Legitimacy in the “Indian” cabildos by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala
Résumés
This article analyzes the criticism that the Indigenous intellectual Guaman Poma addressed to the government of the “Spaniards” in the colonial Andes. To this end, this study situates his work within the doctrinal debates of the late sixteenth century, particularly during Peru's controversy over granting perpetual encomiendas (labor grants). Its aim is to demonstrate how, almost half a century later, the author intervened in these debates with a proposal for the organization of cabildos de indios (Indian town councils). The originality of his proposal lies in the transformation of the Eurocentric logic that defined what a cabildo was and what its functions and legitimacy were.
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CONICET project PICT 2021-1-317: “Theories of resistance in early modernity: republicanism and critique of coloniality in Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala” funded this research.
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Introduction
- 1 For more information on the biographical aspects of Guaman Poma, cf. Steve Stern, “Algunas consider (...)
1This article argues that Guaman Poma – a seventeenth-century Andean intellectual operating at the fraught intersection of colonial power and Indigenous resistance –1 strategically appropriated conceptual frameworks from contemporary debates on conquest legitimacy and territorial sovereignty. Through a subtle reconfiguration of their rhetorical deployment, he transformed European political discourse into a tool of colonial critique. Thus, this study interrogates Guaman Poma’s subversive appropriation of the sixteenth-century Castilian republican lexicon that permeated Andean intellectual circles. Far from merely engaging imposed legal paradigms, his redeployment of these ideals constituted a bold reclamation of Indigenous political autonomy.
- 2 Rolena Adorno, Guaman Poma, Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru, Austin, Institute of Latin Ame (...)
2From this standpoint, the article interrogates interpretive frameworks that either exceptionalize Guaman Poma’s chronicle (as in Serge Gruzinski’s reading) or absorb it reductively within a Renaissance episteme (as proposed by Giuseppe Marcocci), eliding the singular potency of his Andean locus of enunciation. Moving beyond these binaries, this analysis engages critically with Rolena Adorno’s paradigmatic reading – which positions the First New Chronicle and Good Government as a restorative project seeking to conserve Andean autonomy through the rearticulation of pre-Inka ethnic hierarchies – to propose an alternative hermeneutic.2 By excavating the text’s implicit political theory, this study contends that Guaman Poma’s work articulates a more radical intellectual enterprise: one that reconstitutes Indigenous agency not as a vestige of the past or a concession to coloniality, but as a dynamic reimagining of political futurity.
- 3 On the history of the chronicle itself, ver Rocío Quispe-Agnoli, “Enigmas de la Nueva corónica y bu (...)
- 4 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia, (...)
- 5 Serge Gruzinsky, Las cuatro partes del mundo. Historia de una mundialización, Mexico, FCE, 2010.
- 6 Ibid, p. 256–79.
- 7 Ibid., p. 277–278.
- 8 Walter Mignolo, “Delinking. The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality, and the Grammar of (...)
3Before proceeding, a brief detour through these interpretations (Gruzinski, Marcocci, and Adorno) will help calibrate the four analytical distinctions I wish to draw. First, the discovery of Guaman Poma’s chronicle in a Copenhagen library in 19093 was fundamental to the reconstruction of the “connected histories” between the Andean and European intellectual worlds.4 The notion of the “circulation of European things,” proposed by Serge Gruzinski, hints at the reciprocal influence between “the four parts of the world.”5 Thus, cultural elements from parts of the world beyond Europe also transformed what we could consider to be ‘European things’.6 According to Gruzinski, what makes Guaman Poma’s work so unique is that his critical radicalization contributed to this double impulse of reciprocal transformation in an unprecedented way for the Iberian monarchy. Nevertheless, Gruzinski adds, “radical criticism never culminates in a rupture with the Crown.”7 Hence, instead of the delinking Mignolo advocates, this process imposes consensus via syncretism.8
- 9 Giuseppe Marcocci, The Globe on Paper, Writing Histories of the World in Renaissance Europe and the (...)
4Second, in Marcocci’s framing, Guaman Poma belonged to a constellation of world historians of the global Renaissance, whose reach extended from New Spain to China. This historiography allowed a global and diverse antiquity to emerge in the European historical conscience. While certain figures in this constellation never explicitly rejected Christianity's primacy, they encouraged readers to consider moral improvement through comparisons of various antiquities.9 Guaman Poma, suggests Marcocci, positioned himself within the global Renaissance movement when he referred to these chronicles as “past chronicles.”
- 10 Marcocci identifies a similar critique of Christianity in the Discourses on Livy (1531) by Niccolò (...)
- 11 On the radicalism in Las Casas's thought, cf. Enrique Dussel, Política de la liberación: 1. Histori (...)
- 12 Alcira Dueñas, Indians and Mestizos in the Lettered City: Reshaping Justice, Social Hierarchy, and (...)
- 13 Salomon & Nino-Murcia, op. cit.
5Though both proposals offer valid insights, I argue for a more comprehensive interpretation of Guaman Poma's political theory – one that integrates these elements while fully accounting for its inherent complexity. Guaman Poma's use of Andean oral memory openly challenged the moral, political, and economic superiority of the ‘Spanish’ version of Christian civilization. Certainly, his critique of the Spaniards' performative Christianity resembled that of other radical authors of the Renaissance, such as Niccolò Machiavelli10 and Bartolomé de Las Casas.11 Yet, there is an unavoidable difference. This article argues that while Guaman Poma’s work aligns semantically and rhetorically with European ‘past chronicles,’ its pragmatic context – defined by its political aims – marks a decisive difference. Guaman Poma’s self-perception does not stand as an anomaly but rather anchors his chronicle within a living, plurilingual oral tradition – one that echoes the tactical resistance of Andean peoples, navigating between the lettered city12 and the lettered mountain13 inscribed by Indigenous oral memory.
- 14 Cf. Guaman Poma, op. cit., p. 11, where he assimilates both Indians and Spanish readers as “Christi (...)
- 15 Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, “Un mundo ch’ixi es posible. Memoria, mercado y colonialismo” in Canibali (...)
- 16 Cf. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Sociología de la imagen: miradas ch’ixi desde la historia andina (Bue (...)
- 17 Bolívar Echeverría, La modernidad de lo barroco, México, Ediciones Era, 2000, p. 50-56.
6This emphasis has a significant impact on the potential interpretations of Guaman Poma’s work. This analysis reveals how Guaman Poma's comparative history targeted moral formation of the 'Christian reader' – both Spanish colonizer and ‘Indian’ alike – transcending mere syncretism or hybridization through its negotiated yet purposeful discourse.14 Put differently, the political distinction from ‘past chronicles’ situates Guaman Poma's work beyond binary alternatives of exteriority or subjugation to modernity, but in what Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui considers a critical space for frictional encounters.15 In this space, what operates is not ‘contact’ or ‘negotiation’ (understood here as conflict-free mutual accommodation), but rather continuous antagonism – a dynamic of reciprocal exclusion where each position negates the other (a double bind).16 This precluded any possibility of syncretism or hybridization. Through a baroque strategy of cannibalization, Guaman Poma transforms the colonial cabildo, emptying it of Spanish meaning to reinscribe it with Andean ayllu principles.17
- 18 The encomienda was a colonial institution through which the Spanish Crown granted individuals – kno (...)
- 19 Adorno, Guaman Poma, 35; Polemics of Possession, p. 41–46.
- 20 Ambrosio Velasco Gómez, Republicanismo y multiculturalismo, Mexico, Siglo XXI, 2006; Francisco Quij (...)
- 21 See Diego Fernández Peychaux, “Bartolomé de Las Casas and Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala: Republicanis (...)
7Third, this approach reveals how Guaman Poma strategically appropriates European rhetorical frameworks while transforming them to produce different outcomes. To understand this process, I situate Guaman Poma's chronicle within the doctrinal debates of the late sixteenth century, particularly the legal and political disputes over the encomenderos' attempts to secure perpetual grants – a direct challenge to the Crown's 1542 prohibition of hereditary encomiendas.18 As shown below via Adorno’s methodological framework, Bartolomé de Las Casas’ political and theoretical intervention carried considerable weight to this debate. Nonetheless, I do not follow Adorno’s interpretation of Las Casas’s work, particularly her framing of Las Casas’ thesis as a sort of pact-based feudal governance.19 I rather align with Francisco Quijano and Ambrosio Velasco's more convincing reconstruction of the republican tradition emerging in Las Casas's mature political thought.20 As I argued in a previous article, Las Casas, like other critical voices, used a republican vocabulary whereby the political agency transcends elite claims to lordship, residing instead in communal sovereignty.21
- 22 For instance, I refer to Comentarios reales de los Incas of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1609), Relac (...)
- 23 Lamana, How “Indians” Think, p. 123–30.
8Fourth, such contextual grounding becomes vital to interpreting Guaman Poma's discourse – its content, its form, and structural antagonisms it sought to navigate. Like other Andean political actors,22 Guaman Poma’s writing did more than simply seek to explain the Andean world to the Castilians or to envisage a world in which aspects of his own cultural pattern coexist with those of others. Guaman Poma’s critique exposed the twofold significance of the images or concepts in dispute.23 By revealing the arbitrary nature of the borders between Indian and European affairs, Guaman Poma created the conditions for the possibility of crossing those borders, but, more importantly, he explicitly stated the need to constantly redefine them.
- 24 A cabildo was the chief political institution in Spanish colonial towns, typically composed of two (...)
- 25 Bartolomé de Las Casas, Bartolomé “Tratado de las doce dudas” or “Respuesta de Don Fray Bartolomé d (...)
- 26 On the dynastic Inca paintings promoted during the administration of Viceroy Toledo, see Stephens, (...)
- 27 cfr. “Las reglas del juego en la reciprocidad andina” in Reciprocidad e intercambio en los Andes pe (...)
9Drawing on these interpretive refinements, this article explores how Guaman Poma's work reflects the dual valence of the cabildo model within colonial governance.24 As Las Casas did in his Tratado de las doce dudas (Treatise Concerning Twelve Doubts),25 Guaman Poma followed a strategy that firstly signaled at the continuity of sovereign acts between the Incas and the Iberian monarchs in order to justify the legitimacy of the restitution of sovereignty to indigenous people.26 Yet according to Guaman Poma, if the authority of the ‘monarch of the world’ were to coexist with local political authority, the cabildo model would need to organize and structure the latter. The chronicle’s conception of ‘good governance,’ in turn, articulates – using contemporary terms – a logic of reciprocity27 that stands in marked contrast to Las Casas’s republic (i.e., eschatologically bound to cultural uniformity).
10Structured in four sections, this article analyzes how Guaman Poma enacts – throughout his chronicle – a strategic appropriation and reworking of the cabildo system. (i) First, I present the political and doctrinal debate to which Guaman Poma contributes with a critical intervention through his chronicle. I clarify Bartolomé de Las Casas’ three theses against the offer to purchase encomienda grants and the involvement of Andean communities in this controversy. (ii) Next, I analyze Guaman Poma’s reconstruction of ‘universal history’ to support the divine origin of the donation of territories to the Andeans. I also demonstrate how his reconstruction transformed the legitimacy of political authority. (iii) The third section connects Guaman Poma’s cabildo organization with the discussion on the liberation of Andean peoples and the actual limits of authority. (iv) I conclude with reflections on the effects of Guaman Poma’s intervention on the history of political philosophy.
Republicanism and the Encomienda Debate
- 28 Adorno, Guaman Poma, p. 346–374.
- 29 Cf. Lohmann Villena, Guillermo. La rebelión de los encomenderos, Lima, PUCP, 1974; Sergio Angeli, “ (...)
- 30 Rolena Adorno, The Polemics of Possession, p. 83–88.
- 31 Henry Raup Wagner and Helen Rand Parish, The Life and Writings of Bartolomé de las Casas, Mexico, U (...)
- 32 Luciano Pereña, “Estudio preliminar” in Bartolomé de Las Casas, De regia potestate o derecho de aut (...)
11This section centers on situating Guaman Poma's work within broader debates about Spanish territorial sovereignty and Indigenous governance in the Americas. Rolena Adorno’s study, Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru, identifies the sedimentation of polemical discourses in Guaman Poma’s critique of the encomenderos.28 More than half a century earlier, to limit the power of these quasi-feudal lords, the Leyes Nuevas de Indias of 1542 stipulated the encomienda's gradual extinction by abolishing hereditary succession of the grant. The encomenderos responded with a “rebellion”, through which they sought to impose – or more precisely, conquer – control over both land and jurisdiction.29 Following their defeat, the encomenderos launched in 1554 an administrative campaign to “buy the perpetual rights to use the lands and services of the native peoples of Peru from the king of Spain,”30 for seven million pesos.31 Moreover, they undertook efforts to offer the purchase of rights to their civil and criminal jurisdiction, mero et mixto imperio.32
12Although written decades after the events, Guaman Poma's chronicle highlights how encomiendas remained powerful institutions, challenging both royal control and indigenous autonomy. What follows offers a succinct exposition of doctrinal positions formulated in the context of the polemic, whose discursive reverberations emerge within Guaman Poma's chronicle.
- 33 Teodoro Hampe Martínez, “Fray Domingo de Santo Tomás y la encomienda de indios en el Perú (1540-157 (...)
- 34 Pereña, op. cit., x.
- 35 Lamana, Gonzalo, “Agencia indígena, racismo, y libertad. Las juntas de las comunidades del Cuzco du (...)
13The encomenderos’ offer was met with resistance from an alliance of indigenous people, friars, and Spanish commoners in Cusco.33 In 1560, an assembly of curacas appointed Domingo de Santo Tomás and Bartolomé de las Casas to present in Madrid a counteroffer of one hundred thousand ducats more than what the encomenderos had offered.34 In 1561, the king’s commissioners arrived in Peru to finalize the details of the encomenderos’ offer, and the indigenous communities that had not been invited to participate in the negotiations organized three parallel assemblies to address this very issue. The topics discussed in those assemblies are collected in the documents of the trial of residency (in Spanish, juicio de residencia, a hearing held on the conclusion of a term of office) of Gregorio Gonzalez de Cuenca, oidor (high judge) of the Royal Court of Lima, who had been sent to Cusco to prevent the friars and Spaniards from taking advantage “of the Indians’ inability to cope with the novelties of the colonial world.”35
- 36 Bartolomé de Las Casas, “Carta escrita al padre maestro Fray Bartolomé Carranza de Miranda, residen (...)
- 37 Bartolomé de Las Casas, “De regia potestate” or “Sobre la potestad soberana de los reyes para enaje (...)
- 38 Guillermo Lohmann-Villena, “La restitución por conquistadores y encomenderos: un aspecto de la inci (...)
14Regarding the friars, both the history and doctrine of the Castilian law and the republican lexicon were key to the argument in favor of the resistance against the sovereign who alienates the property of the republic without their consent. Among these, it is important to mention the Carta escrita al padre maestro Fray Bartolomé Carranza de Miranda (1555),36 De regia potestate (1559),37 and the Tratado de las doce dudas (ca. 1564), all written by Bartolomé de Las Casas. These works are important for two reasons: first, as previously stated, de Las Casas was dispatched to Madrid by the communities to prevent the transfer of sovereign rights; second, because the legacy of Las Casas’s influence offers a privileged lens through which to analyze the theoretical and political specificity of Guaman Poma’s chronicle.38
- 39 I develop this argument further in Diego Fernández Peychaux, “Bartolomé de Las Casas and Felipe Gua (...)
15The Lascasian claim against the encomenderos’ bid resorted, in accordance with the lexicon used by the Iberian monarchy, to the synonym between the republic and the free city or town (i.e., pueblos libres). Its novelty, however, lies in the fact that, even in the case of indigenous people, Las Casas deliberately used expressions justifying the republican’s freedom (the absence of arbitrary rule) and, as a result, the right to resist the conquest and the encomienda system.39 Mainly, the aforementioned Lascasian writings put forward three theses, summarized in the following extract from De regia potestate, written in the midst of the controversy over the possible (but ultimately unrealized) permanent alienation of the encomiendas, around 1559, and published in 1571 outside Spain to evade censorship:
- 40 Las Casas, “De regia potestate,” p. 77–78. My translation.
Neither King nor sovereign prince has the power to donate, relinquish, trade in, sell or transfer in any way cities, villages, hamlets, places, castles, fortresses nor any other settlement of his kingdom, neither to compromise nor to rearrange the lordship of such objects, without first having requested and obtained the consent of the inhabitants of the alienated town; and if the King acted without this consent, he would commit a mortal sin, and the act would immediately become null and void. By natural right, this would oblige the King's conscience to take all necessary measures - both to revoke the act and restore the prior condition.40
- 41 Las Casas, “Tratado de las doce dudas,” p. 243. My translation.
16Therefore, the first thesis stated that the king could not sell what did not belong to him. The monarch held jurisdiction (civil and criminal potestas with mere and mixed empire) and office over the administration of state assets but did not have dominion over them, let alone over the patrimonial assets of private individuals. According to the second thesis, the pact of submission or acceptance of the encomenderos’ offer required the consent of those involved: the peoples of the “Republic of Indians” (República de indios). Consequently, Indian lords also required the consent of their people to transfer their properties. Finally, Las Casas’ third thesis condemned the arbitrariness of the encomienda and called for the reparative restoration of the prior status quo. On the Tratado de las doce dudas, after the encomenderos’ military, albeit not political, defeat, Las Casas reached the following conclusion: “From the very moment that the said Spaniards seized the said Athabaliba [...] the peoples of those kingdoms, acquired a just and continuous right of war against all the Spaniards, as well as against public enemies.”41
- 42 Enrique Dussel, Política de la liberación: 1. Historia mundial y crítica, Madrid, Trotta, 2007, p. (...)
17However, although Las Casas remained attentive to the tyranny of the conquest, it is important to note that his global historical vision was teleological and relegated Indigenous peoples to the prehistory of Christianity. That is, although Las Casas recognized the rights of Indigenous peoples, he also denied the “contemporaneity” of their historical present. The limited agency he ascribes to them operates reactively, dependent on their historical maturation. In sum, despite criticizing Christianity, Las Casas did not fully cross the threshold that such criticism opened.42
18The representatives of the Indigenous in the community gatherings of 1561, however, adopted a distinct perspective. They introduced themselves to the colonial authorities as “rich and powerful” political allies. In the Cuenca trial document, a witness recalls that Spanish royal administrator (corregidor) of Cuzco, Pedro Pacheco, told him about a conversation with Hernando Bachicao and Francisco Chilche, alcalde ordinario de los indios (Indigenous local magistrate), in which they revealed that:
- 43 Archivo General de Indias, Justicia, p. 434, no 2, r. 1. “El fiscal contra el mestizo Antón Ruiz, i (...)
They were concerned by the perpetuity imposed upon them in favor of their masters, and they had learned that the king was acting under constraint and necessity. Many among them were rich and powerful, and they wished to offer him financial support to help alleviate his need, so that he would not render them perpetual subjects of their masters, and that, once the two generations had passed, they might remain as vassals of the king.43
19As direct vassals of the king, Indigenous communities would terminate their encomendados designation; instead, they advocated for their own local government, thereby gaining political autonomy.
Guaman Poma’s Political Argument
- 44 ‘Mundo al revés’ (the world turned upside down), Maravall argues, was a figure of popular countercu (...)
20The Spanish Crown rejected the encomenderos’ offer. However, this did not imply their political defeat. Half a century later, in 1614, Guaman Poma leveled criticism against the encomenderos as categorically as Las Casas did the century before. In his chronicle, Guaman Poma argued that what was at stake was that “the arrogant (people)” – whether Spaniards or Indians – sought to appropriate the Andean lands, and by extension, the labor of those involved in rendering them productive, turning the world “upside down” (mundo al revés).44 In order to resist them, Guaman Poma put forward two arguments that explain why the Indians were, in fact, the legitimate owners of the land, and why they were politically autonomous: (i) God bestowed this territory to the Indians; (ii) pre-Hispanic Andean ordinances complied with the ten commandments of God (especially the communal mercy that European Christians had lost).
God-bestowed
- 45 Guaman Poma, op. cit., p. 657 [671].
- 46 Ibid, p. 915 [929].
- 47 Ibid, p. 915 [929].
- 48 Ibid, p. 958 [972].
21Regarding the Christian divine endowment, Guaman Poma claimed that “by God and justice, there is no Spanish owner in this kingdom, though they be born in this kingdom.”45 Indigenous peoples were the “legitimate holders, not by the king’s will, but by God[‘s will] and justice.”46 According to Guaman Poma’s version of universal history, “the whole world is God’s” and God “planted in every seed in its lands, the Spaniards in Castile, the Indians in the Indies, the Blacks in Guinea.”47 Furthermore, Guaman Poma argued that: “legitimate holders of the land by right of God and His justice and laws, except the king, and no other Spaniard because all are foreigners, mitimaes.”48
- 49 On the circulation of Renaissance historiography and its scope in Guaman Poma’s work, cfr. Marcocci (...)
22Certainly, this strategy was part of the historical repertoire used to justify land tenure. Guaman Poma, like other Renaissance historians cited through his rewriting of Luis Jerónimo de Oré’s work, invented a historical genealogy to validate Indigenous rights as the Andes' first occupants.49 Nevertheless, I suggest noting that the expression “no Spaniard, except the King, has any rights (here)” adds a fundamental second layer to his argument. On the one hand, Guaman Poma acknowledged a continuity between the sovereign acts of the Incas and those of the Iberian monarchy. On the other hand, however, he critically inverted the interpretation one might expect from a Eurocentric position. Let us consider this interpretation.
- 50 On how such critiques, even in the twentieth century, obscure the political reading of the chronicl (...)
23Guaman Poma introduced his political position by articulating it through a unique historical hypothesis. Mainstream colonial historiography invalidated Guaman Poma's historical reconstruction.50 However, this criticism does not undermine the capacity of that historical hypothesis to articulate Guaman Poma’s political argument. Does anyone dismiss 17th-century contract theorists' political arguments simply because they rely on Eurocentric myths of the state of nature? Thus, beyond these critiques, two fundamental questions emerge: what exactly was Guaman Poma's historical narrative, and what political argument did it serve?
- 51 Guaman Poma, op. cit., p. 6.
- 52 Ibid, p. 376 [378]; see also p. 957 [971].
- 53 Lohmann-Villena, “Notas sobre la estela de la influencia lascasiana en el Perú,” p. 397.
- 54 Guaman Poma, op. cit., f. p. 772[786]. Italics not in the original. As we shall see, Guaman Poma us (...)
- 55 Regarding this, refer to the list of references provided by Lohmann-Villena in “Notas sobre la este (...)
24Although at the beginning of the chronicle he conceded that the arrival of the Spaniards happened to coincide with “the end and destruction, the conquest of this kingdom which is now yours [your Holy Catholic Royal Majesty’s],”51 in other passages he maintained that there was no conquest, since the Inca lords handed over the keys to their kingdom to the Spaniards.52 Indeed, by 1614 the resistance of the Neo-Inca state of Vilcabamba to the Castilian occupation and its indigenous allies had been defeated in 1572. This may suggest why Guaman Poma's approach diverges from Las Casas' earlier demands for restitution of unjustly seized assets.53 Moreover, Guaman Poma considered that the demand had already been fulfilled, stating “the emperor Don Carlos granted restitution and merced (land reward or endowment) to all the chieftains and principals” and “Pope Marcellus the second and [sic] confirmed the emperor’s merced.”54 Even though no documents record this restitution, there are however indications that during the 1560s there was a debate in Peru about the crown’s intention to abandon the conquered lands and return their government to the natives.55
- 56 For a transcription of the norm, cf. MacCormack, On the wings of time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and (...)
- 57 See, for example, the ordinances he sanctioned for the Indians of Charcas on November 6, 1575. Cf. (...)
25In Guaman Poma’s account, restitution did not aim to reinstate Incan or pre-Incan dynastic hierarchies, but rather to justify the organization of Indigenous resettlements (reducciones) according to the Roman-Castilian model of local self-government: the cabildos (town councils). The idea was not institutionally novel. For one, during the Cortes of Toro in 1480, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand had already mandated the creation of town councils.56 Moreover, Viceroy Francisco de Toledo’s administration (1569–1581) had already implemented the model in the Andes decades earlier. 57
- 58 Gruzinski, op. cit., p. 234.
- 59 I draw the characterization of these three institutions from Charles Gibson’s “Encomienda and Corre (...)
26However, in his proposal for the organization of town councils, Guaman Poma carries out a series of argumentative shifts that, whether intentional or not, allowed him to take advantage of the colonial reality to enact a form of institutional cannibalism through which he 'Romanizes' the Andean ayllus.58 First, Guaman Poma viewed cabildos not as a tool for segregation and relocation, but rather as a means of restoring the rights that were taken by the ‘tyrannical’ colonial administration, as summarized by Guaman Poma and Las Casas. Second, the proposal is original by his position of enunciation. If we consider that the cabildos were used by the Crown to limit the rise of the private, political, and religious institutions of the conquerors,59 Guaman Poma’s political argument took a twist that recognized and challenged all of this, as well as the authority of the monarch with its own legal tools. Third, Guaman Poma’s chronicle reconfigures the cabildo’s definition, operations, and legitimacy in ways that, whether intentional or not, subvert the Eurocentric logic that sustains it.
- 60 Multiple perspectives in contemporary social sciences discussed the connection between modern polit (...)
- 61 For a description of the legal and cultural process of individualization of the Andean commons, cf. (...)
- 62 Bolívar Echeverría, Modernity and “Whiteness,” trans. Rodrigo Ferreira, Cambridge, Polity, 2019, p. (...)
27For the history of ideas, this third aspect becomes fundamental. In describing the cabildos of the “Republic of Indians,” Guaman Poma evaded the association between political representation and the appropriation of common decisions. Stated differently, he employed a concept of legitimacy founded on political republicanism and Andean community forms, whose institutionalization included forms of representation.60 For him, the cabildos were legitimate not because they lacked political hierarchies, but because they guaranteed communal possession of the territory and co-responsibility for the reproduction of life in the community.61 In sum, Guaman Poma’s chronicle advocated reenacting the Roman-Castilian model in the Andes – but “to the point of transforming it into a different version of itself.”62 Following, I will explore how Guaman Poma’s political imagination develops in this regard.
The Justice of Andean Ordinances
- 63 Guaman Poma, op. cit., p. 738 [752]–775 [789].
- 64 On post-Inca alliances, cf. Steve J. Stern, Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conq (...)
- 65 See Peter Gose, “Mountains, Kurakas and Mummies: Transformations in Indigenous Andean Sovereignty,” (...)
28According to Guaman Poma, the aim of Charles V’s grant, which was mentioned in the previous section, was to organize a political system in which dynastic or ethnic authorities were interwoven with other elective and rotating forms of governance.63 This interweaving altered the principle of legitimacy in which the authority was founded, because it bestowed greater importance to political and socio-economic principles than to genealogical or patrimonial principles. In other words, through the organization of cabildos, Guaman Poma’s political strategy sought to dissolve the alliances between curacas and encomenderos, or Indians and Spaniards, who attempted to appropriate territories and labor by dissociating them from their community functions, structures, and values.64 From this perspective, I argue that, according to Guaman Poma, the legitimacy of the rulers was not necessarily determined by “who they were” or “how much they had,” but rather by “what they did” in terms of organizing labor, distributing wealth and protecting against the abuses of the “arrogant.”65 That is, by asserting the legitimacy of Inca law, and its practices, Guaman Poma established a critical framework for politically evaluating colonial hierarchies.
- 66 For a more detailed analysis of local hierarchies, cf. Gabriela Sternfeld, La organización laboral (...)
- 67 Guaman Poma, op. cit., p. 742 [756].
- 68 Ibid, p. 744 [758]. The staff of justice refers to a ceremonial rod or baton symbolizing judicial a (...)
29In order to follow Guaman Poma’s argument, it is necessary to briefly summarize how he describes local authorities and their functions.66 At the apex of the pyramid there were the princes of the parcialidades (Chinchaysuyo, Antisuyo, Collasuyo, Condesuyo), their dual subordinated lords (segundas personas) and their kin. Princes held the position of cabeza mayor de una provincia (head of a province) and cabeza mayor del Cabildo (head of a municipal council).”67 According to the “ancient law,” the segundas personas had “office and staff of the Royal Justice [cargo y a la vara de la Real Justicia].”68 Both of them received the title directly from “His Majesty,” and while none of them were tributaries nor did they render personal services, they had the obligation to preserve the community regime founded on mercy.
- 69 Ibid, p. 745 [759].
- 70 Ibid, p. 747 [761].
- 71 Ibid, p. 751 [765]; 752 [766]; 753 [767]; 755 [769].
- 72 Ibid, p. 745 [759]; see also 768 [782]; 769 [783]; 793 [807].
30Elected authorities completed the local government. This was presided by the cacique de mil indios (quaranga curaca, local administrative lord of one thousand Indians),69 mandones mayores (pisca pachaca curaca; the chief overseer who administered five hundred tributary Indians)70 and mandoncillos (pachaca camachicoc, pisca chunga camachicoc, chunca camachicoc, pichica camachicoc, minor overseers who administered from one hundred to five Indians).71 While the king appointed the first group of officials, the cabildos appointed the second. Each had to submit a residencia proceeding upon concluding their term of office.72
- 73 Ibid, p. 745 [759]; see also 746 [760].
31Thereafter, Guaman Poma endeavors to use the term mandón to translate into Spanish a myriad of positions in the Andean Indigenous hierarchy. Guaman Poma suggested the following correlation between the Andean hierarchies and the offices in the cabildo: The caciques de mil indios did not pay taxes, held the office of corregidor or teniente de corregidor (lieutenant of Spanish judicial and administrative officer) for a year.73 Next in line were the mandones, who were taxpayers and eligible for different offices according to the number of Indians under their command. The hierarchy of offices was as follows: the alcalde mayor who had five hundred Indians under his command, the alcalde ordinario, who had one hundred Indians; the regidor, who had fifty Indians, the alguacil mayor, who had ten Indians, and the alcaide, pregonero or verdugo, who had five Indians.
- 74 Ibid, p. 745 [759].
32Building on this structure, Guaman Poma disaggregates the figure of the curaca or cacique into distinct categories. Initially, his proposal appears to imply that eligibility for election to a cabildo office required a certain number of dependents. Yet Guaman Poma consistently employs the same formula in describing each role: “and there shall be no shortage, but rather surplus, of Indians.”74 This formulation may suggest that the mandón was an individual endowed with considerable autonomous political and economic power. In this interpretive frame, Guaman Poma would be, in effect, 'translating' ethnic and economic hierarchies into positions within the cabildo.
- 75 Ibid., p. 738[752]-818[832].
33By contrast, I argue that the mandones functioned, in fact, as intermediaries between the common Indigenous tribute-payer and the Spanish official responsible for its collection – namely, the royal administrator or overseer. Guaman Poma’s critique of the soberbiosos – those who appropriated communal resources – grounds this alternative interpretation. In that critique, he articulates his principle of legitimate authority. Across his chronicle – and particularly in the chapter devoted to the “the Inca kings, princes, and principales” –75 Guaman Poma outlines criteria for political legitimacy rooted in justice and good government, rather than in the mere number of Indigenous subjects under one’s charge. In doing so, he emphasizes not only the act of election, but also the communal consensus required to legitimate the selection of princes and principales.
- 76 See note 26 above.
- 77 Cfr. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Beacon (...)
- 78 Cfr. Mary Van Buren, “Rethinking the Vertical Archipelago: Ethnicity, Exchange, and History in the (...)
34Such communal consensus was only possible as far as the mandones adapted their behavior in accordance with a fundamental principle of the Inca worldview: ayni – foundational Inca principle that modern scholars might classify as a form of reciprocity.76 Identifying this regulative principle does not imply attributing imperturbable harmony to political and economic relations due to the absence of rivalries, hierarchies, and conflicts. Instead, it identifies equivalence as a cultural criterion for judging responsibilities and privileges.77 Beyond the information provided by studies on the variation of such practices among Andean peoples,78 Guaman Poma’s political theory posits as a criterion of legitimacy the proportionality between the benefits and personal services received by the mandones and principales, and the productivity or well-being of the community.
- 79 Guaman Poma, op. cit., p. 769 [783], italics not in the original. Mitayo was a married man who paid (...)
- 80 Ibid, p. 750 [764].
- 81 “Towards the good ones, he must be gentle, toward the bellicose, tough… and if he lacks the spirit (...)
35The following statement provides a hint in this interpretation: “His Majesty’s ordinary mayors serve in all matters and in accordance with the law. Elect the mayors as follows: in the first year, choose a poor Indian; in the next, a mandón Indian. And if it is a large town must elect two mayors – one mitayo Indian, and the other from among the mandones.”79 The poor Indian that was elected ordinary mayor would never “send and hand over the Indians from the mines and the square” unless he was a mandón.80 However, although it is not explicitly stated, one might conjecture that a poor but courageous Indian – who works hard for the poor Indians –81 may earn communitarian respect, and ultimately be elected alcalde.
- 82 Ibid, p. 768 [782], italics not in the original.
- 83 Ibid, p. 769 [783].
36Guaman Poma, then, did not deny the importance of hierarchies in the articulation of communal commitments; rather, he emphasized that the legitimacy of such hierarchies derived from the type of relationships that the authorities established with the community. In the idealized past that Guaman Poma portrayed in his history of the world, the difference between good and bad governments lies not in their lineage, but in their socio-political deeds.82 When the principales failed to obtain the consensus of the community or violated the principle of reciprocity, they lost respect, and thus became mandones, or leaders who led no one. For this reason, when Guaman Poma said, “Even their relatives, brothers, and vassals shun them,”83 he meant that they had lost the consensus necessary to become a principal or mandón.
- 84 Levillier, Gobernantes del Perú, p. 308.
37A main aspect of Guaman Poma’s notion of legitimacy is that, unlike the Toledo ordinances, Guaman Poma clearly overlapped jurisdiction with the organization of community work. For Toledo, it was imperative to distinguish republican officers from the community tasks that the caciques performed. The viceroy states that the cabildo members do not elect the cacique or a second person for alcalde.84 In contrast, Guaman Poma proposes overlapping both functions.
- 85 Ibid, p. 358.
- 86 In Guaman Poma’s account, the poor are the displaced population who lose their communal ties and, a (...)
- 87 Ibid., p. 750 [764].
- 88 Ibid, p. 803 [817].
38This institutional mestizaje had three consequences. First, it eliminated the Royal officials, as well as the curacas – who lacked legitimacy in the cabildo and were therefore exempt from standing residency trials – as autonomous articulators between communal work and the payment of taxes. Second, it disavowed the theoretical and political claims that the Indians were incapable of self-government or that, if they were capable, it was only under the despotic rule of the curacas.85 Third, it linked the payment of the tributes with the functions of the redistribution of goods and administration of the reciprocity practices that had taken place under the ordinances of the Inca, and that, now, were to continue through the cabildos. Consequently, what legitimized the principales, caciques and mandones’ roles was, according to Guaman Poma, that they favored the reproduction of life in the political community. They enacted this system when communities collectively committed to care for the poor, the sick, the elderly, and widows.86 For example, the mandoncillos and the alcaldes ordinarios, even the poor ones, were only legitimate if they became “friends of the poor, and ate and gathered in the square”;87 the same went for the alguaciles mayores, who had to make sure that “everyone had enough to eat in the chacaras (a productive plot).”88
Liberation, Power, and Authority
- 89 I refer only two examples from the period of this infantilization of the indigenous people; Polo On (...)
- 90 Adorno, The polemics of possession, p. 50.
- 91 Guaman Poma, op. cit., f. 769[783], italics not in the original.
39This way of articulating a concept of legitimacy founded on communal principles with an institutionalization that included forms of representation, was an evident critique of the colonial government officials’ discourse. According to Francisco de Toledo, among others,89 the liberation of the Indian people came from the elimination of the communal practices that had been despotically seized by the “tyrannical” principales.90 Starting in the 1570s, Toledo had based his policies on delegitimating the titles of the Incas, by portraying the conquistadores as the liberators of the common Indians. For Guaman Poma, in contrast, liberation hinged on the prevention of despotic practices. As previously noted, Guaman Poma observed that “the soberbiosos (arrogants)” were not only the indigenous authorities. Common Indians could also seek to appropriate the territories, and by extension, communal labor. In this sense, Guaman Poma argued that “the main caciques have to be sweet and sour, they have to rule like a lion and a lamb, they have to be tough and gentle towards the corregidores and fathers of the doctrine and Spanish encomenderos, and do what is needed towards the Indians, whether they be bellicose or good.”91 Then, safeguarding a good government necessitated not only limiting the authority of the officials by means of the concept of the “common good,” but also encouraging modes of production and distribution that forbid the private appropriation of labor mobilized by the productive forces of the community.
- 92 Ibid, p. 25, italics not in the original.
- 93 Ibid, p. 81.
- 94 Ibid, p. 60–74.
- 95 Ibid, p. 56.
- 96 On the historical exceptionality of the Indigenous people in the Andes, according to Guaman Poma, c (...)
- 97 Guaman Poma, op. cit., p. 66; see also 602 [616]; 842 [856]; 843 [857]; 899 [913]; 912 [926].
40The restitution of the ancient Andean laws would revive the production and distribution practices associated with them. Unlike the Castilian laws – which fostered arrogance – Andean legal tradition actually upheld God’s commandment in Genesis: “God commanded people to leave this land and spread and multiply throughout the world.”92 Although Guaman Poma, like Toledo, underscored the idolatry of the Incas,93 this does not mean that Guaman Poma dismissed the collective practices established by their ordinances, which, he claimed, went back to the first Indians placed in the Andes by the Christian God.94 Despite the fact that the Indians had gradually lost their faith and hope in God, said Guaman Poma, “it seems that they had all the laws, commandments, the good work of God’s mercy, even though they were barbarians who knew nothing.”95 The Andean world, it seemed, had not experienced the decline that had affected humankind in other places.96 This is why Andean populations succeeded in discerning – through reason rather than revelation – the divine principle of mercy, and in putting it into practice. In his words: “No nation had had this custom and work of mercy in the whole world like the Indians of this kingdom.”97
- 98 “Considers that the Indians were not so barbaric and pusillanimous but that they had law before the (...)
- 99 Ibid, p. 795 [809].
- 100 David A. Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State 1 (...)
41In short, Guaman Poma believed that Indigenous peoples needed emancipation from the tyranny imposed by the conquerors’ moral, social, political, and economic regimes. However, according to his chronicle, Christian justice and mercy provided the basis of the Indian ancient law, and not of conquest and evangelization.98 Officials (both Spanish and indigenous) had to comply with this law, which was just as Indian as it was Christian.99 Or, to put it in other words, Christian revelation, far from being the exclusive patrimony of Spaniards, “should be regarded as the fulfillment rather than as the negation of the social morality and cosmic reverence of Andean society.”100
- 101 For a further analysis of the classical distinction between potestas and potentia, cf. Leo Strauss, (...)
- 102 Guaman Poma, op. cit., p. 777 [791].
- 103 Ibid, p. 386 [388].
- 104 Ibid, p. 386 [388], italics not in the original. On the discrediting of Uascar Inca cf. María Rostw (...)
42The fruitfulness of political communities, according to Guaman Poma, marks the normative limits (the search for the common good) but also the factual limits (to have a source of power) of any political potestas.101 As an example, Guaman Poma recounts the story of a certain Juan Capcha, who lost his authority when the townspeople abandoned the settlement, leaving it uninhabited.102 The same principle explains the fall of Uascar Inga. Uascar lost his kingdom, said Guaman Poma, in the “conflict and war” with his brother (Atagualpa Inga) due to his own arrogance. Uascar, who was “exceedingly arrogant, miserly, and ill-disposed… he ordered the execution of the said captains, and thus they fled from him; thereafter, no captain or soldier ever wished to support him.”103 Immediately thereafter, on the same folio, he introduces an admonishment: “One can see here how pride can make a man lose his kingdom. A king or captain, if he is arrogant and greedy, will lose his kingdom and his life like Uáscar Inga.”104
- 105 Guaman Poma, op. cit., p. 964 [982].
- 106 Ibid, p. 977 [995].
43What is important to highlight now is that Guaman Poma did not dwell on the past, rather, he applied this principle to his present. Towards the end of the chronicle, Guaman Poma fictionalized a conversation with King Philip III, in which Guaman Poma reminds him that “His Serene Highness emperor and king that God has in his glory became powerful because of the Indians of this kingdom, and Your Majesty’s father was also a monarch with great might and power acclaimed by the Indians of this kingdom and so is Your Majesty.”105 In that same section of the chronicle, Guaman Poma told the King that those flights from the towns, as in the case of Juan Capcha, were not due to the laziness or the corruption of the population, but rather, a response to the abuses of “the corregidor, the father, the encomendero, the caciques principales and the alcaldes of this kingdom,” because it is them who are “unscrupulous animals that given the chance, would swallow and eat you alive.”106
- 107 Horst Pietschmann, El Estado y su evolución al principio de la colonización española de América, tr (...)
- 108 Walter Mignolo, op. cit.
- 109 Dueñas, Indians and mestizos in the lettered city, p. 107.
44Horst Pietschmann indicates that both normative and factual limits were part of the Castilian law that dated back to the Siete Partidas (Seven Divisions of the Law), written in the thirteenth century.107 Nevertheless, the fact that an Indian used the exact same arguments to support the legitimacy of Andean religious, cultural and juridical differences was a radical delinking from coloniality in the making.108 Like Bartolomé de Las Casas, Guaman Poma accepted imperial jurisdiction but denied the emperor’s dominion. Moreover, he pointed out that the Indian peoples supported the emperor economically and politically – not the other way around. Therefore, like the captains of the Uascar Inca, Guaman Poma dared to demand from the “emperor of the world” a reformulated pre-colonial conception of reciprocal benefits.109
Final remarks: Guman Poma de Ayala impact on political philosophy
45This article begins by recovering the present and operative republicanism in the semantic and rhetorical context of Guaman Poma’s chronicle. In doing so, it avoids the misconception of inscribing Guaman Poma in a feudal model that only advocated for the restoration of pre-Inca ethnic hierarchies. That contextualization reinterprets the potential meanings of reciprocal influence between the antagonistic elements of what Rivera Cusicanqui defined as a friction zone. In one dimension of their reciprocal influence, the centrality of Las Casas’s republicanism is undeniable for understanding the terms of the debate during that period. According to him and to other critics of the conquest, the struggle against tyranny and the defense of liberty implied that any political community was the effective cause for determining what was fair. This undoubtedly appears in Guaman Poma’s chronicle. Yet another perspective suggests that Indigenous peoples rejected the subordinate political position that European discourses assigned to them. The testimonies of Hernando Bachicao and Francisco Chilche, as well as in the chronicle of Guaman Poma, articulate this counterpoint. The Andean chronicler portrayed the Indigenous people – not himself – as rich, powerful, and capable of intervening in the conflict between the encomenderos and the Crown.
46Hence, was the demand for the restitution of sovereignty to the conquered peoples a typical fantasy of the Renaissance utopia of Las Casas, or, on the contrary, was it the translation of a demand and a material reality that demonstrated the autonomy of these peoples in relation to their conquerors? Answering this question is beyond the scope of this article. However, formulating it helps clarify Guaman Poma’s position of enunciation, which I sought to reconstruct in the article.
- 110 Rivera Cusicanqui, Sociología de la imagen, Buenos Aires, Tinta Limón, 2017, p. 226.
47Rather than focusing on the fact that Guaman Poma re-created a comparative history, in this article I showed how this comparison expressed and made explicit a critique of his colonial present. Guaman Poma drew parallels between Inca and Castilian ordinances, but rather than succumbing to the erasure of synonymy, he employed homonyms to deal with the antagonism embedded in dual-meaning words like freedom, cabildos, justice, or mercy. In this way, Guaman Poma’s critique was an innovative intervention in the canon of political philosophy because he elaborated a principle of the legitimacy of authority in which ancient Andean law gave new life to the Roman-Castilian model of local self-government: the cabildo. In other words, in his chronicle, the justice of ancient Andean law was neither a relic of the past, nor an edifying example, but a material reality capable of transforming the present. It was therefore urgent to innovate, as Guaman Poma did, to find an institutional mode that would allow its expression. The cabildos did more than create cultural links to appease conflict: they extended the border between what was ‘Indian’ and what was ‘Spanish’ in a battleground of antagonism and seduction.110
Notes
1 For more information on the biographical aspects of Guaman Poma, cf. Steve Stern, “Algunas consideraciones sobre la personalidad histórica de don Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala,” in Histórica, 2, no 2 (1978), p. 225–28; Rolena Adorno, “Waman Puma: El autor y su obra,” in Nueva crónica y buen gobierno, ed. John V. Murra, Rolena Adorno and Jorge L. Urioste, Madrid, Historia, 1987, vol. 1, xvii-xlvii; Alfredo Alberdi Vallejo, El mundo al revés, Guamán Poma anticolonialista, Berlin, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Berlin, 2010. On the indigenous intellectual context, cf. Frank L. Salomon and Mercedes Nino-Murcia, The Lettered Mountain: A Peruvian Village's Way with Writing, Durham, Duke University Press, 2011; Gabriela Ramos and Yanna Yannakakis, Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes, Durham, Duke University Press, 2014.
2 Rolena Adorno, Guaman Poma, Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru, Austin, Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas Press, 2000; Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative, New Haven, Yale University, 2014.
3 On the history of the chronicle itself, ver Rocío Quispe-Agnoli, “Enigmas de la Nueva corónica y buen gobierno de Guamán Poma de Ayala,” Lienzo, no 42, p. 90–101. https://doi.org/10.26439/lienzo.2021.n042.5361. I will use this edition of the chronicle: Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615/1616), København, Det Kongelige Bibliotek, GKS 2232 4°. In the article, the textual quotations are my translation.
4 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies, 1997, vol. 31, no 3, p. 735–62.
5 Serge Gruzinsky, Las cuatro partes del mundo. Historia de una mundialización, Mexico, FCE, 2010.
6 Ibid, p. 256–79.
7 Ibid., p. 277–278.
8 Walter Mignolo, “Delinking. The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality, and the Grammar of Decoloniality.” Cultural Studies 21, no 2-3, 2007, p. 460, https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162647.
9 Giuseppe Marcocci, The Globe on Paper, Writing Histories of the World in Renaissance Europe and the Americas, trans. Ricard Bates, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2020, p. 92.
10 Marcocci identifies a similar critique of Christianity in the Discourses on Livy (1531) by Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527). Cf. Ibid, 55. On various aspects of Machiavelli's 'radical' thought, cf. Filippo Del Lucchese, Fabio Frosini & Vittorio Morfino (Eds.), The Radical Machiavelli: Politics, Philosophy, and Language, Leiden, BRILL, 2015.
11 On the radicalism in Las Casas's thought, cf. Enrique Dussel, Política de la liberación: 1. Historia mundial y crítica, Madrid, Trotta Press, 2017, p. 202; Silvio Zavala, La filosofía política en la conquista de América, Mexico City, FCE, 1977, p. 72.
12 Alcira Dueñas, Indians and Mestizos in the Lettered City: Reshaping Justice, Social Hierarchy, and Political Culture in Colonial Peru, Colorado, University Press of Colorado, 2010; Joanne Rappaport & Tom Cummins, Beyond the Lettered City: Indigenous Literacies in the Andes, Duke, Duke University Press, 2011.
13 Salomon & Nino-Murcia, op. cit.
14 Cf. Guaman Poma, op. cit., p. 11, where he assimilates both Indians and Spanish readers as “Christian lector,” reflecting a rhetorical strategy of inclusive enunciation.
15 Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, “Un mundo ch’ixi es posible. Memoria, mercado y colonialismo” in Canibalizar la modernidad, ed. Diego Fernández Peychaux, Buenos Aires, Tinta Limón, 2023, p. 189.
16 Cf. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Sociología de la imagen: miradas ch’ixi desde la historia andina (Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2015), 326, where she refers to Gregory Bateson’s concept of the “double bind” (doble constreñimiento) as developed in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, New York: Ballantine, 1972. This situation implies an irreducible antagonism in which both positions nonetheless complement each other.
17 Bolívar Echeverría, La modernidad de lo barroco, México, Ediciones Era, 2000, p. 50-56.
18 The encomienda was a colonial institution through which the Spanish Crown granted individuals – known as encomenderos – rights over the labor of entrusted Indigenous peoples (encomendados) for the purpose of their evangelization. However, this personal grant did not include ownership of the land, whose dominion remained with the Crown. Cf. Charles Gibson’s “Encomienda and Corregimiento” in The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule, A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico 1519–1810, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1964, p. 58–97.
Cf. “Encomienda and Corregimiento” in The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule, A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico 1519–1810, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1964, p. 58–97.
19 Adorno, Guaman Poma, 35; Polemics of Possession, p. 41–46.
20 Ambrosio Velasco Gómez, Republicanismo y multiculturalismo, Mexico, Siglo XXI, 2006; Francisco Quijano Velasco, Las repúblicas de la monarquía. Pensamiento constitucionalista y republicano en Nueva España, 1550-1610, México, UNAM, 2017.
21 See Diego Fernández Peychaux, “Bartolomé de Las Casas and Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala: Republicanism on the Colonial Frontier,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2022, vol. 31, no 1, p. 7–8.
22 For instance, I refer to Comentarios reales de los Incas of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1609), Relación de antigüedades de este Reyno del Pirú of Joan de Santacruz Pachacuti (ca. 1620–1630) or Descripción de la Ciudad y Provincia de Tlaxcala (1584) of Diego Muñoz Camargo.
23 Lamana, How “Indians” Think, p. 123–30.
24 A cabildo was the chief political institution in Spanish colonial towns, typically composed of two alcaldes and several regidores, responsible for local governance and judicial functions. It was often the first official structure established in newly founded settlements. cf. Karen Spalding, Huarochirí, An Andean Society Under Inca and Spanish Rule, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1984, p. 216–238; Elizabeth Penry, S., The People Are King: The Making of an Indigenous Andean Politics, New York, Oxford University Press, 2019, p. 63–73.
25 Bartolomé de Las Casas, Bartolomé “Tratado de las doce dudas” or “Respuesta de Don Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, a la consulta que se le hizo sobre los sucesos de la Conquista del Perú en 1564” in Colección de las obras de D. Bartolomé de Las Casas, ed. J. Llorente, Paris, Casa de Rosa, Librero, 1822, p. 175–327.
26 On the dynastic Inca paintings promoted during the administration of Viceroy Toledo, see Stephens, Janet Garver. Constructing the Pre-Columbian Past: Peruvian Paintings of the Inka Dynasty, 1572–1879. PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2013.
27 cfr. “Las reglas del juego en la reciprocidad andina” in Reciprocidad e intercambio en los Andes peruanos, eds. Alberti G. y Mayer E., Lima, Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1974, p. 39–65.
28 Adorno, Guaman Poma, p. 346–374.
29 Cf. Lohmann Villena, Guillermo. La rebelión de los encomenderos, Lima, PUCP, 1974; Sergio Angeli, “De conquistadores a encomenderos. Pacificar, consolidar y reorganizar el Perú”, Desperta Ferro: Historia moderna, no 37, 2018, p. 50–53.
30 Rolena Adorno, The Polemics of Possession, p. 83–88.
31 Henry Raup Wagner and Helen Rand Parish, The Life and Writings of Bartolomé de las Casas, Mexico, University of Nuevo Mexico, 1967, p. 212.
32 Luciano Pereña, “Estudio preliminar” in Bartolomé de Las Casas, De regia potestate o derecho de autodeterminación, Madrid, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1969, liv.
33 Teodoro Hampe Martínez, “Fray Domingo de Santo Tomás y la encomienda de indios en el Perú (1540-1570)” in Los dominicos y el nuevo mundo. Actas del II Congreso Internacional, Salamanca, San Esteban, 1990, p. 355–79.
34 Pereña, op. cit., x.
35 Lamana, Gonzalo, “Agencia indígena, racismo, y libertad. Las juntas de las comunidades del Cuzco durante el debate por la perpetuidad de las encomiendas,” Colonial Latin American Review, 2023, no 32, p. 572-595. Although ‘Indian’ is currently a contentious term, Guaman Poma used it.
36 Bartolomé de Las Casas, “Carta escrita al padre maestro Fray Bartolomé Carranza de Miranda, residente en Inglaterra con el Rey Federico II, en el año 1555, sobre la perpetuación de las encomiendas de los Indios, que se intentó entonces” in Colección de las obras de D. Bartolomé de Las Casas, 2, p. 117–74.
37 Bartolomé de Las Casas, “De regia potestate” or “Sobre la potestad soberana de los reyes para enajenar vasallos, pueblos y jurisdicciones” in Colección de las obras de D. Bartolomé de Las Casas, 2, p. 49–111.
38 Guillermo Lohmann-Villena, “La restitución por conquistadores y encomenderos: un aspecto de la incidencia lascasiana en el Perú,” Anuario de estudios americanos, 23, 1966, p. 21–89; “Notas sobre la estela de la influencia lascasiana en el Perú. El Licenciado Falcón y las corrientes criticistas,” Anuario de historia del derecho español, 1971, 41, p. 373–424.
39 I develop this argument further in Diego Fernández Peychaux, “Bartolomé de Las Casas and Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala.”
40 Las Casas, “De regia potestate,” p. 77–78. My translation.
41 Las Casas, “Tratado de las doce dudas,” p. 243. My translation.
42 Enrique Dussel, Política de la liberación: 1. Historia mundial y crítica, Madrid, Trotta, 2007, p. 202.
43 Archivo General de Indias, Justicia, p. 434, no 2, r. 1. “El fiscal contra el mestizo Antón Ruiz, intérprete, sobre la intención de provocar alzamientos contra los encomenderos entre los indios de Cuzco” in Lamana, “Agencia indígena.” My translation; italics not in the original.
44 ‘Mundo al revés’ (the world turned upside down), Maravall argues, was a figure of popular counterculture in the Baroque period. Cf. José Antonio Maravall, La cultura del barroco: análisis de una estructura histórica, Barcelona, Ariel, 1975, p. 314.
45 Guaman Poma, op. cit., p. 657 [671].
46 Ibid, p. 915 [929].
47 Ibid, p. 915 [929].
48 Ibid, p. 958 [972].
49 On the circulation of Renaissance historiography and its scope in Guaman Poma’s work, cfr. Marcocci, op. cit., p. 80–111; Lamana, How “Indians” Think, p. 68–97.
50 On how such critiques, even in the twentieth century, obscure the political reading of the chronicle, cf. Rocío Quispe-Agnoli, “Habitando en las fronteras: insinuaciones pluriversales en la Nueva corónica y buen gobierno.” (2022). Recial, 13(22), p. 161–182. https://doi.org/10.53971/2718.658x.v13.n22.39354
51 Guaman Poma, op. cit., p. 6.
52 Ibid, p. 376 [378]; see also p. 957 [971].
53 Lohmann-Villena, “Notas sobre la estela de la influencia lascasiana en el Perú,” p. 397.
54 Guaman Poma, op. cit., f. p. 772[786]. Italics not in the original. As we shall see, Guaman Poma uses principals to group together officials and leaders at various levels of hierarchy in the community.
55 Regarding this, refer to the list of references provided by Lohmann-Villena in “Notas sobre la estela de la influencia lascasiana en el Perú,” p. 398–9.
56 For a transcription of the norm, cf. MacCormack, On the wings of time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2007, p. 122.
57 See, for example, the ordinances he sanctioned for the Indians of Charcas on November 6, 1575. Cf. Roberto Levillier, Gobernantes del Perú, cartas y papeles, siglo XVI, Madrid, Imprenta Juan Pueyo, 1925, vol. 8, p. 304–383.
58 Gruzinski, op. cit., p. 234.
59 I draw the characterization of these three institutions from Charles Gibson’s “Encomienda and Corregimiento,” op. cit.
60 Multiple perspectives in contemporary social sciences discussed the connection between modern political representation and the appropriation of common decisions. For more detail, cf. Giuseppe Duso, La representación política: génesis y crisis de un concepto, San Martín, USAM, 2016; on the possibility of interpreting modern texts to re-signify this debate, cf. Diego Fernández Peychaux, “The materialism of Hobbes. Prolegomena for an American Representation of Sovereignty,” Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política y Humanidades, 2018, vol. 20, no 39, p. 535–557.
61 For a description of the legal and cultural process of individualization of the Andean commons, cf. Susan Elizabeth Ramírez, “Land and Tenure in Early Colonial Peru: Individualizing the Sapci, ‘That Which is Common to All’” in Legal Encounters on The Medieval Globe, ed. Elizabeth Lambourn, Kalamazoo, MI-Bradford, UK, Arc Medieval Press, 2017, 2, p. 33–71.
62 Bolívar Echeverría, Modernity and “Whiteness,” trans. Rodrigo Ferreira, Cambridge, Polity, 2019, p. 128–49.
63 Guaman Poma, op. cit., p. 738 [752]–775 [789].
64 On post-Inca alliances, cf. Steve J. Stern, Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1993, p. 27–50; Gonzalo Lamana, “‘Lo que piden los indios’: Imaginarios e iniciativas políticas indígenas en la década de 1560 en los Andes,” Revista Andina, 2023, vol. 59, p. 31–90; Alcira Dueñas, “Cabildos de naturales en el ocaso colonial: jurisdicción, posesión y defensa del espacio étnico,” Histórica, 2016, vol. 40, no 2, p. 135–67. According to Marcos Alarcón Olivos, in the 16th century, the cabildos aided the Crown in limiting the power of the conquistadors and supported the interests of the local population in the first cities. See: “Gobernar un mundo en guerra: el rol de los cabildos en el primer orden colonial peruano (1529–1548),” Histórica, 2019, vol. 43, no 1, p. 7–57.
65 See Peter Gose, “Mountains, Kurakas and Mummies: Transformations in Indigenous Andean Sovereignty,” Población y sociedad, 2016, vol. 23, no 2, p. 9–34.
66 For a more detailed analysis of local hierarchies, cf. Gabriela Sternfeld, La organización laboral del Imperio Inca: las autoridades locales básicas, Madrid, Iberoamericana, 2007.
67 Guaman Poma, op. cit., p. 742 [756].
68 Ibid, p. 744 [758]. The staff of justice refers to a ceremonial rod or baton symbolizing judicial authority.
69 Ibid, p. 745 [759].
70 Ibid, p. 747 [761].
71 Ibid, p. 751 [765]; 752 [766]; 753 [767]; 755 [769].
72 Ibid, p. 745 [759]; see also 768 [782]; 769 [783]; 793 [807].
73 Ibid, p. 745 [759]; see also 746 [760].
74 Ibid, p. 745 [759].
75 Ibid., p. 738[752]-818[832].
76 See note 26 above.
77 Cfr. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Beacon Press, 2001, p. 57; Stern, Peru’s Indian, p. 9–13; Rivera Cusicanqui, op. cit., p. 67.
78 Cfr. Mary Van Buren, “Rethinking the Vertical Archipelago: Ethnicity, Exchange, and History in the South Central Andes,” American Anthropologist, 1986, vol. 98, no 2, p. 340; Kenneth Hirth & Joanne Pillsbur, “Redistribution and Markets in Andean South America,” Current Anthropology, 2013, vol. 54, no 5, p. 645; Frank Salomon, Native Lords of Quito in the Age of the Incas, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 10.
79 Guaman Poma, op. cit., p. 769 [783], italics not in the original. Mitayo was a married man who paid a labor tax to the Inca through military duty, public works, and official occupations.
80 Ibid, p. 750 [764].
81 “Towards the good ones, he must be gentle, toward the bellicose, tough… and if he lacks the spirit to do all that has been said, let another one with that spirit govern,” Ibid, p. 771 [781], see also 769 [783])
82 Ibid, p. 768 [782], italics not in the original.
83 Ibid, p. 769 [783].
84 Levillier, Gobernantes del Perú, p. 308.
85 Ibid, p. 358.
86 In Guaman Poma’s account, the poor are the displaced population who lose their communal ties and, as a result, become impoverished under colonial rule. Refer, for instance, to Guaman Poma, op. cit., f. I, p. 222 [224].
87 Ibid., p. 750 [764].
88 Ibid, p. 803 [817].
89 I refer only two examples from the period of this infantilization of the indigenous people; Polo Ondegardo, “Informe del licenciado Juan Polo Ondegardo al licenciado Briviesca de Muñatones sobre la perpetuidad de las encomiendas en el Perú” in Pensamiento colonial crítico. Textos y Actos de Polo Ondegardo, ed. Gonzalo Lamana, Lima, CBE/ IFEA, 2012 [1561], p. 139–204; Juan de Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, ed. Guillermo Lohmann-Villena, París-Lima, IFEA, 1967 [1567].
90 Adorno, The polemics of possession, p. 50.
91 Guaman Poma, op. cit., f. 769[783], italics not in the original.
92 Ibid, p. 25, italics not in the original.
93 Ibid, p. 81.
94 Ibid, p. 60–74.
95 Ibid, p. 56.
96 On the historical exceptionality of the Indigenous people in the Andes, according to Guaman Poma, cf. Lamana, How “Indians” Think, p. 70–80.
97 Guaman Poma, op. cit., p. 66; see also 602 [616]; 842 [856]; 843 [857]; 899 [913]; 912 [926].
98 “Considers that the Indians were not so barbaric and pusillanimous but that they had law before they were Incas” Ibid, p. 949 [963]; see also 85; 744 [758]; 748 [762]; 795 [809]; 897 [911]; 898 [912]; 912 [926].
99 Ibid, p. 795 [809].
100 David A. Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State 1492–1866, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 165.
101 For a further analysis of the classical distinction between potestas and potentia, cf. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1953, 194; Sandra Field, Hobbes, and Spinoza on Power and Popular Politics, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2020, p. 158.
102 Guaman Poma, op. cit., p. 777 [791].
103 Ibid, p. 386 [388].
104 Ibid, p. 386 [388], italics not in the original. On the discrediting of Uascar Inca cf. María Rostworowski de Diez Canseco, Historia del Tahuantinsuyu, Lima, IEP Ediciones,1988, p. 175.
105 Guaman Poma, op. cit., p. 964 [982].
106 Ibid, p. 977 [995].
107 Horst Pietschmann, El Estado y su evolución al principio de la colonización española de América, trans. A. Scherp, Mexico, FCE, 1989, p. 28.
108 Walter Mignolo, op. cit.
109 Dueñas, Indians and mestizos in the lettered city, p. 107.
110 Rivera Cusicanqui, Sociología de la imagen, Buenos Aires, Tinta Limón, 2017, p. 226.
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Diego Fernández Peychaux, « Legitimacy in the “Indian” cabildos by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala », Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos [En ligne], Débats, mis en ligne le 15 octobre 2025, consulté le 12 novembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/102727 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/1511l
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