CRASSH

Abstracts

Kathryn Burns (University of North Carolina, Chapel-Hill, USA)
The Quilcaycamayoq: Making Indigenous Archives in Colonial Cuzco

One of the best-known drawings in Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s obra maestro depicts an Andean notary seated at a table, rosary before him, writing in Spanish.  Guaman Poma labels him an “escribano de cabildo, nombrado de Su M[ajesta]d”: a royally-sanctioned notary, presumably of his town council.  Yet he is also labeled in Quechua as “quilcaycamayoc” or “paper-keeper”—a usage that suggests a connection between this kind of writer and the quipucamayoc who kept the knotted cords of Andeans’ records.  The scholarship on the colonial Andes tends to overlook this intriguing figure.  How did he relate to the intricate templates and the habitus of the “lettered city”?  Angel Rama, who coined the useful phrase, stressed “letrados’ drastic exclusivity and strict concentration in urban centers” (Rama 1996: 23).  In my presentation, however, I piece together evidence from Viceroy Toledo’s ordenanzas of the 1570s, chronicles, and Cuzco’s archives that hints at a much broader extension of the conceptual “lettered city” by the late 1500s—beyond cities, and into the indigenous towns and parishes of the Andean countryside.  I argue that the “quilcaycamayoc” or indigenous Andean notary played a key part in this extension.  Just whose interests the Andean notary served, though, is far from clear.  Francisco de Toledo wanted him and his kind to redirect Andeans’ writing away from the legal arena (e.g., petitions for justice) and toward the afterlife: specifically, toward wills and the fine points of inheritance.  There’s evidence that Andean notaries did indeed make out indigenous parishioners’ wills.  But they also seem to have done more for their communities, and to have remained fully engaged in the legal arena.

John Charles (Tulane University, USA)
Trained by Jesuits: Indigenous Letrados in Seventeenth-Century Peru

This paper takes as its starting point the images of cultural and religious assimilation traditionally applied to graduates of the Colegio del Príncipe, the Archbishopric of Lima’s Jesuit school for the sons of noble lords, which was inaugurated in 1619 at the behest of King Philip III. The school’s purpose was to educate an elite class of indigenous functionaries who would go on to assist Spanish authorities in the governance and evangelization of Peru’s native peoples. However, former students of the colegio often developed personalized approaches to Christian practice that responded to circumstances and necessities not always consistent with the expectations and goals of royal and church officialdom. As overseers of native conduct in highland villages, the Andean nobles cultivated and exploited their close relationship with the Jesuit order, but they also kept Lima authorities at bay by defending local religious and economic prerogatives through the Spanish legal system. Evidence of this more complicated story can be found in legal papers drafted by El Príncipe alumni that grew out of the Lima see’s extirpation-of-idolatries campaigns of the seventeenth century. “Trained by Jesuits” intends to examine indigenous access to legal knowledge and the debates surrounding native literary activity that this access generated in local native communities and the Lima capital. By what historical processes did Jesuit-trained activists come to intervene as litigants in Spanish tribunals? What were the outcomes of that intervention? And what was the Society of Jesus’s attitude toward indigenous legal knowledge and the place of that knowledge in colonial society at large? By reconstructing the itineraries of these activists and their dealings with Jesuit priests, I hope to provide some answers to these questions and provoke others along the way. The array of positions that native elites adopted in response to Spanish colonial policies and practices allows us to understand the experience of lettered Andeans as one sometimes at odds with the image of “Christian example” that published missionary sources ascribed to them.

Alan Durston (York University, Canada)
Cristóbal Choquecasa, Francisco de Avila, and the Huarochirí Manuscript

My paper will examine a triangle of relationships involving (1) the anonymous Huarochirí Manuscript (c. 1600), the only extant indigenous-language account of Andean religion and history, (2) Francisco de Avila, a secular priest and extirpator of idolatries, and (3) the indigenous nobleman Cristóbal Choquecasa. Avila began his career as a parish priest in Huarochirí, a province in the central highlands of Peru, and was directly involved in the creation of the Huarochirí Manuscript, on the basis of which he began to compose his own treatise on Andean idolatry. It may also have been instrumental for his spectacular success as an extirpator. Avila’s relationship with his parishioners was not a tranquil one and he found an important local ally in Cristóbal Choquecasa. To help Avila in a legal battle Choquecasa penned a Quechua petition on the basis of which John H. Rowe and others have proposed that he also wrote the Huarochirí Manuscript.

Since the identification is by no means universally accepted, my paper will summarize the arguments for Choquecasa as scribe and even author of the Huarochirí Manuscript. I will also use the textual, linguistic, and historical evidence to reflect on Choquecasa’s position as an indigenous intellectual working closely (perhaps at considerable risk to himself) with a priest who exploited this relationship to further his own ecclesiastical career. An exploration (however tentative) of Choquecasa’s experiences and motivations may be key for our understanding of the Huarochiri Manuscript and of Andean alphabetic discourses more broadly.

Juan Carlos Estenssoro (Université Lille III, France)
Usos indígenas de la heráldica en los Andes (siglos XVI-XVIII) 

La labor intelectual es asociada principalmente a la escritura. Sin embargo, muchas manifestaciones de la cultura letrada exceden la palabra escrita como es el caso de la heráldica, entendida en la Edad Moderna como un discurso por excelencia aristocrático y altamente codificado. Las poblaciones indígenas americanas la utilizaron abundantemente para representarse a sí mismas pero no constituyendo una suerte de código independiente y paralelo a la heráldica de tradición hispana (que algunos podrían en tal caso calificar de seudo-heráldica) sino en diálogo y con el reconocimiento y aceptación incluso de la Corona castellana. Se trata pues de un lenguaje compartido que no dejó por ello de ser utilizado de modo transgresor. La presente ponencia busca dar cuenta de las diversas formas de apropiación del discurso heráldico empleadas por indígenas en los Andes tanto para lograr un reconocimiento social como para reformular el pasado (próximo o lejano), poniendo especial énfasis en dar cuenta de los elementos de diálogo con los usos hispanos coloniales del sistema heráldico.

María Elena Martínez (University of Southern California, USA)
Power, Knowledge, and History: Indigenous Intellectuals and Genealogical Discourses in New Spain and Peru

This paper examines the ways in which early modern Spanish notions of popular sovereignty, which emphasized the idea of a pact between king and kingdom, became central not just to Spanish and creole political thought but within many indigenous communities of central Mexico and Peru. In the latter, for example, the idea was conveyed in paintings which depict the king of Spain as a descendant of the Inca rulers. In New Spain, the notion of a communal pact with the Castilian crown was expressed in legal documents as well as in pictorial histories, títulos primordiales, and other documents intended mainly for an internal audience. My paper will explore the meanings of this notion, the discourse of vassalage it was linked to, and the ways it was used by indigenous intellectuals (community officials, painters, and historians) in Mexico and Peru. By exploring these questions, the paper seeks to expand currents scholarly understandings of the role of indigenous intellectuals in molding social relations, collective identities, and ideas regarding native communities’ moral and political relationship to a distant king. 

 
Gabriela Ramos (University of Cambridge, UK)
Indigenous Intellectuals and the Problem of Knowledge in the Colonial Andes

This paper examines the various faces of indigenous intellectuals in the main Andean colonial cities, Cuzco and Lima, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The following issues are discussed: first, the extent to which a comparison between New Spain and the Andes is helpful to understand the conditions that allowed for the emergence of indigenous intellectuals and their specific characteristics in each region; second, through the study of several cases found in Andean colonial cities, the paper examines the areas in which Andean indigenous intellectuals were involved, and the way in which their activities contributed to create, disseminate and reinterpret both local and European forms of knowledge. The third and last section of the paper examines the case of a Jesuit house of study for non-elite Indian men in the city of Cuzco and compares this experience against that of indigenous intellectuals who had no institutional support.

Susan Schroeder (Tulane University, USA)
Chimalpahin and Why Women Matter 

Indigenous and mestizo chroniclers have tended to give women short shrift in their histories, always emphasizing the grand accomplishments of the men of Mesoamerica. The seventeenth-century Nahua annalist Chimalpahin is the exception; indeed, it would appear that his history of Amecameca was written largely to exalt the primacy of women’s lineages in maintaining the integrity of the altepetl. For Chimalpahin, there was no difference between the rulerships of Queen Isabel and her daughters and those of the noblewomen of Chalco and Mexico Tenochtitlan. Yet women of all sorts are included in his histories, and he labors to give them their due, showing how greatly their were esteemed.

John Frederick Schwaller (State University of New York, Potsdam, USA)
The Public Intellectual in Texcoco: From Nezahualcoyotl and Nezahualpilli to Fernando and Bartolomé Alva Ixtlilxochitl

Michael Swanton (Universidad Autónoma ‘Benito Juárez’ de Oaxaca, Mexico)
Chocholtec Men of Letters during Spanish Colonial Rule

The sixteenth-century consolidation of Spanish colonial rule profoundly affected the social organization of Chocholtec people (Xru Ngiwa), an indigenous population located in the northern portion of the Mixteca, in what is today the Mexican state of Oaxaca. This consolidation involved the introduction of new forms of governance and authority which, principally through the cabildo, articulated the Chocholtec and other indigenous communities with Spanish alcaldes mayores, the Real Audiencia, the viceroy, the Consejo de Indias and the monarch. Alongside this administrative hierarchy was another, intimately related one, the Church, which in the Chocholtec region was often administered by friars of the Dominican order. In the remote Chocholtec communities, the friars and secular clergy were often the most visible, direct and long-lasting contact with the new Spanish rule. The Dominicans’ efforts at religious instruction not only involved the foundation of churches and conventos but also the study and writing of indigenous languages. Drawing on previous work carried out with Mixtec, the friars took this literacy of evangelization to the Chocholtec.

The fiscales and escribanos—occupations that might be exercised by one and the same person—spread Chocholtec alphabetic writing outside the walls of the church and into the cabildo. By the turn of the sixteenth century, these Chocholtec ‘men of letters’ regularly practiced alphabetic writing in their native language and produced hundreds of pages of text, often in the form of testaments, testament books and account books. These writings are our primary source for understanding the role of these local, literate social agents. Through them we can discern community-internal social structure and posit the position of these Chocholtec writers within it. Furthermore, since the Chocholtec testaments include those of many escribanos and fiscales, a window is opened to their kinship relations and material possessions.

This talk will therefore describe the little known Chocholtec-language corpus and discuss what it reveals about the very local literate indigenous actors who played crucial, though often invisible, roles in mediating community interests and the maintenance of the new colonial structures.
 

Camilla Townsend (Rutgers University)
Don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza: Tlaxcalan historan and social commentator

Don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza (or “don Juan Zapata” as his contemporaries generally called him) was a member of the indigenous cabildo of Tlaxcala in the middle of the seventeenth century. Equally importantly in his own mind, he was also the keeper of a set of traditional historical annals. The 200-page document he wrote over the course of his lifetime still survives and is an invaluable text. Tlaxcala had an unusual history, in that the people were able to capitalize exceptionally well on the early aid they gave the Spanish conquerors, and thus lived with fewer Spaniards in their midst than did most other indigenous peoples in seventeenth-century Mexico. As a result, certain customs and usages survived somewhat longer than they did elsewhere, among them the traditional annals genre. Don Juan was part of a relatively extensive network of native intellectuals in the region who each maintained their own sets of annals, largely by copying from each other, and he had much in common with the rest of his cohort. Because, however, he borrowed and commented more extensively than did anybody else within his social world (more, indeed than any other Mexican annalist, excepting only Chimalpahin), his text reveals more of his thinking and assumptions than most sets of annals reveal about their authors. What is most striking is that he evidently had a notion of a pan-Indian, or at least pan-Nahua identity extending beyond his sense of himself as a Tlaxcalan. I do not mean to exaggerate: he was not a visionary or an idealist, and apparently saw the hierarchy within the native world as one of its most important and valuable aspects. But he provides undoubted proof that at least some of the people whom we now define as “indigenous” saw themselves that way as well, and not merely as members of their own altepetls.

Eleanor Wake (Birkbeck, University of London, UK)
“Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are!”* An appraisal of the evidence available to suggest continuity in early colonial Mexico of an indigenous system of registering community lands or local geography based on astronomical observation.

The large corpus of colonial Indian maps produced at the behest of the Spanish Crown or its representatives (mainly the mercedes, or land grants, series of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries) range in style from the more traditional pictographic mode through to rough, barely readable, sketches only recognisable as indigenous through underlying graphic conventions. As is perhaps to be expected, in most cases these maps carry some orientational information, usually in the form of pictorial representations, evidently of European origin, of a rising and setting sun, or a sun and a moon (in both cases, to denote East and West) and/or a corresponding alphabetical gloss. Some examples, however, carry no directional information whatsoever, an omission —as I have argued elsewhere— that points to a prehispanic tradition where a system of geographical orientation or organisation other than that of the four cardinal directions was in use.

This paper will concentrate on a sub-group of indigenous maps within the oriented examples which belong to the sixteenth and very early seventeenth centuries only. Curiously, these earlier examples also use stars —most commonly Polaris and Crux— to orient the viewer thereby suggesting that directional information was based on astronomical observation rather than the abstract, and probably European-introduced, system of the cardinal points. In this sense, the pictorial representations of the Sun, Moon, and stars cease to serve as cartographical signs for the cardinal directions for they in fact portray real celestial bodies as they appear in the sky. Indeed, the haphazard arrangement of these astronomical images on some of maps would also seem to argue that they were not intended to reference a set of fixed directions.

Contemporary Europe certainly used the stars for orientational purposes, especially in maritime navigation, and it is possible that these same stars may have appeared on land maps. However, through use of other available documentation from the Indian hand this paper will question the assumption that the pictorial use of celestial bodies on the maps was a direct result of European influence and convention. Rather, it will argue for a previously established native astronomical system of traversing and registering space, particularly at a local level.

* Rhymes for the Nursery. The Star. Jane Taylor (1783-1827)

Yanna Yannakakis (Emory University, USA)
Indigenous Interpreters: Regimes of Language in Colonial Oaxaca

My paper focuses on the career of Joseph Ramos, a descendant of the Indian conquistadors of the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca, and the first “indigenous” Interpreter General of the colonial district of Villa Alta.  Through the use of Nahuatl as a language of bureaucratic mediation, Ramos participated in a process of legal/administrative domination of the Mixe zone of Villa Alta, a region that neither the Spaniards nor the Mexica before them had conquered militarily.

Ramos served as Interpreter General from 1685-1709.  As a descendant of Indian conquistadors, Nahuatl was his mother tongue, and he was the interpreter of choice for dealings with the Mixe (whose language was Mixe).  Court documents reveal that Mixe municipal officials used spoken Nahuatl to communicate with Spaniards, and Mixe scribes used written Nahuatl to produce official court documents such as wills.  Ramos, in partnership with local Mixe interpreters, used Nahuatl as an intermediary language to translate court testimony given in Mixe.  Using Ramos’ career as a window onto the administration of the Mixe zone, I explore how the region’s ethnically and racially diverse Nahuatl speech community – Dominican friars, creole/mestizo petty traders and bureaucrats, Indian conquistadors, and Mixe elites – effected legal/administrative domination.  This shadow regime persisted into the eighteenth century, about two centuries after Spanish had become the official language for dealings with Indians in most regions of New Spain.

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