Guaman Poma De Inca Chapter Summary

Colonial Latin American society in the Seventeenth Century was undergoing a tremendous amount of changes. Society was transforming from a conquering phase into a colonizing phase. New institutions were forming and new people and ideas flooded into the new lands freshly claimed for the Spanish Empire. Two remarkable women, radically different from each other, who lived during this period of change are a lenses through which many of the new institutions and changes can be viewed. Sor Juana and Catalina de Erauso are exceptional women who in no way represent the norm but through their extraordinary tales and by discovering what makes them so extraordinary we can deduce what was the norm and how society functioned during this era of Colonial

The Incas and the Aztecs Before the Spanish and Portuguese "discovered" the New World, there

The Saga of the Tigua Indians is an amazing one. By all reasoning they should have been wiped out long ago. There quiet defiance to change, however, has carried them through. From the height of civilization to near extinction the Tigua have remained. They endure imprisonment by the Spanish, oppression and manipulation by everyone that followed. This is the story of a people thought to extinct, that are once again learning to survive.

Numerical and statistical evidence is the first type that De Las Casas uses to illustrate Spanish brutality. In his “fifty years’ of experience of seeing at first hand the evil [of the colonist]” he writes that he has witnessed ‘infinite numbers of human souls dispatched to Hell’’ and “countless numbers of incidents”. While such numbers do explain the grand scale of Spanish brutality, they pale in comparison to the sickening descriptions of the raping, roasting, and slaughtering of Native Americans. De Las Casas paints dramatic images of the cruelties that the Indians encountered at the hands of the Spanish. Sentences such as “They hacked them to pieces, slicing open their bellies with their swords as though they were so many sheep herded into a pen. They even laid wagers on whether they could manage to slice a man in two with a stroke, or cut an individual’s head from his body, or disembowel him with a single blow of their axes. They grabbed suckling infants by the feet and ripped them from their mothers’ breasts, dashed them head-long against rocks” are examples of his use of grotesque language that he uses to elicit a reaction from his audience. De Las Casas contrasts the horrors of what is being done to the natives with the peacefulness and hospitality that the natives offered to the

separate how De Las Casas might have been an outspoken critic of the Spanish’s treatment of indigenous people, and how he was still a part of a repressive institution. Finally, I

Poma thought that the indigenous people were treated unjust with hatred and believed that the Spaniards were arrogant in the ways that they treated them. Poma believed that the indigenous people would no longer exist in the next twenty years because of the way that they were brutally being killed off. Married and unmarried people men and women were separated in order to make sure that they were unable to reproduce and carry on their lineage. It was a genocide, they want to make the indigenous people extinct. He wrote about how the Spanairds didn’t understand how hard the indigenous people worked, and that was the reason why their empires had become so great. They

Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala was an ethnic Andean, deeply inspired by the injustice of the colonial regime, he wrote a massive manuscript in 1615 about the history of the Inca Empire to the King of Spain. His masterpiece includes 1,200 pages, of which 398 were images full of details, that are clearly considered by the artist to be the most direct and effective way of communicating his ideas to the audience. Felipe de Ayala focused on the conflicts between the settlers and the natives to reveal, in his powerful drawings, his wider purpose of a desire for a colonial reformation that will bring stability and justice to the Andean people. Two major reasons that motivated Ayala to write the manuscript are broadly seen in his drawings: the first

In 1542, a Christian missionary named Bartolomé de Las Casas wrote about the little-known realities of the brutalities occurring in the New World between Spanish conquistadors and Native Americans. Even though the Spanish originally set out to bring Christianity to the New World and its inhabitants, those evangelizing efforts soon turned into torture, mass killings, rape, and brutal slavery of the innocent natives to fulfill their greed for gold and wealth, according to Las Casas. In his primary account A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, Bartolomé de Las Casas attempts to inform King Phillip II of the cruel acts and injustices committed by the Spanish conquistadors. Despite this condemnation, Las Casas does not reject imperialism, because he feels Spain has the obligation to spread the word of Christianity around the world. Instead, he finds fault with the Spanish conquistadors for implementing this evangelization the wrong way, by both physically harming the Native Americans and, fundamentally, in their underlying perception of them as inferior. Furthermore, the key to the coexistence of imperialism with Las Casas’ Catholic ideas and his defense of indigenous peoples lies in considering and treating these Native Americans as equals and as humanity rather than inferiors.

“Thus were the Peruvians made the sad victims of a greedy people who at first showed them only good faith and even friendship” (Gaffigny 10).

The historic documentation of the “Liens de Tlaxcala” painted from a Native American perspective illustrates Spanish documental techniques in Mexican and Central America before during the conquest. Documentation techniques feature illustrations of the conquers Castilians and Tlaxcala’s invading the Western Hemispheres and killing the native Acatepec groups. The illustrations show a much deeper meaning of how the society of the natives was structured based on different gender roles, status, and class hierarchy. An example of social class is how the groups differed in attire, weaponry, and tactics of battle. For instance, image 79 illustrates how the Castilians and Tlaxcala’s were dressed in proper war clothing. The clothing constituted of headbands,

Second Slide: The ways in which Indigenous Women tried to resist, but were ultimately victims of colonization, and how heteropatriarchy has affected them.

The title "Inca Empire" was given by the Spanish to a Quechuan-speaking Native American population that established a vast empire in the Andes Mountains of South America shortly before its conquest by Europeans. The ancestral roots of this empire began in the Cuzco valley of highland Peru around 1100 AD. The empire was relatively small until the imperialistic rule of emperor Pachacuti around 1438. Pachacuti began a systematic conquest of the surrounding cultures, eventually engulfing over a hundred different Indian nations within a 30-year period. This conquest gave rise to an empire that, at its zenith in the early 16th century; consisted of an estimated 10 million subjects living

. By comparing the native mother to a harlot, the Spaniards successfully planted the seeds of shame into every Mexican. The very same seeds Octavio Paz claims to have been planted by La Malinche herself. These historical fallacies have been embedded into Spanish literature to promote the

The Incas learnt to freeze their food , such as potatoes and meat, by leaving them out during cold nights so it could be preserved longer. These skills they learnt helped them feed their people and the army during droughts, they could feed them for years. The Inca Empire was large so they had a large stretch from north to south and there were different climates in the north than in the south, there were also different altitudes. This meant that there would be different types of food around the empire.

The influence of European ideology, such as Christianity, also played a large role in many Andean lives for example the Inca Princess depicted in this painting. Because the indigenous were constantly surrounded by the new Spanish culture, their identities reflected that. They were no longer purely Andean but humans with integrated cultures and values. In Conflict and Order, D. Stanley Eitzen writes “ culture is learned [...] it is not instinctive or innate in the human species [...] when a person joins a new social organization, she or he must learn the culture of that group”. With no sign of the Spanish conquest departing anytime soon from Peru, the indigenous learns the culture of the new people whom they must share their land and lives with.