Writing and its power to counteract oblivion are vividly invoked in the first sentence of the Huarochirí Manuscript (HM), the book-length, early seventeenth-century anonymous account in Quechua at the center of Laura León Llerena’s interesting study. Yet, as the author asserts, the role of writing, in its capacity to produce and impose desired meanings in an emerging colonial context, was still being negotiated at that time. For Father Francisco de Ávila, the manuscript’s possessor and he who commissioned the text or obtained it from his native Andean parishioners circa 1608, the manuscript revealed the latter’s false beliefs, errors, and superstitions, and, even worse, their idolatry before and after the Conquest. For the anonymous author(s), it was an account offered by “we Christians”—a group of parishioners in which the storyteller included himself and likely the potential readers—of why it had made sense for others—their neighbors and relatives—to hold past and present beliefs in the old divinities, cultural heroes, and mythical ancestors that had animated the natural and social landscapes of Huarochirí. Despite his Christian identity, León argues, the narrator refrains from passing negative “moral judgment” (144) on the non-Christian beliefs and practices associated with them. Rather, he attempts an interpretation of the religious transformations experienced by the local inhabitants. These “competing legibilities” (12) become apparent in “the priest’s reading of the HM and the HM’s author’s probable purpose in writing it” (118). Restoring the manuscript’s seemingly lost legibility, that is, retrieving the social role assigned to it by its creators, is the aim of the book.

Each of the four chapters revolves around a well-known text or group of texts. Centered on Ávila’s library’s inventory, Chapter 1 recounts the role of writing, especially by native Andeans, in the colonial Christianizing project. Ávila’s readings and sermons help León reconstruct the ideological frame for the priest’s interpretation of indigenous “idolatry.” Chapter 2 centers on the ecclesiastic dossier of charges filed and later dropped by some of Ávila’s parishioners against the priest right as he came into possession of the HM and began his anti-idolatry crusade. The use of khipus during the trial reveals that “a polyphony of modes of communication competed with and complemented alphabetic writing—often on the same page” (5). The next chapter focuses on the HM. León restates her main thesis, based on its structure, language, and context, which León nevertheless examines in the English and Spanish translations. It also compares the HM to Ávila’s parallel treatise in Spanish. From this analysis, she concludes, “[t]he purpose of creation of the HM is not determined by how it was read (and rewritten) by Ávila” (144). The final chapter places the HM alongside the works of Felipe Guaman Poma and Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti to examine how these Andean authors wrote Christianity into their particular understandings of Andean social orders in the colonial present.

Thus, León intervenes in the ongoing debate about the HM’s authorship, in which she detects “a notable tendency to echo a legibility […] that corresponds to colonial and nineteenth-century notions of literacy and authorial attribution” (12). She presents the HM instead as the collective work of the anonymous “We Christians” who, rather than launching an outright condemnation of the idolatries of their peers, and thus fully succumbing to Ávila’s hegemonic view, embark on a self-reflective effort at making sense of the religious changes wrought by the European conquest. Though León does not present any new external evidence to help us look deeper into the process of writing, editing, and/or compiling the HM, her interpretation is not necessarily at odds with that of scholars who have already argued that previous approaches are not irreconcilable. It might be harder to reconcile this view with recent linguistic analysis by Sabine Dedenbach-Salazar, which strongly suggests an individual author-redactor-compiler. Moreover, recent works and novel sources that were written by the HM’s main (identified) human protagonist, the cacique Cristóbal Choquecasa, and that León seems to have overlooked, shed new light on the preparation of the extant copy of the HM, on the intellectual work of “extirpators” associated with Ávila, for whom sources such as the HM were essential and by no means “illegible,” and on the (to some extent independent) participation of indigenous catechists in the production of the colonial archive about indigenous idolatry. Despite these limitations, León’s careful reading of the HM brings older interpretations back to the discussion table. Her work is a reminder of the multiple possible readings of the manuscript, the importance of considering the text’s many legibilities, and, above all, the equally important need to separate the narrator’s intent from the different uses of the manuscript in Ávila’s time and thereafter.