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Read the text on the right and then review the Documents below:
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The Voice of the Conquered: Guaman Poma De Ayala After defeating the Inca armies in the sixteenth century, the Spanish conquerors tightened their hold over the central Andes. They created new political authorities, invited victors to set up silver mines and trading networks using forced Indian laborers, and licensed missionaries to go out into Andean communities to consolidate a more difficult "spiritual conquest." In reaction, Andean peoples resisted Spanish conquerors. They fled the mines, plundered trade routes, and kept fighting, now with the use of Spanish weaponry. The conquered Andeans also used techniques of the conquerors themselves, like the Spanish language and Spanish books, to resist Spanish control. One of the most polemical voices of the conquered was a native Andean, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (c. 1535– c. 1615). His illustrated history of the Inca kingdoms, Primer nueva crónica y bien gobierno (c. 1615), fiercely criticized colonial rule, while urging the Spanish king, Philip III, to adopt a new model of "good government." The book itself, like the idea that Spain could govern the colonized peoples benevolently, disappeared, and was only discovered in a library in Copenhagen in 1908. As a polemical testimony against European conquest, however, Primer nueva crónica offers readers a voice of colonized peoples. The author’s native tongue was Quechua, but he was schooled, possibly by missionaries, in Spanish language and culture. With his bilingual skills, he was drafted as an interpreter in the Christian campaigns to wipe out heresy and idol worship in the Andes. In this capacity, he read books belonging to missionaries and learned of the religious, political, and historical traditions of the Spaniards. Guaman Poma also served as an interpreter for Indians who challenged the land claims of the conquistadors, and in this capacity he eventually earned himself a reputation as a minor nuisance and was evicted from several jurisdictions. Frustrated that the Spanish conquerors refused to live by their spiritual and political proclamations, he grew increasingly bitter, and delivered his illustrated text of 1,188 pages and 398 pen and ink drawings to the viceroy in Lima to defend the Indians. Rebuffed, he wrote the king on February 14, 1615. Thereafter, Guaman Poma disappeared from the historical record. Guaman Poma narrated the history of the Inca empire, recounted the arrival and victory of the Spanish, and then described the misery of everyday life under colonial authority. Relying on his own first-hand experiences and centuries of oral culture, the author told an epic tale-very much in a Spanish mode-of the tragic fate of a non-Spanish people. Indeed, the book accepted in many ways the Andean destiny, while denouncing colonialism. He was pro-Andean, but he celebrated Catholicism and Spanish monarchical rule. As a chronicler of the Andean peoples before the Spanish conquest, Guaman Poma argued that his people were innocents, a Christian people, well before the conquest. They lived, according to the author, by Christian principles and knew but one God, "though they were barbarous, knowing nothing." Indeed, his history of the Incas begins with biblical creation, the arrival in South America of one of Noah’s sons, and ends with the rule of Inca Huayna Capac. While much of his historical account was his own fabrication, claiming Christian roots enabled the Andean author to denounce the conquistadors as treasonous usurpers. They had killed the natural and legitimate Inca rulers, and were thus eternally doomed. Primer nueva crónica culminated in a detailed account of everyday life in the colony. It charted the system of forced labor in the mines, the burdens of Spanish taxes, and the hypocrisy of missionaries who seized Indian property and failed to defend Indian lives. Guaman Poma wrote that the colonists violated Christian precepts of justice and their own laws. He added that, given the origins of the Andean peoples and their colonial fates, the king of Spain had a moral as well as a political duty to protect his Christian subjects in the Andes: he should free them from sinful authorities and create a sovereign Andean state as a universal Christian kingdom ruled from Madrid. Guaman Poma simultaneously denounced colonialism, while affirming his loyalty to the king. For all his skills at crossing the large cultural and political divide between Andeans and Spaniards, conquered and conquerors, Guaman Poma was not optimistic. Near the end of his work, he asked forlornly, "Where are you, our lord king Philip?" His prose invoked many of the conventions of Spanish treatises, and his strong visual representations were meant to stir the reader’s Christian sentiments. But at the same time, his images portrayed the irreconcilable differences between Spaniards and Andeans. Isolation, and not understanding, was what characterized the colonial experience for Guaman Poma. As he doubted the potential for cross-cultural communication, he concluded that "there is no resolution in this world."
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