In the midst of native people's discontent following Spanish conquest, a native Andean born after the fall of the Incas took up the pen to protest Spanish rule. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala wrote his Nueva coronica y buen gobierno to inform Philip III of Spain about the evils of colonialism and the need for governmental and societal reform. By examining Guaman Poma's verbal and visual engagement with the institutions of Western art and culture, Rolena Adorno shows how he performed a comprehensive critique of the colonialist discourse of religion, political theory, and history....

In this book on early Latin American narrative, Rolena Adorno argues that the foundations of the Latin American literary tradition are located in the writings that debated the rights to Spanish dominion in the Americas and the treatment of its natives. Placing the works of canonical Spanish and Amerindian writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--Bartolome de las Casas in particular--within this larger polemic, she shows how their works sought credibility through reference to the narrative accounts they followed or contradicted, rather than the historical events they sought to...