La Florida del Inca and the Struggle for Social Equality in Colonial Spanish America

Introduction

Among the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish chroniclers who contributed signi¤cantly to popular images about the New World was the world’s original Amerindian-Spanish (mestizo1 ) historian and literary writer, El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539–1616) (Castanien v). He authored several works, of which La Florida del Inca (1605) stands out because of its unique Amerindian and European perspectives on the de Soto expedition (1539–1543). Since 2005 marks the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of this important work, it seems appropriate to take another look at La Florida to discover why the book has remained relevant and the object of scholarship for four hundred years. El Inca was born into the original mestizo generation in Peru. He arrived upon the scene just as the New World conquest ended. Because he was half Spanish and half Incan, El Inca lived in two worlds, and he loved them both. He longed to see these two worlds come together into an integrated society. He believed the Spaniards should supervise the society, replacing the Native American’s paganism with Catholic teachings. Otherwise, he wanted the Amerindians to be allowed to live as they had always lived. His writings tell us that throughout his life he struggled to integrate his Spanish and his Inca heritages . He blended the Amerindian perspective and the Spanish perspective into one—the mestizo perspective. As a mestizo, he was connected to the New World natives; he was concerned particularly with changing the subhuman status into which the Europeans had cast them. As El Inca states in his prologue to La Florida del Inca, he set out to give to Introduction 1. El Inca states, “así nos llaman en todas las Indias Occidentales a los que somos hijos de español y de India o de indio y española” (292) (“thus throughout the West Indies they call us who are children of a Spaniard and an Indian woman or of an Indian and a Spanish woman”; 134). the world a historical accounting about the Adelantado Hernando de Soto and “caballeros españoles e indios”(254) (“heroic Spanish and Indian cavaliers”; 12) in the de Soto expedition.2 When he began La Florida del Inca, he concentrated not upon literature and style but upon the Spanish experiences in the New World and upon presenting what the Native Americans had been, were, and could become. Soon his outstanding literary talents burst through and, in spite of his intentions, his work became known as a New World Spanish classic (Varner 360; Menéndez y Pelayo 76–77). His writings, written in the contemporary Renaissance style, became characterized as literary art (Varner xxxiv). La Florida del Inca reveals, in a general sense, emotions, struggles, and con-®icts experienced by those who participated in the grandiose adventure into La Florida. When El Inca began writing in 1585, he was the world’s only mestizo writer and the only American-born writer (Castanien v; Clayton xxii). His SpanishInca heritage and his childhood provided him perspectives that Spanishheritage writers could not possess, giving him a uniqueness among chroniclers that has been recognized through the centuries. Incidents and experiences in his childhood in Peru gave him characters, scenes, and language to supplement what he learned about the de Soto expedition. He knew Gonzalo Silvestre, the informant for the Florida narrative, in Cuzco. He knew about de Soto because de Soto joined Francisco Pizarro in the Peruvian conquest in 1531, eight years before El Inca was born. El Inca’s interest in converting the inhabitants of La Florida to Catholicism, viii / Introduction 2. All quotations from La Florida del Inca will appear in Spanish and English. The Spanish quotations are from an edition published in 1960 as part of a collection of El Inca’s works entitled Obras completas, edited by Carmelo Saenz de Santa María. This edition is valuable because it is the same as the original edition published in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1605. I was able to verify this by comparing the edition with a 1982 edition, edited by Sylvia-Lynn Hilton, which is a facsimile of the original. Except for an updated orthography, the texts are the same. Quotations from El Inca’s other works are also from the Obras completas. All English quotations from La Florida are from The De Soto Chronicles, edited by Clayton, Knight, and Moore. This two-volume set contains English translations of all four of the chronicles about the de Soto expedition, including La Florida...