Forum Introduction

In this Forum, scholars re-examine and question the claims to nobility made by the Indigenous Andean chronicler Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, who lived in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. They debate how the validity or lack of validity of Guaman Poma’s assertions and the conditions of his life should frame our thinking about how written documents were used in this period and how we should understand this historical figure and his chronicle of colonial and precolonial life and history. Puzzling out the meaning of a handful of archival documents generated by the lawsuits sparked by Guaman Poma’s claims to hereditary ethnic noble status fuels this scholarly reconsideration of his lineage, local status, and social and economic circumstances in colonial society in the Andes. These court cases before Spanish officials and the other testimony and legal maneuvering by Guaman Poma and his ultimately victorious Chachapoya detractors have recently enlivened the study of this fascinating historical figure whose chronicle—a long letter to the King accompanied by 399 full-page line drawings—has long been a mandatory primary source for archeologists, anthropologists, historians, art historians, and scholars of language and literature. Generations of their students have learned about Guaman Poma and his remarkable critique of colonialism. Guaman Poma’s drawings grace the covers and pages of hundreds of academic studies and textbooks of the colonial era. Adrian Masters and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra rightly call Guaman Poma “uncommon” for he is uncommonly well-known today and uncommonly important for comprehending his time and perhaps even useful for comprehending the centuries before his birth and before the Spanish arrival in the Andes.

Scholars from different disciplines have contributed greatly to making accessible and famous Guaman Poma’s chronicle and forging different ways to interpret that work and Guaman Poma’s place in history. Ethnohistorian John Murra, literary studies expert Rolena Adorno, and Jorge L. Urioste teamed up to transcribe, translate, analyze, and publish in three volumes the entirety of Guaman Poma’s 1615 Primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno in 1980 with Siglo Veintiuno Press in Mexico. The Royal Library of Denmark in Copenhagen, which housed the original manuscript of Guman Poma’s chronicle since the early 1660s, created a digital facsimile reproduction of the piece and placed it on its website. There the chronicle is framed within an extensive set of tools to read it in transcription, conduct word and subject searches in the text and among the images, navigate it electronically, read chapter titles and other markers in English, and consult scholarly texts available on the site. Adorno discussed the transformations of Guaman Poma’s piece in its journey to the internet in her published talk, “The Archive and the Internet” (The Americas 61.1, 2004). In English, the chronicle is only available in abridged versions, such as The First New Chronicle and Good Government, selected, translated, and annotated by David Frye and published in 2006 by Hackett. Historians writing about communities in the early colonial period in the central Andes recognized the value of bringing in an analysis of Guaman Poma’s chronicle and his actions into their studies of the transformations of Indigenous society and the political economy in which they lived. For two examples in English, see: Steve J. Stern, Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest. Huamanga to 1640 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1982) and Karen Spalding, Huarochirí, an Andean Society under Inca and Spanish Rule (Stanford University Press, 1984). Just as the small corpus of manuscripts related directly to Guaman Poma has expanded over the years, so too have individual scholars’ interpretations of Guaman Poma evolved over the course of their careers. Citing their views in a particular publication written at a particular time can sometimes miss the nuances and changes in their thinking. This is certainly true in literary and cultural studies, which have provided some of the richest strains of Guaman Poma study by revealing the books, images, and ideas that Guaman Poma engaged in his chronicle and its drawings. Foremost among these scholars, Rolena Adorno published her influential first book on Guaman Poma in 1986, Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru (Texas University Press), and she continues to add to the shared body of knowledge about him throughout her career, dedicating a chapter to him in her 2007 The Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative (Yale University Press) and including him in her on-going writing and thinking about a range of topics. One of the promising avenues of continued analysis into Guman Poma centers on his blending of European and Andean visual sign systems or visual ideologies. A recent example is provided by Lauren G. Kilroy-Ewbank in her examination of self-presentation, ancestral portraits, and clothing, “Fashioning a Prince for All the World to See: Guaman Poma’s Self-Portraits in the Nueva Corónica” (The Americas 75.1, 2018). Periodically, conferences and edited volumes pull together diverse groups of academics to take stock of what is known about Guaman Poma. The Second International Guaman Poma Conference in 2013 generated 14 essays in Andean studies from philology, anthropology, history, and literature published in Unlocking the Doors to the Worlds of Guaman Poma and His Nueva Corónica (Royal Library, Museum Tusculanum Press, 2015). Thus, for several decades, leading scholars have made contributions to his study, revealing different aspects of his significance.

Over the years, Masters and Cañizares-Esguerra have developed a deep understanding of the period under study and in particular the operation of institutions of imperial power and how systems of knowledge arose and changed in the Americas. In We, the King: Creating Royal Legislation in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish New World (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Masters underscores the negotiated nature of much of royal power. This close attention to the dynamics that linked subjects to the crown and crown officials and bureaucracies continues as a central theme in the present article. A historian of science and colonialisms, Cañizares-Esguerra’s contributions relevant to the debate over Guaman Poma are many. Perhaps particularly useful to keep in mind when reading the pieces in this Forum are his works on knowledge systems such as Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford University Press, 2006) in which he identifies traditions of representation, interpretation, and manipulation in the early modern Iberian world and beyond.

Masters and Cañizares-Esguerra sharpen on-going discussions over Guaman Poma’s rank and status in society into a debate with the published literature by taking an unequivocal position in this issue of The Americas, declaring Guaman Poma a commoner who unsuccessfully attempted to use an increasingly document-oriented colonial system to gain power and official recognition. They assert that this commoner Lázaro was an imposter whipped for falsely asserting an Indigenous elite heritage (cacique) that he did not possess. However, far from detracting from the validity and value of studying his chronicle and his travails, Masters and Cañizares-Esguerra argue that Lázaro’s commoner status further elevates his historical importance for the study of the transformations of the early modern era to the level of the French peasant/soldier calling himself Martin Guerre and the Italian miller calling himself Menocchio. Theirs is not an argument that marshals new evidence or presents new documents; rather, the authors boldly offer their reinterpretation of Guaman Poma’s Primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno and the handful of relevant documents that have come down to us over the years by situating them within an era in Spanish America that they view as marked by the increasing prevalence of “paper struggles” to redistribute power and privileges in core colonial regions. By concluding that Guaman Poma was the commoner Lázaro, Masters and Cañizares-Esguerra hope to refocus scholars’ attention toward the ways commoners—rather than the better-studied native lords—tried to secure social mobility as colonial society matured in Mexico and the Andes. They contend that from the 1570s forward, the expanding and increasingly powerful archives of official and personal documents narrowed the opportunities for commoners to gain recognition of elevated status.

Masters and Cañizares-Esguerra argue, therefore, that Guaman Poma’s text should be read both as Lázaro’s new effort to receive his due from the King and as an exceptional commoner’s plea to the Crown to replace the colonial disorder with a restored Christian Andean social order. Lázaro’s lowly rank and lofty aspirations caused many of his chronicle’s inventions, incoherencies, and contradictions. Even though defeated in court by local adversaries more skillful at using documents to undermine him, and failing to win a noble title and royal pension by using paperwork similar to his contemporary Melchor Carlos Inga, they posit that Lázaro advocated “a new archive-based social order” to stop pretenders, ensure loyalty to the Crown, and enforce Christian behavior. By properly understanding who Guaman Poma really was, they hope that scholars and students of the past can more fully appreciate both how similar Lázaro was to early modern plebeians celebrated in famous microhistories by Natalie Zemon Davis and Carlo Ginzburg and how much more important and creative he was because he marshalled the power of writing to offer King Philip III a blueprint for a more Christian, hierarchical, and traditional Andean society governed in part through an “archival regime.”

The responses to this argument provided for the forum by historians Francisco Quiroz Chueca and José Carlos de la Puente Luna point out the many ways scholars have already been raising questions about Guaman Poma’s identity, and they voice caution about how much the existing documents can definitively resolve these questions. They also discuss to what degree the idea of an emerging “power of archives” could have been a reality and a decisive factor in Guaman Poma’s legal defeat. Quiroz’s archival research ranges from in-depth study of Lima’s colonial artisan guilds and markets to broad syntheses of the arc of Peru’s history reaching into the modern era. His work includes examining corruption and petitioners before crown officials; see, for example, this journal article, “Alms for the Rich: Impoverished Spanish Women in Pursuit of Making a Living in Late Colonial Lima” (The Americas 81.3, 2024). As a chair of a history department in Peru and organizer of conferences, Quiroz has been well situated to gather from a wide range of presentations and publications insights into who Guaman Poma was as a historical person capable of crafting a sophisticated and visual denunciation and proposing reforms as good governance. He is less convinced of the novelty of the original article and the need to compare Guaman Poma to Martin Guerre and Menocchio to prove his importance. Quiroz urges readers to understand what we know of Guaman Poma’s intellectual development and the historical context in which he lived and was very active, a transformative moment that common Indigenous populations experienced as dispossession and injustice at the hands of Spanish and mestizo powerholders and kuraka or cacique elites. In crafting the second response, de la Puente draws on knowledge derived from sustained archival study into how to understand historical actors such as Guaman Poma and the institutions that they petitioned. He has published articles on Guaman Poma and others engaging the colonial legal system, including in this journal: “Andean Primordial Titles, Land Repossession, and the Rise of New Communities during the First General Land Inspection (1594–1602)” (The Americas 82.1, 2025), “Tales of Ancestry, Inheritance, and Possession: New Documentary Evidence on Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala and the First General Land Inspection” (The Americas 80.1, 2023), and “That Which Belongs to All: Khipus, Community, and Indigenous Legal Activism in the Early Colonial Andes” (The Americas 72.1, 2015). He is also the author of books on petitioners, advocates, and others—usually Indigenous nobles and mestizos—navigating the systems of power in the Andes and Spain: Andean Cosmopolitans: Seeking Justice and Reward at the Spanish Royal Court (University of Texas Press, 2018) and Los curacas hechiceros de Jauja: batallas mágicas y legales en el Perú colonial (PUCP, 2007). In his response, de la Puente notes the contributions of researchers such as Raúl Porras Barrenechea and Adorno to challenge Guaman Poma’s biography and recognize his chronicle’s origins in legal humiliation. Adorno also pioneered the study of the textual and visual sources Guaman Poma engaged. De la Puente further explains his understanding of Guaman Poma’s legal case, which was about land, and how the court case was won by strategy and public opinion rather than paperwork alone. De la Puente then goes on to discuss the kind of “commoner” Guaman Poma was given that he could read and write, access secular and religious knowledge, and occupied many local and colonial positions over the years.

Forums in The Americas invite the original article’s authors to provide the last word. Thus, Masters and Cañizares-Esguerra return to rebut Quiroz and de la Puente point by point and underscore why they think Guaman Poma was an “uncommon commoner,” who deserves a privileged place among the early modern world’s remarkable common folk who shared their own unique voices and viewpoints with their contemporaries and posterity, paying a high price for this temerity. They once again spur our interest in trying to fully understand this fascinating person and his powerful voice.