The «Royal Commentaries» as a Kaleidoscopic National Archetype: Clorinda Matto de Turner, José de la Riva-Agüero and Luis E. Valcárcel¹

Thomas Ward

Loyola University Maryland

A common misconception about the Spanish conquest of America is that it was a lightning-bolt enterprise that quickly converted the region's inhabitants to Christianity and to the Spanish way of life. But in fact the conquest was uneven and the Spanish needed to use local leaders to control the large masses of indigenous peoples who slowly and inconsistently moved toward adopting a Mediterranean-style cultural and religious ideal. Legislation promulgated in Lima a century and a half after the transatlantic invasion shows that colonial officials were still looking for ways to siphon off political power from hereditary overlords known as curacas (Ballesteros 1685)³. Pre-Conquest customs still persist. Religious beliefs regarding the dead reflect analogous concepts from the period of Incan supremacy (Kaulicke 2001, 25-26), and forms of dance and notions of geographical space have their verifiable origins in the Andes, not Europe (Burga [1988]). Since the nineteenth century, there has been an intense sociological and historical effort to recover Andean traditions, and to measure and favor their persistence in Peruvian society.

The past, therefore, becomes a powerful force, sometimes even more so than Peru's interest in inserting itself into the global economy, an interest that dates from the middle of the nineteenth century when nitrates and guano began to be exported. While many Peruvians, especially members of the civilista political party, were interested in commerce, industrialization, and exportation, others turned their attention back to the moment when Peru first had contact with Spain⁴. True to Manuel González Prada's call to social science (reproduced as the epigraph for this article), Peruvians who still felt the enduring heartbeat of pre-Hispanic modes of being, or those who felt conflicted about the nature of post-Conquest mestizaje, looked for historical documentation to validate those feelings.

A favorite object of attention from the colonial period was the writings of the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539-1616). The Incas were cultural and political elites who ruled over less powerful ethnic nations. Garcilaso's mother was a ñusta, or Incan princess, and his father, whose name he took later in life, was a conquistador who joined Pedro de Alvarado and his group of marauding adventurers as they participated in the conquests of Mexico, Guatemala, and finally Peru. From the early seventeenth century onward, Garcilaso's bicultural roots and mixed-heritage understanding of Peru served as an archetypical model, or as a cultural resource, for subsequent intellectuals looking to put facts to their intuitions about the nation. Garcilaso was uniquely suited to represent a heterogeneous nation because, as intellectual historian Antonio Cornejo Polar points out, «Garcilaso speaks sometimes as a faithful servant of Your Majesty, sometimes as a mestizo who is doubly noble, sometimes simply as a mestizo, sometimes as an Inca, and other times as an Indian» (1994, 94). Thus post-Independence thinkers of various stripes could find something in Garcilaso that spoke uniquely to them. This was true even though he represented the imperial Incan view, not the views of innumerable ethnic nations that inhabited the Andes.

Garcilaso's 1609 Royal Commentaries serve not only as a springboard for the social imaginary, but also as a window into a lost world of pre-Hispanic people and history. One Peruvian critic has described him as a kind of lighthouse to guide lost cultural ships back to a national port in reconstruction⁵. By turning to the Royal Commentaries for inspiration -as had Túpac Amaru in his famous 1780 rebellion, and as had the Congress of Tucumán of the United Provinces of Río de la Plata in 1816- late nineteenth century sociologists and their successors found in Garcilaso's most famous work the raw data necessary to understand the nation as a cultural entity⁶. The Commentaries -which had finally come into print again in the early 1800s- also provided a yardstick to evaluate possible interactions between what the English sociologist Anthony Smith has called «the primordial nation» and what we understand to be the modern state (1988, 7-13)⁷.

Ironically, it was well after independence that Garcilaso's sturdy place in the national consciousness became dislodged. This of course is not as severe a fate as his book being banned, as after the Túpac Amaru uprising, but it was nevertheless a readjustment of his privileged position in the intellectual firmament. That readjustment came with a flurry of first editions of hitherto unknown sixteenth-century chronicles of Peru's history, by Bartolomé de las Casas (1875-1876), Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti (1879), Pedro de Cieza de León (1877, 1880), Juan de Betanzos (1880), and Bernabé Cobo (1890-1895). Other revelations were to come with the startling discovery in 1908 of Guaman Poma de Ayala's Primer nueva crónica (1936). These works offered perspectives that threw into doubt many of Garcilaso's assertions.

Garcilaso's slippery footing on the Peruvian intellectual landscape was not just the result of philological discovery and editorial innovation. José Antonio Mazzotti reminds us that this instability was also instigated by racial initiatives: «Especially since the nineteenth century, Garcilaso has been the cause of many ideological battles, whether fought by Hispanists, indigenists or mestizists» (1998, 90)⁸. From these battles, Garcilaso's Royal Commentaries begin to develop a relationship with the nation that is kaleidoscopic. While a kaleidoscope does not necessarily create harmonious images, the juxtaposition of the themes, images, and colors it creates can indeed be beautiful. Here, we look not so much at the broad strokes of the battle for the nation, for there is insufficient time to foreground the nuances of such a long-lasting dispute. We will simply examine three kaleidoscopic surfaces which had adapted elements of the Royal Commentaries to form a composite national model, further integrating the colors and tones of Garcilaso's take on Andean culture into the national apparatus of memory.

A fascinating feature of the late nineteenth-century intellectual environment in Peru was that women writers, such as Clorinda Matto de Turner (1852-1909), actively organized literary soirées and published in magazines and in books, contesting the notion of the male-dominated nation being confected out of colonial interpretations of culture. Recent research on these socially minded women has demonstrated aspects of their intellectual contributions to the nation (Denegri 1996; Guardia 2007), including their interest in history (Ward 2004a), but beyond Efraín Kristal's work (1994) little attention has been paid to the contribution that the Royal Commentaries made to their ideological paradigms. A framework such as the one provided by sociologist Anthony Smith, which includes nation, ethnicity, and language, allows us to take a step beyond Kristal's interest in the novels of Matto de Turner and other women authors. We will turn now to Matto de Turner's two-part sociolinguistic essay «Estudios históricos» (1888), which is essentially a defense of the Quechua language. There we find direct quotations from the Royal Commentaries, both from Garcilaso himself and from his citations of the Jesuit priest Blas Valera.

In his study on the Ethnic Origins of Nations, Smith brings up the «frequent confusion of language with ethnicity» during pre-modern eras (1988, 17)¹⁰. Garcilaso, quoting Blas Valera, serves as a springboard to consider this issue in Peru when he makes mention of the Incas and how «their vassals from different nations accepted each other as brothers, because they all spoke one language» (1943, bk. VII, ch. III). «Nations», what we might call etnias, what Smith would call ethnie (plural), do not remain narrowly and explicitly limited to a particular tongue if they come together in the lingua franca of the Empire, what Garcilaso calls General Language, in this case, and Matto calls Quechua. Matto followed Garcilaso's framework, but with a twist. While the late-Renaissance historian was describing the process of expansion of the General Language during both the pre-contact period and the early colony, the late-nineteenth-century essayist, after Quechua's four-hundred years of diglossic relations with Spanish, is concerned with its disappearance. She warns that there are still «those who lobby for Quechua's extinction» (1893, 101).

The dualist Spanish-Quechua construction is not political posturing on Matto's part; she is aware that the Incas were polyglots. This she learned from the Inca Garcilaso (1943, bk. II, ch. XVI; bk. VII, ch. IV), and today linguists such as Hardman (1985) recognize it as a fact. Matto deduces that the General Language itself sprung out of that linguistic diversity, and that it originated in Suttupampa and Catonera (1893, 93), provinces listed by Garcilaso as Cotapampa and Cotanera, which he describes as Quechua provinces. Garcilaso, reflecting ancient usage, refers to the «Quechua nation», but not to the Quechua language (1943, bk. III, ch. XII). He does not hint at the General Language also being called Quechua. Matto fills in Garcilaso's blanks when she suggests that it was in reality Quechua that began to be disseminated with Inca Roca (it was Viracocha who later went to these provinces after the Chanca war, according to Garcilaso) and that, much later, the Inca Huayna Cápac came to speak of it as his own language. Sixteenth-century nomenclature is transformed (as it was already during that time by the Jesuit linguist Diego González Holguín) when Matto de Turner deduces that if the General Language was being disseminated, and if the General Language was Quechua, then it was in fact Quechua that was being disseminated, so much so that «the Emperor declared it the general and obligatory language of the people» (1893, 96). Thus in her view, the provincial tongue becomes the language of Empire, the nation as etnia gives way to the nation as state, privileging the General Language now called Quechua. Matto extrapolates a connection not between nation as etnia and language, but between nation as state and language, when she refers to «the designation of Quechuas whose name also signifies the general language of Ancient Peru» (1893, 97). Matto, in the manner of Garcilaso, refers to a linguistic process of diffusion that began in the pre-Inca period in Cotapampa and Cotanera, continued during Cuzco's empire, and further being fortified during the time of colonial occupation when the Jesuits learned it in order to teach the gospel, and only beginning its decline during the republican era.

An important lexical difference between the language employed in «Estudios históricos» and the language in writing by other criollo elites is that Matto elects to use the connotation-neutral «Quechuas» to refer to non-European peoples. In the politically fragmented period that began in 1883 when a truce ending the War of the Pacific was signed, Matto could not argue for a multilingual paradigm for the nation even if she understood the nation's multicultural fabric. In that period of great national soul searching, a recognition of heterogeneity would not have been rhetorically helpful to her arguments¹¹. Taking for granted the dominance of Quechua over other indigenous languages as a positive value was a nation-building attitude she may have assimilated from Blas Valera, who argues, «similarity and conformity of words almost always reconciles and brings true union and friendship to men» (1943, bk. VII, ch. III). Only Quechua had any chance of success in bringing order to the unstable plane of multiple languages competing to overcome colonialism. Operating within the criollo structure of power, Matto's best plan of attack was to lament the lack of knowledge of «our mother tongue» submerged by a Spanish-only political system (1893, 99). She grieves «the low regard in which Quechua is held today, this language that should be the everlasting link that unites the Peruvian race» (1893, 99). This defense of the language definitely encompasses a nativist position. It may also contain a twofold gynococentric posture, perhaps also derived from Garcilaso. First, Peruvian mothers have historically been Quechua speaking. This was the case with Garcilaso himself whose mother Isabel Chimpu Ocllo was a Quechua speaker. Second, domestic servants frequently spoke Quechua as their first language and we also know that Matto de Turner, like her progressive contemporary Manuel González Prada, upheld the domestic ideal as a means of securing education for women. Thus, even if it wasn't Matto's intention, the domestic ideal becomes loosely associated with the Quechua ideal. This brings us back to language. We are now able to make a fantastic leap, insinuated but not stated in Matto's essay: if the Incas disseminated Quechua as an imperial language, so too could the Peruvian State, since Quechua was the language of the people. Thus the Peruvian State would become the successor to the Inca Empire.

Accordingly, Matto de Turner took it upon herself to defend Quechuas or «Indians» (the latter term she would eventually accept and use in her novels), the women and men who represented a direct link between the Empire and the Republic. Such usage sets up a tension between her discourse and a heterogeneous reality, a tension that was initially highlighted in Garcilaso's text as Incas civilizing «barbarian» nations by conquering them. She aims to resolve this tension by creating a progressive strategy to help the nation recover from the heritage of colonialism. She understood the need for a unifying proper name and «Quechua» is the time-honored former neologism she chooses in «Estudios históricos» to refer to the descendents of pre-Columbian peoples. Her unequivocal linking of the Quechua language with the modern nation should not be considered «confusion». Rather, it is the best possible attempt at social recognition for people of Andean origin, in that keyed-up postbellum atmosphere regulated by the hegemonic Spanish language.

Differences between Garcilaso and Matto can easily be explained by the fact that the former was mainly writing for a seventeenth-century European-Spanish audience, while the latter was writing for a modern developing nation. If the chronicler was absorbed in his quest for linguistic accuracy and preserving the civilization of his progenitors for posterity, the essayist, as I have pointed out elsewhere (Ward 2004b, 178-198), was concerned about the degenerate quality of a Quechua-less historiography. Matto's linking of a general language and a generalized ethnicity in her two-part essay folds the past into the present and does so in a bilingual nation that is not solely Hispanic in nature.

The association between the Inca Garcilaso and the early twentieth-century historian José de la Riva Agüero (1885-1944) is itself almost legendary. As Efraín Kristal has noted, Riva Agüero reads Garcilaso as a «true history» (1993, 47). Yet it is not a true history in a rigorous historiographical sense, but in a hybrid sense that brings together two radically different traditions, one that emanates from the Andes and the other imposed from Spain. Riva Agüero does not merely appropriate the Inca Garcilaso; he passes his work through a Hispanic filter synthesizing even more Garcilaso's already doubly synthetic view (barbarians and Incas, Incas and Spaniards), creating a true history in a deeper cultural sense (Indians, mestizos, and criollos).

In his untranslated doctoral thesis La historia en el Perú, Riva Agüero is intrigued by the fact that the Royal Commentaries derive from two sources, Spanish chroniclers and Quechua stories that Garcilaso's relatives and schoolmates retrieved from quipus ([1910] 1962-97, IV: 55). Incan quipus were non-alphabetic recording devices made of knotted cords of different colors. The color and length of the cord along with the position of the knot denote semiotic meaning; the devices were a way of recording history. Garcilaso explains that the quipus «registered the people who went to war... those who were born and those who died each year...they even stated how many speeches and rational pronouncements the king had made» (1943, bk. VI, ch. IX). It is easy to see how the Spanish chronicles preserved the Hispanic side of things, but -as Riva Agüero warns- just one-hundred years after the arrival of the Spanish, the Incan tradition was in danger of being wiped out ([1910] 1962-97, 4: 73). This is an important observation, since the art of the quipucamayoc, the keeper of the quipu, has been lost, although researchers such as Gary Urton have recently deciphered some of their attributes. Thus, Garcilaso's importance becomes obvious. As José Antonio Mazzotti forcefully argues, Garcilaso was able to preserve the system of symbols utilized by Cuzco's elite as a kind of subtext that might be possible to decipher even today (1996, 28). Because the codification of quipucamayoc knowledge had been simultaneously folded into a Hispanic culture of the Renaissance that was expanding, it was available three centuries later for Riva Agüero to study¹². Two intellectual traditions together represented not only colonial society, but also the Peruvian nation that grew out of it.

Garcilaso is not just any example of scholarly syncretism. Riva Agüero sees him as the «perfect type to come from mixing both races, the American and the Spanish» ([1910] 1962-97, 4: 38). This is more than a simple idea, because in accordance with early twentieth-century norms of racial stereotyping, Riva Agüero assigns characteristics to each race. He had done this in an early essay on the institutions of Tahuantinsuyo ([1902] 1962-97, 5: 33-39), the Incan realm, and it was common during the era¹³. From Spanish predecessors, the Inca Garcilaso inherited both «fervor» and «sharpness of wit» and, from the «Indian», «the affectionate sweetness and certain candor that commonly is found behind the proverbial cautiousness and lack of confidence of our indigenous people» ([1910] 1962-97, 4: 38). Despite the stereotyping, there is recognition that both sides of Garcilaso offered something to a nation only independent for eighty years. That something, as Raquel Chang-Rodríguez has observed, was a Neo-Platonic view of mestizaje in which «diverse races and cultures would be linked through love» (1991, 122). This Neo-Platonic view of cultural mixing also had a basis in reality since Garcilaso's parents, whose love begot him, were of two disparate cultures.

Riva Agüero demonstrates the same idea in a commemorative essay about Garcilaso ([1916] 1962-97, 2: 1-62). In that tribute, he reveals a hybrid notion of modern society by inserting the «mestizo from Cuzco» into «the first criolla generation». This reorients Garcilaso, who had first called himself an Indian in La Florida del Inca, and later a mestizo, but not a criollo. In the first case, Garcilaso states he is an Indian from Peru, different from an Indian from Hispaniola (1960-65, bk. II, ch. X). In the second case, he says that because his group had mixed Spanish-Indian parentage, «they call us mestizos» (1943, bk. IX, ch. XXI; his italics). Garcilaso, in his new role as a vaunted member of the first criollo generation, becomes for Riva Agüero a «superior first example of the alloying of spirits that gives rise to Peruvianism» ([1916] 1962-97, 2: 57; his italics). Garcilaso moves in his time from Indian to mestizo and, three-hundred years later, Riva Agüero moves him to criollo, the most widely accepted ethnicity (or race, in early twentieth-century terms) for the modern nation.

Riva Agüero praises Garcilaso the man, but he praises even more the book that the man wrote, even though it is not «an immaculate source on Incan history». After insisting on reading Garcilaso's chronicle as a mixed-heritage paradigm for the nation, Riva Agüero is incapable of going beyond admitting that his history has «value» ([1910] 1962-97, 4: 107). Having «value» is a subjective appraisal of this national paragon. Thus despite Riva Agüero's methodical approach to historiography, despite the 400-plus pages he dedicates to the chronicler, his fraternal or even familial embrace of Garcilaso takes on an intuitive quality. As Smith would say, with Garcilaso he feels the connection with that which came before. That is, Riva Agüero feels Garcilaso in the nation just as he feels the nation in Garcilaso. This is the sense in which Garcilaso can be read as a «true history».

Iberian power controlled the facts and the timbre in which they were presented in Peruvian historiography from the year 1532 onward, even establishing the ideological framework for Garcilaso de la Vega's writing. It was inevitable that at some point there would be a backlash to correct the excesses of what could be called the anti-Incan historiography of Hispanicism¹⁴. The flashpoint of this countercurrent came in the form of a genre-smashing indigenist biography that incorporated elements of both essay and novel, Garcilaso de la Vega visto desde el ángulo indio (1939), by Luis E. Valcárcel (1893-1987). This biography represented a shift of meaning in the title of the prologue Garcilaso wrote for the second part of the Royal Commentaries, the «Prologue. To mestizo Indians and criollos of the Kingdoms and Provinces of the Great and Wealthy Empire of Peru» [«Prólogo. A los Yndios mestizos y criollos de los reynos y provincias del grande y riquisimo Ymperio del Peru»] (1617, Prólogo, n/p)¹⁵. There are two ways to read this title. One way is sans comma, as in the first edition (replicated in the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles), implying that Garcilaso was directing it toward «criollos» and «mestizos», this last category seen as a subset of «Indians». The association of mixed-heritage peoples with the indigenous makes sense since neither group could reasonably aspire to be vecinos, or citizens, during the colonial era. Only people of pure Spanish blood could expect membership in that privileged category. In this sense, there are only two groups that count, the ones who can read, mestizo Indians and criollos.

(1st Edition, La historia del Perv, Flatow Rare Books Collection, UNC-Chapel Hill)

The second reading of the prologue's title is Valcárcel's. By inserting a comma between Indians and mestizos, he updates Garcilaso to reflect a different ethnological reality, implying that the work was directed at three separate groups: «Indians, mestizos, and criollos» (1939, 22). The demographics are striking. Claudio Esteva-Fabregat calculates Peru's 1962 population to have been 4,834,093 indigenous people, 1,293,640 people of European extraction, and 3,078,292 mestizos, along with 518,231 people of African heritage (1995, 329). That is to say, just twenty-three years after Valcárcer's proposal, the dual Spanish-Indian construction that was prominent in written texts of Garcilaso's century is demographically proven to be a tripartite criollo-Indian-mestizo configuration. While this triangular understanding of the social fabric still does not accurately reflect the mosaic of heterogeneous Andean, Amazonian, and coastal cultures that make up the modern republic¹⁶, it does at least make room for the fastest growing category, the insurgent mestizos.

This is important because, for Valcárcel, Garcilaso's Royal Commentaries is no mere historical document; it is also a window on the future. Valcárcel writes, «Indians, mestizos and criollos, those from Garcilaso's time and their descendants over three centuries, will have in Garcilaso not only their annalist (writer of annals) but also their prophet» (1939, 22). «Prophet», in a new social context defined by the inserted comma, implies that all three groups receive Garcilaso's Royal Commentaries as the «Tablets of the Law» (1939, 22). Inherent in Valcárcel's nativist arguments is a tilting of the scales toward a greater recognition of indigenous contributions to Peru's history, while implying for both Amerindians and mestizos the possibility of recovering an identity taken away from them by Pizarros (conquistadors), Toledos (viceroys), and Areches (royal prosecutors). Valcárcel's reading had and has value not as an absolute, but as an explicit comma-inserting model for later cultural historians such as José Durand (Garcilaso de la Vega 1962, 55) and Antonio Cornejo Polar (1994, 96) and as an implicit dialogue with the interpretations of Riva Agüero, Matto de Turner and myriad other Peruvian voices.

These three polemicists, Clorinda Matto de Turner, José de la Riva Agüero, and Luis E. Valcárcel, have differing concerns regarding Garcilaso. All read in their own ways the multiplicity of identities encapsulated in the Royal Commentaries, engendering together a kaleidoscopic system that focuses aspects of the nation in the past liberating it from colonial and colonialist constructions while projecting it toward new complex identities concomitant with the ethnic populations of Peru. Anthony Smith is again helpful in understanding what is happening when these three cultural champions are read in unison. He writes, «in the short term, rival 'histories' may divide the community or sharpen existing class conflicts; but over the long term, the effect of their propagation and inculcation is to deepen the sense of shared identity and destiny in a particular community» (1988, 26). This debate brings Peruvian intellectuals together, and tightens the bonds that bind them to the nation in its full richness. Garcilaso's Inca forbears brought diverse ethnie together into a Quechua-centric paradigm that he himself fortified with his narrative, expanding the parameters of those Andean homogenizing cultural constructions as he fused them into (with) the European Renaissance. He then becomes a memory operating in the minds of nineteenth- and twentieth-century sociologists of diverse schools as the nation inches forward in its quest to understand post-colonially the trajectories of the pan-ethnie known as Peru. For what are ethnie, Smith asks rhetorically, «if not historical communities built upon shared memories» (1988, 25). Such partisan memories foster the debate and create a shared identity, the necessary kaleidoscopic device for the multicultural nation-state.

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