In the Peru of the early seventeenth century, less than a century after the Spanish conquest, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala and a network of indigenous Andean Christian thinkers labored to articulate the faith in Quechua and Aymara categories. Guaman Poma’s 1,189-page First New Chronicle and Good Government, illustrated by his own hand and addressed to the king of Spain, argued for an indigenous Andean Christianity grounded in pre-conquest moral wisdom and indicted the colonial church for its betrayal of the gospel.
“I am not going to plead with the king, but to advise him and unburden his royal conscience.”
— GUAMÁN POMA
