I find Guaman Poma an interesting figure. Even though he is not the direct focus of the book he puts himself in there a lot, mentioning himself and his family. He stresses his family’s importance and status as nobility as well as his own devotion as a Christian and to the Spanish crown. He uses this as an explanation and a humble brag to explain why he undertook such a difficult task. It was all in service of the Spanish king because he is just doing his duty as a loyal subject, which is why he should be listened to. Guaman Poma often seems to be his own biggest fan and I wonder if he was very vain and he was using this book to also serve as self propaganda to help elevate his own societal position. But he could also be doing this as a tactic to increase his own credibility. As an indigenous man he would have had a disadvantage, and so would likely require all the credibility he could get. He seems to me to be  mimicking the Spanish to make himself to appear as one of them, a person apart of the Spanish Empire with connections and status, things that the Spanish understand and respect.

This mimicry made me think about what we talked about as a class in the park yesterday. If Guaman Poma is writing in a colonizer language, in a colonizer form of story telling, to a colonizer king, and championing the colonizer’s religion over native ones is Guaman Poma still an indigenous man or has he been assimilated in to the Hispanic world? Or is he just not performing indigeniety in the way we expect to see it performed, which makes it easy to tell who is indigenous and who isn’t? And why would any of this make him less indigenous? It all depends on who is defining what indigeniety is and what is “should” look like. What constitutes as indigenous varies from place to place and person to person. I don’t think that we can ever have a unified definition, which actually makes a lot of sense because indigeniety varies from place to place and person to person. Guaman Poma himself has a certain idea about the indigenous people of Peru that would have differed from others. He describes this population as Christians at heart and subjects of the Spanish crown.