The Huarochiri Manuscript archive: The experience of writing and speaking Quechua

FAIN: HB-289429-23

Angelica Serna Jeri
University of New Mexico (Albuquerque, NM 87106-3837)

Research and writing leading to a book highlighting the role of native Quechua speakers in the development of written Quechua, an indigenous South American language, during the colonial era.

The proposed grant will result in a monograph on Quechua speakers’ participation in the colonial emergence of a literary tradition in their native language. The book builds on the case of the Huarochiri Manuscript, the only colonial text about Andean people and culture written in Quechua, critically reexamining the roles native speakers played in the writing and translation of a diverse body of texts—from idiosyncratic manuscripts to the printed grammars and vocabularies that circulated widely in the colonial Andes, and from scholarship on Andean peoples to literary works by native speakers. The book contributes a critical perspective on indigenous agency in the emergence of Latin American literary traditions, foregrounding erasure and fragmentation as well as continuities that have been obscured by European language ideologies. Finally, it offers a model case study for researchers interested in the history of the book, environmental history, and colonial studies.