Specialists in colonial Latin American history and literary criticism have traditionally viewed one another with the same sort of suspicion that characterizes the dialogue between art historians and archaeologists. Each regards the others methodology with suspicion, convinced that any conclusions drawn thereby are tentative at best; yet each is inspired by the possibilities the other puts forward and often challenged to test the other’s hypothesis using more reliable methodology.
It is in this context that we turn to this edition of two fundamental sixteenth-century Peruvian relaciones. The first is the Relación de las costumbres antiguas de los naturales del Pirú, which the editors argue convincingly was penned by the mestizo Jesuit Blas Valera (it was first published in 1879 by Marcos Jiménez de la Espada). The second is the Relación de antigüedades deste reino del Perú of don Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamaqui Saicamaygua, a noble from the region southeast of Cuzco. Submitted as accounts that predate the more famous relaciones of Garcilaso de la Vega and don Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, respectively, these works are indeed valuable in assessing the effort put forth by educated mestizos and naturales to describe at length the culture that characterized the Andes before the arrival of the conquistadores. They are not reliable tools for determining the belief structures of native Peruvians, however, for both treatises were written with a clear purpose: to convince the crown that the peoples of the Andes were Christian prior to the conquest, and thereby and otherwise civilized.
What I find most interesting about the introductions, the first by Henrique Urbano and the second by Ana Sánchez, is the underlying perception that by virtue of being mestizo and natural, the authors represented intellectually and perhaps corporally the fusion of cultures that took place during the first few generations of colonial administration. Certainly, Blas Valera’s ability in quichua enabled him to approach native sources, and certainly a kuraka like Pachacuti was in a position to transcribe (translating all the while) the quipu-guided oral history of Tahuantinsuyu. But their purposes were not academic; both were attempting to create space for themselves in the new social order. What they had in common was the need to provide a reason to value the pre-Columbian past that coursed through their veins; and to accomplish that goal, they had to express that culture in the accepted discourse of the day (and the conqueror), Christianity.
That is why literary criticism’s focus on the writer is so crucial, and why the identity of the first relación’s author is so important to the editors and their colleagues; for he is the prism through which the relación is interpreted. Historians consider the social, economic, and political environment to be at least as important, and therefore may apply unpublished, less comprehensive documents to build a synthesis of the processes at work during the colonial period. The archives of Spain and the Andes are filled with the testimonies of mestizos and naturales de la tierra before the colonial authorities; they all share the inevitable skewing caused by the purpose behind them and the language of their masters, Castellano. At the same time, Pachacuti and Guaman Poma are not the only native authors of the period. While they wrote comprehensive, purposeful works for royal consumption, other Andeans wrote more circumscribed but no less authentic letters, petitions, and complaints.
It is also worth mentioning that the oral tradition is still alive and well in the Andes, and the belief system that existed before the coming of the Europeans lives on in a fusion that continues to evolve over time. A historian often gains as much insight from living within that cultural fusion as from poring over documents and secondary sources, for the stories there are authentic echoes of the past.
This volume therefore serves the historian of colonial Latin America as a first pass at two well-known sources, with two introductory essays that pose interesting hypotheses concerning the sociopolitical processes of the early colonial period. Both characteristics make it valuable for building or refining a plan for archival research, but there is still no substitute for archival research and time spent in the field.
