The Chankas and the Priest

In the evening of March 17, 1611, the priest of the remote Andean town of Pampachiri, Juan Bautista de Albadán, died without a will. He had arrived in the region a decade before, and during his time as priest Albadán had amassed a small fortune in an otherwise impoverished region. Because Albadán died without a will and at that time there were no known heirs, the local governor (corregidor) was left with the task of drawing up an inventory of his belongings and auctioning off what could be sold. The wealth of the priest was distributed across three different houses and included a large collection of silver utensils and a 62-volume library. The governor's intent was to pay off the priest's presumably few outstanding debts and then donate the remaining funds to the community. However, the claims that came from the villagers were extraordinary: years of unpaid salaries, huge tavern bills, assertions of stolen horses, and, most troubling, allegations of nearly daily sexual abuse of the girls and the torture of other citizens.In the book The Chankas and the Priest, ethnohistorian Sabine Hyland takes the tragic case files of Albadán and combines them with contemporary condemnation of Albadán by the now famous indigenous writer Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. She then supplements these two important databases with information gleaned from a vast number of documents held in the archives of Lima and Seville to tell the story of a depraved priest and the destruction that he wrought on the social and political order of an Andean village. Since the estate of Albadán also included a remarkable set of personal letters that he had received while in Pampachiri, Hyland is also able to enter into the troubled personal history of this priest as well as his relationships with other family members living in Spain and Peru.The result of Hyland's research and alluring writing style is a mesmerizing microhistory that skillfully connects with, and informs, a broad set of topics focused on the European-American contact experience. Within the wide-ranging chapters, we learn of the sixteenth-century book trade in the Viceroyalty of Peru, the succession practices of indigenous lords in the postconquest Andes, and, of course, the workings (both official and unofficial) of the Catholic Church in provincial settings. The book also presents a number of interesting microstudies on wide-ranging topics such as bezoar stones, the sale of papal bulls, and the organization of forced labor at the Huancavelica mercury mines. The book stands as an inspiration to historians, both new and well-seasoned, who face the excruciating task of bringing order to disparate information scattered across hundreds of pages of colonial documents. It also represents an excellent example of how scholarship can be presented in a personalized voice within a gripping narrative

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