ABSTRACT
For native peoples born under Spanish colonialism, the greatest challenge was communication, and it required knowing the colonizers’ language of Spanish. How could colonized native peoples make their voices heard and tell their own history? A Quechua-speaking native Andean named Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (ca. 1550–after 1615) provided an answer in his manuscript book, El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno [The first new chronicle and good government]. Its history was future-oriented and revisionist: Guaman Poma framed his work with Augustine's ages of the world but complemented it with a parallel sequence of successive eras of Andean and Inca history that located the birth of Jesus Christ during the reign of the second Inca. He turned the history of the Spanish conquest of Peru upside down by arguing that a violent military conquest had never occurred and that the Christian gospel—usually the ultimate justification for conquest—had arrived long before the Spaniards, in the apostolic age. In these ways Guaman Poma presented his work as an act of literate resistance that turned Spanish historical and literary culture into its own enemy. He also revealed the subtle, ambiguous ways in which accommodation and resistance coexist in native responses to colonialism.
