The Origins of Guaman Poma

Let us begin at the origins—Guaman Poma’s claims of elite status, specifically. We have insisted here that understanding Guaman Poma’s life and works, and the viceregal world more generally, can be significantly illuminated by answering the question of who he was. Do most scholars who address his origins believe his claims to being an elite by birth? Here the answer is a clear yes.Footnote ¹ Have scholars suggested outright he was a commoner? No, with one curious exception, which we mentioned previously and describe again below.

For our respondent Quiroz, this conversation about origins is actually long dead. He implies that scholars have fully accepted Guaman Poma’s commoner background. In fact, a review of the literature demonstrates the opposite. Many prominent authors have mentioned Guaman Poma as an elite, generally in passing.Footnote ² Others have dedicated much more attention to the question and have been similarly persuaded of his claims—especially that he was specifically a hereditary elite. Leading expert Rolena Adorno argued in 2012 that “Guaman Poma’s experience reflects the attitudes and actions of Andean provincial elites”—but cautions that his claims of being a “dynastic prince” were strategic exaggerations.Footnote ³ She maintains nonetheless that he was a hereditary nobleman, and even writes, “the Expediente Prado Tello lays to rest any notion that Guaman Poma might have used a fraudulent identity as charged in the Compulsa.”Footnote ⁴ In other words, the Chachapoyas and the Spanish lieutenant field justice were in the wrong. In 2023, Olimpia E. Rosenthal presented a similar overview, asserting that the Chachapoyas falsely accused him and that “his positionality as a pre-conquest native elite is critical” for understanding his work’s positions regarding Indies society.Footnote ⁵ In a 1999 critique of Walter Mignolo’s overly simplistic understanding of the author as a perfect Inca informant, Karen Graubart presented Guaman Poma rather as a spokesperson of “another elite line that held a privileged position within the confederation of ethnicities.”Footnote ⁶

Upholding Guaman Poma’s elite status has been important for ethnohistorians.Footnote ⁷ The editors of a 2003 volume take Guaman Poma’s biography straight from the chronicler himself, and declare that through the Corónica one can “penetrate into the mental order and the principles and values of [the] Indigenous.”Footnote ⁸ Clearly, many accept this genealogy precisely because it renders Guaman Poma’s opus an indispensable portal into the Andean world.Footnote ⁹ One is left to wonder why his ethnographic insights are more valuable coming from a hereditary elite than from a commoner.Footnote ¹⁰

Not everyone has been completely taken by every one of Guaman Poma’s claims, but many scholars nonetheless accept the general outline of his claims to at least local hereditary nobility.Footnote ¹¹ Another major expert, Juan M. Osio, raises serious questions about Guaman Poma’s claims, but concludes that he must have belonged to the ranks of the “indígenas privilegiados.”Footnote ¹² Specifically, he posits from evidence within the Corónica that Guaman Poma was likely descended from an elite family of quipucamayocs or cord-keeping administrators.Footnote ¹³ De la Puente Luna’s view is ultimately that Guaman Poma’s various offices demonstrate that he was not merely Lázaro but in all likelihood had something to back of his hereditary claims. He also insists, correctly, that Guaman Poma had also performed his power by positioning himself as a service elite.Footnote ¹⁴ We agree with the latter point, although we are, as Osio is, deeply skeptical that he ever held many of the roles he abrogated to himself.Footnote ¹⁵ The Corónica and Guaman Poma’s own claims in the Prado Tello seem to be the only evidence for many of these titles. In other moments, however, De la Puente Luna is clearly also skeptical of the chronicler’s lineage.Footnote ¹⁶

Quiroz’s assertion that the 1991 publication of the Prado Tello has essentially closed the debate and demonstrated resoundingly that Guaman Poma is a commoner is therefore demonstrably false. He cites perhaps the only scholar to previously argue for the chronicler’s commoner status—Alfredo Alberdi Vallejo of Ayacucho, the Peruvian city and region formerly known as Huamanga. In the original article, we cited Alberdi and argued that “his point that Guaman Poma was a commoner who invented lineages wholesale is well taken.” We assigned him credit for advancing this argument. However, Alberdi’s work has not gained traction, and for good reason. This author was attempting to prove that Guaman Poma was a true resident of his native Huamanga, responding to the bizarre forgeries of the aristocrat Clara Miccinelli and the esoteric novelist Carlo Animato. The two scandalously presented mestizo Jesuit Blas Valera as the true author of the Nueva corónica.Footnote ¹⁷ Alberdi was rightfully miffed by the suggestion Guaman Poma did not write his book.Footnote ¹⁸ Yet he seems to have fought falsification with falsification. His detailed biography of Guaman Poma perceptively reads the Compulsa and Prado Tello for many inconsistencies.Footnote ¹⁹ From these close readings, Alberdi (vaguely) posited that Lázaro was an orphan raised in the household of encomenderos doña Leonor de Ayala and Pedro Diez de Soler.Footnote ²⁰ So far, so reasonable. But things soon take an abrupt turn. Similar to Miccinelli and Guaman Poma himself, Alberdi presents pixelated documents supposedly from the seventeenth century—and which are manifestly late-modern and have never been seen by the academic community.Footnote ²¹ Unsurprisingly, this eccentric argument failed to gain serious traction in scholarly circles. Despite Quiroz’s insistence that the case is closed, the consensus on Guaman Poma’s commoner origins remains firmly that he was an Andean lord.

Guaman Poma—Poor or Rich?

A far more sophisticated critique concerning Guaman Poma’s origins comes from José Carlos de la Puente Luna, the author of many trailblazing books and articles on Andean society and on our famous chronicler in particular. We begin by addressing an important point he makes: Historians cannot be too careful when dividing Indies society into either “commoners” or “elites.” Guaman Poma did not belong to the ranks of the Andes’ many farmer-peasants. For De la Puente Luna, the commoner–elite dichotomy, which appears in our argument, is too crude. He cautions that Guaman Poma was—at least in a certain sense—no mere commoner. After all, he was not a farmer. Moreover, he was not even poor.Footnote ²² This comes with a corollary argument: If Guaman Poma was a commoner, as we describe him, how can we account for his wide-ranging knowledge of Catholic and Spanish ideas and sources?

There is indeed no evidence that Guaman Poma was ever a farmer or even paid tribute, two hallmarks of most commoner experiences. We also cannot rule out that he ever did farm or pay tribute, for the record is silent in this regard. We agree, then, that his non-elite status does not inherently imply he was a settled commoner who met traditional social duties (even if this remains entirely within the realm of possibility for certain parts of his life).Footnote ²³

Guaman Poma did indeed sometimes possess a certain social status, perhaps with a respectable salary. We can assume he lived far better than many commoners at some points in his life. After all, we know from notarial registers that he worked in 1594 as an assistant of Spanish officials under the title “don Phelipe Guaman Poma lengua.”Footnote ²⁴ This position also included some executive and decision-making responsibilities that extended beyond translation. Some Spanish contemporaries deemed him a don—for a while in the early 1590s at least—and elevated him to the status of a service elite. Similar to many other Spanish and indigenous men in his day, he was “ennobled” by royal service.

However, the commoner–elite divide remained important to our protagonist’s story and is still indispensable for scholars’ understandings of the era. The Chachapoyas and the Spanish lieutenant field justice would establish that his birthname had been Lázaro and that he was “a poor Indian, and a fugitive.”Footnote ²⁵ The justice did not mince words: “through deceit he claims to be a lord (cacique) without being a lord…he has claimed to hold offices…”Footnote ²⁶ Here we see that despite the Indies’ different gradations of status, contemporaries understood there to exist a substantially distinct line dividing a “mere” Indian and a lord−at least in this case. It was a Spanish justice who could interpret this division, and in this case the official in mention did so on the basis of testimonies, physical evidence, and Guaman Poma’s lack of documentation. There was no way around the fact that the jurisdiction he had claimed was his allegedly thriving community was a miserable ruin.Footnote ²⁷ In other words, he lacked the wealth and power that would have supported his claims.

Guaman Poma’s subsequent years of exile, which he refers to obliquely but repeatedly in the Corónica, also suggest he went through better and (much, much) worse phases. He was often on the verge of indigence. A remarkable passage in the Corónica, in which he describes (in third person) his return to his ancestral community of San Cristóbal de Suntunto, makes this long experience with abject poverty very explicit:

His claim of having lived as a poor man for three decades cannot be taken completely at face value. That would stretch the beginnings of his poverty to around 1585. We know that Guaman Poma was gainfully employed in the early 1590s, and that he was at some point working for Friar Murúa, so his circumstances could not have been too dire. But it is possible that even during his late-1590s litigation and petitions in which he loudly declared himself the opulent lord of Chupas (and beyond), he might have been living a very humble life. And after his 1600 expulsion (and the several other exiles that followed), he openly admitted to being an impoverished vagrant, “very tired and very poor and he had not a kernel of corn.”Footnote ²⁹ He also mentions repeatedly receiving alms from certain “friends of the poor.”Footnote ³⁰ In this regard, Guaman Poma might sometimes be far better off than his fellow commoners, and at other times, quite a lot worse off. We believe that his Corónica can be far better understood through the prism of his long experience with poverty, even if there were times in which the author was indeed somewhat prosperous or benefited from the kindness of strangers.

Commoner Intellectuals

De la Puente Luna correctly notes that we might have addressed the sources that the author drew inspiration from, and just as crucially, reflected upon where exactly he got his information. After all, how could someone who was as socially marginal as we have argued have achieved so much and referenced so many sources? The Corónica engaged with at least 18 European works, to say nothing of many Indies laws, oral and written traditions, and sermons.Footnote ³¹ There is no way to deny that the author had “access to this growing body of early modern knowledge, with enough time and leisure (comparatively speaking) not only to digest it but also to extensively engage with it in a one-thousand-page treatise” (DP).

Here, Quiroz makes a useful suggestion. He suggests that “the very high level of instruction that [Guaman Poma] reached can be explained by a possible initial experience of learning Spanish language and other important contents as a foundling servant” in a household of Spanish conquistadors (FQ). Our protagonist would have then acted as an assistant in the service of idolatry extirpator Albornoz and Mercedarian Murúa. Quiroz unfortunately over-relies on the suspect sources offered by Alberdi here. Moreover, we should not completely trust Guaman Poma’s own autobiographical accounts; he presents himself and his kin as early modern Forrest Gumps, present at every key event. We can more safely infer he was a yanacona in a Huamanga hospital as a child and that he served Spaniards in the mid-1590s and worked as an illustrator for Murúa.

We will perhaps never know the specifics of how Guaman Poma obtained access to these sources. But there is abundant evidence that commoner dependents could use periods of service to acquire literacy, learn deeply, and achieve a rather cosmopolitan worldview. This occurred repeatedly during Guaman Poma’s time. The Latin West was home to a small but not insignificant population of self-driven commoners who had access to writing and learning. Some were Menocchios who unwisely confronted authorities with their subversive cosmovisions; others played by the rules. Some of the latter succeeded spectacularly in turning learning into status. A case in point is King Philip II’s assistant Mateo Vázquez de Leca. Born to a commoner mother taken captive on the Barbary Coast, he grew up in Seville as a servant of a church canon. He then rapidly ascended in Madrid as a dependent of the household of a Council of Castile president and ally of the powerful Count of Olivares. By 1573, he had become the secretary to Europe’s mightiest monarch; this circumstance required Vázquez de Leca pay agents to fabricate him a fitting genealogy.Footnote ³² Of course, Vázquez pursued mobility methodically and gradually, unlike Guaman Poma, explaining his success.

Such socially mobile dependent-cum-secretaries also existed in the Andes. Martín Pando’s life provides a strikingly similar story, albeit with a tragic ending. This half-indigenous secretary of the sovereign Vilcabamba Inca Tito Cusi mastered various genres of diplomacy and history writing in the 1560s. Pando’s lineage is utterly unknown. He hailed from Cusco and worked as a dependent of the important jurist and administrator Juan Polo de Ondegardo y Zárate. In 1557, this official tasked Martín with investigating the death of an Inca in Vilcabamba, after which he became the new Inca’s personal secretary.Footnote ³³ Along with the Augustinian friars at Tito Cusi’s court, Pando produced an account signed by Tito requesting lordship over significant areas of Cusco in exchange for peace.Footnote ³⁴ The account is peppered with Manco Inca’s fictional Renaissance dialogues with Pizarro and Almagro and invented lineages of Inca legitimacy. Unlike Vázquez de Leca, Martín Pando’s meteoric rise to the secretary of the sovereign was ill-fated. When Titu Cusi died of poisoning in 1570, one of his wives, Angelina Quilaco, had Pando killed on the spot.Footnote ³⁵

Others in Peru also acquired access to the world of writing as dependents, leveraging this to their advantage. Francisco de Ávila was a mestizo born in Cusco around 1573, and who throughout this clerical career embraced the legal status of expósito. As an abandoned child of unknown parentage, Ávila could overcome any charges of illegitimacy or impurity and acquire the status of nobility of service: “I enjoy the legal privileges of foundlings, and therefore I am entitled to apply for any trade, office, canonship and sinecure, as per right as per absolution.”Footnote ³⁶ Throughout his long career in his numerous probanzas to advance in the church, all witnesses presented him as a foundling.Footnote ³⁷ It is possible that he knew his real parents, and he informally presumed they were “nobles.” Yet as the viceroy of Peru the marquis of Montesclaros would later describe Ávila to the King, “some believe he has known parents, Ávila assumes himself to be a foundling; either way he is a mestizo.”Footnote ³⁸ He was adopted by a family of artisans—the assayer Cristóbal Rodríguez and Beatriz de Ávila, and grew up as a fluent Quechua speaker.Footnote ³⁹ Drawing on the mercantile wealth of his commoner father, Ávila received the best education money could then buy in Peru. He attended a Jesuit high school in Cusco, received a bachelor’s degree at the University of San Marcos in Lima, and began a clerical career that would eventually secure him entrance to the cathedral chapters of both Charcas and Lima.Footnote ⁴⁰

Ávila’s career was partially financed by his exploitative tenure as a parish priest in highland Huarochirí, to the east of Lima. When in 1601 some of his indigenous parishioners accused him of excessive taxation and forcing them to work in his own woolen mills in 1607, he struck back by investigating these communities for idolatry.Footnote ⁴¹ Guaman Poma denounced Ávila by name for his corruption, siring of illegitimate offspring, and retributive harassment of commoners.Footnote ⁴² Yet not all Huarochirí communities petitioned Lima for Ávila’s removal. He had powerful indigenous allies who supported his anti-idolatry campaign, among them an indigenous church acolyte Cristóbal Choquecasa. He was struggling to substitute local traditional lords with new ladino authorities who ruled the recently founded Toledan towns.Footnote ⁴³ Choquecasa helped change the mind of the same skeptical ecclesiastical judges that had initially jailed Ávila and then prosecuted twice over the course of 2 years (1607–1609). He persuaded them that the nearly 100 charges leveled against Ávila by numerous indigenous witnesses were coerced, manipulated, and outright fraudulent, gathered by traditional indigenous nobilities whose legitimacy was built on pagan Andean cults.Footnote ⁴⁴

Ávila and Choquecasa joined forces to crush their allegedly pagan rivals by studying and reflecting on the nature of local indigenous history and myths. These left us a striking collection of manuscripts on Andean religions.Footnote ⁴⁵ Choquecasa penned an extraordinary treatise in Quechua on Huarochirí beliefs.Footnote ⁴⁶ These studies and anti-idolatry campaigns secured Choquecasa his appointment as letrado alcalde of new Toledan towns and advanced Ávila’s clerical career in Lima. Soon the latter was in a cathedral canon in La Plata. He erected a charity in Lima built for foundlings, administered by the Black nun Estefanía de San José (whose hagiography he posthumously published in 1651). He acquired a doctoral degree (1606); generously financed several Franciscan cofradías and capellanías; published two thick volumes of sermons in Quechua (1646 and 1648); and assembled one of the largest personal libraries in America: 3,108 printed volumes and several dozen rare manuscripts.Footnote ⁴⁷ He also bought prime real estate in Lima, Black slaves, and a very large number of religious paintings.Footnote ⁴⁸ This Quechua-speaker foundling could hardly have advanced any higher. Yet there were limits to his power. In 1641, old and at the height of his prestige, Ávila was denied entry to the Jesuits as a mestizo.Footnote ⁴⁹

Indigenous commoners in Peru might also leverage literacy to win access to cosmopolitan environments that dwarfed anything Pando or Guaman Poma ever experienced. De la Puente Luna’s insightful Andean Cosmopolitans has shown the multiple paths taken by provincial indigenous petitioners of questionable lineages who bargained for personal privileges and status, often while claiming to speak on behalf of the Nation of the Indians, the Nación Indiana. Many of these were commoners, not traditional Cusco elites, and they too did not shy away from forging identities and documents to secure lordly titles, offices, and pensions.Footnote ⁵⁰

Take the case of Lorenzo Ayon, a lowly commoner from Reque, northern Peru. Educated by Franciscans in Lima, he became the dependent of the powerful Friar Buenaventura Salinas y Córdova, whom he served in Madrid and Mexico. Ayon wrote memorials demanding labor reform and addressed the king personally in 1646, adding to his name the surname Atahualpa to elevate his status.Footnote ⁵¹ After a 5-year stint in Mexico helping his master administer the Order in Mexico, Lorenzo returned to Peru only to swoop in as one Martin Guere in Lurinhuanca (Jauja) and impersonate the lost son of a recently deceased cacique. As “Jerónimo Limaylla,” Lorenzo received the support of factions within the community. They saw in his ladino skills, his ability to lobby the king, and his assurance that he had secured a collection of decrees against the mita sufficient reason to back his ruse. He spent 11 years in Lima fighting over the right of cacique succession and returned to Madrid to appeal Lima’s high courts negative decisions, where he continued to write memorials and act as legal representative of multiple caciques. He not only personally addressed Philip IV but also acted as the legal representative of dense networks of caciques in Madrid. He is best known for his last Memorial of 1678, petitioning for the establishment of special order of knighthood solely to honor indigenous entrepreneurs, discoverers of mines, and the Order of Santa Rosa de Lima. Criados such as Lorenzo did secure access to vast quantities of knowledge and the means to counterfeit identities. This knowledge allowed him to gain charismatic power and status in Lurinhuanca and recognition as the spokesperson of the Nación Indiana in the Spanish monarchy.Footnote ⁵²

Our intention here is not to provide an exhaustive account of how commoner-dependents might attain the necessary education and connections to dramatically climb the hierarchy. Rather, we mention these cases because they demonstrate that Guaman Poma lived in a world in which he and others could indeed be mere commoners and nonetheless acquire access to the means to think deeply and critically about society. The bedrock social institution that gave commoners such as him this access seems to have been the dependent–master relationship. Yet, while Guaman Poma seems to have used this institution to great effect at times, he struggled to fully exploit it. He soured on his former master Friar Murúa, and seems to have had only intermittent employment in the mid-1590s during his work translating for Spanish officials.

Guaman Poma’s fortunes fluctuated dramatically as he switched professions and masters, but over time, he clearly found poverty harder and harder to escape. By the late 1590s to 1600, his material wealth could not have been too great, and by the time he was finishing his Corónica, things seem to have been dire. So how could he afford to pen this chronicle? There is no document demonstrating where he required the material resources to write his extensive work, but evidently he managed to leverage his tragic tale of being a lord in exile. He noted that throughout his travels he occasionally received enough alms from charitable Spaniards to buy a horse and other goods.Footnote ⁵³ Yet these were not enough to save him from a life of begging throughout the Andes. His Corónica is thus probably not the work of a farmer-serf bound to his ancestral lords but certainly that of a deracinated, vagrant commoner with intermittent experience as a dependent, local official, and experienced wanderer. This was evidently enough to provide him with the resources and time to produce this work, which he hoped in vain to parlay into major privileges.

Debating Social Mobility and Social Transformation in the Late 1500s

Stories such as those of Guaman Poma, Martín Pando, Lorenzo Ayon, and Francisco de Ávila offer detailed testimonies of how social mobility (and immobility) were evolving by the late 1500s. In our original contribution, we placed this pattern of social change at the center of our reflections, noting that “the colossal bottom-up expansion of personal and official archives starting roughly around the 1570s created a complex, difficult-to-navigate, and more epistemologically exacting environment for commoners claiming illustrious lineages than had existed in previous decades.” This process we call archivalization. Readers will note that Quiroz and De La Puente offer quite dramatically different appraisals of Indies social change in their responses. With each, we are in partial agreement.

Our greatest difference is with Quiroz’s vision, which represents the traditional historiographical account of the Spanish conquests: the post-1570s Toledan reforms, the defeat of Andean “military resistance,” and the top-down establishment of a colonial regime. Here, the justice-oriented critiques of Las Casas are crushed by the conquest of the Crown and what Quiroz calls “colonial reason.” Within this framework, Quiroz presents Guaman Poma as an embittered justice-seeker writing when bottom-up initiatives were becoming almost entirely irrelevant. We find this top-down story implausible. The Crown never achieved a firm “military” grip upon the Indies. Nor did it possess as clear a “colonial reason” as Quiroz believes. The Empire was still a system that required substantial negotiation and dialogue and was still based primarily on bottom-up paperwork contributions and improvisation. True, the Inquisition, bishops, and viceroys now had substantial power over friars, native lords, and conquistadors, but this was largely a domination based on paperwork and privileges, not on ever-present soldiers and policemen. This was not Prussia in the Andes, and Toledo was no Bismark.

Consequently, we disagree that Guaman Poma’s writings can be best explained as a journalistic report on the “colonial regime at its moment of consolidation,” a world in which Spanish rulers no longer accepted indigenous negotiation in any meaningful way. Quiroz even implies that Guaman Poma found it necessary to elevate himself to princedom because the Spanish king would not listen to him otherwise.Footnote ⁵⁴ This is certainly false; as many scholars (especially De la Puente Luna) have long shown, after the 1570s indigenous communication with the kings and viceroys actually expanded. Yet we agree with Quiroz that these new communications were often less radical and impactful than they had been before. Social mobility became more restrained not so much through officials’ concerted efforts to impose their will but because bottom-up communication processes structurally changed through the 1500s.

We see the late-sixteenth-century transformation as the end of a radical “charismatic” era of status-making and the advent of a social order much more dependent on archives. Before the 1570s, vassals making claims about their status were ubiquitous and often successful (often regardless of merit). It was, in Weber’s terms, a strongly “charismatic” period.Footnote ⁵⁵ Collective (and deeply factional) consensus helped catapult marginal figures such as Paullu and Manco Inca into positions of authority to replace Inca traditions in Cusco. It was this new regime of charisma, alliances, factionalism, and transactionalism that characterized the first 40-odd years after the conquest.Footnote ⁵⁶

But this unsettled period engendered new regimes of sweeping skeptical doubt. Take, for example, the case of Pedro de Quiroga, who became in 1571 the regional commissioner of the newly founded General Inquisition in Lima. He was imprisoned in 1573 by the new bishop of Cusco, don Sebastián de Lartaún, who refused to cede his prosecuting powers to the Inquisition. Lartaún used two indigenous servants’ testimonies to accuse Quiroga of improper sexual relations with a married Inca princess.Footnote ⁵⁷ Judges absolved Quiroga, but once he left prison he soon framed two agents of Lartaún and had them thrown in jail. One of these agents was the infamous anti-idolatry priest Cristóbal de Albornoz, whom Guaman Poma often praised. In the 1560s, Albornoz had manipulated testimony on an indigenous religious movement in Huamanga, the Taki Onkoy, to advance his ecclesiastical career.Footnote ⁵⁸ Quiroga demonstrated that Albornoz had falsely claimed to have a law degree from the University of Valladolid.Footnote ⁵⁹

In this world of factionalism, counterfeiting, and deception, Quiroga wrote his Colloquys on the Truth, a meditation, similar to Guaman Poma’s, on the impossibility of attaining truth in the Indies. In his Colloquys, Quiroga introduces the fictional Tito Inca, who endures the loss of status and moves to serve a series of archetypical Indies vassals. A rogue soldier teaches Tito to raid and pillage; a merchant teaches Tito to engage in illicit trade; a hermit lectures him about God; and friars—who offer him a formal education—teach him literacy and doctrine. Tito moves to Spain, becoming fully ladino, before returning to Peru. Here, he experiences deceit and humiliation. On the verge of suicide, he is saved by an encomendero-turned-hermit.Footnote ⁶⁰

Similar to Guaman Poma’s Nueva corónica, Quiroga’s Colloquys was a study on the peculiar social structures of sixteenth century Peru that rendered all commoners unruly, defiant toward elites, willing to impersonate anyone, and profoundly dangerous thanks to the power of their testimonies. Quiroga warned Indies newcomers: “From the day you land in this land assume you are surrounded by visible and invisible enemies because in this land a mosquito can harm even the most powerful.”Footnote ⁶¹ The author bemoaned the multiplication of innumerable and cruel commoners-cum-caciques: “Encomenderos make caciques out of anyone; as soon as one false lord dies another is chosen, even if his lineage stems from a wooden stick. Spaniards make lords out of human rabble, choosing the greatest thieves and worst characters”Footnote ⁶²

Quiroga captured the Andes’ unsettled spirit around 1570. All Indies regions had similar problems concerning the identity of native lords; however, Peru was perhaps the most agitated. The Inca Civil War, raging just as the Spanish conquistadors and their indigenous allies arrived, brought about the deaths of many Cusco noblemen. Atahualpa—whom many Spaniards considered a tyrant—had likely murdered most of the legitimate heirs of Huascar. Disease and war killed many more elites. Guaman Poma was one of many contemporaries who noted this problem. According to him, Atahualpa was the son of one of thousands of Huayna Capac’s secondary wives, an illegitimate. The Inca therefore had no legitimate ruler after Pizarro’s arrival, except Guaman Poma himself. The chronicler obviously exaggerated his claims to Inca rule, but in some regards, he had a valid point. Most Inca claimants were sons and daughters of dozens of secondary wives of the Inca from provinces such as Huaylas or Copacabana, as was clearly the case with Paullu himself, Melchor Carlos’s grandfather. Many of the concubines of Pizarro, Hernando de Soto, Almagro, and myriad other conquistadores were women with weak claims to Inca status but whose sons and daughters nevertheless monopolized royal privileges for Inca lords in the wake of the conquest.Footnote ⁶³

Yet Guaman Poma was writing some four decades later, and by then, archivalization had changed the rules. By now years of officials’ often-arbitrary decisions had created the rudiments of a social order based on documents safeguarded in many dozens of interlocking archives. Truth statements could not be invented whole cloth anymore, and the burden of proof was becoming more onerous for commoners who dreamed big. And this phenomenon threatened to arrest the social mobility of the Indies’ many Guaman Pomas. As Quiroga rightly points out, it was in the immediate post-conquest period that indigenous social mobility—downward and upward—was at its most dramatic. Conquistadors, friars, and local officials often elevated commoners or low-ranking elites to high positions, often basing these decisions on candidates’ genealogical claims. These would-be lords could initially defend themselves in court by summoning many favorable witnesses, with or without supporting documents. As time passed and decisions accumulated, however, vassals and administrators accumulated archives brimming with evidence and precedent. These increasingly important archives did not do away with the centrality of oral testimony, but they shaped officials’ decisions more and more and made status falsification not only more difficult but also more dangerous. We believe that Quiroz misses these subtle but fundamental developments. He overstates the might of the colonial regime and underplays the vigor of bottom-up communication.

The considerably more sophisticated sociology of De La Puente Luna offers an excellent counterpoint. In his past works (and in his response), he has not only argued for greater skepticism toward Guaman Poma’s life story, but he has also provocatively and robustly questioned some of the older foundations of a top-down imperial imposition of its interests upon Andean communities. Indeed, he has argued that in the early modern context, such impositions were impossible without local consent. His account of the land regularization drives of 1594–1602 is the opposite of that offered by Quiroz. For De la Puente Luna, Viceroy Toledo’s reforms and the “fixing” of land titles did not amount to “a great dispossession’ in which communities lost their lands to labor-hungry Spaniards through top-down imposition, silencing all Lascasian forms of legal resistance of a previous age. De La Puente Luna documents a different bottom-up process of alliances between pueblos and the representatives of the crown, viceroys, and bishops over rival factions, including encomenderos and indigenous lords. The age of Toledan reforms and composiciones was the age of creation and multiplication of new communities that helped strengthen the power of an intrinsically weak crown that lacked a monopoly over the means of violence. Guaman Poma and the Chachapoyas operated in the 1590s in this new regime and sought to establish legal rights over lands in the ways De la Puente Luna describes—securing occupying empty lands, building chapels, creating brotherhoods, and electing municipal administrators.Footnote ⁶⁴ This era marked the extension of indigenous politics, not its termination. The additional examples we have provided here of the post-1570s indigenous politics in Ávila’s, Choquecasa’s, and Limayalla’s struggles, reinforce De la Puente Luna’s arguments.

We agree fundamentally with De la Puente Luna’s vision of ongoing bottom-up styles of governance, against Quiroz’s top-down vision of a colonial regime that attempted to almost unilaterally “establish conditions of domination.” De la Puente Luna wonders, however, if we overstate the importance of archivalization. His well-taken objection is important on a number of levels, which all have a bearing on both the details and overall argument. First, he questions whether archivalization explains the Chachapoyas’ victory over Guaman Poma. Second, he argues that because we lack the complete Chachapoyas case, “we must acquit Guaman Poma.” Third, he urges that archivalization did not always render documents the end-all, be-all form of evidence to the total exclusion of earlier forms such as witness testimony and physical proofs.Footnote ⁶⁵ We respond to these layered and thoughtful arguments below.

These three intertwined arguments can be addressed simultaneously by revisiting the Chachapoyas documents in the Compulsa. How the Chachapoyas used the archive exemplifies our argument. On November 19, 1586 they petitioned the viceroy alleging services to the Crown—specifically having provided uncompensated labor to royal justices in Huamanga. Their representative don Baltazar Solsol, who referred to himself as a “cacique,” noted that 20 of his landless subjects receive unused lots that once belonged to the Inca.Footnote ⁶⁶ In carefully documented follow-up, local officials and witnesses established that this land possession took place in February 1587, with no public objections.Footnote ⁶⁷ Indeed, the local Spanish official (teniente de corregidor, lieutenant field justice) further granted them permission to settle any number of commoners, as the land was vast, empty, and fertile.Footnote ⁶⁸ The Chachapoyas reinforced their small but growing archive during the late September 1594 land distribution efforts, safeguarding their territories. The land auditor (juez visitador de tierras) destroyed abandoned buildings wherever he found them, notifying the Chachapoyas of certain derelict properties on their land. The Chachapoyas, now led by one don Domingo Jauli, proved possession by demonstrating before witnesses that they had occupied certain buildings, farms, and a church. They also presented the abovementioned edicts and transcripts of land possession from the late 1580s.Footnote ⁶⁹ The Chachapoyas were on sturdy legal ground.

But Guaman Poma disagreed. He alleged before the High Court in 1597 that in 1592 the Chachapoyas—specifically the dastardly don Domingo Jauli and other “Indios cimarrones” had won an edict from the High Court guaranteeing their possession of the lands of Chiara, which he claimed for himself and his associates. Guaman Poma added that Domingo was a diabolical warlock and murderous poisoner who had bribed the field justice 30 silver pesos.Footnote ⁷⁰ A perfect Judas! This climate of harassment, Guaman Poma unpersuasively lamented, made it impossible for him to prove that he owned the land since well before Huamanga’s foundation. He promised that his status was plain to see—he had many subjects in his service; administered a large wealthy town and several churches in Rantavilca; the Incas’ decrees, viceroys’ ordinances, and the Third Council of Lima favored him; and he had certain royal and viceregal confirmations.Footnote ⁷¹ Justice—“the Law of God and of these realms” would help him reach “our justice of our title to our lands and boundaries.”Footnote ⁷²

At no point did Guaman Poma present proofs. But he seems to have had a strategy, namely, to appear at least once mentioned as an elite in a document. By July 1595, there was already a conflict between the Chachapoyas and the small jurisdiction of don Juan Tingo over portions of Chiara and Rantavilca. When don Juan died, Guaman Poma attempted to assert kinship with him. This would have bequeathed him the late lord’s small collection of documents featuring land titles dated back to 1570.Footnote ⁷³ Guaman Poma also eyed another group of documents. Don Juan’s daughter Inés and her close associate, the commoner Martín de Ayala, had won a series of injunctions in the summer of 1595, which actually included the Chachapoyas and don Domingo Jauli as favorable witnesses.Footnote ⁷⁴ By April 1597, things had soured, and Inés, the lumberjack Martín de Ayala, and one Alonso Guamani won an injunction against don Domingo for using wood and land that belonged to them.

Our protagonist seems to have stepped in here. In June 1597, Guaman Poma first appeared before the High Court, claiming vague connections to doña Inés and Martín, and declaring that their jurisdiction included whole swaths of the Chupas region, not just Chiara and Rantavilca.Footnote ⁷⁵ He depicted himself here as the “cacique principal y administrador de la provincia de los Soras y Lucana, Andamarcas y Sircamarca” and wrote alongside doña Juana Chuquitinta. Here he insinuated he was the son of don Juan Tingo or Diego Guaman Malqui, allegedly the current main lord of the region. This allowed Guaman Poma to claim a family bond to don Juan, who was manifestly not his father, and also to don Diego Guaman Malqui, who was not Chiara’s main cacique according to numerous other documents. Later in the petition, Guaman Poma also vaguely referred to someone among his “parents and grandparents” named “don Martín de Ayala gobernador.”Footnote ⁷⁶ The commoner lumberjack had become a lord too. Here, again, Guaman Poma offered forth hazy family relations; later in this same petition he claimed don Martín (and not don Diego Guaman Malqui) as his father. He would claim Martín as his father later, too, in the Corónica. He then listed long abuses by many Indies social groups, including don Domingo Jauli and the Chachapoyas.Footnote ⁷⁷ The record suggests that never once did he manage to provide his filiations; the High Court expected local authorities would vet his claims in Huamanga.Footnote ⁷⁸

And vet them they did. The surviving pages of the Compulsa provide the best evidence of the aftermath. By 1600, don Domingo Jauli had become the lord of the Chachapoyas and had initiated a criminal investigation against Guaman Poma for identity fraud. The Chachapoyas challenged Guaman Poma before the lieutenant field justice, perhaps in a continuation of a drawn-out struggle stretching back to mid-1597, or perhaps in a new case. The circumstances were very similar: They were struggling over the jurisdictions of Chiara and Rantavilca. In March 1600, Guaman Poma’s petitions to the High Court had resulted in a new land inspection. But on his big day, he absconded. Don Domingo was adamant: He had all the necessary documentation. The commoners of both Chupas and Rantavilca had also provided convincing witness statements in this regard.Footnote ⁷⁹ And the abandoned state of the town Guaman Poma claimed under 3 years before was undeniable. The lieutenant field justice considered these factors (and likely other arguments) and decreed that “Don Domingo Jaulo [sic] cacique of the Chachapoyas proved this well and according to procedure.”Footnote ⁸⁰ This commoner-turned-service lord had done things by the books.

But what was different about archives now, in 1600, than it had been before? First of all, witness statements formed the core of mid-1500s disputes and petitions. Then they followed a specific judicial epistemology in which officials weighed the reliability and number of witnesses, especially eyewitnesses. This enabled charismatic figures—including commoners—to perform and secure lordship. Second was a far rarer epistemology—one of physical evidence. This was rare in the mid-1500s as well, largely because disease and violence unsettled many communities. Third were documents, which were also rarer in the mid-1500s, but were nearly omnipresent in the core Indies regions by the 1570s and 1580s, especially among would-be lords. The Chachapoyas rulers of the Huamanga area had acquired all three types of evidence, including, crucially, documentary proofs.

Guaman Poma, meanwhile, failed on all three accounts. Had he proven his filiation to don Juan Tingo, he might have accumulated the community resources and social respect necessary to build up Rantavilca and combat the Chachapoyas in court. Or better yet, had he possessed convincing documents when the viceroy granted the Chachapoyas jurisdiction over Chupas in 1587, these commoners’ pretensions might have failed on the spot. He could not summon witnesses to support his arguments according to standard procedure, suggesting strongly that he did not possess any means to charm, reward, or coerce support.

Guaman Poma did not doubt the power of witness statements. But he could neither muster witnesses nor produce the documents he needed. In the Corónica, he resorted to fantastical claims about favorable testimonies that would never have passed muster before an official. He includes a made-up letter by his “father” don Martín de Ayala, the lowly lumberjack turned-all-mighty-Andean-lord, who conveniently stated all assertions by the author were authoritative and credible. Guaman Poma crafted his forged letter following probanzas written for Cusco Inca witnesses supporting the credibility of Friar Murúa, then a parish priest near Lucanas. He had likely obtained these in the early 1600s, while illustrating Murúa’s history of the Incas.Footnote ⁸¹ He allegedly drew on the oral testimonies of the few descendants of the Runa (pre-Inca) lineages of the four quarters of the former Inca empire. But these imaginary probanzas could not pass factual scrutiny. His alleged witnesses were on average 150 years old—old enough to know Inca history, but too old to be plausible. He even illustrated them in a bid to win him credibility.Footnote ⁸² To no avail—this approach could not persuade officials.

Figure 1

“Pregunta el autor.” Guaman Poma surrounded by imaginary witnesses in his probanza, Nueva coronica, 368.

There remains the question of his guilt. The nature of his punishment is also relevant here. The Compulsa and the Prado Tello both reveal glaring inconsistencies in his story, especially about his parental filiation. Clearly, he was making claims about status that went far beyond minor disagreements, and this resulted in his uncommon punishment. The lieutenant field justice declared him not merely meritless but also stated “that according to the información”—that is, the formal interrogation procedure—“which was made against him at the request of the Chachapoyas Indians, it is established and proven, that he is a humble Indian, who through fraudulent means claims to be a cacique without being a cacique, nor being an elite who has any Indians subject to him, or respect him as such, and the malicious intentions and frauds through which he has proceeded, he has claimed for himself honorific positions…”Footnote ⁸³ This was not a mere disagreement but a criminal case of identity fraud.Footnote ⁸⁴ Unsurprisingly but unfortunately for the protagonist, he was sentenced to lashes and exile. In our view, then, Guaman Poma should almost certainly not be acquitted; we believe his rather extreme sentence for identity fraud in the Compulsa combined with his deeply erratic claims in the Prado Tello and Corónica tell very similar stories. Indeed, all three of the major sources we have on his life offer compelling internal evidence that he was indeed misleading his contemporaries. Instead of merely being dismissed and asked to pay the winning party’s bills, as generally occurred, he was sentenced as a criminal forger. The only silver lining was that the Spanish official overseeing the case had established his status as a poor commoner, meaning the Chachapoyas were saddled with the bill. The nature of his punishment reflected a new, more archivalized era.

But this brings us to the third point raised by De la Puente Luna here—namely, about the growing centrality of archival evidence. He has uncovered compelling evidence in other cases not too far from Guaman Poma’s own context, namely in land litigation from the early 1600s, which shows that litigants with few documentary claims could triumph over those who did have documents in their favor.Footnote ⁸⁵ In 1612, two indigenous litigants in Tomaringa, Bernabé and Leonor, brought titles to an indigenous court over the same land, which were ultimately offset by the testimony of authoritative older witnesses as they testified that the land actually belonged to a third female commoner, Isabel. As Isabel died, she acknowledged that Bernabé did have legal rights over her land (as both were grandchildren of the original owner). Isabel bequeathed the land to Bernabé in her will and the court accepted her will as legal tender.Footnote ⁸⁶ His point is well taken. That “the court of public opinion” continued to be important is certainly true. Magistrates often had broad powers and were not always bound to adhere to past documents to the exception of all other forms of evidence. Indeed, the coexistence of multiple judiciary epistemologies characterized Indies justice in general and the Chachapoyas–Guaman Poma litigation in particular. Officials often made decisions on the basis of evidentiary mixtures: objects (chapels, buildings, terraces), testimonies, and titles. Our point is that Guaman Poma could not muster any of the three forms of evidence and was criminally charged for identity fraud, fully demonstrating his commoner status, while the Chachapoyas’ combined care to keep documentation and perform community governance and status won them the day.

We believe that the phenomenon of overruling past documents was a localized exception, rather than the rule, but that it is nonetheless a valid reminder of the dangers of over-stating the totality of complex social processes. Still, it is important to see the trees and the forest. Countless cases of social mobility in particular reveal that having an arsenal of old manuscripts was increasingly indispensable in virtually all petitions for elite status. Litigation outcomes, too, depended ever more upon mastery of old documents.

Still, the chronology of archivalization can be complicated further, beyond De la Puente Luna and Quiroz’s critiques. This is because in the Empire’s frontier zones, the evidentiary weight of the documentary record was slower to impose itself well into the 1600s and 1700s. There, charisma remained a strong force and therefore resembled the epistemological conditions of the radical age described by Quiroga. Take for example the case of Diego Ramírez Carlos, who grew up in La Paz and was the exact contemporary of Guaman Poma. Diego was a half-indigenous instrument maker who in 1619 approached the Franciscans about entering the Amazon lowlands of the Moxos Province. He convinced the friar Gregorio Bolívar to support his petition to the viceroy to convert Chuncho natives and settle their lands. Soon Diego and Fray Bolívar entered Chuncho territory, where Diego began to behave as the Inca, wearing an Inca tunic and crown (the tocapu and mascapaicha). Diego explained to the friar that the Chuncho were communities that had fled the Inca highlands and wanted an Inca to convert and to live in settler towns (pueblos). The Franciscan was enthusiastic at first but by 1626, turned against Diego’s deceit and treason, for the commoner artisan had hijacked the sovereign authority of the king. When caught, Diego claimed to be one of the mestizo sons of successful Inca claimant don Melchor Carlos, part-Spanish himself, who had died in 1610. The commoner artisan Diego had no papers to prove he was an Inca, yet similar to Guaman Poma, he had the deep desire to be one. The undocumented Diego, however, did manage to be an Inca among the Chuncho for at least 6 years, while deceiving the court in Lima with the help of Franciscans.Footnote ⁸⁷

There is also the case of the counterfeiter Pedro Chamijo, another contemporary of Guaman Poma, who was a lowly Spanish runaway commoner raised by Jesuits in Cádiz. He arrived young in Pisco circa 1620. Near Huamanga, Chamijo married the daughter of a mulatto muleteer and an indigenous woman and settled down for nearly 16 years. When his father-in-law died, Pedro took the mules and fled to the Anti (the Amazon “Andes”), near Jauja, to cohabitate with the daughter of a local lowland lord. Pedro emerged from the tropical forest with a new name, Bohórquez, a cadre of indigenous lords as witnesses, and maps and paintings to prove that he had found the long-lost Inca state of Paititi. Several expeditions followed; in 1650, Pedro secured the royal title of adelantado with broad powers to convert the natives and settle the land. He founded pueblos, issued decrees, and secured support from indigenous communities.Footnote ⁸⁸ Dominicans, however, denounced Pedro in Lima for behaving similar to a conquistador, capturing slaves and raping women. The viceroy sent militias to capture him, and he was sent to the Araucano frontier to fight against the Mapuche.Footnote ⁸⁹ He disappeared into the population of Tucumán ladinos, who helped him hatch a plan to take over the lush but unconquered Calchaqui valley. Pedro convinced the frustrated Jesuits and local governor that he could impersonate the Inca and secure them thousands of converts.Footnote ⁹⁰ In the town of London, Bohórquez staged, with the authorities’ permission, a 15-day festival proclaiming him the Inca. Authorities gathered hundreds of caciques and vecinos in festivals involving theater, poetry, masses, bullfighting, and horse-lancing tournaments. Yet his plans failed owing to profound fractures among the indigenous communities in the valley, divided between Inca former mitimaes who supported Bohórquez and the original ethnic groups that had long resisted Inca power. Inter-indigenous war erupted in the Valley that destroyed the Jesuit missions. Officials captured Bohórquez, subjecting him to a 7-year trial in Lima that ended with his execution. What happened in the seventeenth century borderlands had been typical a century earlier in Cusco, Lima, and Potosí, when charisma ruled and archives were only beginning to take shape.

De la Puente Luna suggests that Guaman Poma “above paperwork was a true believer in justice.” Implicit in this assertion is that the magistrates were not limited by paperwork procedure, that outcomes were ultimately decided by the individual judge’s reliance on natural or divine law. This is a complex issue we cannot fully address here, but we stress that by the 1570s (if not before) proper paperwork procedure and justice were very often considered to be inseparable. Officials could not merely ignore documents, or throw procedure to the wind, without incurring serious risk of investigations or worse. For disregarding procedure was the definition of tyranny and injustice. There were indeed complexities; monarchs and viceroys could use their powers of grace to sidestep formalities from time to time. They could also occasionally delegate extraordinary powers to officials. But lesser officials rarely enjoyed the leeway to merely ignore legislation, norms, and archives. Lastly, while justice is a ubiquitous concept in the Latin West, whose centrality has varied little over the centuries (even until the present), the same cannot be said for the historical nature of archival paperwork, as Indies society went from having very little to very much documentation in a very brief time. Appeals to justice were universal, but vassals realized that archives increasingly became a crucial place whence this justice could be articulated as the 1500s advanced. We see this in the Indies virtually everywhere; all parties—Choquecasa and Ávila, Chachapoyas and Guaman Poma, and all other vassals, argued that justice was on their side. Yet the different outcomes between the Chachapoyas and Guaman Poma, for instance, came not from their invocations of justice alone, but from the former’s mastery of the correct procedure of justice.

Guaman Poma: Uncommon Commoner

What good does it do to rethink Guaman Poma and his works? In the original article and our responses, we have argued that understanding him as a commoner allows new perspectives not only into his life but into the logics of the Corónica. Further still, we believe Guaman Poma’s life allows us to track an important evolution in how social mobility, paperwork, and justice operated—allowing us to propose a model preferable to the ubiquitous top-down “conquest of the Crown” thesis, which we find so implausible. And by placing Guaman Poma upon contemporary bookshelves alongside Martin Guerre and Menocchio (among others) we can better appreciate him today as part of an early modern constellation of rich commoner intellectualism engaged in searing critiques of social hierarchies and power.Footnote ⁹¹ The uniqueness of Guaman Poma rests not in his life story per se—not in his commoner status, not in his frustrated dreams. Rather, he has become unique to us today. Few would disagree that he was a remarkable figure, but others may concur with us for other reasons. Previous culturalist and decolonial analyses of Guaman Poma have variously sought him out as a perfect native informant or as an anti-colonial truth-teller. But they have ignored that he was also a theorist of truth, social mobility, and archivalization. And it is his brilliant, chilling vision of an epistemologically totalitarian archival universe, central to his own life, that has been most often overlooked by scholars interested in his contributions.

This reflection brings us to our final critique. Quiroz chides us for elevating Guaman Poma to the status of a mythical “superhero.” Instead, argues the respondent somewhat unhelpfully, we should understand him as “exceptional” and appreciate his “unique circumstances.” In his conclusion, he offers the similarly infelicitous counter-proposal that “Guaman Poma was not a special person, but he was extraordinary.” Our argument does not, of course, present any such superheroism. We do not argue that he is an implausible (or impossible?) superhero, who flew throughout the Andes using his marvelous powers. He walked the Andes by foot, illustrating a marvelous story about himself that was rich in social critique as it was in fantasy and wish-fulfillment. One might even hazard that the Corónica was a comic book autobiography avant la lettre.

But Guaman Poma could not fly. To the contrary. He constructed for himself, in his delusions of grandeur, a persona that merged figures such as the great Spanish auditors, King David, the Inca, and Jesus Christ. And yet he crashed into the wall of a transforming society.

Delusions are sometimes the stuff of artistic and intellectual brilliance. They acted as Guaman Poma’s wings, propelling his vision of himself atop Peruvian society, ruling as King Philip III’s right-hand man, restoring order and justice, and gaving us the Corónica. And these delusions make him special for us today. His conviction that his written and illustrated cries would be heard makes him unique—not any putative superpowers. He is to the Andes what figures such as Martin Guerre and Menocchio have been for European historians. In their time they were gadfly commoners, an annoyance. But they later became microhistorical-intellectual Virgils in the hands of twentieth and twenty-first century thinkers. These uncommon commoners help us learn, as we have already argued, “much about the early modern world—both the mechanics of historical change and the richness of human beings’ responses to these circumstances.” It is not their superpowers but their social incompatibilities, cantankerous imaginations, and insistence in writing it all down that make them relevant to our questions today. They remind us that the early modern world was richer than we often imagine. Those of us who seek to contemplate the past in all its rich experiences are most indebted to these uncommon commoners.