Imagining Andean Colonial Culture

Pathways of Memory and Power: Ethnography and History among an Andean People. By Thomas A. Abercrombie. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. xxviii + 603 pp., preface, maps, figures, photos, appendix, glossary, bibliography, index. $60.00 cloth, $27.00 paper.)

Cochabamba, 1550–1900: Colonialism and Agrarian Transformation in Bolivia. Second Edition. By Brooke Larson. Foreword by William Roseberry. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. xxvii + 422 pp., foreword, preface, illustrations, appendix, glossary, bibliography, index. $64.95 cloth, $20.95 paper.)

Idolatry and Its Enemies: Colonial Andean Religion and Extirpation, 1640–1750. By Kenneth Mills. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. xiii + 337 pp., introduction, map, illustrations, glossary, bibliography, index. $72.50 cloth.)

From Two Republics to One Divided: Contradictions of Postcolonial Nationmaking in Andean Peru. By Mark Thurner. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. xiii + 203 pp., preface, bibliography, index. $54.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.)

From 1574 until his death in Madrid in 1590, Don Diego de Torres, the cacique (or hereditary chief) of the Muisca town of Turmequé, near Bogotá, fought a legal battle to regain the rights to his chiefdom, taken from him by members of the Royal Court in a move to block Don Diego's efforts to denounce the multiple abuses that Spanish authorities had committed against the indigenous population there. Don Diego, son of a Spanish conquistador and of the sister of the cacique of Turmequé, was a mestizo who inherited his noble position through the maternal line. An educated, highly literate, and cosmopolitan colonial actor, he produced innumerable legal petitions in impeccable Castilian Spanish and a series of European-style maps, the earliest cartographic documents we know for Colombia. Don Diego traveled twice in his forty years to Spain, was granted royal audiences on multiple occasions, socialized with the cream of Santafé and Madrid society, and married a Spanish woman. Falsely accused of leading a general native rebellion, Don Diego maintained close relations with and spoke for the caciques of the Muisca area as well as maintained contacts with native lords in other parts of what is today Colombia. His contacts, however, ranged beyond the Nuevo Reino de Granada: while in Spain, he served as executor of the will of Diego de Atagualpa, grandson of Atahualpa, the last Inca king.

This sophisticated and prolific man, who moved with ease between indigenous and Spanish society, was not unusual in the colonial Spanish American world. There are figures more well known than Don Diego de Torres, such as Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (1980 [1615]) and El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1967 [1609]), who like their northern Andean colleague problematize the neat distinctions we have traditionally made between indigenous and European worlds in our historical treatments of Latin America. Here are colonial indigenous figures who defy radically polarized interpretations. Don Diego and Garcilaso exemplify mestizos of noble native rank, living in a world in which such appellations were not necessarily intrinsic to individuals but were highly contingent, thus allowing for fluid movement across ethnic categories (Kuznesof 1995; Schwartz 1995). The intimate participation in the "lettered city" (Rama 1996) and in the world of Christian notions of morality and history (Adorno 1986) of Don Diego, Garcilaso, and Guaman Poma belies the stereotype of a hermetically sealed and unchanging colonial indigenous sphere. However, their writings have served anthropologists as grist for ethnographic mills, more than they have served as ethnographic subjects—although they have all been subjects of historical and literary studies (Adorno 1986; González Echevarría 1990; López-Baralt 1988; MacCormack 1991; Pupo-Walker 1982; Rojas 1965; Zamora 1988).

How are we to make sense of these multifaceted individuals who move through the "contact zone" (Pratt 1992) in which cultural codes and practices are disputed and contested by native people and Europeans alike? How can we contextualize their cultural discourses within a colonial system that was not characterized by primordial and discrete cultural categories but where ethnic classifications were explicitly recognized as operating simultaneously as tools for domination and as vehicles for resistance [End...