Ethnohistory Serulnikov

The Politics of Intracommunity Land Conflict in the Late Colonial Andes

Sergio Serulnikov, Boston College

Abstract. The article explores the causes, ideological underpinnings, and political repercussions of land battles among the Pocoata, an ethnic group in the south-ern Andes, during the eighteenth century. These disputes afford us a glimpse into the competing native concepts of land tenure rights; the array of means, legal and extralegal, Andean and Spanish, of solving conflicts between families and ayllus; and the key role of the ethnic chiefs in the struggles over community boundaries and the distribution of plots among community members. The essay argues that, by underscoring the inability of both native and colonial rulers to handle mounting demographic pressures, the intense process of intraethnic strife contributed to the disruption of rural authority.

Disputes over land are an endemic feature of Andean peasant society. As in Mesoamerica and other rural areas of Latin America, the expansion of private commercial agriculture that followed the Spanish conquest fostered long-standing frictions between Indian communities and haciendas. In the Andean case, however, some of the roots of the agrarian tensions can be found in the very fabric of the ethnic economies. The scattered pattern of settlement of the Andean ayllus (landholding groups), which possessed multiple pasture and farming fields in the highlands and outposts in valley territories, often inhabited by several communities, gave rise to chronic boundary feuding among member families and adjoining ethnic groups. In the province of Chayanta, a densely populated indigenous area in present-day Bolivia on which this article focuses, the Andean communities recog-nized manifold land tenure rights: highland plots distributed annually to the domestic units to produce specific crops (mantas), fields set aside for communal needs that were cultivated collectively (comunes), and parcels of

Ethnohistory 55:1 (Winter 2008) DOI 10.1215/00141801-2007-048Copyright 2008 by American Society for Ethnohistory

120 Sergio Serulnikov

land assigned to the households on a long-term basis. As regards the latter, the caciques periodically redistributed plots according to a combination of criteria: demographic (size of the families), social (sponsorship of Catholic festivals), and agrarian (land availability). Access to resources, then, could always be a highly contested process. Andean ecology also played a part. Since highland agriculture involves long fallow periods, the occupation and farming of the land was a transitory affair and, consequently, open to dispute. The nature of the boundary markers (mojones) echoes the over-all dynamic of Andean agriculture. According to anthropologist Ricardo Godoy:

Conflicts over land in the highlands have been endemic to common field agriculture in Bolivia. . . . Village boundaries, which are easily disassembled piles of stone, resulted from and cause this ever-changing process of expansion and contraction. Peasants valued impermanent boundaries because they realized temporary interloping was a neces-sary and, perhaps, inevitable attribute of common field agriculture. One could even say boundary ephemerality constituted a mechanism for adapting to changes in human and animal populations. Land dis-putes among ethnic groups were thus viewed as reciprocal and extend-ing over time.1

How did these social and cultural dynamics unfold during Spanish colonial rule? How did Andean and European notions of landholding rights interact in the indigenous society? Despite the significance of these questions, the subject has received relatively little historiographic atten-tion. Whereas a wealth of ethnographic fieldwork has dealt with intraeth-nic agrarian strife, historical inquiries on this subject are much scarcer.2 The reason seems evident: feuds in the Andean community seldom reached the colonial courts and consequently, unlike conflicts in which indigenous groups were pitted against Spanish haciendas or (to a lesser extent) against other indigenous groups, left few documentary traces. And yet, though usually invisible in the historical record, land disputes among members of the Andean ayllus must have been a routine affair in village life. They might have had larger political reverberations as well. The eighteenth-century history of the Pocoata ethnic group, one of the most populous communities of the province of Chayanta (an area known today as northern Potosí) is a case in point. An unusually rich body of his-torical evidence indicates that Pocoata peasants engaged in intense intra-community rivalries over boundaries and land distribution. By the same token, during these years the Indians repeatedly challenged the legitimacy of their native chiefs and played a pivotal role in the acute political struggles

Land Conflict in the Late Colonial Andes 121

that led to the massive insurrection of the province in 1780. The central purpose of this study is then to explore the socioeconomic causes, ideo-logical underpinnings, and political repercussions of these intracommunity land battles. The article begins by reconstructing the economic and ethnic factors underlying the growing imbalance between population and resources in Pocoata society. It turns then to the nature of the numerous land disputes that took place between the 1730s and 1750s. The historian Nils Jacobsen has reminded us that during the eighteenth century enlightened notions of property based on the principle that “the parcels assigned to [commu-nity landholders] should be all the same and adjusted to what one family needed and could exploit” increasingly permeated Peruvian colonial juridi-cal practice.3 The disputes among members of the Andean ayllus analyzed in this article show the concrete impact of Spanish intervention in issues of communal landholding. More important perhaps, Pocoata records afford us a glimpse into the competing native concepts of land tenure rights; the array of means, legal and extralegal, Andean and European, of solving con-flicts between families and ayllus; and the key role of ethnic authorities in land disputes. When combined with fieldwork information on this regional society, the material provides considerable ethnohistorical insight into the Andean cultural rationale behind these occurrences. The essay finally examines the political crisis of the Pocoata ethnic chieftainships. Whereas the previous sections look at the profound ten-sions in the indigenous community engendered by demographic trends and contradictory claims to land, the last section deals with the relationship between agrarian clashes and the institutions of local government. It argues that by underscoring the failure of both native and Spanish rulers to handle the mounting competition over resources, internecine strife contributed to the undermining of rural authority. In this sense, this study speaks to cur-rent debates on the roots of the Indian insurrections that swept the Andes during the early 1780s. Collectively known as the Túpac Amaru rebellion, these massive indigenous uprisings sought to oust the Spanish government, reestablish Inca rule, and in some regions to exterminate or expel the white population from Peru. The province of Chayanta was the first major site of rebel activity, followed by the Cuzco, Oruro, and La Paz regions. Historical literature has amply demonstrated that, along with trends such as mounting fiscal pressures, forced distribution of goods in the rural villages carried out by Spanish officials (repartimiento de mercancías), and diffusion of neo-Inca and millenarian expectations, the crisis of native chieftainships was a crucial motive of peasant disaffection—and one that gave rise to both local revolts and large-scale upheavals.4 Many of these collective protests were


provoked by the discretionary appointment of illegitimate caciques by the corregidores (chief Spanish provincial magistrates). But recent studies on highland communities in Upper Peru, including those in Chayanta, have stressed that there was also a growing peasant resistance to the old heredi-tary lords.5 The case of the Pocoata sheds light on one of deepest layers of social strain underlying this process, since there was a clear correlation between conflicts over land and the demise of the group’s caciques. Effec-tively, one of the causes of land shortage was the accumulation of private wealth by Pocoata chiefs: as members of one of the most prominent ethnic noble lineages in the southern Andes, they had long benefited economi-cally from their status. The pervading agrarian and political turmoil in the community eventually turned Pocoata into a major locus of social unrest in the province. In 1772, citing the continuous intraethnic strife, colonial authorities abolished the Pocoata right to self-rule, a central corporative privilege under Spanish colonialism, by appointing the powerful lord of a neighboring community as their cacique. This policy of social control, in turn, prompted an unprecedented mass mobilization. The Pocoata’s col-lective protests would in fact provide a model for the neighboring Macha, the indigenous community that, headed by Tomás Katari, set in motion the insurrection that shook the foundation of Spanish rule in Upper Peru dur-ing the early 1780s. Although seemingly discrete, isolated occurrences of local conflict, the land battles among Pocoata peasants were part and parcel of this general crisis of political legitimacy.

Agrarian Bases of Peasant Conflicts in Pocoata

The Pocoata were an ethnic group with roots in a pre-Hispanic Aymara federation of Karakara, whose seat was the neighboring group of Macha. In fact, in the first phase of the general census carried out by Viceroy Fran-cisco de Toledo in the late sixteenth century, the group was included as an annex of the Macha and its recognition as an independent indigenous community was only achieved after their caciques voiced their objection to annexation.6 By the eighteenth century, the Pocoata were made up of eleven ayllus, five of them belonging to the moiety of Anansaya and the rest to the moiety of Urinsaya (see table 1). Although those ayllus were in turn composed of local kin groups, collective possession and repartition of land seems to have been mostly vested at the ayllu level. Each ayllu, for instance, set aside common lands to meet community obligations such as providing for the workers serving in the mines of Potosí under the mita system (state-organized labor draft). The ayllu members collectively cultivated these lands on a rotation basis. Each ayllu was ruled by a hilacata (ayllu headman), who


was in charge of the tribute collection. In contrast to the fragmentation that other ethnic groups in the area underwent after the Spanish conquest, the moieties (a legacy of the dually organized pre-Hispanic societies) continued to function in Pocoata as a locus of political organization. Pocoata, like neighboring Macha, had not one but two or more “caciques principales,” who headed a group of ayllus pertaining to the moieties of Anansaya (liter-ally, “upper half”) and Urinsaya (“lower half”). Like most communities in northern Potosí, the Pocoata were able to preserve a land tenure system by which each ayllu possessed fields at dif-ferent altitudes of the Andean landscape. Ecological “complementarity,” an economic model that the anthropologist John Murra has defined as a “vertical archipelago system,” allowed Andean groups a large measure of self-sufficiency.7 Pocoata highlands, a zone at an altitude of over thirty-five hundred meters above sea level where the vast majority of the population resided for most of the year, bordered on the village of Aullagas, where the richest silver deposits in the Chayanta province were clustered. In the late colonial period, the intendant of Potosí, Juan del Pino Manrique, described Pocoata as “an Indian town that enjoys a more benign climate than most other puna towns. These Indians are quite well off thanks to their cattle and their production of wheat, barley, vegetables, and some fruits. They sell all

Table 1. Originarios and Forasteros of Pocoata by Moiety and Ayllu (1754)

Originarios Forasteros Total

Anansaya Collana 88 21 109 Pisaca 85 23 108 Chacaya 47 24 71 Carigua 46 40 86 Pari 86 29 115 Subtotal 352 137 489Urinsaya Capac 84 42 126 Sullcavi 45 25 70 Hilata 45 39 84 Chanca 19 15 34 Hilave 60 25 85 Sullcata 28 25 53 Subtotal 281 171 452Total 633 308 941Source: AGN, sala 13, 18-9-2.


this in Aullagas, which is at a distance of only five leagues.”8 Pocoata ayllus, at the same time, controlled lands in the valley of Chayala and, together with other ethnic groups, in the more distant valleys of Micani and Carasi, although still in the Chayanta province. While in the highlands people lived in hamlets built at the edge of fallow or cultivated lands, the valleys were settled by scattered family units.9 There they cultivated maize, wheat, fruits, and horticultural products. Following the colonial Andean model of double residence, between May and August the peasant families undertook massive migrations to harvest grain in their lowland possessions. According to a tribute census of 1754, Pocoata had a total population of 4,169 souls, including the Indians registered in the highland district of Pocoata and in the various valley outposts (66 households were listed in the Carasi district and 61 in Micani). The census reported an overall popu-lation of 941 tributaries, 682 underage males, 2,125 women of all ages, and 408 reservados (tax exempt due to age or physical disability).10 This ranked the Pocoata as the largest ethnic group in the province along with the Macha and the Sacaca. From the second third of the eighteenth century, social dissension over access to land pervaded among Pocoata peasants. No doubt these mounting intracommunity squabbles in part reflected larger regional trends. These years witnessed a strong increase in the Andean population following the demographic crisis provoked by the great epidemics of 1719–21. According to Noble David Cook’s estimates, the population of Peru grew at an annual average rate of 1.32 percent between 1754 and 1782.11 Likewise, an analysis of parish registers of baptisms and deaths in villages of Sacaca and Acacio, province of Chayanta, reveals a sustained and continuous pattern of growth from the beginning of the 1750s until the last decade of the century.12 This demographic trend might not have posed a problem of overpopulation and food shortages in absolute terms since by the late eighteenth century the population had only recovered the levels that had existed before the plague of 1719–21. Needless to say, during pre-Columbian times, the Andes had supported much larger populations.13 Not only demography but also cer-tain social dynamics may account for the fact that Peru seems mostly to have been spared the cyclical subsistence crises and famines that affected Mexico during the late colonial period.14 In his study of the acute demo-graphic crisis of 1800–1805 in Upper Peru, historian Enrique Tandeter has pointed out that “the effects on Andean communities of the crises of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were cushioned by the efficacy, even in years of scarcity and epidemic, of patterns of subsistence and reproduc-tion that included not only traditional forms of access to resources [i.e., ecological complementarity] but also trade with urban markets and partici-


pation in rural and urban labor markets.”15 Hence Tandeter proposes that the shortages and high mortality of the early 1800s cannot be seen as typi-cal of the colonial period, as the last colonial crisis; on the contrary, they “inaugurated a new kind of crisis in Bolivia,” one that would recur several times in the decades to come. And yet the general growth of the indigenous population, while not producing massive agrarian crises, did engender disputes over lands across the region, a phenomenon largely derived from the social transformations that had taken place over the previous century, especially the extensive pri-vatization of communal landholdings. Divested of considerable amounts of land that had been transferred to Spanish entrepreneurs and to the native nobility during the nadir of the Indian population in the mid-seventeenth century, some Andean communities now faced a relative scarcity of resources. This happened at a time when taxation, price trends, and the forced distribution of goods were steadily deteriorating their living stan-dards. In some areas, the changed ratio of land to people, and the ensuing sense of relative deprivation, led to increasing disputes over land property rights, especially between communities and haciendas.16 As might be expected from the variation in microclimates, demo-graphic density, and expansion of haciendas characteristic of the Andes, agrarian tensions differed greatly, not just across the region, but from com-munity to community within the same area. The province of Chayanta was no exception to this rule. In the 1760s, for instance, some communities in the valleys of San Pedro de Buena Vista and Moscari called into question the past expansion of private estates over their holdings by pointing to the current growth of the Indian population.17 One of the Chayanta corregi-dores at the time went so far as to propose to the viceroy of Peru the com-plete restitution of their original possessions to the Indian communities “to place on these lands all the Indians that now have few plots, or are land-less.”18 Given the predominance of the Andean ayllu in northern Potosí, boundary feuds between neighboring groups and protests against caciques for failing to defend ethnic territories and leasing communal fields to out-siders also loomed large.19 This widespread climate of confrontation not-withstanding, land conflicts in Pocoata seemed more recurrent and intense, and also presented distinctive features: here this period of agrarian pressure was felt mainly through the intense strife among its constituting ayllus and families. A combination of economic and political factors may account for this phenomenon. In the first place, Pocoata seems to have faced particularly severe prob-lems of land scarcity vis-à-vis other communities. By the 1750s, a provincial corregidor named Pablo de Aoíz reported that the Pocoata ayllus lacked


sufficient farming lands to support themselves due to population growth and an unequal distribution of resources in favor of the Indian nobility. This had forced common Indians to lease lands from Spanish haciendas or other indigenous peoples.20 Although the corregidor acknowledged that most peasant communities in the area were under strain, he stressed that the ratio of population to land was especially unfavorable here, particu-larly when compared with the situation of the neighboring Macha. Aoíz commented that while the Pocoata faced difficulties in gaining access to valley fields, “the Macha Indians have plenty of lands in the doctrina de San Marcos [of Miraflores]. They enjoy these valley possessions without having to share them with Spaniards or Indians from other repartimien-tos. And they also have more fields in the valleys of the parish of Carasi.” Echoing perhaps an ongoing trend in the colonial administration in Peru at the time, a growing concern with issues of land redistribution that the historian Karen Spalding has defined as a quiet, nonprogrammatic “kind of piecemeal agrarian reform” based on the precedence of the principle of subsistence needs over existing land titles, the corregidor went on to pro-pose a large reallocation of parcels in some areas of Carasi.21 Plots owned by the Macha should be assigned to the Pocoata, Aoíz said, “so that they get the extension of land that they now lack.”22 The analysis of the Pocoata spatial distribution between valleys and punas seems to support Aoiz’s contention. As shown in table 2, only 15 per-cent of the overall population of Pocoata lived in the valleys. This distribution is about 10 percent lower than for the Puraca and Laymi (two other groups of the Chayanta province) residing in the valley in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.23 In addition, according to a twentieth-century survey carried out in northern Potosí, out of five hundred household heads, 25 percent declared that they owned lands in the valley. Likewise, an ana-lytical model of the subdivision and reunification of lands resulting from the demographic cycles of family units also indicates that about a quarter of the total population of the ethnic groups should reside in the valleys under normal circumstances.24 Significantly, in the mid-nineteenth century,

Table 2. Pocoata Tributaries by Moiety and Place of Residence (1754)

Residencia Anansaya Urinsaya Total

Puna 412 (84.25%) 388 (85.85%) 800 (85.00%)Valle 77 (15.75%) 64 (14.15%) 141 (15.00%)Total 489 (100%) 452 (100%) 941 (100%)Source: AGN, sala 13, 18-9-2.


at a time when contrary to the late colonial period the Pocoata seemed to experience less intense population pressure than the Macha, the valley of Carasi alone was home to almost 17 percent of the group’s population (only 7 percent resided there in the 1750s).25 Direct access to lowland agricul-tural produce, as Andean studies have widely shown, was a crucial aspect of this peasant economy because it allowed households to achieve a mea-sure of self-sufficiency. Pocoata population records suggest another key symptom of land scar-city. The demographic growth was concentrated among the Indians classi-fied under the category of forastero (literally, immigrant Indians). In fact, according to three official censuses, the number of originarios rose slightly between 1751 and 1780, to fall in absolute terms in 1786 (table 3). The forasteros, on the other hand, steadily increased during the same period, growing from a quarter to two-thirds of the overall tributaries. Table 3 shows a similar trend for the rest of the ethnic groups of Chayanta but in a less marked fashion than in Pocoata. This dynamic signals a crucial agrarian development, for, by the eighteenth century at least, the distinc-tion between originarios and forasteros (or agregados, an interchangeable term in this region) was not based on genealogical considerations (the place of origin of the Indians or their antecessors) but on the type of plots usu-fructed by the households. According to customary social arrangement in this Andean world, forasteros were not necessarily past or recent migrants,

Table 3. Originarios and Forasteros in Pocoata and the Rest of the Chayanta Province

1751 1780 1786

Pocoata Chayanta Pocoata Chayanta Pocoata Chayanta

Originarios 443 (76.77%)

1,738 (44.70%)

540 (57.20%)

1,941 (37.50%)

417 (36.10%)

1,996 (27.30%)

Forasteros 134 (23.23%)

2,251 (55.30%)

404 (42.80%)

3,233 (62.50%)

739 (63.90%)

5,321 (72.70%)

Total 577 (100%)

3,989 (100%)

944 (100%)

5,174 (100%)

1,156 (100%)

7,317 (100%)

Source: The 1754 Reinspection in AGN, sala 13, 18-9-2; 1776 census in ANB, EC 1776, no. 77; the 1778 census in AGN, Interior, sala 9, leg. 4, exp. 7; the 1786 census in AGN, sala 13, 18-10-4.Note: In the “Originarios” column of the 1786 list, I added up two categories: “originarios y forasteros con tierras de tasa de 9 pesos 6 reales” and “forasteros con algunas tierras de tasa de 7 pesos” (612 tributarios). The latter consisted of Indians who in previous censuses appeared as originaries but only paid 7 pesos to the cacique due to insufficient lands. This category was applied to the Macha alone.


as the Spanish fiscal classification denotes, but Indians who received fewer or less fertile parcels and, consequently, were required to pay tributes of a lower value. The category implies an agrarian rather than a migratory status. In justifying his proposal for a general restitution of lands to the Andean communities, for example, a Chayanta corregidor in 1766 explained that by so doing peasants “who are considered agregados . . . would pass to the category of originarios.”26 Therefore, the sharp rise in the number and percentage of forasteros might reflect a trend of land fragmentation that left increasing numbers of peasant households with insufficient plots to continue fitting in the originario category. Not accidentally, most of the agrarian conflicts in Pocoata revolved around the occupation of hitherto individual land allocations by a growing number of Indian families. Dur-ing the second half of the eighteenth century, then, demographic pressures seem to have caused the same kind of economic trend that Tristan Platt has found in this region a century later: population growth followed by a subdivision of originario tasas (set of puna and/or valley fields assigned to the families carrying certain tax-liability levels) into several agregado tasas.27 Certainly, this hypothesis is consistent with the Pocoata’s difficulty gaining access to valley holdings, as reflected in the distribution of popu-lation between highlands and lowlands. For ethnographic and historical evidence suggests that the possession of lands in both areas simultaneously is a defining trait of the originario tasas.28 Finally, it should be noted that population and agrarian trends varied in each moiety. The Indians of the Urinsaya ayllus living in the valley were fewer than those of Anansaya (table 2). This inadequate supply of lowland fields may explain the fact that, according to a census of indigenous ten-ants in haciendas of the neighboring district of Moscari realized in 1766, at least nine of the twelve Pocoata families that settled there belonged to the Urinsaya moiety. Seven of the tenants could have been recent migrants since they claimed to have been born in Pocoata.29 More to the point, the number of forasteros (and consequently the subdivision of lands) grew at a much higher rate in this moiety. Between 1754 and 1786, Urinsaya foraste-ros increased from 171 Indians to 474 and the originarios decreased from 281 to 192. In the same period, the Anansaya forasteros grew only from 137 to 265, and the originarios dropped from 352 to 225. This disparate evolution seems to have stemmed from a combination of demographic and political factors. On the one hand, the population growth of Pocoata, again as measured by the tax rolls, was unevenly distributed. Three population counts show a consistent rise in the percentage of tribute payers belonging to the ayllus of Urinsaya (table 4). On the other hand, as we shall see later, the concentration of lands in the hands of the native nobility was especially acute in this moiety.


Taken as a whole, this agrarian trend must be related to the significant number of confrontations between Pocoata families and ayllus during the period. Let us now turn to the dynamic of these conflicts.

Mojones and Linderos: Disputes over Land

In his analysis of the forms of property in noncapitalist societies, the anthro-pologist Maurice Godelier has observed that “one [point] of crucial impor-tance but which has been little investigated is that a society’s property rules take the form of ‘systems’ which simultaneously depend upon several dif-ferent, even opposed, but combined principles.”30 Contrary to crude gener-alizations of primitive societies as solely governed by communal possession of land, this universal “system of combined rights” comprises by definition individual and collective modes of appropriation. Although historical evi-dence on the colonial Andes provides but a partial view of the indigenous claims to agrarian resources, this definition retains its heuristic value. Even when seen through the filter of judicial records, intracommunity land strife highlights the various tenure rights available to community members as well as the type of usufruct claims that tend to take precedence. In addition, settling these conflicts entailed, unavoidably, an often violent political pro-cess. Explicitly or implicitly, agrarian feuds among Pocoata peasants posed the question of who (colonial officials, native chiefs, or commoner Indians) held legitimate authority to decide among opposing landholding principles, and how this adjudication process ought to be conducted. Let us then examine six litigation processes involving Pocoata families, ayllus, and moieties that emerged during the second third of the eighteenth century. These disputes often stretched over long periods of time, touched on manifold aspects of indigenous landholding rights, and involved various agencies of rural government. Given the scarcity of historical evidence on intracommunity agrarian strife in colonial Peru (compared, again, to the evidence on disputes between neighboring communities, and communities and haciendas) this material affords us a rare glimpse into the forms of

Table 4. Pocoata Tributaries by Moiety

Year Anansaya Urinsaya Total

1754 489 (51.96%) 452 (48.03%) 941 (99.99%)1778 420 (44.49%) 524 (55.50%) 944 (99.99%)1786 490 (42.38%) 666 (57.61%) 1,156 (99.99%)Source: The 1754 census in AGN, sala 13, 18-9-2; the 1778 census in AGN, interior, sala 9, leg. 4, exp. 7; the 1786 census in AGN, sala 13, 18-10-4.


ethnic organization, political power, and cultural meaning that shaped the competition for material resources among Andean peasants. The first of these lawsuits took place in Carasi, a multiethnic valley shared by Machas, Laymis, Puracas, and Pocoatas. We have already noted the economic importance of this valley for the Pocoata in relation to the recommendation made by Corregidor Aoíz in the 1750s that plots in this area be redistributed to Pocoata families (nearly sixty of them resided in Carasi at the time) because of their shortage of farming lowlands. Against this background of population pressure, a protracted conflict among Poco-ata Indians emerged. In November 1735, two Chinusiri brothers from the Carigua ayllu (Anansaya moiety) traveled to the city of La Plata to com-plain before the audiencia of Charcas (the highest court in the region) that their families had been stripped of plots located in places named Potrero, Mollemolle, and Caravilque. These lands had been assigned to the Chinu-siris at the turn of the century by the Anansaya cacique Gerónimo Cuñaca because of their status as originario Indians. Yet the main cacique of the Urinsaya moiety, Fernando Ayra, and the hilacata of the Pari ayllu (the largest one of Anansaya), Tomás Yampara, had traveled to the Carasi Valley to reallocate these plots to Indians belonging to the Pari, Capac, and Hilata ayllus.31 A first element of interest in this dispute is the sheer inefficiency of colo-nial officials. Indeed, by the time the Chinusiris’ appeal reached the audien-cia in 1735, decisions had already been made in their favor by two Chayanta corregidores and the audiencia alike. But those decrees did not come into effect. This time, following a Charcas court ruling, Corregidor Bartolomé de Sierralta appointed a judge who returned control of the Carasi lands to the three Chinusiri bothers. Yet, shortly thereafter, the Carigua Indians needed to return to La Plata because “the said intruders tenaciously and disobediently persist in occupying the lands, resisting leaving or abandon-ing them.” In response to a petition that the trespassers be evicted and their “huts knocked down,” the audiencia again commanded Sierralta to travel to Carasi to enforce the Chinusiris’ rights. In July 1736, the corregidor returned the fields to them, warning the contending Indians and caciques against invading these plots again. To no avail: the Hilata, Pari, and Capac families once more ignored the warnings and reoccupied the lands.32 Three years later, the Chinusiris appealed to a third corregidor—Sier-ralta’s successor, the Count de La Vega del Ren—arguing that their neigh-bors “have taken over possession of the lands abusing our rights. Every day they provoke dozens of quarrels, which may stir serious trouble because we are ready to defend our rights.”33 To prove their claims, the Carigua Indians exhibited on this occasion a detailed written description of the location


of the lands in dispute. In July 1739, La Vega del Ren ratified their tenure rights “under the limits and boundaries expressed in this deed.” Despite a Spanish dweller of Carasi’s having then communicated the ruling to the other Indians in conflict, neither the land title presented by the Chinusiris nor La Vega del Ren’s intercession (like his predecessors’ before him) did anything to settle the dispute.34 The Chinusiris explained later that the invasion continued “because although [the caciques] had then said that the order would be obeyed, they indeed did not leave the mentioned lands, and even had the audacity to cultivate them and fallow more fields. Nobody could deter them from doing so and from disrespecting the orders of the Royal Audiencia and Corregidor Conde de La Vega de Ren.”35 In August 1741, six years after the first appeal to the audiencia, the three brothers, Diego, Martín, and Bartolomé Chinusuri returned for the last time to La Plata city to request the placing up of boundary stones “so that from now on the caciques and their ayllus cannot ignore [the mojones] and invade the lands.”36 There is no indication, however, that the Indians felt compelled to abide by boundary markers imposed by colonial magistrates this time either. Several factors seem to have precluded the colonial state from effec-tively arbitrating in intracommunity rivalries. The rather tenuous institu-tional presence of the Spanish government in this rural milieu, consisting of a small number of officials, mostly concentrated in a few towns, governing over a vast indigenous world, is certainly one of them. The fact that colonial officials had little economic interest in the internal repartition of commu-nal land, as opposed to issues of tribute, labor, and haciendas, must have also played a part. Besides the relative lack of actual power and material interest, an even more significant cultural element needs to be highlighted: the impossibility of subsuming the boundary-placement process among Andean ayllus to permanent European-style land rights. Ironically per-haps, the same Chinusiris brought this phenomenon to the surface. While, when dealing with trespassers, the family had tenaciously argued for the validity of old borders that had been established in writing, in 1741 they themselves claimed fields hitherto belonging to an adjacent ayllu. One of their arguments was that the plots “are untilled and nobody has cultivated them, so that I and the Indians of my ayllu may plough and cultivate them for the benefit of all our people, and the governors or the commoners from other ayllus should not invade them because [our claim] does not harm them and the said lands are not under their control.”37 This claim to land little resembles the codified tenure rights implicit in formal legal deeds. Its recourse to criteria of use and exploitation reminds us, instead, of Marshall Sahlins’s observation regarding the Tiv of northern Nigeria that “there


are no natural or artificial boundaries between Tiv minimal segments, as distinct from holdings under cultivation. . . . [hence] the existing fallow between adjacent minimal segments was likely to be disputed.”38 Though the question in the Andes is not the absence of boundaries but their flexible nature, the point remains that the adjudication of these cases could only be done by reference to Andean cultural norms regulating the occupation of space. And it is not merely that the Indians on whose fields the Chinusiris were encroaching must have had their own understanding of why those fields were “untilled” (let us recall the long fallow periods required by high-land farming), but that temporary noncultivation, as supposed to fixed bor-ders, could lead to competing land tenure claims. Outright disobedience was not the only manifestation of the failure of the state to intervene effectively in such disputes. The complexity of the norms regulating possession rights among members of the Andean commu-nities, compounded perhaps by simple bribery, led colonial authorities to endorse petitioners’ requests, no matter how contradictory their decisions might appear.39 Thus, despite having repeatedly backed the Chinusiris’ claims, in 1741 the audiencia also supported a petition from an Indian prin-cipal of the Pari ayllu, who argued for his rights over the disputed Carasi lands. The Indian then showed the ruling to the Chinusiris, but there is no further information on how the conflict evolved.40 Colonial judicial practice illustrates, then, that the right of Spanish authorities to interfere in land disputes among ayllu members, even at the request of one of the conflicting parties, should have been perceived as problematic and of doubtful legitimacy. The inherent ephemerality of mojones alluded to at the beginning of this essay, the cultural mechanisms for establishing boundary markers between ayllus, as well as the specific modes for solving disputes over their location, was foreign to European scriptural and cartographic traditions.41 Some of these discrepancies shaped agrarian conflicts in colonial Mexico, too. William Taylor has observed for instance that peasant communities in eighteenth-century Oaxaca also asso-ciated boundaries with physical features of the terrain (sometimes large land areas like hills or swamps) and movable objects such as rocks. Clashes between Indian towns, often entailing violent interference with measure-ments and possession rites, “frequently arose when Spaniards attempted to make boundaries more precise.”42 In the case of the Andes, this rela-tive vagueness was compounded by the fact that no marking of borders could be performed without the participation and consent of the ethnic authorities. Anthropological and ethnohistorical studies have shown that the confirmation of ayllu boundaries involved ceremonies such as journeys along the perimeters of the community territories, ritual battles (tinkus),


and the performing at certain moments of the annual religious calendar of collective celebrations near the mojones by ayllu members and neighboring communities.43 Intended to ratify agrarian rights either by consent or force, these activities were headed by native officials, caciques, or members of the indigenous town council. Consider for instance the following twentieth-century account of the mechanisms to erect land demarcations between the Pocoata ayllus of Sullcavi and Carigua (the one to which the Chinusiris belonged):

In the presence of the Inca governors of the ayllu Carigua . . . and those of Sullcavi . . . we walked past the hill named Guairayana punta and went down to Huañacota where, following an Incaic custom, each of [the governors] beheaded an ox and made a boda misión . . . so that henceforth no one might trespass the boundary markers, and they [also] walked to Cotani and Huarahuara Cota where an ox was also beheaded with a Cruz Fiesta, and they did so to make sure that no trespassing of boundaries might occur, and both parties swore to this, as they had done in the previous case.44

Certainly, the colonial state played a significant role in setting up ter-ritorial boundaries (i.e., borders between ethnic groups as compared to borders between ayllus belonging to the same political unity), a role more relevant considering the disputes involved the largest social groups. The Inca in their time were known for their capacity to fix boundaries between different polities, an activity associated with the idea of justice, as opposed to warfare and disorder. As the seventeenth-century indigenous writer Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala put it, the Inca conqueror of the Charca province, “had all the kingdom of Collau subordinated and amojonado.”45 In determining the limits of ethnic territories in the province of Chayanta, the new Spanish rulers seemed to have relied on some of those old land demarcations.46 It is well known that Andean peoples preserved some of those colonial titles for centuries—as did Mexican peasant villages—and appealed to them whenever republican governments or private landlords sought to encroach on their lands. The very fact that Andean peasants resorted to Spanish authorities, moreover, highlights the fact that the state might ideally function as a means of solving Andean agrarian struggles. The general point to be made here, however, is that when looked at closely, the actual power of colonial magistrates in this social sphere was limited to sanctioning settlements resolved outside the courts by the Indians, surely through ceremonies like the one just quoted, rather than imposing indepen-dent rulings. Without the consent of the parties, Spanish court decisions lacked legitimacy. Official written documents fixing territorial boundaries


did not create rights; it confirmed them. Colonial land titles must there-fore be regarded, not just in their symbolic form but in substance as well, as hybrid cultural artifacts articulating two disparate agrarian logics. The concrete tensions that emanated from these overlapping cultural systems are, precisely, what the conflicts in Pocoata reveal: formal deeds such as those presented by the Chinusiris, and others I will mention below, gave a sense of immutability—typical of European models of landholding—to possession rights that were in practice shifting and periodically under dis-pute, as the same family demonstrated when claiming uncultivated plots from a neighboring ayllu. The case of the Chinusiris also illustrates at the micro level the impact of larger demographic trends. It must be noted, in this respect, that by 1739 the dispute was no longer limited to Indians from neighboring ayllus, but included also a family from their own Carigua ayllu named Blas. In detail-ing the boundaries of the Carasi lands, the Chinusiris explained that of all the parcels that the cacique Cuñaca had allocated to them at the beginning of the century,

we have divided them in two. The plots from the Chichini Pampa ravine toward the corner are owned by Asencio Blas and his brother Ramos Blas with his sons, and I occupy from a low ridge where is my house to the Macha boundary stone, which is called Molli Molli and is in a gorge. The Audiencia of Charcas has granted me the possession of these lands twice, as the documents I have demonstrate. And Asencio Blas’s sons have boastfully become squatters on my lands even though they have enough possessions, whereas my brother, his sons, and I are eight, plus nephews, and we have to pay eight tributes and I do not have enough land to serve God or the King My Lord.47

The Chinusiris added that these fields could sustain four families. Although there is no data about the number of people making up the family, it is possible that Cuñaca’s initial allotment at the beginning of the century resulted from a situation of relative land availability.48 We know, in any case, that by the early 1730s the Chinusiris were only three heads of house-hold. This favorable ratio of population to resources was bound to change. By 1739 the family had eight adults: the two brothers, four of their sons, and, possibly, two sons of the third brother. In 1741 one of the Chinusiris asked not only for the Carasi fields that had been allocated to their ances-tors but also new plots since the Chinusiris lacked sufficient lands to feed a growing family and fulfill their tribute, personal services, and the mita.49 It is unclear whether these fields were indeed insufficient to provide for the whole family, as the Chinusiris claimed in court. But there is little doubt


about the ongoing deterioration in their standard of living. This process of land subdivision, in addition, could be seen as an example of the agrarian dynamic behind the sweeping rise in the number of forasteros registered in eighteenth-century censuses of Pocoata. A land dispute of a different nature broke out in 1740. In this case, the conflict centered on highland fields, and the dispute was not promoted by a particular family but by representatives of an ayllu in response to the purportedly expansionist ambitions of Indians from other ayllus. Thus the hilacata Matheo Ayra and another Indian principal of the Hilave ayllu (Urinsaya) protested on behalf of their community against members of the Collana and Pari ayllus (Anansaya) for having invaded their lands and for “trying to confound the boundary stones and going beyond the limits and confines that divide them.”50 Perhaps with the purpose of preventing another process of endless litigation like that over the Carasi lands, the audiencia urged Corregidor La Vega del Ren to be especially scrupulous in handling this matter. Reflecting the tentativeness of colonial state interven-tion in this type of conflict, the court commanded the provincial magistrate to analyze the existing land titles, to hear all the involved parties, and to seek a compromise. Only when an explicit agreement was reached should he place the relevant boundary stones. No party ought to be dispossessed, the audiencia warned the corregidor, until this bargaining process had been completed. The Hilave Indians handed this instruction to La Vega del Ren in October 1742. As in previous cases, the state mediation brought no results. A few months later, the conflict shifted to a different physical and cultural sphere. Pocoata communities resorted to a mechanism for resolv-ing conflicts that conformed to engrained Andean traditions. In March 1743, Hilave and Pari Indians engaged in a violent confrontation strongly reminiscent of the contests or ch’axwas in present-day northern Potosí described by ethnographic fieldwork. Ch’axwas are land battles involving hamlets, ayllus, or sometimes entire moieties and ethnic groups aimed at defending the territorial integrity of the community. A distinctive feature of these violent confrontations is that the battles take place on the same fields under dispute.51 Unlike forms of ritual warfare such as tinkus that had no immediate economic consequences, ch’axwas were intended to determine land rights.52 It needs to be stressed once more that given the imperma-nent nature of community boundaries in the Andes, these battles should be seen as part of an ongoing expansion and retraction of neighboring ayllus according to agrarian and demographic cycles. The segunda (caciques’ lieutenant) of the Hilave ayllu, Matheo Ayra, explained that the cacique from the Anansaya moiety, Blas Cori, had


encouraged twenty Indians from the Pari ayllu to occupy the disputed plots and to fallow some of these lands for thirty cargas of seed and the rest for four cargas of potatoes, “trespassing existing boundaries.” The Hilave Indi-ans, in turn, were ready to defend their ground with force. A fight then took place, the Pari Indians beating an adversary so badly that “they almost had to give him the last rites.”53 Leaving aside its obvious partiality, the account underscores some ele-ments of ethnohistorical interest. On the one hand, the confrontation was collective, involving a large number of Indians, and it was not the result of the demands of any particular family. On the other hand, the moiety seems to have functioned as a locus of solidarity since the cacique principal of Anansaya, Blas Cori, the main instigator of Pari Indians’ expansion over the lands claimed by the Hilave ayllu (which belonged to Urinsaya), was neither a member nor an authority of Pari. Blas Cori was an Indian from the Carigua ayllu who might have acted in his condition of Anansaya cacique in a confrontation pitting an ayllu from his moiety against members of the other moiety. Besides, it is possible to conjecture, in a more hypotheti-cal vein, that fields belonging to the manta system, rather than household plots, were at stake in this land battle. The mantas are puna open fields whose fallow and cultivation cycles are collectively determined by the ayl-lus and hamlets. Ethnic authorities are responsible for the yearly allocation of small plots in each manta to domestic units.54 The fact that this was a collective struggle led by ayllu and moiety authorities seems to support this hypothesis about the nature of the disputed lands. In this respect, it has been noted that nowadays “most of the land battles (ch’axwas) that take place over Puna ayllu frontiers are caused by conflicting hamlet claims to border mantas; this threat means that each hamlet must mobilize collec-tively in defense of the disputed lands.”55 Although the recourse to this Andean mechanism for solving intraeth-nic agrarian conflicts is not explicitly mentioned again, two other collec-tive clashes underscore the limited power of Spanish justice in this field of social relations. The first pitted ayllus from different moieties. In the late 1740s, members of Collana and Chacaya (Anansaya) claimed that Indi-ans from Hilata (Urinsaya) had recently occupied some puna lands called Cañacrus, Sallco, Turusana, Sacampampa, and Altos de Chayala. Although the Anansaya Indians had always been in possession of those fields, their neighbors, led by their hilacata, Gregorio Caysala, invaded them, “graz-ing their cattle and sowing potato and other seeds, so that we do not have enough room to cultivate.”56 In 1749, Collana and Chacaya Indians turned for help to Corregidor La Vega del Ren’s successor, Agustín Pérez Vargas. However, the Hilata Indians continued to cross Anansaya boundaries. In


May 1754, members of Collana and Chacaya appealed to the new corregi-dor, Pablo de Aoíz, who commissioned a Spanish neighbor of the village of Pocoata to survey and trace the linderos in the presence of the Urinsaya Indians. According to Collana and Chacaya peasants, he did so “renovating the ancient boundary stones, in front of and with the knowledge of the said [hilacata Caysala] and the said moiety [Urinsaya].”57 That colonial authori-ties lacked the legitimacy to determine community boundaries without the peasants’ consent becomes apparent from the reaction to this initiative. Although the Hilata Indians would later make the point that their rights had been overlooked, their opposition to outside intervention went beyond legal procedures: some of the Hilata Indians removed and destroyed all the boundary stones the judge had erected. A similar dynamic can be observed in a dispute that surfaced in 1759 when six Anansaya Indians traveled to La Plata to protest against new transgressions of village boundaries by other Pocoatas (there is no infor-mation regarding the ayllu or moiety to which they belonged). Corregidor José Gabriel de Larreateagui, like his predecessor Pablo de Aoíz, appointed a nonindigenous dweller of Pocoata to establish new boundary demarca-tions. The difficulties of colonial authorities in settling this type of quarrel, and the rather limited value of formal deeds, is underlined this time by the fact that it was the same claimants who rejected the judge’s procedures. The Anansaya Indians, in effect, complained later that although they had submitted their legal titles to the judge, he had nevertheless fixed the village boundaries “in favor of the opposite party, even taking away from us the fields we still possessed and doing other damage in our fallow lands. When we protested, he proceeded to plunder us with even more violence.”58 Two new conflicts that emerged in the 1750s illustrate social tensions of a different order. Unlike previous disputes, the parties were under the same ethnic authority, and it was not the setting up of ayllu boundaries that was at stake but the distribution of plots within the community. These clashes reflected the contradictions between two socially recognized, but potentially conflicting, types of landholding rights. According to the first concept, land tenure was inherited patrilineally, each male (or in his absence female) offspring receiving a piece of his father’s possessions upon mar-riage. Inheritance rights could be formally recognized through registered deeds.59 The second concept was based on a more complex set of economic considerations: in addition to these hereditary norms, the caciques could allocate plots to the households according to a combination of demographic and fiscal criteria, which was mostly alien to Spanish landholding concepts. It is interesting to note, in this respect, that the institutional constraints of the rural community might have been tighter than in colonial Mexico. In


rural regions like Guadalajara or Oaxaca not only native chiefs (as was the case in the Andes) but also Indian commoners “distributed land at their personal discretion, implying at least an incipient form of private owner-ship.”60 Andean lords, in contrast, seemed to wield considerable authority to reassign fields to ayllu members in accordance with collective social principles, namely, the current balance between population and resources. Although individual and communal land tenure tenets play a part in cus-tomary Andean practices, they could eventually clash, particularly during conjunctures of increasing population pressure. The first of the two disputes mentioned was initiated by an Indian of the Capac ayllu named Salvador Rodríguez Paco against Indians of the Chanca ayllu, both ayllus from the Urinsaya moiety. Paco accused Chanca fami-lies of having misappropriated fields that belonged to him. He explained that his grandparents and parents had owned certain plots called Utucuro, Coropaya (an estancia of the Capac ayllu), and Pampa Oratorio, “which were in ancient times distributed to them out of common lands.” After their parents’ death, Paco and his four brothers inherited the lands. Since then, the family had increased: at least three of Paco’s brothers had married and had four or five children each. Like the Chinusiris before him, Paco argued that even though the inherited fields were already inadequate to feed the extended family, they had to endure “invasions from other Indians.”61 In laying claim to these lands, this Andean family did not appeal to inheritance (and economic need) alone. This principle appears intertwined with another possession rule. Specifically, Paco sought to reinforce his hereditary rights by pointing out that his four brothers and even some of their sons had paid tributes and served as mita workers in Potosí. This was certainly a crucial argument, since Andean peasants established an inextri-cable link between tribute and access to land. As a Pocoata cacique once observed, elderly Indians continued to submit their taxes after they were no longer subject to tribute by law in order to preserve their current land assignations; as did Indian widows, who continued to pay their deceased husbands’ tasas in order to avoid relinquishing their fields.62 The same went for the handicapped.63 The argument could be difficult to sustain as far as individual land entitlements were concerned because it undermined the sense of absolute usufruct rights implicit in hereditary claims. For if commoner Indians could resort to their economic services as a means to buttress their heredi-tary privileges, so could the caciques when seeking to accommodate new households in previously single land allotments as a way of maximizing the ratio between available agrarian resources, manpower, and tribute reve-nues.64 After all, the holdings associated with any given tax liability were


deemed to diminish when demographic growth surpassed the commu-nity’s capacity to expand over marginal or previously uncultivated lands. This is precisely what was happening at the time not just in Pocoata but in the province of Chayanta generally. A corregidor explicitly recognized this phenomenon in 1773 when recommending to the viceroy of Peru that “the originario Indians who lack the fields [topos] due to the [originario] category must receive an equivalent tribute reduction.”65 In brief, given the political economy of the Andean ayllu, the entitlement that peasant com-moners could draw from their hereditary rights and their contributions in cash and labor was open to dispute. Salvador Rodríguez Paco of the Capac ayllu exhibited to the high court of Charcas a detailed nine-folio land title that demonstrated his landholding claims. The ethnic authorities, however, seemed to have had reasons of their own for disregarding this line of argu-ment along with the documents backing them. Not only the hilacata of the contending Chanca ayllu but also the cacique principal of Urinsaya (to which both ayllus belonged) supported the Indians of Chanca, who refused to leave Paco’s plots.66 A similar dynamic appears in the second dispute, which broke out in October 1753 when an Anansaya Indian protested against the main authority of his ayllu for reassigning to other families some fields he had legitimately inherited from his forebears in a place called Ibute. An Indian named Melchor Flores told the audiencia that fifty years before, upon the previous occupant’s death, these plots had been granted to his grandfather, so that he assumed the monetary and labor obligations attached to them. His grandfather, his father, and then his brothers and he himself had cultivated the Ibute lands ever since. Population growth, as usual, had taken its toll. Flores explained that “despite all the years that have passed since that allot-ment, nowadays its continuation is even more necessary since our family has increased so much, for my father is aging and full of sons whereas those lands were allocated to a single person.”67 Like Paco before, Flores sup-ported his claims with a document, the deed issued by the Anansaya ruler Gerónimo Cuñaca in 1707 in favor of Flores’s grandfather Diego Asen-cio.68 Again, colonial written deeds proved to have little legitimacy in the peasant society. Since, after all, the situation of this family should have been akin to many other Pocoata peasants, the ethnic authorities decided that Flores’s hereditary rights did not take precedence over the needs of other families, and they therefore redistributed part of the Ibute lands. Hence Flores lamented that, these fields being already inadequate to guarantee his family’s subsistence, “now the cacique lieutenant attempts to bother us by trying to introduce some Indians in our lands to our prejudice.” In the context of the Andean rural community, the Chayanovian process of land


subdivision and “self-exploitation” was naturally perceived, justifiably or not, as a case of cacique mismanagement. As peasant households could not claim exclusive control over their land resources, life cycles in times of population pressure became politicized. However, colonial rulers could do little to alter this delicate set of economic checks and balances. Predictably, the Charcas court backed Flores’s claims; predictably, too, there is no indi-cation that this support was of any consequence.69 To sum up, an unusually large amount of litigation over land tenure rights took place in the Pocoata ethnic group from the 1730s. These disputes involved issues of village boundaries in puna and valley territories alike, family claims, conflicts among ayllus and moieties, and clashes between hereditary and communal principles of land possession. In one case at least, we have clear indications of the overlapping of judicial mechanisms with customary Andean methods of settling boundary questions through force. As a whole, these intracommunity struggles highlight the fact that, by the eighteenth century, landholding in northern Potosí continued to be in large measure “reciprocal, flexible, and often temporary,” as opposed to the “inflexible, codified, and permanent” Spanish tenure rights that, according to the historian Susan Ramírez, prevailed in other Andean rural areas after more than two centuries of colonial rule.70 It is not that the Indians would not appeal to permanent, often state-sanctioned, land entitlements (either in the setting of boundary markers or in individual land allotments), but that those appeals were ultimately subordinated to a logic of retreating or reversionary rights.71 Since Pocoata families and ayllus, to borrow again from Marshall Sahlins, held “a right against the world to sufficient farming land,” and since territorial borders were inherently porous and economic need and usage could take precedence over formal legal deeds, conflict-ing tenure demands were likely to emerge when such a right was exer-cised. Hence the premise of the land feuds among the Pocoata could be summarized, like that of the Tiv of Nigeria, with the formula “We don’t have a boundary; we have an argument.”72 The conflicts reviewed here help us to understand how these arguments tended to be settled culturally and politically.

Pocoata Lordships in Crisis

Whereas demographic growth and its direct effect, land subdivision, appears as an underlying source of tension in most of the land quarrels, economic pressures alone could not account for the emergence of litigation among the members of the Indian community. Agrarian disputes are just the most visible part of a more profound process: the failure of social mechanisms to


allocate resources in the Andean world. Agrarian conflicts, in other words, must have gone hand in hand with the weakness of the ethnic structures of government, the prime instance of distribution of agricultural resources in this society. Just as the ineffectiveness of the colonial justice system in solving intracommunity land strife proves the irreplaceable role of caciques in the Andean social fabric, the repeated resort to Spanish magistrates sug-gests the authority crisis of the native chiefs. Pocoata lordships were, in fact, in turmoil throughout most of the eighteenth century. Already in the late 1740s and early 1750s, members of the Pari, Carigua, Collana, Pisaca, and Chacaya, the five ayllus comprising the Anansaya moiety, persistently demanded the removal of their cacique, Blas Cori. Cori, whom we have seen involved in one of the land disputes in the 1730s, was accused of being a cacique intruso, abusing the tribute system and participating in the forced distribution of goods carried out by the corregidores.73 Eventually, he was not only dismissed but even arrested and jailed in the city of La Plata.74 The caciques of the Urinsaya moiety, Diego and Dionisio Ayra, descendants of a prestigious lineage of Andean lords, faced collective dissent as well. In the early 1770s, a group of Indians pressed for their dismissal before the audiencia of Charcas, arguing various abuses of power.75 It was against this backdrop of this protest movement that the corregidor of Chayanta and the audiencia of Charcas implemented the most radical attempt at reformulating state-community relations in northern Potosí at the time: the replacement of all the Pocoata chiefs by the lord of the neighboring ethnic group of Moscari, a wealthy and influ-ential cacique named Florencio Lupa.76 This policy, in turn, unleashed an unprecedented collective mobilization, involving dozens of petitions before Potosí and Charcas courts, as well as demonstrations of force against rural authorities. In 1776, Lupa was forced to resign as cacique of Pocoata. That protests against caciques consisted of more than factional dis-putes vented in colonial courts was expressed by Blas Cori himself. Shed-ding light on a range of veiled modes of deception, sabotage, and insubordi-nation that normally go unsaid in the historical record, the Anansaya ruler explained in 1748 that the Indians

do not want to cultivate for us plots in the common lands whether in the valley or the puna; only my relatives and compadres help me in cultivating my scarce plots and the rest, instead, try to take away from me the pieces of land that my ancestors used to sow. If the Indians were to cultivate my plots, I would have to pay them, and I cannot have any services from them, since they only do it for pay, and if we tell them to take care of some of our mules, they break [the animals’] feet and ruin them.77


Although by no means the sole reason for indigenous dissatisfaction, there is a definite link between this crisis of legitimacy and the land feuds we examined in the previous section. This link was both explicit and implicit. It is no coincidence that many of the grievances against the caciques surfaced in July, during the grain harvest in the valleys. It was at this time of year that community gatherings were celebrated, and ethnic authorities reallocated and confirmed lands to the households. Indians of the Capac ayllu report-edly encouraged the substitution of the Pocoata caciques for Florencio Lupa in exchange for his protection in the customary land struggles.78 Lupa himself took pains to recognize the close relationship between agrarian disputes and the political turmoil faced by his predecessors. Upon assuming the post of Pocoata cacique in 1772, he publicly announced to the Indians that new complaints before Spanish officials would no longer be tolerated because their “only reason was the bad distribution of lands, and he would go out and assign them evenly.”79 Then, three years later, in distinguishing his performance from that of his predecessors, he had the audiencia certify that no conflicts of “Indians against each other” had occurred in Pocoata during his tenure.80 Though this was not entirely true and repression as much as consensus could have deterred new litigation, his concern with issues of land repartition seemed genuine. Even at the height of the col-lective outcries against Lupa’s economic practices, a Pocoata Indian made the following remark: in contrast to previous caciques, Lupa redistributed fields to those who needed it, made the parties ask each other for pardon, and left the Indians “in friendship.”81 Provincial authorities, too, were well aware of this connection. In justifying the sweeping abolition of Pocoata’s self-rule, a corregidor stressed the ineptitude of the caciques in settling con-flicts over boundaries and land distribution. He contended that the Pocoata lords “favor some Indians to the detriment of others in the allocation of lands, as a result of which they live in continuous litigation.”82 In addition to their inability to handle the growing competition over land resources, the Pocoata chiefs were politically discredited by a pro-tracted historical process of socioeconomic differentiation and the result-ing misappropriation of community fields. As I have noted, the Urinsaya caciques Diego and Dionisio Ayra belonged to a powerful line of Andean lords.83 The historian Thierry Saignes refers to the Ayra Chinchi Airuto as prominent examples of the entrepreneurial caciques that during the early seventeenth century managed to displace the great pre-Hispanic lineages thanks to their greater ability to adapt to the market economy and the logic of mercantile accumulation.84 There is little doubt, at any rate, that the mechanisms of the accumulation of private wealth fostered strong dis-content in indigenous society. Already in the 1630s, the Pocoata brought


“thirty charges” against one of the Urinsaya lords for having used commu-nal lands and manpower for his own benefit.85 By the 1650s, Fernando Ayra de Airuto supported the establishment by a Spanish mining owner of Aulla-gas of a silver refinery in the Chayala Valley, in the territory of the Poco-ata. The Indians tenaciously resisted this project, arguing that their ethnic lord was not acting on behalf of the common good.86 In the late seven-teenth century, in the course of a general inquiry on the southern Andean caciques carried out in Potosí, a Francisco Ayra was accused of granting lands of absentee Indians to Spaniards and mestizos “and nothing can be done about this, because [the caciques] host the corregidor in their homes and made him their compadre, and if someone denounces their abuses, he gets punished.”87 When population pressure began to mount in the eighteenth century, this long-term trend toward private accumulation must have aggravated land scarcity. As I noted in the first section, the Urinsaya ayllus had a lower number of valley residents and a larger number of forasteros than their counterparts in Anansaya. In the 1750s, Corregidor Pablo de Aoíz attrib-uted the Pocoata’s land shortages to the fact that their lords and noble families had monopolized community fields at the expense of common Indians. Twenty years later, Florencio Lupa stressed that many Pocoata families named Ayra refused “to give up the excessive lands they occupy, for during their tenure as tribute collectors, they monopolized for them-selves and their relatives the best of the community lands. Hence everyone regards himself as a hacendado and makes use of the lands as he wishes.” As a result, many Indian commoners migrated, “and it has been impossible to make them return to Pocoata [reducirlos] because they say that they lack sufficient lands for their maintenance and the payment of tributes.”88 These were not mere allegations. We know, for example, that Diego Ayra owned a private hacienda in Chayala, a valley where two Urinsaya ayllus, Capac and Sullcavi, possessed lands.89 Thus, in 1760, a nonindigenous dweller complained about “the concealment carried out by the ruler of Pocoata, Don Diego Ayra, of twenty Indian tributaries in the lands, haciendas, and mills named Chayala that he owns without any land title, with serious dam-age to His Majesty’s Treasury.”90 These plots must have been sufficiently fertile to be leased out to Spanish rural residents. A protector of Indians of the province, Isidoro Pimentel, was identified as “a tenant of the Mills and Vegetable Gardens belonging to the said Don Diego [Ayra].” So did another mestizo neighbor of Chayala.91 The repeal of an Andean model of government that had underwrit-ten land concentration and increasing litigation among families and ayl-lus surfaced once more in the aftermath of the demise of Florencio Lupa.


After securing the dismissal of the Moscari lord through massive demon-strations of force and legal appeals, members of the Urinsaya moiety suc-cessfully demanded that the protest leader, a Pocoata Indian named Pedro Caypa, not the descendants of the Ayra Chinchi lineage, be appointed as new cacique. One year after Caypa had taken office, the Indians asked the audiencia for his formal confirmation, even when the Ayras alone, as the Pocoata themselves recognized, possessed hereditary rights. Evoking perhaps the numerous past battles over land and ethnic government, they emphasized that Caypa treated the Indians “with love and fairness, which was not the case with previous caciques. For this reason, the people have remained this time peaceful and quiet without the revolutions and turmoil that caciques usually stir.”92 Just as intracommunity dissent had contrib-uted, albeit unwillingly, to the Pocoata’s loss of political autonomy, it left a clear imprint on their struggle to recover it as well.

Conclusion: Agrarian Strife and Notions of Authority

The eighteenth century was a period of intense social unrest in the Andes. Fiscal revolts, struggles between Indian communities and private hacien-das, protests against rural ruling groups, and millenarian and messianic upheavals are some of the visible expressions of the general climate of dis-tress. The case of Pocoata reveals a less visible aspect of this process: the strains and fault lines in the peasant society. Battles over ayllu boundaries and land distribution illustrate the impact on everyday social relations of regionwide trends of agrarian compression in the Andean countryside. It also bears witness to the crisis of customary Andean mechanisms for set-tling land disputes, as well as the difficulties in replacing them by judi-cial procedures. As a whole, this process allows us to put into historical perspective the unique nature of the great indigenous mobilizations that lay ahead. The image of a relatively cohesive community left by the mas-sive uprisings of 1780–81 is not what one observes here. What we see is a society shaped by profound, multilayered contradictions, that is, long-term processes of internal social differentiation, legal battles and quotidian forms of sabotage directed at ethnic authorities, tensions between dispa-rate land tenure rights, boundary struggles, and repeated peasant recourse to state institutions to settle differences with their peers. Viewed from the standpoint of social relationships in Pocoata, ethnic political solidarity seems less the precondition than the outcome of the protest movements of the late 1770s and early 1780s. In addition, the intervention of the Spanish functionaries in village affairs brings into focus two seemingly contradictory aspects of indigenous


perceptions of the role of the colonial government. The first one is the per-vasiveness of state institutions in social life. It is true that resistance against illegitimate ethnic lords required some form of legal strategy because the appointment of caciques was a prerogative of colonial officials. The intra-ethnic agrarian disputes reviewed in this article indicate nevertheless that members of the Indian communities were ready to address colonial courts, often for long periods of time, in order to redress grievances that did not directly affect state interests or demand state mediation. Although it is safe to assume that most of the land battles in the indigenous society evolved outside Spanish institutions (and therefore remain invisible to us), Pocoata records demonstrate that Andean families and ayllus willingly sought alter-native sources of justice and that the colonial state could contribute, at least in principle, to legitimizing the possession and exploitation of community lands. A second aspect of state mediation in rural conflicts is that the perva-sive place of colonial institutions in the Andean social imagination did not translate into power or legitimacy. In the case of litigation over land, the power of colonial magistrates was restricted to sanctioning compromises among the parties in conflict. The cultural norms governing the repartition of fields and the settling of boundary disputes presented Spanish courts, judicial procedures, and land titles with insurmountable problems. Uni-lateral decisions were by rule dismissed and lacked practical effect. Like-wise, agrarian proposals, like the one put forward by Corregidor Aoíz to transfer parcels in the valley of Carasi from the Macha to the Pocoata, as other general projects of land redistribution at the time, fell on deaf ears.93 Enlightened colonial magistrates, as historians have argued, seemed genu-inely concerned with issues of agrarian efficiency and equal allotment of parcels. They nonetheless proved unable to shape landholding patterns in the rural community. Eventually, in the 1780s, the Spanish administration did create new fiscal categories (“forasteros with some lands,” for instance) and reclassified numerous peasant households (from originarios to foras-teros) in order to reflect more faithfully the realities of land scarcity. But these fiscal reforms simply brought state norms into conformance with social practice: caciques and commoners had long established a close link between land tenure and tax liability and recognized a more complex scale of tribute obligations than the official one. The power of the Spanish magistrates was highly contested even in the appointment and removal of ethnic authorities. In the 1750s, provin-cial officials were forced to dismiss the cacique principal of the Anansaya moiety, Blas Cori, after the Indians tenaciously resisted him in the sphere of the Spanish justice and everyday economic interactions alike. Twenty years


later, Pocoata peasants compelled state officials to relinquish their policy of eliminating the political autonomy of the group. Intended to discipline and normalize social relations, this policy ended up publicly exposing the vulnerability of colonial domination in the Andean world. In short, the influence of colonial values on social relations in the Andean community was marked by profound ambivalence. In justifying competing claims to economic resources and power, Spanish notions of land tenure and authority could be strategically deployed as much as readily disregarded. Correspondingly, the pervasive presence of colonial justice in peasant life was not matched by the state’s ability to command acquiescence or to impose its decisions by force. Although in the course of the eighteenth century, facing growing pressures, Indians often looked to state institutions as a means of redressing their agrarian and political grievances, peasant practices did not automatically endow colonial officials with legitimacy. The process leading to the great Indian upheaval of northern Potosí, in which judicial politics and mass violence went hand in hand, would teach puzzled Spanish rulers this lesson.

Notes

1 Ricardo Godoy, Mining and Agriculture in Highland Bolivia: Ecology, History, and Commerce among the Jukumanis (Tucson, AZ, 1990), 46.

2 Fieldwork on northern Potosí includes Godoy, Mining and Agriculture; Olivia Harris, To Make the Earth Bear Fruit: Ethnographic Essays on Fertility, Work, and Gender in Highland Bolivia (London, 2000); Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Ayl-lus y proyectos de desarrollo en el norte de Potosí (La Paz, 1992); Diego Pacheco Balanza and Edgar Guerrero Peñaranda, Machas, Tinkipayas y Yamparas, Provincia Chayanta (Norte Potosí) (Sucre, 1994); Tristan Platt, “El rol del ayllu andino en la reproducción del régimen mercantil simple en el norte de Potosí (Bolivia),” in Identidades andinas y lógicas del campesinado, ed. Lucy Therina Briggs and Domingo Llanque Chana (Lima, 1982); and Platt, “Entre ch’axwa y muxsa: Para una historia del pensamiento político aymara,” in Tres reflexiones sobre el pensamiento andino (La Paz, 1987).

3 Nils Jacobsen, Mirages of Transition: The Peruvian Altiplano, 1780–1930 (Berke-ley, CA, 1993), 88. On Bourbon agrarian policies in Huarochirí and Cocha-bamba, see Karen Spalding, Huarochirí: An Andean Society under Inca and Spanish Rule (Stanford, CA, 1984), 204–8; and Brooke Larson, Colonialism and Agrarian Transformation in Bolivia: Cochabamba, 1550–1900 (Durham, NC, 1997), 276–79.

4 See, e.g., Scarlett O’Phelan Godoy, Un siglo de rebeliones anticoloniales: Perú y Bolivia 1700–1778 (Cuzco, Peru, 1988); Alberto Flores Galindo, Buscando a un inca: identidad y utopía en los Andes (Lima, 1987); Steve Stern, ed., Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, Eighteenth to Twen-tieth Centuries (Madison, WI, 1987); Ward Stavig, The World of Túpac Amaru: Conflict, Community, and Identity in Colonial Peru (Lincoln, NE, 1999); Charles Walker, Smoldering Ashes: Cuzco and the Creation of Republican Peru, 1780–1840


(Durham, NC, 1999); Sinclair Thomson, We Alone Will Rule: Native Andean Politics in the Age of Insurgency (Madison, WI, 2002); Nicholas A. Robins, Genocide and Millennialism in Upper Peru: The Great Rebellion of 1780–1782 (Westport, CT, 2002); and Sergio Serulnikov, Subverting Colonial Authority (Durham, NC, 2003).

5 On the political crisis of hereditary caciques in southern Andes, see Thomas Abercrombie, Pathways of Memory and Power: Ethnography and History among an Andean People (Madison, WI, 1998); Elizabeth Penry, “Transformations in Indigenous Authority and Identity in Resettlement Towns of Colonial Char-cas (Alto Peru),” PhD diss., University of Miami, 1996; Roger Rasnake, Domi-nation and Resistance: Authority and Power among an Andean People (Durham, NC, 1988); Thomson, We Alone Will Rule; and Serulnikov, Subverting Colonial Authority.

6 Tristan Platt, “Mapas coloniales de la provincia de Chayanta: dos visiones con-flictivas de un solo paisaje,” in Homenaje a Gunnar Mendoza (La Paz, 1978), 102–3; Mercedes del Río, “Estructuración étnica qharaqhara y su desarticula-ción colonial,” in Espacios, etnias, frontera: Atenuaciones políticas en el sur del Tawantinsuyu, siglos XV–XIII, ed. Ana María Presta (Sucre, 1995), 3–47. This special relationship between the two ethnic groups continued after their separa-tion. E.g., ritual battles (tinkus) between Machas and Pocoatas continue to this date.

7 John Murra Murra, Formaciones económicas y políticas del mundo andino (Lima, 1975). For northern Potosí, see Harris, To Make the Earth, 77–137; and Platt, “Rol del ayllu.”

8 In Pedro de Angelis, Colección de obras y documentos relativos a la historia antigua y moderna de las provincias del Río de la Plata (Buenos Aires, 1971), 45.

9 For a complete list of Pocoata highland hamlets (called estancias) during the eighteenth century, see Sergio Serulnikov, “Peasant Politics and Colonial Domi-nation: Social Conflicts and Insurgency in Northern Potosí, 1730–1781,” PhD diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1998, 247–51. Many of these hamlets can be located in a current map of the region based on ethnographic data (see Pacheco Balanza and Guerrero Peñaranda, Machas, Tinkipayas, 172).

10 Archivo General de la Nación [hereafter AGN], sala 13, 18-9-2. 11 Quoted in Enrique Tandeter, “Población y economía en los Andes (siglo XVIII),”

Revista andina 13 (1995): 8. 12 Tandeter, “Población y economía,” 8–13. 13 For an argument on “the extremely low density of Amerindian peasant popula-

tion” in the Bolivian highlands, see Herbert Klein, Haciendas and Ayllus: Rural Society in the Bolivian Andes in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Stan-ford, CA, 1993), 130–31. I thank Robert H. Jackson and one of Ethnohistory’s annonymous reviewers for pointing out this issue to me.

14 Enrique Florescano, Precio del maíz y crisis agrícolas en México (1708–1810) (Mexico City, 1969); David Brading, Haciendas and Ranchos in the Mexican Bajío: León, 1700–1860 (Cambridge, 1978); Claude Morín, Michoacán en la Nueva España del siglo XVIII: Crecimiento y desigualdad en una economía colo-nial (Mexico City, 1979); Eric Van Young, Hacienda and Market in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: The Rural Economy of the Guadalajara Region, 1675–1820 (Berkeley, CA, 1981).

15 Enrique Tandeter, “Crisis in Upper Peru, 1800–1805,” Hispanic American His-torical Review 71 (1991): 70.


16 Scarlett O’Phelan Godoy, “Tierras comunales y revuelta social: Perú y Bolivia en el siglo XVIII,” Allpanchis 22 (1983): 75–91; Jacobsen, Mirages, 79–106; Tandeter, “Población y economía”; Larson, Colonialism and Agrarian Transfor-mation; Ward Stavig, The World of Túpac Amaru: Conflict, Community, and Iden-tity in Colonial Peru (Lincoln, NE, 1999); Luis Miguel Glave and María Isabel Remy, Estructura agraria y vida rural en una región andina: Ollantaytambo entre los siglos XVI y XIX (Cusco, Peru, 1983).

17 Serulnikov, Subverting Colonial Authority, chap. 1. 18 Corregidor Navarro to Viceroy Amat, April 1766, AGN, sala 13, 18-9-5. 19 For instances of this type of conflict in Puraca, Chullpa, Auquimarca, Caracha,

and other groups in the Chayanta province, see Serulnikov, Subverting Colonial Authority, chap. 1. For boundary conflicts between highland communities in late eighteenth-century Peru, see Spalding, Huarochirí, 205–6; and Christine Hunefeldt, Lucha por la tierra y protesta indígena: Las comunidades indígenas del Perú entre Colonia y República, 1800–1830 (Bonn, 1982), 105–17.

20 The presence of several Pocoata tenant families in haciendas in neighboring Moscari seems to confirm this assessment (AGN, sala 13, 18-9-5).

21 Spalding, Huarochirí, 206. Land redistribution was applied by the courts on a case-by-case basis and was limited to litigation within the indigenous society. It did not affect the Spanish haciendas at all.

22 AGN, sala 13, 18-9-2. 23 On the case of the Puraca, see the population list submitted by the Indians to

the audiencia in March 1748 (Archivo Nacional de Bolivia [hereafter ANB], Expedientes Coloniales [hereafter EC] 1750, no. 20). According to a census from the early nineteenth century, 25.5% of the Laymi resided in the valley. Olivia Harris maintains that until the 1970s roughly a third of the Laymi lived in the lowlands (To Make the Earth, 83–84). It must be noted that the practice of double domicile allowed households that were not registered as permanent valley residents to have access to lowland fields.

24 Platt, “Rol del ayllu,” 49, 56–60. 25 Tristan Platt, Estado boliviano y ayllu andino: Tierra y tributo en el norte de Potosí

(Lima, 1982), 49, 65. 26 AGN, sala 13, 18-9-5. In the 1770s, a Pocoata agregado reported that the

cacique “told me that I pay as an originario Indian and that he would then assign to me lands to work as such.” He demanded later that he be either assigned originario lands or put back “in the agregado class” (ANB, EC 1776, no. 42). In the 1780s, Chayanta authorities sanctioned this link between land and taxa-tion by placing former originarios without sufficient lands into the category of “forasteros con algunas tierras de 7 pesos.” Hence the 1786 census raised the overall tribute monies in 10,149 pesos while decreasing the number of origina-rios (AGN, sala 13, 18-10-3). On the relationship between tax and land tenure in late colonial Upper Peru, see Daniel Santamaría, “La propiedad de la tierra y la condición social del indio en el Alto Perú, 1780–1810,” Desarrollo económico 66 (1977): 253–71. Certainly, in other Andean regions the forastero category continued to carry its literal meaning. See Larson, Colonialism and Agrarian Transformation, 139; Ann Wightman, Indigenous Migration and Social Change: The Forasteros of Cuzco, 1520–1720 (Durham, NC, 1990), 45–73; Karen Powers, Andean Journeys: Migration, Ethnogenesis, and the State in Colonial Quito (Albu-querque, NM, 1995), 107–32.


27 According to four tax rolls carried out between 1843 and 1877, the number of Pocoata taxpayers rose from 1,220 to 2,149, while originarios dropped from 38.4% to 32.7%. By the same token, the 1856 epidemic was followed by a rise in the number of originarios. Platt (Estado boliviano, 53–67) argues that many forasteros became originarios as a result of the relative land availability. Ethno-graphic information on this issue is available in Harris, To Make the Earth, 116; and Rivera Cusicanqui, Ayllus y proyectos, 99. For an interpretation of the growth of forasteros in nineteenth-century northern Potosí as a migratory phenomenon, see Godoy, Mining and Agriculture, 34; and Klein, Haciendas and Ayllus, 129–32.

28 Platt, “Rol del ayllu,” 40–41; Rivera Cusicanqui, Ayllus y proyectos, 96. Sig-nificantly, in the 1750s, when denying a charge that he had stripped a high-land family of some lowlands, a cacique of the Chullpa group explained that the family members could not possibly possess valley fields because they were “forasteros” (ANB, EC 1753, no. 140). (Let us note that since here the fiscal category forastero carried its literal meaning of “migrant,” the cacique’s asser-tion implied either that the family had been unduly usufructing valley plots or that they had never possessed such holdings.) See Sergio Serulnikov, “De foras-teros a hilacatas: Una familia andina de la provincia de Chayanta, siglo XVIII,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas 40 (2003): 43–70.

29 AGN, sala 13, 18-9-5. 30 Maurice Godelier, The Mental and the Material (London, 1984), 77. 31 ANB, Tierras e Indios [hereafter TI] 1736, no. 44. The Chinusiris also men-

tioned a Macha cacique as involved in the land invasion. 32 ANB, TI 1736, no. 44. 33 ANB, TI 1740, no. 33. 34 The ruling was communicated in the Mollemolle ravine and in Cotapampa and

Tolapampa. According to current ethnic maps, these sites belong to the puna territories of two of the confronting ayllus, the Pari and the Capac.

35 ANB, TI 1740, no. 33. 36 Ibid. 37 ANB, TI 1741, no. 86 38 Marshall Sahlins, “The Segmentary Lineage and Predatory Expansion,” Ameri-

can Anthropologist 63 (1961): 337. For a use of Sahlins’s argument in the Andean context, see Hunefeldt, Lucha por la tierra, 109.

39 Republican elites would show the same pattern of behavior as their colonial predecessors. Alluding to land conflicts between two northern Potosí groups, the Laymi and the Jukumani, in the early twentieth century, Godoy (Mining and Agriculture, 47) has also noted that “judges decided in favor of the party that happened to be present.”

40 ANB, TI 1740, no. 33. 41 For a general discussion of the clash between European and Andean concep-

tions of land tenure and property rights, see Susan Ramírez, The World Upside Down: Cross-Cultural Contact and Conflict in Sixteenth-Century Peru (Stanford, CA, 1996), 42–61. On the tensions between European and native forms of spa-tial representation in colonial Mexico, see Serge Gruzinski, The Conquest of Mexico: The Incorporation of Indian Societies into the Western World, Sixteenth–Eighteenth Centuries (New York, 1993), chap. 3.

42 William Taylor, Landlord and Peasant in Colonial Oaxaca (Stanford, CA, 1972),


84. For an example of the difficulties of creating precise boundary lines between Mexican villages during the Zapatista revolution in Morelos, see John Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York, 1968), 232–35.

43 On the role of the caciques during the collective rituals carried out in the mojones of the ayllus of Yura during the carnival celebrations, see Rasnake, Domination, 250–54. Referring to the case of Kulta, Abercrombie has defined the function of mojones as “sacralized sites of social memory” and the community journeys to establish ethnic boundaries as “ritual pilgrimages” (Pathways, 284–91). On northern Potosí, see Platt, “Mapas coloniales”; and Pacheco Balanza and Guer-rero Peñaranda, Machas, Tinkipayas, 134.

44 In Pacheco Balanza and Guerrero Peñaranda, Machas, Tinkipayas, 133. 45 Quoted in Olivia Harris, “Los límites como problema: Mapas etnohistóricos de

los andes bolivianos,” in Saberes y memorias en los Andes, ed. Thérèse Bouysse-Cassagne (Paris, 1997), 365.

46 Ibid. 47 The document continues, “And so I told the said Salvador Blas not to go beyond

the ravine of Chichini Pampa, the same thing upward and around the ravine of ua uiu [sic] and Molli Molli in the heights of Rarocalaua there is a ridge which borders with the Macha up the ridge there are the heights of Condornasas and at the end there is a large rock, and there V.S. [the corregidor] should order to place the boundary stones, so that we do not have any quarrels or troubles” (ANB, TI 1740, no. 33).

48 Cuñaca´s distribution of plots to other Anansaya families points in the same direction. It was reported that in 1707, while arranging the dispatch of the mita, one of the mita workers requested some fields in a place called Ibute. Cuñaca argued that “since there is nobody available to pay the tribute of the deceased, I grant these lands in Ibute to Diego Ascencio. As these plots carried four ollas of seed, he can pay his taxes and the mita will not prevent him from doing so” (ANB, EC 1753, no. 114).

49 ANB, TI 1741, no. 86. 50 ANB, TI 1743, no. 20. They claimed that “we are the owners and possessors

of the lands named Pichuga, Pichacani, Vilque, Calaquitara, and Sitno, Paco-tanca, Otavi, Iquilliri, Guarichata, and the estancia called Chullucasinito, all as a single body.”

51 Platt, “Entre ch’axwa y muxsa,” 84; see also Godoy, Mining, 46. 52 Certainly, there could be a fluid relationship between ritual and land battles.

For an example of a ritual battle turned into a confrontation over boundaries, see Abercrombie, Pathways, 102.

53 ANB, TI 1743, no. 20. 54 Harris, To Make the Earth, 115–17; Rivera Cusicanqui, Ayllus y proyectos,

91–95. 55 Platt, “Rol del ayllu,” 53. The land battle between the ayllus perhaps accounts

for the sudden end of legal appeals shortly after it took place (ANB, TI 1743, no. 20).

56 ANB, TI 1768, no. 123. 57 Ibid. 58 ANB, EC 1759, no. 65. 59 Tristan Platt, “Mirrors and Maize: The Concept of ‘Yanatin’ among the Macha

of Bolivia,” in Anthropological History of Andean Polities, ed. John Murra,


Nathan Wachtel, and Jacques Revel (Cambridge, 1986), 232. Two wills left by members of Pocoata’s Collana ayllu, the first from 1643 and the second from 1948, show this inheritance rule (Pacheco Balanza and Guerrero Peñaranda, Machas, Tinkipayas, 152–53). On women’s tenure rights, see Godoy, Mining, 48; and Platt, Estado boliviano, 59.

60 Taylor, Landlord and Peasant, 75. In his study of colonial Guadalajara, Eric Van Young (Hacienda and Market, 288) also points out that “many village Indians who achieved relative wealth, be they commoners or caciques, did so primarily on the basis of acquiring land, mostly by purchase.” Susan Ramírez (World, 84) has argued that a similar process occurred in northern Peru’s coastal and high-land regions.

61 ANB, TI 1754, no. 11. 62 ANB, TI 1775, no. 111. 63 An Indian of the Pari ayllu, for instance, refused to quit his inherited fields after

he became blind in an accident, on the grounds that he had continued to pay his tribute as originario and to sponsor religious festivals in the Pocoata village. Regarding his inability to observe his turn in the mining mita, the Indian offered to compensate it “with other service of equal weight” (ANB, EC 1776, no. 57).

64 For instance, the cacique of Moscari, Florencio Lupa, reallocated fields of a Moscari Indian, Matheo Jorge, to two other families “to place them under the category of originarios.” Although Jorge was a personal foe, Lupa could justify the redistribution on the grounds that the plots could produce 29 fanegas and 6.5 ollas of wheat, 1 fanega and 34 ollas of maize, and 9 carnacos of potatoes (ANB, TI 1772, no. 98).

65 AGN, sala 13, 18-10-3, folios 116v–117r. On this proposal, see also Mónica Adrián, “Los curatos en la provincia de Chayanta durante la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII,” Data 6 (1996): 104–7.

66 ANB, TI 1754, no. 11. 67 ANB, EC 1753, no. 114. 68 For the 1707 document, cf. n. 45. 69 ANB, EC 1753, no. 114. 70 Ramírez, World, 45. 71 For a discussion of reversionary land rights in the context of African groups,

see Max Gluckman, Politics, Law and Ritual in Tribal Society (Oxford, 1965), 36–43.

72 Sahlins, “Segmentary Lineage,” 337. 73 ANB, EC 1753, no. 140; ANB, TI 1744, no. 86. 74 ANB, EC 1752, no. 54. 75 AGN, sala 9, interior, leg. 4, exp. 7. 76 Though corregidores routinely appointed friendly caciques, this was the first

time in northern Potosí that the appointment fell to a complete outsider, and that a cacique held the chieftainship of several communities simultaneously. On Florencio Lupa, see Penry, “Transformations”; and Serulnikov, Subverting Colonial Authority.

77 ANB, EC 1750, no. 20. 78 See, e.g., Pedro Caypa, Flores Caypa, Ramos Colque, Carlos Colque, Diego

Anaqui, and Pablo Ciaqui to the audiencia, June 1775, ANB, EC 1776, no. 57. In fact, one of the first confrontations between the Pocoata and Lupa revolved


around complaints that he had reallocated some lands of the Pari ayllu to the Capac Indians.

79 Cruz Chayra to Escudero, July 1776, ANB, TI 1779, no. 195. 80 ANB, TI 1775, no. 111. 81 Basilio Chuncapampa, ayllu Pisaca, July 1776, ANB, TI 1779, no. 195. Other

land issues drew bitter complaints, however. For instance, in reprisal for the Pocoata’s unrest, Lupa encouraged the cacique of neighboring Laymi to invade their possessions (ANB, EC 1776, no. 57). He also failed to prevent mestizo dwellers of Chayala from usurping communal lands and introducing their live-stock into Indians’ fields (ANB, TI 1779, no. 195).

82 AGN, sala 9, interior, leg. 4, exp. 7. 83 During the seventeenth century, the viceroy of Peru and the audiencia of Char-

cas granted the caciques the prestigious titles of alcalde mayor and captain of the mita of the Chayanta province, a coat of arms, and the privilege of bear-ing a sword and a shotgun (ANB, EC 1776, no. 12). See also Thierry Saignes, “De la borrachera al retrato: Los caciques de Charcas entre dos legitimidades,” Revista Andina 5 (1987): 147–88, esp. 157; and Silvia Arze and Ximena Men-dinaceli, Imágenes y Presagios: El escudo de los Ayaviri, Mallkus de Charcas (La Paz, 1991).

84 Saignes notes that these new caciques tended to come from political and social backgrounds that were traditionally considered “inferior.” The rise of the Ayra Chinchi Ariutu may confirm this hypothesis since they belonged to Urinsaya (the lower moiety) as opposed to Anansaya (the upper moiety), and to the Poco-ata as opposed to the Macha, the ancient seat of the Karakara Confederation; Saignes, “De la borrachera,” 147–50. It must be noted, however, that this noble family was already prominent before the Spanish conquest and developed kin relations with Macha lords (del Río, “Estructuración,” 17).

85 Saignes, “De la borrachera,” 148. 86 Platt, “Mapas coloniales,” 104–11. 87 Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz, Indios y tributos en el Alto Perú (Lima, 1978), 133. 88 ANB, EC 1776, no. 12. 89 AGN, sala 13, 18-9-2. 90 AGN, sala 13, 18-9-5. 91 ANB, EC 1776, no. 57. On “caciques hacendados,” see Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui,

“El mallku y la sociedad colonial en el siglo XVII: El caso de J. de Machaca,” Avances 1 (1978): 7–27; Larson, Colonialism and Agrarian Transformation, 152–70; Franklin Pease, Curacas, reciprocidad y riqueza (Lima, 1992), 154–69; and Roberto Choque Canqui, Sociedad y economía colonial en el sur andino (La Paz, 1993).

92 AGN, sala 9, interior, leg. 9, exp. 2. 93 Cf. n. 16. For the case of Cochabamba, Brooke Larson has also noted that the

late eighteenth-century policy of land reform “fell far short of its goals” (Colo-nialism and Agrarian Transformation, 278).

Documents

Ethnohistory Serulnikov