Book Reviews / Colonial Period

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Allies at Odds: The Andean Church and Its Indigenous Agents, 15831671.
By john charles. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010.
Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xi, 283 pp. Paper, $27.95.
This book is the first in-depth study of indigenous church officials in connection to
literacy and legal activism in the Andes. John Charles revisits mundane sources from
colonial ecclesiastical tribunals, which historians had hitherto used to trace Indian resistance to Catholicism, in order to bring to life the world of native bailiffs, prosecutors,
sacristans, teachers, and choirmasters. These officials assisted priests with sacramental
duties and mass, maintained church buildings and ornaments, taught Spanish literacy
and Christian doctrine, and enforced public observance of the faith. Like Juan Carlos Estenssoro and Alan Durston before him, Charles is interested in reconstructing
the contributions of these allies of the church, especially in what pertained to post-
Tridentine debates about linguistic policies, parish administration, and the usefulness
of quipu devices (knotted cords) for confession and conversion. Charles elaborates on the
pioneering works of Rolena Adorno about indios ladinos (lit., Spanish-speaking Indians),
a privileged group of intermediaries who, like the parish assistants at the center of this
work, used the Spanish language to bridge the divide between two cultures (p. 2).
Ecclesiastic documentation such as parish inspection reports, idolatry trials, and lawsuits
against rural priests put to rest the notion that, with rare exceptions, Indians could
neither read nor write (p. 6). In that sense, this book also echoes recent works by Alcira
Dueas and Kathryn Burns in calling for a reformulation of ngel Ramas early concept
of the Lettered City.
But Charles is also concerned with the role of these church assistants as litigants and
legal advocates of their communities (which they saw as part of their religious duties).
Charles succeeds in showing that a porous boundary divided sacramental practices from
legal action (p. 96). The sources indicate that natives acquired literacy primarily for the
practical purpose of litigation in colonial courts, rather than for the spiritual purpose
of reinforcing the Christian lessons they received at doctrina (p. 39). A literate Andean
society emerged in this legal setting. Although scholars had long known about native
litigation against the Andean Catholic Church and its ill-prepared and abusive agents
(i.e., the works of Antonio Acosta and Bernard Lavall), Charles is the first to undertake
the analysis of this type of native juridical writing, mainly petitions and formal accusations, as a distinct legal genre. This is perhaps his major contribution. As he notes, the
Indianness of these documents is problematic and cannot be assumed based on the nominal identity of the authors or a literal reading of the contents. It is reductive, Charles
asserts, to define texts based on assumptions of the authors ethnicity. Rather, it is more
instructive to analyze the positions that a text articulates (p. 181). Charles advocates
an approach to legal manuscript culture in which notions of collective authorship and
shared discursive networks take precedence.
Two aspects of Charless methodology stand out. First, he applies the concept of
rhetorical self-fashioningborrowed from Rolena Adorno and, ultimately, from his-

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torian of the Renaissance Stephen Greenblattto analyze how native petitioners construed a literary persona. Paradoxically, the judicial system constituted native authorities
as both defenders of their subjects and miserables or wretched ones. Thus, indigenous
litigants saw advantages in portraying themselves as both poor and empowered
(pp. 17879). Second, Charles is careful not to suggest that church assistants spoke for
themselves in these documents. Instead, he points out different mediating filters who,
like official defenders of the crown (protectores), notaries, attorneys, solicitors, and other
literate agents, often contributed to the final form of legal petitions and complaints.
As part of their discursive strategies, native litigants merged their literary personae
and interests with the moral economy and literary models of the lettered city (p. 166).
Based on the formal similarities and common structure of these documents with others authored by Spanish reformers and petitioners, Charles highlights Andean litigants
access to common discursive models and legal guidance (p. 172). Charles concludes,
In terms of form and theme, little separated the memoriales of Spanish attorneys from
the causas of Andean plaintiffs (p. 182).
Charles sketches the legal networks and paper trails that connected Andean rural
parishes with the viceregal authorities in Lima. But this task is difficult with the sources
at hand. For most native communities, litigation before ecclesiastical tribunals was not
essentially different from litigating before civil authorities. Therefore, a fuller reconstruction of such legal networks would require consulting notarial records and court
cases aired at the royal Audiencia (high court of appeal) or the Supreme Council of the
Indies, which lie outside the ecclesiastic repositories researched by Charles. The authors
conclusion that Audiencia rulings in favor of the natives were unlikely and that the
possibilities of redress or retribution were slim (p. 165) is based on a debatable reading
of a work by jurist Diego de Len Pinelo; this colonial lawyer seems to imply that court
cases involving native plaintiffs were hard to prove, but not necessarily hard to win.
These caveats do not detract from the overall value of this well-researched and
original work. Allies at Odds is a welcome contribution to a field that, for a few decades
now, seemed to be trapped within the resistance-and-continuity paradigm. As Charles
states, the most consequential response to Spanish authority came not from championing the incorruptibility of Andean traditions in a postconquest world, but from learning
and putting into force the very laws that sought their erasure (p. 70).

jos carlos de la puente luna, Texas State University

doi 10.1215/00182168-1600470

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