Indigenous Intellectuals

Indigenous Intellectuals is the product of two conferences. The first, in 2009 (at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting), explored the theme of Mexican and Andean indigenous intellectuals from the sixteenth century to the present. The second, in 2010 (at the University of Cambridge, home institution for editor Gabriela Ramos), centered the conversation on the past, on the first three centuries of European presence in the Americas. This remains the temporal focus of the published volume, although Tristan Platt's concluding chapter extends the story into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Spatially, the chapters of Indigenous Intellectuals move back and forth between Mexico and the Andes: from central Mexico (chapters 2, 5, and 6) and Oaxaca (chapter 4) to Lima and Cuzco (chapters 1, 3, and 10) and (between those two Andean capitals) Huarochirí (chapter 7). Tristan Platt's conclusion pushes the volume farther south, to the area around Potosí. Three of the chapters bring Mexico and the Andes together in a comparative discussion: the foreword (by Elizabeth Hill Boone), the introduction (by volume editors Gabriela Ramos and Yanna Yannakakis), and chapter 8 (by María Elena Martínez). Chapter 9 (by Eleanor Wake) spans central Mexico, Oaxaca, and Veracruz. Readers with a Mesoamericanist background might be surprised at the absence of Mayaland (given its deep pre-Hispanic history of grammatically structured hieroglyphic writing as well as a century-plus of academic research on post-Hispanic alphabetic traditions), but the region is present in spirit: the book is dedicated to ethnohistorian Nancy Farriss, whose early work studied post-Hispanic Yucatan and whose current projects concern post-Hispanic Oaxaca.Ramos and Yannakakis's concept of “indigenous intellectuals” during the viceregal period is intentionally broad (p. 2). It of course includes indigenous scholars and historians whose names and alphabetic writings are relatively famous today: Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl (chapter 2), Diego de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin (chapter 5), don Juan Zapata (chapter 6), and Cristóbal Choquecasa, the probable author of the Huarochirí Manuscript (chapter 7). It also includes the anonymous indigenous artists who transformed pre-Hispanic traditions of pictorial communication for a post-Hispanic world—visual intellectuals whose work survives in the form of genealogies and maps (chapters 8 and 9). But beyond these authors and artists, the volume also argues that we need to include as indigenous intellectuals the scribes, translators, and bureaucrats (whose names and biographies can often be recovered) who made the Spanish American empire possible by acting as key mediators between indigenous communities and the structures of imperial administration (chapters 1, 3, 4, and 10).If the first citation in Ramos and Yannakakis's introduction is to Antonio Gramsci, the most-cited work in their introductory footnotes is Writing without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes, edited by Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter Mignolo in 1994. This citational density is appropriate, for Indigenous Intellectuals can be seen as a critical extension of that groundbreaking mid-1990s publication. Although both volumes bring Mesoamerica and the Andes into conversation, only two of the twelve chapters in the earlier volume focused on South America; the regional distribution of Indigenous Intellectuals is much more balanced. Where Writing without Words was dominated by anthropologists and art historians working with visual documents, Indigenous Intellectuals is dominated by historians working with alphabetic documents. In many ways, anthropologist Joanne Rappaport's chapter in Writing without Words (focused, unusually for that volume, on the alphabetic archive) sets up the project that Indigenous Intellectuals undertakes: an exploration of how alphabetic literacy reshaped indigenous politics, ecologies, societies, and historical memories (down to the level of the individual reader) from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.Along Rappaportian lines, my favorite moments in Indigenous Intellectuals were its carefully observed, microhistorical revelations about how written documents affected indigenous readers—readers who were often writers as well. In chapter 4, Yannakakis argues that the “language of sin” provided by Catholic catechisms, translated into Zapotec, offered models by which Zapotec litigants framed the criminal accusations that they presented in viceregal courtrooms. In chapter 7, Alan Durston argues that the frequency in the Quechua-language Huarochirí Manuscript of Castilian loanwords, and even redundant Castilian conjunctions used alongside their Quechua equivalents, suggests an indigenous author more used to writing in Castilian than in Quechua. And Kathryn Burns begins chapter 10 with Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala's famous drawing of an Andean scribe writing in Castilian, pointing out that the word floating over his left shoulder, quilcaycamayoc, is a transformation of the pre-Hispanic quipucamayoc (quipu keeper) into a viceregal “paper-keeper” (p. 237). At the same time (as many of the chapters in this volume stress), indigenous archival practices also shaped the structures of empire—and Burns also notes that even Francisco de Toledo, viceroy of Peru from 1569 to 1581, incorporated Quechua terminology into his native Castilian when referring to a native notary as “escribano de cabildo o quipucamayo” (p. 253)

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