"In Spite of Her Sex": The Cacica and the Politics of the Pueblo in the Late Colonial Andes

In October, 1797, the indios principales of the Andean pueblo of Muñani appealed to the royal court in Cusco to depose their governor, or cacica , Doña María Teresa Choquehuanca. ¹ Not challenging hereditary Choquehuanca rule, they instead focused on María Teresa's incompetence and her sex, complaining of "the miseries that we have suffered with [her] inappropriate entry into the cacicazgo ," adding that "on account of her distinct sex she should by justice be deposed, because she is not worthy of so estimable an office." ² That office was central to the indigenous politics of colonial Peru, the legal and administrative ordering of which placed most of the Indian population in relatively autonomous, land-owning "pueblos de indios" over which the cacique, responsible for collecting the crown's tribute and maintaining order, presided as something between a chief and a lord. As the village leaders in a parallel, popular tradition that reserved its authority for men, Muñani's principales asserted that this bastion of elite indigenous authority ought not be held by a woman. But they made clear that it sometimes was: María Teresa had governed Muñani for five years. Nor was she alone. Cacicas governed pueblos and ayllus throughout the Andes, and it was quite common for the husbands of cacical heiresses to rule in their names. ³

These indigenous Andean women lords have long drawn the notice of historians, although most discussion has been anecdotal, focusing on individuals rather than on the relations of colonial governance, gender ideologies, and indigenous politics in which such female authority was situated. ⁴ Those who have examined the cacica more broadly as a phenomenon of colonial society have focused largely on the ancestry of such female office—whether its origins lie in pre-conquest or Spanish colonial ideals of authority. In what remains the most influential work on gender in the colonial Andes, Silverblatt posits a narrative in which the gendered ideology of Spanish rule "tended to recognize men as the legitimate representatives of polities, and patrilineal modes as the principal means of succession, undermining customary Andean gender chains of dual authority" that had emphasized the complementarity of male and female authority. ⁵ The colonial cacica—conceived largely as a figurehead with men wielding the actual political authority—thus becomes a colonized vestige of pre-hispanic female authority, as "the imposition of Spanish traditions on indigenous patterns of succession denied native women the chance to fill the positions of autonomous authority in their communities." ⁶ As Graubart has noted, such claims about pre-hispanic organizations of power are necessarily based on minimal documentary evidence, and privilege imperial Inca sources. ⁷ Focusing on the societies of Peru's northern coast, Graubart argues instead that female lordship did not necessarily have strong pre-conquest precedent. Rather, Spanish succession practices, with their emphasis on family possession across generations, actually created a space for female lordship, albeit one where authority was generally exercised by a man—husband, uncle, father—in the name of the formal heiress. Graubart views the cacicazgo generally as a "colonial artifact, reflecting contemporary power struggles, rather than a prehispanic remnant," the analysis of which allows us "to see how indigenous women and men manipulated the narratives of their own history to claim legitimacy within the new boundaries of colonial institutions." ⁸ Graubart's intervention reclaims the cacicazgo as a space of indigenous politics within colonial society, while in her analysis emphasizing how both men and women of the colonial indigenous elite used gendered discourses of legitimacy to solidify control over their communities. Rather than a marker of patriarchal usurpation, for Graubart the colonial cacica personifies the negotiations of colonial authority.

Focusing on the cacica in the bishopric of Cusco and northern La Paz in the last generations of the colonial era, this essay uses the lens of gender to examine such negotiations, but with attention not so much to the agency of individual actors as to the structural role that female succession to cacical...