Spanish Conquest of the Americas as a long-term process
The Spanish conquest of the Americas was a long-term series of struggles spanning over a century. The development of Spain, various Caribbean groups, the Mexica, and Inca were significant because they provided the context for events beginning in 1492 and continuing into the seventeenth century. While the traditional historiographic approach to conquest was based on a series of military struggles over the course of a few decades, this approach leaves out necessary complexities, notably a deeper understanding of cultural factor over a longer period of time. In order to properly understand the ‘series of fateful battles over the course of a few decades,’ one must understand how each civilization perceived the other as best one can, given the absence of written records for the Americas before Columbus. The period of conquest did not end with initial Spanish victories over native civilizations. Resentment often built up and native resistance movements sprung up. In order to fully understand the Spanish conquest of the Americas, one must take into account pretty much the entire sixteenth century as well as the end of the previous century. Conquest was a long-term process, not a string of Spanish military victories.
The Diario of Christopher Columbus is perhaps the most valuable primary source to use in beginning an analysis of Spanish conquest. However, before getting to Columbus it is necessary to look briefly at Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel in order to lay the groundwork for conquest and examine the roots of divergence between Spanish and American civilizations. Diamond examines the significance of the human transition from hunting and gathering to sedentary lifestyles. As the Spanish, Mexica, and Inca were all sedentary societies with complex political organization and food storage practices, the most relevant part of Diamond’s analysis is animal domestication. With animal domestication, the Spanish were able to utilize horses for transport and a variety of animals not native to Europe for food. In contrast, the Incas had only llamas. No study of the Spanish conquest of the Americas could be taken seriously without mentioning the role of disease. Jared Diamond shows that the European’s constant exposure to animals over the course of thousands of years meant not only the transition of various diseases like smallpox to humans but also increased human resistance to those diseases.[1] As the people of the Americas did not have such long-term exposure, necessary to develop resistance, they were very susceptible to the various diseases, most notably smallpox, that the Spanish brought over upon first contact.
The Diario of Christopher Columbus marks the beginning of primary source documentation on the interactions between Spanish and indigenous Americans, the start of a process of conquest which was to last for nearly a century. The passages from 11–13 October 1492 reveal both initial shock among the Spanish upon seeing naked people in the Caribbean as well as Spanish recognition that there might be significant amounts of gold in the area. “I was attentive and labored to find out if there was any gold; and I saw that some of them wore a little piece hung in a hole that they have in their noses…I was able to understand that, going to the south or rounding the island to the south, there was there a king who had large vessels of it and had very much gold.”[2] Columbus sailed to the island but did not stay there because he wanted to find the island of Cipango (Japan). In these early passages, one gets a feel for Spanish disorientation in the Caribbean. They had not yet realized that they were not in Asia. Despite the Spanish desire for gold, not much was actually found in the Caribbean.
The first interactions between the Spanish and the people of the Caribbean were publicized back in Europe. The earliest indigenous American words entered European print culture within a few years, just as people in Europe realized the Columbus has reached a new continent, not Asia. For example, Columbus referred to the inhabitants of a Caribbean island approaching his ship in dugouts.[3] The word canoe was not picked up until a little later, being used on 26 October. Yet by about 1495, the term ‘canoe’ appears in Antonio de Nebrija’s Vocabulario español-latina.[4] The significance of this in the context of Spanish conquest of the Americas is that the Americas were beginning to form in Spanish consciousness and this process was most clearly manifesting itself among both Columbus’s crew and Europe’s intellectual circles.
The earliest primary source documents in Europe on the Americas shed light on questions regarding language and colonization, something which tends to be overlooked if one is to adhere to traditional narratives of conquistadors conquering natives over the course of a few battles. What was the role of communication or miscommunication in these early encounters? Two examples reveal how the Spanish first attempted to assert sovereignty, first in the Caribbean: the utility of the term ‘cannibal’ and the Requerimiento of 1510. In coming into contact with various cultures in the Caribbean, the Spanish came to understand cannibals as a race of men who ate human flesh, but always in the distance. Reports[5] of cannibals depicted them as savage others on an uncharted periphery and in contrast to the ‘gentle and timid’[6] Indians. By the early sixteenth century, such reports were used to justify enslaving cannibals, or those believed to be cannibals. Reports of cannibals in the primary source material always show them as being on the next island over, as if the cannibals were more legend than reality. In any event, Spanish legal intervention was used to buttress Spanish colonial interests in the Caribbean. The Cannibal Law of 1503 made a distinction between ‘cannibals’ and other Indians.
In examining the language of the Requerimiento of 1510 and how it was used in the context of conquest in the Americas, it is necessary to look briefly at Spain’s emergence in Europe as analyzed by Robert Bartlett in The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change. In the centuries preceding contact, Iberia was a battleground between Christian and Muslim forces. During the Reconquista, Spanish Christian forces pushed Muslim forces out of what is now Spain. Bartlett analyzes this process by looking at the spread of bishoprics after Christian conquests in Iberia, Scandinavia, and the Baltic.[7] The Kingdom of Granada fell to Christian forces in 1492, completing the Reconquista. The significance of the Reconquista in the context of both Spanish conquest of the Americas and the language of the Requerimiento is that Christianity and conquest were linked for centuries of European history. The Spanish conquests in the Americas can be viewed as a continuation of this longer process. The language of the Requerimiento strongly supports this: “One of these Pontiffs [popes] who succeeded that St. Peter as Lord of the world…made donation of these isles and Tierra-firme to the aforesaid King and Queen and to their successors.”[8] The Requerimiento was an ultimatum. Native people of the Americas were to accept Spanish and Christian rule. If they refused, the Spanish said they would “make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and of their Highnesses; we shall take you and your wives and your children, and shall make slaves of them…”[9] The Requerimiento also functioned to reduce Spanish guilt by at least offering a peaceful alternative to violent military conquest. In reality, the Requerimiento did not significantly reduce the potential for violence. In practice, the document was not always read in the presence of the people the Spanish wanted to conquer. Even if it was read to native people directly, the meaning was not necessarily conveyed very well by the Spanish.
The significance of the Requerimiento is that it presents the Spanish perceptions of the conquest (or at least those of a committee back in Europe tasked with dictating policy). This makes the Requerimiento one of the most important, but also least effective, directives for understanding early Spanish views of conquest in the Americas. More important than the Requerimiento itself, were a few very influential voices criticizing such policies in Spain. The most notable and perhaps most vocal critic of Spanish policies toward Native Americans in the West Indies was Bartolome de Las Casas. He lambasted the Spanish in the Caribbean for their brutality. Criticizing a local governor, he said “This wicked wretch of a governor…was to get his gang of robbers to make their way there [a place where gold was purported to be] at dead of night…to read out the terms of this edict, proclaiming (and only to themselves) …”[10] The Spanish reportedly set fire to the houses early in the morning while the inhabitants were still sleeping.
The Spanish established an encomienda system in the Caribbean by the end of the fifteenth century as a way to utilize indigenous labor in a systematic way. As James Lockhart and Stuart Schwartz point out, the wealthiest Spanish settlers became encomenderos. The encomienda itself was located in an area populated by indigenous people, near a Spanish settlement as well as a mine. In this way, the Spanish could draw labor from the indigenous people for both the mines and service in the Spanish settlement. The encomendero himself generally lived within the Spanish settlement while indigenous laborers lived in their own settlement under a cacique.[11]
On the North American mainland, the Spanish encountered one of the strongest civilizations in the Americas at the time: the Mexica. In order to understand how much their society changed with the coming of the Spanish, one must first see what Mexica society was like (as best one can, given the paucity of pre-conquest sources) before the first sightings of Spanish ships. Popularly known as the Aztecs, the Mexica emerged in the fourteenth century, establishing their capital city Tenochtitlan in the Valley of Mexico.[12] The Mexica’s power was based on a series of alliances and labor arrangements in central Mexico with the people of Tenochtitlan atop the hierarchy. Specifically, this regional power (or empire) was composed of a series of ethnic states called altepetl. An altepetl was an organization of people who held power over a specific area.[13] James Lockhart identifies three characteristics of an altepetl: territory, calpolli (constituent parts with rotational duties), and a tlatoani (dynastic ruler).[14] When the Spanish conquer the Mexica and try to organize the indigenous people to meet Spanish labor demands, they confronted the complexities of this organizational system. In doing so, the Spanish had to work within the old system to a significant extent in order to efficiently extract labor from the local population. The Spanish encomienda system developed out of the combination of Spanish aims and the basic realities of Nahua society.
The significance of altepetl in the context of Spanish conquest is that they reveal both the constraints in which the Spanish exerted power as well as the gradual nature of conquest in terms of local experience. The major difference for local experience was the lack of leniency among those in charge of monitoring the labor forces and collecting tribute. Spanish officials had quotas and if they were not met, the person in charge could be arrested. This picture became more complicated over the course of the first century of conquest as the Spanish crown asserted its power, trying to limit the power and influence of major Spanish landowners. The encomienda system was replaced by the repartimiento system, which generated revenue for the crown and was an attempt to weaken local elites.
Gradual change can also be seen in the ways of writing over the course of the sixteenth century. The Mexica used pictographic techniques for communicating ideas before the Spanish arrived. The content ranged from the practical in a warrior society (‘leader pierced by dart’[15]) to depiction of deities (Huitzilopochtli[16]). Spanish-style writing obvious came with the Spanish as they defeated the Mexica militarily. Friars taught the Roman alphabet to the Nahua in the decades after the conquest. A few friars, notably Sahagun, used the opportunity to gather information on Nahua society and creates codices. Lockhart notes that the Spanish experimented with pictoral techniques just as they were teaching the Mexica to write in Roman letters, suggesting at least some reciprocity in the initial stages of Spanish colonization. This, however did not last. Lockhart notes the gradual shift from pictoral to alphabetic writing over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with the former fading significantly by 1600.[17] By 1600, a standard Nahuatl orthography had been developed, thus making communication and understanding easier. This decades-long transition is further evidence for conquest as a long-term process.
Religious change was also rather gradual, despite Strong Spanish opposition to all religions other than Catholicism. As the Franciscan friars were responsible for spreading knowledge of the Roman alphabet, their struggles with how to successfully convert indigenous people to Catholicism are well documented. Though clerics, such as Diego de Landa in the Yucatan, resorted to severe tactics to stamping out competing religious practices, there were some religious figures, such as Sahagun, who were at least somewhat sympathetic toward the local people they were trying to convert. Friars struggled with how to convey topics such as sin, good, evil, and theodicy in Nahuatl. For example, the term tlatlacolli was used for ‘sin.’ However, it also meant ‘damage’, or ‘something damaged.’ The word itself was derived from itlacoa, meaning ‘to damage, spoil or harm.’[18] The written record can be understood in the larger context of increasing standardization of Nahuatl orthography during the first century of Spanish rule in the Americas. Spanish and Nahua people were trying to understand each other. The Spanish, in order to successfully maintain political and religious control, had to engage with how the Nahua comprehended metaphysical concepts.
The changes brought about by conquest in Mexico so far examined relate to every-day life rather than military conquest explicitly. The military and political struggles are essential to the story of conquest and will be explored at length. The series of struggles one reads about between the Spanish and Mexica (or Aztecs) is comparatively brief but must be placed within the context of larger, long-term processes. This is the primary justification for beginning an analysis of Spanish conquest in Mexico with a brief look at the altepetl and writing systems.
The documents relating to conquest, most notably Sahagun’s Florentine Codex, preserve a wealth of details regarding conquest but were also produced in the context of post-military conquest Spanish rule. Book Twelve of the Florentine Codex depicts the Mexica ruler Moctezuma as hesitant and rather ineffective.[19] Part of this is based on the post-conquest idea that Moctezuma thought the Spanish were gods. The Florentine Codex was written decades after the conquest. The Spanish friars interviewing people for information were asking biased questions and the Nahuas had to explain how a proud warrior society was defeated. The notion that Moctezuma thought the Spanish were gods was thoroughly debunked. The notion that Cortez was Quetzalcoatl proved influential decades after the initial military conquest in order to explain the Mexica’s defeat.[20]
Diplomacy and anti-Mexica sentiment, exploited by the Spanish, can be examined through the role of Malintzin. Popularly known as La Malinche, Malintzin was likely of Maya descent and played a crucial role in the Mexica’s downfall. She was initially presented as a gift to the Spanish who found her most useful as an interpreter as Cortes and his army made their way toward Tenochtitlan.[21] Her role as interpreter and de-facto diplomat made her not only essential for the Spanish but also revealed the deep rifts between regional groups toward Mexica suzerainty. Such local rifts were even more apparent when the Spanish, under Pizarro, encountered the Inca.
One of the most well-known episodes in the history of Spanish conquest in the Americas is the meeting of Moctezuma and Cortes in 1519. With the Spanish arrival in Tenochtitlan, the military conquest of the Mexica began. Despite a very diplomatic and welcoming first meeting, the Spanish used their first opportunity, upon being invited as guests of Moctezuma, to capture the ruler. The Spanish then used their technological superiority to assert control. “The Spaniards fired one of their cannons, and this caused great confusion in the city. The people scattered in every direction; they fled without rhyme or reason…they were all overcome by terror…”[22] After this, the Spanish used the opportunity to seize Moctezuma’s treasures, melting down his gold.
Though the Spanish were able to assert control around the palace initially, they lost it upon interrupting a religious service. According to religious practice among the Mexica, selected individuals would be brought to major temples on specific days to be sacrificed to the gods. In addition to religious reverence, the killings asserted Mexica dominance over foreigners.[23] After the Spanish interrupted the ceremony and began killing people, the Mexica began to retaliate. “The Aztecs attacked with javelins and arrows, even with the light spears that are used for hunting birds. They hurled their javelins with all their strength, and the cloud of missiles spread out over the Spaniards like a yellow cloak.”[24] With chaos breaking out in Tenochtitlan, the Spanish tried in vain to re-establish order by getting their prisoner Moctezuma to calm the crowds. Not only did he fail to do this, but he was killed in the process. Leon-Portilla’s text mentions that Moctezuma was in chains after being captured by the Spanish. If he was in chains when trying to calm his own people, then he may indeed have been killed by his own people. The text makes clear that the people of Tenochtitlan considered him as little more than a puppet at this point.[25]
With Moctezuma dead and the palace under attack, the Spanish fled Tenochtitlan. La Noche Triste, or the Night of Sorrows marked the lowest point the Spanish had sunk in their failed attempt to re-establish order or even maintain residence in Tenochtitlan. The Spanish were attacked on a causeway fleeing the city and suffered their worst defeat of the conquest. “The canal was soon chocked with the bodies of men and horses; they filled the gap in the causeway with their own drowned bodies. Those who followed crossed to the other side by walking on the corpses.”[26] The Spanish were ultimately able to return and conquer the Mexica, not only because of internal problems and significant indigenous support, but also disease. Smallpox severely weakened the Mexica, making them far easier to conquer.
A decade after Cortes reached Mexico, another Spanish conquistador led a band of Spaniards into the Americas and came into contact with a larger civilization. The Incan state emerged as an imperial power during the reign of Pachacuti (1438–1471).[27] The early history of the Incas is intertwined with mythology. Before the arrival of Roman letters via the Spanish, the native Quechua speakers did not have a written language. They communicated ideas through knotted strings called quipus. As these have yet to be deciphered, an understanding of pre-conquest Incas must be mediated through post-conquest documents as well as cultural practices most notably mythology. The Incas were the last in a long line of Andean civilizations to unite groups of people. Gary Urton traces Inca mythology and, through that, ideas about politics and kinship. The Sapa Inca, or ruler of the Incas was identified to be the physical manifestation of the sun.[28] Inca society was organized around kinship, landholding groups called ayllus. The term translates as ‘family,’ ‘lineage,’ or ‘part.’[29] Like the Mexica, the Inca Empire emerged not long before the Spanish arrived. Also like the Mexica, the Inca were able to expand their power over a vast territory in a relatively short period of time. With perhaps the best road system in the hemisphere, the Inca were able to mold a variety of people into a hierarchically organized empire based in Cuzco.
The Incas used local belief systems to their advantage. In encountering other metaphysical systems, the Inca directed them toward supporting Inca mythology. The acllas were virgin wives of the sun, gathered by Inca officials from local areas throughout the empire.[30] Irene Silverblatt examines Inca gender parallelism in the context of the Inca belief system, with the deified sun and moon being ancestors to the Incan rulers.
When Pizarro and his men arrived in the Andes in the early 1530s, the Inca Empire was plunged into civil war. Huascar and Atahualpa were battling each other over the throne. The Spanish had first come into contact with the Inca under the reign of Huayna Capac, father of the two brothers vying for the throne. In his text, Guaman Poma depicts Huayna Capac as a curious ruler wanting to know more about these newly arrived people from across the sea. Pedro de Candia, after being washed ashore in Inca territory, was taken to Huayna Capac. Before leaving, Pedro de Candia was given some gold by the Sapa Inca. When he went back to Spain, he spread news of Inca wealth.[31]
Guaman Poma traces the journey of Francisco Pizarro and his men as they travelled toward Cajamarca. The Inca were dealing with political problems of their own. Huayna Capac had died. Atahualpa was still not the undisputed leader of the Inca. The Spanish did not initially appear to be much of a threat according to Guaman Poma. “To our Indian eyes, the Spaniards looked as if they were shrouded like corpses. Their faces were covered with wool, leaving only the eyes visible, and the caps which they wore resembled little red pots on top of their heads.”[32]
The Spanish met with Atahualpa in Cajamarca. When Atahualpa misunderstood what the Spanish meant by the book (Bible) ‘speaking’ to him, he threw it to the ground. Angered, the Spanish began to attack the Indians who ‘rejected god and the emperor.’[33] Guaman Poma’s depiction of Atahualpa is not flattering. Given that there was a civil war, perhaps he was sympathetic to Huascar. It is equally possible that he was doing what Nahua chroniclers were: trying to explain why his people were ultimately conquered. In any event, the confrontation between Spanish and Inca forces ended with the Spanish capturing Atahualpa, ransoming him, and ultimately killing him despite receiving the ransom in full.
Unlike the initial conquest of the Mexica, the Inca Empire did not collapse after a few years of Spanish rule through puppets. A Neo-Inca State was established, based in Vilcabamba, which persisted for decades. While the Inca Empire fell to the Spanish in the 1530s, the Neo-Incan State was not conquered until 1572. Opposition to the Spanish was not limited to the Neo-Incan State. By the 1570s, the Spanish colonial government was strengthening in the Viceroyalty of Peru. The need for reforms arose out of a religious revolt against Spanish rule known as the Taki Onqoy. The Taki Onqoy, or ‘dancing sickness’ emerged as a resistance movement based in traditional Andean values. This included restoring traditional gods and ‘unlearning’ habits associated with the Spanish.[34] While opposing the Spanish, leaders of the Taki Onqoy movement sought solidarity of indigenous people in the Andes. The movement was based in the area around Huamanga. The black and white logic of the Taki Onqoy (‘with us or against us’) limited its power as many indigenous people were willing to work with colonial officials. Steve J. Stern calls the movement a popular outburst. It “was not easily controlled by traditional elites or relationships, and originating partly in rivalry or opposition to governing native elites.”[35] The ambivalence of native elites, political weakness of the movement, and willingness of many to work with the Spanish prevented the movement from lasting beyond the 1560s.
Viceroy Toledo instituted reforms after the Taki Onqoy to solidify Spanish power in the region and stamp out non-Catholic religious practices. Key aspects of Viceroy Toledo’s reforms include the mita, rotating forced labor, and stamping out the Neo-Incan state in 1572 with the execution of Tupac Amaru (I).[36] The two republics system developed as an aspect of colonial rule. The Republic of the Indians allowed the Spanish to maintain control of indigenous people through local elites, supporting the Republic of the Spanish with labor and tribute payments.
While the Spanish conquests in Mexico and Peru are well known and well documented, Spanish conquest in Colombia adds to the overall narrative by looking at a much less known case. In the Alto Magdalena region, there lived a woman named Ysavel Agad who was supposedly over a hundred years old.[37] Regrettably, the people of the time did not interview her about her experiences. Apparently, the experiences of indigenous native women were not valued all that much. Ysavel Agad was a centenarian in the 1620s. This adds another element to the significance of understanding conquest as a long-term process rather than a series of battles: timespan. Admittedly, very few people lived anywhere close to one hundred years. However, those who had lived through conquests in the 1520s-1540s were likely to have lived for a few more decades if they were not killed by battle or epidemic. Even going slightly beyond living memory, the children of those who lived through the conquest could, and did, resist as can be seen with the Taki Onqoy movement in Peru.
A few years after the Spanish conquered the Inca Empire and began the long process of fighting the Neo-Incan state, an expedition of hundreds of people set out in search of precious metals, exploring along the Magdalena River. Many of these people had little experience in the Americas. A year into the expedition (1537), all but 179 people were dead.[38] The leader of the expedition, Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada, led the survivors into Muisca territory in the highlands of Colombia. There they found a civilization rich in gold with some of the best agricultural lands. J. Michael Francis states that the surviving Spaniards insinuated themselves into local politics by forging alliances and supporting certain leaders while fighting against others.[39] The Spanish returned several years later with lots of gold. The area became known as the Kingdom of New Granada, a reference to the last Muslim state on the Iberian Peninsula defeated in 1492.
The Spanish military conquests were not complete by 1600. The last Maya city was not conquered until 1697.[40] In New Mexico, natives under Pope successfully defeated the Spanish, pushing then out of the area for over a decade. Trying to comprehend Spanish conquest as a string of military victories in the early-mid-sixteenth century obfuscates native agency as well as long-term struggles each civilization faced over the course of the first century of contact. In extending the timeframe for understanding Spanish conquest of the Americas, it is also necessary not to go too far. The cases mentioned at the start of this paragraph were outliers, the very tail end of a long period of conquest. Later struggles, such as the Tupac Amaru Rebellion of the 1780s, do not fit into an analysis of Spanish conquest except perhaps as a brief footnote of what was to come. Despite evoking the legacy of the Incas, Tupac Amaru II and his followers were responding to problems within the Spanish colonial system due to the Bourbon Reforms, not resisting the Spanish colonial system to regain native territorial sovereignty. In order to truly understand the Spanish conquest of the Americas, one must analyze events from the late-fifteenth century through the end of the sixteenth century.
[1] Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel. 1997. p.91–92.
[2] Columbus, Christopher. The Diario of Christopher Columbus’s First Voyage to America 1492–1493. p.71.
[3] Ibid., p.69.
[4] Topic explored by John Pollack on Native Languages and Early Colonial Encounters, also explored in Byron Ellsworth Hamann’s The Translations of Nebrija. p. 3, 43–44.
[5] Columbus (Epistola de insulis nuper inventis, 1493) and Niccolo Scillacio (De insulis meridiani atque Indici maris nuper inventis, 1494), both from documents cited in John Pollack’s handout on Native Languages and Early Colonial Encounters.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Bartlett, Robert. The Making of Europe. 1993. p.5–13.
[8] Requerimiento, 1510.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Las Casas, Bartolome de. A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. p.32–33.
[11] Lockhart, James. Schwartz, Stuart. Early Latin America. 1983. p.68–70.
[12] Clendinnen, Inga. Aztecs. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991. p.50.
[13] Lockhart, James. The Nahuas: After the Conquest. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992. p.14–18.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid., p.329.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid., p.345.
[18] Burkhart, Louise. The Slippery Earth. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1989.
[19] Lockhart, James. We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1993. p.82–83.
[20] Townsend, Camilla. Burying the White Gods: New Perspectives on the Conquest of Mexico. American Historical Review. June 2003. p.659–687.
[21] Socolow, Susan. The Women of Colonial Latin America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. P.34–35.
[22] Leon-Portilla, Miguel. The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1962. p.66.
[23] Clendinnen, Inga. Aztecs. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991. p.127.
[24] Leon-Portilla, Miguel. The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1962. p.76.
[25] Ibid., p.78, 83.
[26] Ibid., p.85,87.
[27] Urton, Gary. Inca Myths. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1999. p.57.
[28] Ibid., p.13.
[29] Ibid., p.8.
[30] Silverblatt, Irene. Moon, Sun, and Witches. 1987.
[31] Poma, Guaman. The Second Part of this Chronicle: Conquest and Spanish Rule. p.104.
[32] Ibid., p.108.
[33] Ibid., p.109.
[34] Stern, Steve. Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982. p.57.
[35] Ibid., p.65.
[36] Ibid., p.76–77.
[37] Matallana-Pelaez, Susana. Spotlight on the Indians. Rutgers Dissertation Online. May 2011.
[38] Francis, J. Michael. Invading Colombia: Spanish Accounts of the Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada Expedition of Conquest. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007. p.xiv.
[39] Ibid. p.xv-xvi.
[40] Restall, Matthew. The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.
