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

2000; Duke University Press; Volume: 80; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-80-1-77

1527-1900

Ward Stavig,

Colonialism, slavery, and trade

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.1Access 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, racial, ethnic, economic—the historiography of land tenure does not provide a comprehensive analysis of the situation, but it does contain some interesting approximations. The parts of Quispicanchis closest to Cuzco with the richest soils are partially reflected, even though the mirror is somewhat distant, in the classic works of Francois Chevalier and Charles Gibson for the region of the central valley of Mexico where villages survived, but much land fell into European hands. The situation in Tinta was more similar to what William Taylor found in Oaxaca, where Europeans were slow to arrive and there was significant indigenous land retention, although the reasons were not always the same. Although the historiography of colonial Andean societies is rich, I wish to mention two or three works that are particularly useful to compare and contrast the land tenure systems in Tinta and Quispicanchis with other parts of Latin America. In these two partidos there was very little of the type of land domination, migration, and resettlement that Karen Powers found in Ecuador, while the work of Roger Rasnake on Bolivia reflects, at least in the reduction process, a pattern similar to the upper Vilcanota. Nils Jacobsen’s study of the altiplano region of Azángaro and indigenous land retention certainly sheds light on landholdings in Canas y Canchis.4Even before Inca armies from Cuzco carved the empire of Tawantinsuyu from Andean ethnicities, the region of Canas y Canchis was a center of ethnic land conflict, and these early battles left their imprint on the region. The Vilcanota river drainage system makes the region especially desirable. The wider bottom lands were not only a relatively easy route for moving goods and people in the zone between the Lake Titicaca basin and Cuzco, but were more fertile and better suited to agriculture than most of the lands in the surrounding mountains, punas, and high valleys. These higher regions, with their cold climate and weaker soils, were best suited for pasture and the cultivation of a restricted number of high altitude crops such as the potatoes used in making chuño. However, they were also contested, land of almost any quality being important.Over the centuries, prior to the coming of Europeans, a productive relationship evolved in the southern Andes between cameloid herding, agriculture, and land preparation. This “papa, llama, y chaquitaclla” (potato, llama, and footplow) complex, as Norio Yamamoto calls it, was a mainspring in the region’s livestock and agricultural regime.5 Soils in the higher reaches were often weak and needed to lie fallow for years. Llamas and alpacas grazed on these and other lands and fertilized them. Manure was also collected to enrich the soil at the time of sowing. The chaquitaclla allowed steep hillsides to be worked, as well as valley lands, and its long spade turned the earth deeply. By not breaking the soil the same way as a plow, the chaquitaclla helped avert problems of compaction and erosion, but the “papa, llama, y chaquitaclla” complex also meant that land use was more extensive than in other regions.With the coming of Spaniards and their plants and animals to Peru, the herding tradition of many Andean peoples, such as those in highland zones like Canas y Canchis, left them better prepared to deal with European livestock than those without such a tradition. Having domesticated llamas and alpacas, these naturales incorporated European cattle and, especially, sheep into their way of life without a great deal of difficulty. The extensive pasture needs of the herds and flocks, with high summer pastures and lower winter ranges, were just one factor, but an important factor, in the maintenance of extensive land use after the arrival of Europeans. The herder-agriculturalist tradition, based on transhumance and extensive land use, was preserved.6This was quite a different scenario than occurred in areas with a weaker herding tradition, such as Cajamarca in northern Peru and especially in New Spain, where nature had not blessed the region with large domesticable animals and therefore people had no livestock tradition. As Nils Jacobsen makes clear, this was important in the colonial period to the evolution in Mexico of a system of large livestock ranches dominated by Europeans, for native people had no strong use-based claim to the extensive pasture lands. In New Spain native peoples eventually came to own sheep in some numbers, but cattle, other than as draft animals, were not typically adopted to any great extent by most corearea Mesoamerican people. Contrast this to the situation in the southern Andean highlands, where even in the late eighteenth century indigenous people still owned a majority of the livestock in the region and the holdings of Europeans were nowhere near as significant as in New Spain. Jacobsen argues that “in the Andes … the extension of the mancha india was practically identical with what may be called the mancha cameloida…. In other words, the survival of an Indian community peasantry was most marked precisely where the continuity of Indian livestock raising had been strongest.”7 And communal survival meant the retention of lands on which the community was based.Originally populated by Aymara speakers, the land became, because of its quality and strategic importance, a source of ongoing tensions and intrusions in Canas y Canchis, making it a buffer zone between the Aymara and Quechua worlds, with a diverse ethnic population before the coming of Europeans. This human mosaic apparently did not prevent people from uniting under duress to confront intrusions by powerful neighbors. However, in the period just prior to Inca domination, neither the Canas nor the Canchis seem to have had a strong central authority. By the time of the Inca conquest of the Colla (Aymara) center in Hatunquolla—the region beyond Canas y Canchis in route to Lake Titicaca—“no lord politically the equal of the king of Hatunquolla was to be found in either Canas or Canchis.”8This may have been due, in part, to the settlement patterns of the region, where, outside the valley, the rugged terrain and the focus on pasturing led not only to disperse habitation but to the interspersing of peoples from various communities and ethnicities.9 The majority of the Canas lived on the west bank of the Vilcanota, while the Canchis were concentrated on the east side. There were, however, significant exceptions to this pattern, and in outlying ayllus (kin-based living units, of which there might be several in a community) divisions tended to be more ambiguous.10Unity was further hampered by the diversity of tongues, which made Canas y Canchis, if not quite a “Tower of Babel,” a linguistically distinct zone. Originally, Aymara was spoken there, but contestation and Inca influence brought with them Quechua, the imperial tongue. The process of linguistic change, however, was not an even one. According to the colonial lexicographer Ludovico Bertonio, some Canas continued to speak Aymara until the seventeenth century. The languages that emerged were hybrid dialects of Quechua strongly influenced by Aymara, but they were distinct enough for Guamán Poma to refer to them separately and include Canche and Cana among the muchas lenguaxes of the realm.11This regional fragmentation persisted, and the Canchis and Canas entered the colonial period precocious in their internal divisions. Spanish policies further accelerated the fracturing of ethnic identity and provoked new tensions, especially over land. Before the arrival of Europeans, most people had lived in small, relatively dispersed settlements. The desire to organize native peoples for purposes of extracting labor, meeting economic demands, converting them to Christianity, and bringing them more fully under governmental control led Spain to resettle people from their scattered habitations and ayllus into larger communities known as reductions (reducciones). Established by Viceroy Francisco de Toledo in the early 1570s, these reductions eroded older forms of regional and ethnic identity.12 In most instances the reduction communities, also organized into parishes, persisted as centers of political and administrative life throughout the colonial period and even beyond.13 But sometimes, as in one ayllu of the Canas y Canchis community of Layo, lands were cultivated at some distance from the village, and homes and livestock were built and kept there. The cacique of this ayllu eventually asked for recognition as an independent settlement to “be spared exploitation by other groups in the village.”14During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ayllus often rekindled old bonds and reestablished more extended patterns of settlement to meet the pragmatic needs of everyday life. This was aided by the fact that many ayllus had been assigned lands that had been theirs before the Toledan intervention, and over the colonial period, at least in Tinta and Quispicanchis, there was a growing association or identity of indigenous living units—communities and ayllus—with lands. Thus, in this region the discussion over the clan or land base of ayllus appears to have become moot, for it was most often both.15European pathogens also stimulated fragmentation. Ravaged by epidemics, indigenous lands that the state determined to be in excess of needs were sold or distributed after the massive deaths. Likewise, the horrors of mita service in Potosi, to which both Tinta and Quispicanchis were subject, also led people to flee their natal communities, while naturales from other regions rented vacated lands to live as forasteros and, thus, escape the mita.16 Often these people were eventually incorporated into communities, but they too had diverse origins. The 238 forasteros in the mining center of Condoroma (Tinta) in the late seventeenth century reflect the eclecticism of this process, as they came from some 94 different pueblos and 197 different ayllus and were subject to 201 different curacas.17 By the eighteenth century colonial pressures and changes in the indigenous world had led to “ethnic” identities in Quispicanchis and Canas y Canchis that were at least as complex as they had been prior to the European encounter, this despite a plummeting population. And this identity was expressed most clearly not at a regional or broad ethnic level but at the level of the community, moiety, and ayllu, which became, in effect, the focal point of identity.18The peoples of rural Cuzco were not alone in this process. Ethnic fragmentation was widespread in the Andes. For instance, Roger Rasnake, in his study of the Yura in Bolivia, argues that one consistent Spanish policy through the centuries was that of “turning Inkas and [ethnic groups like the] Wisixsas into ‘Indians,’ the goal of conquest through homogenization and destructuration.” Rasnake sees Toledo’s reductions as an important part of this process, for “a consciousness of wider ethnic identity was lost; ‘new’ loyalties based on the reducciones were evolved, demonstrating a more localized sense of ethnicity … [and] by the middle of the eighteenth century the wider sense of loyalty had disappeared.”19 This was, however, just part of the story along the upper Vilcanota, for while the Spanish may have sought to homogenize native peoples by undermining more inclusive and larger senses of ethnicity, the end result here was often nearly the opposite. Communities and their ayllus in Quispicanchis and Canas y Canchis became both reasonably stable and flexible, allowing people to survive as a unit, but with a multiplicity of localized identities. Thus, the Spanish achieved part of their goal in that communal or ayllu identities were not as threatening as larger regional and ethnic identities, but the reductions also inadvertently provided a mechanism for indigenous peoples to redefine or restructure themselves, to preserve a cultural identity, and, most importantly, to survive.In the short run the very process of creating reductions sometimes exacerbated indigenous disputes over land, Toledo’s late-sixteenth-century upheavals setting in motion forces that led to decades of tensions between certain communities. This was just one aspect of European land tenure policies that affected native life. Taking lands dedicated to the Inca state and religion, the granting to (or purchasing of) property by non-Indians, combined with the appropriation of the labor and resources needed to work lands through the distribution of encomiendas (and later repartimientos), also transformed life. However, one of the most lucrative of the first two dozen encomiendas granted in Canas y Canchis in the sixteenth century went not to a Spaniard but to Inca royalty. Paullu Inca cooperated with the Spanish, while his half-brother, Manco, led the resistance against the Europeans. For his cooperation Paullu Inca was bestowed many privileges, including an encomienda over the former Canas center of Hatun Cana (Santa Lucía de Pichigua). His grandson, Melchor Carlos Inca, was still listed as holding this encomienda in the 1580s.20Due to climate, distance from Cuzco, and smaller concentrations of fertile soils, Canas y Canchis was not as attractive to Europeans as Quispicanchis, where many of the Cuzco elite had lands and homes. The late colonial traveler and geographer Cosme Bueno, scrutinizing rural Cuzco with his keen eye for the economic underpinnings of life, wrote of Canas y Canchis:In the struggle to maintain their holdings, the law proved to be a formidable tool for the naturales. Using the colonial justice system imposed by Spain, the peoples of the Upper Vilcanota region were amazingly successful in the defense of their lands. While they did not win every case involving claims of illegal appropriation, decisions went in their favor more often than not. Understanding that they could, as Eric Hobsbawm put it, “work the system… to their minimum disadvantage,” community leaders became skilled legal strategists, and the Spanish legal apparatus functioned as one of the effective “weapons of the weak.”23The Spanish crown encouraged this “legalism” by establishing a system that included a legal representative for the Indians, the protector (defensor) de naturales; creating a special legal status for Indians, albeit a second-class status; making special laws that governed Indians; and rendering a high enough measure of justice that indigenous confidence in the judicial system was maintained. The reasonable functioning of a protective system of justice, so important to the naturales’ understanding of the reciprocal rights and duties essential to the colonial equation, gave a measure of legitimacy to the state and helped maintain the bonds that tied villagers of rural Cuzco to the system that also oppressed them, for colonial law also legalized the alienation of indigenous lands through various means deemed justifiable by the state.In reality, the communities had little viable recourse but to use the legal system. Court battles were not only the safest form of resistance or vindication but also offered greater opportunity for success than more militant actions.24 Likewise, the limited scope of land occupations and the nature of law, most often involving individual communities or individual actions, militated against widespread collective actions.With the aid of the Spanish protector who helped craft legally powerful claims, naturales developed arguments that curried favor with colonial officials. High on this list were the inability to meet tribute payments; the weak position of the crown’s indigenous subjects who required governmental protection, and the disruption of religious life. For instance, when Captain Juan Francisco de Ochoa invaded lands belonging to ayllu Collatia in Quiquijana, the people described themselves as “poor, defenseless, pusillanimous Indians” who needed the land, and the animals they raised on the land, to pay their tribute. They also pointed out that when deprived of their own lands, community members went to live with Spaniards, who readily received (con todo gusto) these Indians. The ayllu maintained that local Spaniards worked against their efforts to have people return to their villages, which had a very negative impact on the communities. They argued that hacienda Indians did not “pay attention to their caciques, saying that they do not live or eat on community lands, but on those of Spaniards. And because of this, they and their children do not fill their personal service or tribute, nor do they respond to the Christian doctrine, and the burden of not having … [these] Indians means that more burden falls on those in the community.”25Such defenses were common, designed to appeal to crown interests, and fairly effective, but not all land usurpations could be contested in the courts. Powerful individuals, or those with powerful friends, appear to have used their influence to prevent matters from coming before legal authorities or to influence those authorities when possible. Costs also could restrict the effectiveness of the legal system, for while initial court costs were nil or relatively low, long and complicated legal battles had a way of becoming expensive. Influence, or the wealth to retain a lawyer with good knowledge of colonial procedures, allowed more well-to-do Spaniards to make legal battles lengthy and costly, sometimes discouraging communities from pursuing their interests and just causes. In 1763 a curaca in San Pablo de Cacha lamented that the same thing was happening to his community that so often “happened in legal battles over lands with Spaniards, generally the unfortunate Indians lose their just claims, because they do not have the wherewithal to support the expenses of lawyers and others.”26 Thus, while legal decisions encountered in the archives most often favored the indigenous complainants, it is quite likely that other disputes were dropped due to costs or were prevented from reaching the legal system.Europeans, as previously mentioned, did not covet all lands with the same intensity. The fertile river valley lands between Urcos (Quispicanchis) and the Quispicanchis-Cuzco border were the most highly prized. They were closest to the urban hub of Cuzco, with its market demand for the regional produce. Lower and less frigid than Canas y Canchis and most of Quispicanchis, this region was excellent for cultivating the Europeans’ prized grain—wheat—and its irrigation systems enhanced productive potential. It was here that many distinguished residents of Cuzco had their haciendas with gardens, orchards, and hermosas casas de recreo or “beautiful vacation homes.”27 There were many regions that the elite found less appealing but nonetheless were desired by other Europeans. The lower zones of Quispicanchis were centers of coca production, a lucrative enterprise for the hacendados if often deadly for the indigenous workers. Other zones produced wheat, corn, and fruit, while intermediate and higher zones were suited to potatoes, barley, habas or fava beans, and Andean grains such as quinua and kañiwa. Livestock estancias or haciendas were usually attractive enterprises for Europeans, and the higher zones of Quispicanchis and Canas y Canchis contained the needed pasture, but these higher regions had less appeal for Spaniards in this region of Cuzco.The vertical topography, combined with specific local conditions, such as rivers or lakes which tempered the cold—like the lakes near Langui or Pomacanchi—formed microclimates. These ecological niches allowed for agricultural production in zones where otherwise only hardy crops could be produced. Thus, variations in European and indigenous production and settlement had bases in factors as diverse as climate, topography, natural resources, and proximity to Cuzco. For instance, until the eighteenth century relatively few Europeans lived in the higher regions of the two provinces, Sicuani and mining centers such as Condoroma being exceptions. As late as 1689 parish priests in Tinta attested that few Spaniards lived in the midst of an overwhelmingly indigenous population. The priest of Checacupe and Pitumarca noted that there were only three Spaniards in the parish, with “three poor haciendas.” Spaniards held neither haciendas nor estancias in San Pedro or San Pablo de Cacha, although five Spaniards lived in San Pedro and two Spanish women resided in San Pablo. Likewise, in Coporaque and Pichigua there were neither Spanish haciendas nor estancias and just a few “poor Spaniards” as residents. The community of Yanaoca contained one estancia belonging to mestizos, and four married mestizos, described as “poor,” lived in the community.28 Since Europeans preferred properties in the rich, mild valley lands close to Cuzco, this meant that much friction over land between naturales and Europeans was centered in the Vilcanota valley floor of Quispicanchis and along the small Huatanay river that flows down from Cuzco through Quispicanchis and into the Vilcanota. In this zone the Europeans tended to be people of power who either could influence the law or were the law. Their attitudes and behaviors toward their indigenous, as well as their Spanish and mestizo, neighbors were important in determining the quality of life for the people of the local ayllus and communities.After the defeat of Tawantinsuyu, the Spanish crown asserted its legal claim to all lands and began to reward or pay individuals with land grants and to sell properties defined as vacant. Under the onslaught of European pathogens such as measles, mumps, smallpox, and the plague, the majority of naturales disappeared from the face of the earth. This meant that communities often lacked the people to work more marginal lands, and these areas fell into disuse. Even good lands could not always be worked, and under colonial law these fields and pastures were susceptible to being declared vacant and sold. Vacant lands also tempted Spaniards or other naturales to invade.Most lands were lost to Europeans during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the Andahuaylillas region of Quispicanchis “there was a clear pattern of progressive alienation of communal land beginning at least as early as the Toledan reducciones and enduring into the twentieth century. The high water marks for the loss of indigenous lands may have been the Toledan reducciones.”29 The reduction system of Toledo concentrated people, shrank their landholdings, and freed lands to be purchased by, or granted to, Europeans. Indigenous peoples of rural Cuzco, particularly Canas y Canchis, slowly but persistently resisted and undermined the reduction system. Through quiet but determined reoccupation of lands that had not been effectively alienated, naturales reestablished older and more dispersed settlement patterns. As late as the 1790s the community of Andahuaylillas still had members of one ayllu living as far as 22 leagues from the parish center, a distance far greater than the one league in which Indians were supposed to live. It is unclear, however, if this Andahuaylillas ayllu had traditionally occupied this territory or if it had expanded into it during the colonial period. However, the concentration or reduction of communities sometimes meant the loss of, or separation of ties with, more distant ayllus which had been part of an integrated resource system—the vertical system of holdings to which John Murra drew attention. Other communities succeeded in maintaining at least some of their prereduction character. “The ayllu Incacuna, which had settlements in San Blas in Cuzco and in Andahuaylillas, is an example of an ayllu which succeeded in maintaining its preconquest dual location. The ayllu Sailla, reduced into the parish of San Jeronimo near Cuzco, is another example. Sailla maintained ten topos of land in Guaraypata in the areas called Guaina-Carisno and Apo-Carisno in the Quispicanchis community of Quiquijana.”30In the sixteenth century the Spanish crown initiated yet another policy that increased pressure on community lands. Declaring that lands held without just title would become crown property and be available for sale, Phillip II embarked on a process of title clearance known as composición (de tierra). Compositions were a revenue source for the crown, a government official inspecting titles and granting clear ownership for a sum determined by the inspector. Conducted in conjunction with land inspections (visitas de tierras), there were four major periods of inspection and composition of titles in Peru—1590 to 1596, 1615 to 1622, 1665, and 1722 to 1725.31 While individual communities may not have been affected by all of these inspections, many were touched by at least one. Other inspections and title clearance procedures were frequently conducted on a local level, especially at the request of Spaniards who desired to legitimize de facto possession of lands. Naturales who had acquired private lands, as well as communities, also used composition to ensure their titles. Most often, however, the visitas and composiciones de tierras meant a reduction of village property.As we have seen, in Canas y Canchis, with its strong herding tradition, local indigenous peoples maintained greater control of their lands than did those in many other regions. In this way herding, developed out of the blessings of nature and human ingenuity, proved vital to indigenous peoples’ retention of their lands and culture in the colonial era.32Most indigenous lands lost to Europeans were transferred through the aegis of the colonial regime. Reductions, compositions, and land grants effectively and “legally” removed lands from naturales, putting them into the hands of Spaniards. Colonial demands also forced communities to rent, and sometimes to sell, lands to meet state impositions. In this way