Ambiguous Visions: Nature, Law, and Culture in Indigenous-Spanish Land Relations in Colonial Peru

Hispanic American Historical Review 80.1 (2000) 77-111

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Ambiguous Visions:
Nature, Law, and Culture in Indigenous-Spanish Land Relations in Colonial Peru

Ward Stavig *

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The defense of community lands against European encroachment was one of the hallmarks of indigenous resistance to colonial domination. Communal lands were vital to indigenous peoples' social and biological reproduction, and little, if anything, was more important to them. In fact, land was an important part of the equation that defined them as distinct peoples; it was a source of their ethnic identity. They knew their lands and the signs of changing weather and seasons just as well as they knew the backs of their hands. Their very lives depended upon this knowledge. Where possible, they even remade the natural world to fit their needs by altering the landscape with terraces that transformed steep hillsides into more gently sloped, productive agricultural fields equipped with irrigation canals and aqueducts that Europeans observers like Pedro de Cieza de Leon greatly admired. ¹

Access to land also provided indigenous peoples with the most important means to meet economic demands of the state such as tribute, while family access to land, usually through the rights of the adult male tributary, was the right that most clearly defined membership in the community. Since mountains, rocks, bodies of water, and other natural objects were often sacred, even one's relationship to the spiritual world often had geographic specificity. A natural (a term commonly used for an indigenous person in the colonial period) who moved to a distant location often encountered sacred places with attributes similar to those he or she had known before, but the new places or objects of veneration did not necessarily have the same depth of meaning incumbent in a knowledge and faith developed in familiar surroundings and nourished from childhood through adulthood. ² Thus, threats to Andean peoples' control of the land was a threat to their culture and their lives, their very existence.

This article explores the relationship that developed between indigenous peoples and Spanish colonial administrators and individuals during the struggles for village lands in the region of rural Cuzco along the upper Vilcanota (Urubamba) river, especially in the provinces of Tinta (also know as Canas y Canchis because of the two predominant ethnic groups, the Canas and the Canchis, who lived there) and Quispicanchis. These provinces or partidos lie between the former Inca capital and Lake Titicaca. In the late eighteenth century they were at the heart of the Túpac Amaru rebellion, the rebel leader being a curaca from Tinta. In examining the interactions between villagers and Spaniards, I draw special attention to the importance of power, face-to-face relationships, and cross-racial cooperation and interdependence. My research shows that this was a world in which loyalties were frequently guided more by self-interest and personal relationships than by strict racial divisions and where indigenous communities were often in disaccord with one another, just as Spaniards were frequently at odds with their European brethren. However, when Europeans and mestizos attempted to dispossess villagers from their lands, they often resorted to threats, violence, or other real or implied force to occupy lands. Contrarily, indigenous peoples in rural Cuzco infrequently responded to European encroachment with an "eye for an eye," although they used a wide variety of "weapons of the weak" to defend their interests. They made very effective use of the colonial legal system to defend their lands while seeking to assure the maintenance of what they perceived to be the proper social order--or at least the best bargain they could drive--within the limits of colonial domination. ³ In addition, this article explores ways in which the ecology--types of soils, microclimates, and animals--impacted land tenure systems by examining precolumbian land use and holdings in the context of colonial land relations during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Due in part to the differences between Quispicanchis and Canas y Canchis and the diversity within each province--climatological, geographic...