An impossible chronicle: the Instrucción, by the Inca Titu Cusi Yupanqui

Abstract

This essay intends to analyze the very particular relations that the Inca Titu Cusi´s Instrucción (1570) presents between orality and writing, and the peculiar way in wich it takes part in the characteristics of such colonial genres as the petition, the epistle and the historical chronicle. Dictated in Quechua and transcribed in Spanish at the Vilcabamba mountains - focus of Inca resistance against the Spanish power - the Instrucción is a unique text, which depends on the rhetorical and legal conventions of the language of the other in order to postulate the empire of a law that historical circumstances make impossible to apply. It is, then, a text marked by aporias, that somehow announce other aporias that still continue to pervade the Latin American space today.