Mónica Díaz's excellent new edited volume takes up the question of identity formation and categorization in the Spanish Americas with a critical twist. She organizes her introduction and the contributions around the framework of artifacts, artifice, and identity, placing as much emphasis on textual production and contemporary reception as on the fluidity of identities, which has come to characterize much of the recent literature on the issue. This framing creates a more sophisticated interrelation between the individual chapters, written by scholars of history and literature, and brings new depth to the topic.
The volume is organized into four parts, Discerning Indigenous Voices (with articles by Adorno and Nancy van Deusen), Community and the Articulation of Identities (Rachel O'Toole, Tatiana Seijas, Amber Brian), Translation and Alterity in Colonial Texts (Viviana Díaz Balsera, Rocío Quispe-Agnoli), and Indigenous Intellectuals (Susan Schroeder, Pablo García Loaeza). Díaz's introduction serves as a fine overview of the field, particularly in her examination of cultural studies as they have spoken to indigenous subjectivities over the past decades. A brief afterword by Yanna Yannakakis draws conclusions from all the essays effectively. The contributors work on the Andes and Mesoamerica, and their subjects include Africans and Filipinos as well as Spaniards and indigenous peoples.
The best chapters present truly fresh readings of colonial sources. Rolena Adorno sets the stage with an engaging analytic chapter that provides a critical reading of texts by Felipe Guamán Poma, Martín de Murúa, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, and Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl, with an eye to both how they came to exist in their current states and the subjectivities that created and receive them. Her self-conscious work of revealing the unstable collaborations that produced a physical artifact is the perfect introduction to a volume that tries to push us to see colonial agents within a variety of epistemologies and circumstances. Brian similarly approaches the paired mestizo authors Muñoz Camargo and Alva Ixtlilxóchitl with new eyes. Her critical analysis of their writings on the Chichimeca reveal them to have complex and entangled identities, rich, unstable, and non-binary.
O'Toole introduces us to a community of indigenous muleteers on Peru's north coast, governed by their own alcalde and in flagrant (sometimes homicidal) competition with muleteers of African and mixed descent as well as with Spanish officials. Van Deusen and Seijas reconstruct the lives of little-known subjects, the diasporic indigenous slaves who ended up in early Lima, and the Filipino indios chinos who sought to join themselves to indigenous communities in Mexico. Díaz Balsera and Quispe-Agnoli approach European texts based on indigenous sacred rituals and beliefs in Mesoamerica and the Andes to find transformative indigenous subjectivities beneath depreciative Christian presentations. Quispe-Agnoli's animated investigation of the Spanish translation of the Quechua supay as devil sheds new light on Guamán Poma's Nueva Corónica and the Huarochirí Manuscript.
Schroeder and García Loaeza join Adorno in revisiting the lives of indigenous chroniclers, in their cases Chimalpahín and Alva Ixtlilxóchitl, contemplating their self-presentation as historians as well as their appearances in (or absence from) contemporary works and historiographies. Loaeza García concludes, fittingly, from the aporia of identity formation, that Alva Ixtlilxóchitl produced his identity through his acts of writing rather than the other way around.
In all, the chapters present fresh takes on many well-known sources and a few new ones, and at their best disrupt our understandings of categories and identities. This book is a welcome addition to the conversation about race and identity, especially for its attention to archives, documents, and the subjectivities of readers, then and now.
