From Oral to Written Expression in the Colonial Andes

From Oral to Written Expression: Native Andean Chronicles of the Early Colonial Period is a dense collection of short essays on indigenous chroniclers or history writers of colonial Peru. Some essays require familiarity with Quechua linguistics and oral literatures since the essayists seek to explore how indigenous worldviews, languages, and ideas shaped the production of chronicles or relations in Spanish. But also included among the indigenous writings is the Huarochiri Manuscript, written in a literary Quechua. Pictorial representations are also up for analysis, such as the in the famous work of Guaman Poma de Ayala or the work of Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua. Even Diego De Castro Titu Cusi Yupanqui is included among the indigenous chroniclers despite only dictating his words to another to tell a Vilcabamba Inca version of the Spanish conquest. Although dated (published in the early 1980s), this compilation presents an earlier phase in the academic analysis of indigenous chroniclers in the Andean world. Unlike Mexico or Mesoamerica, there were fewer indigenous chroniclers and a lack of a precolonial system of writing like Maya glyphs. Thus, the Andean response to the spread of writing after colonial conquest presents a different "high civilization" adapting writing for its own purposes. As "transitional" literature in the history of historical writings from Latin America, they represent both indigenous and Spanish/Western forms and traditions in a way that was perhaps inaccessible to individuals from distinct worlds. Adorno and Salomon express this quite clearly in the way, particularly the former, tries to juxtapose pictorial representations with an Andean view to elucidate symbolic (and ahistorical) sections of Guaman Poma's work.