Abstract: This article examines how Inca Garcilaso de la Vega's La Florida del Inca (1605) constructs a system of colonial environmental knowledge through the patterned deployment of three Spanish terms: natural, naturales , and naturaleza . Drawing from infrastructure studies and environmental humanities, I analyze these terms not as rhetorical flourishes but as components of a "colonial epistemic infrastructure"—load-bearing lexical devices that facilitate administrative legibility, governance, and classification. Through quantitative analysis of their frequency (122, 47, and 8 occurrences respectively) and qualitative examination of their function, I reveal how this lexical infrastructure simultaneously permits cross-cultural communication while exposing its limitations when confronted with Indigenous environmental epistemologies. The recurring fractures in this system—moments when these terms fail to contain Indigenous mobility, environmental knowledge, or ontological complexity—are not incidental anomalies but diagnostic ruptures revealing fundamental tensions between Spanish anthropocentric frameworks and alternative ecological understandings. Garcilaso's mestizo positionality affords a unique form of mediation: working within imperial discourse while strategically revealing its conceptual inadequacies. By shifting analytic focus from representation to infrastructure—from what colonial texts signify to how their language operates—this study offers a methodological reorientation for colonial studies and environmental humanities, revealing how language both enables and constrains environmental conceptualization across cultural boundaries.
Song No (Sun,) studied this question.
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