Echoes of conquest: the textual representation of voices of indigenous peoples as an expression of ideology in the chronicles of Peru, 1534-1617

The production of written chronicles occurred almost simultaneously with the arrival of the Spanish in the Andean region and continued at a steady rate through the mid-seventeenth century. While these documents represent a diverse corpus, virtually all of them contain textual representations of Amerindian voices. These representations take multiple forms; among the most fi-equent are direct quotes attributed to Indian subjects, direct quotes attributed to Spaniards that report Indian utterances, the author's paraphrasing of Indian speech, recording the responses of native interpreters and translators, and attributing specific information to Indian informants.

Through an analysis of seven texts written between 1534 and 1616, this dissertation will demonstrate that the chroniclers employed representations of Indian voices in their writings as a means of advancing and supporting specific ideological positions with regard to both the pre-Hispanic past and the place of Indians in the society of their day.

The texts I will examine are Francisco de Xerez's Verdadera relacion de la conquista del Peru (1534), Pedro de Cieza de Leon's El senorio de los Incas (c. 1550), Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa's Historia de los Incas (1572), and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega's La Florida del Inca (1605), Comentarios reales de los Incas (1609), and Historia general del Pertj (1617). Finally, I will address briefly Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala's Nueva coronica v buen gobiemo (c. 1615) as an epilogue to the main study.

My analysis will proceed chronologically and will consider the historical, political, and social circumstances surroimding the production of each text. I will frame the analysis with some discussion of contemporary intellectual trends concerning such pertinent issues as language, ethnicity, and historiography. I have also included references to some sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish legal and theological concepts that impacted the writers and texts under examination.

This study is the first to offer a comparative analysis of the representation of Indian voices in the Peruvian chronicles and contributes to the grovraig body of research documenting how colonial writers configured their Indian subjects either in alignment with or in opposition to contemporary master discourses about Native Americans.