The Huarochirí Manuscript and Its Unnamed Author

Around 1608, somewhere in the same activity, a manuscript was written in Quechua setting out the traditions of the huacas of Huarochirí: how Cuniraya Viracocha travelled the coast, how Pariacaca was born from five eggs and defeated Huallallo Carhuincho, how the communities of the province held their festivals, and how the arrival of the Incas and then the Spanish was understood locally. It has no title and names no author. It is the only extended account of Andean religion written in an Andean language by someone who belonged to the world he was describing, and nothing else in the colonial corpus is comparable.

The manuscript passed into Ávila's papers and from there to Madrid, where it sits today, and a Spanish translation of part of it in his hand survives beside it. What is disputed is his role. One reading has him commissioning and directing the compilation as intelligence for the campaign, which would make it a document shaped by an interrogator. Another has an educated Andean assistant collecting local tradition with a good deal of latitude, and treats the pointed local detail and the absence of Christian framing as evidence of that. The text carries both fingerprints, and the argument is not resolved.