Guaman Poma’s ‘Nueva Coronica’ as an Encyclopedia on Counterfeiting.

It takes a counterfeiter to detect counterfeit. Guaman Poma invented a preposterous lineage. He cast himself as a prince, the descendant of kings. His deep knowledge of Inca polygyny allowed him to invent an Inca queen for his yanacona dad: his mother. The deracinated criado of encomendero Ayala, Don Martin, GP’s dad, appears as second Inca lord of Collasuyo, a viceroy of Huascar receiving in Tumbez Pizarro. Don Martin saved Ayala in the Civil Wars from being murdered by killing the attacker. GP has Don Martin receiving thereafter an “encomienda”.

According to GP, the bullshitter, Don Martin abandoned all these power to live a life of piety in the hospital of Guamanga where for 30 years he allegedly educated his sons and his stepson, the mestizo priest Martín de Ayala, to a life of utter Christian piety. Cura Martin was the son of the encomendero Don Martin saved with the alleged Inca queen. Guaman Poma, the humble son of a deracinated commoner, criado, transformed his family into nobility.

In the hospital, GP acquired the most extensive and impressive knowledge of all things Christian and all paperwork genres. He mastered all colonial forms of audits, This gave him immense power. GP is self-fashioning in steroids.

And he almost succeeded. He went to court as lord to demand possession over a huge chunk of “vacant’ land near Guamanga that had belonged to Inca solar cults and therefore was property the crown could give away to worthy petitioners. He secured the land until the Chachapoyas caught up with the bullshiter and the transaction failed.

They demonstrated he was no lord. He was flogged and exiled to the south, to Lucanas and Andhualais, as the son of yanacona and a forger, a huge crime.

In these new land, as lowly administrator of Lucanas commons, GP persisted. He liked to call himself the left-hand of the corregidor and the lord of all the Indios of the entire region south of Guamanga. Problem was, no one recognized him as lord but as a poor, deracinated paralegal. He was removed from ‘his lands and vassals’ for some 15 years and upon return lamented all his descendants were poor, lowly commoners.

Until the bitter end, GP insisted and manufactured coats of arms and forged letters from his father Inca viceroy. He saw himself as a ecclesiastical and viceregal visitador, identifying wrongdoing, issuing sermons, inventing visita testimonies, and advising behavioral change to encomenderos, corregidores, notaries, doctrinero priests, caciques, and itinerant Spaniards abusing indigenous inns.

But far more important, he was the most alert reader of local indigenous politics I have ever encountered. He detected pettifoggers and counterfeiters everywhere he went.

His history of the Inca begins with a counterfeiter, Manco Inca, who claimed to have descended from the sun and moon, emerging spawned from nature itself, a cave. Manco Inca manufactured two coats of arms and manufactured a lineage through massive deception, GP claimed.

The entire Nueva Cronica is a 1200-page encyclopedia on detecting deception, bullshitting, and internal politics in local communities. His prefered target were drunkards’ and coca consumers whose villany made them pirates, willing to ally themselves with priests, encomenderos, corregidores, and notaries to take property away from commoners, particularly women (whom he saw as property), willing to invent forged origins. Coqueros and drunkards created lineages and became lords.

Guaman Poma particularly disliked the Andean devotees of “idolatry.” The sin of idolatry, introduced to the Andes by the bullshitter Manco Capac, had Indians worship lakes and rocks, not the creator. He saw indigenous non-Christian religions as yet another form of deception.

He hated the deracinated yanaconas, like his dad, and ‘fucking whores’, like his mother, that is, women who had procreated with ethnic outsiders. They were all deceivers who invented lineages they did not have, creating wealth on the back of the poor. There is a lot of self-hate in the ‘Nueva Coronica’.

It took a counterfeiter to pay obsessive attention to counterfeiting. It is curious that the love for the ‘Andean’ and the ‘authentic Indian’ has rendered all of this invisible.