Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru, (2nd ed.), by Rolena Adorno. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000.

During the last two decades, Guaman Poma, a native Andean born during the Spanish colonization, has found his place in the Latin American canon. Guaman Poma wrote his Nueva coronica y buen gobierno to protest the abuses of the colonizers and to propose reforms. In her new edition of Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru, Rolena Adorno, a prominent scholar in the fields of Latin American colonial history, anthropology, and literature, brings Guaman Poma studies up to date and offers fresh insights.

Guaman Poma conceived of his Nueva coronica as a retelling of the Spanish invasion and conquest of Peru. He knew the Amerindian side of the story from the oral traditions of his own people, but he was also familiar with the chronicles of Spanish historians. His account was informed not only by his native Andean perspective, but also by European political theory. In order to make his Nueva coronica comprehensible to his intended reader, Philip III, the Andean author drew from familiar models in Spanish historiography and religious devotion. Many of the details in his account are fiction. However, as Adorno points out, "truth" in the early modern period was equated not with accuracy, but with a conceptual authenticity that went beyond the mere accumulation of factual minutiae. Guaman Poma's intention was not to record historical data, but to communicate to the monarch the horrors of Spanish dominance.

In addition to text, Guaman Poma used pictures. Adorno notes that in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, the objectives of visual art were instruction and persuasion. Like the sermonic literature that inspired much of Guaman Poma's rhetoric, images were tools of evangelization. Andean culture also utilized pictorial representation to indoctrinate and inform. Influenced by both traditions, Guaman Poma relied on the power of image to drive home his points. While his language was subject to constraints imposed by politics, decorum, and stylistic norms, pictures offer more freedom. Graphic images, argues Adorno, appear to be neutral and objective. "The power of the visual image," she writes, "resides in the fact that it signifies not by argument but by imperative." The pictorial representations of abuse by the Spaniards from the Nueva...