That Sarmiento's memory, as an individual, should take on the form of a reflection on genealogy – the gathering of family precursors with whom Sarmiento identifies – is not coincidental. From the Inca Garcilaso, who as a child eagerly heard his mother and her brothers evoke a shared Inca past on the verge of oblivion, to Borges who, in his inscription to his Obras completas, thanks his mother for “your memory and, within it, the memory of our elders,” the past, in Spanish America, appears to be, very consciously, a family affair. Borges himself, faced in Evaristo Carriego with the biographer's (and perhaps the autobiographer's) dilemma – “that one person should wish to awaken in another memories that only belonged to a third person is an obvious paradox” – resorts to an ingenious explanation of the workings of memory in Spanish America: