Gods of the Andes

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Preface

Latin American Originals (LAO) is a series of primary source texts on colonial Latin America. LAO volumes are accessible, affordable editions of texts translated into English—most of them for the very first time, as is the case with LAO 6. The first half-dozen books in the series illuminate aspects of the Spanish conquests during the century from the 1520s to the 1610s.

Taken in the chronological order of their primary texts, LAO 2, Invading Guatemala, shows how reading multiple accounts of conquest wars (in this case, Spanish, Nahua, and Maya versions of the Guatemalan conflict of the 1520s) can explode established narratives and suggest a conquest story that is more complicated, disturbing, and revealing. LAO 1, Invading Colombia, challenges us to view the difficult Spanish invasion of Colombia in the 1530s as more representative of conquest campaigns than the better-known assaults on the Mexica and Inca empires. LAO 3, The Conquest on Trial, features a fictional embassy of indigenous Americans filing a complaint over the conquest in a court in Spain—the Court of Death. That text, the first theatrical examination of the conquest published in Spain, effectively condenses contemporary debates on colonization into one dramatic package. LAO 4, Defending the Conquest, is a spirited, ill-humored, and polemic apologia for the Spanish Conquest written by a lesser-known veteran conquistador and submitted for publication—without success—in 1613. LAO 5, Forgotten Franciscans, offers a trio of controversial opinions on conversion processes in Mexico, written between 1543 and 1614.

LAO 6, like LAO 5, casts a surprising light on the spiritual conquest, showing how within the church in Spanish America there were wildly divergent views both on native religions and on how to replace them with Christianity. Gods of the Andes presents the first English edition of a 1594 manuscript describing Inca religion and the campaign to convert native Andeans. Discovered in private hands in Spain in the nineteenth century, the manuscript is attributed by scholars to Blas Valera, a Jesuit missionary who died of injuries acquired when the English sacked Cádiz in 1596. Valera is surprisingly sympathetic to pre-Conquest beliefs and practices, viewing them as preparing Andeans for the arrival of the faith he helped bring from Spain.

The source texts to LAO volumes are either archival documents—written in Spanish, Portuguese, or indigenous languages such as Nahuatl, Zapotec, and Maya—or rare books published in the colonial period in their original language (Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Latin). The contributing authors are historians, anthropologists, art historians, and scholars of literature; they have developed a specialized knowledge that allows them to locate, translate, and present these texts in a way that contributes to scholars’ understanding of the period, while also making them readable for students and nonspecialists.

Sabine Hyland is an ethnohistorian with just this kind of specialized knowledge. She has built upon an Ivy League education, a lifelong fascination with the Andean past, and an acute understanding of Jesuit and Inca history to become one of the world’s leading scholars—perhaps the leader—on Jesuit views of the Incas. As such, she is ideally positioned to package for us Valera’s intriguing take on the religious experience of the Andes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

—Matthew Restall

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