Going into this reading, I knew to expect the perspective of a colonizer from the context we had about the book. The first few sentences, however, were more startling than I was expecting. The Incan people were referred to almost immediately in terms of their “idiolatries and errors,” and Guaman Poma made no effort to hide his motivations for writing this text. He wanted to be sure that it was known that Chistianity was at the core of his message. While some of this may be due to the Christian Spanish audience he was writing for (who he frequently addresses as his ‘Christian readers’), I was still surprised by the blatant admittance of this, since the goal of the text is supposed to be convincing the Spaniards about the rights and humanity of the Incas. Indigenous people only appear useful to Guaman Poma in their capacity to become Christians. This reminds me of the message of Bartolomé de las Casas, who also wrote in defense of the colonized, but justified it by the fact that they are capable of being reformed to Christianity.

In the story of the text itself, I noticed some parallels to the Popol Vuh. The idea that only God can know everything, and that humans are by definition lacking in certain areas of knowledge, was a similarity between both texts. The use of clay for humans was also an interesting connection between both that I did not expect. When God punishes humans with the flood, it does seem related to the idea of vengeance that came up so often in the Popol Vuh, but seemed a bit different to me. In the Popol Vuh, vengeance seemed to me to come up most often between people that were relatively on the same playing field, in terms of respect and power. Mistakes in humans were not necessarily taken out on the humans, but seen as mistakes by the beings that created humans. Here, however, humans are clearly taking the blame. The emphasis on names was another thing I noticed in this text, as well as the previous one. The popes were all listed with their full names, and the idea of a hierarchy of respect also seemed to come up. One last interesting parallel I noticed was in the creation of humans: “the custom of plowing the earth comes from the first people.” I found this quote intriguing because it relates to previous notions that land matters, and food and land and people are all intrinsically linked. In relation to the introduction, however, this bit can be contrasted with how the Incan people were forced off their land, which was especially problematic for their agricultural techniques that relied on land that spanned multiple microclimates brought on by elevation change.