History, Languages, and Cultures of the Spanish and Portuguese Worlds

The History of Christian Translation in Colonial Peru, 1550-1654

Alan Durston

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780268077983
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Pastoral Quechua explores the story of how the Spanish priests and missionaries of the Catholic church in post-conquest Peru systematically attempted to "incarnate" Christianity in Quechua, a large family of languages and dialects spoken by the dense Andes populations once united under the Inca empire. By codifying (and imposing) a single written standard, based on a variety of Quechua spoken in the former Inca capital of Cuzco, and through their translations of devotional, catechetical, and liturgical texts for everyday use in parishes, the missionary translators were on the front lines of Spanish colonialism in the Andes.

The Christian pastoral texts in Quechua are important witnesses to colonial interactions and power relations. Durston examines the broad historical contexts of Christian writing in Quechua; the role that Andean religious images and motifs were given by the Spanish translators in creating a syncretic Christian-Andean iconography of God, Christ, and Mary; the colonial linguistic ideologies and policies in play; and the mechanisms of control of the subjugated population that can be found in the performance practices of Christian liturgy, the organization of the texts, and even in certain aspects of grammar.

Chapter 1

Background

Pastoral Quechua developed from the confluence of disparate cultural, political, and linguistic histories. My outline of this background begins with a brief account of the organization of church and crown in colonial Peru as it concerned the indigenous population, discussing some of the changes that occurred during the period of this study. In the next section I shift my focus to sixteenth-century Europe, specifically the language ideologies and policies associated with the rise of vernaculars and with the processes of religious reform that are characteristic of the period. The final two sections are dedicated to the complex linguistic landscape of the Andes. A discussion of the modern dialectology of the Quechua language family serves as an introduction to current interpretations of the geographical and social distribution of Quechua on the eve of the Spanish conquest. I also emphasize that Quechua was merely the most widespread of a number of language families that were just as well established in what is now Peru. Finally, I provide an overview of Spanish perceptions of the Andean languages and of the impact of colonial rule on these languages.

Church, Crown, and Conversion

In very broad terms, the administrative system that had congealed by the late sixteenth century was organized around two overlapping dualities (imperfect ones, as will be seen): lay versus ecclesiastical, and Spanish versus Indian. As regards the first duality, colonial Peru was ruled by parallel administrative structures: royal officialdom and the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Both were centered in Lima, which was the seat of a viceroy who held sway over all of Spanish South America; of an audiencia or royal court whose jurisdiction corresponded roughly to modern Peru (excluding the Amazon basin); and of an archdiocese, which throughout the sixteenth century was the primate see of the continent. (In the early seventeenth century archdioceses were also established in La Plata [Sucre, Bolivia] and Bogotá.) A separate diocese had existed in Cuzco since 1536, and additional ones (at Arequipa, Huamanga, and Trujillo) were set up within the territory of the audiencia in the early seventeenth century.¹

Matters on the ecclesiastical side were complicated, first, by the presence of the regular clergy—that is, the mendicant orders (Dominicans, Franciscans, Augustinians, and Mercedarians) and the Jesuits (who arrived last, in 1568). These orders were more or less independent from the secular (i.e., diocesan) prelates and established their own administrative hierarchies based in Lima.² The mendicants were the first to have a presence in the area, and early conversion efforts were almost exclusively their work. In fact, many bishops were regulars, including the first archbishop of Lima, the Dominican Jerónimo de Loayza (1543–75). This did not prevent rivalry and conflict between the dioceses and the orders, which were particularly rife when a see was occupied by a secular cleric (as would be the case in the archdiocese of Lima after Loayza) or was being run by the cathedral chapter. The fact that the mendicants administered many Indian parishes, even though this was in principle the task of the secular clergy, was the main bone of contention.

A further complication concerns the lack of separation of lay and ecclesiastical hierarchies: as a result of its powers of royal patronage in the Americas, the crown exercised considerable control over all secular church appointments, from the archdioceses down to the parishes. The crown’s ecclesiastical and pastoral policies were transmitted to bishops and archbishops in the form of direct orders that sometimes conflicted with and superseded papal bulls and briefs. Furthermore, viceroys and audiencias had considerable jurisdiction over ecclesiastical matters: the former had the final say in assigning benefices (including parishes), and the latter was the highest court for certain kinds of ecclesiastical cases. The crown’s control over the regular clergy was nowhere near as complete as over the secular clergy, but the former’s very presence in the colonies and control over parishes depended on royal approval.

The second duality, Spanish versus Indian, is expressed in the vision of colonial society as two legally, institutionally, and spatially separate “republics”—the república de españoles and the república de indios. The patchwork of polities and ethnicities that had formed the Inca empire was subsumed under the homogenizing legal category of “Indian,” which entailed a set of obligations (particularly a head tax and corvée labor) and some protections against the depredations of non-Indians.³ While there was initially some debate regarding the viability and convenience of maintaining the larger polities and their traditional leadership, and these polities certainly did not disappear overnight, the Spanish opted for breaking them down into small, territorially discreet units based in pueblos de indios—nucleated villages with a mixed political system of Spanish-style municipal officials and hereditary curacas or chiefs, who were subject to Spanish provincial governors (corregidores). The application of the “two republics” logic was thus severely limited—Indian self-rule was restricted to the local level, and there was no Indian clergy. Indian parishes, known as doctrinas, were run by Spanish priests (doctrineros) appointed by the local bishop or, in the case of parishes in mendicant hands, by superiors within the order.

The ambiguities surrounding the separate-but-unequal status of Indians in colonial society have everything to do with how their transition to Christianity was perceived by the Spanish. The concept of conversion as an individual epiphany, a moment of total transformation, does not appear very often with reference to Indians in the colonial sources. What separated the Christian from the pagan Indian was the sacrament of baptism, and except at the very beginning of the period of this study, most Indians were baptized at birth. Baptism was the beginning of an arduous and gradual process through which the individual Indian and the Indian “nation” as a whole were infused with the effective contents of Christianity through doctrinal instruction and the power of the sacraments. The immediate goal was to make the Indians Christian enough for them to attain salvation, and what exactly this involved was open to debate. Regardless of the attainments of individual Christian Indians, Indian Christianity was always suspect—particularly of relapse into “idolatry”—and permanently in need of reinforcement. Estenssoro Fuchs (2001) argues that during the period of this study the recognition of full Christianity among the Indians was constantly deferred because it would have undermined the category of Indian itself, and thus the basis of colonial society. It was necessary to always find new faults in Indian Christianity, and new remedies for these faults.

The Indian ministry was a central part of the mandate of every colonial institution, and greater prominence in this ministry equaled greater prestige and power in colonial society as a whole, as well as control over Indian resources and labor. There was continuous disagreement and conflict over pastoral jurisdictions, especially between the secular church and the mendicant orders. These rivalries carried over into language policy and translation, in that competing institutions justified their claims by their ability to minister to the Indians in the vernacular. The mendicants in particular were unwilling to toe the lines drawn by the secular church and the crown in these matters, if only because pastoral ministry was an essential aspect of their mission, which they were loath to submit to an external authority.

The constitution of a stable missionary and pastoral regime can easily take on the appearance of a continuous and incremental process. It is not until the middle of the sixteenth century that one can speak of systematic, centralized efforts and policies; the 1530s and 1540s were a time of upheaval taken up first by the different phases of the conquest itself and then by fighting among conquistador factions. The process of consolidation culminated in the 1570s and 1580s, when a definitive set of pastoral institutions and practices was developed thanks to the efforts of Viceroy Francisco de Toledo (1569–81), Archbishop (later Saint) Toribio Alfonso de Mogrovejo (1581–1606), and the Third Lima Council (1582–83). While Toledo, in particular, put the church in Peru on a stable administrative footing, especially regarding parish organization, the Third Lima Council provided its basic legislative core and produced a printed corpus of official catechetical texts in Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara versions.

There is some truth to the view that the changes that occurred during the second half of the sixteenth century reflect the colonial regime’s process of “getting its act together.” However, such an account would ignore the crucial fact that the sixteenth century was a time of great transformations in the Catholic world as a whole, especially as regards translation and pastoral policies. The practices of the 1550s and 1560s appear fundamentally different from later ones, and not merely because of their incipiency and variability. Sabine MacCormack has argued for a radical shift from models of conversion based on persuasion and accommodation to more intolerant and coercive practices later in the sixteenth century. MacCormack notes, for example, that the 1560 Quechua grammar and dictionary of the Dominican Domingo de Santo Tomás suggested the use of Quechua terms to translate key Christian concepts where Spanish loan words would later be used by the Third Lima Council (MacCormack 1985: 449). The process is summed up as follows: “By the late sixteenth century, missionary Christianity had … crystallized into a rigid and self-contained body of doctrine impermeable to any influence from Andean religion. Quechua terminology used to describe Christian concepts had been carefully eliminated from dictionaries, catechisms, and manuals of preaching to Indians, and the same purist attitude defined all other aspects of Christian life in the Andes” (ibid.: 456).

This shift has been further explored by Estenssoro Fuchs, who distinguishes a primera evangelización (first evangelization) that was at its height during the 1550s and 1560s from a reform period that set in during the 1570s and 1580s in implementation of the policies of the Council of Trent (1545–63) and, more broadly, of the Counter-Reformation. The primera evangelización was characterized by pastoral practices that were more diverse and flexible and less focused on formal catechesis, by very limited administration of sacraments other than baptism, and by a greater openness to the appropriation of native cultural forms and religious terminology. It was brought to an end by a wide-ranging uniformization program that implemented the Counter-Reformation’s narrower orthodoxy and its demands for full catechetical instruction and a complete sacramental regime for all Christians (Estenssoro Fuchs 2003).

The differences between the primera evangelización and post-reform practices can, to a considerable degree, be identified with those between medieval Western Christianity and modern, post-Tridentine Catholicism. The Tridentine reforms implemented key practices that today seem constitutive of Catholicism, such as the centering of the religious life of the laity in the parish and the regular administration of the sacraments—in fact, it was only at this point that the sacraments of confession and marriage acquired their modern forms. Above all, the reforms sought to do away with the rampant diversity of the way Christianity was practiced and to impose common norms and central authority (particularly that of the episcopal hierarchy) over both clergy and laity.⁴ As in much of Europe, these reforms were achieved in Peru through a combination of more stringent legislation, the publication of standard versions of key texts, and political muscle obtained through alliances with the state. And as in Europe, reformed Catholicism in Peru made full use of printing: the press was introduced in 1584 specifically for the publication of the Third Lima Council’s catechetical corpus, and without it the ensuing campaign of both textual and linguistic standardization would hardly have been possible. As will be seen in chapter 3, the Third Council’s preference for print was such that it banned manuscript copies of its own catechetical texts. By contrast, the vernacular texts of the primera evangelización had circulated in manuscript form.

The pastoral regime established during the 1570s and 1580s remained in force through the mid-seventeenth century. The most important institutional process in the wake of the Third Lima Council was the rise of the secular church, which acted with increasing independence from royal officials—after the late sixteenth century, direct intervention by viceroys and audiencia judges in ecclesiastical matters declined. The bishops also began to challenge the autonomy of the mendicant orders, although not always successfully. Mogrovejo carried out a series of wide-ranging visitas or administrative inspections of his archdiocese during the 1590s, implementing the new pastoral system and regularizing the administrative framework. Additionally, he held several diocesan synods whose decrees were collected in a 1613 synod held by Mogrovejo’s successor. Starting around the time of Mogrovejo’s death in 1606, three new dioceses were created. The northern Peruvian coast and highlands were separated from the archdiocese of Lima and a new see established in the coastal town of Trujillo. Two further dioceses were dismembered from that of Cuzco, one based in Huamanga (modern Ayacucho) and the other in Arequipa.

Archbishop Bartolomé Lobo Guerrero (1609–22) had headed the Inquisition in Mexico before coming to Peru and brought a new, more punitive style of pastoral administration. It is surely no coincidence that at the time of his arrival alarms began to sound over the clandestine survival of native cults in the highland parishes of the archdiocese, particularly as a result of the investigations of the enterprising secular cleric Francisco de Avila, who publicized his discoveries in an auto de fe held in Lima in 1609. “Idolatry” became one of the primary concerns of the secular church in the archdiocese of Lima throughout the seventeenth century—formal extirpation campaigns were carried out by ecclesiastical judges who combed highland parishes for infractions and prosecuted the guilty, and a whole generation of clerics made their careers as experts in detecting, uprooting, and refuting “idolatry” (see especially Duviols 1977a [1971] and Mills 1997). Interestingly, the extirpation boom never really caught on in the other Peruvian dioceses—the bishops of Cuzco, Huamanga, and Arequipa refer to the issue, but do not seem to have been seriously concerned about it. Extirpation in the archdiocese of Lima became a cyclical process: there was only sporadic activity under archbishops Gonzalo de Campo (1625–26) and Fernando Arias de Ugarte (1630–38), but Pedro de Villagómez (1641–71) got the extirpation machine moving again on an even greater scale.

There appears to have been a parallel ebb and flow in the production, or at least printing, of pastoral texts during the first half of the seventeenth century. Several Quechua and Aymara grammars and dictionaries, and reeditions of the Third Council texts appeared during the first two decades of the century. There was almost no printing of works in or about Quechua during the 1620s and 1630s (with one important exception in 1631). While Archbishop Arias de Ugarte strongly promoted vernacular training among the clergy, no pastoral or linguistic texts were approved for publication during his tenure. The revival came under Villagómez, who mounted a wide-ranging extirpation campaign in 1649 in which he placed special emphasis on “preventive” anti-idolatry catechesis and preaching in Quechua. That same year he published a lengthy pastoral letter to the priests of Peru instructing them on anti-idolatry methods, which was distributed jointly with a new Quechua sermonario. Pastoral Quechua writing and publishing reached an all-time high in the late 1640s, coinciding with the new extirpation campaigns. However, concern over idolatry should not be seen as the motor behind pastoral translation in the seventeenth century. The works of the first forty years of the century have no clear connection to extirpation at all, and even those of the late 1640s cannot all be regarded as offshoots of, or preparations for, Villagómez’s campaigns. Instead, the author-translators seem to have exploited periods of intensified official interest in the Indian ministry to get their works published.

Language and Religious Reform in Early Modern Europe

Spanish colonial policies vis-à-vis Quechua need to be examined in the light of contemporary European developments in two main areas: linguistic ideologies and policies, and religious reform and reaction. As regards the first area, Burke speaks of a “discovery of language” in early modern Europe—a heightened interest in linguistic variation and change, and in the differing qualities and potentials of languages (2004: 15–42). The spread of humanism, with its emphasis on the need to restore Latin to its classical purity, was a major part of this new awareness. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were also a time when the rise of the vernaculars as written languages was accelerating and becoming more visible, as witnessed by their codification in grammars, the first of which was Antonio de Nebrija’s Gramática de la lengua castellana (Salamanca, 1492). As Nebrija explained in his prologue, the need for such a work was twofold. First, it would serve to fix or stabilize the Spanish (or Castilian) language at what Nebrija believed to be its stage of greatest perfection, protecting it from the ravages of time and making it a worthy medium for history and letters, as Latin and Greek had been thanks to grammatical regulation. Second, Spanish was to become a language of empire, and the grammar was necessary for Castile’s new subjects to learn it (Nebrija 1992 [1492]: II 13–17). While other vernaculars may not have had the same imperial aspirations—at least, not yet—their rise was also a question of standardization: a particular variety or dialect would acquire special prestige, and a standard written form would then develop via grammatical description and widespread use in print. As Burke puts it, “vernaculars won the battle with Latin by ceasing to be vernaculars, by creating a sort of ‘authorized version’ of language that was distant from colloquial speech” (2004: 90).

The early modern rise of the vernaculars should not be confused with that of national languages. The Herderian principle of the isomorphism of language and nation-state belongs to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Burke 2004: 160–172). Nonetheless, it is clear that a loose identification between peoples or “nations” and languages was developing, and that there was a growing belief in the virtues of linguistic uniformity—the trend towards standardization is a witness to this. The rise of the vernaculars was often associated with that of centralizing states—this was most clearly the case in Spain, where the fortunes of Spanish flourished alongside those of the crown of Castile, as Nebrija suggested.

The implications of these developments for the treatment of Indian languages in the Spanish empire can be read in different ways. The promotion and cultivation of Spanish as a literary language with expressive powers on a par with those of Latin could serve as a charter for the status of Amerindian languages as “new vernaculars” that could be studied, codified, and written. Indeed, Nebrija’s grammar served as a model for the first grammar of Quechua, published only sixty-eight years later in Valladolid (Cerrón-Palomino 1995a; Torero 1997). On the other hand, the growing prestige of Spanish could also justify the eradication of Indian languages. The homogenizing tendencies in early modern language ideologies and the rise of a “people-language” identification could also cut both ways. Combined with the perception of all “Indians” as a single republic, they justified the promotion of a native vernacular at the expense of other dialects and languages. However, the incomplete and subordinate character of the república de indios, in particular the fact that it relied on Spanish priests and magistrates, would be used as an argument for Hispanization in the seventeenth century. Perhaps the clearest effect of the particular “language culture” of sixteenth-century Europe was the very hierarchical and discriminating way in which Indian languages were perceived—there was a tendency to seek out the best, purest, and most correct languages and language varieties. This was partly a practical response to the great diversity encountered, but the specific ways in which languages were ranked, praised or vilified, and subjected to processes of written standardization reflect contemporary discourses and policies vis-à-vis the European vernaculars,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Transcription, Translation, and Citation Norms
• Map
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Background
• Part I. History
• Part II. Texts
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Notes
• Pastoral Quechua Works
• Bibliography
• Index