Penry - Colonial Disputations

Colonial Disputations

Colonial Disputations:

Historicizing Sources for Indigenous Towns of the Andes

Forthcoming in Akira Saito and Claudia Rosas Lauro, eds, Las reducciones indígenas en debate:

su impacto en los dominios de la monarquía hispánica, (Colección de Estudios Andinos, Fondo

Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2014)

S. Elizabeth Penry

[email protected]

Fordham University

Bronx, NY 10458

In 1603 a group of native Andeans applied to the viceroy for permission to create a new

town into which they might be resettled to form a new ‘república’, as colonial officials termed

self-governing municipalities with rights of legal representation to the king. They argued that they

needed a new town because, as they claimed, their original town of Todos Santos de Tomave was

dominated by wild and corrupt Indians, making it impossible for them to be good Christians. The

native Andeans asked the Viceroy to name a judge to layout “the plaza, church, cabildo (town

council) building and all the rest necessary to conform to law” for their new town of Santiago de

Tolapampa1 Viceroy Luis de Velasco granted their petition and ordered that their parish priest

regularly travel the roughly five miles separating the two towns in order to say mass and teach the

Indians Christian doctrine. 2

Yet, just a few years later, the corregidor accused the parish priest of

1. "a placa Yglecia Cassas de Cavildo y todo lo demas necisario con forme a Dro." (all quotations

are in original Spanish) Petition of the Siwaruyus of Tomave to Viceroy Velasco, 1603, document

held in Coroma, Bolivia town archive, folio (f.) 1r.

2. My use of the term ‘Indian’ here translates “indio” in the documents.


burning down the new homes in Tolapampa in an attempt to force the Andean Indians to return to

their original town. Denying that he had destroyed their new town, the priest counterattacked and

insisted that the Indians’ petition to the Viceroy had been a lie from the beginning: It was merely a

ruse to allow them to return to idolatrous practices far from the watchful eyes of the priest. The

priest told his indigenous parishioners that he would tell the Viceroy the “verdad” and the Viceroy

himself would “order you to burn this town and be Christians and return to Tomave.”3

Along with administrative reports and padrones, legal disputes such as this one are one of

the most common sources by which historians have judged the implementation and success of the

crown reducción policy—the forced resettlement of the Amerindian population of each

indigenous polity from dozens of small, dispersed hamlets into a few Castilian-styled towns.4 In

the Viceroyalty of Peru estimates are that 1.5 million people were relocated during the Visita

General of Viceroy Francisco de Toledo in the 1570s.5 In the following years, disputes such as

3. "os mandara quemar el pueblo y qe. seais xpianos y bolvaies a Tomahabi" ANB CACh #728

1616 “Memorial de Luis de Vega”, f. 2v.

4. On the term reducción and its origins see Tom Cummins, “Forms of Colonial Towns, Free

Will, and Marriage,” in The Archeology of Colonialism, Claire L. Lyones and John K.

Papadopoulos (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2002), 199–240 and William F. Hanks,

Converting Words: Maya in the Age of the Cross, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

5. Earlier attempts at resettlement were slowed by the protracted conquest and civil wars. See

Susan Elizabeth Ramírez, The World Upside Down: Cross-Cultural Contact and Conflict in

Sixteenth-Century Peru (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996) and Alexandre Coello de la

Rosa, “Resistencia e integración en la Lima colonial: el caso de la reducción de indios de El

Cercado de Lima (1564-1567), Revista Andina, 35(Julio 2002): 111-28.


this one over Tolapampa were fairly common, as Spanish administrators and priests opposed

indigenous town creation as efforts to avoid Christianity, civilization, and crown economic

exactions and framed their opposition in terms associated with religious conversion and the

extirpation of idolatry. In sympathy with indigenous people, some scholars have taken up colonial

Spaniards’ arguments about Indian motives, revaluing claims about return to old idolatrous ways

and marking it as resistance to colonialism. Along with colonial administrators, they have

concluded that flight from reducción towns proves the resettlement policy to have been a failure,

due, colonial priests would have it, to indigenous perfidy and idolatry or, as recent scholars are

more likely to argue, to a heroic struggle against a violent and insidious colonialism.6 Either way,

6. Many scholars have concluded that the reducción policy failed. See for example Margarita

Durán Estragó, “The Reductions,” in The Church in Latin America, 1492–1992, Enrique D.

Dussel (Tunbridge Wells: Burns & Oates, 1992), 351–62; Peter Gose, Invaders as Ancestors: On

the Intercultural Making and Unmaking of Spanish Colonialism in the Andes, (Toronto ; Buffalo:

University of Toronto Press, 2008), 11, 122,136; Alejandro Málaga Medina, “Las Reducciones

Toledanos en el Perú,” in Pueblos de Indios, Otro Urbanismo en la Región Andina, Ramón.

Gutiérrez (Quito: Talleres Abya-Yala, 1993), 263–316; and Ann M. Wightman, Indigenous

Migration and Social Change the Forasteros of Cuzco, 1570–1720 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press,

1990). Textbooks tend to either treat reducción policy as a failure, or downplay its impact: Peter

Bakewell, A History of Latin America: C. 1450 to the Present, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub.,

2004), 250; James. Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz, Early Latin America a History of Colonial

Spanish America and Brazil, (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), 173;

Benjamin and Keith Haynes, A History of Latin America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Publishing Co, 2009), 115; William H. Beezley and Colin M. MacLachlan, Latin America: The


arguments produced by indigenous people to justify additional town foundation and return to

former settlements are understood as subterfuge, a clever way of masking true motives from

colonial officials. But read differently, through judicious source criticism and attention to the

process of legal disputation that produced the sources, equally doubting Spanish officials’ motives

and intentions along with indigenous ones, the same documents that provide evidence of flight and

idolatry tell a different story. They provide evidence that rather than a failed or even indifferent

policy, reducción was profoundly successful. Not that Andeans remained in the small number of

reducciones into which Spaniards settled them but that flight from reducciones invariably meant

creation of additional towns shaped on the Spanish model. Flight was into the embrace of

town-centered life, along with its resignified political, religious, and legal institutions.

Spaniards imagined reducción towns to be a matrix of imperial power, whose rectilinear

streets and plazas, and accompanying juridical apparatus would not only reconceive Andean

space, but also create proper subjects of God and King.7 Castile’s legal authority in the Americas

rested on the 1494 Papal donnation which obligated the crown to evangelize Castile’s new

vassals.8 This evangelization would only be truly possible if the Amerindians lived in buena

policía, in the good customs and habits gained from the urban life and institutions found in the new

Peoples and Their History (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 2000), 51. Akira

Saito's essay in this volume accords well with my interpretation of reducciones.

7. Spaniards were hardly unanimous in their support for the reducción and resettlement process,

see Heidi V. Scott, “A Mirage of Colonial Consensus: Resettlement Schemes in Early Spanish

Peru,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22, no. 6 (2004).

8. Mario Góngora, Studies in the Colonial History of Spanish America, (Cambridge, New York:

Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975).


reducción towns.9 Based on the Castilian model, Amerindians were granted limited sovereignty to

rule themselves through cabildos within their new reducción town. Each reducción town was a

república, thus giving its inhabitants negotiating power with the crown, and the crown’s

representative, the viceroy.10

Rather than a policy innovation for imperial rule of Amerindians,

then, towns with self-governing councils grew out of hundreds of years of experience within the

Iberian Peninsula, and were the basis for the theorization in and exercise of sovereignty.11

Along with the cabildo, Spaniards introduced cofradías (confraternities) to celebrate

patron saints in the new reducción towns.12

Cabildo officers and cacique,13

would be responsible

9. On buena policía, see Richard Kagan and Fernando Marías, Urban Images of the Hispanic

World, 1493-1793 (New Haven: Yale Univ Press, 2000) 26–28, 36. On the relationship between

the crown and towns, see Helen Nader, Liberty in Absolutist Spain the Habsburg Sale of Towns,

1516–1700, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1990).

10. Reducciónes nevertheless were legally defined as “republics” in which Indians would govern

themselves “in the manner of Spaniards.” Guillermo Lohmann Villena, and María Justina Sarabia

Viejo, eds. Francisco de Toledo: Disposiciones Gubernativas para el Virreinato del Perú, 2 vols.

(Sevilla: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos 1986-89), 2:6.

11. Baber’s groundbreaking scholarship shows that resettlement policy, first implemented in the

Viceroyalty of New Spain, was itself influenced by indigenous agency. R. Jovita Baber, “Empire,

Indians and the Negotiation for the Status of City in Tlaxcala, 1521-1550” in Negotiation within

Domination: New Spain’s Indian pueblos confront the Spanish State, eds, Ethelia Ruiz Medrano,

Susan Kellogg )Boulder: Univ of Colorado Press, 2010), 19-44.

12. The enthusiastic uptake of cofradías led the archbishopric to try to limit each reducción to

only two or three saints’ advocations. Synodales La Plata 1628, cap. 9 Reformanse las cofradias, y


for the written records of municipal administration, including those for labor conscription and

tribute payment, kept in the caja de comunidad (a lock-box that served as community chest and

archive), while cofradía officials would help maintain the parochial archive, including records of

each new priest’s arrival ceremony, ecclesiastical inspections, and lists of ornaments belonging to

the church.14

Cofradías also kept records of their license, constitution, and membership list along

with their libros de fabrica, their account books. Together the written legal culture of cabildo and

cofradía were to impart notions of civitas (the people as political community) and buena policía,

through Christian devotion, celebration of patron saints, and new ways of organizing corporate

groups through voluntary civil and religious associations rather than through lineage.

demandas in the Lilly Library manuscript of Pedro Ramírez de Águila’s Noticias Politicas. Even

so by the 18th century it was not uncommon for an indigenous town to celebrate ten saints, see

AGNA 13.18.9.2 “Pocoata padron 1754.”

13. Cacique is the term commonly used in colonial documents. The equivalent term in Aymara is

mallku; in Quechua, kuraka. Most people described in this article were Aymara speakers.

14. In parish records from 1575 for San Pedro de Condocondo, two indios ladinos, don Martin

Hochatoma and don Hernando Chacaco were named as mayordomos, lay leaders in charge of the

church’s goods. AOO “Libro 1 de Bautismos, San Pedro de Condocondo, 1571” fs. 373r-374r;

375r. In 1576, the escribano del cabildo, don Hernando Hucumare, the sacristan don Martín

Taquichiri, and fours signed the parish book as witnesses to attest to an inventory of the church’s

goods, indicating that a civil and religious hierarchy was taking shape, and that literacy was

expected, f. 376v.


As each reducción town was created, cabildo officers were given copies of ordinances

drawn up by Viceroy Toledo, which were to be kept in the caja de comunidad.15

The ordinances

15. Lohmann Villena, and Sarabia Viejo, Francisco de Toledo, 1:43. Cajas de comunidad were

established prior to Toledo, see Maria Rostworowski, “Algunos Comentarios Hechos a las

Ordenanzas del Doctor Cuenca,” Historia y Cultura [Museo Nacional de Lima] 9 (1975): 119–54.

Evidence that reducción towns kept their copies of Toledan ordinances in the cajas de comunidad

is widespread. AHP CR 18 “Libro donde se asientan las tasas” contains 1583 inventories of the

cajas from Totora and Corquemarca, towns in Carangas province which specify that the Toledan

ordinances were in the cajas. Copies also appear in litigation records. Ordinances from Macha

(Chayanta) were copied into a land dispute in 1613, AGNA 13.18.7.1, “land dispute between

Pocoata and Macha (Chayanta).” In 1687 a cacique from Condo (Paria) requested a notarized

copy of material from that town’s caja that included the 1575 Toledan ordinances and the

1548-1550 La Gasca visita, AJP 1687 “Quillacas Asanaques Tasa, unnumbered document.” The

“Chapters and Ordinances for the Town of Our Lady of Bethlehem,” Tinquipaya caja, 1610 has

been published in English in Thomas A. Abercrombie, Pathways of Memory and Power

Ethnography and History Among an Andean People (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin

Press, 1998), 429–35. Cajas de comunidad were also community treasuries. AGNA 13.18.6.4

“Visisas Revisita,” f. 9r documents a forced loan to Spaniards in 1582 from a caja de comunidad;

AHMC: EC #4 “Escritura de Censo” 1579 documents Spaniards paying rent on land to an

indigenous caja de comunidad. In the Viceroyalty of Mexico, as in Peru, legal activities of towns

were also financed through cajas, see Yanna Yannakakis, The Art of Being in-Between: Native

Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca (Durham: Duke Univ. Press,

2008), 37. Towns continued to add to their archives. In the late 18th century, towns often


served as the contract between town and crown, the written law that justified the reducción process

and Spain’s invasion was made part of every indigenous town’s archive. Defining the Incas as

tyrants, Toledo characterized the Spanish invasion as a rescue of Andean people.16

Toledo

believed that caciques were little better than Incas, and so ordered that cabildo membership be

limited to commoners to counterbalance the potentially tyrannical power of the hereditary

caciques.17

Thus resettled into their new repúblicas, Indians would be guaranteed “liberty” as

confronted colonial officials with their own copies of viceregal or ecclesiastical decrees. AGI

Charcas 545 “Testimonio de los Autos de Sublevacion de Chaianta,” 9 Abril 1785, f. 246.

16. Vitoria, Pagden, and Lawrence, Political Writings, 287–8.

17. Toledo’s defense of the conquest, his characterization of the Inca as tyrannical, and the

promise that reducciones brought liberty, especially to commoners, are found in the initial section

of the ordinances “Las cavezas de las tazas que se dieron para los Yndios” in AGNA 9.17.2.5

“Yndice del Repartimiento de Tazas de las Provincias contenidas en este Libro hechas en tiempo

del Excelentísmo Señor Francisco de Toledo Virrey que fue de estos Reynos” and published as La

Visita General y el Projecto de Gobernabilidad del Virrey Toledo, Estela Cristina Salles and

Héctor Omar Noejovich, eds., (Lima, Peru: Universidad de San Martín de Porres, 2008). Also see

note 15 above. In many cases caciques or their families dominated the cabildo early on. Mumford

points out that cabildos “offered another vehicle for the caciques to consolidate their old authority

within the Spanish system.” Jeremy Ravi Mumford, “Vertical Empire: The Struggle for Andean

Space in the Sixteenth Century” (PhD diss., Yale Univ., 2004), 196. However, the groundwork

was laid for commoners to govern; by the 18th century cabildos often took an adverserial role

vis-a-vis their caciques. Commoner self-government would congeal in the concept of ‘el común,’

the ‘commons’ of a town, envisaged as autonomous from hereditary caciques and represented by


vassals of the king.18

However, early on Andeans gained facility with legal documents and filed

numerous legal challenges, leading Toledo to attempt to curb Indians litigiousness by publicly

burning a large number of their documents.19

Andeans remained undeterred and extremely adept

at legal disputation.

In this essay I propose a new reading of reducción historiography. To do so, I shift the

focus of inquiry from Spanish reports of indigenous flight from reducción towns, to study the

disputation process sanctioned by the Spanish crown. Such a shift makes it possible to

the cabildo. See S. Elizabeth Penry, “The ‘Rey Común’: Indigenous Political Discourse in

Eighteenth Century Alto Peru,” in Collective Identities, Public Spheres and Political Order: Latin

American Dynamics, Luis Roniger and Tamar Herzog (Sussex: Sussex Academic Press,

2000), 219–37.

18. The term “liberty” is frequently used in relation with reducción policy. In a broadside dated

Valladolid (Spain) 24 November 1601, the king ordered Viceroy Velasco to insure that the Indians

“lived with the full liberty of vassals.” In this case, concern was for the labor supply for Potosí.

New York Public Library Rare Book Collection *KB 1601. Fray Miguel de Monsalve argued that

the reducción policy, unlike towns in Spain which guaranteed liberty to their citizens, made slaves

of Indians. Miguel de Monsalve, Redvcion Vniversal de Todo el Pirv (Madrid? 1604), 6v.

19. Toledo’s warnings about indigenous litigiousness are found in the headnotes to the tasa

(AGNA 9.17.2.5 “Yndice del Repartimiento …,” see note 17). The classic work on Andeans’

uptake of the Spanish justice system is Steve J. Stern, Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of

Spanish Conquest; Huamanga to 1640, 2nd

edition (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1993),

chapter 5.


contextualize both Spanish administrative arguments about indigenous motives, and very different

motives expressly stated by indigenous people themselves. As the cases below reveal though, this

is rarely ever a straightforward Indian versus Spanish affair: the ecclesiastical hierarchy frequently

supported town foundation when parish priests did not; Spanish civil officials were often on the

opposite side from religious officials; and sometimes indigenous officials in the original reducción

objected to new towns created in their jurisdiction. To avoid a synthetic account that could lead to

homogeneous actors and reduce town creation to simple Indian ‘resistance’ to Spaniards, I offer

here three brief case histories.20

Within these short historical sketches I privilege the legal and

discursive framework of litigation and formal disputation to demonstrate a rapid and significant

uptake of Spanish definitions of legal subjectivity, and understanding and use of the rights granted

to the king’s subjects by membership in the self-governing reducciones. At the same time, I show

that the evidence of the disputation process, along with a permanent increase in the number of

crown-recognized indigenous-founded towns argues persuasively that the policy indeed achieved

at least one of its stated objectives: indigenous uptake of town-based institutions including

commoner-involved self-government.21

20. Here I address critiques made by Sherry B. Ortner, “Resistance and the Problem of

Ethnographic Refusal,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 1 (1995): 173–93 and

Scott, “A Mirage” that synthetic social histories conceal as much as they reveal.

21. Daniel Gade and Maria Escobar, “Village Settlement and the Colonial Legacy in Southern

Peru,” The Geographic Review 27, no. 4 (1982): 430–49 demonstrate that most reduction towns

continue to exist in the southwestern portion of the department of Cuzco. I believe that a close

study would reveal the same to be true across the entire former viceroyalty, with the possible

exception of the Jesuit reducciones of Paraguay.


Around 1616 a group of Aymara-speaking people who had been assigned to the reducción

of San Pedro de Condocondo (Condo) in Paria province (present day Bolivia) sought a license to

found a chapel and cofradía for their image of Santa Bárbara in their hamlet of Aguascalientes,

later renamed Santa Bárbara de Culta. As the cofradía founders later described their settlement in a

deposition given to religious authorities,

Don Pedro Chiri prioste and don Diego Chiri mayordomo and the rest of the

founders of the cofradía de Santa Bárbara [in the jurisdiction] of the town of

Condocondo: I say that in the hamlet of Uma hunto [Aymara: Aguascalientes] I

have my farm with fields and cattle. There, about nine years ago, more or less, with

the assistance of the priest of the pueblo, we founded the said cofradía with the

offices and conditions that continue. To found it, a license was obtained and with

that it has continued to this day. And without doubt the said cofradía and church


where it is founded, have everything needed to celebrate the divine cult, without

missing anything, all bought at our own cost.22

22. "Don Pedro Chiri Prioste y don diego chiri mayordomo y de los demas fundadores de la

cofradia de s.a santa barbara del pueblo de condocondo. Digo qu en la est.a de Uma hunto

[Aymara: Aguascalientes] tengo mis haçiendas de chacaras y ganados de ella en la qual abra nuebe

años poco mas o ms.o que con asistençia del cura del dho pueblo fundamos la dha cofradia con

los cargos y condiçiones que por ela consta para fundalla se lleuo liçençia del ordin.o y con ella se

a continuado hasta oy dia. Y sin embargo de que en la dha confradia y yglesia done esta fundada

tiene todo rrecaudo para çelebrar el culto diuino, sin que les falta cosa alguna comprado a nra.

costa" ABAS: CCE No. 5020: “Condo, liçençia para capilla,” 1626, f. 1r. This document, like the

others I quote in this essay, was written in Spanish, not in Aymara, the native language of the

Chiris. Here I follow Owensby in arguing that by contextualization the indigenous voice comes

through. Brian P. Owensby, Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico (Stanford:

Stanford Univ. Press, 2008), 9–11. On the question of the native voice in the colonial language see

William F. Hanks, “Authenticity and Ambivalence in the Text: A Colonial Maya Case,” American

Ethnologist 13, no. 4 (November 1986): 721–44.


The Chiri brothers’ foundation of a cofradía dedicated to Santa Bárbara would seem to fit

well with one goal of reducción policy: to convert indigenous people to Christianity.23

Christianity, or more precisely cult to the saints helped introduce new concepts of personhood and

identity. Saints took the place of mallquies, ancestral mummies and origin-place wakas (local level

deities) but with a key difference: pre-conquest caciques had been imagined as descendants of

wakas, legitimating their rule, but no person could claim descent from Christian saints.24

Neither

23. As Hanks has recently noted, the conversion that Spaniards hoped to implement was not

simply religious but also political, and that conversion “is a social and cultural process.” Hanks,

Converting Words, 5. Regardless of what colonial priests wrote, most scholars today agree that at

least by the early 17th century, most colonial indigenous people, much like contemporary

indigenous people, regarded themselves as ‘Christians,’ although their Christian practice might

include llama sacrifice, or libations poured in honor of mountain spirits. On the question of

conversion, in addition to Hanks, see Abercrombie, Pathways; Alan Durston, Pastoral Quechua;

the History of Christian Translation in Colonial Peru, 1550–1650, (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre

Dame Press, 2007); Juan Carlos Estenssoro Fuchs, Del Paganismo a la Santidad la Incorporación

de los Indios del Perú al Catolicismo, 1532–1750, trans. Gabriela Ramos, (Lima: Instituto Francés

de Estudios Andinos, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2003); Sabine Hyland, The Jesuit

and the Incas the Extraordinary Life of Padre Blas Valera, S.J. (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan

Press, 2003); and Gabriela Ramos, Death and Conversion in the Andes: Lima and Cuzco,

1532–1670 (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 2010).

24. Gose notes that “The living curaca was a direct descendent of, and privileged intermediary

with, the founding ancestor. Dead rulers’ mummified bodies also formed a mediating chain that

linked the group to its founder. … On assuming office, the [dead curaca’s] successor was himself


Chiri brother claimed cacical status, yet they were founders and leaders of their cofradía. Others,

originally reduced to Condo also sought to live in the new town growing up around the chapel

dedicated to Santa Bárbara. Ascription to membership in new towns involved a form of fictive

kinship, a brotherhood of members of cofradías founded to organize cult to the saints and

especially to the town’s patron saint. Authority was increasingly tied not only to cabildo office, but

invested with a degree of divinity” Peter Gose, Invaders as Ancestors, (University of Toronto

Press, 2008), p. 16. Ramos also points out that in preColumbian Peru, “[i]n the hereafter, social

and political hierarchies persisted and the dead interacted under the protection of, and near, the

divinities to whom they owed their primal origins. ” Ramos, Death and Conversion, 11.


to participation in and leadership of cult to saints.25

New towns founded by indigenous people

adopted these new institutions and authority roles, along with the openness to inclusion of

immigrants that the voluntary ascription to a saint cult and related modes of fictive kinship

(god-parents and god-siblingship of compadrazgo) made possible.

The Chiri brothers’ deposition describing the foundation of their chapel where they had

their farms “de chacaras y ganados” would also seem to speak to the Toledan ordinance that towns

be created within walking distance of fields. But the Chiris did not merely resettle their old lands;

25. Thierry Saignes, “Indian Migration and Social Change in Seventeenth-Century Charcas,” in

Ethnicity, Markets, and Migration in the Andes: At the Crossroads of History and Anthropology,

Brooke Larson, Olivia Harris, Enrique Tandeter, eds. (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1995), 167–95.

Caciques and their immediate families attempted to maintain control of towns not only through

cabildo as noted above, but also through cofradías; BNP 1697, “Son of cacique as prioste”

unnumbered document from Sancos, Huamanga. The linked civil and religious offices of cabildo

and cofradía are known to scholars as the fiesta-cargo system. When the Andean civil and religious

structures merged is a matter of debate but clearly the groundwork was laid in the 16th century.

The classic work is John K. Chance and William B. Taylor, “Cofradías and Cargos: An Historical

Perspective on the Mesoamerican Civil-Religious Hierarchy,” American Ethnologist 12, no. 1

(February 1985): 1–26. On cofradias in the Andes see Olinda Celestino and Albert Meyers, Las

cofradías en el Perú: region central, Frankfurt/Main: K.D. Vervuert, 1981; Paul Charney, “A

sense of belonging: colonial Indian cofradias and ethnicity in the Valley of Lima, Peru.” The

Americas 54(3), January, 1998: 379-407; and Fernando Fuenzalida Vollmar, “Estructura de la

comunidad de indígenas traditional; una hipótesis de trabajo” in José Matos Mar, Hacienda,

comunidad y compesinado en el Perú (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1976), 219-63.


they re-founded their former hamlet by obtaining a license for their church and cofradía. If new

towns founded by indigenous people such as Santa Bárbara de Culta, demonstrate not only active

uptake of colonial forms but also agency, it should be noted that there seems to have been a certain

degree of indigenous agency even in siting the original reducción towns.26

Even though reducción

towns were to remove Andeans from the physical location of their ancestral mummies and wakas,

reducciones were sometimes founded directly on a pre-Colombian hamlet site.27

This seems to

have been the case with Condo.28

Refounded at least twice on the same cite, it is likely that Condo

was the preconquest home of Asanaqi caciques, the ‘ethnic group’ to which the people of Culta

also belonged. The multiple foundations of Condo involved the active participation of Andeans in

the resettlement project and set the stage for further town foundation. By the early 17th century

three licensed saints’ chapels and annexes had been carved out of Condo’s jurisdiction by

indigenous petition to authorities. One of these became the town of Santa Bárbara de Culta (the

others are still-extant Veracruz de Cacachaca and Nuestra Señora de la Concepción de Cahuayo).

26. Compare the important work by Steve Wernke, “Negotiating Community and Landscape in

the Peruvian Andes: a Transconquest View,” American Anthropologist 109(1), March, 130-152.

27. This was likely common but is difficult to trace. Jeremy Mumford argues that it was Toledo’s

“ambivalent endorsement of the old, indigenous systems of the Andes. . . .. that allowed Toledo’s

reducción towns to take root in the Andean landscape.” Mumford, Vertical Empire, 278.

28. AOO, “Libro 1, 1571,” contains a description of the Condocondo church’s burning before

1572 (iserted on two torn pages inserted between fs. 344 and 345). The early foundation and

destruction of the church indicates that the town was founded prior to the Visita General. Since

Condocondo was founded at least twice on the same location, it suggests that indigenous people

had a role in choosing the site, and it was likely a site of preconquest significance. .


The Chiris’ original petition to create the cofradía and chapel has yet to come to light; the

legal deposition quoted above was taken in 1625 in response to a later parish priest who opposed

their move, and filed in the archbishopric archive under the heading, “liçençia para capilla.”29

The

priest, Gonzalo Leal Vejarano testified that only through deception had the Indians of Culta won

the license to found a chapel and cofradía. Whether through deception or not, during the legal

appeal no ecclesiastical authority denied that the people of Culta had established their chapel and

cofradía according to law. Licensing the cofradía required a written constitution, which the Chiris

testified that they had. Together the license and the constitution established the legality of their

chapel and cofradía and would have been placed in the cofradía’s archive. The Chiri’s claim to

have “todo rrecaudo para çelebrar el culto diuino” also attested to the legality of their chapel.

Indeed without license, constitution, and proper ornaments, priests were prohibited from saying

mass in the chapel.30

Among the items listed by the Chiris was a banner with the insignia of Santa

29. Probably because town foundation by indigenous people was fairly common in the 17th

century, it is seldom commented on. The notation on the outside of the Culta file indicates that at

one time town and / or chapel foundation was an established archival category. That arrangement

has long since been unmade by document loss, disarray, and the actions of professional archivists

and the indigenous record of town foundation has largely been lost. On how the making of

archives can ‘silence’ history, see Michel-Rolph. Trouillot, Silencing the Past; Power and the

Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).

30. A priest in Macha was found guilty of saying mass in an annex town chapel that lacked

proper “ornaments.” AGI Charcas 91, No. 11, “Informaciones: Gabriel de Torres Estradas”

(1634). Later priests were forbidden to say mass in any unlicensed chapel, established without

viceregal permission. AAL Capítulos 1757 # 31:11, “Canta, autos seguidos por Don Salvador

Gerónimo de Portalanza,” f.6.


Bárbara with silver cross that they carried with them as they marched across the archbishopric

begging for alms to support the chapel and cofradía. This ritual act would have helped create the

religious, social, economic, and emotional ties to the community growing out of the formal legal

framework of license and constitution.

Not only did the Chiris lay the groundwork for the legality of their cofradía (and by

extension the annex-town that was home to it), they also in effect filed a counter suit against their

parish priest. Since their original permission for the cofradía and chapel included instructions for a

priest to come there regularly to say mass, the Chiris’s petition found that it was the priest,

Gonzalo Leal Vejarano who was at fault, because “indios viejos” in Culta are “without the

sacrament of confession and have died without it, and without hearing mass.” 31

Signing their

names to the petition, the Chiris asked that the priest be ordered come to their chapel regularly.

Archdiocesan officials upheld the Chiris claim and ordered that the priest of Condo, “guard

the custom” of the cofradía by celebrating mass in the chapel, “on pain of excommunication.”32

This was at least the second time that the advocates of Santa Bárbara of Culta had appealed to the

archbishopric and won the decision to compel the priest to say mass in their annex town. But

Vejarano counterattacked, denouncing the Chiri brothers as “being the worst Indians in the

kingdom, ladinos, arrogant and free.”33

Here ladino is clearly pejorative; the Chiri’s literacy

becomes a negative attribute, something with which they can subvert the ideals of reducción

31. "careçen de los sacramentos de la confesion y se an muerto sin ella ni tanpoco oyen missa"

ABAS, CCE No. 5020, “Condo, liçençia para capilla,” f.3r.

32. "guarde la costumbre" "so pena de excomunon" ABAS, CCE No. 5020, “Condo, liçençia

para capilla,” f.3r-v.

33. "ser los yndios mas malos que ay en este rreyno ladinos soberbios y libres" ABAS, CCE No.

5020, “Condo, liçençia para capilla,” f.5r


policy.34

Introducing new facts in the case against the Chiris, Vejarano claimed that by begging

alms in the name of Santa Bárbara they had collected over a thousand pesos, which he asserted,

they used for their “borracheras,” an implicit accusation of idolatry. Vejarano also declared that an

earlier ecclesiastical inspector had ordered their chapel and homes to be burned.35

As Vejarano

read the record, the Chiris’s license for their chapel “was won with perverse and false account”

because, no priests had been “obligated to go administer any sacrament.”36

Using the language of

then-powerful extirpation of idolatry, Vejarano argued that officials in La Plata had erred in

granting the license to build their chapel; it was tantamount to granting them license to flee their

Christian duties to return to their drunken, wicked, idolatrous and incestuous ways hidden by a veil

of feigned Christian devotion. But Vejarano did not produce any evidence or witnesses to prove

his assertions of idolatry or incest.37

Despite or perhaps because of the Chiris’ stubborn insistence

34. Condemnation of indios ladinos as subversives appears in Bartolomé Alvarez, De las

Costumbres y Conversión de los Indios de Perú Memorial a Felipe II (1588), eds. María del

Carmen, Martín Rubio, et al., (Madrid: Ediciones Polifemo, 1998), capítulos 475, 476, 477.

35. Alonso Peña Montenegro wrote that sometimes it was necessary to burn down Indian homes

in order to save their souls. Alonso de la Peña Montenegro, Itinerario para Parrocos de Indios, ed.

C. Baciera, (1668; Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1995), vol 2: 403.

36 "ganado con siniesta y falsa rrelaçion" "obligaçion a yr a administrar sacramento ninguno"

ABAS, CCE No. 5020, “Condo, liçençia para capilla,” f.4r.

37. This is certainly not to say that idolatry, however defined, did not occur or was only a

rhetorical strategy used by priests. On idolatry in the Andes see Kenneth Mills, Idolatry and Its


on putting their requests strictly within a Christian idiom, Vejarano found them completely

untrustworthy.38

In the post-Tridentine Andes, a heightened intolerance for any heterodox

practice led to campaigns to ferret out idolatrous practice in indigenous peoples, ironically making

Christian-inflected speech and practices by indigenous people automatically suspect.39

The litigants present two very different accounts of the foundation of Santa Bárbara de

Culta. The parish priest Vejarano regarded it as a mere ploy to flee their reducción town to gain the

“libertad” to engage in drunkenness and idolatry; while the indigenous petitioners, the Chiri

brothers, argued that the new chapel (and annex town) were needed to make them into more

productive subjects and better Christians. What the two accounts share is that indigenous people

did successfully apply to build a chapel and found a pueblo, with Santa Bárbara as their patron.

What complicates this account is that high ranking officials in the archdiocese approved and

repeatedly upheld their petition over the objections of parish priests, and an ecclesiastical

inspector, revealing a dispute within the archbishopric of how to deal with annex-town creation.40

Enemies Colonial Andean Religion and Extirpation, 1640–1750 (Princeton: Princeton Univ.

Press, 1997).

38. Compare the pathbeaking study by William Hanks on the spread in the 16th century of what

he terms Maya reducido, Maya language inflected with the language of reducción. Hanks,

Converting Words.

39. Hyland, The Jesuit and the Incas, 67; Estenssoro Fuchs, Del Paganismo, 26.

40. Perhaps disagreements in the church hierarchy accounted for their belief or disbelief of

indigenous claims to sincere religiosity. On division in the archbishopric see Lincoln A. Draper,

Arzobispos, Canónigos y Sacerdotes, interacción entre valores religiosos y sociales enel clero de


Whether the foundation of Santa Bárbara de Culta was done in straightforward devotion to a

Christian saint, or / also to conceal idolatry (or heterodox Christianity), to be close to fields and

pastures, or far away from the prying eyes of priests and caciques, cannot be readily determined.

By the same token whether Vejarano opposed the new annex town because he truly believed

idolatrous practices were taking place there or whether he claimed to believe it in order to advance

his career, or whether he simply did not want to walk several miles each way in the harsh

conditions of the high Andean plain, is not clear either. What is certain though, is that Santa

Bárbara de Culta, which gained independent parish status from San Pedro de Condocondo in the

late 1770s, continues to exist today as an autonomous town in Bolivia (as do the two other former

annexes of Condocondo). Contemporary Culteños credit Santa Bárbara not only as their patron but

also as the founder of the town.41

In May 1616, indigenous alcaldes and cacique of the reducción town of Cotaguasi, in the

modern day Peruvian department of Arequipa, arrested Indian Juan Diego García for defying their

repeated orders to abandon the new town that he helped create, and return to Cotaguasi.42

Referred

Charcas del siglo XVII (Sucre, Bolivia: Archivo-Biblioteca Arquidiocesanos “Monseñor Taborga,

2000).

41. Abercrombie, Pathways, 272. It is not unusual for contemporary Andeans to credit the

foundation of their town to their patron saint.

42. The cabildo and cacique were somewhat sympathetic to the argument that the settlers were

poor people with no other recourse to lands; however, they still tried to compel them to return to

Cotaguasi. Indigenous alcaldes and/or caciques not uncommonly tried to put the brakes on annex

town construction, see AGNP Jesuitas varios 102, “Reducción de los Yndios,” 6 August 1596.


to in the documentary record as a forastero and a pleitista, Juan Diego was co-founder of a shrine

and cofradía to Our Lady of Copacabana, an Andean manifestation of the Virgin of Candelaria.43

Much like Santa Bárbara de Culta, the chapel foundation also served as the basis of a new

annex-town, known as Mungui, but in this case the early and vocal opposition to the new town

came from the indigenous power structures of the nearby reducción town. The cacique of

Cotaguasi, Cristobal Castillo, sent numerous letters to Juan Diego and other town officials in

Mungui, revealing great frustration that he could not compel the people of Mungui to return to his

town, and threatening to appeal the case to Lima, the seat of both the Viceroy and the region’s

Archbishop. When later questioned by the corregidor as to why the people of Mungui refused to

return to Cotaguasi, cacique Castillo testified that it was because in Mungui “they have more

liberty,” echoing accusations of libertinism made against the Chiri brothers by their priest.44

One of the most important goals behind reducción policy was that towns be instructional

devices for buena policía; Indians were to learn to how to govern themselves within a juridical

culture of local self-government unlike pre-conquest society. Key to self-government in the

resettlement towns were the indigenous cabildos, made up of a slate of plebeian officials annually

43. Although no specific reason is given for why the Virgin of Candelaria was chosen, she was

credited with many miracles and it was not unusual for pilgrims to travel to her shrine at

Copacabana on Lake Titicaca and return with an image. See Antonio de la Calancha, Crónicas

Agustinianas del Perú [por] Antonio de la Calancha [y] Bernardo de Torres, eds. Bernardo de

Torres and Manuel Merino (1638; Madrid, C. S. I. C., 1972), 429.

44. "estan con mas libertad" Juan Bautista Lasségue, “Cabildo Secular, Justicia y Doctrina en la

Reducción de Cotaguasi (1609–1616),” in Catolicismo y Extirpación de Idolatrías Siglos

XVI-XVII, eds. Gabriela Ramos and Henrique Urbano (Cuzco, Perú: Centro de Estudios

Regionales Andinos “Bartolomé de Las Casas”, 1993), 322-323.


elected by the outgoing cohort.45

The cabildo officers, alcaldes, regidores, and alguaciles were to

regulate land use, engage in census activities, oversee collective productive resources, settle

disputes and both police and judge adherence to the ordinances.46

As a sovereign instrument of

45. For election mechanics see ANB EC 1784 #17 “Expediente sobre que los subdelegados

permitan a los naturales elegir anualmente sus alcaldes.”

46. These offices are specificed in the Toledan ordinances, Lohmann Villena and Sarabia Viejo,

Francisco de Toledo, 2: 36. For evidence of active cabildos in the late 16th and early 17th

centuries, see, in addition to the cases described here, AHP CR 18, “Libro done se asientan las

tasas,” f.237, wherein the escribano of the cabildo of San Pedro de Totora, Hernando Sacama,

signed a receipt for over 2,900 pesos paid out of the community chest in 1583. AHP CR 19

“Descargo de los salarios de los caçiques prinçipales y segundas personas” contains records of

payments from 1575 to 1594; in 1578 they are signed by Pablo Titicondo, escribano of the cabildo,

in 1581 they are signed by “El escrivano de cabildo don Martin Marca.” AGI Charcas 79 No. 20,

“Informaciones Baltasar Valázquez,” 1588 response to priest’s ceremony of possession upon his

arrival in Puna signed by Don Pedro Yucla, who describes himself as “escribano público y del

cabildo.” AGI Charcas 32, “Los curacas de indios” includes a 1591 petition of caciques from near

La Paz who ask to have the Toledan rules regarding election of alcaldes and regidores enforced.

AGI Charcas 79, N.23 “Informaciones: Juan Fernández Ternero” includes the priest Juan

Fernándes de Ternera’s ceremonial possession of the reducción San Gerónimo de Charcas in 1591

witnessed by caciques, alcaldes, regidores and the sacristan. AGI Charcas 140 Exp 246 1648

“Juicio sobre jurisdiccion,” describes vara (staff of office) carrrying cabildo officers chasing a

murderer who escaped from execution. A published account of the ‘election’ of a segunda persona

(cacique’s second-in-command) in 1584 for Macha (Chayanta) province includes public


justice, the cabildo was the court of first resort for most indigenous legal cases. The Toledan

ordinances specified the ways through which townsmen could seek legal satisfaction: Indians

could sue their cacique, their priest, and their corregidor. The indigenous escribano was charged

with taking testimony in such cases.47

In case of disputes with Spaniards or with neighboring

towns, the corregidor was instructed to intervene on the community’s behalf before the audiencia.

The legal regime implicated in reducción towns provides a clue to why indigenous people sought

to create their own towns: only properly constituted towns had legal rights.48

The set of disputations over town foundation that began with the alcaldes’ arrest of Juan

Diego illustrates a rather enthusiastic uptake of town level offices, as well as the literacy

implicated in buena policía. Eventually Spanish civil and religious officials became involved in

the effort to force the people of Mungui back to their reducción of Cotaguasi. In 1609, a state

inspector ordered that their houses be burned in an effort to force the people and their image of

Nuestra Señora de Copacabana to return to their reducción. Numerous appeals failed, and the

image and cofradía were temporarily relocated to Cotaguasi in 1609. Even so, seven years later,

indigenous officials in Cotaguasi were still attempting to enforce the inspector’s order.

commentary by don Lope de Mendoza alcalde and principal of ayllu Solcahavi and Pedro Juarez,

escribano de cabildo of ayllu Condohata: Tristan Platt, Qaraqara-Charka Malku, Inka y Rey en las

Provincia de Charcas (Siglos XV-XVIII : Historia Antropológica de una Confederación Aymara

(Lima: Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos, 2006), 790–91.

47. For a case prosecuted and recorded by literate cabildo officers against their cacique see ANB

EC 1664 #31 “Los indios principales alcaldes de Pocona.”

48. A path-breaking study of indigenous litigation and ideas about justice at the local level in

Mexico is Owensby, Empire of Law.


After his arrest in 1616 by the indigenous alcaldes and cacique of Cotaguasi, Juan Diego

was prosecuted by the corregidor “for grand offenses against [both] Majesties, divine and human.”

Swearing to tell the truth the forty-nine year old Juan Diego listed his occupation as nothing more

than “paper and pen.”49

Indeed, Juan Diego was an indio ladino who had worked as a secretary for

another corregidor. Although literacy was expected for town officials, indios ladinos like Juan

Diego were frequently regarded as sly types who only learned Spanish in order to pursue

lawsuits.50

At the heart of the case against Juan Diego was incriminating evidence in his own

handwriting; a legal agreement in which the Indian signatories agreed to found the town of

Mungui, dated only a month after Viceroy Juan de Mendoza y Luna had explicitly ordered all

Indians to return to their original reducciones. Besides a foundational text for Mungui, the

document sheds light on the complicated business of populating a new town. For the people who

settled Mungui came not only from Cotaguasi, the reducción town that was behind the prosecution

of Juan Diego, they also came from another reducción, Pampamarca, in a different province.

Indeed, the document is an agreement between leaders of Mungui with caciques from

Pampamarca that Indians under Pampamarca’s jurisdiction could settle in Mungui. Acting “in the

49. "grandes ofensas a las Magestades divina y humana" "no tiene mas oficio que tinta y papel"

Lasségue, “Cabildo Secular,” 299-300. Juan Diego also wrote wills for people of Mungui.

50. A 16th century priest in the area noted that in two Carangas province towns, Corquemarca

and Andamarca, indios ladinos had purchased a copy of the Siete Partidas, the 13th century legal

code of Castile, and a copy of Monterroso’s Práctica civil y criminal, y Instrucción de escribanos,

a guide for filing lawsuits.See Alvarez, De las Costumbres, 268. Kagan has argued that Castile

was a particularly litigious society; that litigiousness seems to have been transferred to the

Americas. See Richard L. Kagan, Lawsuits and Litigants in Castile, 1500–1700 (Chapel Hill:

Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1981).


name of the rest of the tributary Indians,” the leaders of Mungui “have reached an agreement . . . in

order to settle anew in the seat of Mungui where it is depopulated. All this [is] in service to God,

our Lord.” The Mungui founders then added an explicit link between cofradía and annex town

foundation: “In order that Mungui be made permanent, [the chapel and cofradía of] the Mother of

God of Copacabana is established. . . .Thus we have agreed together by the sign of the Cross. . . as

a sign of the truth, we sign our names.”51

With this document the Indians of Mungui appear to have sidestepped Spanish civil

officials to create a town on their own authority, by creating a cofradía. However, they did claim

that they had authority from the bishop of Cuzco for their cofradía. Some “founders” of Mungui

produced petitions defending their cofradía as being for the “remedy of the poor people.”52

According to Mungui principales don Juan Pomac and don Juan Guamancaquina, their cofradía

was made up of some thirty tributary Indians, along with their wives.53

Like the people of Santa

51. "en nombre de las demas yndios tributarios" "emos concertado ... para haser poblar de

nuevo en el asiento de Mungui donde esta despoblado y todo esto para servir a Dios nuestro Senor

y para perpetuamente en el asiento de Mungui esta fundada la madre de Dios de Copacabana. Asi

emos concertado conjuntamente con la señal de la Cruz ... por señal de verdad firmamos de

nuestros nombres." Lasségue, “Cabildo Secular,” 307–8. In this and other documents included

in this case Juan Diego showed familiarity with the form of notarial records as described by in

Kathryn Burns, “Notaries, truth, and consequences,” American Historical Review 110:2 (April

2005)350-379. It is possible that the founders of Mungui were attempting to recover a

pre-conquest social structure, but no other documents suggest that.

52. "remedio de los pobres" Lasségue, “Cabildo Secular,” 327-328.

53. Whether the office of principal was elected or inherited varied by town and time.


Bárbara de Culta, they also claimed that their cofradía was governed by a “constitution.” Although

no cofradía constitution is included in the record, an extant constitution for a cofradía dating from

1592 provides clues about what might ordinarily have been included in the statutes: provisions for

masses to be said, instructions for care of sick cofrades, how funerals should be conducted, and for

burial of poor people staying with a member.54

Cofrades’ roles in the oversight of burials, with the

baptized dead now buried in church tombs and projected out of social space into purgatory and

heaven or hell, marked a shift not only in burial practices but in the afterlife of the dead and in

community formation.55

Just as important to community formation was the inclusiveness of

cofradía membership: the cofradía constitution from 1592 stated that any faithful Christian, “men

as well as women of whatever condition or estate, whether they are young or old can enter in this

54. ABAS Cofradias #306 1612, Limpia Conçepçion en Molle Molle, (Moromoro). For Spanish

models of cofradías see Maureen Flynn, Sacred Charity Confraternities and Social Welfare in

Spain, 1400–1700 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).

55. Ramos eloquently argues that the burial regime introduced by Spaniards—and eradication of

the pre-existing Andean treatments of the dead, was crucial to the conversion of indigenous

people. Ramos, Death and Conversion.


holy cofradía.”56

Cofradías, with their ‘open’ membership, were a key element in knitting together

a very heterogeneous group, making them spiritual kin, and were a way to make forasteros like

Juan Diego part of a new town. In this way, water was thicker than blood: the baptismal font and

cofradía constitution made ritual brothers and sisters of the people in Mungui. The Mungui

cofrades even conducted an idolatry campaign of their own: they tried and found guilty “una yndia

llamada Francisca Vilcamama” for engaging in witchcraft using coca leaves and corn beer.57

This

parallels other famous cases of idolatry prosecution taking place at nearly the same time, but in this

56. “ . . . ansi hombres como mugeres de qualquier condiçion y estado que fueren chicos y

grandes puedan entrar en esta Santa cofradia . . .” ABAS Cofradias #306 1612, “Limpia

Conçepçion en Mollle Molle (Moro Moro).” This cofradía included Spanish and indigenous

cofrades, not an unusual mix; only two parishes in the early seventeenth-century Archbishopric of

Charcas held no indigenous parishioners, and both were in the city of Potosí. Draper, Arzobispos,

Canónigos y Sacerdotes, 41. The membership list for this cofradía listed unmarried and widowed

indigenous women. Women also figure prominently in the foundation of Mungui as members of

the cofradía, and in other ways played key roles. When townspeople decided to pursue a legal suit,

women were assessed 4 reales “per head” to pay for legal costs, while men were assessed 8 reales,

indicating an autonomous, if lesser role for women within the annex-town. Lasségue, “Cabildo

Secular,” 302, 305.

57. As punishment, Francisca was sentenced to 50 lashes and a fine of 4 pesos paid to the Virgin

of Copacabana. Lasségue, “Cabildo Secular,” 308–9.


case, the judge and jury, as well as the accused were native Andeans and residents in their

self-generated town of Mungui.58

Despite their efforts to portray themselves as responsible townspeople, devout Christians,

and even extirpators of idolatry, the Dominican friar assigned to the reducción town of Cotaguasi,

denounced Mungui’s foundation as an excuse to return to idolatry and ordered that the town be

burned down (again).59

To celebrate these proceedings against Juan Diego García and his fellow

cofradía and cabildo members as evidence of the failure of reducción policy requires disbelieving

every word that they themselves wrote-- and completely believing every petition against Mungui

produced by the cacique of Cotaguasi, the Dominican priests and Spanish bureaucrats. Ultimately

none of the colonial officials, indigenous, or Spanish, civil or religious were successful in having

Mungui destroyed; it continues to exist in present-day Peru, and its patron saint remains the Virgin

of Candelaria.

The litigation over Santa Bárbara de Culta and Mungui is fairly contained. Each side

presented their evidence during the same time and in full knowledge of their opponents’ cases and

each has been preserved within a single file in a single archive. I turn now to a more complex case

of disputation, one in which one side of the documentary record has only recently come to light.

This disputation, this negotiation over town foundation, and the rights of townspeople takes place

in the Audiencia of Charcas (modern Bolivia).

58. Karen Spalding describes older women, accused of idolatry by younger, hispanized men.

Karen Spalding, Huarochirí, an Andean Society Under Inca and Spanish Rule (Stanford: Stanford

Univ.Press, 1984), 258.

59. Juan Diego Garcia’s punishment was to be forbidden to hold the office of escribano.

Lasségue, “Cabildo Secular,” 335.


I opened this essay with a brief account of the foundation of Santiago de Tolapampa, an

annex town carved from the reducción town of Todos Santos de Tomave in 1603. Thirteen years

later, Luis de la Vega, parish priest of Todos Santos de Tomave, sent an impassioned petition to the

Audiencia de Charcas, responding to a charge made by the corregidor that he had burned down the

houses in the annex town of Santiago de Tolapampa.60

Rather than simply denying the crime,

Vega argued that the whole thing had been invented: He had not burned down the houses; they

were still standing. The story, he contended, had been concocted by the corregidor in an attempt to

terrorize the Indians and discredit him.

In marshalling his evidence, Vega recounted the history of Todos Santos de Tomave,

beginning with its 1575 foundation as a reducción.61

At that time there were two “naciones” living

60. For Vega’s letter see ANB CACh 1616 #728. Vega regarded himself as a champion of

indigenous people; he wrote a denunciation of the mita, AGI Charcas 135, “Memorial de Luis de

Vega,” 6 March 1612. For more on Vega, see Draper, Arzobispos, Canónigos y

Sacerdotes, 99–122.

61. Details on reducción foundation in this area can be found in AHP CR 18 “Libro donde se

asientan las tasas de los yndios.” In February 1575 the people were ‘reduced’from 28 villages

totalling 5,968 people to two reducción towns, Talavera de Puna and Todos Santos de Quillocaya,

by 1616 known as Todos Santos de Tomave. A third town, San Francisco de Coroma, was created

(through an unknown process) between 1575 and 1600. Likewise the pre-Columbian Asanaqi

people had been initially divided among three reducciones, including San Pedro de Condocondo,

from whose territory the Chiri brothers carved out a space for Santa Bárbara de Culta.


in the area, the Siwaruyus and the Arakapis.62

In creating reducciones Spaniards were little

concerned with maintaining pre-Columbian distinctions. Pre-conquest “naciones,” or ‘ethnic

groups,’ were frequently separated into various towns, and even different provinces. Each ‘ethnic

group’ was made up of a number of ayllus, a kinship and landholding group, and the basic unit of

social organization. Spaniards were aware of ayllu structures, but they made little attempt to keep

all ayllus of one ‘ethnic group’ in one town. No town was a perfect duplicate of a pre-Colombian

‘ethnic group.’ A pre-conquest ‘ethnic group’ might find itself divided among several different

reducción towns, along with members of an entirely different ‘ethnic group.’ Such was the case

with Tomave.

The priest, Vega, reported that at first everyone came to mass, but now his Siwaruyu

parishioners had fled because of the hated religious instruction. Every Sunday the indigenous

alcaldes went from hamlet to hamlet, forcing people to come to mass.63

Vega also accused the

62. In the preconquest Andes social organization was based on a moiety structure; each polity

was composed of two, theoretically equal, but sometimes ‘ethnically’ distinct and always ranked

halves. Siwaruyus and Arakapis, each made up of several ayllus, were paired together but each

would have had its own cacique in preconquest times. Abercrombie argues that the Arakapis likely

were the original inhabitants of the area while the Siwaruyus were resettled there after they helped

the Inca defeat the Arakapis. Thomas Abercrombie, “The Politics of Sacrifice, an Aymara

Cosmology in Action” (Chicago, Il: The Univ. of Chicago, 1986), Appendix 1. The reducción of

Tomave was founded with approximately 450 tributary heads of household of whom about 60

were Siwaruyus.

63. The alcaldes, as cabildo officers, were charged by Toledo to assist the priest. Lohmann

Villena and Sarabia Viejo, Franciso de Toledo, 2:169.


Siwaruyus of idolatry, drunkenness and incest. Vega testified that on the festival of Corpus Christi,

“I went to their homes and found them closed and in every one, three, four, five or six people were

drinking and worshipping Inca style.” Following this discovery Vega forced more than 160 of his

parishioners to the plaza where he whipped them before saying mass.64

In anticipating the question of where the Siwaruyus had fled and how they had come to be

there, Vega painted a portrait of indigenous chicanery and Spanish naivete. As Vega explained it,

the Siwaruyus had gone to the viceroy for permission to create their town of Santiago de

Tolapampa as “a way to avoid mass.” And much like the people of Culta, they obtained an order

that the priest would come regularly to their new chapel at Santiago de Tolapampa. For the

Audiencia’s benefit, Vega repeated how he addressed the Siwaruyus and he reported their

responses to him:

I tell you I scolded them a thousand times and they ran away, saying to me, “The

viceroy gave me permission to be in this town and I don’t want to go to Tomave.” I

said to them, “Look children, even though the viceroy gave you permission to be in

this town, he doesn’t know the truth, or the inconvenience. And he didn’t give you

permission not to come to mass, or for your sins of incest and drunkenness. If he

64. "fuy abuscar y halle las casas atracandas y cerradas por defuera, y en cada una tres, quatro,

sinco y seis personas bebiendo y mochando al uso del inga" ANB CACh 1616 #728, “Memorial de

Luis de Vega,” f.1v. This conforms to other reports from the region. In 1649, some seventy small

idols were found in the town of Coroma. See Abercrombie, Pathways, 277.


finds out, he’ll order you to burn this town and be Christians and return to

Tomave.”65

For Vega the petition of the Siwaruyu people to create their new town was a deception, a way to

avoid religious indoctrination. Even so his account confirms that the Siwaruyus had obtained

vice-regal permission to construct a chapel and town, and an order for their parish priest to come

there.

Documentation of Vega’s struggles with the Siwaruyus in Tolapampa ends there. This case

of indigenous resistance to Spanish policy seems clear-cut. Indeed, an archivist had helpfully

labeled the document as a good source for “resistance to the nuevo régimen” of reducciones. But

since successful prosecution of idolatry could lead to promotion and even fame, we should be very

cautious here. Indeed, just a few months earlier Vega had applied for promotion to a wealthier

parish but was rejected.66

Perhaps with his accusations of idolatry he hoped to draw favorable

attention to himself. Fortunately, we need not rely exclusively on Vega to interpret these events,

since the very petition through which the Siwaruyus had obtained permission to found Tolapampa

has recently come to light. The petition for the creation of Tolapampa comes from the neighboring

town of San Francisco de Coroma, and unlike the other documents I analyze here it comes from the

65. "Dixe que lo avia reñido mil veses y que se escapan condesir, [”]el Virrey me dio liçençia de

estar en este pueblo y no quiero yr a Tomahabi[”] y qe. aunqe. les e dho. [”]mirad hijos qe. aunque

os dio liçençia el Virrey de estan en este pueblo, no supo la verdad ni los inconvinientes. Y no os

la dio para no venir a missa ni para vuestros pecados inçestos y borracheras. Y si lo sabe os

mandara quemar el pueblo y qe. seais xpianos y bolvaies a Tomahabi" ANB CACh 1616 #728,

“Memorial de Luis de Vega,” f.2r.

66. Vega was ranked last among applicants for a parish in Pacajes province, AGI Charcas 135,

“Oposiciónes, doctrina de Julloma,” 21 September 1613.


town’s own archive. Not far from Tomave and Tolapampa, the town of Coroma was also the

sixteenth century home of Siwaruyu people. Though founded after Toledo’s Visita General was

completed, it had the status of an independent reducción by the time the Tolapampa case began.

Today, Coroma is famous for its cache of historic textiles that are stored in bundles under the

auspices of the town’s ayllus.67

Kept inside these textile bundles are the town’s documents-- the

archive of the community of Coroma. Cristina Bubba, who has worked closely with people from

Coroma, describes each textile bundle as filled “with ancient documents that contain land titles,

litigation over community boundaries, censuses, lists of tributaries, and others that date from the

16th century to the present.”68

These ceremonially important bundles of weavings are used to

ritually mark the boundaries of the municipality, the mojones. Once a year, the textile bundles with

their precious documents inside are carried around the town borders by cabildo members, much as

67. In the 1980s, many of Coroma’s textiles were illegally obtained and sold on the international

art market. In 1989 people of Coroma made a film about their experience, Camino de las Almas,

produced and directed by Eduardo Lopéz Zavala. The theft led US Customs officials to issue

import restrictions on cultural artifacts from Bolivia based on the UNESCO Cultural Property

Convention.

68. “… documentos antiguos que contienen títulos de propiedad de terrenos, litigios de linderos,

revisitas, listas de contribuyentes y otros, que datan desde el siglo XVI hasta la fecha.” Cristina

Bubba, “Los rituales a los vestidos de Maria Titiqhawa, Juana Palla y otros fundadores de los

ayllus de Coroma,” in Saberes y memorias en los Andes: in memoriam Thierry Saignes, Thérèse

Bouysse-Cassagne, ed. (Paris, Lima: Institut des Hautes Études de l’Amérique Latine, Institut

Français d’Études Andines, 1997), 396, n. 17. I thank Cristina Bubba and Thomas Abercrombie

who provided me with a copy of the Coroma document.


would have been done during the colonial era, in a performance that defines the jurisdictional

space of the town.69

One of these documents is the petition by Siwaruyu people for the creation of

their new town, Tolapampa.

This 1603 account complements the one produced by the priest Luis de la Vega in 1616

But a very different version of the foundation of Tolapampa emerges from a close reading of this

document. It begins with the corregidor’s formal receipt of a petition presented to him by

Siwaruyus from the towns of Todos Santos de Tomave and San Francisco de Coroma. As it is

written in the first person, the petition itself seems to have been composed (or dictated) by Don

Diego Hallasa, the Siwaruyu cacique of San Francisco de Coroma

I say that the Excellent Señor Don Luis de Velasco viceroy of these kingdoms

orders through this provision, based on the presentation that we made, that the

Indians of the said parcialidad [moiety of Siwaruyus] that are settled in the town of

Todos Santos de Quiscaya [Tomave] in the pampa of Tolapampa should make

there a new town and all the Indians of the said parcialidad that are contained in the

said provision should be reduced to it. . . . we ask and beg Your Mercy, if to this

end, you will name and order a person who will go and determine the limits of the

said town and the plaza, church and house of the cabildo and all the rest necessary

to conform to law so that in everything it will comply with what Your Excellency

69. On how and where documents are kept reflects on their importance, see M.T. Clanchy, From

Memory to Written Record, England 1066-1307, 2nd

edition. (Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell, 1993)

and Dorothy Tanck de Estrada, Pueblos de Indios y educación en el México Colonial, 1750-1821.

(México, D.F.: El Colegio de México, Centro de Estudios Históricos, 1999).


orders and commands, as well to the service of God, our Lord and of His Majesty

and in the conservation of the said Indians. . . . 70

What stands out about this petition is that these townspeople from Todos Santos de

Tomave and San Francisco de Coroma knew that they could appeal directly to the viceroy--the

highest ranking Spanish official in the Americas--leaping over the corregidor and the judges of the

audiencia in La Plata.71

As with Spanish towns, each indigenous town was imagined as a

self-governing republic, with crown-delegated sovereignty, thus giving its inhabitants negotiating

power with the crown, and the crown’s representative, the viceroy.72

The people who were

70. "Digo que el Ex.mo. Señor Dn. Luiz de Vilasco Visorrey destos Reynos por esta su

Provicion de que hacimos presentacion manda se pueblen los Yndios de la dha parcialidad [de

Siwaruyus] que estan Poblados en el Pueblo de Todos Santos de Quiscaya [Tomave] en la pampa

de tolaPampa y que para yfecto se haga en ella Pue.o. nuebo y rridusgan en el todos los Yndios de

la dha parcialidad que contiene la dha. Provecion ... pedimos y suplicamos si a servido de mandar

nombrar persona que baya a señalar el dho. Pueblo y los lemites del y la placa Yglecia Cassas de

Cavildo y todo lo demas necisario con forme a Dro. paraque en todo si cumpla lo que su Ex.mo.

hordena y manda pues tanto conuiene al servicio de dios= Nuestro Señor y de su Mag.d. bien y

conservacion de los dhos. Yndios." “Petition of the Siwaruyus of Tomave to Viceroy Velasco,”

1603, document held in Coroma, Bolivia town archive, f. 1r-v.

71. Other caciques seeking permission to ‘reduce’ Indians wrote directly to the king himself,

bypassing even the viceroy. AGI Charcas 49 “Los caciques y principales del repartimiento de

Carangas al Rey,” 1 January 1612.

72. Spanish political thought held that God granted sovereignty to the people. The people then

delegated their sovereignty to the king who ruled as long as he acted in their best interests. If he


forming Santiago de Tolapampa would gain that right to appeal, to litigate, to dispute, once they

had created their town.

An order from Viceroy Velasco followed the petition to create Tolapampa. Decrees of this

sort begin by repeating the information presented to them by the petitioners.73

The history of the

creation of the reducción of Tomave was recounted. Reduced by Captain Agustín de Ahumado in

1575, the petition noted that it was done “forcibly and against their will” because it was so far from

their fields and pastures, offering two legal justifications for why a new town was needed.74

But

the primary argument for the new town revolved around the other ‘ethnic’ group reduced to Todos

Santos de Tomave, the Arakapis. According to the petition, the reducción of Tomave had been

created in Arakapi lands, making it difficult for Siwaruyus to attend mass. The Arakapis

outnumbered the Siwaruyus and forced them to perform personal services for the Arakapis. Worse

than any other problems, don Diego Hallasa claimed that the Arakapis were “cimarrones” that is,

feral, wild beings, returned to savagery.75

And Hallasa expressed fear that the Siwaruyus were

picking up the bad habits and trickery of the wild and lying Arakapis. Based on these ‘facts’ of the

case cacique Hallasa asked for permission to create an annex of Tomave to be constructed in a

became a tyrant, the people could revoke their sovereignty. On early modern Spanish political

theory see Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2: chapters 5–6 and Bernice.

Hamilton, Political Thought in Sixteenth-Century Spain. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963).

73. In his work on colonial Mexico, Owensby notes that Luis de Velasco during his term as

viceroy of Mexico “began to grant special permission for people to return to their villages of

origin.” Owensby, Empire of law, 22.

74. "forciblimente y contra su boluntad" ” Petition of the Siwaruyus,” f.1v. Lohmann Villena and

Sarabia Viejo, Franciso de Toledo, 1:34, 257.

75. “Petition of the Siwaruyus,” f.1v.


plain of thola bushes, known as Tolapampa. Unlike the priest Vega would later claim, Hallasa

argued that it would be very easy for the priest to come to Tolapampa. The Siwaruyu caciques

from Todos Santos de Tomave and San Francisco de Coroma offered to pay for the cost of

constructing the new annex-town of Tolapampa. Viceroy Luis de Velasco granted their petition

and ordered the construction of plaza, church and cabildo building. The layout would follow the

standard design for the reducciones and now the standard for annex-towns.

The judge commissioned to administer population matters directed the cacique Hallasa and

the Siwaruyu alcalde ordinario, don Francisco Aja, both described as “muy ladino” to follow these

directives from the viceroy to build the new annex and assemble the Siwaruyus to draw up a new

padrón. Taking the 1575 padrón of Tomave in hand, the judge created the new padrón for the

annex-town of Tolapampa on January 18, 1603. Lining up by ayllu and giving their names, their

age and sex, their tribute status, their kin relations to others, the amount of land they farmed and

the crops they grew, and the animals they owned, the total population of 144 men, women and

children began the process of making themselves the town of Tolapampa. This census recorded by

ayllu would become their tribute roll, and would help reproduce ayllu structure by reinforcing the

economic function of ayllus, and the political function too, since this collection mandated an ayllu

‘head person,’ to carry out these duties. Toledan ordinances required that other town officials,

including the post of alcalde, be alternated by ayllu.76

Strengthening and refocusing the ayllu on

the reducción town would help create structures of feeling that would bind Andeans to their towns

so that over time town identification would become tantamount to ethnic group; by the early 18th

century, Tolapampa would include both Siwaruyu and Arakapi ayllus, merged into a common

identity as Tolapampans.77

With the formal foundational ritual completed, the legal proceedings

76. Lohmann Villena and Sarabia Viejo, Franciso de Toledo, 2:205.

77. On creating the structures of feeling that would make reducciones permanent, see the articles

by Zuloaga and Wilde in this volume. On the 20th century relationship of ayllus to towns, see Gary


that the Siwaruyus began with their petition to the viceroy were copied and put in the cajas de

comunidad of Todos Santos de Tomave, San Francisco de Coroma and the new town of Santiago

de Tolapampa.78

In the end, the breakaway Indians won their case. Like the other new towns

mentioned here, Santiago de Tolapampa continues to exist to this day.

The multiplication of annex towns during the generations following the Visita General is

attested everywhere in colonial Peru. Every piece of evidence regarding town creation in the 17th

century that I have consulted demonstrates that new towns were established through the

determination and persistence of indigenous Andeans largely against the will of the colonial

regime. In fact, by the early 17th century, more than a full generation after the reducción general

and over a lifetime since the conquest, it had become so important to create towns that Andeans

seemed dedicated to an epochal struggle to reduce themselves.79

How is it that something so

contrary to what is ordinarily reported about reducciones appears over and over in the

Urton, “La arquitectura pública como texto social: la historia de un muro de adobe en

Pacariqtambo, Perú (1915-1985),” Revista Andina 6:1 (Julio 1988): 225-261. By the mid-18th

century, preconquest ethnic groups are seldom mentioned as a source of self-identification. Instead

people identify themselves by their town.

78. Each town would need a copy of the proceedings to ensure that people were not

double-taxed.

79. For additional examples see the case of Itapaya (Bolivia) in ABAS Visitas 1680 #4838,

“Visita del curato de Tapacari,” and AHMC EC #7, “En el pueblo de yndios llamado Hitapaya,”

and the town of Aymaya (Bolivia) in ABAS Visitas 1680 #4845, “Visitas de Chayanta.”


documentary record? From the perspective of official reports, reducciones did fail. Viceroy Luis

de Velasco who granted permission for Siwaruyu Indians to found Tolapampa wrote to the crown

that “the reducciones that Viceroy Francisco de Toledo made are a thing ruined…because [the

Indians] have fled to avoid mita [forced labor] in the mines …” 80

If the primary purpose behind

reducción was to concentrate the Indian population in larger and fewer towns so as to facilitate

access to indigenous labor and tribute, the policy could not be deemed a success. However, if the

question is rephrased to ask what impact the policy had on the lifeways of Andeans, the answer is

different.

Again, reducción policy could be deemed to have failed if designed to make the towns

permanent residences of their Indians. Andeans refused to occupy their new towns the way

Spaniards expected them to, as full time residents. Instead, they built houses in the new town, and

returned more or less regularly to attend mass or catechism classes, to participate in saints’

festivals, to deliver their tributes or be counted by census-taking inspectors, or to participate in

public works; all key elements of collective life for Andeans. Scholars reading from colonial

reports have focused on the fact that Indians did not live in the towns full time, rather than the fact

that the number of towns increased dramatically in the generations following Toledo. Only

occasionally did colonial officials mention the increase in the number of towns. One notable

exception was Pedro Ramírez del Águila, the cura rector of the metropolitan church in La Plata. In

1639 Ramírez del Águila, who had served over twenty-five years in the archbishopric of La Plata,

wrote that although there were only about 130 Indian doctrinas (parish-towns) in the

archbishopric, “each doctrina has, outside of its principal pueblo, many others of 150 citizens with

80. “Las reducciones que hizo el Sr. Don Francisco de Toledo están algo desbaratadas … a causa

de [los indios] han huído por evadirse de las mitas de las minas … “ Hanke and Celso Rodríguez,

Los virreyes españoles en América durante el gobierno de la Casa de Austria: Perú II, Biblioteca

de Autores Españoles (Madrid: Atlas, 1978), 52.


their chapels and cofradías founded in them, they call these annexes, with those there are more

than 600 pueblos in highlands and valleys where many local and foreign Indians live.”81

In other

words, each parish had generated another four to five small annexes, each with chapels and

religious brotherhoods.

What could be the motivation to establish so many new towns? There were at least two

separate forces at work. One thing that would seem to argue against new town creation was the

continuing decline in native population.82

Yet this population loss had the opposite effect. In the

late 16th century, the crown began to apply an Iberian policy known as composiciones de tierras to

indigenous towns in the Viceroyalty of Peru, where all ‘vacant’ land was subject to being

reclaimed by the crown and auctioned off to the highest bidder.83

With this institutionalized land

theft, reducción towns were forced to buy back their own lands.84

The composiciones de tierras of

course provided a great impetus to find ways to maintain land claims, leading the indigenous

population to spread itself thin, attempting to occupy and use as much of their land as possible. As

81. “cada doctrina tiene fuera del pueblo principal otros muchos de a cincuenta y cien vecinos,

con sus capillas y cofradías en ellos fundadas que les llaman anexos, con que habrá más de

seicientos [sic] pueblos de punas y valles, adonde residen muchos indios naturales y advenedizos

de otros que llaman mitmas.” Pedro Ramírez del Águila, Notícias políticas de Indias (1639; Sucre,

Bolivia: Universidad, 1978), 111–12.

82. Noble David Cook, Demographic Collapse, Indian Peru, 1520–1620, (Cambridge:

Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981).

83. For the Iberian policy see Nader, Liberty in Absolutist Spain, 124.

84. Examples of towns battling over the composiciones include ANB EC 1593 #19

“Composición de las tierras de Guaranga en el repartimiento de Macha.”


they moved back to distant fields, they created new towns that in many cases would become the

annexes of the original reducción. In each of the three cases presented here, claims regarding land

loom large

While certainly part of the story, materialist arguments do not explain why within

annex-towns, Andeans created chapels and organized cofradías. Ramírez del Águila estimated that

nearly 600 small “pueblos” with their chapels and cofradías dotted the countryside by the 1630s.

Reducciones had become key in producing social life, but it was the Andean uptake of the civil and

religious institutions within towns that had become central to defining who was a legitimate

member of the community. I am not arguing that cabildo and cofradía within reducción towns

were adopted or operated as in Castile. Indigenous Andeans did not have an identical

understanding of saints or religious celebrations, or kinship or personhood. Just to take a few

examples: cofradía leadership was organized by ayllu; llama sacrifices punctuated saints’ days;

‘eucharist’ was performed with coca leaves and corn beer; the Virgin and Santiago spoke to

believers through shamanistic practices.85

All of these represent Andean uptakes of Christianity

that Spaniards rejected as idolatry. By the early 17th century, institutions that would on the surface

appear ‘Spanish’ became foundational to new indigenous notions of personhood, kinship, religion

and politics.

Self-government by commoner Indians was a colonial innovation for Andeans; prior to the

conquest rule was by hereditary aristocracy. One clear advantage of establishing new towns was

the possibility for commoner Indians to enjoy some degree of self determination and to represent

their own interests against those of priests, hacendados, and also their own hereditary caciques.

Establishing chapels and cofradías dedicated to saints laid the ground work for political solidarity

85. For cofradía leadership by ayllu see AGNA 9.6.5.6, “Testimonio del Quaderno 8o,” 1795

festivals in the town of Carasi; llama sacrifice, eucharist with coca and corn beer, and shamanistic

practices are detailed in ANB EC 1758 #136, “Autos seguidos por don Lorenzo Garcia Apaza.”


and sovereignty. The Inca-era wakas had legitimated an aristocracy of indigenous nobility who

claimed descent from them; the saints, in contrast, were egalitarian and accepted all as their

children.86

Commoner Indians were no longer excluded from government because they were now

eligible to serve in the cabildo. In most cases of town foundation, it was commoners who sought to

create a new town against priestly and cacical opposition. The accounts of town creation described

here provide evidence that Indians did not flee from resettlement towns, but rather fled to them,

aiming to found new towns in the very image of the ones they had left, beginning with chapel and

patron saint.

Indeed, even the evidence of massive forasteraje during the 17th century—of the flight of

indigenous people from their original reducciones, brought them back into the arms of indigenous

towns and parishes.87

There was no ‘no man’s land’ to which to run. Instead, the movement of up

to half of the population in some regions of the Andes (including the sites studied here) shows

some astute calculation.88

Becoming a forastero in a new town, out of the reach of original tribute

86. Thierry Saignes has argued cabildo, cofradía and compadrazco became the prime institutions

for forging community relations. See Saignes, “Indian Migration.”

87. The classic work on forasteraje in the Cuzco region is Wightman Indigenous Migration. For

the Audiencia de Charcas (roughly present day Bolivia) see Brooke Larson, Cochabamba,

1550-1900: colonialism and agrarian transformation in Bolivia, expanded edition (Durham: Duke

Univ. Press), chapter 3. Although his focus is on language rather than town foundation in the Maya

Yucatán, Hanks identifies reducción as the single most influential policy imposed by Spaniards on

the Maya people and that flight “exported the forms of reducción.” Hanks, Converting Words, xiv,

58.

88. Karen Power’s path breaking work on cacical recruitment of outsiders to their towns, thus

encouraging forasteraje is instructive here. Karen M. Powers, “Resilient Lords and Indian


collectors and labor leviers, afforded advantages, and indigenous leaders seem to have aimed to

attract immigrants with promises of temporary relief from colonial fiscal pressures. Certainly,

some of the new social forms of Christianity and town life made incorporation of migrants easier

than it might have been before the conquest: Membership in the community could now proceed

through service to the community in cabildo posts and cofradía positions, where ties of fictive (or

voluntary) kinship could link incomers to the saints who were now the focus of collective

devotion.

For Spaniards, reducción was a utopian project in social engineering on a massive scale:

the new world was imagined as a place of futurity where well-ordered republics could be realized,

unfettered by tradition or tyrannical feudal rule and where Indians would live in buena policía, the

good habits learned from urban self-government. In this sense, Spanish colonialism created

modernity avant la lettre.89

Implanting reducciones, bringing Indians to buena policía, and the

cult of the saints, led to the uptake of those institutions and to indigenous participation in a legal

regime, collective religion and a written documentary society. Yet the new colonial culture,

neither pre-Columbian, nor Spanish, would ensure that for Spaniards all this would be evidence of

duplicity, lack of reason, and resistance to civilization. What Indians were doing in founding new

Vagabonds: Wealth, Migration, and the Reproductive Transformation of Quito’s Chiefdoms,

1500–1700,” Ethnohistory 38, no. 3 (Summer 1991): 225–49.

89. On the new world as tabula rasa and Spanish modernity see Carlos J. Alonso, The Burden of

Modernity the Rhetoric of Cultural Discourse in Spanish America (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1998).


towns, was proof of civility and Christian zeal only when done by Spaniards.90

An insuperable

contradiction at the heart of all colonial projects ensures that they can never succeed: colonial

subjects are imagined as wards of benevolent, civilizing agents who then are deeply disturbed

when their wards assert their own agency. But reexamining the evidence shows that the Indians

refused to be cast into the traditional past or infantilized as mere passive recipients of policy and

policía.

Each of the three towns discussed here exists today, as do the vast majority of

reducciones and annex towns across the Andes. Anthropologists have shown that these

colonially-founded towns are key for contemporary Andeans; they remain religious and political

centers, and have become the primary form of differential ethnic self-identification.91

With

independence, these towns were marginalized by the highly centralized nation state. In the 1990s,

the colonially founded towns of Bolivia gained new political legitimacy via the neo-liberal

impulse toward political decentralization. The towns provided a key source of support for the rise

of Bolivia’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales and his Movimiento a Socialismo (MAS)

party, strong critics of capitalism and neo-liberalism.

Conquest was achieved through violence, and colonial rule, including forced resettlement

in reducciones, through coercion. But reducción was not only an instrumentality of oppression and

exploitation. Municipality was the Castilian technique of autonomous self-governance of the

people as república. Within the mature colonial system, town institutions were the primary sources

90. Every conqueror proudly listed the towns they founded (or refounded) as they moved across

the landscape. As Nader points out, Spain “became an empire by increasing the number of towns.”

Nader, Liberty in Absolutist Spain, 98.

91. See for example, Abercrombie, Pathways and Roger Rasnake, Domination and Cultural

Resistance; Authority and Power among an Andean People (Durham: Duke University Press,

1988).


of autonomy and rights to legal protection and redress. Andeans made reducción and its

institutions their own. Claiming that reducción failed, or suggesting that Andeans remained

authentically themselves only when they ran from its institutions, is to deny Andeans’ own role in

the forging of colonial society. It is also to accept only select arguments from some Spanish

officials, rather than the voices of Andeans, in the extant colonial records of conflict over

Andean-initiated chapel and town foundation during the early seventeenth century. Producing

something different than the Castilian model, Andeans shaped the use of grid-plan town spaces

and institutions to their own ends as instruments of contestation and autonomy. Making their

voices heard, and their actions recognized, through effective legal strategies, they founded new

reducciones, peopled new cofradías and cabildos, and transformed reducción into the armature of

Andean community-making, as well as the principle vehicle through which they would continue to

negotiate relative autonomy and assert their legal rights in colonial courtrooms.

Abbreviations:

AAL: Archivo Arzobispal de Lima (Peru)

AGNA: Archivo General de la Nación (Buenos Aires, Argentina)

AGNP: Archivo General de la Nación (Lima, Peru)

AHP: Archivo Historico de Potosí (Bolivia); section: CR: Cajas Reales

ABAS: Archivo y Biblioteca Arquidiocesanos de Sucre (Bolivia); section CCE: Causas

contra Eclesiásticos

AGI: Archivo General de Indias (Seville, Spain); section: Charcas: Audiencia de Charcas

AHMC: Archivo Histórico Municipal de Cochabamba (Bolivia); section EC: Expedientes

Coloniales

AJP: Archivo Judicial de Poopó (Bolivia)

ANB: Archivo Nacional de Bolivia (Sucre); sections CACh: Cartas Audiencia de Charcas;

EC: Expedientes Coloniales

AOO: Archivo Obispal de Oruro (Bolivia)


BNP: Biblioteca Nacional de Perú (Lima)

Penry - Colonial Disputations

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