Early Peruvian recorded daily life under the rule of Spanish conquistadors

One of the most intriguing dimensions of the encounter between Old World and New is the testimony of those who lived in the intercultural, inter-ethnic setting of the first hundred years of contact.  Much more scarce than European accounts of this experience are those of American natives.  One such extraordinary testimony comes from the central and southern Andes of Peru after the turn of the 17th century.  Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala's Primer nueva coronica y buen gobierno (The First New Chronicle and Good Government) (1615) survives as one of the most extraordinary writings of all colonial Spanish America.

Guaman Poma was an ethnic Andean who addressed his 1,200page work, of which nearly 400 were pen-and-ink drawings of Inca and colonial life, to King Philip II of Spain.  His hope was to inform the king about affairs in Peru in order to insure colonial reform and greater protection for Andean people.  Whether the king ever saw the Nueva coronica is unknown.  In fact, the work came to modern attention not in Spain, but at the Royal Library of Copenhagen, when Dr. Richard A. Pietschmann of the University of Gottingen came upon the work in 1908.

Guaman Poma was probably born around 1535, a few years after the Spanish invasion.  According to his own account, he was of patrilineal descent from the pre-Incaic Yaru Willka dynasty of Huanuco, and his mother was the daughter of the Inca Tupac Yupanqui.  He said that he was indoctrinated in the Christian faith and learned to read and write as a boy.  He wrote not only in Castilian, but in his native Quechua during the very period when it was being transcribed into a written language.  In his youth and adulthood, he worked as an informant and interpreter in negotiations between colonial and native societies.  Among such experiences were his assistance in the 1560s campaign to destroy a nativist movement, called Taki Unquy, whose leaders incited their native followers to reject European ways and prepare for the return of the Inca.  He is also known to have participated in the 1590s in the redistribution of Andean lands to colonial owners.  Yet Guaman Poma came to regret this earlier collaboration with colonialist initiatives and became an activist for Andean causes.  In his own work, he tells how he schooled other Andeans in the arts of reading and writing--an indispensable means to enter the Spanish legal system in the defense of Andean rights.

The historical background against which the Nueva coronica was written was an increasingly difficult one for Andeans.  The eighty years of Guaman Poma's life coincided with the period that marked the large-scale disintegration of the highland Andean political and social organization which had characterized the Inca period.  Following the Spanish invasion of 1532, the next forty years brought the disarticulation of Inca society and included the civil wars among the Spanish conquistadores from 1541 to 1548.  The tenure of the Viceroy Francisco de Toledo from 1569 to 1581 brought with it the establishment of patterns of colonial administration that were to characterize the vast area of the viceroyalty of Peru for most of the colonial period.  In 1571, Toledo executed the Inca prince, Tupac Amaru, and thus ended the rule of the Inca government in exile in Vilcabamba.  Toledo was responsible for major resettlements of the native population through reducciones or reurbanization campaigns, which established municipalities which made native labor available for use for colonial purposes.

As the traditional organization of native Andean society was dismantled, its distinctions of class and caste were gradually lost.  By the 1570s, native Peruvian society was being transformed into an undifferentiated mass.  Members of the indigenous lordly classes could occupy administrative positions only by virtue of colonial appointment, not on the sole basis of inherited rank.  One such office was that of administrator of the native settlements of the corregimiento or municipal district, and Guaman Poma himself claimed to have occupied such a post.

Guaman Poma's activities as an investigator and writer are those which hold greatest interest for us today.  His reliance on Andean languages and the accounts of the elders who either had survived the Spanish conquest, or had known those who had, gives his accounts of pre-Columbian Andean society an authority found in few other places.  His time spent working with colonial church inspectors and civil officers gave him the experience from which to construct an unusually complex view of colonial administration, including its goals at the highest levels and its practices and abuses at the level of the local community.  His self-taught knowledge of the European historiographic, juridical and rhetorical traditions reveals the type of Spanish literary and intellectual culture that was available to the native elite.

For Guaman Poma himself, writing represented an attempt at social intervention in an environment where traditional models were no longer available.  The literary work conceived by Guaman Poma was both a history of ancient Andean and Inca times (the "new chronicle") and a treatise on colonial reform (the "good government") which would combine Inca social and economic organization with European religious culture and technical advances.  Guaman Poma called his book a "new" chronicle because he knowingly contradicted many established sources on matters of Inca and conquest political history in order to put forward arguments about the rights of native Andeans to hegemony over their own territories.

He framed his outcry against injustice and his formal plans for imperial reform on the basis of his concern over various sources of native suffering.  Three of these were particularly important to him.  The first was the steep population decline among Andeans through miscegenation, abusive treatment from the colonists and disease.  The second was the genocidal character of the massive deportations of forced indigenous labor to the mercury and silver mines at Potosi and Huancavelica.  The final calamity which he catalogued with bitterness concerned the campaigns of "extirpation of idolatries" of Francisco de Avila in Huarochiri.  These large-scale campaigns, organized in 1610 to end the adherence of Andeans to traditional beliefs, terrorized the native citizenry and ruthlessly confiscated their properties.  To unmask the excesses of colonialism and to defend the cultural and historical dignity of his race were the literary tasks to which Guaman Poma applied himself.  Thus, the features of chronicle, the catechism and social satire come together in the Nueva coronica and render inadequate any single generic classification that might be proposed.

With the discovery of the Nueva coronica, a whole new perspective on Andean culture came into being.  Here was a document that offered an indigenous Andean perspective on conquest and colonization and, more importantly, a knowledge of Andean and Inca society that most European chroniclers, and even some famous Peruvian-born writers like El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, could not duplicate.  As John V. Murra observed nearly twenty years ago, the Nueva coronica y buen gobierno is a "source of basic information about Andean institutions available nowhere else."

There is no better way to demonstrate the variety on information available than to sample a few of Guaman Poma's extraordinary pictures which cover the gamut and range of historical and anthropological subject matter.  With regard to the traditional Andean way of life, Guaman Poma's pictures document a comprehensive view of the agricultural cycle and its coordination with the ritual calendar, the division of labor by sex and age, and the various ethnic groups which had been incorporated into the Inca empire.  There are also hundreds of drawings that depict events in Peru from the time of the Spaniards' arrival.  The bitterness of the colonial experience and visions of a utopian Andean world-to-be dominate the expressive and imaginative pictures of the Good Government.

All in all, Guaman Poma offers a vision of a lost Andean empire and a people, in all their cultural dimensions, that will remain evergreen because of the nobility of the mind and spirit of one who knew how to capture it.