Alcira Dueñas has written an important book on indigenous and mestizo scholars who questioned Spanish rule in the Andes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She examines approximately a dozen writers who challenged Spanish legitimacy in long, often arcane, publications that in most cases reached Madrid. These writers built on a variety of intellectual traditions and their work constitutes important, yet overlooked, oeuvres in colonial intellectual and political history. The author seeks to remove them from the shadow of their much better-known predecessors, Guamán Poma de Ayala and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega.
Dueñas stresses from the beginning the complexity of the texts and the challenges in classifying and deconstructing them. She correctly dismisses understanding them in terms of resistance, and instead probes their origins and their overlap with broader, non-indigenous and non-Andean intellectual currents. Adding to the challenge is that some of them were anonymous and the authorship of several more is under dispute. She places them nicely not only in the Peruvian but also in the transatlantic context. The texts are rich, dense and challenging. In the midst of her book it struck me that a key reason that we like Guamán Poma so much is that, well, he has pictures.
After a brief introduction, Dueñas outlines the authors and their work in separate chapters on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Only a handful of specialists will know well the work of authors such as Don Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla or José Rafael Sahuaraura, and even they will benefit from Dueñas' archival and bibliographical detective work. She outlines the educational opportunities offered to Indians and mestizos by the viceregal state and the Church. Several of these authors were friars, and the Jesuits and Franciscans play an important role. She then turns to the intellectual framework they used, stressing late medieval currents. Her sections on Scholasticism and Neo-Scholasticism are not easy reading – such a topic almost cannot be – but prove to be enlightening. She then examines two main themes and points of tension addressed in these works: the legitimacy, or even legality, of Spanish rule, and the demand for inclusion by eighteenth-century writers, particularly clerics, and for greater autonomy. As she correctly points out, the first tendency marked the seventeenth century and the latter, somewhat contradictory, demands characterised this form of writing in the Bourbon period. The last substantial chapter examines late colonial discussions about Indians' role in the viceregal system, what she concisely deems ‘the politics of identity formation’, which is the title of chapter 7.
Dueñas writes as competently on local intellectual circuits as she does on Thomist thought or political currents in Spain. She moves her level of analysis easily between the local and the transatlantic, demonstrating from the first page that these authors built from a variety of sources and grievances. She deconstructs, for example, the 1749 Representación verdadera judiciously: I wish that I had had access to this book for my work on the 1750 Huarochirí uprising and its intellectual foundation. She struggles, however, in the search for a theoretical framework, employing terms such as ‘transcultural’ with limited success. Of course, creating a framework for such diverse, almost sui generis works is difficult, but she writes with much greater confidence when examining the authors themselves and their writing. In contrast to my usual reading habits, I found myself glossing over some of the introductions while immersing myself in the mid-chapter details.
My major criticism might actually be a compliment. I wanted to hear much more about the adventures of the authors and their texts. Several of these individuals, such as Don Juan Lorenzo Ayllón and Don Andrés de Ortega Lluncón, managed to reach Madrid and hand over their denunciations to the Madrid court. These odysseys make for a rich story, not developed here. Moreover, I wanted to learn how these publications were written, how they were transformed from manuscript into published form. These are difficult questions to research and Dueñas gives enticing leads, but she could have developed the history of the texts themselves. What is clear, however, is that her work, which probes the lives of these authors and examines with unprecedented depth the intellectual roots of their work, will allow such studies (and many more) on these intellectual networks and the authors themselves. Alcira Dueñas has done the heavy lifting and her book will facilitate or even permit new studies and further debate about Andean colonial thinkers insufficiently appreciated by modern scholars. We are in her debt.
