Vilcabamba, the infamous "last holdout" of the Incas, and home to the penultimate, semi-sovereign Inca Titu Cusi Yupanqui, had become an "other space" in the Andean cultural imaginary leading up to, and in the years...
moreVilcabamba, the infamous "last holdout" of the Incas, and home to the penultimate, semi-sovereign Inca Titu Cusi Yupanqui, had become an "other space" in the Andean cultural imaginary leading up to, and in the years after, its final capitulation to the Spaniards in 1572. (1) Vilcabamba was both a space of crisis and one of deviation, and its inhabitants, especially its leaders, were represented as apostates, that is, renegades who rejected Christianity and Spanish rule, "standing away" from the imposition of colonial power. (2) As Jose Rabasa convincingly argues, apostasy is a unique category of being "without history," for apostates reject their forced incorporation into universal history that Christian baptism and conversion signal (172) and are written into history as "an attribute imposed from without" (177) and that functions rhetorically so as to incorporate the so-called apostates into (Western, universal) history. One of the characteristics of this imposition is a "bundling" of tropes of heterodox practices and identity markers in the representation of apostates so that they become figured in history (and more specifically, in the texts I read here) asa combination of renegade, idolater, sexual deviant, diseased, nonwhite, nonEuropean, polluted, stained, and so forth. (3) In short, this bundling produced abject subjects and was figured on the body and space of the colonized and those who resisted colonization, in this case, the rebellious Incas of Vilcabamba. At first seemingly cooperating with and then later rejecting Spanish colonial subjugation and returning to their ancestral practices, they were characterized as apostates by Spanish missionary-chroniclers and historians. Cristobal de Molina and Cristobal de Albornoz, missionaries and early extirpators of idolatry, described Vilcabamba as the new center of Inca religious resurgence and attempted to tie a localized millennialist movement known as Taki Onqoy to the Inca priests of Vilcabamba. Seventeenth-century Augustinian missionary and historian Antonio de la Calancha also represented Vilcabamba as a space of not just military resistance but also Inca apostasy. In his accounts of the martyrdom of one of his Augustinian brothers, Friar Diego de Ortiz, Calancha elaborates from his baroque perspective how the neo-Inca refuge was a "university of idolatry" led by Titu Cusi Yupanqui and Tupac Amaru. These writers, by appealing to apostasy as the main charge against the Andeans in both Taki Onqoy and Vilcabamba, and by extension the Inca leader Titu Cusi Yupanqui, simplify what I perceive to be a more complex colonial subjectivity. Titu Cusi Yupanqui, the alleged apostate, is known to us today precisely because he wrote himself into history by producing the Instruccion del Inga Don Diego de Castro Titu Cusi Yupangui para el muy ilustre Senor el Licenciado Lope Garcia de Castro (1570), a testimonial-like narrative that defends his father Manco Capac's actions in rebelling against the Spaniards, denounces the Spanish treatment of the Incas in the conquest and postconquest, and negotiates a future relationship with the Crown. Titu Cusi Yupanqui declares himself a Christian, is baptized, and participates in various Christian ceremonies and Spanish cultural practices, yet his words and deeds recorded in the Instruccion represent "heresies" in relationship to Christian orthodoxy and reveal his so-called apostasy, that is, his return to and continuance of Andean religious and cultural practices the extirpators denounced. Titu Cusi Yupanqui crisscrosses the boundaries constructed by the binaries established by discourses of orthodoxy and apostasy. As I explain below, the Andean concepts of tinkuy and chaupi inform how Tuti Cusi Yupanqui elaborates the body and space so central to Andean religious practice in his Instruccion. I will show how the Inca's version of history challenges the "bundling" of bodily and spatial tropes found in those hegemonic narratives that sought to reduce him to apostate. …