The Religious Psychology of Mestizaje: Gómez Suárez de Figueroa or Garcilaso Inca de la Vega

Pastoral Psychol (2008) 57:115–124 DOI 10.1007/s11089-008-0131-4

The Religious Psychology of Mestizaje: Gómez Suárez de Figueroa or Garcilaso Inca de la Vega Néstor Medina

Published online: 11 June 2008 # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2008

Abstract Contrary to airtight notions of identity, this article argues that the construction of identity of peoples is far more complex and cannot be conceived separately from the sociocultural, religious and psychological dimensions of life. Using the example of the 16th century Peruvian writer Garcilaso de la Vega, I highlight the way in which the adoption of Catholic Christianity helped him resolve his internal psychological and existential identity conflict. By redefining the label of mestizaje and mestizo de la Vega reclaimed his dual ethnocultural identity, and began the painstaking job of carving a social space for people of mixed descent. He provides an alternative for framing the complex process of identity construction, and the central role of religion in it. Keywords Mestizaje . Multiple identities . Hybridity . Multiculturalism . Indigenous

Introduction The year 1492 serves as the historical marking point for the initial encounter between the Spanish and indigenous peoples in what today we call the Americas. Such encounter gave birth to mixed children (mestizos/as), and these later became the central protagonists in the articulation of mestizaje discourse in Latin America. In this paper I intend to sketch some of the conditions that contributed to the ambiguous birth of the mestizo/a people, and the subsequent creation of mestizaje discourse. I seek to show how Garcilaso de la Vega adopted Spanish culture and religion as an alternative for resolving his internal psychological, existential, and self-identity conflict. First, I will briefly mention some of the historical, cultural, and ideological factors that collided in the initial encounter between Spanish and indigenous peoples. I will then outline some of the historical and sociopolitical circumstances in which mestizos/as children constituted themselves, which later contributed to the social construction of the consciousness of mestizos/as as a distinct people. And third,

N. Medina (*) Emmanuel College, Toronto School of Theology, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected]

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I will examine the work of Garcilaso de la Vega as a representative first figure in articulating the psychological experience of mestizaje.

The social conditions in Spain The marriage of Isabel La Católica and Fernando de Aragón (1469) had consolidated Spain into an empire under the banners of Catholic Christianity and the Spanish language. The Spanish rulers undertook to be the new champions of Catholicism, committing to remove all (Christian) unbelievers and/or destroy all “pagan” religions. During the Spanish Inquisition (1478–1834) this religious zeal came to its highest expression when Spain’s efforts were concentrated also on eradicating Protestantism from its territories. During this period, and with a renewed sense of Hispanic identity, “purity” of blood was construed as a key social, economic, and political factor in Spain. “Purity” of blood could not be taken for granted; it quickly served as the differentiating symbol between those contaminated with Muslim or Jewish blood and those with “pure” “sangre azul” (blue blood) (Gracia 2000, p. 95). These elements combined provided the necessary material out of which the Spanish selfperception was constituted, and that later was imposed upon the peoples and lands of the Americas. From Columbus through the long line of conquistadors and adventurers, the goal was to expand the Spanish territories, propagate Catholicism, counter all paganism, “civilise” all “savage” peoples, and enrich themselves. Nowhere else are these elements as conspicuous as in the conquest of the Caribbean and the Americas.

The initial clash: the Spanish conquistadores and the indigenous tribes There is no need to repeat what many other scholars have recorded concerning the events, violence, and bloodshed that took place in the clash between indigenous peoples and the Spanish conquistadors (Las Casas 1992; López de Gomara 1964; de la Vega 1988). I simply want to note that Columbus’ colossal mistake of navigation and judgment opened the door for the encounter of different groups of people, and, in turn, for the birth of the mixed peoples of the American continent. On one hand, as the indigenous collided with the Spaniards they were catapulted into a process of identity clash, deconstruction and reconstruction of their own, forming their own ideas of the Spaniards (and Portuguese)/Europeans. There is very little by way of example of how indigenous peoples perceived the Spanish (Ospina 2000). On the other hand, the Spaniard’s superior weaponry and horses facilitated the victory over the indigenous; they also helped crystallized the Spanish self-perception of superiority. The many Spaniards who wrote about the Americas provide us with extraordinary threads concerning the ideological lenses through which they saw, interpreted, and commenced the construction of mythological indigenous peoples of the “new” world (Columbus 1970; Fernández de Oviedo 1950; d’Anghiera 1966; Vespucio 1985). We find in their records not what the natives thought of themselves, but what the Spaniards thought of the natives. The natives remained hidden behind the negative projection of them. The Spanish accounts offer racialized depictions of the indigenous peoples that downplayed the outstanding achievements expressed in their diverse civilisations. At the same time, they also insisted on the biological and cultural superiority of the Spanish. The constructed self-perception of the Spanish as superior, more advanced, courageous men, served as the filter through which they created a disfigured portrait of the natives as

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cowards, sodomites, anthropofagi, and naturally deprived of any shred of cultural advance (Carrión 1986). These views eventually contributed to the initial social constitution of their mixed-mestizo/a descendants. The Spaniards failed to see the indigenous people as equal to themselves. They only saw “underdeveloped” confused and “primitive” groups lagging behind in their development. They perceived them as people who “needed” their paternalistic help. And they were glad to grant it, as long as the indigenous groups acknowledged the dominion of Spain. This was the language used by Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1951) in articulating his support of the forced imposition of the Spanish over the indigenous peoples, which, as far as he was concerned, was for their own benefit.

The social construction of the mestizo/a people All the prejudices and misgivings the Spanish had against the natives, and all the hatred and resentment the natives had toward the Spanish, received concrete expressions in their mixed children. From the beginning they were singled out, marginalized, and stripped of social and political privileges on the basis of their mixed condition. It is true that the Spanish emperors did encourage Spanish nobles to marry indigenous noble women in order to create important political allegiances. For the average Spanish male adventurer such interaction with indigenous women did not generally entail marriage. Even though the Spanish Crown had allowed the marriage between indigenous women and Spanish males since 1517, as they struggled to redefine themselves in a new and changing context, the Spanish elite appealed to the idea of purity of blood. This became the means through which people distinguished themselves in the racialized social hierarchy that developed as a result of intermixture (Konetzke 1961). The emphasis on purity of blood worked against mixed people, so that Spanish elites perceived them to be closer in “racial” nature to their indigenous parents. Soon, the Spanish “pure” elites used the same prejudicial stereotypical descriptions of the indigenous people to describe the mixed population as inclined to vices like lust, lying, and laziness. Mixed males were considered by the elite Spaniards to have inherited the bad tendencies of their indigenous parents, through their mother’s breast milk, from which they drank “the vices and lasciviousness of the indigenous men and women” (Rosenblat 1954, p. 141). According to Ares Queija (1997), the colonial caste structures were such that the majority of mestizos/as had been relegated to the lower social classes along with African descendants, mulattoes, zambos and indigenous people. Nevertheless, within the ambiguous racialized politics of mestizaje, some of the mixed children of Spanish noble men entered the Spanish elite society like Francisca Pizarro, Garcilaso de la Vega, el Libertador José de San Martín, and Diego de Almagro Jr. Many were absorbed by the indigenous communities and led armed rebellions against the Spanish, like Túpac Amarú II (José Gabriel Condorcanqui) and Túpac Katari (Julián Apasa). The majority of the mestizos/as, however, found themselves in the social-political and cultural “inbetweenness” created by the caste colonial society, a new, unstable and contested space. Many mixed male children often had a different upbringing from the males of both sides of their ancestry line. Often they were taught to ride horses, and shoot harquebus as Spanish males were, and many also learned to shoot arrows, and survive in the wilds as the natives did. As mestizos began to multiply in number, they became the objects of greater suspicion from Spanish elite. Because of their distinct gifts, abilities, and training, and because of their connection to the indigenous peoples, the Spanish authorities prevented them from

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carrying weapons and owning horses; they feared that mixed children would join the indigenous and together rise against the Spaniards. In the complex, unstable, rapidly changing and racially charged colonial societies, the Spanish authorities sought to regulate every aspect of life and reserved positions of power for Spaniards (Klor de Alva 1999). As a result, mestizos were also prevented from occupying public offices, enlisting in the army, being ordained as priests, and entering schools where only people with “pure” blood were allowed (Rosenblat 1954; Ares Queija 1997). They were discriminated against in many ways, and legislation was even passed by the Consejo de las Indias, in which they could not own property, have encomiendas, or have indigenous people as servants. In some cases, the Spanish Crown did everything possible to prevent that mestizo/a children inherited the riches of their Spanish fathers. To preserve the racialized hierarchies, and in a complex process of codification, laws were passed to prevent the growth in number and sociopolitical and economic influence of the mixed population. According to Richard Konetzke (1961), at first canon law allowed Spanish men to marry indigenous women, but later, with the proliferation of mixed children, such decisions were reversed by the Spanish Crown, mandating Spaniards to marry Spanish woman under the punishment of losing their newly acquired properties. In the changing contexts and interests of social groups, and as a desperate attempt to preserve Spanish social control and the myth of purity of blood, the Real Pragmática was issued promoting social endogamy: People were ordered to marry within their “caste” group, and those who would marry below their “caste” group would be punished with loss of their social status (Konetzke 1961; Meléndez Obando 2003). Overall, mestizaje did not represent good news for the indigenous peoples. Searching for lands to cultivate many mestizos/as invaded the indigenous regions and robbed them of their lands, and even others claimed to be indigenous to have access to their commonly held lands (Klor de Alva 1996). Many mestizos maintained a close relation with their Spanish fathers, with whom they eventually set out to continue the conquest. Some began imitating the sexual behaviour of their fathers, engaging in sexual abuse of indigenous women (Soriano Hernández 1993). This situation exacerbated the way mestizos were perceived by the natives, i.e., as the continuation of the predatory Spanish rule.

(Re)naming and (re)claiming the mestizo condition Doubly rejected by the indigenous and the Spanish, mestizos/as were set apart, differentiating them from both ancestry lines. In this way, and in these everyday living situations, mestizos/as forged a collective consciousness. They began to (re)define themselves as people. Occupying ambiguous social and ideological spaces, mestizos/as constituted themselves in different ways in different countries as a different ethnocultural, and sociopolitical unit, carrying their Spanish and indigenous ancestral genealogies. It is at this historical juncture that we find Garcilaso de la Vega and his articulation of mestizaje. To my knowledge, he is the earliest example of how mestizo/a descendants began to construct their mestizo/a identity, as they (re)claimed their legitimacy as people amidst uneven social structures that discriminated against them on the basis of their mixed ethnocultural and racialized background. One cannot overestimate the value of Garcilaso de la Vega when discussing issues concerning mestizaje. Known primarily for his Comentarios Reales and his Crónicas de la Florida, he embodies the birthing point in the development of mestizaje discourse(s). He did not write a treatise specifically concerning mestizaje. His importance in mestizaje

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discourse relates to the manner in which this 16th century mestizo came to terms with his experience of biological and cultural intermixture. Because of his strong commitment to preserving the historical memory of the Inca royal family and the indigenous peoples of Peru, his writings were listed in the Index Librorum Prohibitum, banishing them from the Americas by the commission that led the Spanish Inquisition. It would not be until the time of the wars of Independence of the Latin American nations that his writings would be vindicated (Rojas 1943).

What’s in a name: Gómez Suárez de Figueroa or Garcilaso Inca de La Vega To the children of Spanish male and Indian [sic] woman, or Indian [sic] male and Spanish woman, they call us mestizos, because we are the mix of both nations; it was imposed by the first Spaniards who had children with the Indian [sic] women, and for being an imposed name by our fathers and because of its signification, I unashamedly use it for myself, and feel honored by it. Although in the Indies, if anyone is told: “you are a mestizo”, they take it offensively. (de la Vega 1943, p. IX. xxxi) This small paragraph reveals the contested character of mestizaje, used differently by different people. For de La Vega, at the end of his literary career and life, it meant the appropriation of the label mestizo as a self-defining category. It is his daring attempt at incorporating the elements of both his Spanish and Inca identities into one that reflected his own condition of being mixed. His was a painstaking process of negotiating his dual identity and cultural background. De la Vega was born during one of the most conflicted periods of Peruvian colonial history. Not long after his arrival to Cuzco, his father, Sebastian Garcilaso de la Vega Vargas took La Palla (young woman) Chimpu Ocllo, or Doña Isabel Ñusta Yupanqui, as his concubine. Chimpu Ocllo was a direct cousin of Atahualpa, and a member of the royal Inca family. In order to make sure that mixed children would not inherit from their Spanish fathers, the Spanish Crown threatened Spaniards with losing their lands, properties and encomiendas, if they did not marry Spanish women. So Captain de la Vega Vargas abandoned Doña Isabel and married Doña Luisa Martel de Los Ríos; and he gave Doña Isabel to one of his lower ranking officers, Juan de Pedroche. But de la Vega Vargas and Doña Isabel had a son, Gómez Suárez de Figueroa, in April 12, 1539. After the separation of his parents, the boy remained with his father, who resolved to give him a “good Spanish education.” And when his father died, in his will he stipulated that he be sent to Spain. It took two years for Gómez Suárez de Figueroa to arrive to Montilla, Spain in 1562. There, he lived a divided life. He maintained close contacts with the royal Inca family, always seeking ways to improve the situation of the Inca people back in Peru (de la Vega 1944). And he also looked for ways to belong to Spanish society by becoming the noble captain of the Alpujarras fighting against the Moors—people mixed just like him. To make his acculturation complete, he immersed himself among priests and intellectuals, who encouraged him in his literary journey and priesthood (Díaz del Olmo 1991). At this juncture, in this tension between his indigenous and Spanish identities, Gómez Suárez de Figueroa became the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. The battleground of these identities would be his first literary work: the Spanish translation of the Diálogos de Amor by León Hebreo (Hebreo 1949). Although de la Vega’s was not the first translation of this work, his choice of book reveals much about his psychological and existential internal dilemma (Díaz del Olmo 1991). León Hebreo was the pseudonym used by a Shephardic

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Jew named Judá Abarbanel who had opted for exile with his father and people during the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 (Hernández 1992). The content of the book serves as unique platform for de la Vega’s unique personal questions. Using platonic categories the book affirms the superiority of spirit over matter (Hebreo 1949). Philon (knowledge) and Sophia (wisdom), the interlocutors in the dialogues, discuss the tension between love and desire. Their goal is not to obtain love, but the search for the union brought about by knowing love, that is, the kind of love expressed in all aspects of life. The thrust of the book is that from the sun and the moon, the fauna and the flora, to the man and the woman, this love brings unity through intermixture (Hebreo 1949). In this cosmic dichotomy between the superior-spiritual-heavenly realm and the inferiormaterial-earthly realm, Hebreo explained the relationship between the world and the divine, and between the man and the woman. This is not a subtle point that he makes. In his second dialogue he interweaves the relation between heaven and earth and man and woman at the level of sexuality. Heaven or the principle of masculinity, what is spiritual and superior, loves out of abundance and by its own perfection wishes to be united with earth or the principle of femininity, what is material and inferior, to give her what she is lacking (Hebreo 1949). In the case of a man and a woman, their union is inspired by love and perfected by mutuality and reciprocity. In this uneven heterosexual framing, the man seeks to love out of abundance and the woman seeks to join in love out of need. Thus, in the same way that the coital intimacy between heaven and earth resulted in the creation of the world; by inference, when a man and a woman engage in sexual intercourse the result is also the creation of something new (Hernández 1992). From his vantage point of being mixed, this book provided de la Vega with a needed space for rethinking and redefining his experience and constructing his mixed identity. Through the Diálogos de Amor the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega began to reinterpret the world of mestizaje being created in the Americas (Hernández 1992). He began to see himself as a mestizo, the son of a Spanish noble man and a woman of royal Inca blood, as Gonzalo Silvestre had told him he was he was; his later writings will reflect this change. It is on the basis of idealising his parental genealogies as equal that he appropriates mestizaje. He was well aware that equality, reciprocity, and mutuality were absent from the encounter between Spanish and indigenous peoples. And they were also absent from the relations of his Inca mother and Spanish father. In his diary, he even wondered whether his mother ever loved his father. He had arrived at a crossroad, which he had to painstakingly resolve to come to terms with his mixed condition. His interrogation of the issue provoked a rigorous self-examination: “Am I Indian? [sic] Am I mestizo? Am I Spanish? At the court some thought that I am a Spaniard-Indian; it might have been because they heard me speak Castilian as my father did. The majority murmured: ‘he is Indian’” (de la Vega 1996, p. 13). The inner tension in de la Vega was reflected in the people’s perception of him. He commented that almost never one hears the word ‘mestizo’ in Montilla. I mention it to explain those whom I come to know who I am and what I am. My features are neither like the Spaniards nor like the Indians [sic], the colour of my skin, the hair. Perhaps not even my walk. On the fields the labourers treat me as a Spaniard. One of them has told me, amazed, that in the big house that I call the castle, they consider me an Indian. [sic] (de la Vega 1996, p. 42) Despite his attempts to hide his indigenous identity by wearing his father’s military regalia, de la Vega was the object of discrimination for being mixed, and because his father never married his mother he carried the stigma of illegitimacy (de la Vega 1996). This explains why his father never gave him his last name, as was customarily done with the

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first-born child. He was given a distant name from his paternal grandmother (Hernández 1992). To belong among the Spanish he tried to distance himself from his mother for being indigenous. As he wrote: did my father want to cleanse me of my mother’s Indian [sic] blood? He always had me there, by his side, teaching me his habits and customs. I distanced myself from my mother in Cuzco, and I was further separated from her when I came to Spain. I detached from her daughters, my sisters. And I am here begging for a little bit of honour. (de la Vega 1996, p. 17) In the end, he could not repudiate his Inca heritage. Out of his internal struggle, he came to the realisation that the natives of Peru were his relatives, and his mother was the allimportant link that united him to his Inca ancestry. His bold adoption of mestizaje involved a defiant affirmation of his identity defined outside of one airtight unchanging ethnic and cultural tradition. He had a double ethnic and cultural identity: he was Inca and he was Spanish; he was mestizo! The adoption of the mestizo label was the radical reclaiming of his indigenous identity, and resulted in the effort to keep their memory alive along with his Spanish identity. He negotiated this by adopting Christianity. Strongly influenced by the platonic love-spirit paradigm of the Diálogos de Amor, and blinded by his own admiration of the Spanish, he became convinced that the Spaniards had brought a superior religion. Without taking into consideration the human cost of the conquest, he concluded that it was the divine will of the Christian God that brought the Spaniards to the continent. Along with their lust and greed for gold and power, they brought what the Inca people were missing: Christianity. In a hierarchy of indigenous groups where the Inca people were considered superior to others, he perceived that Inca teachings and society worked like a primer for evangelism, a praeparatio evangelica (Poupeney Hart 1996). They prepared the people to convert even “willingly” to “La Santa Madre Iglesia Católica” (de la Vega 1945, p. I.xv). His own mother, he wrote, was greater for her conversion to Christianity than for her Inca lineage (de la Vega 1996). De la Vega found in Christianity the complementing ingredient “lacking” in his native relatives, but nothing else. The Spaniards did not improve Inca culture and society, which, for him, was comparable to ancient Rome. For that reason, the Inca memory deserved to be recorded in history. In fact, de la Vega’s writings are bold stances that challenged dominant Spanish-European historiography that recorded only the memory of the victors (de la Vega 1943). Using the same Spanish categories of courage and bravery, he concluded that the memory of the natives of the Americas deserved to be honoured in this fashion (de la Vega 1988). With his writings, he intended the preservation of the Inca historical memory, and in so doing he offered a role model to the natives in the Americas (de la Vega 1988). As Airaldi (1997) explains, his writings were a political act of resistance against the established Spanish powers, epitomized by Viceroy Toledo, who sought to eradicate the Inca lineage. Consequently, his growing consciousness of mestizaje obligated him to fight for his Inca relatives to give them the voice they deserved. He became proud to say that he was both a descendant of the Inca royal family and Spanish nobility. He was aware of the Spanish self-perception of superiority. Mestizos/as were seen by the Spanish “pure” elite as being closer in nature to their indigenous parents. Often the same prejudicial racialized stereotypical descriptions used against the indigenous people were applied to the mixed population. So de la Vega exploited this in order to gain the support of key figures in the European societies. For example, in his letters to Maximiliano de Austria,

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he assumed a posture of false modesty. Concerning the Diálogos, he stated that “he does not contribute anything to this translation, for it is but a mere daring act of an Indian [sic] simply intending to serve as an example to those in Peru” (Hebreo 1949, p. 23). And with regards to his Florida del Inca, with the same degree of clever wit, he remarked that his readers received it with enthusiasm, and if they found any mistake in it, “forgive me for I am Indian [sic]” (de la Vega 1988, p. 104). As de la Vega embarked on the daunting task of preserving the historical memory of his Inca relatives, he inaugurated the first mestizo intellectual version of indigenismo, which entailed the ambiguous and uneven appropriation of the indigenous ethnic/cultural heritage to legitimate his mixed condition. His writings represent “the creation of a new interstice, intellectual-cultural and spiritual space” to locate those who are mixed like him (Airaldi 1997, p. 240). With all the tensions and contradictions in this internal tug-of-war, he was compelled to ask: “how does God choose the soul given to mestizos?” (de la Vega 1996, p. 91). His reply to this question can only be inferred by his actions. He was the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega; in him both traditions found a common ground and were seamlessly joined through Christianity. He represented—and so did the entire generation of mestizos/as—the utopian ideal of Spanish and indigenous peoples coexisting in peace; in the Inca de la Vega, mestizos/as had become the generation of the future world being built in the Americas. But not everything is resolved in de la Vega’s mestizo/a paradigm. No doubt he saw himself as the representative of the Incas, and as such he was one of the victims. He was also a descendant of the conquistadors, in fact a member of the Spanish nobility, and as such he had killed “Indians” to protect the Spanish crown. He married a Moorish woman whom he despised for her skin colour, and was father to a son that unfortunately reminded him of his indigenous ancestry (de la Vega 1996). There is a logical and necessary progression in de la Vega’s work. The Incas had shared their advanced culture with other indigenous tribes through conquest, invasion and assimilation. Now, by necessity, with their cultural and religious advance, the Spaniards were responsible for taking the indigenous tribes of the Americas to the next level of development. As Poupeney Hart (1996) avers, de la Vega’s idealization of the Incas forced him to see Spain (Europe) as the measure of the final stage of advance. In his temporal dialectic of what was and what is, the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega saw the end of the indigenous past era, and a future ushered in by the reality of intermixture-mestizaje sealed with Christianity. This is not to say that de la Vega wanted the extermination of his own relatives. He simply saw intermixture-mestizaje (read assimilation) with the Spanish, embracing their culture and religion as the alternative for survival of the indigenous peoples. De la Vega’s framing of mestizaje remains elusive, but it did advance his initial intention to carve out a sociocultural and political space for those who were mixed: of Spanish and indigenous parents. In his writings, however, this took place at the expense of assimilating the indigenous peoples, and appropriating their traditions and symbols under the emerging mestizo consciousness. He effectively condemned the Inca people to the past, so that even today in the Latin American countries the indigenous peoples are seen as vestiges of ancient great civilisations.

Concluding remarks Mestizo/a children enjoyed extreme discrimination in the early colonial societies of Latin America. But as they gained power and became a significant social force by the sheer size

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of the mestizo/a population, the power differential started to shift. Many climbed the social ladder and quickly assimilated into Spanish society as to denying their indigenous ancestry, and themselves continued the conquest unfinished by their Spanish fathers. Indeed, de la Vega contributed to the articulation of the experiences of mixed descendants in the colonial societies of Latin America. It shows how the majority of the mestizo/a children found themselves in the social-political and cultural “in-between-ness” created by the caste society, and carved to themselves a new, but unstable and contested space. To resolve his psychological and existential tug of war, de la Vega drew from Leon Hebreo’s Platonic version of intermixture, coupled with the adoption of Christianity and Spanish culture as the elements the Incas needed to move up the next level of human existence. In his writings, the mestizos/as embodied this reality. But his proposal of mestizaje as the future of the Inca people unwittingly set the stage for the Europeanization of the mestizo/a Latin American societies. Mestizaje became a mechanism for whitening the entire population, and for replacing the indigenous peoples with mestizos/as. It is in this way that the indigenous people were silenced from the social and political social fabric of the vast regions of Latin America for the last five centuries, until very recently. Unlike the utopic dream of de la Vega, far from bringing the equalisation of peoples, mestizaje left the colonial power differential and structures undisturbed and unchallenged.

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