Space-Time Perspectives on Early Colonial Moquegua

7. Encomiendas in Moquegua

117 DOI: 10.5876/9781607322764:c07 7 Encomiendas in Moquegua What were granted in encomienda were not territories or even Indians in the strict sense, but kurakas.1 —Efraín Trelles Aréstegui (1982: 158) Spanish colonization of the Andean landscape was implemented through the institution of encomienda, grants of indigenous populations awarded to individual conquerors.These awards began to be made as Francisco Pizarro and his men crossed the northern Peruvian desert and were later implemented with conquest of the south, quickly reaching the Arequipa/Moquegua area. Although the indigenous town of Moquegua was known to early Spaniards such as Diego de Almagro, who followed an existing road through the southwestern region on his return to Cusco from Chile in 1537, this community and the middle Moquegua valley itself apparently never constituted a distinct, named encomienda .2 This might be because it was part of Cochuna or, more likely, because its Lupaqa settlers were so closely identified with Chucuito. encomiendaS in peru In Peru, the earliest encomiendas were assigned by local governors, beginning with Pizarro, rather than by the Spanish crown because the expeditions of exploration and conquest were financed by private citizens. After 1543, however, with the first encomenderos having been killed in uprisings and Peru having become a viceroyalty, the viceroy, as crown agent, redistributed them. In awarding encomiendas, one goal of the Spanish monarchy was to provide inducements for ENCOMIENDAS IN MOQUEGUA 118 Spaniards to colonize the new lands and make them productive for the homeland . A second crown (and papal) goal was evangelization. By accepting an encomienda, the grantee assumed extensive obligations, set out in the Laws of Burgos in 1512 (Bakewell 2011), for indoctrinating the natives in the Catholic faith. Duties included building a church, maintaining priests, and attending services with their tributaries. The priests fulfilled the encomenderos’ responsibilities for confession, baptism, catechistic (e.g., the Ten Commandments, Seven Deadly Sins) and moral (wearing clothing; not having multiple wives) instruction, and testing the tributaries on their religious knowledge. Not all encomenderos complied with these responsibilities, particularly if their encomendees lived some distance from major Spanish towns. Besides, the goal of the encomenderos, like that of later settlers, was decidedly material rather than spiritual: to get rich. Encomienda awards varied in size and value depending on the recipient’s financial investment, length of service and loyalty to the crown, and bravery in the enterprise of exploration. As a result, they were simultaneously sources and reflections of social, economic, and political power among their holders. They were also sources of conflict, as encomenderos’ power was viewed as a threat to the crown and resented by later settlers who lacked these tickets to wealth. In response, the “New Laws of the Indies” were promulgated in 1542 to reiterate the principles of Burgos, as well as to limit encomenderos’ holdings to a single lifetime, forbid the creation of new encomiendas, and prohibit the slavery of indigenous peoples. These stipulations precipitated an encomendero revolt in Peru, and the New Laws were never implemented. As the epigraph suggests,the key figure in an encomienda was the kuraka(s), for these local leaders ultimately controlled production of goods and services, often by ayllu members who lived at some distance. For example, in 1572 the kuraka of hanansaya Chucuito, Martín Cari, claimed to have twenty-five retainers in Moquegua to plant maize (Julien 1985: 201). Although encomiendas were formally population units, for most purposes they were effectively spatial: roughly coterminous with the ill-defined spatial limits of a particular ayllu, its agricultural lands and other resources, and, ideally, indigenous ethnopolitical districts. In the Inka heartland and perhaps elsewhere in the Andes, the earliest encomienda populations may have been delimited on the basis of official boundary markers, or mojones, drawn by the amojonadores (Julien 1983: 28; cf. Ramírez 2005: 36–37). If so, this Inka practice conferred upon these markers significant agency (sensu Latour 2005) in defining community politico-economic relations that lasted into the next imperial regime: that of the Spaniards. ENCOMIENDAS IN MOQUEGUA 119 Throughout the provinces, discontinuous settlement patterns and multi-ethnicity made it difficult for the Spaniards to avoid conflict among the encomenderos themselves as well as vis-à-vis their tributary populations. Nevertheless, despite—or perhaps because of—the imprecision of spatial boundaries, encomenderos also claimed whatever resources, agricultural or mineral, their populations exploited. In the mineral-rich southern Andes, these resources represented significant wealth...