The increase in the Spanish and criollo urban population and the native’s demographic collapse broke the original balance between the needs of colonizers and the indigenous economy to satisfy them, which supported the encomienda system. The result was the emergence of the first estancias (farms juridically different from the encomienda) around the land of the encomenderos, one of which was acquired by Rodríguez Freile. In other words, the author of El carnero found his economical opportunity with the breakup of the encomendero power. And since by then the indigenous were not able to make a living by solely cultivating the small land of their resguardos, they were compelled to work in the Spaniards’ and criollos’ farms. This was very probably Rodríguez Freile’s source of labor for his own estancia. These farms, once Spanish legislation made it easier to secure an indigenous labor force, were able to create a type of agricultural unit capable of supplying the cities and mining centers in and outside the Santafé de Bogotá area with cereals, dairy products, and root vegetables.
These intricacies of the social inequalities among Spaniards, criollos, poor mestizos, and the indigenous are totally erased in Rodríguez Freile’s self-portrait as an estanciero, an erasure that has been preserved by most nineteenth- and twentieth-century readings of El carnero. This is evident when Rodríguez Freile, paraphrasing the Latin poet Horace and resorting to a literary trope known as beatus ille (praising the charms and simplicity of country life), proudly proclaims:
Fortunate is the man who, far away from business, and with modest assets, quietly and peacefully retires; he whose nourishment is assured by the fruits of the land that he cultivates, because, as virtuous as mother nature is, it produces them; fortunate is the one who does not expect his reward from the hands of greedy and tyrannical men. (Chapter 21)
El carnero, Its Commentators and the Indigenous Subject
The scholarly attention given to this text has stemmed in two opposite directions. On the one hand, historians such as Juan Friede, David Brading, Germán Colmenares, Julián Vargas Lesmes, and Martha Herrera Ángel – among others – have great confidence in El carnero’s referential value. This is evident in the frequent consultations they make of it in order to illustrate historical characters as well as colonial society, politics, and culture involving both Iberian newcomers and native subjectivities. Literary critics, on the other hand, tend to dismiss or downplay El carnero’s referentiality and have popularized the text’s current reputation as a work of fictional, impudent narratives comprising part of the Latin American literary canon. They are also the only ones who have studied the text as a whole. Most literary studies, however, have been overly concerned with El carnero’s typological nature and with elucidating its place in that discursive formation called (European) literature. Conversely they have paid less attention to the cultural milieu in which the author lived and wrote his text, a propensity which has allowed them to overlook, for instance, the significance of the indigenous population among which the author lived and its impact in the composition and assessment of his work.
Even though scholarly approaches to colonial texts during the last quarter of a century have been altered, often with interesting results, by postmodern cultural theories (particularly cultural studies, postcolonial studies, feminism, queer theory, and subaltern studies), most studies of El carnero have not been affected by these changes. They have been faithful to the parameters of literary appreciation and have overlooked the “colonial situation” in which the text was produced, that is, the condition under which an invading European and Christian minority controlled and profited from a non-European, non-Christian majority (as Walter Mignolo explains in the Preamble to this volume). With this prevailing literary approach, the presence of the indigenous people and the author’s relation to them are missed; also missed is the regimen of colonial servitude to which the former were subjected.
Despite the visibility of the indigenous in Rodríguez Freile’s daily life and society, he managed to define El carnero exclusively as a history of Europeans and Euro- Americans: “I wanted, as best as I could, to inform others about the conquest of this New Kingdom, about what happened between the time when its first Conquistadors settled it until the present time of writing, the year 1636” (Chapter 1); he then marginalized the indigenous subjectivity by means of a controlled and denigrating representation of it: “I have wanted to say all of this so that it would be understood that the Indians are capable of committing any evil act, that they kill men to rob them … I say all of this lest you let your guard down with them” (Chapter 16).
El carnero makes frequent references to the indigenous as servants throughout the text, or as a precious commodity (workforce), whose demographic decline threatens the material well-being of Spaniards and criollos. From the start, Rodríguez Freile laments the fact that there are still huge quantities of precious metals to be unearthed and taken to Spain, but there are not enough Indians to do it: “Many more and greater treasures could have been taken, as was necessary, had it not been for the lack of natives” (“Prologue to the reader”). Rodríguez Freile also gives the indigenous ample narrative space on five occasions. However, in all of them they are presented as either a flawed culture that needs to live under Spanish rule, as a people unworthy of good treatment by Spaniards or criollos, as individuals who hold riches they do not need or deserve, or as a threat to the security and development of colonial society.
Those first two (of five) instances are: (1) his account of the pre-Hispanic Muisca culture and civil wars (Chapters 2 through 7), in which the indigenous are represented as incapable of self-government and unable to manage their accumulated resources, including the fertile land they occupied; and (2) the resistance of the Pijao groups (a “perverse pestilence,” as the author calls them) and the military campaign against them led by Juan de Borja with the purpose of securing the commercial routes between the New Kingdom of Granada and Peru (Chapter 19). The theme of the plunder and theft of gold allows Rodríguez Freile to elaborate two main stories. In the first one (3) a defiant shaman, who persists in his native religious rituals, is tricked, and his golden idols are taken by a Catholic priest who specializes in stealing the natives’ riches on the pretext of evangelization. He “took from him 4,000 pesos in gold which the shaman had as offering in an altar” (Chapter 5). In the second story (4), a “thieving Indian” already integrated into colonial society as a servant of a priest named Reales (who treats him well by allowing him to dress in silk and carry a blade) takes advantage of his master’s trust and snatches gold from the royal offices, among many other thefts. After being caught, “he confessed his crimes and was condemned to being burned alive, a sentence that was carried out in the central plaza” (Chapter 16).
The final story (5) deals with the threat of indigenous subversion. Don Diego de Torres, cacique (chief)