Reading the Illegible

The anonymous, undated, and untitled Quechua-language book known as the Huarochirí Manuscript has no peer as a source from an early colonial Andean culture and not just about one. In thirty-one chapters and two supplements, a narrator-redactor presents the rites, customs, and ancestral stories about several deities and large non-Inca descent groups who in Inca times invaded down to the Pacific as far as the mighty pilgrimage center of Pachacámac. Those mythohistories form the armature, but the text is almost infinitely rich in deeper detail about how highlanders saw their own societies one lifetime after the Pizarran invasion. These riches are hard for us to grasp because the narrator assumes local knowledge that Euro-Americans never possessed. Unlike other works called chronicles, it was not precooked for a Spanish imperial readership.The bilingual Peruvian-Spanish priest Francisco de Avila left this work in his priceless stash of manuscripts about “the people called Indians,” where it rested unnoticed in Spain’s National Library until the 1870s and untranslated until 1939. Now, as the manuscript acquires growing literary and artistic renown in Peru, Laura León Llerena’s English commentary brings welcome emphasis on its text idiosyncrasies. She focuses on “legibility,” by which she means not intrinsic code properties of an alphabetic script but “both the ability to read a particular technique of inscription (Latin script) and the understanding of a set of cultural and social expectations necessary to unlock the meaning” (5). This usage takes getting used to because it reverses the common meaning of legibility by attributing graphic potential to the reader rather than the read.The core argument is that differences in “legibility” between the manuscript’s compiler-narrator and its clerical collector illuminate what alphabetic writing came to be in the colonial world.León Llerena unfolds this perspective from one penetrating contrast: The “yndio” writer was a late product of the “first evangelization.” That is, he learned literacy and Spanish (as a second or third language) during the late sixteenth century, when the “spiritual conquest of Peru” was still taking unstandardized forms. These sometimes allowed ways for Natives to make Christianity their own. For example, they devised aids to catechism and prayer using khipu, the Andean knotted-cord medium. Strong evidence indicates that the writer was Cristóbal Choquecasa, a noninheriting son of a local curacazgo. Choquecasa was thirty-three at the end of the interval when the manuscript could have been written (1608), which was also the beginning of the extirpation era. So he could have found some leeway to explore the evolving Indigenous-Hispanic world in his own way.León Llerena does not uphold Choquecasa’s authorship, preferring a hypothesis of “collective authorship” as manifested by the discrepant auto-ethnological explanations of society in different chapters. But Choquecasa (?) himself acknowledged that “it is impossible to decide” on a single “true” Andean history, because in segmentary kinship-based society various ayllus credited proprietary versions. Choquecasa could well have marshaled plural mythohistories to fulfill what León Llerena considers the purpose of the book. That purpose (she and this reviewer agree) was to provide his fellow Andean Christians with a locally comprehensive explanation of an unfinished, only partly Christian culture—an overview that opened when literacy afforded critical distance from tradition. From the convert position, he worked inward into Huarochirí’s regional complexity, like an ethnographer.Father Avila, by contrast, pioneered the “second evangelization.” In the seventeenth century, the Archbishopric of Lima staffed and funded “extirpation” campaigns to impose Tridentine uniformity. Avila was the single greatest innovator of this movement, as well as its publicist and exploiter. He amassed a huge book collection. Its surviving inventory attests León Llerena ́s view of him as an au courant intellectual expanding his knowledge outward from provincial origins toward the vastness of the recently explored globe. He meant to conform the “idolatrous” Andes with a world Christendom under Rome. It was for this purpose that he precooked the first seven chapters of the Huarochirí Manuscript into the Spanish Treatise on the False Gods. Tracing the details of his rewrite, León Llerena deduces properties of a specifically imperial “legibility.”And yet, somehow, the two writers had the Huarochirí Manuscript in common. The crucial fault line between their “legibilities” is the object of León Llerena’s analysis. She brings fresh insights even to those who have studied the Huarochirí Manuscript in depth. She sets a refreshing dissent from the “postcolonial” current of criticism that sees in colonial literacy nothing but a weapon of cultural violence. She furthers the case against a formerly dominant assessment of the Manuscript as a prosecution brief given to Avila by his local cat’s-paw. This new book stands as a major contribution to Andean ethnohistory from the humanist perspective, comparable to Rolena Adorno’s landmark Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru (1986; 2000, second edition).León Llerena studied the Huarochirí Manuscript in Quechua at Peru’s San Marcos University, but her book does not include a Quechua-oriented complement to her inquiry on Spanish “legibility.” Inevitably one asks: At a time when writing Quechua in Roman alphabet was a relatively new art, what could have constituted “legibility” among Quechua-reading Christian Huarochiranos? Reading the Illegible generally relies on the English translation of the manuscript published by this reviewer with George Urioste in 1991. It stays away from possible Quechua “legibility” variables such as Andean usage of evidential morphemes or Quechua’s nuanced system for spaciotemporal orientation. One can make a good start into such riddles by studying Sabine Dedenbach-Salazar’s “Point of View and Evidentiality in the Huarochirí Texts (Peru, Seventeenth Century)” and Willem F. H. Adelaar’s “Spatial Reference and Speaker Orientation in Early Colonial Quechua.” Both are available in Creating Context in Andean Cultures, a 1997 volume edited by Rosaleen Howard-Malverde. An excellent digital facsimile of the original manuscript can be studied at http://bdh-rd.bne.es/. The way is open to study the Huarochirí Manuscript as a book with much yet to reveal

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