Contested Territory: Mapping Peru in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

6. Contested Frontiers and the Amazon/Andes Divide

s i x Contested Frontiers and the Amazon/Andes Divide A curious paradox marks Inca and Spanish relations with the tropical lowlands. The Spaniards—unlike the rulers of Tawantinsuyu, for whom a concept of opposition between Andes and Amazon was fundamental to their sense of identity—did not generally articulate such a binary at the time of their arrival in Peru, nor, like the Incas, did they regard the tropical forests in predominantly negative terms.1 Only with the repeated failure of military forays beyond the Andes did the tropical lowlands emerge in Spanish discourse as a coherent entity that stood in opposition (whether positive or negative) to the highland regions. Once established, however, the colonial rupture between Andes and Amazon was considerably more profound than that which had existed under the Incas, who regarded the forest as a realm complementary to that of the highlands. The dualism that emerged in Spanish geographical portrayals was an asymmetric one, for the Amazon regions had come to represent an alien space that lay outside the boundary of dominant colonial identities. It was relevant only as a repository for disruptive elements that threatened the order and security of the consolidated colonial territories.2 The dream of expansion into the Amazon nevertheless endured throughout the colonial period and emerged as a prominent force  in the construction of national self-images and identities in the Republican era.3 In the writings that promoted such expansion, such as the petitions of Juan Recio de León, the solutions to problems that beset colonial (and later also Republican) society in the Andes were to be found in the unexploited territories of the eastern lowlands. Whether as a space of barbarism or as one of natural exuberance and plenty, the Amazon provided discursive counterpoints to the highlands that dramatically revealed the “need” for its conquest and colonization. Despite the prominence of binary oppositions between Andes and Amazon in colonial imaginings, however, these dualisms were also in- flected and modified by portrayals of the eastern piedmont regions that, depending on the commentators’ point of view, either connected or separated the highlands and the tropical lowlands. Just as the histories and geographies of these regions have received relatively scant scholarly attention, so too, the place that the piedmont held in colonial representational practices is often subordinated to an interest in the broad binary oppositions between Andes and Amazon, which structured so many imaginative geographies of the colonial era.4 This chapter, which attempts to go beyond the identification of this fundamental binary, examines diverse portrayals of the colonial frontiers of Charcas and Cuzco (see fig. ) produced by soldiers, missionaries , and colonial officials in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In focusing initially on accounts of sixteenth-century military expeditions , I trace the emergence of profoundly negative portrayals of the piedmont regions, in stark contrast with idealized visions of the Amazon lowlands, and illustrate how the idea of the piedmont as a hostile barrier was reinforced by the writings of missionaries and colonial officials . In the second half of the chapter I discuss the fact that in numerous seventeenth-century writings, the piedmont appears instead as a promising gateway to the Amazon regions and, indeed, as a territory that connected rather than divided the highlands and lowlands. Drawing once again on the work of Rabasa, I establish a connection between these discursive reformulations of the piedmont as a welcoming gateway and the stipulations of the royal ordinances on new explorations and settlements that were issued in .5 The metropolitan production of legislative texts was not, however, the only factor that shaped colonial portrayals of the piedmont. Embodied experiences of these tran-  Contested territory sitional landscapes, the agency and representational practices of indigenous groups, and the enactment of locally and regionally focused rivalries over the colonization of the Amazon all played important roles in the negotiation of these colonial frontiers. Before considering in detail the eastward-bound expeditions that were launched from the southern Andes, it is worth reflecting briefly on Francisco de Orellana’s famous navigation of the Amazon river in Contested Frontiers and the Amazon/Andes Divide  Fig. 10. Southern Peru and the Amazon frontier. ‒. The portrayals of Amazonia that emerged from his expedition reveal some striking parallels and continuities with those of later expeditions. The Orellana Voyage and the Northwestern Amazon Frontier In the wake of the conquest of Peru, the equatorial regions that...