Forgotten Territorialities: The Materiality of Indigenous Pasts

The research produced on colonial Latin America in the last two decades by scholars trained in language and literature departments shows dramatic differences in comparison to what was previously produced in the field. Since the early 1980s, these scholars have been building, slowly but effectively, a corpus of works that shows a higher degree of awareness of the complexity of colonial situations.¹ These changes were acknowledged by Rolena Adorno in a 1988 article, where she describes what she first calls a paradigm shift— cambio de paradigma (11)—and later an “emergence of certain new practices and priorities”—aparición de ciertas prioridades y prácticas nuevas (12). That shift consists mainly of two theoretical moves: first, a change of focus from literature to discourse; second, a growing concern for the problematic of the Other (11). This means that practitioners in the field of colonial Latin American literature stopped worrying about the celebration of the literary value of texts and focused, instead, on the diversity of discourses that characterize a colonial situation (14). Such a shift of focus is related to the theoretical move proposed by Walter Mignolo (e.g., 1992, 810; 1991), that consists of distinguishing between a canon and a corpus-oriented research. For Mignolo (1989a), a study of the totality of texts (be they written in European alphabetic systems or not) produced under colonial situations is mandatory if one wants to account for, and understand properly, a colonial situation. In his opinion, one should talk about colonial semiosis (the totality of symbolic messages and exchanges in colonial situations) instead of colonial discourse—an expression that limits the corpus to verbal messages, whether oral or written. One of the consequences of the move he proposed was the incorporation of maps, amoxtllis, kipus, and other objects that served as material support for symbolic messages, into the research agenda of colonial Latin American studies produced by members of language and literature departments (see Mignolo 1989b and 1992, among many others).

The incorporation of nondiscursive sign systems, in addition to the emergence of a series of studies focusing on authors of indigenous descent—such as Guaman Poma, Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui, and Titu Cusi Yupanqui from the Andean region, as well as the publication of Fernando Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s work and a reassessment of the Popol Vuh and the Relaciones geográficas, from Mesoamerica—and the appearance of new studies on women writers—besides the already canonical Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz—are symptoms of the so-called paradigm shift in colonial Latin American studies. According to both Adorno (1988) and Mignolo (1992), all this results in a new situation in the field characterized by the incorporation of the indigenous, female, and other non-European/nonpatriarchal perspectives to the scholarship produced within the boundaries of the discipline. All this progress toward a less colonized view of colonial times is undeniable. However, it is my contention that there is still a lot of work to do, if one’s goal is to produce a more complete picture of colonial semiosis.

One of the issues that needs attention is the dearth of studies on colonial situations in territories occupied by Amerindians who did not organize their societies around a state. Most works published in the area have as their object the texts produced about (and sometimes, although less frequently, by) the indigenous cultures usually considered the most “developed”: the Inca, the Maya, and the Mexica or Aztec. As a consequence, the geographic areas favored by a high percentage of the research in the field of Latin American colonial studies are Mesoamerica and the Andes. Other geographic areas and peoples are thus, more often than not, neglected. The vast majority of scholars trained in language and literature departments do not pay much attention to the existence of, for example, Guarani culture—despite the fact that it covered an enormous expanse of land and that its members outnumbered most of the other Amerindian...