The dreamlike struggles of Don Cristóbal: Dreams and religious syncretism in the Huarochirí Manuscript (17th century, Central Highlands, Peru)

This article explores the epistemological importance given to dreams by the indigenous peoples of the Andean worlds through a hermeneutic reading of the Huarochirí Manuscript. To this end, it mainly interprets chapters 20 and 21 of this viceregal document, which tells Don Cristobal Choquecaxa’s dream struggles against the Huacas. The reading of this account also reveals the processes of trans-culturation and religious syncretism unleashed by the implementation of the viceregal system and the campaigns to extirpate idolatry. In this way, Don Cristóbal’s narrative implicitly manifests the subsistence of particular fundamental dynamics of ancestral rationalities (in open opposition to clerical demands) under the adoption and conversion to Christianity.