Legitimation, Self-Censorship, and Fatherhood: Garcilaso Inca and Diego de Vargas

Through new archival research, this article breaks the silence of Garcilaso Inca (1539-1616) about his fatherhood. It does so by reconstructing the legitimation of his son Diego de Vargas (1582­–1652) undertaken to attain ecclesiastical ordination thanks to his status as a foundling, an abandoned newborn who never knew his parents' identities and who was to be admitted to orders, not on a genealogical basis but exclusively on his own merit measured by his education and practice of virtue. Diego's successful legitimation forced him and Garcilaso to live without acknowledging their parental ties. This study demonstrates that Garcilaso's social circumspection became in his writings a self-censorship of his paternity, but its presence makes his translation of the Diálogos de amor a personal meditation on paternal love. The analysis also contends that Diego's legitimation quietly informs the author's comments in the Comentarios on Inca pedagogical policy, his narrative of his own father and the rebuttal of those chroniclers who attacked Diego de Almagro for being a foundling. It finally argues that Garcilaso extrapolated the criteria of the merit-based legitimation of his son onto his opinions about nobility and education, and onto his interpretation of the topic of arms and letters.