Verticle Empire by Jeremy Ravi Mumford

vertical empire The General Resettlement of Indians

in the Colonial Andes

jeremy ravi mumford

Vertical empire

Vertical empireThe General Resettlement of Indians in the Colonial Andes

Jeremy Ravi Mumford

d u k e u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s d u r h a m a n d l o n d o n 201 2

© 2012 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper ∞

Designed by Heather Hensley

Typeset in Quadraat by Copperline Book Services, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data appear

on the last printed page of this book.

This book is dedicated to Sohini Ramachandran

A new world

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

PaRt I ethnography

1. The Cities 13

2. The Mountains 27

3. The Grid 41

4. Lords 53

PaRt II resettlement

5. “That So- Qualified Assembly” 75

6. The Viceroy 85

7. Tyrants 99

8. On the Ground 119

PaRt III after

9. In and Out of the Reducciones 143

10. Four Hundred Years 157

Epilogue 175

Appendix 187

Notes 197

Glossary 255

Bibliography 259

Index 285

contents

I owe many people my gratitude. This book began at Yale,

where I benefited from the guidance and savoir- faire of my

advisor, Stuart Schwartz, and from the advice of teachers and

colleagues. I wrote my dissertation alongside Martin Ken-

ner, so that Andeans, Spaniards, and German- British bank-

ers walked side by side. Those who taught me the most about

the colonial Andes were Herbert Klein, Pedro Guibovich,

and Rolena Adorno, who invited me to her home and intro-

duced me to Guaman Poma and Cieza de León. President

Howard Lamar explained much to me at Mory’s. And the

person who helped me begin my career as an investigator

was Johnny Faragher, a true guide.

In Seville, I had the privilege of working at the Archivo

General de Indias, and enjoyed the resources of the Escuela

de Estudios Hispano- Americanos and its kind director Enri-

queta Vila Vilar. While there I received help and advice from

fellow researchers such as Tom Cummins, Gary Urton, Luis

Miguel Glave, Kristin Huffine, the late Sabine MacCormack,

Matt O’Hara, Peter Gose, Berta Ares, Chuck Walker, and es-

pecially David Cook and Sasha Cook. In Sucre, I enjoyed the

richness of the Archivo Nacional de Bolivia, and the oppor-

tunity to discuss my work with Josep Barnadas, Carmen Bea-

triz Loza, Ximena Medinaceli, and Tristan Platt. In Cocha-

bamba, I benefited from the erudition of scholar archivists at

the Archivo Departamental de Cochabamba, especially Susy

Portillo and Itala de Mamán, and the kindness of friends

acknowledgments

x acknowledgMents

such as Nancy Arispe, Sister Aleksandra Sojka, and my Quechua teachers,

especially Fritzy Zembrana.

At Brandeis University I enjoyed the mentorship of Silvia Arrom. In the

Michigan Society of Fellows, I benefited from the guidance of several men-

tors, in particular Donald Lopez, Rebecca Scott, and Richard Turits, and

colleagues including Katherine Ibbett, Hussein Fancy, Anna Guillemin, and

Stella Nair. At the University of Mississippi, I received friendship and advice

from Joe Ward, Douglass Sullivan- Gonzales, and Charles Eagles, among

others.

For reading all or most of the manuscript, in its stages, I thank Silvia

Arrom, David Cook, Alan Durston, Renzo Honores, Jane Mangan, David

Mumford, Daniel Stolzenberg, the late Catherine Julien, and especially Ken

Mills, Karen Spalding, and Sohini Ramachandran. For useful comments on

specific chapters, I thank Karene Grad, Stella Nair, Kerstin Nowack, Claudia

Brittenham, Kathryn Burns, John Charles, Kris Lane, Rolena Adorno, Steve

Wernke, Susan Ramirez, Naoko Shibusawa, Vazira Zamindar, and Jim

Muldoon. I thank Hanna Rose Shell for giving the book encouragement and

a title. I also received helpful advice from Thomas Abercrombie, Alejandro

Málaga Nuñez, Elizabeth Penry, James Scott, Ann Whiteman, Rafael Varón,

José de la Puente, Rachel O’Toole, Ann Farnsworth, Sam Haselby, Gordon

Wood, Amy Remensnyder, Sabine Hyland, Charles Lansing, Amy Kurtz

(now Kurtz- Lansing), Gen Liang, and Bernard Bailyn.

I received research funding from a Fulbright- Hays Fellowship, a fellow-

ship from the Howard Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Bor-

ders, and a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship. Erin

Clermont copyedited the manuscript. Bill Nelson designed the maps. And

I thank Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor, where I wrote much of this book

upstairs by the window.

I have been nourished by the love of my parents David, Erika and Jenifer,

my sister and brothers, their partners, my parents- in- law, my nephews, my

flower girls Maya, Leela, and Irene, and most of all Sohini Ramachandran.

My trajectory has been indirect, and I had already begun a doctoral

dissertation on nineteenth- century North American circuit- riders when I

discovered the path to this book. I made the discovery in Rome, behind

the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva — built over a pagan temple, the

Coricancha of the Old World — when a black cat looked into my face and led

me through the back door into the cool, dark church. I am grateful for the

guidance which that cat, along with my other counselors, gave me.

A T L A N T I C O C E A N

P A C I F I C O C E A N

Viceroyaltyof Peru

Viceroyaltyof New Spain

Brazil(Portuguese)

Salvador

Aud. of Mexico

Aud. of Guadalajara

Aud. ofGuatemala

Aud. of SantoDomingo

Aud. ofPanama

Aud. of Santa Fe

Aud. of Quito

Aud. ofLima

Aud. ofCharcas

Aud. ofChile

Santo Domingo

Bogotá

Quito

Lima

La Plata

Santiago

Guadalajara

Guatamala City

Mexico City

Panama City

Modern borders

map 1 Viceroyalties and audiencias in 1570. Map by Bill nelson.

xii chaPteR 1

AUDIENCIAOF QUITO

AUDIENCIAOF LIMA

AUDIENCIAOF CHARCAS

LakeTiticaca

P A C I F I C O C E A N

N

0

0 200 300 km100

100 200 mi

Viceroy Toledo’s route during the General Resettlement

MapArea

Departed Oct. 22, 1570;Returned Nov., 1575

(Dec. 1572–April or May 1573) (April or

May1573–Jan.

1575)

(July 1575–Nov. 1575)

Vilcabamba

Chucuito

Cajamarca

Millerea

Huánuco

Lima

Jauja

HuancavelicaCuzco

Huamanga

ArequipaLa Paz

Cochabamba

La Plata

Potosí

Guayaquil

Arica

Condes

Villanuevade la Plata

Yanquecollaguas

Chérrepe

Piura

Trujillo

Cañete

Ica

Cuenca

Loja

Arica

(Feb. 1571–Oct. 1572)

Huarochiri

map 2 toledo’s route, 1570 – 1575. Map by Bill nelson.

In 1569, the Spanish empire undertook something new in

the history of European colonialism: forcing an entire con-

quered society to change its way of life overnight. The vice-

roy, don Francisco de Toledo, ordered the native people of

the central Andes to abandon their homes and move to new

towns founded after a Spanish model. The word for this pro-

cess was reducción, from the Spanish verb reducir, meaning to

reduce, subdue, persuade, or reorder. The viceroy’s officials

fanned out through the provinces with instructions to con-

solidate small settlements into larger ones, to lay out streets

and house lots, and to force more than a million peasant

farmers to relocate. The new towns, or reducciones, were to

have a uniform, quadrilateral street grid surrounding a cen-

tral plaza and church, governed by indigenous men holding

Spanish municipal offices and titles. When they were done,

the inspectors were to make their work permanent by de-

stroying the old villages. This was the Reducción General de

Indios — the General Resettlement of Indians.

It was not the first campaign of reducción. Spanish friars

had already experimented with reorganizing Indian commu-

nities in the Caribbean and Mesoamerica. But in scope and

organization, the Andean campaign surpassed all previous

efforts and most later ones. Its ambition anticipated state

projects of the twentieth century, from Tanzanian model vil-

lages to Soviet collectivization. With gridded streets, stan-

dardized institutions imposed from above, and vast popula-

introduction

2 IntRoductIon

tion registers exposing individuals to the scrutiny of a distant monarch, the

campaign foreshadowed the modern state.

How could a small group of colonizers, vastly outnumbered by indige-

nous people, accomplish something so violent and so profound? And what,

exactly, did they have in mind? Surprisingly, historians have scarcely tried

to answer these questions. Whether celebrating the General Resettlement’s

paternalism or decrying the destruction it wrought, scholars have acknowl-

edged the campaign’s importance while describing it only in general terms.

One reason for this neglect is the lack of sources: strikingly few have

survived for such an important campaign by a government known for care-

ful record-keeping. The officials who carried out the resettlement left little

documentation of how they did so, and few observers described it in writing

at the time. Some records shed light on the campaign — tribute documents,

government financial accounts, judges’ legal rulings — but the informa-

tion they offer is scattered and hard to interpret. Historians have relied

mainly on the orders and instructions for the Resettlement, which tell us

more about what was supposed to happen than what actually happened.

We know that the General Resettlement took place. Throughout Peru and

Bolivia today, many of the oldest rural towns trace their origin to Toledo’s

campaign and preserve the checkerboard layout he demanded. But how and

why it happened as it did — the contours and logic of this massive act of

social engineering — have remained unclear.

In fact, the campaign succeeded by drawing on the organization of An-

dean communities, the power of the native lords, and the memory of the

Incas. Paradoxically, the Resettlement’s radical restructuring was designed

to preserve certain aspects of indigenous culture, even while destroying

others. There was much that Spaniards wanted to destroy, and much that

they despised. Officials claimed that Andeans, “dispersed and separated

in narrow valleys and ravines” on the steep mountain slopes, “live[d] bes-

tially, [men] sleeping with their mothers and daughters,” in wretched huts

that “seem[ed] more for monkeys than for men”; until they were brought

together in towns they could not be true Christians or, indeed, fully hu-

man.1 The General Resettlement was designed to transform indigenous

society — but not entirely. Even while laying out new streets and leadership

positions, the reducciones were built on Andeans’ existing institutions, which

Spaniards believed were the creation of wise Inca kings. And, tacitly or ex-

plicitly, many of the old villages survived alongside the new towns. Entirely

destroying those villages and institutions was not possible in any case, and

IntRoductIon 3

the Resettlement relied on collaboration with native elites. But Spanish offi-

cials also knew that Andeans could not produce wealth, and therefore could

not pay tribute, without their own institutions. Violent and exploitative, the

General Resettlement of Indians was also recuperative, reflecting indige-

nous lords’ cautious acquiescence and Spaniards’ ethnographic inquiry into

Andean society.

“Ethnography” is a frequent word in this book; I mean it in its most lite-

ral sense, as “writing about peoples.” Early modern colonizers, while forcibly

imposing Christianity and their own cultural norms, also practiced an

open- ended study of conquered cultures, with roots in medieval travel writ-

ing, Christian apologetics, humanist philology, and the emerging science

of government. Missionary priests studied indigenous cultures as an aid to

evangelization, and the Spanish crown sent questionnaires to local officials

on subjects such as native tribute systems. Those investigations shaped the

General Resettlement of Indians.

Beginning soon after the Spanish conquest of the Inca empire in 1535,

and its re- christening as the Viceroyalty of Peru, colonial officials inquired

into how Andeans organized their societies and how those ways differed

from their own. Their motivation was not a disinterested search for knowl-

edge but a dilemma: the rich and populous land they had seized from the

Incas was becoming poor and depopulated, threatening the supply of trib-

ute and labor. Fascinated with the opulent, pagan Inca kings, Spaniards

asked what the Incas had done right that they themselves were doing wrong.

Spanish officials considered Andean labor a precious resource, renewable if

carefully husbanded. They knew that one cause of the declining population

was disease (without realizing that Europeans had introduced new diseases

to the Americas). But they also suspected that they were undermining insti-

tutions that had promoted wealth in a challenging landscape.

What they learned was that the landscape of the Andes imposed its own

rules on society. In an environment where no single place produced all the

necessities of life, communities often controlled scattered settlements

dedicated to producing specific things: llamas and alpacas on the high pla-

teau, potatoes at a lower elevation, maize below that, vegetables and coca

leaves in the hot lowlands. The vertical landscape encouraged a model of

community that was not compact but a network of linked settlements. To

function properly, these complex communities had to preserve tight inter-

nal organization and traditional leadership, even if that made them harder

to control directly.

4 IntRoductIon

Curiosity did not mean sympathy: most colonists considered indigenous

Americans radically inferior to themselves. Colonization was based on ex-

ploitation. Even the dedication of some Spanish friars to “protecting” In-

dians often disguised a desire to substitute their own control over Andeans

for that of secular colonists. But regardless of their opinion of the Andean

people they saw around them, Spaniards admired the accomplishments

of the prehispanic Inca kings. To the extent that indigenous society func-

tioned well, many Spaniards attributed it to the Incas, who they believed

had designed institutions to maximize the environment’s resources and

compensate for their subjects’ limitations.

Others, however, saw Andean communities as disorganized, deficient,

and in need of rebuilding. Many Spaniards considered Christianity insepa-

rable from a specific conception of community. For Spaniards, as for other

Mediterranean peoples, the ideal community was the city, the classical polis,

from which Spanish derived the word policía, a word that has no exact English

equivalent. In its narrowest definition, policía referred to a town’s clean and

attractive appearance, but it could also encompass everything from the lay-

out of the streets and the offices of municipal government to the virtue of

the citizens. A common expression for what the Spanish hoped to bring to

the Andes was ley divina y policía humana, divine law and human civilization.

These two colonial goals, cultural survival and cultural change, were

not necessarily contradictory. Indeed, most officials believed that Andean

society should be partly preserved and partly remade. The General Resettle-

ment was designed to reconcile the two conflicting impulses: an ideology of

civilizing Andeans, and an ethnographic tradition that warned officials to

be careful about how they did so.

This book’s argument builds on a half- century of work by ethnohistorians.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Romanian- American anthropologist John Murra

rediscovered the same model of conquest- era Andean communities first

described by early colonial Spanish writers. Murra worked with collabora-

tors from South America, North America, and Europe. Combining docu-

ment ana lysis, archaeology, human ecology, and anthropology — which

combined to create the discipline of ethnohistory — they described a model

in which Andean communities, prehispanic and colonial, maintained set-

tlement enclaves at different elevations, and pooled the products of diverse

ecological zones. Murra called this model the vertical archipelago.2

IntRoductIon 5

My project is different from that of the ethnohistorians. Murra’s most im-

portant source was economic and census data from sixteenth- century visitas,

which were inspections of Andean communities undertaken to assess their

tribute obligations, rather than from more descriptive colonial accounts. His

discovery was impressive precisely because he uncovered hidden patterns in

raw data. In the quantitative records he used, the inspectors who recorded

the information did not spell out its sociological implications: that was not

the format of their reports. But the most insightful of the colonial officials

understood those implications. Ethnohistorians have used those officials’

writings as supplementary evidence, but have not pursued the significance

of the fact that colonial experts anticipated their own findings. Their interest

is in indigenous systems, mine in colonial ones.3

As a unified campaign, the General Resettlement of Indians took place in

the Audiencias of Lima and Charcas, which map very roughly to the mod-

ern nations of Peru and Bolivia. This was the region Viceroy Toledo effec-

tively controlled, although the viceroyalty of Peru was much larger, also

including the Audiencias of Quito, Chile, New Granada, and Panama, and

quasi- autonomous frontier districts such as Tucumán and Santa Cruz in the

south and Popayán in the north. Each territory had separate administrative

apparatuses for gobierno, government, and justicia, justice, or executive and

judicial branches (although they did not correspond exactly to the modern

categories). In each Audiencia the branches of gobierno and justicia were

headed respectively by a governor and by a court, also called the Audiencia,

which was composed of several judges, a president, and other officials. The

line was not always sharp between the two branches: governors sometimes

presided over judicial disputes, and Audiencias sometimes exercised execu-

tive powers, especially when the governor was absent. Conflicts between

governors and Audiencias were chronic.4

Nominally, the viceroy was the supreme authority throughout the vice-

royalty; in fact, not only did the Audiencias resist his control, but some ter-

ritories had their own governors, which limited the viceroy’s power even

in the realm of gobierno. All territories, furthermore, corresponded di-

rectly with the king, who frequently disregarded his own viceroy. In New

Granada, which had the title of a captaincy- general, the viceroy had little

influence. Chile and Panama were more integrated into the viceroyalty, but

they had their own governors; Toledo made little effort to exercise authority

6 IntRoductIon

there except when physically present, as he was while passing through

Panama on the way to Lima at the beginning of his term. It was only in the

Audiencias of Lima, Charcas, and Quito, which covered the territory of the

Inca empire and were the core provinces of the viceroyalty, that the viceroy

had the title of governor. And even there his authority varied. In Lima, the

capital of the viceroyalty, the viceroy was ex officio president of the Audiencia,

and the members had little power to oppose him — although some did so

when they could. The Audiencias of Charcas and Quito retained separate

presidents, giving them a basis for defiance. Toledo spent significant time

in the territory of the Charcas Audiencia, and was able to carry out the Gen-

eral Inspection (Visita General) and General Resettlement there. In Quito,

though, the situation was different: the viceroy was far away, and the Au-

diencia had received a special privilege from the king to exercise powers of

gobierno within its own jurisdiction during this period. Toledo had little

leverage in Quito; he appointed a handful of inspectors there, but the Audi-

encia apparently took charge of resettlement efforts itself.5

This book, therefore, focuses on the Audiencias of Lima and Charcas,

and especially on an area within it stretching from Lima and Jauja in the

north (modern central Peru) to Potosí and La Plata in the south (modern

central Bolivia). The best data from the General Resettlement survive from

this region. This was the area where the vertical archipelago was most pro-

nounced. The northern part of this zone had a highly irregular topography,

in which people traditionally lived in small village on steep slopes, in close

contact with settlements at various elevations; the southern part of it, the

altiplano or high plateau, had larger settlements with substantial enclaves

in distant valleys. This zone was the area in which the surviving Inca aris-

tocracy in Cuzco negotiated with Toledo, and the refugee neo- Inca kings

of Vilcabamba struggled for independence. It was the region of the great

mines of Huancavelica and Potosí; these depended on the labor draft called

the mita, which in turn depended on strong and self- sustaining Andean

communities, so this was the region where Spanish authorities paid the

most attention to Andean social structures. Finally, this was the area that

Toledo toured personally while overseeing the General Resettlement.

chapter outline

Part 1 explores the ideological origins of the General Resettlement. It fol-

lows the parallel tracks along which Spaniards constructed an ethnographic

vision of Andean community and an ideology of Indian resettlement. The

IntRoductIon 7

first colonists were fascinated by the Incas’ monumental stone cities, an

infatuation which initiated a colonial ethnography of Andean space. But,

as chapter 1 shows, the Inca cities were political and ceremonial centers,

not spaces of household residence and trade as Mediterranean cities were.

Chapter 2 shows the Spanish gradually turning their attention to the struc-

ture of community in the Andean highlands and the vertical networks that

defined that community. Meanwhile, as discussed in chapter 3, colonists in

the Caribbean and Mesoamerica began resettling Indians into centralized

communities for the purpose of control and indoctrination; this social en-

gineering was an innovation, unknown in medieval and early modern Eu-

rope. Colonial governors’ efforts were scattershot, intermittent, and local,

but established new patterns. Chapter 4 shows how the ideology of resettle-

ment took root in Peru in the 1560s, in dialogue between Spanish officials

and Andean ethnic lords, whom the Spanish called caciques.

Part 2, the central part of the book, examines the General Resettlement

itself. It begins with the task force called the Junta Magna, which the king

assembled at the Spanish court in 1568 to reassess colonial government.

How did the Spanish crown decide to implement the first truly large- scale

resettlement campaign, and to do so in the Andes, the region of the Ameri-

cas where it was most challenging? Most scholars have attributed the de-

cision to the Junta Magna. In fact, as chapter 5 shows, the Junta Magna

considered elevating Indian resettlement to a high priority, but declined to

do so. By default, the locus of decision making shifted to the colony itself.

Chapter 6 shows how and why Toledo undertook the General Resettlement

of Indians, a project that developed from earlier Spanish interventions but

went far beyond them.

As resettler, Toledo reimagined himself as an heir to the Incas. He did

not intend to destroy Andean culture, as scholars have often assumed, but

to effect a combination of change and continuity. The key to that combi-

nation, explored in chapter 7, was his fascination with the conquered and

dead Inca kings. He set out to prove that the Incas met Aristotle’s definition

of “tyrant,” supplying a legal justification for the Spanish conquest. Yet,

paradoxically, he believed the technologies of rule that Aristotle defined

as tyrannical were what enabled the Incas to govern the Andes effectively,

including designing the archipelago model of community. Toledo designed

the General Resettlement of Indians in part to emulate the Incas’ “tyran-

nical” legacy.

Chapter 8 addresses the most elusive question about Toledo’s campaign:

8 IntRoductIon

What exactly happened on the ground? I approach the question through

a series of case studies. The first uses accounts kept by an inspector and

preserved in the Archivo General de Indias, in combination with the same

inspector’s report to the king, written (as he said) “with his hands in the

dough.” Another uses two lists of reducciones in a specific locality, recon-

structing the logic by which the inspector assigned groups to reducciones.

The third draws on archaeological research in the area of Collaguas to un-

cover the historical dynamic behind the locations chosen for two resettle-

ments The fourth case study examines a lawsuit between neighboring

indigenous communities, preserved in the Bolivian archives, which docu-

ments the decisions the inspectors made in that area. Cumulatively, the

examples show how inspectors and caciques balanced resettlement with

cultural survival.

Part 3 traces how the reducciones took root, gradually and incompletely,

in Andean society. Chapter 9 describes the world the Resettlement created,

drawing on archival evidence and on the vivid descriptions of the indige-

nous author don Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, while chapter 10 follows

the reducciones up through today. In spite of Toledo’s efforts to sideline

the caciques, they remained for a long time the chief protagonists of in-

digenous politics, dominating the relationship between Andeans and the

colonial state. The General Resettlement did not fully replace Andeans’ pre-

vious villages, but supplemented them, while setting in place the structures

of exploitation that constituted the mature colonial system in the Andes.

The reducciones became something like what the Inca cities had been: cer-

emonial spaces for engagement between the local community and the state,

where individual families had homes, but where they lived only part of the

time. From the sixteenth century to the present, the ebb and flow between

town and countryside has been a fundamental dynamic of Andean history.

The interpretation of the General Resettlement presented here is a new one.

At one time scholars accepted what might be called the transparent model

of the Resettlement: that Toledo had the straightforward goal of replacing

Andean lifeways with Spanish ones; that reducciones laid out on a grid were

a self- evident way to do this; and that his own reports are sufficient evidence

of the Resettlement’s methods and its success.6 In recent decades, schol-

ars have questioned or complicated each aspect of this model. Several have

shown how complex was the seemingly simple urban grid, with a wealth of

IntRoductIon 9

specific cultural resonances for both Spaniards and Andeans.7 Others, re-

examining Toledo’s record, have shown that his thinking about Andean his-

tory was ambivalent and that he admired aspects of the Inca empire.8 And

studies of the General Resettlement in specific areas, although few, have

shown that its success was variable, and often limited.9 Some recent schol-

ars have offered valuable brief discussions of the General Resettlement as

a whole, unencumbered by the older model, though tending to address the

Resettlement’s long- term impact more than the campaign itself.10 Most of-

ten, though, scholars critique some parts of the model while accepting oth-

ers. Manfred Merluzzi’s 2003 biography, Politica e governo nel Nuovo Mondo:

Francisco de Toledo, viceré del Perù, offers a sophisticated reading of Toledo

within a Foucauldian framework, but does not challenge the older depic-

tion of him as a single- minded agent of cultural remaking. While scholars

no longer accept the older model as a complete package, they have not pre-

sented a new synthesis. This book offers a coherent account of the General

Resettlement by placing it in the context of developing New World impe-

rialism and colonial ethnography. Indeed, it is impossible to understand

the General Resettlement except through the lens of colonial ethnography.

In the General Resettlement, the twin impulses of ethnography and cul-

tural remaking intersected with a new conception of government which

was vertical, in more than one sense. Spaniards in Peru came to believe

that the challenges of the Andean environment and its people necessitated

a centralized, authoritarian government, and forms of social engineering

unknown in Europe.11 The vertical landscape, they believed, had created the

vertical empire of the Incas. Some colonists argued that Inca rule, combin-

ing authoritarianism and surveillance with a specific, network- based form

of community economy, should be the model for the Spanish in Peru. The

General Resettlement of Indians, one of the earliest examples of large- scale

state social engineering — in many ways a strikingly modern project — was

informed by Spanish visions of a prehispanic empire.

If colonists were studying the Andean world, Andeans were studying the

Spanish one. As subjects of the Incas, often in regions that fell to Inca rule

less than a century before the Spanish arrived, they knew about cultural ex-

changes between conqueror and conquered. Andeans, especially caciques,

sought ways to integrate themselves into the Spanish empire and build a

future in it. Resettlement had the potential to do serious harm, but also to

create a new and sustainable basis for Andean society and caciques’ power.

Andeans helped to shape the General Resettlement, but they did so from a

10 IntRoductIon

position of weakness and in ways that appear only dimly in the documents.

This book draws on both Spanish and Andean voices, but relies more on

Spanish ones, partly because indigenous texts before 1580 are scarce, and

partly because the book’s focus is the theory and practice of imperial rule.12

Colonial ethnography was not benign: it was motivated by the desire to ex-

ploit more efficiently, and it helped the conquerors to do so. In focusing on

the colonists’ curiosity about the Andes my aim is not to make ethnographic

Spaniards into heroes, or to depict Andeans as objects rather than agents

of their own history, but to portray the complexity of the imperial project.

The General Resettlement of Indians looks at first like a clear case of cul-

tural remaking, even “ethnocide,”13 but it was more complex than that. The

campaign quietly embraced certain aspects of Andean culture, while loudly

rejecting others. Spanish and indigenous officials, from the viceroy down,

knew that Andeans could best support both themselves and their conquer-

ors through their own methods. The result of the General Resettlement was

a regime of local autonomy by peasant communities, closely watched and

harshly exploited, but coping with that exploitation in ways they themselves

constructed.

introduction

1 Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, 48: “apartados y escondidos en huaycos y quebradas . . . ni pueden ser dotrinado ni ser hom-bres perpetuamente, no estando juntos en pueblos”; BPR, II/ 2846, N. 12, “Memorial dado por el racionero Villarreal al vir-rey Toledo” [c. 1570], f. 304v; “una casilla que mas parece de monejos que de hombres, . . . vivir vestialmente, durmiendo con su madre e hijas.”

2 Murra, “El control vertical de un máximo de pisos ecológi-cos en la economía de las sociedades andinas,” in Formaciones económicas, 59 – 115. Scholars have seen the archipelago model most clearly in the regions surrounding and south of Lake Titi-caca, while some scholars glimpsed it in one form or another in many other parts of the Andes. Van Buren, “Rethinking the Vertical Archipelago”; Goldstein, “Communities without Bor-ders”; Angelis- Harmening, ‘Cada uno tiene en la puna su gente.’

3 Murra did, however, observe that this was significant: “We note that the earliest sixteenth- century observers reached cer-tain conclusions which have been confirmed by modern schol-arship”: “Andean Societies Before 1532,” 61. Beginning in the 1980s, Murra became interested in early colonial ethnographic officials, although he published fairly little on the subject. See Murra, “Nos Hazen Mucha Ventaja” and “Le débat sur l’avenir des Andes en 1562.”

4 Haring, The Spanish Empire in America, 83 – 88; Eagle, “Beard- Pulling and Furniture- Rearranging.” The composition of the Audiencias varied between jurisdictions and over time, but each normally had several judges, called oidores, a president, an alcalde de crimen (criminal judge) and one or more fiscales

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(crown attorneys). Haring, The Spanish Empire, 120. The governor, whether it was the viceroy or someone else, usually had the additional title of captain- general, or supreme military authority. The viceroy had the power to decide whether a problem was a matter of gobierno or justicia, and Toledo used this power ag-gressively against the Audiencias. Fray Rodrigo de Loaysa wrote in 1586: “Don Francisco de Toledo jamás tuvo paz con ninguna audiencia.” Ibid., 87.

5 Ibid., 83 – 88. Toledo noted to the king that the Quito Audiencia had a real cédula granting the Audiencia president powers of gobierno, that Chile was likewise resisting his authority, and that his own papers did not grant him formal juris-diction over Tucumán or Santa Cruz, frontier territories connected to Charcas. Toledo to king, Cuzco, 1 March 1572, in Gobernantes, 4:48 – 208, see 191 – 92.

6 This is the argument, or rather the underlying assumption, of Toledo’s two major twentieth- century biographies: Levillier, Don Francisco de Toledo, Supremo Organizador del Perú, and Zimmerman, Francisco de Toledo, Fifth Viceroy of Peru, 1569 – 1581.

7 Fraser, The Architecture of Conquest; Durston, “Un régimen urbanístico en la América hispana colonial”; Cummins, “Forms of Andean Colonial Towns, Free Will, and Marriage.”

8 Spalding, Huarochirí, 212 – 14; Brading, The First America, 138; Coello de la Rosa, “Discourse and Political Culture in the Formation of the Peruvian Reducciones in the Spanish Colonial Empire (1533 – 1592)”; Colajanni, “El Virrey Francisco de Toledo como ‘primer antropólogo aplicado’ de la edad moderna”; Cook and Cook, People of the Volcano, chap. 4; Julien, “History and Art in Translation”; Mer-luzzi, Politica e governo nel Nuovo Mondo, 101 – 15.

9 Alejandro Málaga Medina, while using primarily the same legislative sources Levillier had used, showed some of the ambiguity of the campaign’s success: “Las reducciones en el virreinato del Perú” and Reducciones toledanas en Arequipa. Major steps forward were Saignes, “Las etnías de Charcas frente al sistema co-lonial,” 72; Cañedo- Argüelles, “Las reducciones indígenas en el sur andino”; Jurado, “Las reducciones toledanas a pueblos de indios”; Río, Etnicidad, territo-rialidad y colonialismo en los Andes; Wernke, “Negotiating Community and Land-scape in the Peruvian Andes.”

10 Durston, “El proceso reduccional en el sur andino”; Huertas Vallejo, “El pro-ceso de concentración social en el espacio andino”; Cook and Cook, People of the Volcano, chap. 4; Gose, Invaders as Ancestors, chap. 4.

11 This kind of social engineering had precedents in other parts of the world, as well as in the ancient Mediterranean, but not in medieval or early modern Europe.

12 Scholars have done impressive work in reconstructing Andean mentalities in the seventeenth century, though indigenous voices are more elusive during the middle decades of the sixteenth century. A key seventeenth- century source, dis-cussed in chap. 9, is don Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615 – 1616); see Adorno, “Guaman Poma de Ayala,” in Pillsbury,

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ed., Guide to Documentary Sources, 2:255 – 68. On the Huarochirí manuscript, see Frank Salomon’s bibliography in ibid., 2:296 – 303. On the church as a forum for Spanish- Andean encounter, through pastoral relationships as well as ex-tirpation campaigns, see Mills, Idolatry and Its Enemies; Durston, Pastoral Que-chua; Charles, Allies at Odds. Early Quechua- language documents produced by Andeans are rare but exist: see Durston, “Native- Language Literacy in Colonial Peru.”

13 Yaranga Valderrama, “Las ‘reducciones,’ uno de los instrumentos del etnoci-dio.”

1. The Cities

1 Twenty-four meters is equivalent to an eight-story building today. Protzen and Rowe, “Hawkaypata”; Bauer, Ancient Cuzco, 3. There does not seem to be definite consensus on the dimensions of Hawkaypata; Protzen and Rowe, “Hawkay-pata,” 239, measures it as 190 x 210 meters, or 39,990 square meters; Moore, “The Archaeology of Plazas and the Proxemics of Ritual,” 797, as 190 x 165 me-ters, or 31,350 square meters.

2 Estete, “Noticia del Perú” [1540s]: “trayendo a las dichas fiestas todos sus agüelos y deudos muertos . . . sentados en sus sillas, y con mucha veneración y respeto,” 54 – 55. Pizarro, “Relación del descubrimiento y conquista de los re-inos del Perú” [1571]: “convidándose unos muertos a otros, y los muertos a los vivos y los vivos a los muertos,” 67. See also Polo Ondegardo. “Relación de los fundamentos acerca del notable daño que resulta de no guardar a los indios sus fueros,” 97; Zuidema, “El ushnu”; Gose, “Oracles, Divine Kingship, and Politi-cal Representation in the Inka State”; Cummins, Toasts with the Inca, 104.

3 What follows is a narrative of the conquest as interpreted by the conquerors in its immediate aftermath, drawn from the earliest accounts: Miguel de Estete, “La relación del viaje que hizo el señor capitán Hernando Pizarro” [1533]; let-ter from Hernando Pizarro to the Audiencia de Santo Domingo, Puerto de la Yaguana, 23 Nov. 1533, in Urteaga, ed., Informaciones sobre el antiguo Perú, 167 – 80; Xérez, Verdadera relación de la conquista del Perú [1534]; the anonymous account from 1534 usually attributed to Cristóbal de Mena, in Pogo, ed., “The Anony-mous ‘La Conquista del Perú’ (Seville, April 1534) and the Libro Vltimo del Svm-mario delle Indie Occidentali (Venice, October 1534)”; Ruiz de Arce, “Una nueva relación de la conquista” [1543]; and the “Noticia del Perú” traditionally but not definitely attributed to Miguel de Estete (see Pease, Las crónicas y los Andes, 18 – 19), probably from the 1540s.

4 In Quechua, Sapa Inka. Tawantinsuyu was a multiethnic empire; the Incas, along with other ethnic groups from the Cuzco area who were called “Incas-by-privilege,” ruled through the local ethnic lords of the conquered provinces.

5 Miguel de Estete described the Inca settlement of Jauja as “hecho a la manera de los de España, y las calles bien trazadas”: “La relación del viaje que hizo el señor Capitán Hernando Pizarro,” 144.