“Failing to Marvel”: Atahualpa's Encounter with the Word

The encounter between Atahualpa and the Spaniards in Cajamarca Plaza on 16 November 1532 provided the dramatic moment that has been highlighted in narratives of the conquest of Peru by generations of historians, from Francisco de Jerez and Titu Cusi Yupanqui to William Prescott. More recently, James Lockhart's highly influential Spanish Peru (1968) and its companion, The Men of Cajamarca (1972), have defined the striking encounter at Cajamarca as the starting point for understanding the conquest history of Peru. Edward Said and Peter Hulme, however, have suggested that within the genre of conquest narrative the conflict among different versions of the same event mainly revolves around the issue of where the story should start. If so, readers are impelled to take the designated beginning of the history of Spanish Peru—the events at Cajamarca—as not merely a dramatic framing device for telling history but as a choice implying an ideological understanding of the Spanish role in Peru. In recent American historiography, this choice of beginning with the events at Cajamarca has become a means of telling a classic tale of upward social mobility for Spaniards, one that starts with the capture of treasure at Cajamarca.