Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua, Joan de

Joan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua, writer. Not much is known about the life of Santa Cruz Pachacuti other than that he lived in the first part of the seventeenth century in the region between Cuzco and Lake Titicaca in Peru. But his importance grows day by day because of the information contained in his work Relación de la antigüedades de este reyno del Pirú (1613; An Account of the Antiquities of Peru), one of the most interesting views of the Inca world. The text includes several drawings that have served as clues to the interpretation of the Quechua cosmological view of the world. At the time, Spanish culture, which emphasized writing as its privileged system of recording and as the mark of civilization, coexisted with Quechua culture, based on oral and visual systems of signification. Santa Cruz Pachacuti attempts to explain his native religion in the framework of the Christianity brought by the Spaniards, and in doing so he discovers that language is limited and must employ visual images. From this tension emerges the force of the Relación. Together with the works of El Inca Garcilaso De La Vega and Felipe Guamán Poma De Ayala, that of Santa Cruz Pachacuti is one of the most important indigenous sources of Inca society as well as of the conflicts of acculturation during the colonial period in the Andean region.

See alsoLiterature: Spanish America .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gary Urton, At the Crossroads of the Earth and the Sky: An Andean Cosmology (1981).

Regina Harrison, "Modes of Discourse: Relación de antigüedades de este reyno del Pirú by Joan Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua," in From Oral to Written Expression: Native Andean Chronicles of the Early Colonial Period, edited by Rolena Adorno (1982), pp. 65-100.

Regina Harrison, "Script and Sketch: A Semiotics of Knowledge in Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui's Relación," in her Signs, Songs, and Memory in the Andes (1989), pp. 55-84.

Additional Bibliography

MacCormack, Sabine. "Pachacuti: Miracles, Punishments, and Last Judgement: Visionary Past and Prophetic Future in Early Colonial Peru." American Historical Review 93 (Oct. 1998): 960-1006.

Urbano, Henrique, and Ana Sánchez. Antigüedades del Peru. Madrid: Historia 16, 1992.

                             Leonardo GarcÍa PabÓn