Saberes hegemónicos y dominio colonial: Los indios en el Gobierno del Perú de Juan de Matienzo (1567) by Germán Morong Reyes (review)

Germán Morong offers a theoretically sophisticated analysis of Juan de Matienzo’s Gobierno del Perú (1567), a key work for understanding the early colonial history of Peru and especially the reforms put in place by viceroy Francisco de Toledo. Matienzo, born in Valladolid, Spain, served as a judge of the chancellery court there for 17 years before being named an oidor of the Audiencia of Charcas in 1558, where he served for roughly the next 20 years. His deep legal experience in Spain would affect his plans for Peru.

Morong’s analysis is guided by three key ideas: one, that Gobierno del Perú is a “systematic discursive effort to reveal, classify and organize the ontological and sociocultural nature of the Indians” based on Aristotelian philosophy, particularly the idea of natural slavery; two, that Matienzo described people of radical alterity, with a “fixed and unchangeable” inferiority; and, three, that the ethnographic writing offered by Matienzo “constitutes a privileged discursive space from which to analyze the construction” of colonial knowledge (23–24). Building on arguments of Walter Mignolo and others, Morong argues that hegemonic Spanish alphabetic writing was deliberately deployed to keep indigenous people out of the “lettered city” and frame them as permanently other (33–35).

Morong puts Matienzo’s work in a Foucaultian framework, that is, in the genre of modern practices of governability. In particular, the detailed plans for resettling native Andeans in reducciones, resettlement towns modeled on those of Castile, where Andeans would be schooled in “policía” and “buen govierno,” constitute an early example of a “positive scheme” of government, designed to control by inculcating good behavior, rather than simply punishing the bad (20). Spaniards believed that only through the sociability of town life could people live a civilized life.

The reducciones were to be self-governed through cabildos elected from among indigenous commoners. Here, Matienzo shared (or fueled) the distrust that Toledo had for the ruling Incas and lower-level indigenous nobility (caciques), denying the former the status of natural lord, and granting it only reluctantly to the latter. Tension between caciques and commoners would be enshrined in the new towns. Yet, these were not dictums created solely for a colonial society: the king’s Spanish subjects, in Spain and the New World, were also expected to abide by these rules for urban life, and the tensions between native nobles and Andean commoners reflected a dynamic similar to that between lords and commoners in Castile.

The historical and ideological context of Matienzo’s work, especially that of the 1550s and 1560s, is also brought to bear. Key to this is Church-state conflict, particularly as seen by Bartolomé de Las Casas who denounced the Spaniards in Peru as tyrants. But following Matienzo, Toledo would famously denounce the Incas as tyrants in order to legitimate the Spanish invasion and conquest. Dating to the medieval era, Hispanic political philosophy decreed that sovereignty originated with God, who granted it to the people collectively. The people then loaned it, but did not permanently alienate it, to their king. This left the people free to reclaim their God-given sovereignty. In an early modern application of international law, Toledo argued that the Inca so tyrannized their people that they were unable to regain their sovereignty, so that the Spanish crown came to their aid and overthrew the Inca. This political theory would be enshrined in the archives of reducciones, as Toledo’s orders were copied and distributed to every new indigenous town.

Originally a 2016 PhD dissertation from the Universidad de Santiago de Chile, the book is occasionally a bit too workmanlike, with many obligatory citations, and overly long digressions in footnotes. Morong’s discussion of the “two republics” draws on older scholarship and seems slightly dated, not taking the Iberian...