In the midst of native people's discontent following Spanish conquest, a native Andean born after the fall of the Incas took up the pen to protest Spanish rule. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala wrote his Nueva corónica y buen gobierno to inform Philip III of Spain about the evils of colonialism and the need for governmental and societal reform. By examining Guaman Poma's verbal and visual engagement with the institutions of Western art and culture, Rolena Adorno shows how he performed a comprehensive critique of the colonialist discourse of religion, political theory, and history. She argues that Guaman Poma's work chronicles the emergence of a uniquely Latin American voice, characterized by the articulation of literary art and politics.

Following the initial appearance of Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru, the 1990s witnessed the creation of a range of new studies that underscore the key role of the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno in facilitating our understanding of the Andean and Spanish colonial pasts. At the same time, the documentary record testifying to Guaman Poma's life and work has expanded dramatically, thanks to the publication of long-known but previously inaccessible drawings and documents. In a new, lengthy introduction to this second edition, Adorno shows how recent scholarship from a variety of disciplinary perspectives sheds new light on Guaman Poma and his work, and she offers an important new assessment of his biography in relation to the creation of the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno.

In 1540 a small number of Spaniards founded the city of Arequipa in southwestern Peru. These colonists, later immigrants, and their descendants devoted considerable energy to exploiting the surrounding area. At first, like many other Spaniards in the Americas, they relied primarily on Indian producers; by the late 1500s they had acquired land and established small farms and estates. This, the first study to examine the agrarian history of a region in South America from the mid-sixteenth through late-seventeenth century, demonstrates that colonials exploited the countryside as capitalists. They ran their rural enterprises as efficiently as possible, expanded their sources of credit and labor, tapped widespread markets, and lobbied strenuously to influence the royal government. The reasons for such behavior have seldom been explored beyond the colonists’ evident need to sustain themselves and their dependents.

Arequipa’s case suggests another fundamental cause of capitalist behavior in colonial South America: rural wealth was inextricably tied to the colonists’ desire to reinforce and improve their stature. Arequipa’s Spanish families of the upper and middle social levels consistently employed land and its proceeds to attract prominent spouses, to acquire prestigious political and military posts, and to enhance their standing by becoming benefactors of the Church. They rarely lost sight of the crucial role that wealth played in their lives. Thus, when the region’s economy flourished, as it did during the late 1500s, they expanded and improved their holdings. When it faltered at the beginning of the next century, they made every effort to retain properties, even fragmenting land to accommodate family members and new spouses. Unlike patterns sometimes suggested for Spanish America, many Arequipan colonial families possessed land and retained it over many generations. Neither the increasingly rich Church nor a few powerful persons managed to build up extensive estates.

Landowners in Colonial Peru explains how and why rural property became so important. It emphasizes both the capitalist bent of Hispanics and the manner in which wealth served social aspirations. The approach makes clear that many of the economic and social characteristics so often attributed to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Latin Americans were present from the early Colonial period.

A central tenet of Catholic religious practice, confession relies upon the use of language between the penitent and his or her confessor. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as Spain colonized the Quechua-speaking Andean world, the communication of religious beliefs and practices—especially the practice of confession—to the native population became a primary concern, and as a result, expansive bodies of Spanish ecclesiastic literature were translated into Quechua. In this fascinating study of the semantic changes evident in translations of Catholic catechisms, sermons, and manuals, Regina Harrison demonstrates how the translated texts often retained traces of ancient Andean modes of thought, despite the didactic lessons they contained.

In Sin and Confession in Colonial Peru, Harrison draws directly from confession manuals to demonstrate how sin was newly defined in Quechua lexemes, how the role of women was circumscribed to fit Old World patterns, and how new monetized perspectives on labor and trade were taught to the subjugated indigenous peoples of the Andes by means of the Ten Commandments. Although outwardly confession appears to be an instrument of oppression, the reformer Bartolomé de Las Casas influenced priests working in the Andes; through their agency, confessional practice ultimately became a political weapon to compel Spanish restitution of Incan lands and wealth. Bringing together an unprecedented study (and translation) of Quechua religious texts with an expansive history of Andean and Spanish transculturation, Harrison uses the lens of confession to understand the vast and telling ways in which language changed at the intersection of culture and religion.