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Five SUBALTERN HYBRIDITY? Inca Garcilaso and the Transculturation of Gender and Sexuality in the Comentarios Reales How many must there be in the world who flee from others because they do not see themselves. —Lazarillo de Tormes In this chapter I consider yet another historian writing from the chaupi between two cultures, the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega.1 I am interested in exploring the ‘‘darker side’’ of his ‘‘subaltern’’ identity and the complexities of cultural hybridization in his seminal ‘‘mestizo’’ text, Comentarios reales de los Incas (1609), while weighing the limitations of recent theoretical characterizations of one of Latin America’s founding fathers of counterhegemonic colonial writing.2 The queer neoculturations produced from his chaupi are not unique to the hegemonic early-modern gender and sexual ideology, but are strange to and transgressive of pre-Hispanic Andean gender culture. We must cross the Atlantic yet again to understand what I consider to be one of the most transculturating of the colonial Andean texts and its representation of the Andean third gender. In this chapter, we shall appreciate the full implications of transculturation, of what Moreiras calls the ‘‘war machine’’ and its ideological filtering of cultural practices that produce queer products (‘‘José María Arguedas’’). The tropes of sexuality that originated in Iberia, traveled to the Andes, and misrepresented the unintelligible aspects of Andean gender culture now return to their point of origin in this foundational history of the Incas and of the Spanish Conquest, written by a mestizo, a culturally queer writing subject in the hostile years of imperial Spain.3 As we shall see, the Andean sexual Other is not only misrepresented, but also completely sacrificed in Inca Garcilaso’s effort to mediate between his two cultures. In thinking through the myriad possibilities of subject construction in the mid-to-late sixteenth century, it is provocative to ask what happens when one ‘‘hybrid’’ subject meets another in rhetorical exchanges between Subaltern Hybridity? 231 colonial literatures. Does one recognize himself in the other? This question is not the invention of twenty-first-century scholars, but was also an issue for the early-modern intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic. The Renaissance Spanish picaresque hero Lazarillo de Tormes melancholically expressed this moral dilemma, reproduced as the epigraph to this chapter, in reference to his half-brother’s rejection of his black father, who fled in fear from his own father’s racial identity, which he perceived as anathema. In the context of the pureza de sangre (blood purity) social dynamics of imperial Spain, the issue of race and ethnicity was at the heart of subject construction. Inca Garcilaso was aware of the implications of race, as evidenced by his explicit self-positioning in all of his writings. His self-conscious shaping of a discursive identity appears throughout the Comentarios reales, first in the ‘‘Preface to the Reader,’’ when he declares that his authority to ‘‘comment’’ on other histories and chronicles lies in his being ‘‘a native from the city of Cuzco’’ (4) [natural de la ciudad del Cuzco (5)]. In his ‘‘Notes on the General Language of the Indians of Peru’’ Inca Garcilaso identifies as an Indian —‘‘since I am an Indian’’ (5) [pues soy indio (7)]—and therefore as expert in the linguistic interpretation that becomes one of his most distinguishing attributes as a revisionist historian. Finally, when discussing the ‘‘new generations ’’ of racial combinations in colonial Peru, Inca Garcilaso assumes the name given to him and others of mixed Indian and Spanish blood: The children of Spaniards by Indians are called mestizos, meaning we are a mixture of the two races. The word was applied by the first Spaniards who had children by Indian women, and because it was used by our fathers, as well as on account of its meaning, I call myself by it in public and am proud of it, though in the Indies, if a person is told, ‘‘You are a mestizo,’’ or ‘‘He’s a mestizo,’’ it is taken as an insult. (607) A los hijos de español y de india o de indio y española, nos llaman mestizos, por decir que somos mezclados de ambas naciones ; fue impuesto por nuestros padres y por su significación me lo llamo yo de boca llena, y me honro con él. Aunque en Indias, si a uno de ellos le dicen ‘‘sois un mestizo’’ o ‘‘es un mestizo,’’ lo toman por menosprecio. (Bk. 9, chap. 31, 266) [18...

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