Garrett - The Cacica and The Politics of The Pueblo in Late Colonial Cusco

"In Spite of Her Sex": The Cacica and the Politics of the Pueblo in Late Colonial Cusco
Author(s): David T. Garrett

Source: The Americas, Vol. 64, No. 4 (Apr., 2008), pp. 547-581
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30139176
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The Americas
64:4 April 2008, 547-581

Copyright by the Academy of American
Franciscan History
"IN SPITE OF HER SEX":

THE CACICA AND THE POLITICS OF THE PUEBLO
IN LATE COLONIAL CUSCO*
In October, 1797, the indios principales of the Andean pueblo of Mufiani

appealed to the royal court in Cusco to depose their governor, or cacica,
Dorm Maria Teresa Choquehuanca.1 Not challenging hereditary Choque-
huanca rule, they instead focused on Maria Teresa's incompetence and her
sex, complaining of "the miseries that we have suffered with [her] inappro-
* My sincere thanks to the three readers from The Americas and to Michael Breen for their excellent
and helpful comments; and to Helen Nader and Bianca Premo for their generous responses to out-of-the-
blue inquiries. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Sexto Congreso Internacional de
Etnohistoria in Buenos Aires, as part of the Simposio de Polftica, Autoridad, y Poder, and I am greatly
indebted to the coordinators, commentators, panelists and audience for their questions and suggestions.
And, once again, my deepest thanks to Donato Amado and Margareth Najarro in Cusco, who made this
archival project possible. Research for this paper was generously supported by the Social Science
Research Council, Reed College, and the Michael E. and Carol S. Levine Foundation.
1 I use "cacique" (and "cacica") rather than "curaca" or "kuraka," as this was the usage in eighteenth-
century documents. In colonial Andean communities, caciques were responsible for tribute collection
and maintaining order, and played a dominant role in the communal economy. Widely used by the eigh-
teenth century, the term applied to individuals ranging from the college-educated hereditary governor of
a pueblo more than 1000-strong, and the illiterate tribute collector of an ayllu with 40 inhabitants, and
thus imposes an artificial uniformity on a wide array of offices, individuals, and communities. As this
article argues, cacicas tended to appear in communities with well-established hereditary hierarchies,
although these included both small, noble ayllus among Cusco's Incas and the large pueblos and moieties
of the Titicaca basin. For the cacique and colonial indigenous society, Karen Spalding, Huarochiri: An
Andean Society Under Inca and Spanish Rule (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984); Maria Rost-
worowski de Diez Canseco, Curacas y sucesiones, Costa Norte (Lima: Minerva, 1961); Steve J. Stern,
Peru's Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640 (Madison: Univer-
sity of Wisconsin Press, 1982); Carlos J. Diaz Rementeria, El cacique en el virreinato del Perri: estudio
histOrico-juridico (Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla, 1977); Silvia Rivera, "El Mallku y la sociedad colo-
nial en el siglo XVII: el caso de Jestis de Machaca" Avances [La Paz] 1 (1978): 7-27; Thierry Saignes,
Caciques, Tribute and Migration in the Southern Andes: Indian Society and the Seventeenth Century
Colonial Order (London: University of London, 1985); Luis Miguel Glave, Trajinantes: Caminos indi-
genas en la sociedad colonial, siglos XVI y XVII (Lima: Instituto de Apoyo Agrario, 1989); Nathan
Wachtel, Le Retour des Ancetres: Les Indiens Urus de Bolivie XXeme-XVIeme siecle: Essai d'Histoire
Regressive (Paris: Gallimard, 1990); Franklin Pease, Curacas, reciprocidad y riqueza (Lima: Pontificia
Universidad CatOlica del Pern, 1992); Roberto Choque Canqui, Sociedad y economia colonial en el sur
andino (La Paz: Hisbol, 1993); Scarlett O'Phelan Godoy, Kurakas sin sucesiones: Del cacique al alcalde
de indios, Perd y Bolivia 1750-1835 (Cusco: Centro Bartolome de Las Casas, 1997); Karen Powers,
547
548 "IN SPITE OF HER SEX"
priate 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 pop-
ulation in relatively autonomous, land-owning "pueblos de indios" over
which the cacique, responsible for collecting the crown's tribute and main-
taining order, presided as something between a chief and a lord. As the vil-
lage leaders in a parallel, popular tradition that reserved its authority for men,
principales asserted that this bastion of elite indigenous authority
ought not be held by a woman. But they made clear that it sometimes was:
Maria Teresa had governed Mufiani for five years. Nor was she alone. Caci-
cas 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 his-
torians, although most discussion has been anecdotal, focusing on individu-
als rather than on the relations of colonial governance, gender ideologies,
and indigenous politics in which such female authority was situated.4 Those
Andean Journeys: Migration, Ethnogenesis and the State in Colonial Quito (Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press, 1995); Susan Ramirez, The World Upside Down: Cross-Cultural Contact and Con-
flict in Sixteenth-Century Peru (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); Ward Stavig, The World of
Tripac Amaru: Conflict, Community and Identity in Colonial Peru (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1999); Kenneth J. Andrien, Andean Worlds: Indigenous History, Culture, and Consciousness
under Spanish Rule, 1532-1825 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001); Sinclair Thom-
son, We Alone Will Rule: Native Andean Politics in the Age of Insurgency (Madison: University of Wis-
consin Press, 2002); Sergio Serulnikov, Subverting Colonial Authority: Challenges to Spanish Rule in the
Eighteenth-Century South Andes (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); S. Elizabeth Penry, "Trans-
formations in Indigenous Authority and Identity in Resettlement Towns of Colonial Charcas (Alto Peril)"
(PhD Diss., University of Miami, 1996); David T. Garrett, Shadows of Empire: The Indian Nobility of
Cusco, 1750-1825 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), particularly pp. 34-38 for the vari-
ety within cacical office.
2 ". . las miserias que hemos sufrido con el postizo ingreso . . . al cacicazgo . . . ella por su distinto
sexso se deve por justicia deponerla que no es digno de este empleo tan recomendable. . . ." ARE, PRA
343. The Choquehuancas ruled Azangaro Anansaya from before the conquest to independence. Leonardo
Altuve Carrillo, Choquehuanca y su arenga a Bolivar (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1991), pp. 41-6.
3 Variously a village, neighborhood, clan, or extended family, the ayllu is the basic unit of Andean
society, a grouping of people, bound by kinship, for productive and reproductive purposes. Before the
Spanish reducciones of the 1570s, successful ayllus were distributed across space in numerous settle-
ments; the colonial ayllu, as legally defined, was a land-holding, corporate entity and a constituent part
of a larger parish or pueblo. The pueblo is a village or town established by the Spanish, composed of con-
gregated ayllus. For the ayllu, Tristan Platt, "Mirrors and Maize: the Concept of Yanantin among the
Macha of Bolivia" pp. 228-259 in Anthropological History of Andean Polities, eds. John V. Murra,
Nathan Wachtel, and Jacques Revel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
4 For discussion of individual cacicas, see, for examples, Karen Vieira Powers, "A Battle of Wills:
Inventing Chiefly Legitimacy in the Colonial North Andes," pp. 183-214 in Susan Kellogg and Matthew
Restall, eds., Dead Giveaways: Indigenous Testaments of Colonial Mesoamerica and the Andes (Salt
DAVID T. GARRETT 549
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, Sil-
verblatt 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 cus-
tomary Andean gender chains of dual authority" that had emphasized the
complementarity of male and female authority.5 The colonial cacica-con-
ceived largely as a figurehead with men wielding the actual political author-
ity-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 author-
ity in their communities."6 As Graubart has noted, such claims about pre-
hispanic organizations of power are necessarily based on minimal docu-
mentary evidence, and privilege imperial Inca sources.? Focusing on the
societies of Peru's northern coast, Graubart argues instead that female lord-
ship did not necessarily have strong pre-conquest precedent. Rather, Span-
ish 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 indige-
nous 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 pol-
itics 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 personi-
fies the negotiations of colonial authority.
Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1998); Spalding, Huarochiri, p. 237; Stavig, The World of Ttipac
Amaru, pp. 93-4; Gary Urton, The History of a Myth: Pacariqtambo and the Origin of the Inkas (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1990), pp. 48-63; Karen Graubart, With Our Labor and Sweat: Indigenous
Women and the Formation of Colonial Society in Peru, 1550-1700 (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2007), pp. 158-161 and 176-185.
5 Irene Silverblatt, Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. xxx.
6 Silverblatt, Moon, Sun, and Witches, p. 152.
7 Graubart, With Our Labor and Sweat, pp. 161-167.
8 Graubart, With Our Labor and Sweat, p. 160.
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
office played in the allocation of authority in colonial, indigenous society.
Most obviously, that cacicas appear repeatedly in 18th-century documents
requires that we refine patriarchal models of indigenous politics.9 Refine but
not reject: male caciques greatly outnumbered female, and contemporary
discussion of cacicas betrayed ambivalence to women possessing such polit-
ical authority. So too does the preponderance of cacical heiresses, whose
husbands ruled in their names, over governing cacicas (although an interro-
gation of the archival sources suggests that the written performance of male
rule disguises the location of paramount authority with the cacical couple
rather than one of its members). This ambivalence stands in marked contrast
to the widespread acceptance of indigenous women's active role in the
Andean market, and of the economic authority it brought.1- In that, concerns
about female exercise of cacical power suggest the gendering of authority
itself in ways that do not entirely coincide with a public/private dichotomy.
While formal, political authority that associated with offices-was under-
stood as male, the economic authority associated with market activity and
private property was clearly open to women. That the cacicazgo was the one
colonial political office routinely held by women exposes a central tension
in the constitution of cacical authority under colonial rule: between the tacit
(and at times explicit) treatment of ayllu and pueblo lordships as hereditary,
familial possessions, and assertions by Spanish officials that the cacicazgo
was a bureacuratic office within the crown's gift. For more than two cen-
turies, until the Great Rebellion of 1780-2, that tension stood at the heart of
the relations between the indigenous elite and the crown's officers; wherever
9 Silverblatt, Moon, Sun and Witches; Graubart, With Our Labor and Sweat; Steve J. Stern, The
Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Colonial Mexico (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press); Thomson, We Alone Will Rule.
10 Jane E. Mangan, Trading Roles: Gender, Ethnicity and the Urban Economy in Colonial Potosi
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Elinor Burkett, "Indian Women and White Society: The Case
of Sixteenth-Century Peru," pp. 101-128 in AsunciOn Lavrin, ed., Latin American Women: Historical
Perspectives (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978); Maria Rostworowski, La mujer en Peru prehispanico
(Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2001); Frank Salomon, "Indian Women of Early Colonial Quito
as Seen through their Wills," Americas 44:3 (January 1988), pp. 325-41; Kimberly Gauderman, Women's
Lives in Colonial Quito: Gender, Law, and Economy in Spanish America (Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press, 2003); Ann Zulawski, "Social Differentiation, Gender and Ethnicity: Urban Indian
Women in Colonial Bolivia, 1640-1725," Latin American Research Review 25:2 (1990), pp. 93-113;
Graubart, With Our Labor and Sweat; Silverblatt, Moon, Sun, and Witches, pp. 109-124; Leo J. Garofalo,
"The Ethno-Economy of Food, Drink, and Stimulants: The Making of Race in Colonial Lima and Cuzco"
(PhD Diss., University of Wisconsin, 2001).
they held office, cacicas embodied a local resolution in favor of hereditary

possession by the Indian nobility.
Peering into the pueblo from the vantage point of the cacica also allows
a new perspective on two contradictions central to the constitution of the
Indian republic's internal politics. First is in the allocation of the elite
authority of the cacique. Scholarly interest in caciques over the past few
decades has sparked considerable discussion of how colonial cacical author-
ity was legitimated, and challenged through illegitimation, within indige-
nous communities.11 With its emphasis on cultural constructions of "just" or
"legitimate" rule, the focus of such enquiry has been on norms and their vio-
lations, not on the mechanics of cacical succession and election, so central
to the pueblo from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth century. Moving
beyond concerns of legitimacy, study of the cacica and female succession
foregrounds noble male competition as a crucial domain of indigenous pol-
itics. The larger and more complex communities and multi-pueblo ethnic
societies of the colonial Andes had pronounced social hierarchies, and
caciques and cacical families almost invariably came from the elite strata of
their communities.12 Families like the Choquehuanca, who managed to
establish and maintain control over a cacicazgo for many generations, were
the exception. In areas like Cusco, with large Indian nobilities, competition
among hereditary nobles for control of cacicazgos was fierce. In others, the
pressures of the colonial order were such that dominant households and lin-
eages rose and fell within one or two generations, and prominent men were
eager to win cacical office when it fell open. Even the Choquehuancas and
their peers around Titicaca sought to strengthen their control over society by
alliances between cacical dynasties. Thus, the negotiation and competition
surrounding the possession of cacical office constituted a principal arena of
colonial, indigenous politics, and in this cacicas played a crucial role. As
heiresses they reproduced inter-generational hierarchies; but as wives they
allowed cacical authority to move between different noble patrilines, and
thus to address competition among Indian noblemen for the cacicazgo.
11 Rostworowski de Diez Canseco, Curacas y Sucesiones; Pease, Curacas, reciprocidad y riqueza;

Susan Ramirez, "The 'Duel- of Indios': Thoughts on the Consequences of the Shifting Bases of Power
of the `Curacas Viejos Antiguos' under the Spanish in Sixteenth Century Peru," Hispanic American His-
torical Review 64:4 (November, 1987): pp. 575-610; Powers, Andean Journeys; Stern, Peru's Indian
Peoples; O' Phelan Godoy, Kurakas sin sucesiones; Spalding, "Social Climbers"; Garrett, Shadows of
Empire, pp.148-180. And, for seventeenth-century concerns about cacical legitimacy, see Felipe Guaman
Poma de Ayala, Nueva Coronica y Buen Gobierno, ed. by Juan V. Murra and Rolena Adorno. Mexico
(City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1980), p. 768.
12 Garrett, Shadows of Empire; David Cahill and Blanca Tovias, eds., Elites indigenas en los Andes:
Nobles, caciques y cabildantes bajo el yugo colonial (Quito: Ediciones Abya Yala, 2003).
Elite competition for cacical power was but one arena of politics in the
colonial pueblo. The legal distinction at the heart of the colonial order,
between Indian and Spanish republics, placed the majority of the indigenous
population in self-governing communities with a dual organization of polit-
ical authority. Sixteenth-century attempts to reform indigenous Andean soci-
ety along the lines of rural Castile sought to place the elective and reason-
ably democratic (if exclusively masculine) offices of alcalde and the cabildo
at the heart of local politics. However, the need to maintain hierarchical
structures to facilitate extraction from the indigenous economy led to the
preservation of the cacicazgo. And while efforts to affect the balance of
power, between the more popular offices of alcalde and cabildo and the elite
control instituted in the cacicazgo, were constant, that balance favored the
latter until well into the eighteenth century.
Then, both helping to provoke and aided by the Great Rebellion, popu-
lar challenges to cacical authority brought about a consolidation of demo-
cratic rule in the pueblo in the last decades of Spanish rule. Elaborating
changing ideals and relations of authority, a wealth of scholarship over the
past fifteen years has highlighted both the depth of this profound change in
the social order of indigenous communities, and the turbulence of the tan-
sition.13 This democratic challenge to elite rule coincided with efforts by
rural creoles to usurp the local authority of the Indian nobility, and both
challenges to the caciques were abetted by a crown that became openly hos-
tile to the Indian elite following the rebellion. Often cacicas stood at the
center of these new politics, as both Maria Teresa Choquehuanca and the
principales of Muriani could testify. But while village elders rejected the
cacica as both the embodiment of noble authority and a threat to male
authority, creole men sought cacicas as wives in an effort to legitimate their
new, elite authority in rural society.14
Information about cacical authority and succession is anecdotal: colonial

authorities maintained no systematic records of cacical rule, and beyond the
broadest (often ignored) strictures of colonial law, information comes from
wills, succession disputes, and other legal proceedings. These make clear
13 David Cahill, From Rebellion to Independence in the Andes: Soundings from Southern Peru,
1750-1830 (Amsterdam: Aksant Academic Publishers, 2002), 152-168; Nuria Sala i Vila, Y se arm6 el
tole tole: tributo indigena y movimientos sociales en el virreinato del Perti, 1784-1814 (Huamanga: Insti-
tuto de estudios regionales Jose Marfa Arguedas, 1996); O'Phelan Godoy, Kurakas sin sucesiones;
Thomson, We Alone Will Rule; Serulnikov, Subverting Colonial Authority; Penry, " Transformations."
14 Cahill, From Rebellion to Independence, 157-159.
Woman caticpt
It Woman is. caticpt
.f Woman as heirms.;.bastvmd ts cacique
eaoth of tht abtxt
Unde
Altitude in Meteis,
5000
4000
3000
:20X,
ICCI)
5)3
0
5)3
Map 1. Women Caciques
that cacicas were common in late colonial Cusco, a bishopric that stretched
hundreds of miles from the semi-tropical valleys north of the city to Lake
Titicaca [Map 1] .15 In 1790, three-quarters of its 300,000 people were clas-
sified as Indian, living in diverse societies along the bishopric's many rivers,
and on the high slopes above.16 Those in the temperate north (2000-3500
meters) tended to be Quechua-speaking agriculturalists. Across the bish-
opric's middle, societies along the ridge dividing the Titicaca and Amazon
15 "Indian" is used to refer to those so classified legally, on the basis of bilateral Indian ancestry: they
constituted the "reptiblica de indios." "Spaniard" refers to everyone else: those in the "reptiblica de
esparioles." "Creoles" were people of Spanish ancestry born in Peru. Many "creoles" were in fact mes-
tizo, but this term had derogatory social and economic implications in the colonial period.
16 HipOlito Unanue, Guia politica, eclesicistica y militar del virreynato del Peru para el alio de 1793.
Ed. with prologue by Jose Durand (Lima: COFIDE, 1985), pp. 89-90.
Fromfathe Fromfathe Femalin? Femalin? Fromfathe Fromfathe Frompaents Fromhusband Fromfathe Unclear Fromfathe Fromthe Fromhusband Fromhusband? Frompaents Fromfathe Frompaents? Fromhusband Fromfathe Fromsite
contiuedxpag
1760s-8 1750s-9 1790s 1769-ca.83 1768- 178-90 178-9 180-s 170s 1760s-8 1780s-9 1760s 170s-84 170s-ca.8 175-ca.0 174-? 1769-? 175-6 176-82
Until176 Ca.1745-68 ?-1738 ?-175
Guamnrich)
Husband(VicetChoq) Inowame Husband(CyetoTp Husband(SimoTcyrtp) Inameofs Husband(JochimTSyrtp) Husband(Grielmtc) Inameofs Inameofgrdchil Husband(FrcioAlvez) Caci,wdo(SntsuYg) Husband(DoNiclR) Husband(DoRmiqel) Inameofchildr? Inameofs Husband(LorezCpic) Husband(AtoliQpeUcmy) Inowame Husband(MrcoChigtp) Inameofs Husband(JoefMySritp) Inowame Husband(MelProStp)
TABLE1
Cusco:Bel&an Cusco:Sanebtihm Cusco.Sanebti: Cusco:Sanebti Cusco:SantAhpy Cusco:Santigh Cusco:Santigh Cusco:Santigh Cusco:Santigh Abancy:Por Abancy:t Abancy:t Abancy:Zurite Abancy:Zurite Abancy:Gurod Urubam:Ms Urubam:Gyl Urubam:Ycy CalcyLres:m CalcyLres:m
CAISNLTEOURDGHBPV
Guamn Orcoguan
CaciProvne:ubl/shAyTpfRDt*S DoriaSntusAc DoriaLendTcstup DoriaAsencQupS DoriaRfelSnch DoriaJunUcl DonaMuelYris DoriaCtlnTscSyup DoriaMRmsTtAuch DoriaPetnlsc DoriaMmngQuspe [1RosaPmYng DoriaFendMtup DoriaGegPlctup DoriaSebstnGumc DoriaJulnSchUsp DoriaMchelPmy DoriaIsdz DoriaMchelPup DoriaBendPucp
DoriaEulSh
Fromfathe 7 7 Fromfathe Fromcusin Frombthe Fromthe Fromthe Fromthe

Fromthe Fromhusband Fromfathe
1782-4 175-ca.0 1789-? 1780-9 170s 170s-8 175-80s 1765-ca.84 1750s- 170-8
Mid170s early1780s
Pomayli)
Husband(MigelGyprt Inameofs Husband(ermgiloUzt) Husband(SetiUz) Inowame Inowame Inowame(thrugs) Husband(TomSieryApt) Husband(TomOrcg) Husband(JoeBtizCpcr) Inameofgrdchil Husband(PeroJ6Sh) Husband(FrcioAlvez)180-
5aylus
CalcyLres:m CalcyLres:o CalcyLres:o CalcyLres:T CalcyLres:Snvdo Paucrtmbo:C Paucrtmbo:Clqep Paucrtmbo:Clqep Paucrtmbo:Cy QuispcanhOroe:Cz Quispcanh:OroeCz Quispcanh:OroeCz
Apocndri Ariza
TABLE1(contiued) CaciProvne:ubl/shAyTpfRDt*S DoriaMelchPdSuntp DoriaIsdTupOcgn DonaMriYgPuc DoriaRtTmbgucs DoriaJunGmb DoriaAnmedz DonaMrtiChgup DonaPhelipRsy DoriaMtnGumbp DonaMelchrYuiAz DoriaSebstnBuzYc DonaEuliShr *Aproximate. Sources:BlmARC,Od.93(175-6)f2tib;INTH8anFL40 cia,AGNDI36(170);forRelC824dguzLm.Jy9Snt:O5FM ARC,N1835riasdeL2f.7My6;otlnO:9()ITGbJph BernadoGm,126f.Octb79;EuliARC(80-)Py:v453FMDg ARC,N1825TapiSrmento376f.July0;sPYgIH4(9)Z:FdBvG- goria,ARCOd.61:397(8)GucnINTb25MselLymBE4- 7.Yucay:IntheTmbogslir,ARCOd31(98)62LFM0;fBPv May176;forelch,ARCN80T.Gm342ugst:Od(9)SnvI Tambogucslitry,ARCOd.31(798)6:BPe40-qpNMnz52fv ber182;ARC,N3JuanBtisGm[]ly75.c:E49P-dOop [],178;forpst-0inheTambguclyARCUDOd.3(9)
Women Caciques
2 Woman is cacique
Woman as htirmn*. husband is cacique
Ecth of tht a bovt
Undew
Altitade in 1A4i,..itts
5000
4000
3000
2E03
1000
500
0
Map 2. Women Caciques-Cusco Detail
basins formed an agropastoralist boundary between these and the complex

Aymara-speaking societies around Lake Titicaca (3800-4000 meters); the
linguistic border of Quechua and Aymara clearly, if imprecisely, followed
this social and ecological divide. In its own fashion, the colonial archive
reproduces this geography. The Inca nobility-imperial rulers reduced to
dominating the villages around Cusco city-are the best-documented
indigenous group in the colonial Andes.17 The great cacical dynasties of the
pueblos superimposed on the sefiorios around Titicaca also left a sizable
17 Carolyn Dean, Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ: Corpus Christi in Colonial Cuzco, Peru
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); David Cahill, "Una nobleza asediada: Los nobles incas del
Cuzco en el ocaso colonial," pp. 81-110 in Cahill and Tovias, Elites indigenas en los Andes; Donato
Amado, "El alferez real de los Incas: resistencia, cambios, y continuidad de la identidad inca," pp. 55-80
in ibid.; David T. Garrett, "Los Incas borb6nicos: la elite indigena cusqueria en visperas de Ttipac Amaru"
Revista Andina 36 (Spring, 2003), pp. 9-63.
record; for the communities in between, and in the west of the bishopric,
there is scant information on cacical authority.18
In at least seventeen of the roughly thirty Inca-ruled villages and parishes

within twenty-five miles of Cusco city, cacicas and their husbands governed
at some point between 1750 and 1800 [Table 1 and Map 2]. More than a
dozen of these women ruled in their own right, exercising cacical authority
and responsible for their communities' obligations to the crown. If not typi-
cal, they were by no means extraordinary. Further south, in the Vilcanota
highlands and the Titicaca basin, the much thinner archival record nonethe-
less provides evidence of at least one ruling cacica in almost every province
from 1750 to 1800 [Table 2], and rule by cacicas and their husbands, or the
latter in their wives' names, was common.
However limited and anecdotal, this evidence allows three broad conclu-
sions. First, within the area from Cusco to La Paz there was regional varia-
tion. Cacicas were more common in the Inca-dominated villages around the
city of Cusco than in the Aymara societies to the south. This difference may
just be apparent, reflecting only the Incas' over-representation in the archive.
But in section three I suggest that female succession played a particularly
important role in the politics of Cusco's colonial Incas, enabling the move-
ment of cacical office between competing noble male lineages. Second, and
here less ambiguously, throughout the southern highlands cacical heiresses,
who inherited offices and whose husbands ruled either with them or in their
names, outnumbered cacicas who formally governed on their own; and these
latter usually exercised formal authority only after their cacique-husbands
died. This understates the preponderance of heiresses, as the written record
often does not tell how a cacique came to possess office: the more informa-
tion one finds, the more likely a marriage to his predecessor's daughter will
emerge. Finally, when women inherited or occupied cacicazgos they did so
through hereditary claims. I have found only one instance in which a woman
without clear familial claim to the office occupied a cacicazgo, whereas
interim male caciques were as common as hereditary caciques in 18th-cen-
tury Cusco.19 In that, cacicas personified hereditary, aristocratic authority in
Indian society, and a women's inheritance of cacical office asserted the con-
18 Choque Canqui, Sociedad y economics; Thomson, We Alone Will Rule; Glave, Trajinantes and
Vida, simbolos y batallas: CreaciOn y recreaciOn de la comunidad indigena. Cusco, siglos XVI-XX
(Lima: Fondo de Cultura EconOmica, 1993); Stavig, The World of Tapac Amaru; Wachtel, Le Retour des
Ancetres.
19 Dofia Catalina Salas y Pachacutic, an Inca noblewoman from Zurite with no hereditary claims to
the offices, held the cacicazgos of Yanaoca and Layo. ARC, N18, 292 Zamora: 402-13, 21-10-1785.
TABLE2
GOVERNICASUTHDLPZ*
*Describdagovnhw,tu'klm.
*Aproximate. 1705,9;Yungyo:AREPSG3CpacbN-IX4LxB6Ti28JesdMh 179-46.

CaciomuntyPrveYs* DohaTmsitCndeyAc,Qup1760-8 DoilaAnCquePmchsQpd-170 DohaCtlinSsyPcuLT1760-? DohaCtlinSsyPcuY,A.HT170-8 DoilaLucPjeCpm1720s-3 DoilaBerndPchNLmp170s? DonaJuVilcpCtgs,Trhmbv1780 DamIsbelMngoTurpScAz1790 DohaJulinCrsUAcyzg1790 DohaIsidrCtcAu1780 DadJulinTcoChpZet170s-8 DoilaMrAngeCchtYuyUs1790 DohaMriJsefXugClqpcbnOmy178-0 DoliaFepCmsAcLxOuy170,9 DonaMriPxptTgucSs1780-9 DoriaTesFndzGuchJMS170? Sources:A,mayndgRCBET13092-;Phi4LYN87 and29Zmor:40-13,785;CupiARUDO.()NctgsTVl6f 01-789;SanTrco:ARE,PdGhyCINb4(6)uitB3Zep
tinuing authority of her family in the community; while rule by cacicas' hus-
bands affirmed male authority.
The cacica was not a late colonial innovation. While evidence is scarcer
for the Habsburg era and rare for the pre-conquest Andes, it appears that
female political authority was well established at the time of the Spanish
conquest and continued to be a feature of indigenous politics in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries.20 Graubart has challenged Silverblatt's general-
ized colonial narrative of patriarchal usurpation of female political author-
ity, arguing that such authority has not been demonstrated in many areas
under Inca rule.21 However, for the Incas of Cusco the sixteenth-century
sources do suggest both that women ruled over some communities and
played an active role in governance generally. Under Spanish rule these tra-
ditions of authority confronted a formal assertion that indigenous authority
be masculine, coincident with attempts to impose primogeniture. Following
decades of discussion and vacillation, in 1614 Philip III decreed that "since
the provinces of Peru were discovered it has been . . . the custom among the
Indian caciques that sons succeed fathers in cacicazgos, and my will is that
the said custom be maintained."22 However, earlier royal decrees suggest
that father-son succession had held no hegemony in Andean custom; one
from 1602 observed that Andean custom was for "sons, brothers, and close
relatives inherit" cacicazgos.23 As Graubart argues, this move to a preference
for father-son succession unintentionally defined a colonial space for office-
holding by noble women.24 The 1614 decree had the effect of refashioning
the cacicazgo or curacazgo into a modified mayorazgo with its preference
for parent-child succession, so that in the absence of sons (a common phe-
nomenon in the epidemic-wracked colonial Andes) daughters would be pre-
ferred to male cousins and brothers. As we shall see, in practice succession
20 Rostworowski, Curacas y Sucesiones; Silverblatt, Moon, Sun, Witches, pp. 20-108; Terence A.
D'Altroy, The Incas (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 103-8; Urton, History of a Myth, pp. 41-70.
21 Grabuart, "Con Nuestro Trabajo," pp. 281-90; Silverblatt, Moon, Sun and Witches, pp. 150-3. See
also Alejandro Diez, Pueblos y cacicazgos de Piura, siglos XVI y XVII (Piura: Biblioteca Regional,
1988), pp. 45-6; Kerstin Noawack, "Aquellas senoras del linaje real de los Incas: Vivir y sobrevivir como
una mujer inca noble en el Peril colonial temprano," pp. 9-54 in Cahill and Tovias, Elites indigenas en
los Andes.
22 ". . . desde que se descubrieron las provincial del Peril ha estado en posesiOn y costumbre entre
los indios caciques de que los hijos suceden a los padres en los cacicazgos, y mi voluntad es que la dicha
costumbre se conserve y guarde." Diaz Rementeria, El cacique en el virreinato del Peru, p. 218.
23 "[A los cacicazgos] se heredan por sucesiOn de padres a hijos, hermanos, y parientes mas prOxi-
mos, siendo legitimos. . ." (22 February 1602). Diaz Rementeria, El cacique en el virreinato del Perd,
p. 218.
24 Graubart, With Our Labor and Sweat, pp. 164-6.
depended as much on local politics as on the broad strictures of colonial law.

But whether colonial law created a space for women lords in the Indian
republic, or simply provided a mechanism by which pre-conquest traditions
of female office-holding were conveyed into colonial society, seventeenth
and eighteenth century documents from the Cusco area assert that cacicas
were seen as a traditional part of the Indian republic's politics.25
That is not to say they went unnoted: cacicas provoked comment in mid-
18th-century Cusco. Occasional explanations in the archival record about a
woman's possession of office suggest that (male) Spanish officials, creoles,
and Indian nobles looked on the phenomenon with concerned interest. While
for most cacicas there is no qualifying observation, those that exist are
enlightening. In Taray two Tamboguacso cousins, whose family had gov-
erned at least since the 1600s, battled over the pueblo's cacicazgo in 1782.26
Don Toribio's father Don Joseph had been cacique until his death in 1761;
Joseph's cousin Don Lucas had then held the office. After Lucas's death in
the late 1770s, Toribio married Lucas's widow and challenged his
cousin/step-daughter Doila Rita and her creole husband, Don Sebastian
Unzueta, for the cacicazgo. In his investigation, the corregidor asked Rita's
witnesses lilt' it is true that in the pueblos of this province it is customary
that daughters succeed to cacicazgos."27 All seventeen men she presented
duly said yes, but they are not witnesses whose testimony we should readily
dismiss. Taray was a stronghold of the colonial Inca nobility, and those tes-
tifying included one of the electors from Cusco's Inca city council, the sac-
ristan of Taray's church (and that of neighboring Pisac), the village alcalde,
and overall a respectable cross-section of Taray's Inca elders, along with
men from well-established creole families. Don Fernando Pumayalli, the
Inca elector, gave examples of five cacicas in nearby parishes, governing
6 ' . . . without any objection, [and] this is without knowing how to read and
write"--a reminder that by the late 1700s Indian noblemen often had basic
literacy, becoming an informal, gendered qualification for cacical office.28
25 ARC, INT, RH, 218 (1807), f. 6r for Caycay's cacique in the 1750s basing his claim on that of his
grandmother, Doha Ana Cusimayta y Espinoza, "cacica principal y gobernadora que fue en la provincia
de Paucartambo." ARC, RA, Ord., 27 (1798), f. 22r, for seventeenth-century documents recognizing the
claims of "Dona Cathalina Sisa, casica que fue en propiedad" in Maras. Whether these claims are accu-
rate is, of course, not certain, but that they were made to establish the legitimacy of later cacical claimants
suggests their political value; see Powers, "A Battle of Wills."
26 ARC, RA, Ord., 31 (1798), ff. 62-75.
27 "Como es verdad que en los Pueblos y lugares de distrito de la mencionada Provincia ay costum-
bre de que sucedan las hembras en los casicasgos... ." ARC, RA, Ord., 31 (1798), ff. 60r.
28 Dominga Quispe Guaman, Isidora Diaz, Juana Uclucana, Maria Ramos Tito Atauchi, and Martina
Chiguantupa. ARC, RA, Ord., 31 (1798), ff. 62. ". . . sin que aiga embarazo, esto es sin saber leer, ni
escribir."
Other witnesses were more interested in the circumstances in which a

woman might inherit office. Both a creole and Taray's Indian alcalde testi-
fied that ". . . in the pueblos of this province, as in its neighbors, in the
absence of men women govern the cacicazgos, that is [if they are] heirs by
the direct line, and everybody knows this custom."29 Others made clear that
not only was female succession acceptable, but also that (in the words of
Pisac's sacristan), "by custom . . . women succeed to the cacicazgo and
govern for themselves."3-
Other documents show a similar, conditional acceptance of female suc-

cession and rule.31 In 1770 Don Pedro Sahuaraura Ramos Tito Atauchi
explained that he served as cacique of the Ayllu Cuzco in Oropesa through
his wife, "Doria Sebastiana Bustinza Yaurec Arisa, legitimate daughter of
the late Don Jospeh Bustinza and Dona Melchora Yaurec Arisa who is alive,
governess of the said ayllu to whom [the cacicazgo] fell by absence of a
male [heir] since her ancestors, and the cacicazgo passes to my said wife .. .
[and so] I was named interim cacique and confirmed by the Royal and Supe-
rior Government, until there is a male or female successor."32 The implica-
tion is that either a male or female heir would be acceptable, but in the latter
case her husband will rule. After Sebastiana's death, Pedro retained the caci-
cazgo in the name of their three children; when he was killed by Ttipac
Amaru's forces in 1780, Melchora Yaurec Ariza reoccupied the cacicazgo
until her death in the mid-1780s.33 Such practice was fairly common: wid-
owed mothers and grandmothers ruled in the name of underage heirs.
This, of course, raises the issue of whether these women who formally
possessed the cacicazgo actually exercised its authority, and attended to its
duties: did Melchora Yaurec Ariza personally instruct the village officers in
their duties, oversee the collection of tribute and distribution of land, and
29 ARC, RA, Ord., 31 (1798), ff. 73 ". . . en los Pueblos de esta Provincia como en las demas que a
falta de Barones gobiernan las mugeres los Casicasgos, esto es siendo acreedoras por linea recta y que
nadie ignora desta costumbre."
3- ARC, RA, Ord., 31 (1798), f. 68 ". por costumbre assi en esta provincia como en otras subceder
a las hembras en los casicasgos y gobernar por ellas mismas."
31 In 1732 the corregidor concluded that "ser costumbre el que hereden y subsedan hembras en los
casicasgos de dicha villa" of Maras. ARC, RA, Ord., 27 (1798), f. 50r. Also Don Miguel Guaypartupa's
attempt to regain the cacicazgo of Lamay, in the name of his wife. ARC, AUD, Ord., 18 (1795).
32 ARC, N18, 133 Juan Bautista Gamarra, n/f, n/d. "Dolia Sebastiana Bustinza Yaurec Arisa hija lex-
itima de Don Jospeh Bustinza ya difunto y de Doria Melchora Yaurec Arisa que al presente vive gover-
nadora de dichos ayllos en quien recay6 dho ayllo a falta de varon desde sus antepasados, y . . . recae
dho gov.no en la dha mi muger lex.ma . . . de consentim.to y beneplasito [de Doha Melchora] por hal-
larse ya de abansada hedad fui nombrado por tal casique interino y confirmado por el R1 y Sup.r Gov.no
de estos Reynos, hasta en el interim que tenga susesion de varon o de hembra. . . ."
so on? For most instances the record is so brief that such questions are
unanswerable, but it is noteworthy that the matter was openly addressed in
colonial testimony. Indeed, in 1782 several witnesses in the Tamboguacso
succession dispute named Melchora Yaurec Ariza as one of several cacicas
who governed for themselves in nearby communities.34 Another was Pedro
Sahuaraura's mother, Doria Maria Ramos Tito Atauchi in Cusco's Santiago
parish, who governed Ayllu Cachona (under hereditary Sahuaraura control)
after his death. In 1787, she sought permission to appoint a segunda (Don
Lorenzo Quispe Tacuri, an Inca noble related to her by marriage) to per-
form her responsibilities, because of her age.35 Nonetheless, she remained
formally the cacica until her death a decade later, in so doing ensuring that
the office passed to her grandchildren. To the south, in the Vilcanota high-
lands, Doria Catalina Salas y Pachacutic claimed in her will that she owned
land in Layo that had been given her by the community and the corregidor
in compensation for services and debts as cacica, suggesting a very active
engagement. And in 1795, when Doria Juliana Carlos Uisa, who had gov-
erned Achaya since the death of her father, was briefly deposed in favor
Don Felipe Carlos Uisa, she was quickly reinstated by the Intendant "[in
response to] the clamor of the Indians" who considered Felipe incapable of
governing.36
Such testimony does not provide clear answers to what, if any, particular
duties and authorities of the cacique were considered inappropriate for caci-
cas. But it suggests that to people in eighteenth-century Cusco it was plau-
sible that women cacicas might "govern," a relation to the community that
was, in testimony, distinguished from simply having formal claim to the
office. That women who actually wielded cacical authority raised concerns
is clear; so too is both that such women were accepted, and that the formal
recognition of a cacica's authority could maintain familial possession of
office, whether she actually ruled or not. Perhaps don Francisco Xavier Tico
Chipana captured these ambivalences better in 1791 than any modern com-
mentary when, seeking restitution of his family's rule over Zepita Urinsaya,
near Lake Titicaca, he noted that his sister, Doria Juliana Tico Chipana, had
been cacica until she was killed by rebels in 1781, and that she had governed
well "in spite of her sex."37
33 Sahuaraura was killed leading the royalist regiment of Cusco's Inca nobles in the first major battle
of the rebellion, at Sangarard.
34 ARC, RA, Ord., 31 (1798), ff. 62-75.
35 ARC, CAB, Ped., 116 (1787-1799).
36 "al clamor de los naturales" ARC, Int. Gob, 147.
37 "a pesar de su sexo" BNP, C-1705.
In short, if somewhat suspect cacicas were nonetheless widely accepted.

I have come across only two explicit challenges to the right of an Indian
noblewoman to inherit or rule because of her sex; one is that against Maria
Teresa Choquehuanca. The other again comes from Taray. When Rita Tam-
boguacso's father Lucas succeeded to the cacicazgo in 1762, he was chal-
lenged by a cousin, Doria Gregoria Tamboguacso (whose parents had held
the cacicazgo before Joseph). In the ensuing lawsuit, none of the witnesses
challenged Gregoria's ancestry, nor the standing of her husband (Fernando
Pumayalli, who would testify on Rita's behalf twenty years later); but, while
one creole gave examples of nearby cacicas, other witnesses insisted that "it
is the Inca and immemorial custom that women do not succeed to this caci-
cazgo."38 That "Inca and immemorial custom" changed (without comment)
in two decades suggests that the issue was less a firm commitment to male
succession than a rhetorical deployment of custom to serve contemporary
political interests within the community.39
Still, the invocation of custom to deny women political authority is note-

worthy: certainly no witness in the colonial Andes would have asserted that
by custom women did not inherit property. Indeed, more striking than
women possessing political authority is that this possession and exercise
were circumscribed, for indigenous women had considerable power in colo-
nial Andean society.4- Over the past decades historians have exposed
women's central roles in the colonial economy, as traders, lenders, landown-
ers, and the dominant force in many urban marketplaces.41 Indian noble-
women amassed, and inherited, sizable fortunes.42 While in theory the hus-
band's permission was necessary for notarized contracts, most of the
indigenous economy operated outside the purview of the notary, and Indian
women engaged on their own in business dealings. Inca noblewomen in
urban Cusco were active grain merchants and moneylenders, owned textile
factories and taverns, and joined with corregidores in the forced sales of the
reparto; the fortunes of the richest of these equaled those of the richest Inca
38 ARC, RA, Ord., 31 (1798), f. 18v ". . . es costumbre ynconcuza e ymmemorial no succedan las
hembras en este Gobierno."
39 Graubart, With Our Labor and Sweat, pp. 158-185 passim for the political deployment of pre-con-
quest "custom" in cacical succession battles.
4- For women's informal role in village politics, see William B. Taylor, Drinking, Homicide and
Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979), pp. 116-7; and
Stern, The Secret History of Gender, pp. 204-8.
41 Mangan, Trading Roles, pp. 9-13 for a survey of the literature; also n6 above.
42 Susan Kellogg, "From Parallel and Equivalent to Separate but Unequal: Tenochca Mexica
Women, 1500-1700," pp. 123-144 in Indian Women of Early Mexico, ed. by Susan Schroeder, Stephanie
Wood, and Robert Haskett (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), p. 134 for colonial inheri-
tance law.
noblemen.43 Rural cacicas also owned considerable property: Doria Catalina

Salas y Pachacutic's estate included the local oven, a small textile factory,
and haciendas worth 10,000 pesos, and in her wills she insisted that all was
acquired through her own work, with no help from her two husbands.44
The authority of Indian noblewomen was not limited to the realm of prop-
erty and the market. Evidence here is scarcer, but documentation from the
Great Rebellion of 1780-82 makes clear that elite women had considerable
power in their communities. Doria Micaela Bastidas, Jose Gabriel Ttipac
Amaru's wife, was central to the rebellion's leadership.45 The cacica of
Acos, Doria Tomasa Tito Condemyata, was executed along with the Ttipac
Amaru family for having gathered troops to defend a river crossing, while
in Cavanilla Doria Juana Quispe Yupanqui also rallied tributaries to join the
rebellion.46 More generally, statements in lawsuits make clear that such
women were forces to reckon with in their pueblos. After the rebellion the
widow of the cacique of Guarina, in La Paz, sought the office in the name
of their underage daughter, noting that she had considerable experience gov-
erning the town during her husband's absences.47 In 1794, when the princi-
pales of Azangaro Urinsaya complained to the Cusco Audiencia about the
abusive rule of their cacique, Don Domingo Mango Turpa, they conceded
that, as he spent most of his time in Cusco enmeshed in lawsuits, they had
suffered little directly from his hands. Rather, his wife, Doria Antonio
Chuquicallata, governed in his stead and was a terror, subjecting them to
"abuses and mistreatment . . . so that they fear to enter her house [to provide]
the customary service."48
Such comments suggest hostility toward women's power, manifest in

gruesome popular violence against cacicas around Lake Titicaca during the
Rebellion. Indeed, in 1781 the women from the commons of Azangaro had
hung those of the Mango Turpa family in the main plaza; and in Juli, after a
massacre of the Indian nobility, rebels were reputed to have drained and
43 AAC, II-7-128; ARC, COR, Ped., 90 (1756) for the trade dispute involving Dofia Phelipa Pillco
Sisa; ARC NOT18, 133 Juan Bautista Gamarra, 133 n/f, 23 August 1758 for the will of Dofia Tomasa
Ramos Tito Atauchi; n/f, 12 February 1777 and n/f, 20 October 1745 for Dofia Antonia Loyola Cusitito
Atauyupanqui and Dofia Catalina Sutapongo.
44 See above, n19.
45 Leon G. Campbell, "Women and the Great Rebellion in Peru, 1780-1783," The Americas 42:2
(1985), pp. 163-96. ColecciOn Documental del Bicentenario de la Revolucion Emancipadora de Ttipac
Amaru, ed. by Luis Durand FlOrez (Lima: 1980), IV: pp. 14, 20-25, 42, 188-208.
46 Durand Florez, ed., ColecciOn Documental del Bicentenario de la Revolucion, III: pp. 56, 76, 324.
47 Thomson, We Alone Will Rule, p. 233.
48 ". . . algunos dafios y maltrato . . . y que por to tanto temen entrar a su casa con el servicio que es
costumbre. . . ." ARC, RA, 14 (1794).
drunk the blood of one cacica.49 Taken together, such incidents and com-
plaints about abusive cacicas and caciques' wives show opposition to
women possessing such power, but also underscore that they did possess it.
And they displayed it. Eighteenth-century paintings of elite Inca women

feature a servant holding a parasol over the noble, illustrating the perform-
ance of female authority.50 The wills of highland cacicas list lavish vestments,
largely of indigenous garb-Fianacas worth dozens of pesos, llicllas and
acsus made of vicuna and fine wool and embroidered with gold and silver
thread.51 Noblemen, too, marked their status through their clothes, but by the
eighteenth century these were the garb of well-to-do creoles: jackets and
trousers, capes, beaver hats. Certainly indigenous noblemen were more "his-
panicized" than noblewomen, more likely to be literate and fluent in Spanish,
with greater knowledge of colonial law and the workings of colonial govern-
ment. As a result, indigenous authority was hispanicized: culturally, the most
powerful Indian man in a community was the most like his creole neighbors
and most distant from the village commons. This gendered performance of
cultural identity reflected a broader coding of authority, with the markers of
Spanish-ness indicating political power. At the same time, the colonial order
required and produced indigenous political authority in rural communities;
that Indian noblewomen were less culturally "Spanish" than their male peers
might have helped to make cacicas acceptable to communities.52
But analyzing cacical authority based solely on the cacique or cacica

overlooks a central aspect of Andean culture: notwithstanding the occasional
bachelor, spinster, or widowed cacique, and despite the formal colonial
49 Caciques and other male nobles were also subjected to extreme and ritualistic violence;
Szeminski's findings suggest some gendering to the actions, although descriptions in any detail are
scarce. Gilberto Salas Perea, Monografia Sintitica de Azcingaro (Puno: Editorial Los Andes, 1966), p.
22; Jan Szeminski, "Why Kill the Spaniard? New Perspectives on Andean Insurrectionary Ideology in
the 18th Century" in Steve J. Stern, ed., Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peas-
ant World, 18th to 20th Centuries (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), p. 171.
50 Luis Eduardo Wuffarden, "La descendencia real y el 'renacimiento inca' en el virreinato," in Los
Incas, reyes del Perd (Lima: Banco de Credito, 2005), pp. 217, 227.
51 The lliclla is a rectangular woven shawl, worn (pinned across the chest) over the acsu, a wrapped
skirt or dress of a rectangular weaving; the fiaiiaca is a small cloth worn on top of the head as a sign of
high female rank. In 1756 among the clothing of Doria Rafaela Tito Atauchi, the daughter of the Inca
cacique of Copacabana and wife of the cacique of Pucarani (both in La Paz), was a taffeta-lined velvet
liatiaca appraised at a remarkable 36 pesos, ANB, EC-1773-83. For noblewomen's clothing generally.
ADP, INT, 51; ARC, N18, 133 Juan Bautista Gamarra, n/f, 26 August, 1755; n/f, 9 January 1749; and n/f,
12 February 1777.
52 For gender and ethnic identity in twentieth-century Cuzco, Marisol de la Cadena, "'Women are
More Indian': Ethnicity and Gender in a Community near Cuzco" pp. 329-348 in Ethnicity, Markets and
Migration in the Andes: At the Crossroads of History and Anthropology. ed. by Brooke Larson and Olivia
Harris (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).
understanding of the cacicazgo as held by an individual, in their role in vil-

lage life it is more accurate to speak of a cacical couple or household. Cer-
tainly lawsuits against caciques generally include complaints of abuses by
the cacique's spouse and children.53 Beyond the practical value of embed-
ding caciques and cacicas in their domestic economies, treating the cacical
couple as a unit also acknowledges the enormous importance of dualism in
Andean thought.54 A unity requires opposed constituent parts; in that, the
cacical couple-whatever their standing in the eyes of Spanish law-more
fully represented both community and authority than just the cacique or
cacica. While reading colonial Andean society through imperial Inca prac-
tice is problematic, the mother and principal wife of the Inca emperor
actively participated in rule; and, according to Betanzos, the Inca emperor
married his principal wife at the time of his ascent to the throne, suggesting
that supreme political authority resided with a couple.55 The archival record
hints at a similar understanding of cacical authority within the pueblo in the
late colonial southern highlands. Antonia Chuquicallata-the heiress to
Saman's cacicazgo who tributaries claimed actually governed Azangaro
Urinsaya-did not describe herself as a "cacica" of Azangaro in legal docu-
ments.56 And yet, to the male elders of Azangaro she was, with a formidable
authority that derived from her ancestry, her husband, and her role in the
cacical household. This suggests that, in practice if not formally, cacical
authority often lay with the couple more than just the cacique or husband--
particularly when husbands ruled with heiresses.57 Then the union of legiti-
mate authority, held by a woman through inheritance, with its formal exer-
cise by a man (often from another community), joined female and male,
community and outside world, hereditary and acquired authority.
Nonetheless, it remains that women formally possessed political author-

ity far less than they wielded economic clout, with men enjoying a monop-
oly on the elective offices of the pueblo and disproportionately controlling
the aristocratic authority of the cacicazgo. Nor is this inconsistent with
Spanish society, in which women maintained title to their property and exer-
53 For examples, ANB, EC-1762-144; ANB, Ruck, 217; ARE, PRH, 184.
54 Silverblatt, Moon, Sun and Witches, pp. 20-66; Therese Bouysse-Cassagne, "Urco and uma:
Aymara concepts of space" pp. 201-227 in Anthropological History of Andean Polities, ed. by Murra et
al.; Floyd G. Lounsbury, "Some aspects of the Inka kinship system" pp. 121-136 in Anthropological His-
tory of Andean Polities, ed. by Murra et al.
55 D'Altroy, The Incas, pp. 91, 103-106.
56 Although in a 1797 dispute she did refer to herself as the ". . . casica proprietario por derecho de
sangre del Pueblo de Saman. . . ." ARE PRA 392; ARE PRA 482 for claims of Inca ancestry.
57 For references to cacical couples collectively as the "los caciques gobernadores" of their commu-
nity, see ANB, EC-1793-11 (Chucuito); ARC, N18 110 Joseph Bernardo Gamarra, 3 July 1785, f. 710
(Oropesa); ARC, AUD, Ord., 33 (1799) (Juli).
cised considerable control over it in marriage, but were excluded from

formal roles in politics.58 This suggests a dichotomy between formal or offi-
cial authority, defined in the great reform of Andean society by viceroy
Toledo and his advisors in the 1570s, and the realm of economic, familial,
and personal authority that mattered enormously in Andean communities but
functioned away from the direct purview of Spanish administration. The
exercise of colonial official authority-that affiliated with offices of munic-
ipal government, royal rule, and the church-was formally limited to men.59
The honorific offices of elector and standard-bearer of Cusco's Inca cabildo
were held by Inca noblemen: not one woman appears among over one hun-
dred electors in the 18th-century electoral book.6- And the democratic inno-
vations of the Toledan reforms-the village cabildo and the alcalde-were
also exclusively male: I have never found reference to a woman alcalde or
cabildo-member in the archive.61
The one clear exception to this exclusion was the cacica, exposing a cen-
tral contradiction in the definition of cacical power, recognized in the laws
of colonial Peru as both a bureaucratic office (hence, male) and a family
possession (hence, not necessarily gendered).62 With this we return to the
one universal characteristic of the late colonial cacica: she possessed author-
ity based on a familial claim, thereby embodying the supremacy of aristo-
cratic, seigneurial control of cacical office in the Indian republic over the
bureaucratization of cacical power and its inclusion in the domain of the
colonial state. So too did the cacical heir, and when an adult son succeeded
his father as cacique family authority foreclosed communal politics. But in
the many instances where there was some recognized claim to a cacicazgo
but no male heir, the cacical heiress created a space of aristocratic authority
within the pueblo that was protected from royal intrusion, yet open to aris-
tocratic, male competition.
58 Mary Elizabeth Perry, Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1990), pp. 14-20. And, of course, Lope de Vega's Fuenteovejuna and Calder& de la
Barca's El alcalde de Zalamea.
59 Convents offered a partial exception for Spanish women. Kathryn J. Burns, Colonial Habits: Con-
vents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).
60 ARC, COR, Civ., 29, 620.
61 See Bianca Premo, "From the Pockets of Women: The Gendering of the Mita, Migration, and Trib-
ute in Colonial Chucuito, Peru" The Americas 57:1 (July 2000), pp. 63-4 for concern by the Potosi
cabildo that the demographic havoc wrought by the Potosi mita had led to women alcaldes around Titi-
caca; the absence of archival mention of such women suggests that this was rhetorical hyperbole.
62 A similar contradiction manifested itself in Spain, over women's inheritance and exercise of
seigneurial authority. Cristian Berco, "Juana Pimentel, the Mendoza Family, and the Crown," pp. 27-47
in Helen Nader, ed., Power and Gender in Renaissance Spain (University of Illinois Press, 2004); and
the discussion of Leonor de la Vega and Aldonza Tellez de la Vega in L.J. Andrew Villalon, "The
Anatomy of an Aristocratic Property Dispute, 1350-1577" (PhD Diss., Yale University, 1984).
By no means was the sex of the cacique the only, or even a dominant,
issue in pueblo politics, which for the two centuries between Toledo's
reforms and the rebellions of 1780-82 were driven largely by competition
between the commons and hereditary elites, and within those elites for con-
trol of cacical office. The first was the result of a central contradiction in the
colonial codification of the Indian Republic. We know very little about how
ayllu leaders were chosen, what their powers were, and what were the inter-
nal strata in pre-conquest communities. But Habsburg officials were deeply
concerned about village structure, which they aggressively reordered in the
late 1500s. The central reform was the resettlement of dispersed ayllus into
larger villages modeled on the Castilian municipalidad, ideally fairly demo-
cratic and by law (but not practice) closed to Spanish settlement.63 Both a
community in itself and a composite of its constituent ayllus, the pueblo had
an elected cabildo and officers, most importantly alcaldes and regidores,
chosen from and by the originarios, responsible for local governance and
the distribution of communal land.64 As in Spain, officeholding and election
were the preserve of men, so that democratic authority in the pueblo was
clearly gendered as male, with apparent deference to age as wel1.65
Holding the native elite responsible for the "barbarism" of indigenous

society, Toledo and his advisors had made clear their hostility in anti-aristo-
cratic decrees such that "the principal caciques not interfere in the elections
for alcaldes, regidores, and other offices of the republic," and that "neither the
cacique nor his second person be elected as alcalde or regidor."66 But the fre-
quent mention of caciques betrays the power that those at the top of the soci-
63 For the municipalidad, Helen Nader, Liberty in Absolutist Spain: The Habsburg Sale of Towns,
1516-1700 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), pp. 17-45.
64 Men in the "reptiblica de indios" fell into a number of legal categories, which were simplified in
the eighteenth century. The most common was that of originario, an adult man under 50 who was a full
member of the community in which he lived and had access to communal land; in return he owed trib-
ute and was responsible for communal burdens (most onerously, from Canas y Canchis south, the mining
mita to Potosi). Reservados were those over 50 who, in theory, received less land and did not pay tribute
or owe labor service. Forasteros were migrants, who had left their own communities and settled else-
where, who were responsible for lower tribute and exempt from the mita, but did not have formal access
to communal lands. Nobles were exempt from tribute and personal service; the source of nobility could
be written concession by the crown, or custom. In addition, every community had its "principales," usu-
ally noble or originarios, who generally spoke for the community and from whom elective officers were
drawn.
65 Stern, The Secret History of Gender, pp. 151-215; Thomson, We Alone Will Rule.
66 ,,. . . los Caziques principales, no le entremetan en las eleciones de los Alcaldes y Regidores y
demas oficiales de la Republica . . . no elijan al Cazique ni segunda persona para Alcalde o Regidor."
Thomas de Ballesteros, Tomo primero de las ordenanzas del Peril (Lima: Francisco Sobrino y Bados,
1752), Book II, Title I, Ordenanzas v-vi.
eties of the former Inca realms still retained. During the reforms Peru's Span-
ish officials debated what role this indigenous elite should have in the vicere-
gal order; in the end, the crown's dependence on native lords' ability to
extract tribute and mobilize labor corvees carried the day.67 As a result, the
crown recognized the cacicazgo and tried to model it on a hereditary lordship,
so that as it evolved the formal description of the cacique's authority
extended beyond tribute collection to promoting respectable, Christian living
and preventing discord; settling small disputes; assigning and executing cor-
poral punishment; and generally serving as patriarch of the community.
This contradiction between the democratic ideals, institutions and offices

of the colonial pueblo and the power concentrated in the cacicazgo consti-
tuted one of the principal tensions in the Indian republic-as the principales
of Muriani and Maria Teresa Choquehuanca could testify.68 As in Muriani, in
many communities the principales and originarios were important actors.
Court cases often saw a score or so men, led by a few taking the honorific
"Don," testify on behalf of "el comtin."69 Still, in most communities, and
particularly in large pueblos with complex economies and hierarchies,
caciques-of the entire pueblo or of individual ayllus-were the dominant
force until after the Great Rebellion, when a widespread assertion of (male)
democratic power weakened the Indian nobility before its legal abolition in
the nineteenth century.
The cacicazgo thus stood at the heart of pueblo politics, and was the
object of noble politicking as men of elite lineages sought to claim the
office. Some communities had established dynasties-the Tamboguacsos
and the Choquehuancas. In others, the cacicazgo fell within the gift of the
crown to be occupied on an "interim" basis by a royal appointee; maneu-
vering to obtain these offices was central to the politics of the pueblo, albeit
generally limited to men from the dominant lineages.70 But many cacicaz-
gos fell in between: hereditary in a family where the late cacique left no
adult heir, or sufficiently in the hold of an interim cacique that his son or
son-in-law became the obvious successor. In these cases, cacicas played a
67 Francisco Falcon, "RepresentaciOn hecha . . . sobre los daiios y molestias que se hacen a los
Indios" in ColecciOn de documentos ineditos del Archivo de Indias, ed. Luis Torres de Mendoza, Series
I, VII: pp. 451-95 (Madrid: Ministerio del Ultramar, 1864-84); Juan Polo de Ondegardo, RelaciOn de los
fundamentos acerca del notable dalio que resulta de no guardar a los Indios sus fueros (Lima: Sanmarti
y ca., 1916); Hernando de Santillan, Relacion del gobierno de los Incas (Lima: Sanmarti y ca., 1927).
68 Thomson, We Alone Will Rule, pp. 27-63.
69 ANB, EC-1762-144; ARC, COR, Prov., aim., 84 (1745-73) for Mamani of Marangani.
70 For politicking around interim cacicazgos, ANB, EC-1780-58 (Hulloma, Pacajes); and ARC, RA,
Adm., 167 (1808-9) for the 1759 cacical election in Rurioa.
central role in elite politics, in two ways. First, as an heiress the cacica dis-
played and enabled a family's intergenerational control of office. Second,
cacical aspirants outnumbered offices, and female succession helped medi-
ate competition among a broader male elite, with marriage to the cacical
heiress serving as the mechanism by which cacical authority was assigned
while also making possible the reproduction of a broader hereditary elite.
These politics, and the role of the cacica, differed by community and
region. In the highlands between Cusco and Titicaca, an area that suffered
heavily from the obligatory annual labor corvees to Potosi's mines and the
migrations this mita provoked, cacical heiresses both brought political con-
tinuity and enabled upward mobility for successful men in the Indian repub-
lic, as sons-in-law took over cacicazgos through their marriage to cacical
couples' daughters.71 Such succession also helped to prevent consolidation
of cacical authority in one male line. In Marangani Don Baltasar Mamani
ruled Ayllu Lurucachi in the mid-1700s after marrying Doi% Cecilia Pocco,
the daughter of the previous cacique. Yet more than two dozen of the com-
munity's men joined to oppose the rule of their son, Don Santos Mamani,
specifically citing as a grievance that his father had been a forastero, so the
son could not succeed.72 Here female succession enabled the incorporation
of a successful outsider to take on the communal burdens, but the male
elders of the community repudiated efforts to establish hereditary rule in one
male line.
In other areas, particularly the Titicaca basin and the Inca-dominated

provinces around Cusco, the Indian republic had provincial, rather than
pueblo, elites, who maintained hereditary control over the region's cacicaz-
gos. Particularly common in these areas, cacicas were essential to the main-
tenance and reproduction of such provincial nobilities. Spanish rule made no
place for extra-local associations of Indian nobles.73 Regional elites were
thus self-fashioned groups, in these two instances building on the founda-
tions of powerful and hierarchical pre-conquest societies. Christian mar-
riage--one institution the Spanish were eager to see flourish in the Indian
republic--allowed noble lineages to forge bonds across several provinces.
In the perpetuation of these regional elites, and the allocation of authority
within them, cacicas played a central role.
71 Also ARC, COR, Prov., Ord., 76 (1780-84), for Don Cristobal Aruni Mollo Apasa's succession to
the cacicazgo of Ayllu Anza in Sicuani in 1761. For migration and the mita in the bishopric, Ann Wight-
man, Indigenous Migration and Social Change: The Forasteros of Cuzco, 1520-1720 (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1990).
72 ARC, COR, Prov., Crim., 84 (1745-73); Stavig, The World of Tiipac Amaru, pp. 231-2.
73 With the very limited exception of the ceremonial Inca cabildo in Cusco. Amado, "El alferez real."
In the Aymara societies around Lake Titicaca, ancient, powerful pueblos

with populations in the thousands came under the hereditary rule of equally
ancient, and powerful, lineages, many tracing their ancestry to the Inca
emperors and pre-conquest local lords.74 Here in the mid-1700s a score or
so families created a regional aristocracy through matrimonial bonds
stretching across the lake. The bonds of the Choquehuancas of Azangaro
Anansaya are illustrative. Don Blas Choquehuanca (brother of Maria
Teresa) married Doria Maria Siriani, daughter of the cacique of Carabuco,
fifty miles away on the eastern shore of the lake. Maria's mother was a Fer-
nandez Chuy, the cacical family of Laxa south of the lake.75 In turn, the Fer-
nandez Chuy intermarried with the cacical houses of Pucarani and Copaca-
bana.76 In the 1770s, such interwoven networks of cacical dynasties left
thousands of tributaries under the rule of an interrelated aristocracy.77 Often,
occupying the wife's family cacicazgo as well as or instead of the hus-
band's, these cacical couples were among the richest in Indian Peru, amass-
ing fortunes of over 10,000 pesos; class tensions within the Indian republic
were correspondingly stronger here than elsewhere in the bishopric.78 The
formation of this cacical aristocracy increasingly excluded secondary vil-
lage elites from power, fueling the opposition to "wife-takers"--men from
other communities who obtained the cacicazgo through marriage--detected
by Thomson.79
Around Cusco, cacicas were equally important to the consolidation and

reproduction of the regional Inca nobility, but with Cusco's peculiar his-
tory its organization differed markedly from that of the Titicaca basin. A
major Spanish city, Cusco nonetheless retained important features of the
city's former imperial society. Inca Cusco had comprised dozens of kin-
ship groups, linked together in complex hierarchies of interdependence
and each scattered over the region.8-- The Toledan reductions had under-
74 Garrett, Shadows of Empire, pp. 106-13.

75 ANB, EC-1789-80; ARE, PRA, 290.
76 ANB, EC-1773-83; and AGN-A, IX, 31-3-4, f. 103.
77 ANB, EC-1785-23 (for Don Ambrosio Quispe Cavana of Cavanilla and Doha Maria Ygnacia
Chique Ynga Charaja of Pomata); ARC, N18, 124 Joseph Bernardo Gamarra, f. 233 (for Don Bernardo
Succacahua of Umachire and the daughter of Don Manuel Garcia Cotacallapa of Usicayos); ARC, N18,
288 Villavisencio, f. 352, 27-02-1778 (for Francisco Succacahua and the daughter of Quiquijana's prin-
cipal caciques); below for the Mango Turpa-Chuquicallata alliances.
78 Fernandez Chuy in Copacabana (AGN-A, IX, 31-3-4, f. 10); also Quispe Cavana in Pomata,
Mango Turpa in Saman, Succacahua in Quiquijana; Garrett, Shadows of Empire, pp. 131-2. Also Glave,
Vida, Simbolos y Batallas, pp. 117-78; Choque Canqui, Sociedad y economia colonial; and Rivera, "El
Mallku y la sociedad colonial."
79 We Alone Will Rule, pp. 77-80.
80 Silverblatt, Moon, Sun, and Witches, pp. 20-66; D'Altroy, The Incas, pp. 103-6, Brian Bauer,
Ancient Cusco: Heartland of the Inca (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), pp. 177-9.
mined such ayllu networks, and by the 1750s Cusco's pueblos were dis-
crete communities. But still binding them together was the kinship net-
work of the erstwhile royal Incas (broadly redefined through two cen-
turies of Spanish rule). Several colonial, Inca ayllus enjoyed near
universal male nobility, and together with other Inca lineages and hered-
itary cacical families they formed a broader caste, perhaps one-twentieth
of the indigenous population, that enjoyed a near monopoly on the area's
cacicazgos.81
The generous concession of nobility (by edict and by custom) to the

Incas left far more nobles than cacicazgos around Cusco. Here female suc-
cession played a crucial role in both establishing continuity across genera-
tions and allowing a mechanism by which to contest possession. In Taray,
the two succession battles featured a male heir against an heiress and her
locally prominent husband. In the first, Lucas was successful; in the
second, Rita and Sebastian. Perhaps we see a shift to greater creole power
and the consolidation of parent-child succession; or perhaps just the same
structural contest playing itself out differently. What is striking is how often
a cacical heiress stood at the heart of such competition: father-son succes-
sion was by no means the norm. In a century of undisputed Tamboguacso
rule in Taray, only once in five successions did a son follow his father.82
The frequency of female succession produced a constant traffic in Inca
noblemen, strengthening the bonds between the Inca nobility of different
villages and leaving many ayllus under the rule of men from outside.83
Thus, from the 1740s to 1790 Santiago's Ayllu Choco was governed by the
daughter and granddaughter of Don Diego Yarisi and their husbands, Inca
noblemen from other parishes. Nor was succession always harmonious: in
Choco the claim of Doila Catalina Tisoc Sayritupa and her husband, Don
Gabriel Guamantica (son of the cacique of Guarocondo), was unsuccess-
fully challenged by Catalina's younger sister and her husband, the son of
the cacique of Ayllu Sucso in San Sebastian. Akin to the "wife-takers"
around Titicaca, such forastero caciques did not go unchallenged. In Maras,
Don Pablo Llanac Aucapuma, cacique of one ayllu, unsuccessfully opposed
the accession of Dofia Juliana Sancho Uscapaucar and her husband, an Inca
noble from Pucyura, to another of the pueblo's cacicazgos.84 But these bat-
tles had more to do with intra-elite politics than with a popular repudiation
of the practice.
81 Garrett, "Los Incas borbOnicos."

82 Garrett, Shadows of Empire, p. 94.
83 See Table 1, for Bela, Guarocondo, Maras, Guayllabamba, Lamay, Caycay and Oropesa.
84 ARC, COR, Ped., 90 (1753-65).
In some cases, cacicas were "second bests," a way to maintain a lineage's

hold on a cacicazgo in the absence of a male heir. Indeed, Juliana Sancho
Uscapaucar's father left the cacicazgo first to her brother Sebastian; she suc-
ceeded only because he died without heirs.85 But at times daughters were
preferred to sons as heirs. In the 1780s and 1790s Pucyura's Ayllu Ayarmaca
was ruled by Don Blas Quispe Uscayamayta, son of one of the pueblo's Inca
lineages and husband of Dofia Marcusa Nancay. Her grandfather, Don
Miguel Nancay, had been the ayllu's cacique in the middle of the century,
when he achieved lasting fame for traveling to Lima to successfully defend
the community's mill against the aspirations of the parish priest. Her uncle,
Pascual Nancay, was cacique of another ayllu, Collana.86 Rather than pass-
ing directly from father to son, here the pueblo's ayllu cacicazgos moved
among several noble lineages, who intermarried to consolidate control over
the larger community without any one establishing hereditary rule over a
particular ayllu.87
Indeed, in some cases a cacical matriline apparently prevented any one

male lineage from establishing dominion over other noble lines in the com-
munity. San Sebastian, an agricultural suburb of Cusco, was home to many
of the imperial Inca ayllus, among which Ayllu Sucso (the descendants of the
Inca Viracocha) was exceptional in its size and nobility: in 1768 all 120 of its
men enjoyed the noble exemption from tribute and personal service. From
the 1750s to the early 1790s Sucso's cacique was Don Cayetano Tupa Gua-
manrimachi.88 An Inca noble, Cayetano came from Ayllu Aucaylli, of which
his father was a part but not cacique; from her name Dona Pascuala Quispe
Sucso--his mother appears to have come from Ayllu Sucso. Cayetano suc-
ceeded an uncle as an elector of the Inca cabildo, and became cacique of two
of San Sebastian's smaller, non-noble ayllus in the 1750s. He then married
Doria Asencia Quispe Sucso from Ayllu Sucso. Notably, she brought as part
of her dowry her share of the "casa principal" of San Sebastian, suggesting
that she was the cacical heiress--although, strikingly, he, not she, was
referred to as cacique. But their sons did not succeed Cayetano (one instead
trying to claim the cacicazgo in Santiago, another serving as cacique of San
85 See the copy of his will in the claim to the cacicazgo made by Don Mauricio Uscamayta. ARC,
AUD, Ord., 27 (1798).
86 ARC, INT, RH, 211 (1801); ARC, N19 77 Pedro Joaquin Gamarra, f. 584, 16-08-1804; ARC,
CAB, Ped., 117 (1800-09); "Indios de sangre real," Revista del Archivo HistOrico del Cusco 1:1 (1950):
pp. 211-2.
87 Similarly, in Guarocondo a noble from Urubamba, Don Lorenzo Copa Cusicondor, married
Gabriel Guamantica's half-sister Sebastiana and succeeded their father, Don Joseph Guamantica, while
Gabriel occupied the cacicazgo in Santiago through his marriage. ARC, INT, Gob., 133 (1785).
88 ARC, N18, 245 Rodriguez de Ledezma, f. 507, 27 June 1790.
Sebastian's Ayllu Sahuaraura).89 This suggests that the Ayllu Sucso--with its
many noblemen aware of their privileges--solved the problem of internal
hierarchy by bringing in an outsider with maternal ties to the ayllu as cacique;
asserted male dominance by recognizing him, not his wife, as cacique; yet
kept communal control by tying the office to a matriline.
To be sure, not always did the husband rule with, or in the name of, the
cacica. Throughout the bishopric a number of women ruled over their com-
munities, almost always as widows, as mother or grandmothers preserving
family rule until the next generation reached maturity (Tables 1 and 2),
although even here there were exceptions. Doria Martina Chiguantupa, an
unmarried beata who lived in seclusion in Cusco, succeeded her father as
cacica of most of the ayllus in the parish of Colquepata and formally gov-
erned for more than thirty years, usually through male deputies. In the south-
ern highlands Catalina Salas Pachacutic and Tomasa Tito Condemayta gov-
erned despite having living husbands. But overall, the governing cacica
personified a family's control over its community, strong enough to weather
the absence of an adult son or son-in-law.
Cacicas also loomed large in another negotiation at the heart of pueblo

politics: the border between Indian and Spanish. From 1690 to 1790 the
number of rural "Spaniards" in the bishopric of Cusco went from scarcely
5,000 to over 50,000, or from about four percent of the population to over
eighteen.9-- Most were impoverished mestizos, but every province had its
Spanish elite of hacendados, miners, and merchants, which grew over the
eighteenth century. While local elites of the two ethnic republics had long
forged bonds through intermarriages, as late as 1750 many cacical families
had no Spaniards in their genealogies.91 But from then, such marriages, and
creole caciques, became more common: from 1760 to 1780 in Acos, Anta,
and Taray, creole husbands entered important cacicazgos through their
wives.92 To be sure, in the 1770s as many cacical heiresses married Indian
noblemen as creoles, and cacical politicking remained largely a concern of
89 ARC, INT, Gob., 139 (1787); ARC, CAB, Ped., 116 (1787-99).
9-- Garrett, Shadows of Empire, pp. 60-71. During that period the Indian population went from
120,000 to 240,000.
91 ANB, EC-1793-11 (Chucuito); Horacio Villanueva Urteaga, ed., Cuzco 1689, Documentos:
economfa y sociedad en el sur andino (Cusco: Centro Bartolome de Las Casas, 1982), pp. 195 (Anta)
and 397 (Guaquirca).
92 For Don Tomas Escalante and Doria Ana Tito Condemayta of Acos, ARC, N18, 258 Joseph Tapia
Sarmiento, f. 357, 6 May 1767. Ana was succeeded by Doria Tomasa Tito Condemayta, who also mar-
ried a creole (Don Faustino Delgado) but is described as the "cacica gobernardora" in her own name. For
Delgado, Scarlett O'Phelan Godoy, Un siglo de rebeliones anticoloniales: Perri y Bolivia 1700-1783
(Cusco: Centro Bartolome de Las Casas, 1988), p. 315.
the Indian republic. But that would change dramatically in the last decades
of the colonial era, as the cacicazgo became the site of other, larger political
contests and the Indian nobility lost its control of the pueblo and its position
of privilege.
From late 1780 through 1781, much of the Indian population from Cusco
south to Potosi rose against the colonial order. The inter-related rebellions led
by TtVac Amaru, the Catari brothers, and Tapac Catari, and the countless
jacqueries they provoked, constituted the most sweeping challenge to Span-
ish rule in the Americas from the conquest to independence.93 While loyalist
forces reasserted royal control by 1782, the Great Rebellion and the ensuing
royal response provoked a restructuring of the rural political order that wiped
away the social space of the Indian nobility. The interaction of three chal-
lenges to aristocratic authority produced this erasure: the expansion of creole
power, the crown's efforts to extend its authority and to check that of the
Indian elite, and popular opposition within the Indian republic. Slowing this
general move was the courts' commitment to respecting well-documented
claims from particular families, but by the outbreak of the Wars of Indepen-
dence in 1809, the Indian nobility was no longer a powerful sector of society.
In seeking to expand royal and popular authority, both crown officers and vil-
lage men explicitly challenged female power, although creoles supported
women's succession to office as a means by which to extend control over the
pueblo, through marriage; and royal officials' assault on cacicas was disci-
plined by the courts' occasional insistence on respecting previously conceded
privileges. In that, while the politics of the pueblo changed dramatically after
the rebellions, the cacica remained at their heart.
The rebellions were responses to the crown's efforts to expand its control
over the viceroyalty and to increase revenues; in their aftermath, far from
backing down, royal officials increased the intrusiveness of these reforms. A
Royal Audiencia was founded in Cusco, and a new system of provincial
governance was established, in which the corregidor was replaced by the
(very similar) subdelegate, but now every five or ten of these governors
came under the authority of an intendant located in the nearest city.94 At the
local level, responsibility for tribute collection moved from the interim
93 O'Phelan Godoy, Un siglo de rebeliones anticoloniales; Thomson, We Alone Will Rule; Serul-
nikov, Subverting Colonial Authority; Cahill, From Rebellion to Independence in the Andes; Walker,
Smoldering Ashes; Garrett, Shadows of Empire.
94 John R. Fisher, Government and Society in Colonial Peru: The Intendant System, 1784-1814
(London: University of London, Athlone Press, 1970).
cacique (a position formally abolished in 1790) to the new "recaudador,"

although hereditary caciques often continued to serve as tribute collector.95
For the Indian nobility, this last change proved catastrophic, as it included
a clear preference that the recaudador be Spanish. As the subdelegate of Car-
avaya argued in 1784, "the principal object . . . in the new system of gov-
ernment . . . is that of creating Spanish caciques in each province and their
respective pueblos."96 Driving this change was the erroneous belief among
Spanish officials that the Indian nobility had been responsible for the rebel-
lion, when the upper ranks of the Indian republic had remained overwhelm-
ingly loyal to the crown, and suffered enormous losses at the hands of the
rebels.97 But also behind the reform was a commitment to bureaucratizing
and redefining local rule in the Andean countryside. In lawsuits against
Spanish tribute collectors royal judges would insist that the recaudador was
"without the titles, concept or authority of the cacique, nor does he have any
other superiority over the Indians" than the authority to collect tribute.98
Tellingly, the judge here referred to the position as an "empleo": the office
was a bureaucratic post, not familial property. While this reform did much
to hispanicize the office, it also rendered it explicitly male. Subdelegates and
intendants repudiated efforts by creole widows to follow cacical tradition
and occupy their late husbands' offices by explicitly invoking sex; as the
intendant of Cusco put it, "the office of tribute collector is a public office,
not suited to being held by women."99
The replacement of Indian interim caciques by creole recaudadores

shifted rural power from the Indian nobility to Peru's creoles. But this
realignment of social hierarchy was effected over two generations, during
which cacicas played a central role as the personification of hereditary, aris-
tocratic authority in the Indian republic. Cacicas benefited from the crown's
selective recognition of its debt to those who had defended royal rule; and
as many caciques had died in the rebellion, a number of loyalist cacicazgos
passed to mothers and grandmothers as caretakers, and to orphaned daugh-
ters as heirs.m Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of the rebellion, such
96 ANB, EC-1797-46 for the decree.

96 ARE, PSG, 158. "... siendo que el objeto principal ... en el nuevo sistema de govierno ... es el de
crear caciques Espanoles en cada partido y sus respectivos pueblas."
97 Garrett, Shadows of Empire, pp. 183-210.
98 ARC, INT, Gob., 150 (1800-1802), Catca. ". sin titulo, concepto, ni autoridad de cacique, ni
tener otra alguna superioridad en los naturales. ." In practice, the recaudador retained the privileges
and authority of the cacique.
99 ARC, INT, Gob., 147 (1796-7); Acomayo. ". que el officio de Recaudador de Tributos es un
empleo Pdblico, ageno de desemperiarse por Mugeres."
100 Garrett, Shadows of Empire, pp. 218-21, 233-44.
heiresses enabled surviving members of Titicaca's cacical dynasties to

attempt to rebuild the kin networks that had structured the regional aristoc-
racy. Don Pedro Mango Turpa (who had been studying in Cusco when the
rebellion broke out, and thus escaped the carnage around Titicaca) quickly
married Dofia Ana Maria Choquehuanca Sifiani, whose immediate family
had all died at Sorata and who thus became the teen-aged "cacica principal"
of Carabuco.1--1
Continuing until the outbreak of the wars of independence in 1809,

daughters and granddaughters of particularly prominent loyalist caciques
continued to inherit the office. However, notwithstanding a few alliances
like that of Mango Turpa and Choquehuanca Sifiani, from the mid-1780s on
their husbands were almost invariably Spanish. In that, female succession
both enabled royal officials to strip Indian caciques of their office, and
allowed creoles to gain control of Indian communities. As the presumption
that cacicazgos were hereditary in some form gave way to the presumption
that the new tribute-collectors would replace all but the most strongly-doc-
umented proprietary caciques, courts became more hostile to succession
practices that deviated from the father-son ideal. The Incas' tradition of
daughter/son-in-law succession facilitated the royal assault, as the royal
courts interpreted the husband's rule as an interim appointment, and the
office no longer the hereditary possession of the family.102 Thus, the caci-
cazgo of Lamay--which had moved for at least four generations through a
noble female line--passed to the first of a series of creoles in 1782 when the
courts refused to confirm the new Inca cacique of Lamay, who had distin-
guished himself in the crown's defense during the rebellion and sought the
office through his wife.1--3
Courts and governors looked more favorably on the claims of cacicas'

creole husbands. Here the renewed efforts to gender rural authority as male
and race it as Spanish collided. For these alliances nicely resolved some of
the contradictions in the crown's post-rebellion policy toward the cacical
elite: they tacitly recognized the claims of loyalist families, while moving
authority in the pueblo to the Spanish republic and allowing a formal asser-
1--1 In August, 1781, rebel armies captured the pueblo of Sorata, a refuge of royalist creoles and Indian
nobles from the areas north and east of Titicaca; the ensuing massacre decimated the region's indigenous
elite. Other Mango Turpas intermarried with the Chuquicallata, hereditary caciques of Saman and San
Taraco. ANB, EC-1786-175; ARE PSG, 149 (1790). Don Mariano Quispe Cavana (son of Antonio of
Cavanilla) married Doria Maria Rosario Llaclla Garcia Paca, an orphaned cacical heiress from Juli, and
served as cacique there in the 1790s; ARE, PRA, 386 (1797); ARE, PRA, 299 (1796).
102 See also Guarocondo and Pucyura: ARC, INT, Gob., 133 (1785); ARC, INT, RH, 202 (1798).
103 ARC, RA, Ord., 18 (1795); ARC, N18, 181 T.S. Gamarra, 17 July 1799.
tion of royal control over the office, as such creole appointments were
viewed as interim.104 In Anta, Nicholas Rosas was succeeded by his creole
son-in-law. In Taray Sebastian Unzueta continued to rule through his wife
Rita Tamboguacso. In neighboring Coya his nephew, Don Hermenegildo
Unzueta, eloped with the 17-year old heiress Doria Maria Ynga Paucar in
1789, and the couple successfully sought the cacicazgo.'--5 And so on
throughout the bishopric.106
Indian noblewomen certainly perceived this change in policy. In

Carabuco, Pedro Mango Turpa lost control of the cacicazgo after his wife
died in the mid-1790s. In 1805 their 22-year old daughter, Doria Bernarda,
complained to the intendant of La Paz that her father had not protected her
interests and requested permission to marry a creole, Don Pedro de Leario.
By the end of the year she appeared with her creole husband--Don Manuel
Bustillos, not Leario--petitioning for the cacicazgo.107 The rapid shift in
Bernarda's marital strategy suggests both her preference for a creole, rather
than Indian noble, spouse to help pursue her claim, and that creoles appre-
ciated the opportunities that cacical heiresses offered to tap into, or take con-
trol of, pueblo economies.108
That Bernarda Mango Turpa and her peers turned to creole men to defend
their position was a result not only of the crown's clear desire to establish
rural creoles as the new dominant class in the pueblo, but also of a pro-
nounced shift within indigenous societies. During the rebellion, anti-noble
violence had been widespread, as communities directed their wrath against
the native elite.109 That antagonism did not dissipate with the defeat of the
rebels: the 1780s and 1790s saw popular riots against surviving cacical fam-
ilies, and frequent appeals to the courts to depose cacical dynasties. "-- This
1--4 See Sebastian Unzueta's unsuccessful attempt to be named cacique of Taray after Rita Tam-
boguacso's death in 1798; the proprietary claim of their children was acknowledged. ARC, AUD, Ord.,
31 (1798).
1--5 ARC, AUD, Ord., 6 (1790) and 9 (1791).
1--6 Table 1; also ARC, INT, Gob., 142 (1790) for Captain Narsiso Valdeiglesias (husband of Dofia
Martina Tito Sutic Callapitia) in Pacarectambo; ADP, INT, 35; ARC, AUD, Ord., 33 (1799) for the hus-
bands of Pacoricona heiresses in Lampa and Calapuja; AGN, DI, 574 for the son-in-law of the late Don
Andres Calisaya as cacique of Tiquillaca; ARC, AUD, Ord., 30 (1798) and Ord. 33 (1799); ARC, AUD,
Admin. 161 (1801-02); for the creole husbands of two heiresses in Juli. Also Cahill, From Rebellion to
Independence, 157-9.
107 ABN, EC, 1805-19 and EC, 1807-11.
1--8 AAC, LXIV-4-62, 1808 for Dona Petrona Sinanyuca's divorce proceedings in which she insisted
that she had married her creole husband only to hold onto the family cacicazgo in Coporaque.
1--9 Szeminski, "Why Kill the Spaniard?"; Thomson, We Alone Will Rule; Garrett, Shadows of
Empire.
11-- Sala i Vila, Y se armO el tole tole, pp. 118-27.
popular opposition resonated with efforts by Spanish governors to promote

the cabildo and its offices as a counterbalance to the indigenous nobility.111
Formally an assault on aristocratic authority, the impact of invigorated dem-
ocratic governance was deeply gendered, as the 1797 challenge to Choque-
huanca authority in Muriani demonstrates. So do the complaints of Doria
Isabel Mango Turpa, the widow of San Taraco's hereditary cacique who had
been appointed cacica on his death.112 In 1802, Isabel wrote to the intendant
of Puno that in electing its alcalde the community had "laughingly cast aside
my proposal, appointing Pablo Quispe . . . in spite of the prevalence in this
individual of a disobedient spirit"; Quispe had long been a staunch foe of the
Chuquicallatas.113 This formal repudiation of her power was reflected in a
general loss of authority: in 1800 she sent a plaintive letter to her son in
Puno, detailing her plight: "the Indians, seeing that I am a poor, destitute
woman, pay no attention to me, and often there is no one to bring me a
pitcher of water to the kitchen.-,,114
Isabel's emphasis on her sex highlights changing relations of ethnicity,

estate, gender, and authority in the pueblo. Despite the assault on aristo-
cratic, indigenous authority (culminating in its abolition at independence),
for noblemen the democratic offices of pueblo government remained open.
Many communities did not repudiate their cacical families, and former
caciques retained authority by occupying the elected office of alcalde. In the
short-lived constitutional order of 1811-14, Indian noblemen served on the
new, inter-ethnic pueblo ayuntamientos; and after independence men from
old cacical families numbered among the electors for the Peruvian con-
gress.115 In contrast, insofar as indigenous noblewomen became simply
"indias,-" they lost formal political authority. One response was for Indian
noblewomen to become less Indian and more Spanish. Thus, when the Span-
ish vecinas of Lampa wrote to the viceroy in Lima in 1813 to complain
about the declining subservience of the pueblo's Indian population ("with
their arrogant and seditious character"), one of the signers was Doria Igna-
cia Pacoricona, from the old cacical family.116
Independence brought the end of the Indian elite. Formally, this happened
in 1825, with the abolition of the cacicazgo and of legal nobility, although
111 O'Phelan Godoy, Kurakas sin sucesiones; Sala i Vila, Y se arm6 el tole tole, pp. 151-62; Garrett,
Shadows of Empire, pp. 226-7.
112 ARC, PRA, 170. Both families had been staunch defenders of the crown in the rebellion.
113 ARE, PRA, 139 and 320.
114 ARE, PSG, 180.
115 Garrett, Shadows of Empire, pp. 226-7, 246-7, 253-4.
116 BNP, Man., D-6075.
over the preceding generation the office that had enabled their authority was
claimed by creoles and by the crown, and the Indian republic itself repudi-
ated its hereditary ruling stratum.117 After 1825 the "two republics" of colo-
nial Peru the unequal but separate realms of Spaniard and Indian--were
replaced by the ethnically stratified Republic of Peru, such that the very idea
of an "Indian nobility" had no place in the new national politics.118 At the
individual level, old cacical families maintained their privilege by marrying
creoles and becoming "white," bringing cacical lands as private property
into the control of a new rural elite that aggressively used a language of eth-
nicity to differentiate itself from the Indian peasantry.
So complete was this elision of a space of Indian privilege, that only in

the past decades has the role of indigenous elites in colonial society attracted
the notice of scholars; study of the cacique has produced a reevaluation of
the organization of colonial society and of the collaborations that enabled
Spanish sovereignty, as well as a rethinking of identity, community, and cul-
ture in the Indian republic. Similarly, attention to the cacica refocuses our
view of the politics of the Indian pueblo, and the effects on them of colonial
legislation, the state, and creole settlement. Most obviously, such a perspec-
tive foregrounds the gendering of authority, confirming but also nuancing
the patriarchy of cacical rule to account for both women's formal possession
of the office and the centrality of the cacical couple as the dominant politi-
cal force in most communities. Focus on the cacica also elucidates the
importance of elite power and politics in the Andean pueblo, revealing a
larger stratum of nobles who dominated the communities of the Indian
republic for most of the colonial era, and who competed for the paramount
authority of the cacique, a competition often conducted and resolved
through the tying of cacical office to a noble heiress. If formally such poli-
tics and determination of succession ran afoul of both the crown's efforts to
affirm father-son succession and royal control over the cacicazgo, in prac-
tice the cacica solidified the noble control over communities on which Span-
ish rule relied. In her possession of patriarchal office, the cacica embodied
the contradictions that constituted the colonial order in the pueblo: between
popular and elite local rule; between a bureaucratic, sovereign state and the
local lords on which it relied; and between the ideal of pueblo autonomy and
the ever-expanding creole population.
117 Nils Jacobsen, Mirages of Transition: The Peruvian Altiplano, 1780-1930 (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1993), pp. 122-4.
118 Marc Thurner, From Two Republics to One Divided: Contradictions of Colonial Nationmaking in
Peru (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).
Eventually, those contradictions brought down the colonial order, and

with it the cacique. Certainly, democratic opposition to aristocratic power
and a strengthening state seeking to control offices created and conceded by
earlier absolutist monarchs were common in the Atlantic world in the late
1700s, and elsewhere these forces had similarly gendered implications. The
complex process of usurpation and marital alliance by which highland cre-
oles managed to win control of the Indian pueblo was more peculiar to the
Andes. And, of course, the resultant post-colonial society of the Andes, with
its democratic pueblos under constant assault from an invigorated creole
elite and a liberal state, set the groundwork for a modern political economy
in the highlands that both denied and reproduced the two-republic
dichotomy on which the colonial order was erected. Historians have long
emphasized how the expansion of capitalist relations of production and
world markets in the nineteenth century transformed the pueblo economy,
and more recently how the expansion of the state in the eighteenth century
reworked pueblo politics.119 That in the process the possibility disappeared
that a Dofia Juliana Tico Chipana would be able to rule her community, a
pesar de su sexo and in keeping with generations of practice, reminds us
both of the enormous variety in the myriad collaborations and compromises
that comprised rule in the early modern world, and the unnoted elisions in
Latin America's post-colonial transition.
Reed DAVID T. GARRETT

College
Portland, Oregon
119 Florencia Mallon, The Defense of Community in Peru's Central Highlands: Peasant Struggle and
Capitalist Transition, 1860-1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); Herbert S. Klein,
Haciendas and Ayllus: Rural Society in the Bolivian Andes in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); Jacobsen, Mirages of Transition; O'Phelan Godoy, Kurakas
sin sucesiones; Thomson, We Alone Will Rule; Serulnikov, Subverting Colonial Authority.

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

Author(s): David T. Garrett

64:4 April 2008, 547-581

"IN SPITE OF HER SEX":

In October, 1797, the indios principales of the Andean pueblo of Mufiani

who have examined the cacica more broadly as a phenomenon of colonial

Focusing on the cacica in the bishopric of Cusco and northern La Paz in

they held office, cacicas embodied a local resolution in favor of hereditary

11 Rostworowski de Diez Canseco, Curacas y Sucesiones; Pease, Curacas, reciprocidad y riqueza;

Information about cacical authority and succession is anecdotal: colonial

Map 1. Women Caciques

Fromfathe 7 7 Fromfathe Fromcusin Frombthe Fromthe Fromthe Fromthe

Map 2. Women Caciques-Cusco Detail

basins formed an agropastoralist boundary between these and the complex

In at least seventeen of the roughly thirty Inca-ruled villages and parishes

*Aproximate. 1705,9;Yungyo:AREPSG3CpacbN-IX4LxB6Ti28JesdMh 179-46.

depended as much on local politics as on the broad strictures of colonial law.

Other witnesses were more interested in the circumstances in which a

Other documents show a similar, conditional acceptance of female suc-

In short, if somewhat suspect cacicas were nonetheless widely accepted.

Still, the invocation of custom to deny women political authority is note-

noblemen.43 Rural cacicas also owned considerable property: Doria Catalina

Such comments suggest hostility toward women's power, manifest in

And they displayed it. Eighteenth-century paintings of elite Inca women

But analyzing cacical authority based solely on the cacique or cacica

understanding of the cacicazgo as held by an individual, in their role in vil-

Nonetheless, it remains that women formally possessed political author-

cised considerable control over it in marriage, but were excluded from

Holding the native elite responsible for the "barbarism" of indigenous

This contradiction between the democratic ideals, institutions and offices

In other areas, particularly the Titicaca basin and the Inca-dominated

In the Aymara societies around Lake Titicaca, ancient, powerful pueblos

Around Cusco, cacicas were equally important to the consolidation and

74 Garrett, Shadows of Empire, pp. 106-13.

The generous concession of nobility (by edict and by custom) to the

81 Garrett, "Los Incas borbOnicos."

In some cases, cacicas were "second bests," a way to maintain a lineage's

Indeed, in some cases a cacical matriline apparently prevented any one

Cacicas also loomed large in another negotiation at the heart of pueblo

cacique (a position formally abolished in 1790) to the new "recaudador,"

The replacement of Indian interim caciques by creole recaudadores

96 ANB, EC-1797-46 for the decree.

heiresses enabled surviving members of Titicaca's cacical dynasties to

Continuing until the outbreak of the wars of independence in 1809,

Courts and governors looked more favorably on the claims of cacicas'

Indian noblewomen certainly perceived this change in policy. In

popular opposition resonated with efforts by Spanish governors to promote

Isabel's emphasis on her sex highlights changing relations of ethnicity,

So complete was this elision of a space of Indian privilege, that only in

Eventually, those contradictions brought down the colonial order, and

Reed DAVID T. GARRETT

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