Shifting landscapes. Heterogeneous conceptions of land use and tenure in the Lima valley

Abstract

This essay argues that Andean and Spanish agents both brought a spectrum of understandings of land tenure and land use to their colonial interactions. After a critical survey of what is known about practices in the Andes and Iberia prior to conquest, it turns to specific cases of property conflict and entangled definitions in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in the Rimac Valley, Peru. There heterogeneous definitions of both use and tenure often coexisted, either as forms that communities and individuals could shift between depending upon venue or listener, or as multiple hybrid varieties that eventually produced a common language of property. Finally, the case of urban property, new to the indigenous Rimac Valley, is discussed with an eye to the learning curve wherein indigenous homeowners came to an understanding of the meaning of their lots. These cases, taken together, demonstrate that, rather than supplanting or conflicting, indigenous and Spanish agents often constructed an entangled landscape of property relations, at least until Spanish control of the valley became more hegemonic.

Notes on contributor

Karen Graubart is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of With Our Labor and Sweat: Indigenous Women and the Formation of Colonial Society in Peru, 1550–1700 (2007), which was awarded the Ligia Parra Jahn prize from the Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies in 2008. She has published articles in Hispanic American Historical Review, Colonial Latin American Review, Slavery and Abolition, The William and Mary Quarterly, and other journals and books. Her work has received generous support from numerous foundations, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright, the American Association of University Women, the Kellogg Institute, and the John Carter Brown Library.

Acknowledgments

This work has been funded in part by the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. I am grateful for comments by Marcy Norton, Ralph Bauer, and Dana Leibsohn, two anonymous reviewers, and the participants in the ‘Entangled Trajectories’ conference in Washington DC in April 2014; and to Barbara Mundy for introducing me to the Oztoticpac map.

Notes

1. The map does not necessarily illustrate pre-Hispanic practices: the lower left quadrant represents a joint venture between don Carlos and a Spaniard to grow fruit trees and vines, which were planted on lands belonging to don Carlos as well as some commoner farmers. The map itself has been examined in Cline 1996 and in Jaffary, Osowski and Porter 2009, 95–99.

2. Recent legal history has embraced the concept of multiple regimes coexisting in creative and interactive ways. See Benton 2002; Benton and Ross 2013; Owensby 2008.

3. In the Andes, ‘destructuration’ was introduced by Wachtel (1976, 58) to explain how Spanish domination made use of isolated Inca institutions, but in a decontextualized way that left them incoherent. The literature on accommodation, which argues that while the Spanish conquest relied heavily upon native labor and political systems, ultimately Spanish systems became hegemonic, might best be represented by the work of Stern (1992, 1993). The Mesoamerican works of Lockhart (1992) and his students likewise fit into that model, though they claim hegemony was slower. The hybridity paradigm is discussed critically in Dean and Leibsohn (2010). See Ortiz (1983) on the related concept of transculturation.

4. The Andes does not have the advantage of indigenous cabildo records (in native languages) that may occasionally be found for sixteenth-century Mexican pueblos de indios. See Graubart 2015, and for the Mexican sources, Yannakakis 2013, and Lockhart et al. 1986.

5. This claim drew upon the Castilian tradition in the conquest and resettlement of Muslim territories in Iberia, wherein ‘all property won from the enemy was at the disposition of the king, who could grant it at his will’ (Vassberg 1984, 7).

6. Translation from Pagden and Lawrence (1991, 251). See further Brian Owensby 2013, and Pagden 1995, esp. 46–52.

7. The idea that property was largely held collectively is standard in many histories (e.g. Stern 1992, 23–24); for a more sophisticated but still dichotomous analysis, see Ramírez (1996, 16 and 44–47), where she differentiates between Andean understandings of property as ‘use’ and Spanish notions of private property. D’Altroy (2000) is an excellent if uncritical overview of natural environments, and land and resource use strategies in the Andes.

8. Netherly 1990.

9. The debates over resource use are laid out in Larson, Harris and Tandeter 1995. The classic ethnography of Andean resource archipelagos is Murra (1975), modified by Rostworowski's ethnohistories of the coast (1983, 1989). See also Rowe 1946.

10. In addition to the works cited above, see Pease 1986; Ramírez 1996, ch. 3.

11. The debate over whether Indians lived in the state of nature and its political and legal consequences is described in Pagden 1982.

12. I borrow this argument from David Kazanjian, who notes that ‘modes of possession prior to dispossession are often empirically opaque to us' (2014, 273–74).

13. The expropriation and privatization of community lands is the subject of much of the historiography of the early colonial period. See Stern 1992, esp. 161; Larson 1998, esp. 74–77. On the Peruvian coast, see Cushner 1980, Charney 2001.

14. For example, the visitador Gregorio González de Cuenca in 1566, quoted in Rostworowski 1975, 141.

15. Lima's metamorphosis as ciudad and then cabecera is described in Osorio 2008, ch. 1.

16. For the history of the valley in this period, see Rostworowski 1978, Charney 2001, Graubart 2016.

17. Municipal cabildos considered managing urban food scarcity, quality control, and related issues one of their central mandates. See Mangan 2005, ch. 3.

18. The statement that most of Lima's lands had been transferred (legally or illegally) to Spanish hands by 1592 comes from Viceroy Cañete, but there are no records of overall property ownership in the period. See Cushner 1980, 18–20; Charney 2001, 44.

19. Don Juan, the cacique of Surco, another polity in the region, was alone in claiming that the lands that Lima was founded upon did not belong to Taulichusco, though he agreed that Spaniards had purchased or taken many lands from him. Don Juan's testimony is in Rostworowski 1983, 114–16.

20. On arguments that reducciones did not succeed as they were said to, see Fraser (1990, 78–79) and Mumford (2012). Webster (2011) notes that even ‘Spanish’ cities were built with an indigenous vantage point, as does Morgado (2007). For the traditional view that pueblos de indios took a variety of forms but largely represented the destructive imposition of Spanish will on indigenous cultures, see Gutiérrez and Esteras 1990.

21. See for example the incomplete will of María Capan in the same year, which also identifies her ayllu. AGN TI Leg 1, 1596.

22. Ramírez (1996, 48) notes that chacara or sementera generally referred to planted lands, while tierras describe unused land. A fanegada (or fanega de sembradura) was the amount of land that could be planted with 1.5 bushels of seed, and later measured as 144 × 288 varas (Ramírez 1986, 279). In early colonial documents, fanega and fanegada are often used interchangeably; for clarity's sake I use fanegada when translating land measurement.

23. The corregidor's accounts for that composición are missing, but in 1619 he reduced twelve provinces of Vilcashuaman, AGN Derecho Indígena, Leg 4, Cuaderno 65 (1619).

24. On equal partible inheritance, see Poska 2005, ch. 2. Indigenous actors approached either Spanish or Spanish-trained indigenous notaries, who would understand that only wills accommodating Spanish law would be enforced in Spanish courts.

25. For an analysis, see Graubart 2016. Owensby (2008) studies cases before the Mexican version of this institution, a court for Indian disputes, which left more significant records than its parallel in Lima.

26. This is, of course, the classic argument of Stern 1992.

27. There are certainly exceptions, notably Charney 2001 and Abercrombie 1998.