Death and Conversion in the Andes: Lima and Cuzco, 1532-1670

4. Spaces and Institutions for the Missionary Project

chapter four | Spaces and Institutions for the Missionary Project Enacting policies to implement the missionary project required defining the spaces, institutions, and methods of reaching the native Andeans . Following age-old European and Spanish precedents, colonial and ecclesiastical authorities exhorted the Indians to live “politically” in the belief that cities provided the ideal space in which human beings could be governed adequately and live in order and harmony.1 Hence, the Spanish colonial project was conspicuously characterized by the development of urban life (Farriss 1984, 160). The concentration of often-scattered native populations into urban settlements was intended to make the teaching of the Christian doctrine easier, separate the Indians from their sacred places, and disrupt the continuity of their religious practices. The spatial reorganization brought about by the founding of towns and villages was accompanied by the creation of territorial districts and institutions that had manifold objectives and effects. The new urban centers were divided, in their turn, into parishes, whose work of spiritual administration was complemented by the creation of hospitals. The purpose of these establishments was not only to provide health care and practice charity but also to generate and preserve the social order. Both in the most important cities of the Peruvian viceroyalty and in the lower-ranking towns and villages, the parishes and the Indian hospitals were usually a single institution from which the conversion of the native population was promoted. Finally, the confraternities—associations devoted to the worship of a particular devotion (that is, saint, relic, or religious| 89 image) in the parish and convent churches—were influential in reorganizing the political and ritual activities of the local populations. These institutions were crucial to the teaching and promotion of Christian ideas about death: the parish and convent churches became mandatory places of burial; and the hospitals diffused ideas about the body, health, and the Christian art of dying well, while an essential part of the confraternities’ mission was attending the funerals of their members and commemorating the deceased. The creation of appropriate spaces in which the Indians might learn, as José de Acosta wished, to be “first men and then Christians,” entailed the removal of the native populations to settlements known as reducciones.2 These organized most of the existing Spanish-occupied towns and villages throughout the territories according to a checkerboard pattern whose symmetrical shape instilled in the minds of their inhabitants the principles of order and control.3 The founding of urban centers in the Andes followed the advance of the first conquistadors, with a handful of inhabitants, as in the case of Piura (1532), or indicated the space from which territory threatened by Indian rebellions would be defended, as with the city of San Juan de la Frontera in Huamanga (1539). In contrast to the reducciones , set up to relocate the Indian population once a reasonably well-organized colonial apparatus had developed, by the end of the 1560s the first colonial cities primarily housed Spaniards, who owned encomiendas and were seeking a location adapted to their economic and communication needs; these cities were for military defense at a time when the conquest was far from being consolidated. Lima (1535) is an example. The politically important city of Cuzco, however, is a different case because its existence preceded the conquest; hence, its “refounding” by Francisco Pizarro in 1534 in an act of symbolic appropriation (Esquivel y Navia 1980, 1:86). Its Spanish residents constituted a small but powerful group in this city inhabited by a mostly Indian population, whose leading members were descended from the Inca rulers. It is clear, then, that the common principle inspiring the creation of the urban centers took shape according to different itineraries , whose characteristics and significance for the project of religious conversion we need to identify and understand. To study how the policies formulated for Christianizing death in the Andes were put into practice, I will focus on the cities of Lima 90 | death and conversion in the andes and Cuzco, the two most important urban centers of the Peruvian viceroyalty. I will show that the distribution and occupation of space entailed by the creation of the parishes expressed the circumstances of the cities’ inhabitants, reasserting and modifying the bonds among them. These social bonds, in their turn, gave a particular character to the institutions—hospitals and confraternities—established to teach the Christian ways of confronting disease and death, assisting and...