Indigenous Intellectuals in Colonial Andean Cities

The creation, appropriation and dissemination of ideas in colonial Peru was largely in the hands of Spanish and Creole elite men most of whom constructed the idea that indigenous men and women were good at imitating, but incapable at thinking. To a great extent, this idea continues to permeate our thinking about the intellectual endeavors of the indigenous people in colonial society, or even today: the testimonies that are left of their activities, whether they were artistic, political, or religious, are generally perceived as the result of their ability for mimicking, or merely using ideas generated somewhere else (European) or sometime earlier (a time before the European conquest), but not seen as creative pursuits. Thus the idea of indigenous intellectuals appears to many as a contradiction in terms. To critically examine this assumption, this paper aims to explore who were the indigenous intellectuals in urban settings in the Peruvian viceroyalty in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The range of individuals considered include ethnic chiefs or curacas, but also indigenous men and women who did not hold political office but whose social standing and activities might give them a position of leadership within society (some of them might include interpreters, notaries, confraternity leaders, and school-teachers). By analyzing their position in society, their activities, social strategies and networks, the paper intends to examine their links to colonial power, their relation to literacy, their understanding of their own condition as ‘Indians', and their activities as propagators, mediators, and creators of ideas.