Born in Cuzco, Peru, the son of a Spanish conquistador and an Incan princess, Garcilaso de la Vega is often considered the first spokesperson for the South American mestizo. Garcilaso spent much of his youth listening to stories of the culture and glories of his mother's civilization and the heroics of his father's conquering comrades. At age 20, after the death of his parents, he moved to Spain, where he spent the rest of his life. In Spain, he served for a time in the Spanish army, was ordained a priest, and wrote on a variety of subjects. His account of Hernando de Soto's travels in Florida, The Florida of the Inca (1605), set the stage for his more personal interest in the pre-Hispanic history of his homeland of Peru. This interest culminated in his masterpiece, Royal Commentaries of the Incas (1609), in which he movingly describes the Incan Empire and its conquest by Spain. A mestizo, Garcilaso wrote a mestizo history in the Royal Commentaries, both praising and criticizing his parents' peoples. His desire to know and understand the past in order to know one's self and one's present reflected a serious historical consciousness and made Garcilaso one of several sixteenth-century chroniclers whose writings began a long Latin American narrative tradition. Their work, with its factual as well as emotional content, continues to enrich the work of students of the Euro-American encounter. Garcilaso was also among the first to appreciate that bicultural encounter from the perspective of the conquered indigenous populations.
