Beyond the Lettered City: Indigenous Literacies in the Andes

Introduction

Introduction From 1574 until his death in Madrid in 1590, Don Diego de Torres, the hereditary chief or cacique 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, or Audiencia, in Santafé de Bogotá in a move to block his efforts to denounce the multiple abuses that Spanish authorities had committed against the indigenous population there. Don Diego, son of a Spanish conquistador and the sister of the cacique of Turmequé, was a mestizo and an educated, highly literate, and cosmopolitan colonial actor who produced innumerable legal petitions in impeccable Castilian Spanish, all signed with a clear and precise hand.1 He was fully aware of the genres through which he should formulate his various texts, and he was conversant enough in the laws of the Indies to address his needs and complaints properly.2 Furthermore, he understood the need for graphic representation as part of his presentation, perhaps in response to the royal questionnaire known as the Relaciones Geográficas of 1571. In his petition presented to the king in 1586, he includes two Europeanstyle maps, made two years before (figures 1 and 2).They form an integral part of Don Diego’s document—he addresses Philip II directly, in word and in image—that voices his hopes that the king would remedy the abuses committed in the areas represented by the maps. One of them represents the indigenous communities and the jurisdiction of the Province of Tunja, in which Turmequé was situated; the other configures the same for Santafé de Bogotá. These are the earliest carto- Figure 1 Map of the province of Tunja, its towns and jurisdiction, artist unknown, ca. 1586, agi/S, mP Panama 7. Ink and paper. Courtesy of Archivo General de Indias, Seville. Figure 2 Map of the province of Santafé, its towns and borders, artist unknown, ca. 1586, agi/S, mP Panama 8. Ink and paper. Courtesy of Archivo General de Indias, Seville. introduction • • • 3 graphic documents we know for Colombia and they were meant to demonstrate in the visual channel the place described in prose in the document, a place where one could still see similar mistreatment—“verlo ocularmente,” as he states—such that “it would require a thick book” (Seria hacer un libro de gran volumen) to describe it all (agi/S 1586b, 232r). Don Diego de Torres turned the pen to two different acts, writing and drawing, but toward a single purpose, the defense of his rights and those of his community. To accomplish this, the cacique of Turmequé did not just send his letters to Spain. Rather, he traveled twice in his forty years to the Royal Court, where he was granted audiences on multiple occasions and where he socialized with the elite of Santafé and Madrid society. While in Spain he married a Spanish woman, to whom he left his estates in the New Kingdom of Granada (agi/S 1633); he also served in Spain as executor of the will of Alonso de Atagualpa, grandson of Atahualpa, the last pre-Hispanic Inca ruler. Accused of leading a general native rebellion in the Bogotá region, Don Diego did not neglect his American subjects; he maintained close relations with most of the caciques of the Muisca area, as well as in other regions of Colombia towhich he traveled.3 Indigenous Peoples and the Lettered City This sophisticated and prolific man, who moved with ease between indigenous and Spanish society, was not altogether unusual in the colonial Spanish American world.Other members of the Andean and Mexican native nobility composed petitions and myriad other documents that are clear indications of the eloquence of the colonial indigenous voice. Among them are figures more well-known than Don Diego de Torres—such as Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (1980 [1616]), Diego Muñoz Camargo (1981 [1585]), and Inca Garcilaso de laVega (1723 [1609])—whose writings are today considered to be part of the colonial literary canon. Nonetheless, notwithstanding the exceptional nature of Guaman Poma, Muñoz Camargo, and Garcilaso’s contributions, they were, essentially, petitions to the Crown (Adorno 1986; González Echevarr ía 1990), a quotidian activity common among members of the colonial elite—both European and indigenous—throughout Latin America.4 In fact, written documents, many of which had some form of legal status, constituted one of the primary channels...