Don Diego de Torres y Moyachoque, An Indian Nobleman Petitions his King

As a mestizo descended from a conquistador and an indigenous noblewoman, Don Diego de Torres y Moyachoque (1549-1590) pays close attention to the interracial relations surrounding him. He went to Spain, taking a formal complaint to the Spanish king. This complaint contains twenty-two ways the Spaniards mistreated the indigenous population in the Muisca region. De Torres depicts the natives as victims, referring to them as “miserable Indians” (De Torres 255) multiple times. De Torres depicts the administrative officials’ taxation policies of the native population as unreasonable; the administrative officials perpetuate a cycle of debt through taxing the indigenous workers more money than what they make. De Torres also critiques the Spaniards’ treatment of the native women. Specifically, he critiques how indigenous wetnurses are taken away from their own families and how the administrators abuse native women.

De Torres’ status as an indigenous nobleman allows him to understand the intricacies of the native community; he disapproves of the fact that native women who were noble prior to Spanish conquest have been forced into demanding positions of servitude. Even though De Torres’ argument connects him with the indigenous population and De Torres was not popular among some Spaniards, the fact that the king of Spain is his audience demonstrates the social status he has as the son of a conquistador (De Torres 253).

During the colonization of the Muisca territories, these natives “were considered as […] rapidly assimilated into the colonial system” (Gómez-Montañez 108). Due to the Spanish Crown’s distribution of agricultural land, the white landowners had significant amounts of power (108-9). Furthermore, the native language of the Muisca quickly left once the Spanish arrived (108). De Torres’ words are valuable in understanding the hardships natives faced as well as the mestizo perspective in this time of Spanish dominance in the Muisca area. De Torres’ argument also helps to understand the power dynamics in Latin America during the Encounter period (1492-1600), where “colonization created patterns of social domination that became eternal givens” (Chasteen 17). This shift is demonstrated in De Torres’ acknowledgement that those who were once nobles became servants. De Torres’ negative description of indigenous life shows his opposition to the social impact of the Encounter period.

Works Cited

Chasteen, John C. “Encounter.” In Born in Blood & Fire: A Concise History of Latin America, edited by Jon Durbin, 4th ed., 17-53. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016.

De Torres, Diego. “An Indian Nobleman Petitions His King.” In The Colombia Reader: History, Culture, Politics, edited by López Ana María Gómez, Farnsworth-Alvear Ann, and Palacios Marco, 253-56. Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2017. Accessed February 10, 2021. doi:10.2307/j.ctv125jtrj.51.

Gómez-Montañez, Pablo F. “Tropes, Oxymoron, and Discursive Construction of Ethnicity: The Case of Muisca People in Colombia and Its Ethnopolitics of Memory.” In La Comunicación En Un Eventual Escenario De Transición Y Posconflicto, edited by Albarracín Fredy Leonardo Reyes, González María Teresa Suárez, and Navarro María Ligia Herrera, 105-28. Bogotá D.C., Colombia: Ediciones USTA, 2016. Accessed February 10, 2021. doi:10.2307/j.ctvb938zf.8.