Francisco de Ávila

In 1607 the Andean parishioners of San Damián in Huarochirí brought a formal complaint against their priest, alleging extortion, forced labour and abuse. Ávila's response was to open a different case. He gathered testimony that his accusers were still worshipping the huacas of the district, collected the objects to prove it, and in 1609 held a public ceremony in Lima at which those objects were burned and an Andean religious specialist was flogged and exiled. The archbishop was persuaded, the extirpation of idolatry became an organised programme of the archdiocese, and Ávila was appointed its first visitor.

Over the following decades teams travelled the highland parishes taking depositions, destroying shrines and mummies, and punishing those they identified as teachers. The extirpation records they generated are now among the richest sources on Andean religion in existence, and they exist because their authors were trying to end it. That is the standing problem with the whole archive: it is detailed, it is close to the ground, it names practices and places and people, and every word of it was produced under duress by people with reason to lie in whichever direction seemed safest. Ávila built a career out of it, moving on to posts at Huánuco, in Lima and in Charcas, and the campaign he began ran on in the archdiocese for decades after he had left the parish that provoked it.

Around 1608, somewhere in the same activity, a manuscript was written in Quechua setting out the traditions of the huacas of Huarochirí: how Cuniraya Viracocha travelled the coast, how Pariacaca was born from five eggs and defeated Huallallo Carhuincho, how the communities of the province held their festivals, and how the arrival of the Incas and then the Spanish was understood locally. It has no title and names no author. It is the only extended account of Andean religion written in an Andean language by someone who belonged to the world he was describing, and nothing else in the colonial corpus is comparable.

The manuscript passed into Ávila's papers and from there to Madrid, where it sits today, and a Spanish translation of part of it in his hand survives beside it. What is disputed is his role. One reading has him commissioning and directing the compilation as intelligence for the campaign, which would make it a document shaped by an interrogator. Another has an educated Andean assistant collecting local tradition with a good deal of latitude, and treats the pointed local detail and the absence of Christian framing as evidence of that. The text carries both fingerprints, and the argument is not resolved.