"Historiography on the Ground": Provocations on Inca and Nahua "Youth" in El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615) and the Florentine Codex (1577)

Abstract

In her book, The Narrow Pass of Our Nerves: Writing, Coloniality, and Postcolonial Theory, Sara Castro-Klarén describes the practices of “historiography on the ground” as a series of discursive steps taken by the Viceroy Francisco de Toledo and other Spanish coloniz-ers in order to systematically “deauthorize[e]… local [Indigenous] knowledges” (158). Castro-Klarén describes this three step process as including: 1) first a “systematic gathering of ‘facts’” as “result[ing from] ‘observations’ conducted by Spanish agents of the Crown who decoded the observed cultural practices” in the context of their own (European) “cultural matrix” rather than in light of an Indigenous “grid of signification” (157); 2) the subsequent resolution of “confu-sion, disjunction, and contradiction” through various translational processes (157–58); and 3) a final reading, re-casting and taming of contemporary Indigenous realities through the framework of “‘Greek and Roman antiquity’ in order to estrange Indigenous discourses of