This is a preprint of an article whose final and definitive form has been published in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas © 2009 Americas Society, Inc.; Review Literature and Arts of the Americas is available online at: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a915991647. I am grateful to Daniel Shapiro at the Americas Society and to the Routledge/Taylor and Francis Group who graciously offered permission for this article with a slightly modified title to reappear in Cervantes Virtual. I am also indebted to the Consortium for Latin American Studies at Duke University and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill for a Title VI Education Summer Grant (August 2005) which allowed me to study colonial legislation (at Duke) and first editions of sixteenth-century chronicles (at UNC). April Brewer of the Rare Book Collection, Wilson Library, UNC-Chapel Hill, offered her skilled expertise in scanning the prologue to the second part of the Royal Commentaries which allowed me to continue working on it and to include an image in this study. I also wish to express my gratitude to Raquel Chang-Rodriguez for suggesting that I continue exploring the interesting field of Garcilaso's reception in the national imaginary. Finally, I want to thank Leslie Morgan, my colleague at Loyola, who gave this paper a crucial second reading. Any errors, however, result from my inability to put into words this slice of Garcilaso's complex trajectory through the ages.

González Prada, «La muerte i la vida» ([1890] 286). All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

I am presently engaged with this colonial legislation as one tradition-smashing practice among many involved with seeding even more strangling vines of colonialism. The tentative title for this project is «The Formation of Latin American Nations: From Late Antiquity to Early Modernity».

Civilismo was a political movement and party founded by Manuel Pardo who became president in 1872. The party was primarily interested in promoting business and overcoming the militarism that defined Peruvian governments during the first half of the nineteenth-century. It also played a decisive role in reconstruction after the War of the Pacific and remained a dominant force in Peruvian politics until the second decade of the twentieth century.

The idea of Garcilaso as a lighthouse comes from Luis Velazco Aragon (1955).

It was most likely that Túpac Amaru read the 1722-1723 edition (Chang-Rodriguez 1991, 44). For further information on the appropriation of the Royal Commentaries in Argentina, Peru and other areas, see (Durand 1974), Guibovich (1990-1992), Mazzotti (1998), Fernández (2004, 154), and Díaz Caballero (2004, 2008) and Elmore (2008).

I have chosen Anthony Smith as a theoretical frame for this discussion about ethnicity and nation because he understands the relationship between them in a way that escapes a priori theorists such as Benedict Anderson.

Jerry Mumford references anthropologist John Murra and historian Karen Spalding as having a further role in «helping to dethrone Garcilaso's picture of an all-powerful state» (2008, 134).

I have selected Clorinda Matto, José de la Riva Agüero, and Luis E. Valcárcel as objects of study here because their connection to Garcilaso is concrete and verifiable in their thematic material, quoting practices and ideas. Of course there are others who fall into this category, Juana Manuela Gorriti, Ricardo Palma, Luis Alberto Sánchez, Raúl Porras Barrenechea, José María Arguedas, and Antonio Cornejo Polar are six, and there are still others whose debt to Garcilaso while notable is more difficult to prove in a systematic way, such as would be the case with the essays of Manuel González Prada and José Carlos Mariátegui. The three chosen here are diverse and present one possible wide-ranging kaleidoscopic vision of the nation. Turning the kaleidoscope and adding others presents other composite views.

Smith makes the argument that «ethnicity is largely "mythic" and "symbolic" in character» (1988, 16). It would be an error to rule out the ingredients that gave rise to ethnic identities, but it is also a limited understanding of these identities that does not recognize the role of language, in a positive or negative sense, in the formation of nations, pre-modern or otherwise.