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The Transatlantic Bestiaries of Felipe Guamán Poma (Waman Puma), c. 1615
Lauren Beck
Scholarship about the Spanish invasion of Peru tends to focus on the agency of European actors in the colonial project. As a result, scholars see few windows into the criticism Indigenous people expressed about the coloniality of their lives. One such critique comes to us through the illustrated chronicle of an Indigenous man, Felipe Guamán Poma, whose Quechuan names mean falcon (Guaman) and puma (Poma) and who possessed mixed Indigenous ancestry, with an Incan mother and a Yarowilca father. The author-artist, whose chronicle is titled Primer Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno (c. 1615), had hoped to deliver it personally to the king of Spain. Split into two parts, the first provides a history of Guamán Poma’s culture and traditional lifestyle, and the second recounts how life changed in Peru after the Spanish invasion. Guamán Poma uses the chronicle genre as a means of educating the king about the ills of Spanish-Peruvian life. To adequately describe these unacceptable conditions, Guamán Poma reaches for the animal world to express a significant critique of the Spanish invasion and subsequent colonization of the Andean world (Andean, in this sense, includes the many Indigenous peoples and identities associated with pre-invasion and colonial Peru and Tahuantinsuyo).
Whether intentionally or not, Guamán Poma configures his seventeenth-century text using several medieval forms, including the bestiary, chronicle, and mappamundi (map of the world). By using these genres, Guamán Poma frames the knowledge and critique that he extends to the king using a discursive strategy with which the king would have been familiar. Guamán Poma may even have been exposed to printed versions of medieval European works, such as the much-copied thirteenth-century Estoria de España, one of the earliest written chronicles for Spanish history. Chronicles such as this one served as a moral compass for the reader as he learned about Spain’s history and to avoid repeating the mistakes of past monarchs (Miohaud 2018: 28). Just as the bestiary reinforced good behavior and adherence to socially accepted and desired values, Guamán Poma’s use of the animal world for teaching the Spanish reader to behave better deserves attention. In so doing, I reposition the Andean author-artist as an authority on right and wrong, thereby converting his intended European reader into a cohort in need of his knowledge and wisdom, much as we would view the author of a medieval bestiary.