lima who helped convey information from the plaintiffs to the viceregal authorities of the Audiencia of Lima and disseminated laws among the indigenous communities. The Indian networks described in this book, however, encompass a larger group of people acting in different regions, which fundamentally incorporated elite Indian and mestizo scholars, creole clerics, lawyers, and a few sympathetic Spanish judges in provinces and colonial centers of Peru. Very important, though, such networks also connected with other Indian and non-Indian supporters in the royal court and reached out to the king. These networks began to function early in the post-conquest years, but they became more visible in the first half of the seventeenth century, when the campaign against the mita was in full sway, discussed further in Chapter 2.