Narrative
El Lazarillo: A Guide for Inexperienced Travelers between Buenos Aires and Lima
El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes
Alonso Carrió de la Vandera · 1775
Synopsis
A postal inspector travels the mail route from Buenos Aires to Lima, accompanied for part of the way by an Indian guide from Cuzco, Concolorcorvo, with whom he talks and quarrels. The book gives the itineraries, the distances, the relay stations and the mule trade, and argues for a reform of the service; it also describes the customs of the peoples encountered, treats the gauchos and the Indians of the pampas harshly, takes the defence of the Creoles and the encomenderos, and mocks in passing the French fashion that is spreading into the Spanish language.
Context
The title page announces printing at Gijón, at the Rovada press, in 1773; the book was in fact printed in Lima in 1775 or 1776 and circulated clandestinely, and the name of the press is thought to be a play on words. The text is presented there as the work of Calixto Bustamante Carlos Inca, known as Concolorcorvo, a native of Cuzco; according to Emilio Carilla, he was only a copyist, who accompanied the inspector only between Córdoba and Potosí. The research of Rubén Vargas Ugarte, then that of Marcel Bataillon and José J. Real Díaz, in the fifties, established that the inspector himself was the author. The date adopted here remains an approximation.
Who it is for
A long itinerary in eighteenth-century Spanish, to be read in stretches of road; the French translation of 1962 is introduced by Marcel Bataillon.
Prizes and reception
The book describes a route that the creation, shortly afterwards, of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata was to leave almost empty of travellers.