V
VALERA, BLASBorn in 1544 in Levanto, Chachapoyas, northern Peru, of a Spanish father,
Luis Valera, who served with Francisco Pizarro, and a Native woman, whose
baptismal name was Francisca Pérez, Valera studied in Trujillo, Peru, and
joined the Jesuit order in Lima in 1568. He worked in the Jesuit missions of
Huarochirí, in the highlands east of Lima, and in Cuzco, as well as Julí and
Potosí. In 1583 Valera translated a catechism from Spanish into Quechua and
Aymara for the Third Lima Provincial Council. That same year, however,
Valera was imprisoned for unspecified charges, apparently because his Jesuit
superiors disapproved of his writings, which were critical of the Spanish
Colonial administration. After several years of imprisonment and house
arrest, he was exiled to Spain, where many of his papers were burned in 1596
in an English pirate attack on the Spanish port city of Cádiz. Garcilaso de la
Vega subsequently came into possession of the surviving papers. Valera died
the following year in Alcalá de Henares, Spain, from injuries incurred during
the sack of Cádiz.
With the exception of one document, not one of the accounts attributed to
Valera has survived in their original form; they only endure in the chronicles
of others—especially in the Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General
History of Peru by fellow mestizo author Garcilaso, who had access to
Valera’s manuscript, Historia Occidentalis (found among the papers rescued
from the pillage of Cádiz). Garcilaso noted that Valera wrote about the Incas
in “elegant Latin,” idealizing the rulers of Tahuantinsuyu and their
achievements. Valera also collected myths and legends and interviewed
Native informants about their history and religion. Garcilaso cites long
passages from Valera, whom he credits in particular for information about the
northern part of Tahuantinsuyu, about which Garcilaso himself had little
knowledge, and for details of events in Peru that occurred after Garcilaso had
left for Spain in 1560.
Blas Valera’s name is intimately linked to a set of documents that make
extraordinary claims about his role following his supposed survival of the