‘La plebe y mal político gentío’ (II. 49): The Political and Military Community of Arauco

The scenes have more differences than commonalities, however, and both structurally and linguistically Oña’s canto also explicitly imitates the first Araucanian gathering in La Araucana II, with echoes of III, VIII and X–XI. Most of these assemblies are, in Ercilla, a way of exploring the paradoxical Araucanian republic, and the nature and extent of Caupolicán’s power in relation to the senado; they are exclusively the province of a male, aristocratic warrior class. The most striking feature of Oña’s version, by comparison, is the dissolution of the political system consistently, if provocatively, outlined in his model. In this first assembly, both the Doge-like Caupolicán and the orator-counsellor Colocolo, whose speeches go furthest in constructing the idea of a republican patria governed according to reason and prudence, are conspicuously absent; the only familiar characters to be mentioned by name at the very end of the canto are the hot-blooded Rengo and Tucapel, who will dwarf Caupolicán in the narrative to come. In this ‘plebe y mal político gentío’ [plebeian and unpolitical crowd] of both sexes, no social or political hierarchy is apparent. As we have seen, Ercilla surprises his readers with the information that the locus amoenus within which the caciques first assemble is an artificial creation, analogous to an urban ‘plaza’. For Oña, the space is once again a purely natural one: in the whole poem, in fact, the Araucanians only ever appear against a natural backdrop, whether pastoral idyll or woodland wilderness, never in a fortification, a gondola, a farmed field, or even a village; Arauco is, quite literally, virgin territory to the Spanish eye, and does not have a fully political community to speak of.

While the ‘borrachera’, communal feasts and dancing, and a tradition of hechicería and augury, with variously exotic, classicising, or diabolical associations are present in La Araucana, Oña combines these features and makes them the exclusive focus of his Araucanian gathering. The assembly is thus not only apolitical, but also replete with vices and customs which were particularly prominent in contemporary discussions of Amerindian (in)civility. Dominating the scene is the hyperbolic representation of drunkenness: Oña’s Araucanians not only indulge in ritual inebriation, but prolong their bacchanalia for seven or eight days at a time, from dawn until dusk (II. 22), on any pretext (II. 13), until the air itself is saturated with alcohol (II. 20); in highly sensory language, the reader sees the revellers not only swaggering and quarrelling, but staggering, blurry-eyed, comatose, and ever thirstier. With chicha come the host of deadly sins (II. 21): first, a bestial gluttony, as attendees gorge on raw meat torn apart in a violent anaphora (‘desmiembran, descuartizan, despedaçan’ [they dismember, quarter, tear into pieces]) with a possible hint of cannibalism (II. 13). The lust which follows in its aftermath is similarly characterised by animalistic imagery, with an emphasis on semi-nakedness and euphemistic turns of phrase (‘desnudo el medio pecho y la rodilla, | al modo que las yeguas en la trilla […] penetra el dios alado con su vira’, [half-naked on top and from the knee down, just like mares at threshing season, the winged god penetrates with his arrow], II. 17–18). The whole scene, of course, is an elaborate demonstration of sloth.

Moreover, the celebrations move seamlessly into a deliberately shocking description of idolatry and devil-worship. The effect is cumulative. At first, the reader is presented with an Araucanian dance. While the ordered chorus is a traditional symbol for the harmonious functioning of a political community, here it is the opposite: ‘un compás flemático y terrible, | confuso y ronco son desapacible’ [a sluggish and terrible rhythm, disagreeable, confused and harsh sound] (II. 15).1 The analogy appears, for instance, in Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, p. 91: ‘A choral dance makes an elegant spectacle so long as it is performed with order and harmony, but it becomes farcical if the gestures and voices get confused; similarly, a kingdom and city is an excellent institution if everyone is assigned a place and performs his proper function’. This representation is very much in tune with the shift in official attitudes in Lima towards Andean music and dances such as the taki from around 1570: before this point, they were often co-opted into evangelising efforts, but they later became tantamount, as here, to drunkeness and idolatry.2 See Javier Marín-López, ‘The Sonic Construction of a New Capital: Urban Soundscapes and Acoustic Communities in 16th-Century Lima’, in A Companion to Early Modern Lima, ed. by Emily A. Engel (Leiden, 2019), pp. 442–69 (pp. 451–52), and Juan Carlos Estenssoro, ‘Los bailes de los indios y el proyecto colonial’, Revista Andina, 20 (1992), 353–89. The relatively familiar superstitions of astrology (II. 23) and the consultation of prodigies (II. 33–37) follow, before a grotesque and seemingly gratuitous digression on indigenous necromancy, involving sordid underground mummification (the ‘ibunché’) and child sacrifice (II. 52–61). The climax is the hechicero Pillalonco’s conjuration of the devil, who utters a prophecy of Spanish victory.3 As Nicolopulos points out, Pillalonco is a parody of Ercilla’s Fitón, ‘thoroughly deconstructing Ercilla’s elaborately fabricated reconstruction of the indigenous shaman as Renaissance mage’, ‘Pedro de Oña’, p. 109. Mazzotti, in ‘El mirador criollo’ and again in Lima fundida, pp. 57–86, regards Oña’s description of Araucanian religion as displaying an in-depth ethnographic knowledge, but in my opinion this is to take the poet too much at his word and results in some attempts to draw analogies with other sources of ethnographic information which are extremely stretched. While there are some (highly distorted) glimpses of actual Mapuche practice, notably the ibunché, most of the rituals as Oña describes them would not be out of place in any contemporary condemnation of Amerindian idolatry.

The disappearance of civic order is paralleled by the absence of the military order painstakingly set out in La Araucana. When the Araucanian forces do wage war, they are almost entirely divested of formation, strategy and efficacy. Not only is the battle one of the many against the few in overall terms, but also in individual combats, and while indigenous casualties are massive, the only Spanish soldier to be killed is clubbed from behind in an act of treachery (X. 69). The only battle losses on the Spanish side, in fact, are those of indigenous (and occasionally African) auxiliaries, who are divested of the proactive role they play across the fluid frontiers of La Araucana and instead appear devoid of honour and initiative, whether as panicking messengers (VIII. 80), vindictive but clueless captors (XII. 16–28), or helplessly buried in the mud (XI. 66–69), completely unable to hold their own against their scornful compatriots without the protection of their Spanish overlords (XI. 70). While Ercilla’s extensive application of similes of animal activity to the fighting had portrayed the bestiality of violence as a universal phenomenon, Arauco domado applies such imagery only to the Araucanians. Where the patriotic zeal of the Araucanian republic and its commanders had elicited comparison to the heroes of the Roman republic in La Araucana, Oña finds no bestial or human savagery a true analogy to Araucanian cruelty:

Secondly, the devaluing of the past history of the Araucanians is, as we have seen, explicitly related to the colonial present. In the second canto, for instance, the ‘borrachera’ is mostly narrated in the present tense, as a paradigmatic example of ‘los varios modos que los indios tienen de festejarse y celebrar sus banquetes’ [the various ways that the Indians have of revelling and celebrating their banquets] (II, title), with frequent reminders that such diabolical rituals persist, and that attempts at reform continue to be resisted by the stubborn, secretive and demon-enchained natives (II. 12, 59–61). This insistence might be productively understood in the context of contemporary discourse concerning evangelisation and its relationship to colonial institutions. In his influential De procuranda, Acosta emphasises the relationship between civilising and mission efforts: ‘first the barbarians must learn to be men, and then to be Christian’.4 José de Acosta, De procuranda indorum salute: Pacificación y colonización, bilingual edition by Luciano Pereña and others (Madrid, 1984), p. 538 (my translation). Further references are given after quotations in the text. While the Jesuit clarifies that indigenous languages and customs not contrary to Christian teaching should be maintained (chapter XXIV), certain mores attract particular censure, such as communal houses like those briefly glimpsed in Arauco domado (e.g. II. 49, V. 61). Particularly excoriated, however, is the Amerindians’ innate ‘otium’ [idleness], which is associated with the communal consumption of alcohol: ‘there is no defect more widespread, pernicious nor difficult to cure than their drunkenness’ (p. 544). As in Oña, drunkenness is the gateway to other vices and social problems such as poor health, premature death, antisocial behaviour, fighting and promiscuity, and is intimately associated with sacrilege and superstition: ‘nowadays they have no better way of protecting their ancestral errors and idolatry than by means of solemn communal drinking and dances’ (p. 562).

Oña’s Araucanians, then, are presented with equivocal characteristics. On the one hand, they are past and present adversaries engaged in an unjustifiable war of aggression and without a legitimate republic, which answers many of the questions Ercilla had raised concerning the ethics of the war. On the other, they manifest many of the generic, unchristian customs ascribed to contemporary colonial subjects, and thus open up a new series of questions concerning the governance and reform of the Amerindian republics. The presentation of Caupolicán, delayed until the fifth canto, is a case in point. His first appearance, naked and carefree as he bathes with his beloved Fresia, is an unusual celebration of male beauty, in contrast to the ‘beautiful and immaterial body’ of the chaste Hurtado.5 Pittarello, ‘Arauco domado de Pedro de Oña’, p. 259. As Blanco puts it, the critical tendency to see Oña’s ‘eroticization’ of the Araucanian heroes as derogatory sometimes ‘says more about the Puritan mentality of contemporary critics than that of Pedro de Oña and his contemporaries’, ‘Fábulas de amores’, p. 31. The scene appears to take inspiration from the downfall of Lautaro in Ercilla, whose surrender to love is, as we have seen, swiftly followed by his tragic death, but also from Caupolicán’s first appearance in the ‘prueba del tronco’, in which physical prowess and political virtues are literally and symbolically intertwined. Here, only the former remain. Soon after, Caupolicán is stirred up by the disguised fury Megera to return to the battlefield. Megera’s speech leaves the reader in no doubt as to the leader’s status. Neither an elected general nor even a rightful king (though he is said to aspire to being a ‘famoso rey’ and ‘señor del mundo’ [lord of the world], V. 47, 55), he behaves to all intents and purposes as a tyrant, concerned only with the maintenance of his personal ‘estado’, glory and liberty (V. 48–55 – the anaphora of the second person singular pronoun is insistent), never that of Arauco. Possessed by the serpentine fury, he becomes like Virgil’s Turnus (to Tucapel’s Mezentius, VI. 20) rather than Lucan’s Pompey, and initially a neglectful one at that (V. 25). When he at last appears clothed and at the head of his people, he is notable not for eloquence or military strategy, but mainly for the description of his barbaric armour, with its serpentine crest evoking Tasso’s antagonist, the sultan Soliman, via Ercilla.6 Choi, ‘La presencia oculta’, pp. 84–87. The character, then, is definitively divested of the political and military virtues and the dignified ‘serenidad’ of his inspiration. At the same time, both his first appearance and that of the Araucanian community as a whole have one overriding feature in common: their ‘ociosidad’ [idleness] (V. 26) and its accompanying vices. As we have seen, the alleged ocio of the Indians is a given in the colonial discourse of this period, and a frequent justification for the occupation of land and the imposition of forced labour. It also suggests a subsidiary reason for Oña’s insistence on the plebeian status of most of the work-shy warriors, since indigenous nobles were conventionally exempt from such obligations.7 See e.g. Acosta, De procuranda, VII, XIX, etc.; Cañeque, The King’s Living Image, p. 171, highlights the ubiquitousness of this trait in the ‘civilizing program’ of the period, in both secular and ecclesiastical sources: ‘certain customs (real or imagined) are peculiar to the Indians that define them as barbarians and must be eradicated by any means: incest, sodomy, idolatry, nakedness, idleness and drunkenness. All of these “vices” are closely related, as idleness, which is the root of all evil, leads to drunkenness, and this to all kinds of aberrations, both physical and spiritual’.

Notable also, in this light, is Oña’s positioning of the Araucanians within Acosta’s three ‘classes’ of barbarian, a schema by which the Jesuit reshaped Las Casas’s relativisation of the concept into a more palatable notion of hierarchy and degrees. The first, ‘those who are not far from a perfect use of reason’ (p. 60), whose high level of political and cultural sophistication is marred only by their paganism, are those of East Asia, who must be converted through appeal to their reason alone. Both the De procuranda and the very popular Historia natural y moral de las Indias [Natural and Moral History of the Indies] (1590) assigned the Indians of Chile and Peru to the second, intermediate class, lacking letters and ‘ciencias’ but with political and military order, fixed residency, and a certain dignity of religious practice, though still needing the guidance of a superior authority. In the opening cantos of Arauco domado, however, they appear to descend to the third class, who according to Acosta occupied the still unintegrated frontiers of the viceroyalty: ‘wild’ or ‘half men’, without law, king or magistrates, unclean and sometimes cannibalistic. Their position within the schema has implications for their treatment, for while the Jesuits, by this period, had explicitly condemned both the pretexts for and waging of the wars of conquest (though recommending a pragmatic silencing of the sixteenth-century debates over the justice of the Spanish titles), a more limited use of violence was sanctioned in the case of this third class. If these, like petulant children, refuse the gentle persuasion of their ‘doctors’ and ‘teachers’, they may be compelled to their salvation by a proportionate use of force, in recognition that the ‘ancient and apostolic method of evangelisation’ has often proven in the Indies to be ‘extremely stupid’ (De procuranda, p. 307). The characteristics of such missionary entradas are, revealingly, retrospectively applied to the campaign of Hurtado. In Acosta’s terms, the Chileans have given abundant causes for an armed response (attacking a fortification, attempting to burn the ships, dealing deceitfully with their adversary and refusing to furnish provisions, among others); the Spaniards, in turn, are assured of undertaking only a limited, moral vengeance through the moderating influence of their Christian commander.

Overall, then, the Araucanian community of Oña, in an explicit answer to the innovations of Ercilla, is a realm of anarchy or tyranny, rather than republican virtue; a furious horde, rather than a disciplined militia; mired in the most unnatural of diabolical sins, and inherently incapable of waging a just and defensive war. The campaign against these rebels executed by Hurtado (and, by implication, his successors) is, therefore, ethically sound, even according to the more stringent criteria for a legitimate use of aggression elaborated by Acosta in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. The Araucanians are also, however, representative of the vice and pagan customs which allegedly persisted in the Amerindian communities under Spanish rule, and in this sense act as a microcosm for the examination of ongoing concerns over the future of their administration and evangelisation. It is this second element which is at the forefront of the apparent shift in characterisation when a handful of Araucanian nobles are taken from the battlefield after the first encounter and embark on a series of chivalric, pastoral and courtly adventures. If the opening cantos highlight the need for military intervention against the Araucanian community and the difficulty of rooting out entrenched and harmful customs, these subsequent episodes are addressed to a hypothetical post-conquest future, balancing the unwelcome tasks still to accomplish against the susceptibility of the indigenous inhabitants of Chile to peaceful and productive integration into the Spanish colonial system and the path of true (Christian) virtue.