The 'Royal Commentaries', the invention of Inca tradition and the emergence of Creole patriotism in the Andean area

This dissertation studies the role of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega's Royal Commentaries (1609, 1617) as a foundational text of the Inca tradition and its appropriation by Creole patriotism in the Andean area. This study argues that this text helped to legitimize different ideologies of mestizaje and narratives of emancipation in Europe and Spanish America.;The prologue discusses the centrality of the Spanish idea of "patria"---as opposed to "nation"---in the development of Creole patriotism and identity. The first chapter analyzes the multiplicity of the subject and discourses (history, fiction and legal writing) that are found in the construction of the Royal Commentaries as allegory of legitimization of the noble mestizo.;The second chapter examines the concepts of "nation" used in the Royal Commentaries and the different appropriations of this text by both Indigenous elites and Creole patriots during the 17 th and 18th centuries. I suggest that the heterogeneous construction of Garcilaso's father as "padre de la patria," following the models of the epic Christian hero and the Inca ruler, was another instrument of legitimization for the noble mestizo.;The third chapter focuses on the heterogeneous reception of this text by enlightened writers both in Europe and the Viceroyalty of Peru. I argue that the appropriation of the Inca tradition by new utopian narratives of emancipation of the Enlightenment had a decisive influence in the ideas of Creole exiles such as Juan Pablo Viscardo and Francisco de Miranda, who used the Inca tradition as a legitimizing narrative of anti-colonial Creole patriotism.;The fourth chapter discusses the use of the Inca tradition, taken mainly from the Royal Commentaries, as a provisional guiding fiction in the process of invention of the new sovereignty by the leaders of Creole patriotism such as San Martin and Bolivar, and the canonical patriotic poem Canto a Bolivar by Jose Joaquin Olmedo.;The main conclusion of my dissertation suggests that the Creole appropriation of the Royal Commentaries was based in the harmonious ideology of mestizaje that proposes the inclusion of the Indians as part of the patria but not of the secular Creole nation.