Beyond the Lettered City: Indigenous Literacies in the Andes

3. The Indigenous Lettered City

The Indigenous Lettered City The Spanish colonial social formation, writes Ángel Rama using a stunningly apposite metonym, can be best comprehended as a “lettered city,” a baroque edifice dedicated to the civilizing mission , within which architectural, administrative, political, and social practices were consolidated and ordered in relation to an ideology grounded in the primacy of the written word and the power of pens wielded in the service of empire (1996 [1984], 17). The preeminence of letters as a basis for empire filled a number of crucial functions. The administration of a world-wide empire, stretching from the Philippines to South America, could only be accomplished through the creation of far-flung networks of literate communication connecting Madrid to its colonies (ibid., 19; Elliott 1970).The lettered city was also central to the evangelizing project of the church—a textual community created around the holy scriptures—as well as to the intellectual formation of a creole elite (Rama 1996 [1984], 19–20), establishing as it did the absolute ascendancy of the Spanish language and of alphabetic communication over Native American tongues and systems of inscription and legitimizing Spanish for ensuring the spiritual welfare of humanity (Mignolo 1995; Pagden 1982). Within this system, documents were worth more than simply their contents. They became objects subject to ritual manipulation, operating as symbolic representations of the colonizing project. Patricia Seed (1995) argues that the symbolic primacy of the written word in Spanish 3 114 • • • chaPter 3 America was unique among the European colonial powers of the time. Unfortunately , Seed makes the mistake of focusing exclusively on the ceremony surrounding the reading of the requerimiento, the statement read in Castilian to indigenous populations at the moment of conquest, whose purpose was to absolve Spain of responsibility for the consequences of invasion by reframing conquest as a just war in the service of the introduction of Christianity . Given that the requerimiento represents only a fleeting moment of initial contact and that we have no documentation of its use in the highlands of the New Kingdom of Granada, it is perhaps not the best example of the Spanish fetishization of the written word. However, the requerimiento is but one of a series of ritual acts connected to literacy that were aimed at consolidating the hegemony of the lettered city in the centuries after conquest. The drawing of maps prior to the founding of cities, the ritualized reading of written documents in the course of ceremonies granting possession of plots to individuals, and the ritual manipulation of royal decrees by colonial functionaries are better illustrations of how the continuous performance of literacy begat power in the Spanish colonies. With literacy operating simultaneously as symbol and as the crystallization of an ideology of domination, the exercise of power was determined by the control of writing by letrados—the religious pedagogues and secular jurists entrenched in the upper reaches of the colonial bureaucracy. But even more so, the lettered city was maintained by notaries and their minions, who penned the numerous legal documents that oiled the Spanish bureaucratic machine. The latter were instrumental in the perpetuation of empire, functioning as the “documentary umbilical cord” between the metropolitan center and its colonial possessions (Rama 1996 [1984], 22, 33–34). These midlevel officials were ubiquitous in daily life. They were present at all trials. They certified the authenticity of a broad range of documentation that was written by nonspecialists. They were familiar with the legal formulas necessary for producing acceptable petitions, wills, and contracts. Thus, notaries not only created a bridge between the Crown and its colonial possessions, but also between the colonial administration and its subjects, whether they be aristocratic Spaniards, African slaves, or indigenous caciques. Native Peoples and the Lettered City The Spanish empire was characterized by a particular hierarchical character based on language and ancestry—we are loathe to refer to race in a colonial the indigenouS lettered city • • • 115 context that preceded the advent of “scientific” racial classification in the nineteenth century (Lewis 2003; Poole 1997). Rama (1996 [1984], 31) blames the lettered city for creating a form of colonial diglossia in which two kinds of languages coexisted parallel to one another: an elite, lettered, and rigidly codified discourse on the one hand, and a popular, quotidian, and fluid idiom on the other. Social hierarchy was replicated in a cultural stratification founded in notions of ancestry that divided the colonial administration into two republics, the Rep...