Reading Blog 4

Hi baes!

As I was reading Poma I was intrigued by the repeated focus on Generacion or lineage. Being able to associate oneself by blood to a person with status or power has usually granted one certain benefits, which seems to hold true in the time of Poma. Poma spends much of these first 50 pages attempting to legitimize the rule of the Inca’s as not that different from the Spanish crown, while also attempting to legitimize his social standing. I was particularly interested in the legitimacy gained from the illegitimate. 

In Part 3, Poma draws an argument that current Inca rulers are descendants from Adam and Eve themselves, which should thus legitimize their rule in the present. However, in Part 4, the first father of the Inca’s Manco Capac Inca is the son of the sun. He marries his mother (who is also his sister if she’s also the daughter of the sun?) which is an act of incest. However, such a taboo doesn’t seem to delegitimize his claim to rule. The dodgy logic of his fatherhood and birth out of wedlock also doesn’t damper his claim to the throne. 

I was also interested in the multiple meanings of the word bastard. In the introduction, it’s mentioned that an Inca nobleman usually fathered children with multiple women, so the child with the second wife was referred to as the bastard. Bastard to the Inca’s wasn't a derogatory term, and such a child could still access positions of power in society. In Iberian law, bastard children were deemed illegitimate to access land and inheritances due their birth outside of a marital structure. 

In the introduction, Poma claims to have an illegitimate older half-brother that his mother had with a powerful Spaniard (pg ix). The child was a product of sexual violence, which is obviously awful but his existence wasn’t seen that way. Being mestizo allowed them to occupy an intermediary space between the Incas and the Spaniard’s that came to be highly valued. 

Throughout these examples, a child being born outside of a marital partnership wasn’t seen as delegitimizing their lineage. If anything, these children facilitated more socially powerful connections and were thus held more social capital. This was particularly interesting to me as Poma is attempting to appeal to the Spanish crown and not quite following their rules of legitimization. By trying to legitimize himself, Puma attempts to legitimize what the Spaniards viewed as illegitimate by hoping to appeal to genetic proximity. 

A bit of a wacky argument in my opinion because he should’ve considered his audience a bit more. Could this potentially have been a reason his manuscript got lost and wasn’t taken seriously during his time? I was intrigued by the different familial structures of the Incas, and as we keep studying the history of the viceroyalty of New Granada I’m curious to see how family structures shift and the importance of lineage changes as racial mixing becomes more common.