6
THE POLITICAL CULTURE OF ANDEAN ELITES
___________

Social Inclusion and Ethnic Autonomy

ANDEAN ELITES AVIDLY SEARCHED for avenues of social recognition within the colonial world and viewed such spaces as niches from which to reassert their sense of nobility in a world that increasingly denied them the opportunities and rights to which they felt entitled. In her intriguing discussion of the links between pureza de sangre and religion, María Elena Martínez maintained that the incorporation of the Castilian notion of purity of blood had implications for the definition of Indian corporate rights and that the royal recognition of Indian purity introduced concerns about blood, genealogy, dynastic histories, and race among the native elites of Mexico.¹

Underlying the recurring critique of colonial rule by Andeans is the idea that Spanish rule introduced ethnic discrimination in the Andes—a practice foreign to Andeans—in which only Spanish Christians received ecclesiastical and secular honorific positions. Ladino scholars articulated this position in their indictments of the Spanish monopoly over positions of power, although at times they voiced a longing for the Spaniards’ love and respect. Eventually, they expressed their position as part of a hope that Spaniards and Andeans could live together as Christians without conflict, merging fully “in body and soul.” Alongside their discursive criticism of Spanish discrimination, then, since the late seventeenth century, Andeans had supported a coherent agenda of social inclusion that developed further in the eighteenth century, including access to positions of power they were denied given their status as “newly” Christian Indians.

This chapter explores the ways Andean intellectuals justified these inclusionist positions. Why were Andeans so eager to join the priesthood and other colonial institutions of power in spite of their criticism of these institutions? The complexity of Andeans’ political and intellectual practices emerges in the textual and political history of their campaigns for Indian priesthood and education, reconstructed in this chapter, against the backdrop of their understanding of prevalent notions of purity of blood that presented a barrier to the fulfillment of their entitlement to such opportunities. The point of departure is the 1697 royal decree, known as the cédula de honores, and Andeans’ struggles to secure its enforcement. The cédula de honores became a cornerstone for Andean legal and political activism in the decades to follow, at least until Charles III issued a decree in 1776 that recognized the cédula de honores and began to enforce it. This chapter examines the discursive underpinnings of the campaigns, offering a linguistic analysis that is contextualized in both their history and results and in contemporary discussions of the cultural transformation of the Indian elite class in the mid- and late colonial period.

The Andean proposals for social change demonstrate the transformation of educated Andeans into a group of politicized agents, aware of their ability to participate in the process of social and cultural change. This period saw the consolidation of a colonial regime that shifted from the paternalistic Habsburg rule to the more pragmatic and modernizing Bourbons. Both dynasties, however, were almost equally dismissive of the royal cédulas of 1697 and 1725 and the later reissuing of these two rulings that acknowledged native elites’ political and social privileges. Colonial authorities remained largely negligent regarding native Andean claims for social justice, as market forces and rising colonial demands for Andean labor and goods increasingly undermined Andeans’ notions of authority and introduced deep social divides within the “republic of Indians.”² Both the secularization of Indian parishes in 1750 (see Chapter 3) and the 1776 royal decree enforcing social privileges for Indian elites allowed Andeans access to a few lower positions in the secular clergy, but not before the aftermath of the Túpac Amaru Rebellion, which did little to modify the dominant trend of excluding indigenous peoples from positions of power in colonial society.

Writing was paramount in the discursive articulation of intellectual Andeans’ campaigns for social inclusion, a cultural practice that enabled their search for social equality and autonomy through questioning colonialism’s hierarchical order and redefining elite Andeans’ place in the changing colonial world. While seeking social recognition, Andean elites struggled to access a world of social opportunity akin to that of the colonial nobility and to enjoy the relative freedom it entailed. They endeavored to participate in institutions of power and knowledge, but although sanctioned by royal decrees, admission to convents and schools and to positions in the judicial system proved beyond the reach of most. On the other hand, these Andeans’ political and social imaginaries remained within the confines of a hierarchical view of the Indian world. Their social and political goals were geared toward elite Indians and mestizos only, leaving little or no room for a more extensive egalitarian notion of Andean rights that would bridge the social distance between elites and commoners within the Indian republic.

Colonial kurakas and other lettered Andeans seized every opportunity to belong to prestigious institutions equivalent to those of the Spanish nobility. Very important, they also struggled to be recognized as full members of the church, asserting their ability to act as priests, missionaries, bishops, and prelates; they even campaigned for the beatification and canonization of members of their own communities, qualifications that would allow them into spaces of the utmost sanctity in the afterlife. Along with their desire to belong to religious institutions, Indian and mestizo scholars viewed secular education as a way out of their historical subordination and sought access to schools for caciques, seminary schools of the religious orders, and universities. They empowered themselves by locating their discourses in the gap between the potentially favorable mandates of the monarch and the systematic disregard of such laws by the colonial church and authorities in Peru.

HISTORY OF THE LEGAL CAMPAIGNS FOR ANDEAN NOBLE PRIVILEGES

Although the crown had sanctioned certain religious prerogatives for noble Indians and their descendants in the sixteenth century,³ these mandates remained dormant; in practice, the crown had only sporadically granted exemptions to noble Indians in the first two and a half centuries of colonial rule. In the late 1600s, intellectual Andeans began to advance a legal campaign to have the crown recognize their social standing and the opportunities attached to it in the colonial world of Peru. Such efforts may have been in part a response to the social unrest created by official attempts, or rumors about such attempts, to hold mestizos liable to mita and tribute obligations. Attaining recognition of noble privileges would likely deter such attempts by reasserting the mestizos’ elite status.

As a result of Juan Núñez Vela de Rivera’s lobbying in Madrid, on March 26, 1697, the king issued a new royal decree resanctioning noble privileges for Indian elites and their mestizo descendants. The ruling established that they should receive “all the preeminence and honors, both ecclesiastical and civil, that is [sic] customary to confer to the noble [h]idalgos of Castile, so that they can participate in any community that requires stature of nobility, because it is clear that they were noble even in their former state of gentilismo [gentiles’ standing before conversion], and their subordinates paid vassalage and tribute to them.”⁴ The ruling is important not only because it explicitly acknowledges new avenues of social inclusion and power for Andeans but also because it implicitly invalidates neophytism as a reason to deny Indians and mestizos access to key social institutions that required purity of blood for admission. The struggles over the enforcement of this ruling, however, have a history of their own, a long legal and textual battle for social inclusion waged by Andean scholars in the royal courts. The campaigns unveiled the impossibility for the Habsburgs and, later, for most of the Bourbon administration to sustain an inclusive discourse of empire vis-à-vis their Indian subjects.

Individual and collective efforts by Andean elites to obtain privileges and restitution of their cacicazgos and lands through litigation had started in the sixteenth century. Since then, Andeans had been aware of Spanish laws and used them to support their claims at both the rhetorical and practical levels. A more concerted effort to advance a comprehensive agenda for social inclusion, however, can be identified as beginning in the late seventeenth century. A key intellectual figure in these struggles was Juan Núñez Vela de Rivera, the mestizo racionero (prebendary) from the Arequipa cathedral in 1691 and one of the exceptional Andeans who accessed ecclesiastical positions in that century. While residing temporarily in the royal court in Madrid, he articulated memoriales that offered different arguments for the recognition of Andeans as cristianos viejos, or old Christians, in support of Andean demands for expansion of their rights within ecclesiastical, secular, and social organizations more generally. In 1693, for example, Núñez Vela de Rivera obtained a decree from King Charles II declaring Indians and mestizos eligible for appointments to the Inquisition Tribunal.⁵ That recognition seemed to allow for exceptions to Andeans’ automatic status as neófitos (neophytes) and idolaters. Historian Juan Carlos Estenssoro Fuchs also stressed that this change implied the recognition of pureza de sangre for Andeans. After returning to Lima in 1695, Núñez Vela de Rivera continued his activism for Indian autonomy, becoming chaplain of the recently founded Copacabana beaterio and church and supporting with memoriales the canonization process of the Indian Nicolás de Dios.⁶

Prior to the royal decree of March 26, 1697, the key textual evidence in the legal campaign for Indian privileges was a memorial from 1691 written by Núñez Vela de Rivera. This text became the legal cornerstone that supported claims for the social inclusion of Andeans in the church, schools, and military orders. The ensuing 1697 mandate further mobilized kurakas from various regions of the viceroyalty to cross the Atlantic to the royal court in what became a long campaign for its legal enforcement.

Núñez Vela de Rivera’s text also links most of the Andean writings analyzed in this chapter. All of the texts and authors discussed sought social mobility for elite Andeans by using the paths available within the colonial system in an effort to attain social equality between the nobles of the two “republics,” as subjects of the same king. Along with the other writers, Núñez Vela de Rivera used the rhetoric of evangelization to validate the status of Andeans as old Christians, individuals who had long ago renounced their status as gentiles and “idolaters.” Núñez Vela de Rivera’s memorial stands out for its construction of social and religious identity. Introducing himself as a descendant of Synchi Roca and Spanish knights, he identified himself as a mestizo, a “descendant of gentile Indians, Christian primitives” of the Peruvian kingdom, and a “most faithful son of the Roman Catholic Church.”⁷ Throughout the text he speaks in the first-person plural, referring to “we” the Indians, and he consistently claims privileges and social honors for noble Andeans, himself included. Unlike all other Andean intellectuals, Núñez Vela de Rivera chose to identify himself as a descendant of the “gentiles” rather than denying his “idolatrous” past, as Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla, Juan de Cuevas Herrera, and Fray Calixto de San José Túpac Inca did. Núñez Vela de Rivera validated an indigenous past in which he de-stigmatized Andeans’ condition as “primitive gentiles” because of their Christian conversion at the time of the conquest. Thus, he “erased” the stigma attached to being a gentile, which was usually regarded as “idolatrous,” and identified himself as a descendant of primitive Christians because doing so allowed him to position himself within the religious framework of his royal audience and to show the evangelization project’s effectiveness.

Núñez Vela de Rivera’s memorial reminded the king of his commitment to equalize Andeans’ status with that of Spaniards and demanded a wide range of noble privileges for Andeans.⁸ To support his demand, the mestizo from Arequipa used the text of the Instrucción (instruction) the Catholic kings had given Christopher Columbus in 1492. He interpreted the Instrucción as a reciprocal arrangement between the crown and Andeans, in which the latter would accept Christianity and vassalage to the king in exchange for privileges and treatment akin to those accorded all Spanish subjects. Inspired by the Instrucción, Núñez Vela de Rivera remarked about the Catholic kings’ interest in officially recognizing the pureza de sangre of Andeans and their nobility:

Since, as a father and protector . . . Y. M. [Your Majesty] is obligated in conscience to look after us and defend our honor, you should command that the pristine blood of Indians will not be an obstacle, impediment, or restriction to obtaining ecclesiastical dignities, even the bishopric; neither will it prevent them from entering schools, churches, chairs, universities, chaplaincies, military offices [including military orders], and all which is related to the service of Y. M., and which may require purity of blood to access, because this is totally present in the Indians, the most faithful vassals of Y. M.⁹

Núñez Vela de Rivera redefined the colonial notion of purity of blood to include Andeans in the category of cristianos viejos. His peculiar rendition of the Spanish notion of pureza de sangre is based on descent from gentile idolaters, thus validating the Andeans’ “idolatrous” past while equating it with European Catholics’ own past: “And, since the foundation of honor rests upon purity of blood, and Indians certainly have it in excessive and noticeable amounts, therefore, on the surface of the earth, there is no other nation that exceeds the Indian in purity of blood. Because they [native Andeans] bring their genes from gentile idolaters like all the ones who now profess the [R]oman [Ca]tholic religion.”¹⁰

Rather than their inherited nobility, previously recognized in Spanish law, what accorded the status of pureza de sangre to Andeans was the fact that they had descended from “gentiles and idolaters” who later converted to the Roman Catholic religion, just as all Spaniards from pagan roots had converted in the early times of the church and were now officially considered cristianos viejos. Thus, he metaphorically “cleansed” the Andean past and constructed a new ground of social equality between Andeans and Spaniards, both of whom shared a gentile past. Núñez Vela de Rivera’s reformulation of the Andean past as gentile validates the evangelization project of his day while opening an avenue for broader advancement of his fellow Andeans. In sum, Núñez Vela de Rivera argued that conversion to Christianity should suffice for the recognition of Andeans as nobles. Since conversion also entailed vivir en policía (living like “rational” people gathered in towns), he understood that it was necessary to receive the same honors and recognition as those given to civilized Europeans.

To further reinforce these claims, Núñez Vela de Rivera used the foundational text of the Instruccion to remind the king of his debt of reciprocity to his indigenous subjects in the late seventeenth century. He supported Andeans’ right of nobility on a clause in the Instruccion in which the Catholic kings ordered Christopher Columbus “to give gifts and donations to the Indians and to honor them substantially,” hoping that the mandates of Charles II’s ancestors would still have authoritative power two centuries later. He appealed to “the compact that at the beginning of those conquests the king made with his natives, in which he promised that if Indians accepted subjection and received the sacred gospel, he would honor them as he did the rest of his vassals.”¹¹ Núñez Vela de Rivera attempted to negotiate reciprocity with the king. The appeal to the Instrucción and its implicit compact was also a rhetorical strategy to articulate reciprocity in the language of the colonizer in an effort to achieve an Andean agenda, aimed at reasserting the noble status of Indian elites and their mestizo relatives and at preventing royal attempts to downgrade their standing and make them liable to colonial obligations akin to those of commoners.

This reference to a “compact” reveals that Núñez Vela de Rivera’s ideas were infused with Scholastic notions of the kingdom as an organic whole, a corpus politicum mysticum, prevalent in late-medieval Spain and influential in Limaylla’s and Fray Calixto’s writings. Núñez Vela de Rivera’s representation of the king as a “father,” “protector,” and “the only hope of the Indians” reflected the trans-culturation of European philosophies in the colonial Andes and his self-perception as a subject bound to the king by reciprocity. The Andean author thus implied that the king, as the foremost legal protector of the Indians, had the responsibility to enforce for Andeans the right to join the priesthood, to receive education in colegios mayores and universities, to be granted professorships in universities, to found chaplaincies or capellanías, and to hold military positions: “Y. M. and your supreme ministers are obligated in conscience to look after our honor and defend us from all those who want to calumniate our pristine blood. . . . God chose Y. M. as our father for our protection.”¹²

The famous cédula de honores issued on March 26, 1697, in Madrid¹³ recognized Andeans’ status of nobility equal to that of Spaniards and ratified privileges King Charles II had recognized in 1588, granting Amerindian and mestizo women and men admission to religious institutions and the right to hold positions in the political government and the military.¹⁴ The privileges of nobility thus given to Andeans on the basis of their allegiance to the king and colonial values naturally strengthened royal authority. For Andeans, however, this may also have amounted to a partial political victory. After all, the decree opened the way for an ethnic space within traditional colonial institutions of power and began to break through, at least at the legal level, seemingly insurmountable racial barriers. Although the 1697 real cédula remained unenforced for years, it was a crucial achievement for Andeans at the symbolic level, representing that writing and lobbying in the royal court could be factors in the negotiation of beneficial laws.

Within the political and scholarly culture of elite Andeans, Núñez Vela de Rivera’s memorial constituted a crucial point in the systematic incorporation of legal discourses into Andean scholarship and became a vital tool in the campaigns for social inclusion in the eighteenth century. Although Andean authorities had systematically used litigation and legal discourses since the sixteenth century, Indian visitors, with their memoriales, showed up more frequently in the royal court in the years following the 1697 royal decree, giving special vitality to a trans-Atlantic movement of protest writing and constructions of identity that brought members of the Amerindian elite simultaneously closer to and farther from the apex of the empire. With the ascent of the Bourbons to the head of the Spanish empire, changes occurred in which colonial demands on Andeans tightened, the illegal practice of repartimiento de comercio intensified, and tensions between local officials and Andeans increased. Social unrest and rebellions characterized the eighteenth century, in which some of the goals of the campaigns for social inclusion were articulated anew, particularly in the Huarochirí and Túpac Amaru rebellions. Toward the end of the century, particularly after 1783, the crown began to enforce the right to join the priesthood only for caciques and elite Incas who had fought against Túpac Amaru, although they were ordained only as secular priests.

The struggles for enforcement of the 1697 royal policy involved further writing, traveling, and negotiation with viceregal and royal authorities. Don Francisco Saba Capac Inga and Don Joseph de Castro, Indian nobles from Lima and leading figures within Lima’s Indian networks, initiated this phase of the legal campaign, which extended for approximately the next seventy years. They put together memoriales and letters and sent them to the Viceroys Diego Ladrón de Guevara, Diego Morcillo Rubio de Auñón, and Marqués de Castelfuerte and to Kings Philip V and Louis I in 1711, 1722, 1724, and 1726. They demanded that the cédula de honores finally be published and circulated, since ecclesiastical and state authorities in Peru were systematically ignoring it.¹⁵ An intertwined exchange of correspondence among different levels of the colonial administration followed the Indian petitions. The king invariably issued new cédulas reinstating the purpose of the previous ones but did little more than warn officials in Peru of the gravity of their negligence, and the petitions languished in this endless bureaucratic inertia.¹⁶ In 1732 Procurador de Naturales Vicente Morachimo joined this legal campaign, and Fray Calixto did so in 1749. One of the main reforms he demanded was the abolition of innocuous laws and the issuing of new ones, responding to the new realities of Christian Andeans who had come of age and were ready to act as ambassadors of God on earth.¹⁷ Not until September 11, 1766, was a royal decree issued by Charles III, along with a confirmation by Pope Gregorio XIII, that reiterated and reinstated the contents of the 1697 and 1725 royal decrees.¹⁸

INTELLECTUAL BATTLES FOR THE ANDEAN PRIESTHOOD

Before the Europeans arrived in the Andes, Andean and Inca lords exerted power over the almost inseparable realms of the sacred and the mundane. After the Spanish invasion, kurakas’ ability to act within these spheres was constrained by the new colonial arrangement.¹⁹ In an effort to continue to legitimate the sacred character of their authority within the colonial situation, kurakas and other members of the Andean elite strove to occupy spaces within the colonial sacred sphere, increasingly dominated by the Catholic Church. Andean elites’ struggles to enter the priesthood can be understood, then, as an effort to access the newly redefined realm of spiritual power in society.

Sakari Sariola interpreted Fray Calixto’s claims for the priesthood in the “Representación verdadera” as an expression of the Andean intelligentsia’s desire to participate in the creation of spiritual symbols and in forms of “spiritual self-organization” within the colonial situation. Andeans perceived that the Catholic priesthood was an avenue to spiritual power and sometimes even an opportunity for social advancement. This strategy would enable them to forge ethnic identities and spaces in which Christianity would attempt to replace preexisting indigenous beliefs. Sharing the “divine principle” would function as a “protective and life-giving symbol instead of a threatening memento mori.”²⁰ Sariola’s interpretation usefully acknowledges the politics of spirituality in the colonial situation and the motivations of subordinate Andeans when participating consciously in the religious realm of the colonizer, an empowering space to counter social exclusion in the name of Christianity.

After studying the Indian campaigns for sainthood and the priesthood in colonial Peru as expressions of Indian Catholic virtuosity, Juan Carlos Estenssoro Fuchs argued that colonial Andeans sought acceptance into Catholicism to fully partake in its “symbolic and institutional reproduction,” which also revealed Andeans’ impetus to preserve their autonomy within the colonial society.²¹ Estenssoro Fuchs interpreted the church’s systematic opposition to the admission of Indians and mestizos into the priesthood as an acknowledgment of the danger implicit in their full inclusion. The admission of Andeans into the priesthood, a profession allowed only to Spaniards and creoles, threatened to blur racial barriers the church had upheld for centuries. Rather than reflecting Andeans’ desire to assimilate into Catholicism, their struggles for recognition as Christians were dangerous weapons that threatened to erase well-entrenched colonial hierarchies.²²

This interpretation helps us make sense of Andeans’ stubbornness in pursuing the priesthood, even after many years of continuous ecclesiastical disregard for the crown’s policies in favor of Andean social privileges. Estenssoro Fuch’s interpretation is important for understanding Andeans’ struggles to equalize their status with that of Spanish nobles as a form of anticolonial struggle that reveals Andean intellectuals as deconstructors of the colonial social order through their canny use of its own legal and religious discourses.²³ The 1677–1716 Indian campaign for access to heaven was an important movement that made evident the social activism of the Lima network of Andeans and their drive for ethnic autonomy at the spiritual level.

The desire to join the priesthood and share ecclesiastical positions with creoles and Spaniards represented a way for Indian nobles to participate simultaneously in colonial public life and the spiritual realm of power within colonial society. In pre-Columbian societies Andean authorities had led the sacred and the profane, but in the colonial situation they struggled to maintain a spiritual presence in the public arenas. Even within the constraints of the hierarchical colonial order, they still sought openings of power for themselves, mostly at the local and lower levels of society. As most spheres of life were socially and politically defined, in the colonial setting the sacred was a realm of power and exclusion that mirrored the contending forces and attitudes prevalent in the larger society. Andean struggles for access to the priesthood also had an autonomous impetus, however. The recruitment of Indian missionaries and native teachers for Indian communities, the insistence on the need to preach in the native language, and the campaigns for Indian priesthood all reflected the desire of caciques and mestizo leaders to control Andeans’ religious realm.

The Catholic Church in America had to grapple with the inherent contradiction of a Christian institution engaged in spiritual conquest and the inconsistency between the Christian promise of human equality and the racial basis of the colonial project with which the church was deeply associated. Concerns for Andean inclusion in religious institutions of power conjured up long-standing ecclesiastical notions of purity. In Genealogical Fictions, María Elena Martínez established that since the late fifteenth century in Iberia, ecclesiastical statutes of pureza de sangre had functioned to preserve the purity of religious and social institutions by excluding new Christian converts of Jewish and Muslim origin. She also argued that similar statutes were brought to America and shaped Indians’ perceptions of themselves. The Indian nobility became invested in the writings of their ancestry and concerned with the notion of purity, as the crown recognized Indian purity and entitlement to noble privileges.²⁴ Fray Calixto and Núñez Vela de Rivera were well aware of this royal jurisprudence, as they exposed the legitimacy of their claims for inclusion on the grounds of their purity of blood and their condition as old Christians. Thus, Fray Calixto delved into a full deconstruction of neophytism as a barrier of Spanish ecclesiastical manufacture and strove to demonstrate Andeans’ identity and status as cristianos viejos, overtly denouncing the racial differences introduced by Spaniards into the Andean world: “After the conquest of the West Indies, the Spanish founded a monarchy different from any other [monarchy] . . . with that differentiation of Spaniards and Indians, so absurd, absolute and tyrannical . . . and which turns even harder by the day.”²⁵ In justifying his claims for the creation of an Indian noble knightly order, Limaylla made it clear that the order would help elevate elite Indians’ dignity “so Spaniards would have them [Indian nobles] in high regard, and would hesitate to oppress them.”²⁶

Among the body of Andean writings in the late colonial period, the “Representación verdadera” stands out as the foremost rendition of Andeans’ will to participate in the realm of Catholic priesthood and presents the most complex discussion of the institutional and theological obstacles that systematically prevented Indian subjects from being accepted as intermediaries between humans and God. The text capitalized on an apparent opposition: on the one hand, the crown’s endorsement, but non-enforcement, of the admission of capable Indians to the priesthood, which would have allowed Andeans to mediate between the people and God, and, on the other, their systematic exclusion from ecclesiastical spheres of power by the Peruvian church, mostly the religious orders. The idea of purity of blood and the assumption that Andeans had never stopped being neophytes kept them from being fully acknowledged as mature Christians by the church.

The campaign for Indian and mestizo participation in the priesthood developed at the intellectual and legal levels during the years preceding the 1750 Huarochirí rebellion and the Lima conspiracy—mostly in the Lima area, with a clear locus in the Cercado cabildo. Not only the illegal repartos and increasing tribute in the mid-eighteenth century but also the lack of enforcement of the 1697 cédula de honores increased the frustration of Andean communities and leaders, who usually gathered at the seat of the audiencia to publicize their grievances and organize movements against these irregularities.

The “Representación verdadera” in particular represented the main locus of a complex argument that advocated noble Andeans’ right to enter the priesthood. Its discussion intertwined knowledge of the history of the early Catholic Church, theological debates in the Scholastic style, and the contribution of Andean experiential knowledge and intellectual agency. The text ultimately demonstrated the inconsistency of ecclesiastical policies regarding native participation in the church across time and space. Fray Calixto sought to debunk the reasons the ecclesiastic councils of the sixteenth century, still prevalent in the eighteenth century, denied native applications to the priesthood. Thus, the “Representación verdadera” disputed ecclesiastical assumptions of Indians’ religious status as “gentiles,” “neophytes,” and “idolaters” and the construction of Indians as alcoholics, promiscuous, and savage—300 years after the evangelization programs had begun.

The textual validation of the campaign for the Andean priesthood gravitated around juridical expedients, theological debates, redefinitions of Indians’ social status, and discussions of native Andeans’ ability to act as priests. Andean scholars seemed to invoke no spiritual reasons to support their desire to become “magistrates of the sacred.” The underlying argument is political at the same time that it is revealing of the politics of religion within the colonial context.

The dossier entitled “Breve y compendiosa satisfacción,”²⁷ an entire subsection of the “Representación verdadera,” engaged in a counterpoint with ecclesiastical views to construct a critique of the church’s social discrimination against Indians. The text used authoritative canonical sources, including Saint Paul’s epistles and opinions of other founding figures of the early church in Rome, the mandates of the Church Councils of Nicea and Trent, and the writings of Chiapas’s Bishop Fray Bartolomé de las Casas—all of which provided theological and theoretical support for the Andean claims for recognition as cristianos viejos. Aside from these more Western sources, the “Breve y compendiosa satisfacción” also incorporated rhetorical strategies and examples from Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s Comentarios reales de los Incas, since its elaboration of Inca religion reinforced Andeans’ arguments in favor of a Catholic Indian priesthood. The text develops an imaginary counterpoint between the supporters of natives and mestizos joining the priesthood and the church councils’ and Episcopal views on the issue, which were fundamental in defining Andeans as gentiles and neophytes and constructed stereotypes that identified them as alcoholics and illiterate.

ANDEAN DECONSTRUCTION OF
THE ECCLESIASTICAL EXCLUSION

The discussion of Andeans’ ability and entitlement to mediate between God and Indian congregants was a political battle against the power of colonial ecclesiastics and their discourses to “fix” Amerindian identities through ethnic stereotypes. This constituted the “colonial difference,”²⁸ which justified the exclusion of Andeans from the church on the basis of their ethnic otherness. The overall argument of Andean scholars was directed toward the Episcopal authorities in Lima, who perpetuated the views of the sixteenth-century Lima church councils. In Archbishop Pedro de Villagómez’s pastoral letter from 1649 and in his response to Juan de Padilla’s “Parecer” in a letter to King Philip IV (July 21, 1657), Villagómez expressed more vocally how difficult it was to uproot idolatry. Among other reasons, he believed this difficulty stemmed from

the cunningness of the devil and the rusticity and small capability of the Indians, and also from the fact that they were ab initio children of idolaters, given to customary drunkenness, and most importantly [because] they imitate their ancestors in this issue of idolatry . . . and also given the diligence that the ministers of idolatry put toward their own preservation, as well as the disposition of their towns and the fact [that] they are inevitably surrounded by the objects they use to worship.²⁹

Archbishop Villagómez conducted extirpation campaigns in the Lima diocese during the years 1641–1671, with particular emphasis in 1649–1670, and his views seem to have prevailed in the Peruvian church until the mid-eighteenth century. Andean scholars waged a discursive war against the stereotypes highlighted in the statement just cited.

In terms of religious maturity, the church councils regarded indigenous peoples as gentiles and idolaters because of their descent from non-Christian forebears, a perceived inferior status that in the eighteenth century still had a powerful discriminatory force. In this view, gentilismo “handicapped” Andeans. Their ancestors’ paganism made them prone to misunderstand Christianity and relapse into idolatry. Thus, the ecclesiastic discourse of the Lima church forced Andean intellectuals to separate themselves from their forebears and profess: “Our forefathers the Inca kings and other gentiles sinned indeed . . . for their prolonged and multiplied idolatry, it is true; but they are no longer our fathers, though they and we still bear their iniquities. Are not thou, Lord, our Father, our Lord and our King? For how long should we be held responsible for someone else’s idolatry, bearing such an affront upon us?”³⁰ The statement evidently constructs Andeans’ religious identity as old Christians.

Fray Calixto debunked the notion of gentilismo, arguing that it lay at the very inception of the Catholic Church in the Old World: “It was from gentile converts that the [p]ontiffs, [b]ishops, [p]resbyters, deacons, nuns, and monks, from Pope Saint Lino to the present, originated; [a]nd the Catholic Church is made up of that gentilismo, later converted to Christ by [b]aptism.”³¹ Andeans reminded Spaniards that idolatry had existed in Spain and all of Europe, Africa, and Asia since antiquity and had coexisted with Christianity since the Middle Ages. Therefore, early Andean religious customs did not make Andeans any worse than European Christians: “In the thirteenth century, in Poland and in the surrounding kingdoms of Germany, Christians were still living like gentiles, worshipping leafy trees, stones, and snakes . . . and all throughout Europe even today, there are superstitions and omens among Christians, who maintain the names of gentility.”³²

Episcopal authorities also categorized Indians as neophytes. As newly converted people, Indians were viewed as incomplete Christians, unable to comprehend the canon or to minister as competently as Spanish priests and prelates. Aided by a letter from Saint Paul and the theses of the Council of Nice, Fray Calixto argued that by the eighteenth century, Indians were no longer neófitos. According to the credited sources, ten years after being baptized, gentiles ceased to be gentiles and became eligible for ecclesiastical preferment. Therefore, Peruvian and Mexican Indians could not be considered neophytes, since they had been baptized and Christianized about three centuries earlier: “These American [I]ndians from Peru and Mexico entered the Church and have been baptized for more than two hundred years, and they are now twenty or thirty generations farther from gentilidad and still they cannot find a way out of it.”³³ The writers are thus aware of the inconsistencies of the church’s stances regarding neophytism, as applied to Indians and mestizos.

The discussion in the “Representación verdadera” then turns to the idea that while the early church in Europe incorporated colonized peoples, the Peruvian church marginalized Andeans and obstructed their attempts to become full Christians. According to Andean scholars, Jewish converts and former slaves were elevated to high ecclesiastical positions in the early period, whereas the Peruvian church denied the positions to Andeans, even those legally defined as free subjects and despite their “willing” conversion to Christianity. The text’s examples extend to the early Roman Empire, arguing that gentiles of Greek origin later became knights in the Roman Empire. The Romans did not simply impose their religion on the vanquished, but to bring about social peace they also incorporated the gods of the vanquished into their own pantheon.

Almost equating the Roman and Inca approaches to empire, the text points out that the Romans “received their conquered’s idols, religions, ceremonies, and their ‘wandering gods,’ thus integrating them happily and agreeably.”³⁴ The text continues: “And thus the Romans conquered all [of] the world. And they made knights out of the nobles from all the conquered nations, who enjoyed privileges, immunities, and respect. . . . Also, the noble and plebeian Moors that remained in Spain became Spanish.”³⁵ What the Andeans did not discuss was the different phases in the long history of the church. During its early times, it needed to gain adherents and supporters to grow, although in the eighteenth century, as a hegemonic and powerful institution, it reproduced the racial barriers prevalent in the larger colonial society to maintain its power and differentiation. Similarly, the text contested accusations that Indians were drunkards, retorting that drinking was a European practice and the consequence of the abusive repartos.³⁶

The writers proposed a political and cultural negotiation to the king: conversion would more effectively preserve Christendom and monarchical authority if missionaries were Indians. Their relatives and friends would listen to them, and Indian and mestizo friars and clergy would be less costly than Spanish friars.³⁷ If allowed into the priesthood and ecclesiastical positions, the argument went, Indians and mestizos would be more effective missionaries in areas where Spanish missionaries had met fierce resistance. The manuscript tacitly alluded to the viceregal army’s failed attempts to extinguish Juan Santos Atahualpa’s rebellion in Cerro de la Sal, which had broken out six years earlier, in 1742, stressing the need to send Indian and mestizo missionaries to support the conversion of those who had “retreated to the mountains” in resisting the efforts of the church. Spanish missionaries had been, and would continue to be, unable to reach out if they proved unable or unwilling to incorporate Andeans as missionaries: “Spaniards are unable to reach so many of the gentiles because of the natural horror, aversion and fear that they, themselves, rouse in the Indians and because they know that Spaniards intend to enslave them instead of treat them with love for their souls. Thus, it is useless that Y. M. keeps sending costly armies of missionaries to the area because the more they come, the less successful they will be.”³⁸

The mestizo and doctrinero Juan de Cuevas Herrera sought to empower Andeans who were proficient in both European and Amerindian languages, suggesting that they were more competent to act as missionaries and priests than their Spanish counterparts. What the text proposed was based on placing value on the Andean experience, and the offer to collaborate in the civilizing mission was more complex than mere acceptance of the colonizers’ religious projects. This effort had the potential to situate Andean missionaries and the Andean faithful in a more favorable position to compete with Spaniards for key positions of spiritual and social control in their communities. In support of this right, Andeans such as Fray Calixto later claimed, for example, that since the Congregation of Propaganda Fide in China ordained native Chinese as missionaries, Andeans should be allowed to benefit from similar ecclesiastical policies in the Andes.³⁹

In deconstructing the ecclesiastical discourse regarding impediments to the creation of a sanctioned Andean priesthood, the authors contrasted racial discrimination in the colonial church with the ethnic diversity of the institution in its formative stages in Mediterranean Europe:

Thus, one sees that among Spaniards, the French are admitted to the priesthood and so the Spaniards are admitted to the priesthood among the French, and both of them [enjoy that right] among Italians, and all of them [enjoy that right] in their own and foreign regions only because the Holy Mother Catholic Church receives every man, her children, in the universal embrace of her love, and she doesn’t want Zion’s roads to the priesthood to be closed for them to ascend to perfection. Because if her husband, and head, who is Christ . . . serves everyone, why has this Church been closed to Indians and only to them, when it was not closed to the [b]arbarian gentile sects, the serfs, and the free? If [Indians] are already Christians, why not [let them also be] priests? . . . There are no laws, neither [n]atural, written nor [d]ivine [g]race, neither positive nor humane, and neither ecclesiastical nor royal laws that oppose it. There is only a tyrannical error practiced by the capricious Spanish vanity. . . . Why is it that only in the Indies are Indians not received into the orders and dignities?⁴⁰

The intellectuals who crafted this text suggested that the church of Christ had stopped serving everyone and turned against Andean believers, clearly exposing the church’s disparate positions. The difference between being an Andean Christian in Peru in the eighteenth century and a European Christian in the early church would then be the “colonial difference,” which deemed the European faithful superior to Andeans because of the latter’s perceived lower ethnic status. Unlike the gentiles in the early Mediterranean church, Andeans in late-colonial Peru saw their potential for full membership in the church reduced to that of the faithful with duties (e.g., paying tithes and abusive ecclesiastical fees, attending mass, confessing) rather than entitlement to minister in positions of power, as the Spanish Christians did. More clearly, the text denounces colonial discrimination against indigenous prospects:

And since antiquity, it has been seen that there have been a handful of secular Indian presbyters both in Peru and New Spain, although this has created contempt and repugnance among Spaniards. . . . [The Spaniards] have become the sole masters and possessors of all that is spiritual, eternal, and temporal. . . . [A]nd just because candidates [to the priesthood] are white and Spaniards, they are easily admitted, and, with no hesitation, the habits are granted to these unworthy, ignorant, vicious, illegitimate, adulterous, and sacrilegious [men]. Thus, the orders are crowded with disgusting and illegitimate children.⁴¹

By seeking admission to the priesthood, Andeans were attempting to break the racial monopoly of the sacred space, to create an opening into the spiritual realm of power of the colonial society, a crack through which Andean scholars were able to situate their claims for religious inclusion. The consistent postponement of recognition of Indians and mestizos as full Christians reveals one of the prominent dimensions of the church as a colonial institution that deliberately turned evangelization—a temporary tool—into a permanent undertaking.⁴² Because the colonial church largely failed to grant Indians access to the priest-hood, the Andean nobility undertook the task of advancing its own campaign to make the institution consistent with the Christian discourse of social inclusion and to actualize the Habsburg promise of granting privileges to Indian elites, which seemed available only to a select few. A brief history of Andeans in the priesthood will historically contextualize the scholarly discussion that ultimately turned a seemingly religious campaign into a political battle over Christian exclusion and ethnic empowerment.

THOSE WHO MADE IT: A BRIEF HISTORY OF
ANDEANS IN THE COLONIAL PRIESTHOOD

Only a handful of Andeans managed to join the priesthood prior to the late eighteenth century, and they remained rare exceptions.⁴³ In a way, the history of colonial Andeans in the priesthood is the history of a spiritual impossibility that reveals more about the institutional hurdles Andeans faced in their attempt to join religious orders and the secular clergy. But even an examination of these obstacles is significant because it tells us much about the politics of spirituality in a colonial setting and the ways Indian subjects attempted to negotiate them.

The ecclesiastical councils in the sixteenth century had the power to define the guidelines for eligibility for the priesthood, even though the religious orders themselves eventually exerted a measure of freedom of interpretation. The 1552 church council in Lima opposed the ordination of Indians, arguing that they were neophytes and therefore prone to misinterpret the divine mysteries. Given the scarcity of curas doctrineros in Peru, the second church council in 1567 considered allowing mestizos, fit and proficient in native languages, to be ordained into the sacred orders, although they would not be given the opportunity to hold beneficios (parishes). The council did not take serious steps to implement this policy, however, and in practice the Lima church precluded Indians and mestizos from ordination and confined them to serving only in the roles of sacristans and altar boys. Indians thus remained excluded from the priesthood because of their neophytism and impurity of blood.⁴⁴ The third council added that mestizos ordained ad titulum indorum could be assigned to doctrinas following their ordination.⁴⁵ Finally, in 1682 a Limeño provincial council of the church approved the ordination of native Andeans and mestizos provided they were legitimate and fit for the priesthood.⁴⁶ It seems, however, that in practice secular authorities were reluctant to implement this policy. For its part, the Mexican church’s policies were little different. The 1555 Mexican council expressly prohibited the ordination of Indians, mestizos, and blacks. Both the Franciscan and Dominican orders adopted the same policy in 1576.⁴⁷

High-ranking members of the church in Rome, by contrast, seemed to have more consistently favored the admission of Indians to the priesthood. In 1586, as a result of a petition circulated by mestizos, Pope Gregorio XIII sanctioned the ordination of mestizos by the bull Nuper ad Nos and provided a special dispensation for illegitimacy. He also authorized that legitimate Indians could be ordained as priests, provided they fulfilled the conditions of competence and other virtues previously mandated by the Council of Trent. The cardinals’ college at the Vatican rejected the exclusion of Indians from a priestly career in 1631, concluding that Indians’ ordination was consistent with royal policies on the matter and was only at odds with the dispositions of the American episcopate. Francesco Ingoli, secretary of the Propaganda Fide congregation in Rome, warned in 1638 that the American church would remain weak and incomplete if it did not ordain Indian priests.⁴⁸

The Spanish crown also exhibited an ambiguous attitude toward the ordination of nonwhites in America. During the second half of the sixteenth century, the crown reprimanded secular authorities for allowing mestizos into the priesthood in Mexico (1550), Quito (1568, 1575), New Granada (1576), Lima (1578), and Santiago de Chile (1588) and ordered the immediate suspension of new ordinations. In 1588, a new royal decree abolished previous decrees and allowed mestizos and mestizas to join religious orders and nunneries.⁴⁹

The royal attitude began to change as a result of new petitions filed by mestizos in the late seventeenth century. Although King Charles II, in 1691, and King Philip V, in 1725, issued royal decrees that allowed Andeans to enter both the priesthood and the colegios mayores (religious colleges), the secular and regular clergy largely disregarded the decrees. In 1726, kurakas from Lima were still petitioning for this right and asking the real audiencia to make public the royal decree of 1725.⁵⁰ Not until 1776 was the ruling on Andean priesthood amply diffused in Peru. This change had to do with Pope Clemente XIII’s brief to America the same year, prompting the admission of Andean elites to colegios mayores and religious orders “according to their capacity.” Shortly thereafter, Charles III likewise issued a royal decree that restated the previous mandates.⁵¹ The opinions and attitudes of the Peruvian church diverged from the will of the kings and the pope for a long period, as these decrees and statements illustrate. In practice, a dispensation from the bishop—seldom granted—was mandatory to ordain individual Indians and mestizos. Moreover, in most religious orders’ statutes the ideal of pureza de sangre, which excluded those considered neophytes, remained a major hurdle to Andeans’ ability to join the priesthood. Only in exceptional cases did secular authorities diverge from the institutional requirement of purity.

Around 1731, Quito bishop Alonso de la Peña Montenegro, whose writings inspired Fray Calixto’s advocacy of the priesthood, maintained that Andeans did not lose their right to join the priesthood because of their origin and nature. As long as they were apt and capable, he maintained, they might be admitted into the church “to its service and holy ministries.” The bishop, however, adhered to the early mandates of the Council of Trent that state that only legitimate Christians are eligible for the priesthood, and “Indians could lose this right for their vices, bad customs and life.”⁵² In other words, it would be up to the ecclesiastical authorities, Spanish and creole, to individually determine native Andeans’ eligibility. The extent to which cultural differences and racial origin would be associated with vices and bad customs was an issue with which Andeans always had to contend. The disparate opinions over the position of Indians in the church held by authorities in Spain and Rome, on the one hand, and the Peruvian episcopate and religious orders, on the other, reveal a long-lasting rift within the power institutions of colonialism—one Andean scholars would seize in every possible way to empower their struggles for social inclusion in the institution that controlled spiritual power in the realm.

Over the years, Andeans who managed to enter convents and monasteries did so mostly in marginal positions—either as donados (servants), mission aides, or lay priests—and were seldom ordained as priests with full capability to administer the sacraments. Andeans thus entered the religious orders in a subordinate capacity, in which they were regarded as secondary members of the order; they could wear habits but were not allowed to take vows.⁵³ Donados, however, did receive religious instruction and training in Latin, Spanish, and native languages. Because of their cultural and linguistic background, many performed missionary work, serving as predicadores (preachers) and aides to facilitate the introduction of new prospective indigenous groups into the evangelization campaigns.⁵⁴ Fray Calixto de San José Túpac Inca, discussed earlier, had joined the Franciscan convent of Santa Rosa de Ocopa in Tarma as a donado and served there for years, probably starting in the late 1730s. Later, in 1750, after he entered the Franciscan seminary in Valencia (Spain), he was able to be ordained, but only as a lay brother.⁵⁵

The Indian enrollment situation slowly began to change in the late eighteenth century when the number of Indian priests seems to have increased as the age of Bourbon secularization progressed and concerns about pureza de sangre waned, even though they still played a role in the evaluation of Andeans’ applications to the priesthood. Changes in the church’s attitude toward Amerindian Christianization, now less associated with concerns about idolatry, allowed more Amerindians to be ordained as priests.⁵⁶ Scarlett O’Phelan has maintained that the secularization of the curatos de indios along with the cédula de honores facilitated the admission of Indians and mestizos to the clergy. She only identified a few Indian priests before the Great Rebellion, however, and most of them served as secular priests in the minor orders, with a number proceeding from the Cusco area.⁵⁷ The available evidence predominantly suggests that the number of ordained Indian priests, even following the 1766 royal decree by Charles III, remained rather low in spite of unsupported affirmations to the contrary.⁵⁸ Most mestizos and Indians ordained in the late eighteenth century were in the minor orders, were stationed in remote posts, and served only as assistants.⁵⁹ Only after the Great Rebellion do the numbers show some improvement, although ordinations remained largely circumscribed to the Cusco area and among such prominent Inca lineages as the Carlos Inga, the Choquehuanca, the Sahuaraura, the Tito Atauche, and the Pumacahua. Such promotions were granted as rewards for support of the colonial establishment during the Great Rebellion.⁶⁰ David Garrett maintained that in 1792, at most 5 percent of the priests in the regular orders of the Cusco Bishopric were noble Indian men.⁶¹ Other sources have maintained, without sufficient empirical support, that by the end of the eighteenth century, Indian priests had been appointed in all of the ecclesiastic cabildos in New Spain and Peru, in areas densely populated by Indians. Hans-Jürgen Prien maintained that Indian priests were numerous, although they were classified as minor clerics, with little possibility for promotion.⁶² Overall, the available evidence supports a very modest degree of Indian ordination toward the end of the eighteenth century.

Regardless of the actual numbers of Andeans admitted to the priesthood, it seems clear that—although belated and reiterative—the 1769 and 1776 royal mandates by King Charles III, along with the bull of Pope Gregorio VIII, represented a response to Andean struggles for the priesthood. They were particularly a response to the trans-Atlantic activism of Fray Calixto de San José Túpac Inca and the comprehensive set of proposals raised in the “Representación verdadera” and the “Planctus indorum,” copies of which were sent to the pope in 1751 and may have reached him. The decree benefited Andean elites from Cusco more than those from the Audiencia of Lima area, whose caciques and mestizo relatives had been more actively engaged in the campaign for these opportunities.

Beyond directly critiquing ecclesiastical regulations, however, Andean aspirants to the priesthood had been using creative ways to access religious positions. Caciques became involved in the foundation of capellanías and other pious organizations to secure posts as chaplains for family members, endow applicants to the priesthood, and enhance their institutions’ prestige.⁶³ O’Phelan described this strategy by Andean and mestizo applicants to the higher orders, along with their self-empowerment as native speakers of indigenous languages.⁶⁴ In some areas of New Spain, possessing a capellanía was a sine qua non for entering the priesthood.⁶⁵ Andean lords’ daughters entered nunneries earlier than Indian men were able to obtain access to the priesthood.⁶⁶ Although such cases were rare, they likely occurred because in the predominantly male-oriented ecclesiastic power structure, even white Spanish nuns had long been excluded from the wide range of power roles performed by priests in the Catholic Church, not to mention from higher positions.

Overall, the key question remains: why did the Peruvian church—particularly the regular orders such as the Jesuits, Franciscans, and others—so consistently deny Andeans the priesthood and so confidently disregard royal and papal mandates on the matter? In attempting to answer such questions, we must remember that the colonial church had to come to terms with its own contradictions. The raison d’être of the church in America was to evangelize and convert; granting the priesthood to indigenous peoples would seem to have been a natural result of a successful missionary enterprise. The church embraced Indian converts through sacraments such as baptism, confession, matrimony, and eventually communion and extreme unction. Yet when good converts were ready to administer the sacraments and spirituality more generally, the church turned its back on them with the typical inclusion/exclusion ambiguity that characterized its approach to Amerindian religiosity. This ambiguity sustained or justified Indian nobles’ ongoing effort to become fully recognized as cristianos viejos and therefore eligible to participate in the divine realm, mediating between mortals and God.

Francesco Ingoli concluded in 1638 that Spanish American ecclesiastical authorities had actively prevented the ordination and education of native Andeans, not because they were incapable or alcoholic by nature but rather to facilitate their continued subordination. The most important cause of the stagnation of missionary work in the seventeenth century, Ingoli maintained, was the exclusion of Indians from the clergy, combined with the association of evangelization with their dispossession and enslavement. Indians were intelligent, capable, disciplined, and fast learners and were often superior to Europeans in their devotion and moral values. In fact, Ingoli proposed, admitting Indians to the priesthood would eliminate the linguistic ignorance of bishops and foreign missionaries and the need for Spanish missionaries, who used evangelization as a pretext to carry on their own business affairs and intrigues rather than to assist native Andeans spiritually.⁶⁷ In the seventeenth century, Ingoli was already aware of the colonial interests of the church, a structural rather than a theological reason for excluding Indians from the priesthood.

In interpreting the ecclesiastical attitude toward Indian priesthood, Venezuelan historian F. Eduardo Osorio maintained that the rejection was a response to the system of racial hierarchies prevalent within the larger colonial society, which also permeated the ecclesiastical institution. Allowing Indians into the priesthood would unsettle the ideological hegemony that supported colonial domination by leveling off racial differences at the religious level, which could jeopardize the social dominance of whites.⁶⁸ The de facto recognition of Indians as full Christians (no longer neophytes in need of conversion) eligible for the priesthood would render void the role of the church in the New World, since its presence was justified on the grounds of bringing Christianity to infidel Indians. Once these Indians had reached the status of cristianos viejos and were able to minister as priests and nuns, the evangelization project and the presence of the Spanish church would no longer be necessary, at least in theory. But, obviously, the church’s scaffolding was well entrenched within the structures of colonial society and had vested interests that diverted to a wider field of power.

Along similar lines, Estenssoro Fuchs posited that an “Indian priest” would have been a contradiction in itself, from the point of view of the colonial rationale, because recognition of Christian Indians’ coming-of-age would mean they were no longer Indians; ordaining Indian priests would thus amount to doing away with the category “Indian” altogether, with the consequent disappearance of colonial ethnic hierarchies such neophytism endorsed.⁶⁹ As minors in the process of Christianization, neophytes needed protection, guidance, and mentor-ship. Once the ecclesiastical institution was well established in America, these were no longer treated as temporary stages in a conversion process but instead as a permanent state that would secure the continuity of the ecclesiastical institution. The church had thus become a colonial institution that perpetuated the racial hierarchies of both the larger colonial world and itself as a hegemonic institution within that world.

These challenges to the church’s ability to control Indians underlay its negative responses to the claims for Indian access to the regular and secular orders. Those responses stemmed from the recognition of the power Indian parish priests could exert in their communities and the potential remote parishes in particular would represent to the achievement of Indian autonomy. The danger that religious Andeans would support Indian rebellions, for example, became particularly clear in 1757, when Fray Calixto was condemned to life in exile and seclusion for his political activism before and after the rebellion in Huarochirí.⁷⁰

In the colonial situation, Indian priesthood was a double-edged sword. Indian priesthood had the potential to serve an agenda for ethnic autonomy, as was the case in the social movements led by Juan Núñez Vela de Rivera, Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla, Vicente Morachimo, and Fray Calixto. On the other hand, Indian priesthood could also function as a legitimizing tool for Christianity among Indian subjects, institutionalizing Indian priests within the state’s and the church’s larger civilizing and political mission. In fact, a vocal and enthusiastic group of Indian priests bitterly opposed the Túpac Amaru upheaval and the rebel leader in particular and stood out as ideological strongholds of the dominant church and the crown in the Cusco area in the 1780s.⁷¹ A more inclusive church could have granted Indians access to the priesthood and worked to win them over to its agenda of social control, as Secretary of the Propaganda Fide Ingoli had early envisioned, without jeopardizing the interests of the Franciscan institution he represented in Rome. Obviously, the results of these positions were unpredictable, as was the colonial project of Indian education, which similarly served opposite purposes simultaneously. The textual campaigns for the Indian priest-hood overall reveal Andeans’ political awareness of those realities and the way struggles for the priesthood constituted just one piece of the Andean agenda for ethnic self-assertiveness as a tool of Indian resistance under Spanish rule.

EDUCATION FOR ANDEANS IN SCIENCE AND LETTERS

In spite of the 1697 cédula de honores, educational opportunities for Indians proved elusive. Only two colegios for caciques operated in Lima and Cusco, each with a long history of financial problems. Such schools seemed to fade away as the eighteenth century approached, receiving a final blow with the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767. Beyond that, opportunities for Andeans in the colegios mayores and universities appeared less accessible; only a handful of elite Indians and mestizos managed to enter those establishments. Following a long history of Andean petitions and lobbying for admission to schools, a more clearly articulated claim for Andean education appeared in the “Representación verdadera” in ca. 1749–1750.

The condition of illiteracy was used to characterize and then to ostracize natives and mestizos from positions within the Catholic Church, and educated Andeans were well aware of the political and social value of literacy and education—especially in the late colonial period, when European enlightened culture had high regard for education and progress. Indian illiteracy, as viewed by the church and colonial officials, became a stereotype that naturalized Andeans’ mental and intellectual inferiority, another expression of the “colonial difference.” To rebut the assumption that Indians were mentally unable to learn how to read and write, let alone to become more broadly educated, the “Breve y compendiosa satisfacción” developed four arguments that concisely addressed the politics of literacy and education in the colonial situation.

First, by “remaining brute and illiterate,”⁷² Fray Calixto maintained, Indians were unable to defend themselves in the Spanish world. In all business matters, they had to deal with Spanish functionaries (judges, lawyers, attorneys, and scribes) who were prejudiced and less than impartial. Second, because of native Andeans’ illiteracy, ecclesiastical and administrative positions were given to Spaniards, even those that involved the administration of Indian hospitals. For the same reason, Spaniards were free to monopolize the religious orders, even if they were not the best candidates for priestly service. Third, Spaniards did not care about educating themselves because their social and racial status, “the superiority of being a Spaniard,” was sufficient for them to access ecclesiastical positions and privileges.⁷³ Finally, by keeping Indians illiterate, lower-status Spaniards who had been shepherds, gayanes (laborers), or oficiales (workers) back in Spain were able to behave like “knights” in Peru. Spaniards could remain idle while enjoying administrative positions and social privileges, a situation that would continue as long as Andeans remained illiterate.⁷⁴

Ultimately, Andean intellectuals were aware of the political connotations of illiteracy under colonialism. The “Representación verdadera” thus deploys a rather “enlightened” defense of education:

Although among Spaniards it is seen as a sign of vileness . . . illiteracy is not a fault among Indians because it is involuntary. They would love to learn how to read and write and advance in Latin and literature, but it is not possible because Spaniards overload them with work and obstruct all their ways to obtain learning. Spaniards think that teaching an Indian is a waste of time because he will be a nobody and all he would do is sue them; then, when the Indian complains and defends himself, that is an offense [for Spaniards]; learning is an atrocious crime; and [an] Indian’s ignorance is the greatest virtue, achievement, and convenience for the Spaniard. . . . Such ineptitude is not natural or permanent. Quite the contrary, it is seen that they [Indians] are very quick and smart, and they have an acute comprehension and tenacious memory.⁷⁵

This passage reflects the more secular nature of the education Andeans pursued in the eighteenth century, as well as the political advantages Spaniards derived from keeping Indians ignorant. Illiteracy was not “natural” but political. It was their subordinate position in the colonial society that separated Indians from the world of letters.

But Andeans were also well aware of the importance of education in achieving social mobility and political autonomy. They not only reclaimed access to educational opportunities but also insisted on running the educational establishments created for young members of the indigenous elite, as becomes clear in this passage from the “Breve y compendiosa satisfacción”:

It is said that it is easy to remove and remedy this irregularity [illiteracy] in Indians . . . by letting them learn freely the letters and study in universities like Spaniards and even mulattos . . . and they should be allowed to possess the schools and study houses they have in Lima, in El Cercado, in the San Martin school, in Cusco and in all other seminary schools of the [b]ishoprics in the Indies; and by opening schools in all Indian towns, so they can learn how to read and write as it has been commanded by the Lords Kings of Spain, this situation would be remedied. But what happens instead is that, against all reason and deceiving Y. M, the corregidores usurp all the salaries that Y. M. disposed to pay for schoolteachers.⁷⁶

Ethnic autonomy in Indian schools was a shared goal among members of the Lima Indian network in 1755. One of those members, Don Felipe Tacuri Mena, an Indian representative, wrote from Madrid to the Cercado cabildo in Lima, advocating for self-run Indian schools. His letter illuminates that education and autonomy were linked in the minds of late-colonial Andean elites and scholars. Writing from Madrid, Tacuri Mena informed the Cercado cabildo about a petition granted to the Tlaxcala Indian presbítero (presbyter) Don Julián Cirilo y Castilla for the creation of a school for the children of caciques in Mexico, to be run only by Indian presbíteros without the intervention of Spaniards or creole priests and with the full financial support of the crown. He urged the Lima caciques to find the most apt subject to raise a similar petition and stressed that “if the petitioner is a presbítero, I have no doubts the petition will be granted as we desire. This said gentleman [Cirilo y Castilla] says that the perdition of our nation is to remain together with these ravens, and that with this separation, it will be seen who will gain.”⁷⁷ Cirilo y Castilla had, in turn, addressed his “Papel político legal” (legal and political paper) to the Council of the Indies sometime around 1753, advocating for the foundation of a school for Indian priests in which the teachers would be Indians, for the purpose of mentoring Indians as parish priests and missionaries so they could indoctrinate other Indians in their native languages. Apparently, Cirilo y Castilla spent the last thirty-five years of his life in Madrid, petitioning and lobbying for the foundation of these schools.⁷⁸

Another interesting aspect of Andeans’ views on education is the nature of the knowledge they sought in the eighteenth century. Rather than religious instruction or indoctrination, the writers made clear their desire to advance in literacy, Latin, literature, and the sciences. In the “Representación verdadera,” the call is for knowledge in “science and letters,” a rather secular approach to education: “Lord, as our Father, you disposed that the bread of the [d]octrine in science and letters be imparted to us. . . . Thus, your ancestors commanded that we were admitted into schools and literary lecture halls. But, we are fasting from this bread, because our father the king does not know whether it is imparted to us.”⁷⁹ The text equates spiritual food with a more secular knowledge in science and letters, suggesting that Andeans were as avid for knowledge as they were hungry for spiritual bread. To realize their educational goals in science and letters, the Andean authors demanded admission to “royal schools and seminaries,” alongside the children of the Spanish and creole elite.⁸⁰ The goal in this statement was to enable Andeans to access avenues of knowledge at all levels—including universities—thus enabling them to perform as authorities and agents in the public realm of state and church administration. The statement also mandated that Andeans’ right to education be enforced, subtly reproaching the king for the non-enforcement of his ancestors’ stated will (laws) in that regard.

Andeans continued to reclaim educational opportunities throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and well into the late twentieth century. In Fray Calixto’s time, education seems to have been understood only as an instrument for achieving a more expansive role in public life that would enhance Andean nobility and social standing vis-à-vis Spaniards. The “Representación verdadera” also attested to noble Andeans’ desire to participate in the lettered world, public offices, and other occupations of noble rank as well as in public spaces, where they sought to become socially visible: “Spaniards do not allow Indians any noble occupations, or other elevated thought, such as devoting themselves to the letters or the study of the liberal arts and sacred theology, as well as becoming members of the militia, governing by themselves the camps and divisions; neither do they want Indians to become judges, lawyers, procuradores, or join other professions where they could be distinguished for their prowess and exploits.”⁸¹ This is a significant expression of the modernizing imaginaries of late-colonial Andean thinkers, which contributed from their relatively subordinate positions to the discursive construction of an incipient public sphere inhabited by the upper echelons of the Indian republic in Peru.

Overall, the texts that sustained the campaigns analyzed here constitute an important record of social inclusion that must be regarded as the result of legal battles for ethnic reassertion and the enforcement of early laws that potentially empowered Andean elites. In the process, Andean scholars and activists unmasked the ambiguous approach of the Habsburg monarchs, as well as the Bourbons before 1776, toward Indian elites—an approach that involved simultaneous concessions and neglect.

Along with trans-Atlantic travel and the use of discursive and legal strategies in their efforts to obtain direct justice from the king,⁸² the Amerindian battles for social recognition and inclusion were further developed in the Bourbon eighteenth century through visual, oral, and performative devices. These devices included genealogies represented in Inca paintings, such as those of the Cuszqueño school; religious performances, such as the “Corpus Christi” procession in Cusco; dances; wancas, or Quechua theatrical representations of the death of Atahualpa based on oral traditions and texts; and masquerades to celebrate the coronation of Bourbon kings (see Chapter 3).⁸³ This was also a period in which Inca lords appeared more often in public using traditional Inca paraphernalia (e.g., tunics, textiles, keros [Inca vessels], ritual jewelry, furniture).⁸⁴ These practices were institutionally promoted through royal decrees recognizing the noble privileges of those who demonstrated Inca ancestry and were also sought by Indian intellectuals and nobles who believed these legal and cultural practices would foster their struggles for political and cultural survival.

The culminating moment of the legal campaigns for social inclusion and social justice was the explosive outburst of discontent and rebellion in the years 1780–1783 in Upper Peru. The insurrectionary conjuncture opened a space in which Andean rebels attempted to achieve, through violence, a long-anticipated state of social justice they had been unable to attain through legal struggles. The rebels felt they were forced to rebel for the same reasons as those other indigenous intellectuals from the past had denounced and campaigned against. Diego Cristóbal Túpac Amaru explained this to the Bishop of Cusco, as the rebel expressed his doubts about the offer of general pardon by Viceroy Agustín de Jáuregui y Aldecoa in 1781:

These inhuman men [corregidores] have been the cause and the principal axis of this rebellion. Otherwise, these miserable [Indians] could not have possibly shaken off the heavy and unbearable yoke that, against reason and justice, the subaltern ministers had placed upon them, going against the many repeated, wise, and good dispositions that the paternal love of our monarch had issued incessantly to their benefit. But they could not attain anything for their powerlessness and orphaned state. This is why these naturales became excited and agitated by themselves, without my brother Joséf Gabriel Túpac Amaru having any influence.⁸⁵

The lines dividing legal and insurrectionary approaches to justice became blurred, as to the end, rebels maintained a willingness to abide by the terms of the colonial compact of justice between king and subjects rather than seek a revolutionary transformation of the colonial society, even if their methods were akin to those of revolutionary movements. Even more specifically, José Gabriel Condorcanqui Túpac Amaru II expressed his adherence to colonial law to Visitador General José Antonio de Areche in 1781, at a peak moment of the insurrection: “I lack the right voice to express the royal greatness of our father and lord. . . . [Y]ou must publish his royal greatness and explain the core of his love: the recopilación de Indias, the ordinances, royal decrees, provisions . . . and other dispositions addressed to all the viceroys, presidents, judges, audiencias, chancellors, archbishops, bishops, priests . . . which I think they all are in favor of these poor neophyte Indians.”⁸⁶

In the midst of violent confrontation, the rebel leaders expressed their will to follow royal laws, as other groups did, but they also demonstrated their awareness that full Indian inclusion in the world of the colonizer was impossible to attain. After Andeans’ systematic efforts to forge social equality, the colonial subordination of the “republic of Indians” to the “republic of Spaniards” proved resilient. In the long process of campaigning and writing for social inclusion and ethnic autonomy, Andean intellectuals also attempted to bring about social and political change through reforms of the imperial administration, which uncovered another facet of their activism and allows us to further understand the changes in the political and social imaginaries in the Andes near the end of Spanish colonialism.

REFORMATION OF THE EMPIRE

Andean scholars crafted proposals for reform of the colonial administration of the Indian republic consistent with their agenda for social inclusion. The Andean tradition of proposing political and social reforms was not new in mid- to late-colonial Peru. At the turn of the seventeenth century, Don Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala filled his Nueva corónica y buen gobierno with propositions to remedy the manifold ills of the problematic colonial world in which he lived. These reforms reflected his notion of buen gobierno (good government) and included a series of urgent steps he believed King Philip III needed to take to restore the balance for Andean societies, which had been lost with the Europeans’ disruptive presence since the conquest period. Such “remedies” serve as a record of early attempts by Andean intellectuals to act as political agents in the colonial world.⁸⁷ Andean writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were also concerned with social matters long overdue for immediate action. Their proposals varied from specific requests to broader sweeping reforms, which not only offered a hint of their different interests and views of social change at different times during those centuries but also anticipated the political agenda of the Great Rebellion beginning in 1780.

Aware of the correlation between colonial exploitation and the anomalies of Spanish rule and the troubled evangelization process in the late seventeenth century, the mestizo and cura doctrinero Juan de Cuevas Herrera voiced a series of political demands. He sent his petitions to the king, asking for the replacement of corregidores and more power for caciques in the local administration. For the administration of justice in the provinces, he demanded that a new alcalde be elected from among the resident hacendados, who would conduct inspection tours and administer justice. Along with the alcaldes mayores or caciques, this alcalde “would collect and render the tribute” to the crown.⁸⁸ In the end, Cuevas Herrera suggested that even alcaldes ordinarios could easily and cheaply perform the tasks of the corregidores, thereby avoiding much harm to the Indians and saving money for the crown.⁸⁹ Although it is not clear whether these elected Spanish mayors would be less corrupt or incompetent than the corregidores, this is one of the earliest demands by Andeans to remove the entire administrative position of corregidores—considerably earlier than a similar claim was articulated by Fray Calixto in 1749 and earlier than the 1780 rebellion, in which Túpac Amaru and Micaela Bastidas “enacted” this demand in a more radical form.

Concomitant with their critiques against the colonial church, Andean scholars proposed a reform of the ecclesiastical administration at the local and episcopal levels. To remedy the protracted abuses and inefficacy of parish priests, Cuevas Herrera asked for a more selective policy of assigning beneficios (parishes or benefices) to attract honest persons to this job. Very important, he demanded that curas be proficient in native languages, and for those who already held the position without meeting the language requirement, their salaries should be suspended immediately. To secure the transparency and efficiency of pastoral visits, ecclesiastic visitadores (inspectors) were to be carefully selected to avoid the conflicts of interests that were common when relatives or associates of oidores, prelates, and the reviewed parties were appointed ecclesiastical judges. He recommended that virtuous, mature, and zealous functionaries who spoke Indian languages be selected to conduct these inspections. Cuevas Herrera’s proposals echoed some clerics’ and particularly the Jesuits’ complaints about the poor language training of parish priests and proposed to work toward language training for missionaries to secure delivery of the Christian message to rural Indians. Although Cuevas Herrera’s petitions in this regard reflected his support for mission work and Christianity at large, his suggestions offered mechanisms for control of the abuses committed against Amerindian women and men by corrupt and inefficient priests. In many ways this discourse empowered Cuevas Herrera himself as an Andean doctrinero who spoke Spanish and Aymara, skills he put at the forefront to support his aspiration to become a prelate.⁹⁰ These suggestions attempt overall to bring transparency and efficiency to both the colonial state and church administration without questioning or undermining the meaning and roles of those institutions.

As Cuevas Herrera joined the voices campaigning for the abolition of the mita system in the seventeenth century, he agreed that in fairness the Potosí mita should be abolished. Nevertheless, he only advocated for lessening the amount of work assigned to mitayos “because natural reason demonstrates that it is unfair that just a few [Indians] now have to carry out the amount of work that previously took many of them to complete, and also it is unjust not to reduce their workload as the number of people declined.”⁹¹

With respect to the mita issue and other social concerns included within the larger problem of the ineffectiveness of colonial justice for Indians, the most comprehensive set of recommended changes was formulated in the mid-eighteenth century when the “Representación verdadera” appeared amid an insurrectionary conjuncture, intensified by the repartos and new threats that mestizos’ precarious standing could be downgraded to that of tributaries. The wholesale reforms of the justice system proposed in the text were intended to modify the judicial structure and procedures to achieve effective justice for Indians. Because unruly and corrupt officials had devalued the power of the law, the need for restitution of legal procedures in ecclesiastical and secular matters was reiterated. This restitution involved not only effective enforcement of past laws beneficial to the interests of native Andeans but also the replacement of ineffective laws to create suitable legislation according to contemporary problems. In a way, this proposal accentuated the role of Andeans as legal activists, pressuring for the production and abolition of laws as they saw fit.

The set of petitions for new laws revealed Andean ladinos’ new self-perception as de-colonized subjects. They fought for laws that overall reformulated the subordinate status of “Indians” in colonial society. As an example of laws needed urgently, the removal of restrictions that complicated Andeans’ free passage to Spain appears as an indicator of the change in the times.⁹² In 1749, legal activists such as Fray Calixto questioned the restriction of Andeans’ free mobility and the kind of tutelage the crown had exerted over Indians since they were legally constituted as minors. In conquest times, Fray Calixto maintained, laws prohibiting Indians’ free passage to Spain made sense for Spaniards. In the current times, however, such laws no longer applied, perpetuating Andeans’ lack of freedom: “Is there anything more oppressive than, whereas slaves can get their freedom and move around and travel to Spain, the Indian, even the noble, becomes a tributary and mitayo of your [Spanish] serfs and lacks the free will to choose where to live, or to pass to Spain to meet his king and show him his wounds?”⁹³ As has been pointed out, Indian authorities and other intellectual ladinos who represented native communities had been traveling to Spain since the late sixteenth century. The claim for free mobility thus evokes the transformation of Indians into more autonomous, cosmopolitan subjects who deemed themselves entitled to present their complaints directly to the king and were concerned with enforcing, by practical means, their right to use the legal system. Andean ladinos were well aware of the existing legislation that allowed kurakas in particular to seek justice directly with the audiencias⁹⁴ and wanted to expand those rights to other elite Andeans so they could bring their cases to the king.

Along the same lines, Andeans reclaimed the freedom to own their community assets, to manage them by themselves, and to be able to dispose of them so they could conduct businesses autonomously; they claimed their right to manage their own haciendas, Indian hospitals, brotherhoods, and community funds, “just as the Spanish administer theirs.”⁹⁵ In colonial Peru, the administration of the colegios de caciques, Indian hospitals, cajas de comunidad (a safe or box containing community documents and cash) and Indian cofradías was supervised by Spanish and ecclesiastical authorities. These proposals sought to debunk the idea that native Andeans were legally minors and needed supervision and tutelage in their own social organizations. The writers felt Andeans “were subjects of trust, reason, honesty, and credit.”⁹⁶ Furthermore, this reform included the prohibition against renting the community’s and Indian hospitals’ assets to Spaniards and mulattoes, since this practice left the funds exhausted and with unpayable debts. Aware of the opportunities and the need to engage in the market economy, Andeans demanded freedom to participate in that economy (tratar y contratar) without being hampered by the alcabala, which was illegally levied on Indian merchandise—further burdening Indians already overwhelmed with personal service, the mita, and the repartimiento de comercio.⁹⁷

Because access to the priesthood was a crucial aspect of the Andean vision of social inclusion in the public domain of society, Andean scholars articulated this demand in ways that reflected their understanding of social equality among Spanish and Indian women: “[And that] according to merit, legitimacy, sufficiency, and virtue, [Andeans] be admitted in the sacred orders and the ecclesiastic beneficios. Likewise, competent Indian and mestizo women should be allowed to possess the black and white veil as monjas profesas [nuns taking vows] either in the Indian nunneries founded for them or elsewhere.”⁹⁸ The proposal was tailored to the requirements the Council of Trent had set for candidates applying to the priesthood and for women seeking admission to nunneries, requirements that referred mostly to competence, virtue, and legitimacy.

This Andean proposal also contained limits to gender equality, however. Although women were included in the full agenda to enter religious institutions, the “Representación verdadera” made no claims for Indian women to be eligible to perform in an equal capacity as priests, nor did it question the gender hierarchies of power within ecclesiastical institutions—a level of gender consciousness that even today is largely absent from the Catholic Church. Social equality and Indian political participation featured prominently in the political imaginaries of colonial Andeans, who deemed themselves capable and willing to perform in positions of power within both the church and the state administration.

In this regard, both the desire to expand public spaces of power for elite Indians and the limitations of their views on gender equality become more apparent: “And [we ask] that those Indios who will be mentored in the future and those who are at present being mentored (because there are some now) be designated for the ecclesiastical and secular dignities; and that bishoprics and canonries be conferred to them as well as they be appointed as ministers of the Holy tribunal [of the Inquisition], consultants, garnachas [judges] in the audiencias, and especially that the fiscal protector and the two procuradores be Indians.”⁹⁹ Such a comprehensive reform would have substantially altered the ethnic composition of the secular and ecclesiastical administrations. These suggestions bring to the surface the range of roles intellectual ladinos attempted to play in the public domain of colonial society, none of which appeared open for Indian women. Definitions of the category “Indian” thus underwent significant reformulation by late-colonial Andeans who sought political power within the most prominent institutions of government, in the process undoing their status as Indians and minors—considered both political and social “handicaps” in Spanish law and colonial practice.

This proposal echoed the comprehensive range of rights reclaimed by Andean elites since the 1697 cédula de honores, still unenforced in Fray Calixto’s time. Likewise, these reforms spoke to a movement conducted by the indigenous Cercado cabildo to eliminate the legal tutelage of Spanish protectores de naturales, widely criticized since the seventeenth century for their inefficiency and corruption and their inability to support the enforcement of the cédula de honores. In the decades preceding the composition of the “Representación verdadera,” the Indian cabildo had set out to request that the position of procuradores de naturales be redefined to make qualified Indians eligible to hold the post. Through the diputado de los indios (deputy for the Indians) Pedro Nieto de Vargas, they finally obtained a royal cédula on July 1, 1735, that granted the posts of protectores and diputados generales to competent Indians.¹⁰⁰

In around 1749–1750, the “Representación verdadera” insisted on the matter because the decree was not enforced, as the Spanish procuradores Conde de Villanueva, Jerónimo de Portalanza, and Manuel Soriano, among others, remained in those positions for about thirty years after the decree was issued. After a long legal battle for enforcement of the 1735 royal decree by the Cercado cabildo and its two officials, Alberto Chosop and Joseph Santiago Ruiz Túpac Amaru Inca, they obtained final approval from the Audiencia of Lima to act as procuradores de naturales—a position long held by Spaniards, although intended to defend Indian legal rights. As an example of the wider struggles to seat Indian secular and ecclesiastical judges, the “Representación verdadera” articulated this claim:

But what a disgrace, my lord, that the doors of justice are closed for us, and we find your justice neither in you nor your ministers nor in your bishops or pastors, who are there only to impede our lamentations and complaints from reaching you. Because there is no secular or ecclesiastical judge from our nation . . . neither [do we] have a procurador of ours. . . . And despite the fact that King Dn. Felipe V, our glorious father, has commanded through a royal decree from 173[5] that we had two Indians as our procuradores in each audiencia, and that also Indians were to act as protectores in the cities of the kingdom, nothing has been done about it, because when laws benefit Indians either they are not enforced or they are turned against us.¹⁰¹

Andeans’ struggles to have their own protectores de naturales were the result of their long experience with a decadent judicial system in which non-enforcement of laws for the preservation of Indian labor and Indian noble privileges was an institutionalized pattern. Holding the office of protectores de naturales would have allowed Indian officials the freedom to travel to Spain and to periodically inform the king and the Council of the Indies about the state of Indian judicial matters—law enforcement—in the colonies. Indian procuradores could also have defended their cases in the regional audiencias and influenced their judicial decisions, which might otherwise have reflected only the interests of the most powerful groups. Of course, there was also the incentive of a position endowed with a salary and that entailed a measure of social prestige, as the holder was usually knowledgeable about the law, if not a lawyer himself, and a noble of pure blood. Chosop and Ruiz Túpac Amaru Inca faced the opposition of a well-entrenched bureaucracy of mostly corrupt Spanish lawyers who had held the position since the post-conquest era and whose most vocal member in 1734 was the former Spanish protector de naturales Don Juan de Portalanza. Chosop and Ruiz Túpac Amaru Inca led the legal struggle for enforcement in the 1760s, finally obtaining the recognition of the real audiencia on October 1, 1763.

Doubtless, the most radical proposition of the “Representación verdadera” was to abolish the post of corregidor and replace it with Andean administrators or judges. This idea attempted to redefine the boundaries of colonial and Andean authority and revealed Andeans’ concern about political autonomy: “And [we ask] that the Spanish corregidores . . . must be removed absolutely and totally; and judges, or Indian corregidores for Indians, should be appointed who govern them appropriately; and that Indians only be subject to Y. M. and to the viceroy for temporal matters, and to the bishop for spiritual ones . . . and that Indians be governed by Indians themselves, and that they are their own corregidores, and that Spaniards do not have anything to do with them.”¹⁰² Thus, the new line of authority would bypass the provincial government, and its functions would now fall under the purview of the caciques. Tribute collection would be rendered promptly to the king by Indian corregidores, since they would not have the financial obligations of the Spanish corregidores, which usually delayed the remission of tribute moneys to the crown. Most important, this proposal would be a “detour” that included the abolition of the hated repartimiento de comercio, an abusive practice conducted by corregidores: “repartimientos will cease.”¹⁰³ Caciques would not purchase their posts, so they would not face the ensuing debt burden. Also, unlike Spanish corregidores, Andeans were parsimonious in their consumption, so it would be relatively inexpensive for the king to replace Spanish corregidores with Andean judges. Thus, the king would save the money he was spending on salaries for ineffective officials, and, as a bonus, many gentiles would stop practicing idolatry and convert to Christianity.¹⁰⁴ Early-modern Andean scholars thus expressed a pragmatic understanding of imperial finances at the time of the Bourbon reforms while using their suggestions to advance their own interests so they could remain outside Spanish purview.

The proposed set of sweeping reforms to state administration involving Indian participation ended with key changes to the judicial system: “It would be good that a new tribunal be set up . . . that depended directly on Y. M., and that [the tribunal] be made up of one, two or more bishops and other noble people . . . very respectful of God and faithful servants of your Majesty, along with Indian nobles and mestizos, the knights of the Spanish and Indian Nation.”¹⁰⁵ This authority structure would put an end to the non-enforcement of laws benefiting Andeans and would advise the king about detrimental laws that should be eliminated. The prohibition on Indian travel to Spain and the laws endorsing the mita system were among those to be abolished, while the said tribunal of justice could address an effective, practical execution of the privileges and fueros de indios for noble Indians. The tribunal would last only until Indian men and women were admitted to the religious orders and noble Andeans were granted admission to royal schools, seminaries, and universities throughout the kingdom. These mandates were to be obeyed by all audiencias, bishops, and officials, who were to facilitate the documents required for Andeans to travel to Spain to assure the king that his laws were duly enforced.¹⁰⁶

These reforms attest to the ways Andeans envisioned their political participation in the achievement of social justice: a structure of justice tied directly to the king, in which representatives of Spaniards, Indians, mestizos, and the church would share judicial power in a tribunal specially designed for Indian matters. This proposal for participation by noble Andeans in a special tribunal of justice, away from the regular colonial justice system, was the culmination of Andeans’ long search for justice directly from the king to circumvent the protracted neglect of previous laws for the social empowerment of the Andean elite. Elsewhere in the “Representación verdadera,” a variant of the proposal was raised to the king: “You should rule that other judges elected by us be appointed along with caciques, principal Indians, and that all of them carry out your royal will.”¹⁰⁷ Thus, these thinkers contested the protracted malfunctioning of a colonial justice system plagued by corruption, exclusionary practices, and systematic noncompliance with sanctioned royal mandates in favor of Indians—themselves the result of the consistent intervention of Andean authorities in audiencias and the royal court in Madrid. Perhaps they exposed too blatantly the contradictions between the religious foundations of Spanish rule and the political practices of the secular and clerical states inherent in the colonial situation.

Given the stratified and segregated nature of colonial society, this sharing of judicial power between colonial elites and a group of subaltern subjects was a proposal too challenging to be considered by the crown and its advisory council. After receiving the manuscript from the Franciscans Fray Calixto de San José Túpac Inca and Fray Isidoro de Cala in 1750, King Ferdinand VI commanded Viceroy Conde de Superunda to investigate the denunciations that preceded the proposals. The viceroy, with the support of the king, ordered the banishment and seclusion of Fray Calixto, whom the viceroy ultimately held responsible for the “Representación verdadera” and the social activism the manifesto helped support.

The composition of the proposed tribunal of justice indicates that Andean elites were, in theory, willing to share judicial power with Spaniards and the church. These proposals, however, acknowledged no place or representation for the large sectors of elite women and non-elite Indian women and men, let alone the vast sector of black and mulatto women and men, whom Fray Calixto perceived as inferior to the Indians. None of these groups were included as eligible representatives in the proposed tribunal of justice, which shows the internalization of the notions of purity of blood and exclusion in these Indian-mestizo discourses of Andean power.

Overall, the reform proposals questioned the concentration of power by Spaniards, and the spirit was to end the subordination of the “republic of Indians” by the “republic of Spaniards”: “With this [reform], we all will be saved, and everyone, both Spaniards and Indians, will have peace, Spaniards governing Spaniards and Indians governing Indians.”¹⁰⁸ This reassertion of Indian self-government harkened back to the Habsburg attempts to separate Indians from Spaniards in two different administrative republics. But these intellectual Andeans envisioned an Indian republic in which Indian commoners would be governed autonomously by members of the Andean elite who, empowered by privileges akin to those of the colonial nobility (education, priesthood, social recognition), would administer justice for Indians and ensure fulfillment of the colonial demands on their own.

The proposals outlined here imagined various degrees of Indian autonomy as a way to deny Indians’ subordinate condition as legal minors and ultimately to do away with the sanctioned category of “Indians” for elite Andeans. In various ways, the proposals reflect the fact that these late-colonial Andeans envisioned themselves as cosmopolitan subjects, aware of the political rights that would define them as autonomous, de-colonizing ethnic subjects and free them from the constraints of colonial impositions. The reforms also reflect Andean intellectuals’ willingness to participate as free subjects in the economy and as capable and knowledgeable candidates for political participation in the state administration, which would enable them to engage in political self-government.¹⁰⁹

A comparative analysis of different reform efforts by mid- and late-colonial Andeans reveals that the demands raised during the rebellion of Túpac Amaru denote the reformist aspect of the insurrection and the fact that its demands had been articulated earlier in the proposals examined here, in spite of Túpac Amaru’s advocacy of violent social change.¹¹⁰ Along similar lines, in 1780 Túpac Amaru proposed the creation of reales audiencias, presided over by a viceroy, located close to Indian towns for prompt administration of Indian justice.¹¹¹ Although none of the writers discussed here placed the abolition of tribute at the head of their agenda, perhaps because they understood tribute as Andeans’ contribution to the reciprocal compact in exchange for the conditions necessary to secure their social and cultural reproduction under Spanish rule, Túpac Amaru’s vision of an upcoming Inca rule in the Andes through a revolution and with no place for Spaniards in the new society stands out as more radically anti-colonial than the vision of any previous Andean leader.

Beyond the feasibility of these reforms and regardless of whether Andeans were successful in their attempts to reform the empire’s administration, the nature of the proposals is important in its own right, as they represent a common political culture of Andean elites under Spanish rule—more clearly articulated in the 1700s in the decades before the Great Rebellion. That is, their impetus was to carve a more autonomous space within colonial society in the face of the failed arrangement of the “two republics,” which Andeans regarded as an opportunity to redefine their own place in society rather than as a serious empowering policy. The overall aim of the proposals for social reform was to achieve justice for Indians at different levels and to hold Spaniards accountable for the one-sided, nonreciprocal relationships they had established with Andeans.

As a political undertone and a driving force in colonial Andean scholarship, ethnic autonomy mirrors a long-standing tradition of political and cultural battles by Indian authorities to organize their lives somewhat independently of the colonial authorities. The history of these battles is extensive and mostly unwritten, but as an illustration of such an impetus, a few references suffice here. In 1623 the Chicho Indians from the Valley of Tarija (Province of Charcas) demanded that the Spanish administrators of the censos (Indian lands rented out to non-community members) and cajas de comunidad cease having control over the communities’ assets. They asked the crown to replace these officials with the kurakas.¹¹² Another episode illustrates the impetus for religious autonomy. Indian devotees of the Virgin of Copacabana in Lima took it upon themselves to petition for and follow up on the construction of a chapel for the virgin in the San Lázaro neighborhood, where they felt they belonged and where the virgin was originally lodged before the town’s Indians were forcefully relocated to El Cercado in 1591.¹¹³ They campaigned for about thirty years, obtained the funds needed, and were finally allowed to build the chapel in 1633. At that time they applied for construction of an Indian beaterio, which they obtained and built themselves. They reclaimed the right to choose the chaplain and to manage the cofradía and beaterio as patrons of the church. They also complained that the designated priest did not know Quechua, the language they wanted for the religious services. Finally, in 1704 the Indians were allowed to choose their own chaplain and were considered the legitimate founders of their chapel and beaterio.

Even within the framework of colonial Christianity, Andeans felt entitled to control the religious organizations of which they were a part and in which they had invested community funds. This expression was as much religious as it was political, and it had to do with a strong sense of ethnic self-assertion under Spanish rule rather than a revival of Inca ways or the search for Inca identity per se, in the case of their complaint about the lack of prayers in Quechua.

CONCLUSION

As colonial pressures mounted following the Toledan reforms—threatening the survival of Indian life and structures of government—Andean authorities, writers, and legal representatives advanced a social and political movement to access the honor, political authority, and symbols and institutions of social prestige accorded to them. This movement had started in the early seventeenth century, but it became broader and more coordinated in the late 1600s. The attempt was less about seeking full assimilation into Spanish society than about the realization of an autonomous and reformulated “republic of Indians.” In such an ethnic niche, Andeans imagined having their own priesthood and ecclesiastical authorities, Indian and mestizo representatives in the secular government, and school system. In addition, they would partake in the performance of power practices, such as belonging to knightly orders, cofradías, capellanías, and similar groups. Those who perceived themselves as legitimate heirs to chiefdoms and as old Christians of pure blood needed not only the political but also the social recognition attached to power in the colonial society, a necessary step to be considered by Spaniards as valid interlocutors and recipients of authority and thereby to maintain their power structures in the new colonial era.¹¹⁴ Inasmuch as these prominent Andeans struggled to erase the hierarchical relationship between the two “republics,” their texts betray the elitist biases of their social agendas. Those eligible for participation in the aforementioned institutions included only noble Indians and their mestizo descendants, excluding the lower echelons of the “Indian republic” from such opportunities.

The Andean discourses created in the search for social equality revealed the cultural negotiation of Andeans’ reciprocal expectations between ethnic autonomy and obedience to imperial rule. They questioned the injustice of colonialism and advocated Indian autonomous organizations while playing the role of ideal colonial subjects, endorsing the goals of empire to stress their allegiance. Understanding these negotiations of rule and identity helps us to visualize the interstices in Andean discourses at which departures from the colonial agenda emerge. They allow us to question assessments of these Andean practices as forms of plain “cultural assimilation” or as mere co-optation or corruption of Indian authorities and elites.

Limaylla’s petitions to both the cacicazgo of Luringuanca and the knightly orders on behalf of noble Indians were denied, as the king and the Council of the Indies considered him incapable of producing complex memoriales and because granting these honors would inconveniently motivate other Indians to petition and travel to the royal court. Although the 1697 cédula de honores granted elite Indians and their mestizo descendants the right to access schools, the reality was that during the eighteenth century the schools for caciques languished, and Andeans’ participation in colegios mayores was marginal. By far the most contentious issue in the efforts for social inclusion proved to be the admission of noble Indians to the priesthood, since even after two centuries of evangelization the Peruvian church did not feel Indians were sufficiently Christianized to perform key roles in the colonial realm of the sacred. Even though a few more Indians were admitted to the priesthood after 1776, only a few had been admitted after the secularization in 1750, and for the rest of the colonial period they remained largely excluded from holy orders. The reforms of the colonial administration of justice proposed in the “Representación verdadera” were largely disregarded in the royal and viceregal spheres after Fray Calixto was exiled and secluded in a remote Spanish monastery in Ormus (Valencia) in 1756, where he likely died. Andean intellectual and political battles to join the colonial spheres of power demonstrated that the hierarchical divisions of race and ethnicity in colonial Peru tended to prevail over paternalistic laws that promised, and rarely delivered, inclusion of Andeans in the social world of the ruling elite.

The Andean proposals of reform in particular placed indigenous and mestizo intellectuals at the forefront of a de-colonizing movement that promoted forms of political participation in institutions of justice, knowledge, and spirituality. By reclaiming the freedom to travel to Spain, informing the king, and actively seeking enforcement of what they perceived as empowering laws, they attempted to scrutinize the performance of judicial and ecclesiastical officials. The mid–eighteenth-century impetus to have Indians appointed as corregidores, protectores de naturales, escribanos, and elected judges in a special tribunal for Indian justice challenged the colonial justice system’s protracted inability to deliver on the colonial discourse of making Indians true members of the kingdom’s body politic and on the fictional discourse of social equality between the nobles of the two republics. In striving to self-manage their social organizations and communities, opening avenues for participation in the market economy, and reclaiming their right to own and manage property, Andeans sought to advance their social condition as mature and autonomous subjects of the empire. They effected a deconstruction of their imposed colonial identity as “Indians” and rid themselves of the subordinate status of legal and social minors.

Through their critiques, proposals, and trans-Atlantic travels, Indian scholars acted as indirect lawmakers and law enforcers. These roles placed them and the Indian networks they were part of within the nascent public arena of the colonial judicial system. Even in the midst of the late-colonial Great Rebellion, they used the discourse of law as a referent to justify their struggle; their proposals, in turn, attempted to change the legal basis of imperial administration to measures that facilitated the avoidance of Spanish rule in the Andes, even if they continued to pledge allegiance to the king—an uncertain and distant “head” of the dislocated body politic.

Simultaneously a by-product and a rhetorical tool of the political and social activism of Andean educated leaders, a consistent endeavor to redefine the identities of colonial Indians and mestizos underlies the texts under study. Their attitudes, values, and discussions of religiosity also add a textual layer to ethnic self-perception and the campaigns for social inclusion. Along those two themes, Chapter 7 approaches the politics of identity formation in Andean scholarship to further discern changes in Andean culture under colonial rule.

NOTES

1. Martínez, Genealogical Fictions, 112–122.

2. Glave, “The ‘Republic of Indians’ in Revolt,” 514–515.

3. On August 31, 1588, King Charles II had ordered archbishops and bishops to ordain mestizos who met the necessary sufficiencies and “calidades.” Mestizo women who likewise qualified were to be admitted to nunneries. Recopilación de leyes de las Indias, tomo 2, libro 1, título 7, ley 7. Available at http://www.congreso.gob.pe/ntley/LeyIndiaP.htm. Individual efforts to acquire prestigious social distinctions had been advanced prior to 1697 by elite Andeans seeking access to cacicazgos and exemption from tribute and mita obligations. An intriguing case was the request for the creation of a knightly order for the “Incas and Montezumas,” advanced in approximately 1677 by the Jauja noble Don Jerónimo Lorenzo Limaylla, one of the Andean writers studied in this book and introduced in Chapter 2. He argued that as subjects of the same king, Andean and Spanish nobles were socially equal and therefore entitled to the same privileges. He wanted to associate the order with Santa Rosa, a patron saint dear to Andeans and creoles alike. Limaylla, “Memorial.”

4. “R. C. que se considere a los descendientes de caciques como nobles en su raza,” Madrid, Marzo 26, 1697. Transcribed in Konetzke, Colección de documentos, vol. 3, part 1, 67.

5. Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo a la santidad, 495. See also Chapter 2, note 73.

6. Ibid., 497.

7. AGI, Indiferente General, 648, Juan Núñez Vela de Rivera; AGI, Lima, 19, Juan Núñez Vela de Rivera, 1690.

8. Among other things, Núñez Vela de Rivera demanded that noble Indians and mestizos be admitted as knights in military orders, including the prestigious Toyson de oro Order, and admitted as bishops and cardinals in the Holy Church of Rome. Buntix and Wuffarden, “Incas y reyes españoles,” 164.

9. AGI, Indiferente General, 648, Juan Núñez Vela de Rivera, 1.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid. On May 30, 1691, the king had approved a real cédula commanding that schools of Castilian language be founded in Peru and New Spain as a first step toward enabling Indian nobles to occupy public positions. AGI, Lima, 22.

13. “R. C. que se considere a los descendientes de caciques como nobles en su raza,” Madrid, Marzo 26, 1697. Transcribed in Konetzke, Colección de documentos, vol. 3, part 1, 66–67.

14. Recopilación de leyes de las Indias, libro 1, título 7, ley 7, reales cédulas of August 31 and September 28, 1588, by Felipe II. Available at http://www.congreso.gob.pe/ntley/LeyIndiaP.htm.

15. AGI, Audiencia de Lima, 495, Lima, Octubre 26, 1711; Lima, Abril 1, 1722; Lima, Junio 27, 1724; Lima, Mayo 13, 1726. Thirty-one caciques and Indian nobles signed the memoriales; regions represented included Pachacama and Lurin, Jaen de Bracamoros (Chachapoyas), La Magdalena (Lima), Miraflores, Andahuailas, Cusco, San Bartolomé of Guánuco, and Manta in southern Ecuador.

16. AGI, Lima, 495, Buen Retiro, Marzo 31, 1722; AGI, Lima, 22, Cuadernos nos. 1–3. The Indian memorialists responded with more writing and travel and this time demanded that the text of the 1697 cédula be engraved on bronze plaques and posted in the major plazas of the real audiencia’s principal cities. AGI, Audiencia de Lima, 495, Lima, Mayo 13, 1726.

17. “Representación verdadera,” 145v–146.

18. “Real cédula para que los indios sean admitidos en las religiones, educados en los colegios y promovidos, según su mérito y capacidad, a dignidades y oficios públicos,” San Ildefonso, Septiembre 11, 1766. Transcribed in Konetzke, Colección de documentos, vol. 3, part 1, 333–334. AGI, Lima, 495, Buen Retiro, Marzo 31, 1722. For the papal confirmation, see AGI, Lima, 22, Cuadernos nos. 1–3. The royal decree was finally promulgated in Lima and Callao, by order of Viceroy Don Manuel de Amat, on June 10, 1767, and was posted as a public edict and promulgated by public crier by the Protectores de Naturales Don Alberto Chosop and Don Joséph Santiago Ruiz. Paz y Guiní, Guerra Separatista, 281–286.

19. See Ramírez, “Cosmological Basis of Local Power in the Andes.”

20. Sariola, Power and Resistance, 183.

21. Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo a la santidad.

22. Ibid., 26, 78.

23. Estenssoro Fuchs discussed the religious practices of virtuous Indians in colonial Peru and examined at length the particular case of the Indian Nicolás Ayllón’s canonization process (1677–1716). Even though this case proceeded successfully to the point of receiving recognition of sanctity by Rome, it was delayed and finally frustrated by the Inquisition in 1716. Even though unacknowledged by the Inquisition, Estenssoro Fuchs argued, the reasons for the denial were the inconsistency inherent in the identity of an Indian saint and the enforced status of Indians as permanent neophytes. Ibid., 468–493. For Estenssoro Fuchs, the “Representación verdadera” represented a “culminating moment” in Indians’ long pursuit of incorporation into Catholicism, a step closer to achieving religious autonomy.

24. Martínez, Genealogical Fictions, 112–122. Martínez also argues that Spanish notions of purity were redeployed in the New World against people of African descent. Indeed, Fray Calixto’s negative perceptions of blacks reflect such a bias (see Chapter 7), while he also used the notion to empower Andeans.

25. “Representación verdadera,” 146.

26. Limaylla, “Memorial,” 207.

27. The dossier’s full title is “Brief and compendious rendition of the reasons that the Spanish nation holds for the erroneous practice of rejecting the admission of the very pristine and very noble Nation of American Indians and the mestizos and descendants from the Indians in the religious orders of friars and nuns and to the ecclesiastical dignities.”

28. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs, 13.

29. AGI, Lima, 59, cited in Marzal, La transformación religiosa peruana, 139; Villagómez, Carta pastoral.

30. “Representación verdadera,” 120v.

31. Ibid., 133v.

32. Ibid., 131.

33. Ibid., 134.

34. Ibid., 146v.

35. Ibid., 147.

36. Ibid., 137–137v.

37. Ibid., 157v.

38. Ibid., 153v.

39. Ibid., 157.

40. Ibid., 142–142v.

41. Ibid., 143, 144v.

42. Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo a la santidad, 27.

43. Among them were most of the Andean scholars whose writings constitute the core of this book, including Cuevas Herrera and Núñez Vela de Rivera. Fray Calixto attained the status of lay brother, and José Rafael Sahuaraura was appointed a cura doctrinero in 1784. A few others were also known in 1751, including Cirilo y Castilla. Proficiency in native languages as well as Castilian and Latin seemed to have helped Cuevas Herrera enjoy an appointment as cura doctrinero in various towns of the Charcas Province for most of the seventeenth century, and in the mid-eighteenth century Fray Calixto became a mission aide and ecclesiastical functionary.

44. Vargas Ugarte, Concilios Limenses.

45. AGI, Lima, 988.

46. Vargas Ugarte, Concilios Limenses, 46.

47. Ricard, La conquista espiritual, 349.

48. Prien, La historia del cristianismo, 244; Osorio, Clamor de los Indios Americanos, 29.

49. Recopilación de Leyes de las Indias, libro 1, título 7, ley 7, reales cédulas from August 31 and September 28, 1588, by King Philip II. Available at http://www.congreso.gob.pe/ntley/LeyIndiaP.htm.

50. AGI, Lima, 495, 9–9v.

51. Olaechea, “Los indios en las órdenes religiosas,” 256; Konetzke, Colección de documentos, vol. 3, part 1, 333.

52. AGI, Lima, 988.

53. As a result, religious orders customarily received not only native Andeans but also occasionally mulattoes and blacks as donados, although the church tried to prevent this practice several times. Olaechea, “Los indios en las órdenes religiosas,” 242. It seems that the number of donados was significant at times. The San Francisco de Jesus convent in Lima had no fewer than forty during the seventeenth century. Although they remained excluded from the priesthood for many decades, it seems that as the eighteenth century neared, a few were allowed to officiate as priests. In New Spain, donados apparently came to be highly regarded for their moral virtues and spiritual achievements. Some were reported to be able to perform miracles and become saints. Torquemada, Monarquía Indiana, Libro 18, Cap. 11, 111, 237, cited in Olaechea, “Los indios en las órdenes religiosas,” 245.

54. Olaechea, “Los indios en las órdenes religiosas,” 244.

55. Ibid., 252.

56. Figuera, La formación del clero indígena, 384.

57. O’Phelan, La gran rebelión, 56, and “Ascender al estado eclesiástico.” O’Phelan cited six Indian postulants to the major orders, some from areas outside Cusco: Manuel de Avalos and Ramón Charhuacondori in 1755; Joseph Antonio Montes, 1756; Marcos Caballero de los Reyes, 1759; Nicholas Zevallos (n.d.); and Gregorio Aguilar de Vergara, 1757; as well as the mestizos Luis de Averza and Francisco Mariaca. Most of these Indian and mestizo priests had been ordained in the minor orders and were seeking promotion to the major orders. O’Phelan lists these ordained Incas: Antonio de Bustamante Carlos Inga, parish priest of the Guaripaca Doctrine, Cusco, as apparently in 1760 he was already functioning in that capacity; Gregorio Choquehuanca, interim parish priest, was promoted after the Great Rebellion; Manuel Chirinos y Cabrera, brother-in-law of Don Juan de Bustamante Carlos Inga, applied in 1754 for an ecclesiastical post at the Cusco cathedral and was reluctantly admitted; and Don Francisco Javier Carlos y Antequera (no date of appointment given), son of Joséph de Antequera, in turn parish priest of Guallatas (Cotabambas) in 1765. O’Phelan, La gran rebelión, 59, 60, 66.

58. In 1772 the Holy Office worried that there were “numerous Indian priests ordained in Peru.” Archivo Histórico Nacional (AHN), Legajo 2212, Expediente 1, Carta del tribunal de Lima, 10-1-1772, cited in Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo a la santidad, 514. The numbers of ordained Indians and mestizos remained low in spite of a 1769 dispatch from Charles III commanding the foundation of seminaries in which at least a third or a fourth of those admitted were Indians or mestizos. Cited in O’Phelan, “Ascender al estado eclesiástico,” 323.

59. Brading, “Tridentine Catholicism,” cited in O’Phelan, La gran rebelión, 58.

60. The members of Cusco’s prominent Inca lineages in the priesthood prior to the Great Rebellion were Rafael José Jiménez de Cisneros Sahuaraura Tito Atauche, a presbyter in the Cusco diocese; Sixto Sahuaraura Tito Atauche and Leandro Jiménez de Cisneros Sahuaraura Tito Atauche, the latter also a presbyter in the same jurisdiction; and Fernando Ramos Tito Atauche, curate from the town of Umachari. Among the royalist Incas ordained as priests as a reward for their roles in fighting the Great Rebellion were Don Pedro Solís Quivimasa, Don Antonio Solís Quivimasa, and Diego Chuqicallata. In 1784 Don Gregorio Choquehuanca was promoted to racionero of the La Plata cathedral; he had been an interpreter for the colonial authorities during the Great Rebellion and donated cattle to the royal troops. The children of Don Pedro Sahuaraura, who was killed in battle fighting against Túpac Amaru in Sangarará, became eligible for the priesthood and were offered a paid congrua (entrance fee), royal scholarships to enter the school of caciques in San Borja, and capellanías in which they would minister as chaplains. Durand, Colección documental de la independencia del Perú, 226. José Rafael Sahuaraura, the writer of the “Estado del Perú” and brother of Don Pedro Sahuaraura, was given the Juliaca doctrine in propriety in 1784. Don Leandro Sahuaraura, brother of the previous two men, was a lieutenant priest in the town of Nuñoa. Ibid., 247. Fernando Ramos Tito Atauche, their uncle, received the title of chaplain of the cacique Don Pedro Justo Sahuaraura’s troops and a scholarship to study in the Cusco seminaries; he was ordained by the archbishop. He also became an interim doctrinero in Carabayas; in 1809 he was promoted to the Soraya and Angaraes doctrines and was nominated as an ecclesiastical judge and vicar foráneo. O’Phelan, La gran rebelión, 67. A daughter of Mateo Pumacahua’s was temporarily accepted to the creole monastery of Santa Clara in Cusco.

61. Garrett, Shadows of Empire, 144.

62. Prien, La historia del cristianismo, 247.

63. Such a practice is richly documented in the Archivo Arzobispal del Cusco (AAC). (To mention a few cases, AAC, Caja 66, Paquete 3, Expediente 68, ff. 1–5, 1–11, 1–31, 1739; Caja 2, Paquete 4, Expediente 71, f. 5, 1814. See also Archivo Departmental del Cusco, Notarial, Juan Bautista Gamarra, Leg. 133, 1746–1781.) For a discussion of the financial and political implications of Indian chaplaincies and benefices in the Cusco area, see Garrett, Shadows of Empire, 144–145.

64. O’Phelan, “Ascender al estado eclesiástico,” 316–325.

65. Gruzinski, La colonización de lo imaginario, 261.

66. Burns, “Nuns, Kurakas, and Credit,” 56–57.

67. Ingoli cited in Prien, La historia del cristianismo, 245.

68. Osorio, Clamor de los Indios Americanos, 27.

69. Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo a la santidad, 514.

70. See the discussion of Fray Calixto’s activism in Lima in Chapter 3.

71. In 1784 the Inca noble and priest José Rafael Sahuaraura, an ardent supporter of the ecclesiastical institution and the Cusco bishop Don Juan Manuel Moscoso y Peralta, adopted the position of the Spanish administration in de-legitimizing the Great Rebellion and its leader and also in favoring the hard-line militaristic approach against the rebels. Sahuaraura also represented the most conservative ecclesiastical discourse of the time, endorsing an inquisitorial approach toward participants in the rebellion and toward the social control of Andean survivors more generally. Sahuaraura Tito Atauche, “Estado del Perú.”

72. “Representación verdadera,” 139.

73. Ibid.

74. Ibid., 139–139v.

75. Ibid., 136v–137.

76. Ibid.

77. Quoted in Loayza, Fray Calixto Túpac Inca, 81.

78. Tanck de Estrada, Pueblos de indios, 165.

79. “Representación verdadera,” 119v–120. Simultaneously, in the late eighteenth century the enlightened bishop of Trujillo, Baltazar Martínez Compañón, promoted the foundation of elementary and boarding schools for native boys and girls, with an emphasis on literacy, religion, and useful trades, to Hispanicize and neutralize contemporary native rebels and turn them into “loyal, productive and Christian citizens.” Ramírez, “To Serve God and King,” 74.

80. “Representación verdadera,” 167.

81. Ibid., 135v.

82. Virtually all of the Andean scholars and activists who led the campaigns made their way to Madrid with their petitions and sought audiences with the king, including Limaylla, Núñez Vela de Rivera, Morachimo, and Fray Calixto.

83. On the use of genealogies and paintings, see Gisbert and José de Mesa, Historia de la pintura cuzqueña. On the performance of Inca nobility and also the use of paintings, see Dean, Inca Bodies. On the use of Inca choreographic dancing, theatrical representation, and Inca portraits, see Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo a la santidad, 498–508.

84. Szemiński, “The Last Time the Inca Came Back,” 284–285. Szemiński follows John Rowe’s notion of an “Inca nationalist movement” (explained in Chapter 2) and views these cultural expressions as part of that movement, maintaining that “Inca nationalism” involved the participation of both Inca nobles and commoners and was based on a resignification of “ancient religious precepts.” Both the participation of commoners and the redefinition of the Inca or pre-conquest Andean religion, however, are unclear in this notion of “Inca nationalism” before the rebellion of Túpac Amaru and after the writings of Garcilaso de la Vega and Guamán Poma de Ayala.

85. Valcárcel, Colección documental de la independencia del Perú, 151.

86. Túpac Amaru II, 1781, reproduced in Durand, Colección documental del bicentenario, 204–222, 212.

87. As previously stated, Guamán Poma de Ayala was probably the first Andean intellectual to articulate a discourse of justice against the encomienda system, the institution of corregidores, and the legitimacy of the Spanish conquest and rule. Likewise, he first demanded the restitution of Amerindian lands to their legitimate owners following the pillage of the Spanish conquest, along with a series of changes to the colonial administration and the church. Some of these demands were inspired by the earlier writings of the Dominicans Fray Bartolomé de las Casas and Fray Domingo de Santo Tomás, as well as, more closely, the benevolent practices of Bishop Jerónimo de Loayza toward native Andeans. Adorno, Cronista y príncipe, 33–35.

88. Cuevas Herrera, “Cinco memoriales,” 247v.

89. Ibid., 251v.

90. Ibid., 237v–238. Cuevas Herrera was apparently seeking an appointment as a prelate or an ecclesiastical visitador.

91. Ibid., 264.

92. Recopilación de leyes de las Indias, libro 6, título 7, ley 17, Madrid, December 10, 1576. Real cédula prohibiting caciques and indios principales from visiting the court without royal license.

93. “Representación verdadera,” 121–121v.

94. Recopilación de leyes de las Indias, libro 6, título 7, ley 1a, Valladolid, Febrero 26, 1557. Real cédula ordering the audiencias to hear cases involving Indians on their cacicazgos. While Fray Calixto led a struggle in search of justice directly from the king, other contemporary Andeans in the town of Andagua resisted payments of overdue tribute by rejecting the authority of the corregidor and acknowledging the jurisdiction of the viceroy only for Indian matters. Salomon, “Ancestor Cults and Resistance,” 151, 155.

95. “Representación verdadera,” 166v.

96. Ibid.

97. Ibid., 166v.

98. Ibid., 167.

99. Ibid.

100. On July 10, 1735, a royal decree stipulated that capable Indians could in effect be elected by the Indian cabildo to perform as procuradores de naturales. Alberto Chosop and Joseph Santiago Ruiz Túpac Amaru Inca finally attained appointments as principal and substitute procuradores de naturales, respectively, in 1763 and performed as such well into the late 1780s. AGN, Derecho Indígena [hereafter DI], Leg. 18, Cuad. 311, ff. 8–12, 22–23, 38–39v, 57–59, 60–68.

101. “Representación verdadera,” 126.

102. Ibid., 167v.

103. Ibid., 168.

104. Ibid., 167v–168.

105. Ibid., 168v–169.

106. Ibid., 169.

107. Ibid., 128.

108. Ibid., 168.

109. David Cahill spoke about the “constitutional activism” of the twenty-four Inca electors in Alférez Real, Cusco, during the 1814 “Revolución de la Patria,” Cahill, “Liminal Nobility,” 178. This was perhaps an expression of Andean elites’ willingness to participate in the political conduct of society, already articulated in the mid-eighteenth century by Andean intellectuals and activists such as Fray Calixto.

110. See discussion in Chapter 3, “José Gabriel Condorcanqui Túpac Amaru II.”

111. AGI, Lima, 1039, 29–29v.

112. AGI, Charcas, 53.

113. For detailed accounts of the Indians’ removal from the San Lázaro neighborhood to El Cercado in 1591 and the history of the miraculous Virgin of Copacabana, see Lowry, Forging an Indian Nation, 51; Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo a la santidad, 458, 497. Estenssoro Fuchs maintained that the Andean scholar Juan Núñez Vela de Rivera, the key figure behind the cédula de honores and the proceedings for the canonization of Ayllón, was chosen as chaplain of the Copacabana chapel after his return from Spain in 1695. For an extensive presentation of the founding of the Cercado Indian town, see Lowry, Forging an Indian Nation. For more details on this subject and the intra-elite and internal ecclesiastical tensions underlying the removal of the San Lázaro Indians, see Coello de la Rosa, Espacios de exclusión.

114. Pease, Perú Hombre e Historia, 312.