108 CHAPTER 5 STATE, CHURCH, AND SOCIETY
Waman Puma states that he left his home “to
know the needs of, and to redeem the poor Indians,
for whom there is no justice in this kingdom” and
that he hoped Philip III would read his work. Wa-
man Puma’s painful effort to express himself in the
unfamiliar Castilian tongue, the passionate rush of
words interspersed with Quechua terms, and the
melancholy and disillusioned tone of the work tes-
tify to the author’s sincerity and the reality of the
abuses he denounces.
SCIENCE, LITERATURE,AND THE ARTS
The second half of the seventeenth century saw a
decline in the quantity and quality of colonial schol-
arly production. This was the age of the baroque
style in literature, a style that stressed wordplay,
cleverness, and pedantry, and that subordinated
content to form and meaning to ornate expres-
sion. Yet two remarkable men of this period, Carlos
Sigüenza y Góngora in Mexico and Pedro de Peralta
Barnuevo in Peru, foreshadowed the eighteenth-
century Enlightenment by the universality of their
interests and their concern with the practical uses of
science. Sigüenza—mathematician, archaeologist,
and historian—attacked the ancient but still domi-
nant superstition of astrology in his polemic with
the Jesuit priest Kino over the nature of comets. He
also defi ed prejudice by providing in his will for the
dissection of his body in the interests of science.
Peralta Barnuevo, cosmographer and math-
ematician, made astronomical observations that
were published in Paris in the Proceedings of the
French Royal Academy of Sciences, of which he
was elected corresponding member; he also super-
intended the construction of fortifi cations in Lima.
Yet this able and insatiably curious man of science
also sought refuge in a baroque mysticism, and in
one of his last works, he concluded that true wis-
dom, the knowledge of God, was not “subject to
human comprehension.”
Colonial literature, with some notable excep-
tions, was a pallid refl ection of prevailing literary
trends in the mother country. The isolation from
foreign infl uences, the strict censorship of all read-
ing matter, and the limited audience for writing
of every kind made literary creation diffi cult. The
discouraged Mexican poet, Bernardo de Balbuena,
thus called the province of New Spain “a narrow
and dwarfed world.” To make matters worse, co-
lonial literature in the seventeenth century suc-
cumbed to the Spanish literary fad of Gongorismo
(so called after the poet Luis de Góngora), the cult
of an obscure, involved, and artifi cial style.
Amid a fl ock of “jangling magpies,” as one lit-
erary historian describes the Gongorist versifi ers
of the seventeenth century, appeared the incom-
parable songbird, known to her admiring contem-
poraries as “the tenth muse”: Sor Juana Inés de la
Cruz, the remarkable nun and poet who assembled
in her convent one of the fi nest mathematical li-
braries of the time. But Sor Juana could not escape
the pressures of her environment. Rebuked by the
bishop of Puebla for her worldly interests, she ul-
timately gave up her books and scientifi c interests
and devoted the remainder of her brief life to reli-
gious devotion and charitable works.
Because of Sor Juana’s brilliant defense of the
rights of women to education and intellectual ac-
tivity and her attacks on the prevailing irrational-
ity with regard to the sexual conduct of men and
women (“foolish men,” she asks in one of her son-
nets, “why do you want them [women] to be good
when you incite them to be bad?”), Sor Juana’s
work belongs to what has been called “colonial
subversive discourse,” which challenged the of-
fi cial ideology and idealized vision of colonial life
propounded by church and state. Satire and mock-
ery, often carried to extremes of grotesque distor-
tion, were the weapons used by colonial critics
to expose the hollowness of the ruling ideology,
the gap between the idealized vision and the
seamy reality of colonial life. They drew much of
their inspiration from the rich traditions of the
Spanish picaresque novel and satirical poetry that
subjected the follies and frailties of Spanish soci-
ety to pungent criticism. Naturally, because of the
strict censorship of published works, colonial sat-
ire circulated principally in manuscript form, and
the satirists often took measures to conceal their
identities.
The fi rst known Spanish American writer of
satire was the peninsular-born Mateo Rosas de
Oquendo, whose “Satire About the Things That