The Pedagogy of the Evangelization, Latinity, and the Construction of Cultural Identities in the Emblematic Politics of Guamán Poma de Ayala

Abstract

Transculturation processes and the formation of identity are analyzed in this investigation into the emblematic politics of the Primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (First new chronicle and good government) of Guamán Poma de Ayala (ca. 1616). Understood as pluricultural acts of discourse between Andean cosmological visions and the new systems of European cultural codification, this study follows the emblematic chronicler from Poma on the subject of colonial education and the Ladino Indian, through structured relations fixed between space, icon, and symbol. The careful iconographic arrangement of the drawings of Guamán are the result of conscient knowledge of the usefulness of the image and its didactic, persuasive, propagandistic, and mnemotechnic potential. Learning the reading and writing of the Castilian language will be presented here as one of the most effective social instruments in the colonial order and in the defense of native Indians before Viceroyal authorities. Mastery of writing sets the foundation for shaping a multiple and transcultural non-exclusive identity, which shows evidence of dialogic and effective communication of a cultural memory, the result of the negotiation of two identities, one from the awareness of the pre-Hispanic past and another orderly realignment in accordance with European cultural patterns.

1. Introduction: Emblematic European Politics and New Spain

Linked to the renaissance revival of artes memoriae and politicized in the contrareformist European context, the emblem constituted the practice of combining the word with the image in “the idea that all knowledge depends on sensory impressions, particularly those produced by the sense of sight” (López-Baralt 1990, p. 55). Its visual composition (frequently, an engraving) and textual message (a brief poem in the form of an epigram, octave, decima, sonnet, or gloss in prose—habitually in the Hispanic emblematic style) was usually accompanied by a pithy motto or a moral saying, following the Horacian maxim of utile dulci. This stable structure, the expression of abstract and conceptual realities of indeterminate time and space, and employed, for the first time, in the Emblematum liber (Alciato 1531) of the poet and juris counsel, Andrea Alciato (1492–1550), and the painter, Breuil, had a tripartite arrangement (emblema triplex) to be admired: Motto, caption or inscriptio: naming the composition; Pictura or illustration: visual core of the emblem; Epigrama or subscriptio: commentary given over to revealing the meaning of the symbolic image that is proposed.

The didactic end of the emblematic literature is completed with the senses (Sebastián 1995), with the finality of guaranteeing the reception of desirable models of thought in the reader–observer, whether a prince, religious, or illiterate. Its didactic and esthetic value was oriented towards the expression of ethical values in a special merger of sensitivity and the conceptual–textual (delectare–docere), and the urging passions and humors of the reader–observer (mouere), modeling his behavior. This approximation of the tangible and the intangible therefore reached the imaginative expression of a moral concept on the virtues that would have to govern conduct—moral action—of the ‘source’ of the Republic, the sovereign. The political imaginaries complied with three basic functions, as summarized below (Ortega-Sánchez 2011a, 2011c):

• Political. The symbolic image reaffirms political power, expressed as ‘good sovereignty’, against tyranny;
• Ideological. ‘Good sovereignty’ appears entwinned in allegorical images of mythological and fabulous natures, which include carnivalesque clothing, theatrical, and poetic works. In accordance with their symbolic capacity, the political power, habitually personified in the figure of the king, is identified with historical and mythological figures, among whom Solomon, Hercules, Atlas Perseus, Apollo, and Helios. Later on, the heliocentric debates and the texts of Bodino would motivate the introduction of other metaphors of power: the sovereign as the planetary king and pilot of the ship of State (Perceval 2003);
• Moral. The head of ‘good sovereignty’ incarnates the figure of the ‘father of State’, just and protector of the ‘family’ institution.

This interrelation between word and image, initially evoked in the work of Aristotle, for whom thought functions through a coherent concatenation of images, was recovered by Franciscanism, disseminated through (the Jesuit concept of) ‘composition of place’, and defended at the same time as controlled at the Council of Trent (1545–1563). It was accepted in general by the ars memoriae and, building on the successes of emblematic creations following the publication of Emblematum liber, it would find renewed justification in the context of Indian reality (Ortega-Sánchez 2011c). In effect, beginning with the mnemotechnic purpose of the figurative or geometric image of the Amerindian, the intention of which was to “represent the central event on which they wished to fix their memory” (Florescano 2002, p. 89)—events and memory—the novo-hispano rhetoric would turn that relation into artificial memories and knowledge, in the Pre-Colombian style.

Guamán Poma de Ayala came to this didactic vocation from the relations established between space, icon, and symbol, in the emblems of 16th and 17th century Europe, by adapting the conceptual suppositions of the European emblem to his Primer nueva crónica y buen gobierno, which is concretized into specific and time-bound spatial realities (Ortega-Sánchez 2011b). Unlike the ‘emblematic library’ of Soto, Covarrubias, Solórzano, and Saavedra Fajardo, the historicity with which the work of Poma is represented, in a moral tone, and the administration and the colonial society of the Peruvian Viceroyalty all transcend the traditional functions of emblematic European politics, likewise announcing a type of ‘applied emblematic’, of a political and ideological nature1.

The careful iconographic arrangement of the emblems of the chronicler represent the result of conscient knowledge of the utility of the image and its didactic and persuasive, propagandistic, and mnemotechnic potential. In addition, the learning of reading and writing in Castilian Spanish will be presented here as one of the most effective social instruments in keeping (colonial) order and in the defense of the native Indian before the courts and tribunals of the Viceroyalty.

Guamán Poma implants the grain of political and administrative order in the language, the writing, and the education of colonial days. In that sense, the mastery of writing would set the foundation for the communication of a multiple and non-exclusive transcultural identity, which makes evident the dialogic and effective communication of memoria cultural, the result of two identities negotiating, one proper to awareness of the pre-Hispanic past and its orderly recodification within European cultural patterns.

The transcultural and consolidative processes of cultural identities in the emblematic politics of the Primer nueva crónica y buen gobierno by Guamán Poma de Ayala (ca. 1616) are analyzed in this paper, in this context of rhetorical interpretation of the memorable image in the New World. Understood as a pluricultural, dialogic act between Andean cosmological visions and the new systems of European cultural arrangements, the study contemplated the figure of the Ladino Indian, in the administrative and social context of the Peruvian Viceroyalty.

This investigation analyzes the emblems related with educational methodology, the learning of Castilian Spanish, and social awareness of its use, with a view to approaching the definition of its relevance in the construction of new cultural identities around the figurehead of the Ladino Indian.

We designed a data screening instrument for a reading and an analysis of the emblematical range of the chronicler, and a categorical analysis of symbolic–topological readings and interpretations, valid in the decodification and critical commentary on the 398 emblems of the Primer nueva crónica.

2. Guamán Poma de Ayala and the Primer Nueva Crónica y Buen Gobierno

The few biographical anecdotes on Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala are mostly passing references to himself throughout his manuscript. He was possibly born around 1535 at San Cristóbal de Suntunto (Sondondo), in the region of Huanuco and Lucanas, and would have died around 1616. In his own words, he inherited the royal Inca and Yarovilca dynasties; his mother, Juana Curi Ocllo, was the youngest daughter of the tenth Inca Túpac Yupanqui, and his father, Martín Guamán Malqui de Ayala, descended from the Yarovilca Allauca Huánucos, Lords of Chinchaysuyu and promotors of imperial pre-Inca unity.

Together with linguistic competence in his mother tongue, a dialect of runa simi, Guamán acquired Spanish language skills. According to his biographic notes, he knew other dialects and native languages: “I chose the Castilian language and phrases, aymara, colla, puquina conde, yunga, quichiua ynga, uanca, chinchaysuyo, yauyo, andesuyo, condesuyo, collasuyo, cañari, cayanpi, quito” (Poma de Ayala ca. 1616, p. 10)2. He may have received some humanistic training from his brother-in-law, Martín de Ayala, Presbyterian, and a Mestizo hermit, son of Juana Curi Ocllo and captain Ávalos de Ayala3, and would complete it, giving service in the administration and the colonial jurisdictions as an interpreter, lieutenant to the corregidor (crown administrator and magistrate), guide for ecclesiastical visitors, instructor, and secretary. This privileged position would grant him access to elite educational libraries and centers for mestizos and sons of chiefs, and knowledge of the new cultural codifications of the catalogues of questions, formulated for the visits, the confessionary, the legal files, and protocols, and other forms of administrative documentation, such as inventories and calendars (Fritz 2005, p. 91).

The controversial Primer nueva crónica y buen gobierno (ca. 1616)4—henceforth, NC5—of Guamán Poma de Ayala might be the most important verbal–visual text of the intellectual production of novo-hispana. Among its end purposes, the idea was to compile documentary evidence of the Spanish massacres and abuses in the Peruvian Vice-Royalty, as well as to find support for his proposal for ‘good government’6; it was organized into ideal models of behavior, morality, and virtue, coming from each particular hybridization of the didactic–visual European cultural style: Yarovilca or Inca.

The NC, found by the German researcher Richard Pietschmann, at the Royal Collection of Copenhagen in 1908, consists of 1189 pages, the writing consuming a period of only a few years, as against the twenty or thirty that the chronicler was said to have investigated (Serna 2012, p. 113). Its historiographic complexity and narrative distances the manuscript from its adscription to any cultural tradition, complicating its affiliation to the chronicle of the Indies, justified by its chronological punctiliousness, the use of eye-witnesses and the moralizing bent (González Boixo 1999). Likewise, the presentation of an alternative politics of bad government of the Spanish monarchy in the Viceroy of Peru (Poma de Ayala ca. 1616, pp. 438–90) brings Guamán’s text closer to the thought of arbitration (Pérez-Cantó 1996, pp. 141–88; Poma de Ayala ca. 1616, p. 671); to the charter; to the political treatises on law and education in principles (López-Baralt 1988, p. 481)7; to the manual for preachers (Poma de Ayala ca. 1616, pp. 974–99), through the use of the didactic technique of question–answer cross-dialogue (‘interview’ between the preacher and the neophyte), frequent in the manuals of evangelization, and the incorporation of more than a dozen sermons (Adorno 1991b, 1991c; Poma de Ayala ca. 1616, pp. 11, 52, 56, 62, 78, 144, 369, 490, 573, 672, 673, 714, 725, 751, 832, 922, 972, 998, and 1085), the probable influence of sermons and Catechism delivered in Lima after the celebration of the Third Council of Lima (1583)8; and the Indian chronicle, a genre initiated by the first generation of Amero-Indian chroniclers Castro Tito Cusi Yupanqui, and Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti, characterized by the absence of the fatalist attitude, the historic inexactitude9 and linguistic nuances of Quechua–Castilian (Porras Barrenechea 1999, p. 41)10 as shown by the errors of transference and overcorrection of the manuscript of Guamán.

In spite of the narrative heterogeneity, the NC adapts to the precepts of contemporary European historiography, by having incorporated the social responsibility of the individual as an agent both of historic change, and of the genesis and the future for all States; diligent observation of nature with detailed ethnographic descriptions of the pre-Inca or Inca past; and the adoption of providentialism as a perspective, traced out from America towards the Old World. Along these lines, the NC approaches the history of the colony from ethical–legal parameters through slavery, freedom, and injustice in the different phrases where it is said.

In view of the diversity of themes, it is possible to recognize three different parts in the manuscript: the Nueva Crónica and the Historia de la Conquista, finished between 1612 and 1613, and Buen Gobierno, finished between 1613 and 1615 (Pezzuto 2006, p. 227). The first and the second part both develop the history of Tawantinsuyu, from the Christianized creation of the world up until the conquest of Peru and the civil wars, reinterpreting “the Andean cosmovision with the application of Christian terms to precolonial concepts” (Fritz 2005, p. 93). In other words, the reform of the universe according to the Andean quadripartite in which each part finds itself governed by a principle, and in which the Spanish emperor would reunite in his person the power of the “new Inca of Andean Christianity” (Ortega 1988, pp. 371–72). In both, the image of the Inca is profiled by the illegitimacy of his governance, despotism, and cruelty. The arrival of the Spanish, Guamán affirms, would be necessary for the eradication of Inca idolatry, and acceptance of the conquest. The Spanish empire is therefore interpreted as the instrument of divine designs, and the conquest as its natural process of legitimization (Serna 2012, pp. 114–18)11. In this reordering of the disordered Inca idolatry, the work of evangelization was also proclaimed, especially the work of the Franciscan and Jesuit orders (Poma de Ayala ca. 1616, pp. 673–74). This providentialism would stimulate the assessment of the New World as cross-roads of Christianity.

Finally, with the title of Buen gobierno, the Andean related the history of the first years of the 17th century, fundamentally those included between 1608 and 1613, and analyzed Colonial life under Viceroyal administration. Presented with the title of Royal counselor before Philip III, the king of Spain, Guamán writes and illustrates this third part as a compendious litigation of reports denouncing the abuses of corregidores, religious (with the de facto exception of Franciscans and Jesuits), commissioners, fraudulent lawyers, and idle criollos, and idolatry, the avariciousness of the local chiefs, and the lustfulness of the clergy12. With the positive approval of the monarch himself and of certain Viceroyal authorities, he started his proposed reform (Serna 2012, p. 114).

3. The Emblematic of the Primer Nueva Crónica y Buen Gobierno

The drawings in pen and ink on paper of the NC denote a knowledge of European engraving, although its special compositional style and originality is highlighted in linearity and cleanness of stroke—with references to European iconography—likened to the indigenous mural art of the time13. Its apparent simplicity and naturalist nature, by which people, facts, and concrete objects are represented, include contents where the conceptual surpasses the figurative, offering two iconographic readings: a descriptive external one, directed at the European reader–observer, and another internal one, speaking to the native.

Despite the thematic and generic complexity of the chronicle that makes any summary classification inappropriate, the images of the work of Guamán are close to the structural and conceptual model of emblematic European politics, because of their effective didactic, mnemotechnic, and propagandistic potential, incorporating discursive didactic images in the textual narratives (López-Baralt 1988; Ortega-Sánchez 2009a, pp. 42–63; Ortega-Sánchez 2010; Ortega-Sánchez 2011a, pp. 57–76).

However, in accordance with the designs of the author, the extensive denunciation would subvert its own purpose: By substituting the political notion of the emblem, understood as a widow front of good sovereignty, for one of the tyranny of the colonial administration, it transmutes the ideological notion, represented in classical fables and myths, into another more realist one, descriptive and delimited in concrete time and space; finally, it uses the moral notion to drive and to argue its protest/proposal of ‘good government’ from an organicist perspective of the State. In that sense, the author makes no effort to recall and/or to theorize on the virtues of the Christian prince, head of State, on the good functioning of his government, but to direct them towards the political and religious agents closest to the native, whose values were retrieved from the nostalgic and idealized vision of pre-Hispanic Peru.

The emblems of the NC, in any case, fit in with the didactic–propagandistic functionality of the European emblematic, sharing compositional elements: Both inscribe their images with a mote (caption or title); subsequently, both incorporate the figure (principal discursive iconographic theme); both include, on occasions, descriptive phrases (completing the iconographic discourse of the figures)14; and both are associated with extensive glosses in prose, habitually in the form of a sermon, intended to reveal the meaning of the proposed pictura.

As Van de Guchte (1992) and Ortega-Sánchez (2011a) demonstrated from a compositional perspective, both the stylistic and the thematic patterns of the picturae that constitute the emblems of Poma also record relations of dependency with the European cultural outlook. Among the possible correspondences, it is enough to mention those referring to denunciations of tyranny, articulated into scenes of executions witnessed by the unmoved faces of the authorities (Figure 1), and in corporal punishments (Figure 2), and in avarice (Figure 3), represented on a coin, a frequent symbol in political–moral emblematic European treatises.

The arrangement of figures and scenes from the chronicles, moreover, comes from the topological relation between icon, space, and symbol, as a result of which two structural regularities underlie two types of content: one directed at the European reader–observer and another, the Andean. The semiotic reading and its iconographic interpretation disclose their forms, based on the European artistic code of Christian iconography and the topology of the spatial symbology of the Tawantinsuyu Inca, the quadripartite arrangement around a unifying center point, mediating or summing up. The emblems of Guamán Poma de Ayala are, in consequence, presented as “semiological apparatus for the symbolic conquest of reality” (Rodríguez de la Flor 2000, p. 342), through the codified interaction of the European and the Andean cultural paradigm. This subjectivized determination of what was cultural would affect the foundational constructions of the new novo hispana reality.

In accordance with the iconographic readings of Adorno (1984) and, more recently, González Vargas et al. (2001, 2003), the iconography of the chronicler–artist maintains the dual hierarchical perspective of the Andean universe, based on opposing yet complementary pairs: up–down, (Hanan–Hurin), right–left, masculine–feminine, old–young, heaven–earth. From this system, the spatial topology of the Tawantinsuyu could be understood, the Andean world of the four pathways: Chinchaysuyu (Northerly Path), Antisuyu (Easterly Path), Collasuyu (Southerly Path) and Cuntisuyu (Westerly Path). The formation of this organization would take Cuzco as the center, ‘the belly-button of the world’15, on which basis it could be defined as the axis of upward–downward movement of life on earth (Hanan–Hurin). Chinchaysuyo and Antisuyo would form the first term of the pair: upwards-Hanan, while the second, (downwards–Hurin) would be formed by Collasuyu and Cuntisuyu (Figure 4).

According to hierarchized models of Inca thought, the four cardinal directions of the Tawantinsuyu would be ordered through the designation of values, in such a way that Antisuyu would outpoint Chinchaysuyu in the Hanan and Collasuyu would outweigh Cuntisuyu in the Hurin.

The panels of the chronicler likewise reflect the positional value of complementary pairs of opposites in which hierarchical patterns are distinguished, where the first term receives a higher value than its counterpart that is therefore subordinate to the first, in the narrative–iconographic reading and composition. These relations carry and add value to the different motives that compose the picturae of Sr. Poma, relations commonly presented in a simultaneous way. As a function of this, we find patterns of vertical hierarchy with the “up–down” pair, the first identified with the superior, divine world, and the second with the earthly and natural world; from the horizontal hierarchy of space with the relations east–west, backwards–forwards, right–left; to the horizontal hierarchy of time with relations between younger–older ages; and the horizontal hierarchy of gender (male and female) (

Table 1. Icongraphic decodification. Source: Authors’ own, based on Adorno (1984), and González Vargas et al. (2001, 2003).

Topological Category of Reading	Key to Narrative–Iconographic Interpretation	Description
Direction of reading Scenographic narratio	Central iconographic space Invert the reader–observer position	The direction of the iconographic reading starts at a central space, in accordance with the scenographic narratio, the inverse of the position of reader–observer.
Symbolic right–left relation	Right (high values, good ethics, generally positive ethical scores) Left (conceptual opposites)	In the symbolic right–left relation, the high values and ethical virtues are awarded to the right space, while their conceptual opposites, pictorial motifs confronting the definition of such high values, to the left.
Symbolic male–female behavior	Male (right) Female (left)	In the symbolic masculine–feminine relation, the topological correspondence of the first will be towards the right, while the topology of the second will be governed by the symbolic space of the left.
Hanan–Hurin Relation	Hanan (up) Hurin (down)	The topological values of the Hanan correspond to the position of “upwards”. In the Hanan is found the Chinchaysuyu, the richest and most virtuous suyu or pathway of the Tawantinsuyu, from whom Guamán states his descendance. The topological values of the Hurin, in turn, correspond to the position “downwards”. In the Hurin, we can find the Collasuyu, known, as the Chronicler tells us, for its hypocritical and covetous nature, illustrated by the exploitation of the mines of Potosí.
Counter value of the vertical hierarchy. Counter value of horizontal right–left hierarchy.	Vertical inverted hierarchical relation Investment of the right–left relation	When the author protests about certain events or customs, the vertical–hierarchical relation appears intentionally reversed. This contrary attitude would be the expression of chaos. If with the hierarchy of security, the authority or standing of the individual or group of individuals is placed in a contrary position, then likewise, security in the right–left relations reinforces the idea of disorder or superimposition of the Collaysuyu on the Chinchaysuyu—the ‘world upside-down’.
Regulating motive right–left	Regulation and synthesis	The regulatory reason can be found in some right–left relations, by which the relation between those self-excluding extremes is measured by a regulatory element, placed center stage. The importance of its function is rooted, either in its capacity to conciliate the difference, integrating it into a harmonious whole, or to synthesize the opposing pairs that were surrounding it.

).

4. The Learning of Castilian Writing and Participation in Colonial Administrative Processes: The Ladino Indian

The religious orders, either individually or in collegiate congregations for the offspring of Grandees, with their seminaries and doctrines, were pioneers in the early educational and training methodologies for the acculturation of the native population (Alaperrine-Bouyer 2007). In those educational encounters, an alphabetic script would be imposed as the sole means of communication and Spanish as the official language of administration, justice, literature, and the high clergy, for which reason indigenous writing in Hispano-American societies was to be submerged in a process of transculturation that would persist throughout colonial relations (Dueñas 2008, p. 189).

The learning of both reading and writing in Spanish is in consequence presented in the NC as a necessary instrument for the survival and defense of natives before the courts and tribunals of the Viceroy (Ortega-Sánchez 2011b; Poma de Ayala, ca. 1616, pp. 685, 686, 758, 762, 766, 770, 784, 785, 796, 799, 803, 807, 838, 872, 906). Writing, to which Guamán attributes specific social functions in the colonial context, operates as a responsible cultural mediator in the NC. In fact, faced with the need to learn both to read and to write Castilian Spanish—with awareness of the letters—the author remarks on his responsible use of cultural awareness (Ortega 1988, pp. 373–74). The texts emerging from this apprenticeship would therefore express the transculturation of the European political imaginary and its reconversion for the intellectual construction and interpretation of the new Andean reality.

Very significative indeed is emblem number one (Figure 5), entitled with the mote or wording: “Fathers. The father makes petition and takes note and turns the chief against the corregidor or against the very head chief sowing discord between them. Then, after some time they take vengeance on the chief and ask for bribes from the Indians” (Poma de Ayala ca. 1616, p. 602).

The scene represents the local native authority, Don Juan Pilcone, who, together with another indigenous Indian, is addressing their complaints before the corregidor, while a father of the doctrine, with great attention and dressed in traditional sacerdotal dress and adornments, writes out the report that had to be presented to the colonial authorities. In it can be read the following phrases: “Don Juan Pilcone de Apcara, chief of the Camachicoc: I say that the corregidor asks me for an Indian to betray”. The two natives maintain the finger of the right hand held high (pronus), sign of affirmation or reference to arguments of great importance (Ortega-Sánchez 2013).

The local authority, for its part, appears decorated for llauto, a characteristic ornament of Inca governmental dignities (Ossio 1998), and adorned with a flower at the front and a feather at the back. The whole scene is developed in a small room with a paved floor, with a small window towards the exterior, situated in the symbolic–iconographic space of the priest.

According to the symbolic relations of Andean laterality–opposition and in accordance with the intention of the author, both find themselves in foreseeable topological spaces: Juan Pilcone to the right, conceptual positivist and the father of the doctrine to the left, his opposite. Likewise, the complaints of the father occupy center stage of the scene, an element dividing antagonistic figures. With this image and the extensive gloss of commentary that accompanies it, Guamán denounced the fathers of the doctrine and their interference in the requests from princely Indians:

“How they make petitions those fathers and priests of the said doctrines of these kingdoms or the said vicars for returning to the said corregidores with the local chief. They draw up those petitions with their own hand and note and order a lawsuit and insist as much as they can until the earth quakes. Then they laugh at both the corregidor and the Indian chiefs: behind the scenes, they order the punishment of the Indian chief and like that they wreak their revenge.”

(Poma de Ayala ca. 1616, p. 603)

The frequent textual references, in combination with and completing the picturae, expose the harsh consequences of formalizing these petitions and complaints against the colonial administration, and the author–artist concentrates on the figure of the Ladino Indian, Amero-Indian converted to Catholicism and competent at the use of Spanish language and customs (Adorno 1992). Indeed:

“The Ladino Indian expression covered a variety of social categories, referring as easily to common Indians as to the landed nobility, who possessed some knowledge of the Spanish language and customs, and maintained links with the colonial administration and the Church. The common feature of this wide-ranging group was their experience as intermediaries who employed Spanish and the indigenous languages to establish contact within the Spanish and the local communities in civil and ecclesiastical spheres.”

(Charles 2004, p. 13)

Learning the Spanish language gave the Ladino Indian a distinguished social position, as a cultural mediator in colonial society, and as an “intermediary between colonial bureaucracy, the elite and the best part of the indigenous population” (Lutz 1995, p. 222). This social figure would employ the new linguistic and intercultural message with the aim of assisting the negotiations between the colonial administration and the native peoples. In other words, the intermediary between the first captains of the conquest and the kurakakuna, ethnic mediators from among the elders of native society and colonials, and the yanakuna, indigenous servants of colonial patrons16.

The authority of this new actor in the social structure of the Viceroyalty of Peru and his intervention in colonial cultural discourse resides not only in recognition of the need for written Spanish in maintaining the new order but also in its capability, at linguistic and symbolic–cultural levels, to connect both worlds.

Don Cristóbal de León: Recurrent Character of the Ladino Indian

Guamán personified the figure of the Ladino Indian in don Cristóbal de León17, son of the chief of the village of San Pedro de Queca, García Mullo Guamani, and who is frequently presented in the New Chronicle as one of “their principal Christian and Ladino disciples and friend of the poor” (Poma de Ayala ca. 1616, p. 499). The character led the intentions of Guamán Poma at the same time as he was represented as part of a privileged social group, capable of influencing the colonial order that he condemned. It would come precisely from the textual and iconographic embellishments where the author called attention to the importance of knowledge of written and spoken Castilian Spanish for reclaiming rights and its repercussions in colonial administration. At that point, Guamán tells of the prosecution to which Cristóbal de León was subjected by the corregidor (district administrator and crown magistrate), Lucanas, who had him arrested, punished on the stocks, his house burnt down, and then banished for having supported complaints against the government (Ortega-Sánchez 2011a). This figurehead also helped him to express his disapproval of any immoral use of linguistic skills of the Ladino in the falsification of information18.

Explicitly, in the third emblem under analysis, with the caption “That the local official have the principal chief, don Juan Cayan Chire hung and to keep the official content have the corregidor hung” (Poma de Ayala ca. 1616, p. 571) (Figure 6), We see that there are three characters: Juan Cayan Chire, principal chief brought to trial, a corregidor, and a local official.

The spatial layout of the characters and the reading of their gestures contribute keys to the interpretation that the author completes in the gloss of the panel: The native is found situated to the topological right, while the corregidor and local official occupy the central and left-hand-side spaces, respectively; the corregidor carries the sign of office, the cane, and the local official, an order to dispense the death sentence in his left hand, the heading of which reads: ‘petition against don Juan’.

The corregidor, elegantly dressed, with a sword at his waist and a satisfied smile, points with his left hand to the local official, a sign of indignity, compliance with the death sentence. In the same way and with the same attitude, the local official asks the corregidor to remain silent over sentence and execution. Meanwhile, the personification of local authority appears with clasped hands upholding a crucifix, a sign of faith and an expression of injustice.

This image is recrimination against, the abuses of the principal Royal officials, expressed in death sentences, in which the local official or the father of the doctrine asks the corregidor to apply the death sentence to the headman or chief, accused of presenting a legal defense. As we see in the drawing, the request approved, the local official takes a stance, perhaps, of silence with the right hand. The relation of this possible silence with the hanged Indian is clear, as Guamán codifies him in the person of the corregidor, guiding the reader–observer in the final reading of the pictura. In the gloss to the image, Guamán refers to the punishment of don Cristóbal de León who, as the local authority, was persecuted for the defense of rights:

“The local officials are mortal enemies of the head chiefs because they have to defend the Indian. And so they make sure that they all die hung. And the said corregidor has him hung or punished, in public, to the contentment of the local official and the father of the doctrine, as they hung don Juan Cayan Chire, head chief, and don Pedro Poma Songo of Luri Cocha, who died while retreating. Don Diego Tiracina de Banbo who died retreating. And don Cristóbal de León was taken and punished.”

(Poma de Ayala ca. 1616, p. 572)

This rejection of ‘the Ladino ways’, because of training for participation in the colonial legal system, is made clear, and in a very specific way, in the following two emblems (Figure 7 and Figure 8), where the capture of the disciple of Guamán is shown, a recurrent narrative device in the NC.

In the first picture, with the words “Corregidor holds don Cristóbal de León, second person, prisoner and admonished, because he defended the Indians of the province” (Poma de Ayala ca. 1616, p. 498) (Figure 7), the vertical spatial planes that compose this scene of a paved interior can be separated from the idea of emphasizing the division between the defense of the native Indians, which Cristóbal de León championed, and the injustice dispensed by the crown magistrate. The chronicler–artist dramatizes a brief dialogue in order to reinforce this vertical laterality between the crown official and the prisoner with two descriptive phrases: one written between two vertical iconographic compositions—“Uarcuscayqui galeraman carcoscayqui, pleyista vellaco yndio” (I’m going to hang you, I’ll get you chucked off the galleys, unruly litigious Indian)—and another in the wood of the Ladino’s shackles—“Runayrayco cay sepopi nacarisac” (By my people, I am going to suffer in these shackles).

On the conceptual right, the Ladino Indian accepts with resignation the unjust punishment of shackles that immobilize his legs. In an attitude of prayer and chained hand and foot with leg irons and hand chains, he appears elegantly dressed in Spanish style with a hat, cape, and hood. On his conceptual left, the corregidor or magistrate and governor of the crown who, equally well dressed, carries the staff of his office in the left hand, a gesture that emphasizes the immorality of the governor. In addition, he raises his index finger, and the iconographic gesture used, as we pointed out, for the expression of relevant content.

In accordance with the caption or motto of the image and the gloss commentary that accompanies it, the punishment was imposed by the magistrate from the province of Lucanas in response to the refusal from Cristóbal de León to deliver up Indians to be “cannon fodder” and his appeal to the Viceroy (Poma de Ayala ca. 1616, p. 499).

With the caption “Another corregidor admonishes don Cristóbal de León once again, because he responded in favor of the Indians” (Poma de Ayala ca. 1616, p. 500) (Figure 8), the second emblem represents what could have constituted another of the moments in the process of capturing the disciple of the chronicler. The compositional arrangement of the motives in the design of the picture maintain the separation of independent vertical spaces. Cristóbal de León, accused, according to the gloss of the image, of not having agreed to hand over “drunken Indians” neither ready to weave nor to spin, conserves the resigned and prayerful attitude, while the magistrate, called “ass of a magistrate”, “thick-minded magistrate”, and “donkey of all the chiefs in the world” (Poma de Ayala ca. 1616, p. 501), sleeps placidly with his wife. The running sentence that the author inscribes on the drapes to the four-poster bed of the Viceroyal ruler reveals the key to the reading: “Hina uanuy, pleytista” (die like that then litigant), to which the Ladino answers with the text inscribed on his wooden shackle: “By God I will do this work”. With it, the animadversion of the Viceroyal authorities towards the participation of the Ladino Indian in the legal processes is expressed. With regard to the spatial relations, they correspond to those of the emblem that preceded it: Cristóbal de León on the right and the magistrate and his wife to the conceptual left.

This didactic and persuasive conscience of the relations between word and image is revealed in the gloss itself with the phrase “Look at this poor don Cristóbal de León, how he is admonished and prosecuted, they sleeping and thieving and robbing, playing, they turn out rich. The poor suffer great works” (Poma de Ayala ca. 1616, p. 501). The information on place (pictura), the imperative “look” and the deictic “this”, together with adjectives “poor”, “admonished”, and “prosecuted”—rhetoric elements that seek to animate the passions of the reader—make manifest the assumption, by the chronicler of the Tridentine principles, on the convenience of the use of images in predication (López-Baralt 1988, pp. 124–25, 171–85), and of the pictorial–sensory followers of Ignacio de Loyola.

5. The Father or the Master of Doctrine, Learning Obstacles?

Despite the existence of colleges for natives and parish schools in Cuzco, Quito, and Lima, there was evident disinterest among local officials, corregidores, and fathers of the doctrine in the education of the indigenous population (Navarro Gala 2003); according to the chronicler, a disinterest that starts with the intention of pleading ignorance of “lawsuits and regulations”:

“Those magistrates and fathers and local officials deeply hate the Ladino Indians who know how to read and write, and even more so if they know how to draw up petitions, because they are not interrogated about all the aggravation and upset and damage. And if they can, they will banish them from this people in this kingdom.”

(Poma de Ayala ca. 1616, p. 493)

Corporal punishment was also added, constantly denounced in the manuscript and especially lambasting the father of the doctrine, the last one in charge of both catechetic (Figure 9) and basic education (Figure 10).

In Figure 9, with the wording “Those fathers cruelly punish the children. After 5 years entering the doctrine, at seven years he has to leave for the communities and the obligations; be it understood, a boy and not a girl” (Poma de Ayala ca. 1616, p. 599), two horizontal planes are superimposed: one inferior, dedicated to a group of children seemingly in prayer, and another upper one, with the representation of aggression with the whip of a priest on a bare child, mark of vulnerability19. The symbolic layout of these two planes is governed by the superiority of one over the other. The upper plane includes the figures with a regulatory function over the lower plane, subjugated therefore to the norms of the first. Likewise, the upper plane is subdivided into another two opposites: the right, occupied by the small boy who, clothed in an ample tunic (unku) with rolled-up sleeves, directs a horrified gaze towards his aggressor, and the native adult chief attacking him; and the left, a sign of injustice and indignity, in which the religious is garbed in classic dress with a grimacing face holding, with her left arm, the foot of the child, while she harangues the child with the right hand. The native chief maintains a direction towards the right, a hand with which he upholds his cane of authority, which finishes in a cross, sign of his magisterial office.

In the gloss, our author protests because of the cruel punishments to which the children are subjected and recalls the educational obligation of the fathers of the doctrine:

“The fathers of the doctrines cruelly punish the children. Although it is ordered in the rules of don Francisco de Toledo, Viceroy, and confirmed by His Majesty and the Holy Concilium, the boys of five years enter the doctrine and at seven years leave for the communities.”

(Poma de Ayala ca. 1616, p. 600)

Were that criticism not enough, the chronicler adds the invective against the ignorance of the choir masters20, their love of wine and violence, present in Figure 10 with the caption “Masters: the choir masters and school of tributary kingdom” (Poma de Ayala ca. 1616, p. 684). The spatial layout of the iconographic motifs, in this case developed in a paved interior scene, is similar to the earlier emblem, a scenic framework that Guamán recovered, precisely, in order to consolidate its denunciation. In this image, the symbolic space is divided into two conceptual vertical planes, subdivided into another four: one upper right, where the musical partiture of the lesson was placed; another lower right, in which the attacked child is carried by a native servant, symbolic representation of the subordinance of punishment to the value of education; and a negative one on the left, dedicated to the master in an aggressive attitude. Finally, a third may be recognized, of a lower horizontal layout, subordinate to the upper one where the authority of the master is found, with the representation of a set of disciples seated together on a bank: Concentrated on the lesson, their gaze is neither directed at the master nor directed at the punished child, but they continue, as shown by one of the students, with the notes of the lesson.

The figure of the master, accompanied with the descriptive phrase: “Francisco de Palacios de Lunaguhuaná”, from the province of Cañete, in this case, merely nominative, appears with a hat with three feathers at the back and a flower at the front, an overfitted tunic (unku), pair of trousers, and cloak. In the left hand he holds a book of lessons and in the right wields a whip.

Despite the identification of the figure of the master as Francisco de Palacios, the gloss speaks to us of the master Damián, an Indian from Santiago de Huayanay, who, after having received the honorarium for his work as magistrate, and with the consent of the priest, had not complied with the labors given to him:

“(…) Throughout the year, the boys of that school were neither taught the doctrine nor knew nothing of it. They were drunk every day, lost and crying, earning wages to the pleasure of the father at the cost of the Indians.”

(Poma de Ayala ca. 1616, p. 686)

6. Conclusions

The new evaluation of the native texts on the conquest and the colonization of the New World has highlighted the existence of processes of transculturation, understood as acts of dialogic translation between different cosmological visions (Parodi and Luján 2014) and new systems of cultural codification. In this sense, the careful arrangement of the emblematic of Guamán Poma de Ayala represents the result of conscient knowledge of the utility of the image and its didactic, persuasive, propagandistic, and mnemotechnic potential (Chang-Rodríguez 2005).

The more than one-thousand pages of the Primer nueva crónica y buen gobierno is a view onto the emblematic European visual didactic culture when it establishes direct relations between the verbal and iconographic narrative, and at the same time as maintaining the symbolic–spatial principles of the Andean cosmovision in a specific discursive design of three-hundred and ninety-eight “memorable images”. In this way, through the use of writing and of the image, and from his condition of Ladino Indian, Guamán Poma, proficient in the Amer-Indian languages, united traditional Andean knowledge and European culture, without exclusion, with the objective of explaining the colonial reality in a complete identificatory discourse.

Guamán definitively planted the germ of colonial political and administrative order in the language, the writing, and the education of Peru. As advanced in the introduction to this study, the mastery of writing lays the foundation for the formation of a multiple and transcultural non-exclusive identity, which provides evidence of dialogic and effective communication of a cultural memory, resulting from the negotiation of two identities, the one proper to the conscience of the pre-Hispanic past and its ordered recodification following European cultural patterns. We are speaking neither of the evident proof of what could be called “integral acculturation”, nor of mixed races (mestizaje), promoted by the ideology of “integration” that waters down the aborigine into the colonial identity, but of a cultural pluralism at different degrees of syncretism (Ortega 1988, p. 366).