Guaman Poma

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Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, best known as Guaman Poma, (c. 1550 – after 1616) was an indigenous Peruvian who became disillusioned with the treatment of the native peoples of the Andes by the Spanish after conquest.

The son of a noble family from the central Southern Peruvian province of Lucanas located in the modern day department of Ayacucho, Guaman Poma was a native Quechua and Aymara speaker who probably learned the Spanish language as a child or adolescent, and who went on to become fully literate in the language. He described himself as "eighty years of age" in his 1615 manuscript (see below), leading many to deduce that he was born in the year 1535, when the Spanish conquest of Peru was in full swing. It seems that he used the figure "80" as a metaphor for old age, however, and many other references in his text indicate a more probably birthdate of 1550 or shortly thereafter.

We know from a handful of sixteenth-century documents in that Guaman Poma served in the 1570s as a Quechua translator for Spanish priests in the campaign to "extirpate idolatry" in the Peruvian countryside. Guaman Poma himself appears as a plaintiff in a series of lawsuits from the late 1590s in which he attempted to recover land and political title in the Chupas valley that he believed to be his by family right. These suits ultimately proved disastrous for him; not only did he lose the suits, but in 1600 he was stripped of all his property and forced into exile from the towns that he had once ruled as a noble.

Guaman Poma's great work, the nearly 1,200-page El primer nueva corónica [sic] y buen gobierno (The First New Chronicle and Good Government), is the longest sustained critique of Spanish colonial rule produced by an indigenous subject in the entire colonial period. Written between 1600 and 1615 and addressed to king Philip III of Spain, the Corónica outlines the injustices of colonial rule and argues that the Spanish were merely foreign settlers in Peru. "It is our country," he said, "because God has given it to us."

The Corónica is remarkable in many ways: first, for its brilliant melding of writing and fine line drawings (398 pages of the book consist of Guaman Poma's famous full-page drawings); second, for expressing the view of a provincial noble on the conquest (most other existing expressions of indigenous views from the colonial era come from the nobility of Cusco, the ancient capital of the Incas); and third, for the author's frequent use of Quechua words and phrases in this primarily Spanish work. This is the only surviving text that has actual illustrations of pre-conquest Inca life, and is an invaluable resource for archaeologists and anthropologists studying the Inca.

The original manuscript of the Corónica has been kept in the Danish Royal Library since at least the early 1700s, though it only came into public view in 1908. A facsimile edition was produced in Paris in 1936. In 1980, a thorough transcription of the book by John Murra, Rolena Adorno, and Jorge Urioste was published as Felip Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva crónica y buen gobierno (Mexico City: Siglo XXI). A high-quality digital facsimile of the original manuscript was published online in 2000.

Guaman Poma's name means "Eagle (or Falcon) Puma" in Quechua. In modern Quechua orthography, it would be spelled Waman Puma, and it is sometimes listed as such, or as any number of variants, such as Waman Poma and Guamán Poma (the latter with an incorrect Spanish accent; the correct accent is on the first syllable). In his own writing, he sandwiched his Quechua name between his Spanish baptismal name, Felipe (or Phelipe, as he spelled it) and the family name of a Spanish conquistador connected to his family history, Luis Ávalos de Ayala. Guaman Poma writes about the symbolism of all his names in his book, so it would not be stretching things to see the form of his name as a statement that his Quechua identity remains his core, though it is surrounded by flamboyant Spanish names.

[edit] External links

• "Guaman Poma - El Primer Nueva Corónica Y Buen Gobierno" – A high-quality digital version of the Corónica, scanned from the original manuscript.

(Note: this article was corrected by the translator of the forthcoming Hackett Publishing edition of Guaman Poma's book, and contains much of the same information that will be found in the introduction to that translation.)