Sublevando el virreinato: Documentos contestatarios a la historiografía tradicional del Perú colonial

Abstract

Sublevando el virreinato is a collection of 14 papers, all more or less related to the theme of correcting the traditional scholarship on colonial Peru, first presented at the 52nd International Congress of Americanists in Seville in 2006. Among the most notable contributions of the almost 500-page volume are two chapters on Gerónimo de Pallas. The first, by notable Sevillian historian Antonio Acosta, introduces the unpublished work (included as a CD at the end of the volume) that Pallas wrote as a young man to prepare Jesuit missionaries for their future work among the natives of America. The second, by Paulina Numhauser, continues Pallas’s story as one of many Italian Jesuits that through their teaching at schools (for which they became famous) and other means sowed the seeds of an anticolonial project that in the long run led to the independence movements of the early nineteenth century.Giuseppe Piras expands on the Jesuit projects with a discussion of Padre Diego de Torres Bollo and his plans to establish a “primitive church” in the reducciones of Paraguay. Those familiar with Sabine Hyland’s book on the biography of Blas Valera will welcome Manuel Casado Arboniés’s discussion of the “seises” (a dance) and its representation at Alcalá and in the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (NC), and the connections he makes to the two, hypothesizing that personnel at the University of Alcalá played a role in a pro-Inca stance. María de la Concepción Piñero Valverde and María Dolores Aybar Ramírez, in two separate pieces, discuss the portrayal of cities in the NC and the Historia general of the Mercederian Padre Martín de Murúa. The first finds that Murúa described the urban centers in superlative terms, while the NC included less favorable language. The second points out that Murúa focused on Cuzco’s centrality, while in the NC, the city is 28th of the 38 cities profiled.Next, Davide Domenici begins a discussion of the Miccinelli documents by comparing the Lettera apologética with Historia et rudimenta, concluding that part of the Historia was the source for Lettera. Giorgia Ficca turns attention to systems of indigenous writing by comparing the tocapus (symbols usually woven into indigenous textiles or depicted as such) in the Galvin codex and NC. The conclusion is that the tocapus of the Galvin codex are more indigenous than those in the NC, which seem more mestizo or hybrid. Ethnographer Gail Silverman uses oral history to analyze the tocapus from a ceramic, incised beaker to show that they refer to the landscape, ancestors, seed, and plots of land.Most of these interdisciplinary presentations share the assumptions that the Miccinelli documents are valid and that Blas Valera, not Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, wrote the NC. Together the tale that emerges from these very different analyses is that some Jesuits were critical of the colonial administration and plotted actively for change. To achieve their ends, they became schemers. They took to heart “hecha la ley, hecho la trampa” (a law is made and a way around it is found) by arranging to fake Valera’s death, as they often changed individual Italian Jesuits’ real names to allow them to sail to America during times when foreigners were prohibited from entering Spain’s overseas kingdoms. The machinations in America and in Europe make accusations that the Jesuits advocated seditious ideas ring true.The major problem with the volume is the lack of a detailed introduction that would prepare those unfamiliar with the Miccinelli documents and the international controversy that they provoked with the background to appreciate the textual analyses that follow. Without such a beginning, the volume’s content is largely unintelligible to many, relegating the book to a much smaller readership than it deserves. What is impressive is the deep and continuing research by over a dozen scholars on Blas Valera and others critical of the colonial establishment, and the related efforts being made to understand the quipu (an accounting system based on knotted and colored strings) and tocapu as indigenous forms of writing. It is to be hoped that future investigations will add to these efforts, settling the controversies and helping scholars learn to decipher native symbols to better hear the silent voices that proclaim the natives’ points of view.