Expediente Prado Tello: Legal actions

|<

<

>

>|

Expediente Prado Tello: Legal actions

Legal actions regarding land titles in the valley of Chupas near Huamanga, Peru (ca. 1560-1640)

In November of 1991, Monsignor Elías Prado Tello and Alfredo Prado Prado published a document that had been in their family’s possession since the end of the nineteenth century. Known to the world of Andean scholarship since the 1950s when the Reverend Prado Tello published fragments from it in El Estandarte Católico, the complete Expediente (published under the title Y no ay remedio… by the Centro de Investigación y Promoción Amazónica, Lima), provides valuable information about the legal activities of the Andean author of the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno. Containing accounts of legal actions regarding the area of Chupas just outside the colonial city of Huamanga in south central Peru (see the extraordinary map on folios 52v-53r), the Expediente, as Elías Prado Tello and Alfredo Prado Prado have pointed out, offers data for the reconstruction of the history of the peoples of Chupas and other matters pertinent to the rural area of Huamanga (today Ayacucho) in the first decades of the colonial era. The period covered extends from the second half of the sixteenth century to approximately 1640.

In the autumn of 2002, the Peruvian anthropologist Juan M. Ossio of La Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú sought and received permission from Alfredo Prado Prado and the Prado family to have the manuscript scanned and digitized. The project was realized with the support of the Banco del Crédito del Perú. The digital facsimile of the manuscript, referred to as the Expediente Prado Tello in honor of the Monsignor Elías Prado Tello, makes its appearance here on the Royal Library’s Guaman Poma website on February 14, 2003, on the occasion of the first anniversary of the Monsignor’s death.

The Royal Library acknowledges with gratitude the collaboration of Juan Ossio and the cooperation of Alfredo Prado Prado and the Prado family in making possible the digital publication of the document that follows. For an analysis of its contents in relation to the activities of Guaman Poma, see on this website Rolena Adorno, “The Genesis of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Nueva corónica y buen gobierno”/”La génesis de la Nueva corónica y buen gobierno de Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala”. For the full transcription of the document, consult Elías Prado Tello and Alfredo Prado Prado, ed., Y no ay remedio…, Lima, Centro de Investigación y Promoción Amazónica, 1991.