By the turn of the 17th century, most of the conquest of America had been accomplished, and historians, some appointed by the Spanish crown, attempted to provide a comprehensive overview of the event. Whereas at first chroniclers had prevailed—some of whom, such as Columbus and Cortés, had been protagonists—now the historians took over. Other than Las Casas, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo and official court historian Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas continued the work that Peter Martyr had begun. The most significant among these new writers, however, was Garcilaso de la Vega, El Inca, the son of a Spanish conquistador and an Inca woman of noble lineage. Because of his combined heritage, Garcilaso, who was born in Peru but spent most of his adult life in Spain, is commonly considered to be the first truly Latin American writer. His masterpiece is Los comentarios reales de los Incas (1609, 1617; Royal Commentaries of the Incas, with a foreword by Arnold J. Toynbee), whose second part is called Historia general del Perú (General History of Peru).

The Comentarios reales tells the history of the Inca empire, providing a detailed description of all aspects of Inca culture. It is also the story of Garcilaso’s maternal family, based on his own recollections of what his relatives told him and on the oral and written testimony of others. Garcilaso’s avowed purpose is to correct the Spanish histories of the conquest of the Andes (hence the title “commentaries”), which were written by men who did not even know the Quechuan languages spoken by the natives of Peru. He gives a dramatic account that combines autobiography, ethnography, and history, all cast in an elegant and precise prose style. The Historia general del Perú relates the tale of the Spanish conquest and the civil wars among the Spanish, in which Garcilaso’s father played a prominent, though controversial, role (he was accused of aiding those rebelling against the crown). It is the story of Garcilaso’s paternal family, told in excruciating detail for it was intended to clear his father’s name before the Spanish authorities.

Garcilaso is the most prominent of the native historians of the conquest because his book is of such a high literary quality and also because of his mixed heritage. In the 20th century his fellow Peruvian Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala was also intensively studied. Guamán Poma’s lengthy and wide-ranging El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1612–15; “The First New Chronicle and Good Government,” translated in abridgment as Letter to a King) is written in a very faulty Spanish, laced with Quechua words and troubled by Quechuan syntax, which gives his work an authentic and dramatic tone. The book is illustrated with Guamán Poma’s primitive but trenchant full-page drawings of the events he narrates. Its author accuses the Spaniards of not abiding by their own Christian doctrine, which he himself has adopted, and demands the restoration of native leaders to local rule. The Primer nueva corónica is a laboriously told history that includes lore and descriptions of native customs and practices. Guamán Poma did not have much impact on Latin American literature and historiography because his manuscript was not discovered and published until the 20th century.

While historians were interpreting the events of the conquest and debating their consequences, literary life in the Spanish empire continued unabated. Renaissance poetry, as well as other cultural manifestations, soon evolved into Baroque forms, particularly in the viceroyalties of Mexico and Peru. A distinctive kind of Baroque art developed in colonial Latin America, a style that has come to be known as the Barroco de Indias, or “Baroque of the Indies,” arguably the first authentic artistic style to emerge in the region.

The Barroco de Indias

In poetry, the Barroco de Indias begins with a gleeful acceptance of the manner originated by Luis de Góngora y Argote, the great Spanish Baroque poet, who had brought about a veritable revolution in poetic language. Góngora’s poetry is difficult, laden with mythological allusions, bristling with daring metaphors that strain the limits of the language, and syntactically complex. He soon had numerous and ardent praisers and detractors in Spain and the viceroyalties. Among the poets, whatever their status, he was mostly admired and imitated. In fact, gongorismo is practically a whole poetic movement in colonial Latin America, affecting poetry through the 17th century and well into the 18th.

Britannica Quiz

Famous Poets and Poetic Form

Baroque poetry is known for its vicious satires. Góngora, for example, delighted in heaping invective on his literary rivals. Viceregal courts outdid the Spanish court in pomposity, constantly providing ample targets for their poets to exercise satirical wit. Whereas Balbuena’s Grandeza mexicana (1604) praised Mexico City, Mateo Rosas de Oquendo’s Sátira hecha por Mateo Rosas de Oquendo a las cosas que pasan en el Pirú año de 1598 (1598; “Satire Written by Mateo Rosas de Oquendo About Things Happening in Peru in the Year 1598”) satirized Peru. The Spanish-born wanderer lived for some time in Tucuman and Lima, where he turned a caustic eye on colonial society. Lima itself, profiting from silver mines in Potosí, now had literary academies, luxurious goods, and various forbidden pleasures, all of which called forth an elaborate invective from Rosas de Oquendo. He was surpassed in his criticism of colonial doings, however, by Juan del Valle y Caviedes, a shopkeeper who was also Spanish-born. Caviedes, the best-known satirical poet of the Barroco de Indias, focused on the frailties of the human body, to the extent that some readers believed him to be syphilitic as well as misanthropic. His most important work was Diente del Parnaso (“The Tooth of Parnassus”), a collection of 47 poems not published until 1873. These are given over to ridiculing the hapless doctors of Lima, who killed more often than they cured. Caviedes, as did other poets of the Barroco de Indias, found the scholastic “science” of the time lacking and showed a modern impatience with its crude methods of observation and reliance on received authority.

Probably the best practitioner of Gongorist poetry in colonial Latin America was Hernando Domínguez Camargo, a Jesuit born in Bogotá. Domínguez Camargo wrote a voluminous epic, Poema heroico de San Ignacio de Loyola (1666; “Heroic Poem in Praise of St. Ignatius Loyola”), praising the founder of the Jesuit order, but he is best remembered for a short ballad titled “A un salto por donde se despeña el arroyo de Chillo” (“To a Waterfall Where the Chillo Brook Crashes”). The said brook is portrayed as a bolting horse that smashes himself against rocks at the bottom of a waterfall, presenting an image of grotesque beauty typical of the Baroque.

The Barroco de Indias peaks in the poetry of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, who has become a canonical figure in Spanish-language literature. Sor Juana’s life was dramatic: she rose to fame from illegitimacy and a precarious childhood. Invited to the viceregal court, she shone there and was later admitted to a convent, where she suffered a saintly death while assisting the victims of an epidemic. Despite all misguided efforts to make her a heretic, Sor Juana was a pious Catholic nun. As a writer, she was versatile, putting forth poetry, prose, and plays. Her extended philosophical poem Primero sueño (1692; “First Dream,” Eng. trans. Sor Juana’s Dream) ranked alongside Góngora’s Soledades in the breadth and depth of its aspirations. “The Respuesta a Sor Filotea” (written 1691; “Answer to Sor Filotea,” included in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Poems, 1985) is an early instance of feminism in its argument that women should be permitted to have intellectual interests. Sor Juana’s love sonnets manage to be at the same time playful and profound. Her secular and religious plays are well-crafted. Along with Garcilaso de la Vega, but surpassing his literary accomplishments in both quality and quantity, Sor Juana stands at the apex of colonial letters. Her modern perspectives foreshadow the work of the 18th century and beyond.