The richness and complexity of Garcilaso’s endeavor – to take on the entire panoply of imperial history that denigrated the Inca and, by extension, other Amerindian civilizations – has not yet been properly assessed. Although the chief villain of his history, the viceroy Toledo, was dead by the time the Commentaries appeared, readers understood that this was not a chronicle, but a formidable rebuttal that showed the refined intelligence of the Incas and the creative capacity of Andean culture. The influence that the Inca’s work had in shaping the European and American imaginary with respect to Inca society as sort of a utopia can never be underestimated. The Royal Commentaries rejoiced and influenced contemporary audiences in Peru and inspired many eighteenth–century encyclopedists and playwrights. It has been reprinted many times and its many and rapid translations into all the major European languages made it a bestseller. It accompanied Tupac Amaru II in dreaming of a more ordered and just world. Despite the fact that the circulation of the book was forbidden by the Spanish authorities, it was always to be found in Bolivar’s tents and San Martín’s luggage. Its readers recognized a monumental recovery of memory and epistemological potential essential to the maintenance of the community of mankind.
By the 1550s it was clear throughout the Spanish–American empire that the idea of evangelizing the Indians had failed rapidly. Between 1567 and 1582 the church held a council in Lima to discuss many matters, including the arrival of the new order: the Jesuits. Among other things it was decided to deny the Indians admission to holy orders and to forbid them from taking communion. The Indians were basically disenfranchised as Catholics. Toledo had put his ordinances in place and the whole Andean world was near collapse, with the demographic catastrophe in full swing. It is conservatively estimated that the population went down from 16 million to 3 million. Exhausted, resistance was no longer possible. Confusion and grief reigned everywhere. People fled their villages and abandoned their families in search of work in the Spanish towns. Guamán Poma seems to have paid very close attention to the proceedings of the Council as well as to all other matters in Peru.
In 1614, when he is about to hand his manuscript to the person who will take it to Spain and hand it either to Philip III or some trusted advisor, Guamán Poma claims to be 80 years old. Most of what we know about him is gleaned from his own auto-biographical presentation as “author” of the Primer Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1516). He claims to be from Lucanas, to be the son of a curaca, or “prince,” as he translates the term into Spanish. He casts himself as servant of the king, a noble Andean Christian who has sought to serve the cause of the king and justice, as a defender of poor Indians in court, as translator and advocate of true Christian causes. For such dedication to the king’s interests he has only received scorn and unjust treatment from the Spaniards, especially the priests, whose main interest is the spoliation of Indian labor and property, not to mention their compulsive desire for Indian women.
Guamán Poma, not unlike Garcilaso, knew Toledo’s work very well. He was surely familiar with Toledo’s Ordenanzas – the viceroy’s legislation over every aspect of human life in the Andes (Castro–Klaren, 2001). In fact his familiarity with the events of the extirpation of idolatries as well as the format of the informaciones – the canvassing of the Andean territory for information useful to the crown – suggests that Guamán Poma may have been a translator for Spanish extirpators, magistrates, priests, and other letrados. His familiarity with Christian doctrine is firm and well grounded. There is no doubt that Guamán Poma was endowed with a powerful mind and an indefatigable thirst for knowledge, for he seems to have heard of every argument and piece of information animating the polemic of the American Indian and his political and intellectual right to rule the land of his ancestors.
His Corónica or extended letter to the king (of 908 pages) is surprisingly critical of the Incas. He would agree with the Toledo Circle in claiming that the Incas were only recent rulers who, through conquest and tyranny, expanded their original Cuzco holdings into the huge territory of the Tahuantinsuyo. Guamán Poma even denies that the Incas were originally from Cuzco. But in a crafty redeployment of Las Casas, Guamán Poma proposes that the land and government of Peru be given back – restituted–to the Indians, that is to say to the curacas or ethnic lords, like his family, not the descendants of the Incas. On this other matter he was squarely against the Toledo Circle, and that included Acosta.
Guamán Poma’s account of universal time is even more surprising, as he not only tries to find the point to link Amerindian time to biblical unilinear time, but pushes back Andean time deeply into four pre–Inca epochs. New research into the differences that account for the passage of time in the Andes and the events concerning Inca rule and the making of the Tahuantinsuyo shows that some of the discrepancies among the cronistas are due to the fact that they interviewed different Inca panacas or came into contact with different ethnic accounts (Rostworowski, 1987). In this light it is clear that Guamán Poma offers an account of time and history that not only differs substantially, but is in fact at odds with the Cuzco accounts prominent in Garcilaso de Vega, Inca and Juan de Betanzos, for instance. The four ages that Guamán Poma figures preceded Inca times postulate about a million years after Adam (Brading, 1991: 150). He begins the history of the New World with the arrival of Noah sometime after the universal flood. The four ages tell of a human cultural development that precedes the arrival of Manco Capac – the first Inca and cultural hero – and accounts for most of Andean cultural developments: agriculture, cities, laws, and the building of fortresses. Brading notes that the evolutionary development in Guamán Poma is reminiscent of that advanced by Cicero and redeployed by Las Casas (1991: 150–1).
Guamán Poma’s boldness never ceases to amaze his readers, given the climate of orthodoxy and censorship in both Spain and the colonies. Not content with having grafted Andean time onto biblical time by having found the common and universal phenomenon of the flood, the khipukamayuc advances the notion that Andean civilization is actually a forerunner of Christianity. This idea is also advanced by Garcilaso. Although it is not possible to know how Guamán Poma came to learn the details of the Spanish controversy on the American Indians (Adorno, 1986), it is clear in the text that he nimbly uses the natural law argument developed by Las Casas and Vitoria in order to argue that in pre–Hispanic society, people were organized and governed by the reason of natural law. Andean peoples led virtuous lives, as they followed their own laws and the Devil was not anywhere to be seen, except in the person and life of some of the Collas, or Inca queens. There is no doubt that even in this account of Andean pre–Christian virtue, which defies the consensus reached in Spain about the Indian’s immaturity (as in Kant’s immaturity also), Guamán Poma feels “safe.” It may be that he is aware of the fact that his portrayal of the Incas as usurpers and tyrants coincides with the views sought and propounded by the circle of letrados serving the viceroy Toledo. He must have reasoned that his devastating critique of Spanish colonial rule, coming as it did from a doubly virtuous person, that is, Christian pre–Christian, or a natural intelligence taken to its true telos by the enlightenment of Christianity, would gain him an audience with the king.
If his account of universal history would have seemed outrageous to his contemporaries had they had a chance to read it – the manuscript got lost and was not read until 1911 – his daring to give advice to the king of Spain on how to govern so as to save his soul is as admirable as it is laughable. In one of his now famous drawings he imagines a scene in which he sits next to the king of Spain who, as his pupil, listens to the information and recommendations that Guamán Poma, the good