Allies at Odds: The Andean Church and its Indigenous Agents, 1583-1671

1: The Making of a Literate Andean Society

13 Chapter 1 The Making of a Literate Andean Society Images of Andean Literacy In 1588, Bartolomé Álvarez, the padre doctrinero of the pueblo of Aullagas in the southern diocese of los Charcas, penned a lengthy memorial to Philip II in which he decried the havoc that literate Indians were creating in the native parishes of his district. Álvarez stated that “indios ladinos” did not apply their Spanish-language skills and positions of authority to teach Christian doctrine to native parishioners, as royal law had prescribed. Instead, they used their knowledge of Spanish writing and colonial law to bring complaints against parish priests: To grasp the [ladinos’] bad intentions look no further than to the designs of the Indian who wants to be a “letrado,” but only to make lawsuits, without having the proper studies. If you were to ask him about Christian doctrine, he wouldn’t know the law of God, or understand the catechism, or how to recite it. . . . The ladinos have not profited from the Spanish language or the Christian doctrine they have learned in the homes of priests, except to be worse than the other Indians and interpreters of their own aims and our ruin.1 In the priest’s formulation, “their aims” meant the commitment to lawsuits rather than to Christian doctrine, and “our ruin,” the destroyed reputations of good priests and, by extension, the survival of the Andean idolatries that the ladinos and native church personnel were supposed to combat. Álvarez invoked a colonialist form of reasoning, according to which the souls of innocent neophytes were at stake and should be protected from the bad example of ladino Indians no matter what the cost. 14 Chapter 1 Álvarez was not alone in expressing unease about the spread of Hispanic language and customs in the Indies and about the Indians who were familiar with the ways of the Spanish. Andeans educated in colonial law and Spanish letters had special powers both to aid the cause of Christianity and to advance personal or anticlerical agendas. Contests for supremacy between priests and literate Andeans were an everyday part of native parish life, in which native literacy of the religious domain came into dramatic conflict with that of the political. The clergy’s concern about how to direct the linguistic and social action of indios ladinos toward the goal of evangelizing Indians and away from litigious pursuits formed part of a heated polemic in missionary writings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The recurring trope of the acculturated yet disloyal native intermediary hints at an elusive problem at the core of Spanish missionary drives: alphabetic literacy and its uncertain place in the evangelization program. Álvarez’s condemnation of the ways educated Andeans used Spanish and written documents recasts the story of evangelization as one in which Indians were historical agents and not simply passive victims of Spanish designs. His account also points out a contradiction in colonial writings on the topic of native literary practice. Generally speaking, historical sources of the period did not represent Indians as writers, however incompetent or misguided they might have been in the eyes of some. In fact, missionary chroniclers attributed the Andeans’ so-called delayed evolution and immorality to the absence of an alphabetic writing system. The Jesuit historian Bernabé Cobo summed up this view: “[The Indians’] capacity of understanding is so dull and clouded . . . because they lack the letters, sciences, and fine arts that tend to cultivate, perfect, and make it quicker and livelier in its operations and reasoning powers.”2 Spanish historians of the South American conquest belabored the Indians’ puzzlement when they confronted written words, the canonical instance being Inca Atahualpa’s confusion at Cajamarca and ultimate rejection of the authority contained in holy books. The native peoples’ supposed repudiation of literacy empowered Europeans to assert the relative “barbarism” of Andean cultures against the standard of Christian Europe and therefore the legitimacy of Spanish military and spiritual conquest. Consistent with colonial reports of this type, today’s histories of early modern communication have emphasized the “tyranny of the alphabet”: the role of alphabetic literacy in the erasure of traditional native forms of The Making of a Literate Andean Society 15 representation, the transformation of indigenous cultural domains, and the consolidation and maintenance of Spanish power.3 The idea that Indians perceived writing as foreign has prompted gainful research on alternative native literacies or ways of encoding memory...