In building its early modern empire across the Atlantic, Spain deployed an army of legal bureaucrats who were rooted in the Iberian culture of letters and inherited Roman law. To rule their possessions in the New World, the Habsburgs attempted a wholesale incorporation of indigenous peoples into a Hispanicized legal culture. They redistributed the native population, introduced new forms of communication, and implemented their notions of justice and social order to counter the authority of kurakas (ethnic lords) in the Andes. Over time, the establishment of Spanish legal and political institutions encouraged new supra-ayllu (community) loyalties among Andeans, while in the newly created reducciones or Indian towns, native literate officials became the immediate brokers between the colonial state and the República de Indios, a colonial reordering of indigenous worlds.Footnote 1 Working closely with one another, indigenous escribanos, alcaldes ordinarios, procuradores de cabildo (legal advocates of the Indians’ council), along with interpreters and fiscales de iglesia (overseers of Indian conversion), performed their jobs in local office in both expected and unanticipated ways. They interwove alphabetic literacy with their experience as servants of the state and the church, creating alternative legal practices and interpretations.
This essay argues that literate native officials from the Lima area joined efforts during the eighteenth century to refashion the republic of the Indians at times of social upheaval. As social tensions rose under the increasing pressure of repartos (forced distribution of goods to Amerindians) and the loss of communal lands, native escribanos, alcaldes, and interpreters undertook a common political project, redefining in the process and practice the functions ascribed to their positions in the 1575 Ordenanzas of Viceroy Francisco de Toledo. These native officeholders endeavored to use the institutional structure of the cabildo, their literacy skills, legal knowledge, and political networking to effect enforcement of laws as a way to overcome the negligence of the colonial system of justice toward Indians. I illuminate these practices through the work of three of these native letrados: the interpreter general don Nicolás Tupac Guamanrinchi Inga, in 1731 in Lima, and the indigenous cabildo officials don Alberto Chosop, alderman (regidor), and don Santiago Ruiz Tupac Amaru Inga, notary (escribano), in Lima in 1735.Footnote 2 Both the financial exigencies of the Habsburgs and the long-established commoditization of public office affected, negatively, the enforcement of justice for indigenous peoples in the Andes. Along with an important number of high-ranking state offices, the post of procurador de naturales had been offered for sale since the seventeenth century.Footnote 3 As I will discuss, indigenous officials from El Cercado cabildo persuasively argued that the privatization of these positions promoted entrenched networks of collusion among factions of the colonial elites, endangering the delicate balance between the king's discourse of protection for Indians and the impact of the financial policies intended to sustain his empire.Footnote 4
In the midst of such circumstances, the 1731 writings and legal activities of don Nicolás Tupac Guamanrinchi redefined the functions of the native interpreter, enabling him to become a de facto procurador de naturales. He worked in association with don Vicente Morachimo, a native noble from the Lambayeque valleys who was previously appointed by Viceroy Marqués de Santo Buono as a procurador de naturales, operating mostly in Madrid.Footnote 5 For his part, the alderman don Alberto Chosop led a campaign from inside the indigenous town council of El Cercado to replicate and extend there the tenure of Morachimo as a native procurador. Along with the Indian cabildo's notary, don Santiago Ruiz Tupac Amaru Inga, and eventually with other members of the cabildo who signed their petitions, Chosop and Ruiz advocated in Madrid to secure the positions of procuradores and protectores de naturales for literate indigenous subjects, with the intention of supplanting the Spanish officials, usually lawyers, who had been appointed to this position since the sixteenth century.Footnote 6 Obtaining the 1735 royal decree that sanctioned the petitions of the Indian cabildo officials, however, proved easier for Chosop and Ruiz Tupac Amaru than obtaining the necessary recognition and official appointment by the Lima Real Audiencia (high court) and the resignation of the incumbent Spanish protectores de naturales.
Don Nicolás, don Alberto, don Vicente, and don Santiago, among other indios principales and caciques, were part of a trans-regional network of native authorities who worked for the enforcement of royal decrees that recognized them as colonial nobility and allowed them important roles in the judicial arena. The royal decrees had been ‘produced’ at the behest of other Andean intermediaries in this and prior legal campaigns since the late seventeenth century, but enforcement had been weak. The more mature leadership of don Nicolás, don Alberto, don Vicente, and don Santiago in 1735 anticipated yet further transatlantic campaigns by Andeans to secure judicial posts in the Real Audiencia toward the mid eighteenth century.Footnote 7
In this essay, I suggest a rethinking of the República de Indios, in light of both the changing nature of pueblo government in at least one of the more cosmopolitan sites of the viceroyalty of Peru (Lima and its attached pueblo or reducción, El Cercado), and the involvement of native officials in the colonial culture of the Lettered City through writing and discursive production of justice and legal change.Footnote 8 I am expanding on Ángel Rama's notion of the Lettered City, an exclusionary cadre of high-ranking colonial bureaucrats and clergymen who controlled writing and produced law and the religious canon that sustained the Spanish imperial edifice. I also include in the notion of the Lettered City the texts and activism of members of the indigenous educated elites who appropriated writing and reformulated the language of law with alternative purposes. They sought to open spaces of justice for Andeans within the colonial society, and as they did so carved their own spaces as an unacknowledged intellectual elite.
Although crucial for an understanding of everyday colonial society and the role of indigenous literate subjects in it, the history of the formation and change of pueblos de indios remains an almost unwritten chapter in colonial Andean history. Waldemar Espinosa Soriano has provided a useful synthesis of the legal inception of Indian municipalities in the sixteenth century, punctuated with intriguing accounts of a few of the first indigenous officials appointed as cabildo members in various pueblos of the viceroyalty of Peru.Footnote 9 With few notable exceptions, the scant studies on the subject tend to look at the pueblo as either an entity that followed without alteration the design established in the Toledan Ordenanzas, or as a minor local institution of colonial government of little consequence for the formation of colonial political culture.Footnote 10 Overall, little to no attention has been paid so far to the views and actions of the cabildos’ Andean officials.
I intend to demonstrate in this essay not only that the structure of Indian pueblo government changed throughout the colonial period, but also that there were important variances in the administrative structures among the many Indian municipalities in the viceroyalty of Peru, going back as far as the inception and structuring of the pueblos. In particular, the functions and activities of such native officials as the regidores, escribanos, procuradores, and interpreters in the Lima area changed in important ways in the late colonial period. Toledo and his antecessors had laid out a prescriptive role for cabildo officials as enforcers of indoctrination and Spanish social mores. However, in the late colonial period literate and politically mindful native officials such as Chosop, Ruiz Tupac Amaru Inga, and Tupac Guamanrinchi went further, appropriating knowledge of Spanish law, taking stock of their own experience with Spanish protectores de naturales, and utilizing the institutional structure of the native cabildo to accomplish the enforcement of laws favorable to the achievement of justice for Indians.
A Brief History of the Indigenous Pueblos and Cabildos
The management of Indian labor and the social control of native communities and their political authorities had been important concerns of the Spanish crown and the Council of the Indies from the early years of European presence in the Americas. Such a preoccupation was apparent in the royal policies and viceregal ordenanzas intended to introduce European patterns of settlement and Catholicism. Legislation advancing the concentration of Indian communities into villages, however loosely enforced, dates from as early as 1503, when mandates were given to Nicolás de Ovando in Alcalá de Henares, in order to resettle Indians, build churches, and appoint chaplains who would regularly impart Catholic doctrine to accomplish the conversion of Indians.Footnote 11 Prior to the wholesale push of the Toledan Ordenanzas to further the Indian cabildo structures, a real cédula from 1549 dictated the foundation of pueblos de indios, or Indian resettlements, to be governed by cabildos staffed with indigenous alcaldes ordinarios, regidores cadañeros (annually elected aldermen), and alguaciles (constables). Initially, the duties of these officials were tied to disciplinary and civilizing roles, mainly the eradication of indigenous customs and the incorporation of Spanish ones. In 1550, two principales from Huarochiri and the Valley of Lima were designated as regidores; they carried varas altas de justicia (staffs symbolizing justice) and were in charge of appointing other functionaries to undertake duties in the administration of the local hospital, inns, administrative buildings, jails, and the like.Footnote 12
The viceroy of Peru, the Marqués de Cañete, was instructed in 1554 to arrange for the annual appointment of alcaldes ordinarios by the royal audiencias or by corregidores in all towns. These native alcaldes ordinarios would adjudicate petty cases of a civil nature, which could be appealed to the corregidor who, in turn, would summarily render a verdict. The Marqués de Cañete created the first municipality of the República de Indios in the Lima valley in 1557, a town with a designated group of residents or vecindario, agro-pastoral lands, and legal jurisdiction (justicia y regimiento). The viceroy merged the three kinship groups or parcialidades of Lima, Maranga, and Guática to found the Indian town of Santa María Magdalena de Chacalea as a Spanish-style municipality, built on a grid with designated solares or urban land plots, vegetable gardens, and demarcated communal lands. Likewise, he appointed the first alcalde ordinario, regidores, and alguaciles. According to Espinosa Soriano, the imposition of Spanish legal systems onto resettled indigenous groups severely undermined the traditional authority of the cacique.Footnote 13
The social unrest that had come to pervade life in the Andean countryside by the 1550s, and more broadly until the arrival of Viceroy Toledo, made it difficult for the royal authorities to control what transpired in the recently founded pueblos, and prevented the full the enforcement of the policies described above. The transformation of these initial structures for the political and social control of Amerindians began soon after the inception of Indian pueblos and cabildos, when the implementation of such mandates had barely began. The following case demonstrates the immediate effects of the changes, and also introduces changes that would have a long-term effect on the official policies.
Don Nicolás Tupac Guamanrinchi: Interpreter and Procurador
A review of the correspondence between members of the colonial indigenous government and their representatives in Spain provides fruitful insight into the transformation of their roles over time. In 1575, a wholesale consolidation of the colonial enterprise in Peru was put in place under the gaze and administrative zeal of Viceroy Francisco de Toledo. Among other laws structuring the government of reducciones through native cabildos, Toledo established in his Ordenanzas that intérpretes-generales, or interpreters-general of the Audiencia should work closely with the Protector General de Indios, translating faithfully for him. Further, in the latter's absence the interpreter general should substitute for him, composing a record of the individual demands of Indians and the collective complaints by caciques.Footnote 14 Thus, the interpreter general was eventually charged with writing memorias or reports, and thereby creating an archive of Indian legal activity.
In its fourth section, however, the Ordenanzas specifically prohibited interpreters from writing petitions on behalf of Indians and also from acting as their procuradores or solicitors.Footnote 15 This section contradicted the mandate that directed interpreters to support the work of procuradores de naturales, or even ‘substitute’ for them—how could they do so if they were prohibited from exercising the procuradores’ basic functions? Toledo envisioned an interpreter who translated well but remained neutral, “interpreting clearly and openly without concealing or adding anything, simply presenting the bare facts of the crime.”Footnote 16 The limits of the interpreters’ legal activities were clearly demarcated in the Ordenanzas, which prohibited interpreters from serving as procuradores for Indians’ lawsuits (pleitos) but rather prompted them to bring the Indian litigants before the Audiencia instead of hearing them directly.
In spite of Toledo's anxiety, readily evident in his 1575 ordinances, the close interactions between the interpreter and the procurador de indios and even the escribanos left ample room for the redefinition of these positions. The changing roles and agendas of interpreters became evident in the performance of the various colonial Andean actors introduced above, years after the Toledan laws appeared. Even though he was appointed as interpreter-general sometime in 1732, don Nicolás Tupac Guamanrinchi had already acted in Lima as a rather proactive assistant for don Vicente Morachimo, one of the first indigenous procuradores de naturales, in the 1720s. Aside from his translation work, don Nicolás actually drafted complaints that would demand exercise of the legal advocacy that Morachimo initiated in Madrid on behalf of the Andeans affected by the dubious composiciones de tierras (consolidations of lands seized illegally from Indians) in Trujillo Province in the 1720s.Footnote 17
From the perspective of assisting the work of the procuradores de naturales, don Nicolás's activities were more or less in compliance with the role of interpreter that Toledo had prescribed in 1575.Footnote 18 But the role of agents like don Nicolás evolved as social tensions escalated and as the viceregal capital developed a vibrant intercultural milieu over the colonial years. For indigenous authorities, Lima had a unique status in the viceroyalty of Peru, not only as the seat of the viceroyalty but as an audiencia capital, a place where kurakas from different regions would travel to file their appeals for cases not resolved at the provincial court of the corregidor. Throughout the years the cabildo of El Cercado, on the outskirts of the viceregal capital, had been taking in for the duration many of these indigenous litigants who not only came to know each other but would occasionally undertake collective legal action in the pursuit of social redress for common grievances and the struggles to buttress their declining authority.
The use of the Spanish laws and provincial and royal courts in the Americas to restore a sense of social balance and justice in the face of colonial pressure became a necessary and regular recourse for indigenous authorities from about the mid sixteenth century, once the royal audiencias and the corregimiento system were established and operating. Developing new skills of literacy, becoming knowledgeable in Spanish law and legal procedures, and gaining access to sources of information and circles of influence became key for the caciques to gain legitimacy in their communities.Footnote 19 Such practices continued over time and intensified whenever the Crown attempted to tighten control over its Indian subjects for economic, social, or political reasons, and when the colonial authorities on the ground either intensified enforcement or increased their own demands. In late colonial Lima, in particular, such practices became routine for Indian officials, many of whom were themselves members of the local or neighboring indigenous nobility. These Andean nobles appeared more frequently in litigation proceedings, ever more seasoned in the conduct of legal action, and as with the litigant caciques of previous eras, they acquired prestige, support, and legitimacy for their legal achievements.
Indigenous authorities had been engaged for decades in systematic legal negotiation with the Audiencia and with the Crown itself, attempting to ameliorate the impact of the encomienda, the compulsory work in mines or mita, the colonial tribute system, and the expropriation of communal lands. In late colonial times, the iniquitous repartimiento de mercancías (forced sale of commodities to Amerindians) strained Andean societies and provoked an increasing number of lawsuits. In a parallel effort, El Cercado officials had been creating networks among the nobles of the República de Indios and had sent their representatives to Spain, where they were to empower themselves as the nobility of the corporate “Indian nation.”Footnote 20 As the tensions created by the repartimiento and the Bourbon reforms mounted, some cabildo officials, on the other hand, became involved in the Lima conspiracy and the Huarochirí Rebellion (both in 1750), while they continued to participate in civic rituals in Lima's public space.Footnote 21 This two-pronged strategy of fulfilling colonial authorities’ expectations and at the same time struggling to shape the ways in which colonial impositions were implanted characterized much of the political culture of indigenous officials in the late colonial period.
In the early decades of the eighteenth century, as he worked to support Morachimo's legal representation of Andeans, don Nicolás Guamanrinchi began to engage in more critical writing and devoted time to envisioning creative ways to make justice more accessible to Andeans as they brought their appeals to the Audiencia. To expedite the dormant Andean cases that had accumulated on the desks and shelves of the court, don Nicolás proposed that the Real Audiencia of Lima re-establish a long-forgotten practice of setting aside two days a week to receive Indians “en audiencia,” or in individual hearings. Aware of the networks of collusion between Audiencia members and other colonial elites, don Nicolás went on to demand that such hearings be held in a private space, away from the intrusion of the Audiencia lawyers, who apparently had remained present in prior meetings of this kind. In other words, Guamanrinchi argued that the Audiencia attorneys—who typically represented encomenderos (Spanish grantees of native labor), mine owners, and corregidores—should not be allowed in these hearings, since their interests clashed with those of the native communities and individual Andeans. In his view, they were just “spies from the government.”Footnote 22
Given Toledo's explicit prohibition of interpreters performing as procuradores on the Indians’ behalf, don Nicolás Tupac Guamanrinchi instead presented don Vicente Morachimo with important information the procurador himself could use to defend the cause of justice for Andeans in Madrid. Don Nicolás had to pass along this information in a private letter, but in doing so he was doing something like preparing a brief. Don Nicolás's main argument was that Indians were affected by the collusion of abusive colonialists and Spanish officials, which had resulted in entrenched webs of power that perpetuated injustice for Amerindians. One case he fleshed out in his letters involves Spanish lawyers who had been appointed as procuradores de naturales. These officials took advantage of their monopoly on legal writing, juridical authority, and possession of the office, which they had obtained by purchase. Don Nicolás explained the painful process of filing and moving forward natives’ complaints and petitions in the face of a close-knit collaboration among the members of the colonial elites and government officials in the audiencia. Showing numbers, don Nicolás elaborated on the profitable business of procurador de naturales: how these officials deliberately and blatantly prolonged the length of the written allegations, or memorials, they composed for their native clients, leaving large amounts of space between lines in the folios they prepared for cases so that they could charge Indians extra fees per line and per page. They even violated Toledo's prohibition against procuradores charging for their services to the Amerindians they represented on behalf of the king.Footnote 23
Corroborating the crisis of the protectoría de naturales (legal practice of protectores de naturales) in the Bourbon period, Guamanrinchi uncovered a deeper conflict of interest among the Spanish procuradores de naturales; some maintained a private practice outside their official positions and simultaneously represented in court Indians and groups of elite Spaniards, oftentimes the very subjects against whom Indians had filed their complaints and lawsuits. Thus, the disappearance of autos, reales cédulas, and memoriales from the Andeans’ files became a common occurrence as procuradores supported the interests of wealthy colonists who paid their lawyers handsomely and showered them with gifts or camaricos. In Guamanrinchi's eyes, these corrupt functionaries could get away with this because they had “power and clout.”Footnote 24 Well aware of the terms and prohibitions spelled out in Toledo's Ordenanzas, Guamanrinchi recorded the names of these procuradores de naturales and the corresponding amounts they charged illegally to Indians for writing a memorial, signing a complaint, or checking on the petitions they needed to file or to advance their claims in court.
Citing specific locations and circumstances, Guamanrinchi's writings abound in references to violence inflicted upon caciques and Indian litigants who suffered illegal imprisonment and blackmailing by members of the Audiencia to force them to withdraw their lawsuits against such judges. The native interpreter-general denounced abuses committed by the soldiers of the Audiencia against native female street vendors struggling for a spot in the main plaza in fierce competition with selected male vendors who were favored by the authorities. Forced labor in bakeries and workshops was not uncommon, but was now made known, along with cases of violent and unjust imprisonment for resistance or for unavoidable legal infractions. Indian commoners were often forced to walk in the street at late hours because their estanciero bosses would not let them out of work early enough to avoid the curfew. Guamanrinchi also exposed attacks against commoner Indians; when bringing their products for sale in the market, they would be intercepted on the road by abusive merchant-agents in the employ of religious orders (among them the Augustinians), who underpriced native goods or robbed them outright.Footnote 25 These are but some of the injustices included in a lengthy narrative of abuses that, according to the interpreter and de facto procurador, were neglected by the audiencia authorities and for which Andeans were consigned to long years in prison and sometimes even loss of life. For some, death came because “their heart succumbs at the realization of such an unjust suffering. So, there is no protector or anyone else who turns to look after them but God who relieves them by taking them away.”Footnote 26 Don Nicolás Tupac Guamanrinchi concluded that under such circumstances, and at the behest of the affected Andeans, he was able to file petitions on their behalf and particularly for those cases brought against the abusive agents of the San Agustín convent. He also used his own connections with friends from the corregidores’ families to release some caciques from prison.Footnote 27
Native Escribanos and Regidores as Procuradores
Over time, the escribanos and regidores, especially those who took on some functions of the procuradores, made significant changes in the structure of the colonial justice system. The role of the colonial indigenous notary or escribano has a long history, dating perhaps to even before the arrival of Europeans in the Andes. In the pre-Columbian administrative culture of the Inca empire, the quipucamayocs or record keepers who crafted mobile quipus as knotted information devices are perhaps the closest associates of the Indian notaries who were sanctioned in Toledo's 1575 Ordenanzas. Toledo designated them as escribanos quipucamayocs, alluding to their charge to convert information encrypted in quipus into written documents in Spanish. These documents would fulfill an administrative and disciplinary purpose: to provide written accounts of infringement of the social order in the pueblos by Indians, priests, and corregidores.Footnote 28 Even though the new duties of native escribanos under Toledo gravitated around writing that had legal weight, the viceroy was anxious about litigation in the hands of Indians in general. He saw to it that complaints and petitions were channeled instead through the protector de naturales, the appointed lenguas or interpreters, the procurador de naturales appointed by the king, and even through the corregidores. The colonial record keeper in the Toledan reducciones, designated as quilcaycamayocs or “paper keepers” by Guaman Poma de Ayala, thus became the native official in charge of translating pueblo life into alphabetic writing, the chief communication tool of the colonizer.Footnote 29 In other words, native escribanos and other town council officials became what were probably the first cultural translators from within the indigenous world under colonial rule.
But the world of Indian escribanos and regidores of El Cercado such as don Alberto Chosop and don Santiago Ruiz Tupac Amaru Inga in the 1730s was different from the Toledan years of colonial consolidation in the Andes. Chosop, a native from Lambayeque Province who migrated to Lima at an early age, wrote from a late colonial social milieu charged with a deepening social crisis for Amerindians. This was a result of the infamous repartos, an inflation in the tribute rate following the infamous revisitas (reassessments of eligible tributaries), loss of communal lands through fraudulent composiciones de tierras, and the new fiscal demands on mestizos and Indians under the Bourbon reforms of the eighteenth century.Footnote 30 Don Alberto Chosop belonged to a family of elite Indians who had long been engaged in the struggles for the enforcement of the comprehensive real cédula known as the cédula de honores obtained in 1697 by another elite Andean from Arequipa, Juan Núñez Vela de Rivera; this cédula consecrated important privileges of nobility for elite Indians but remained largely unenforced.Footnote 31
By the late colonial period, the native cabildo El Cercado had become an established municipal government institution that reflected the growth and vibrancy of the town itself. Its proximity to the Lima Audiencia made this cabildo a sort of home for the sojourning native authorities from many provinces who flowed into the city on judicial business.Footnote 32 By the eighteenth century, its native alcaldes, regidores, procuradores, and escribanos were not only literate but also well versed in legal matters including petition writing, and were litigating directly with the Lima Audiencia. They were familiar with the culture of the viceregal capital and some of them even built connections with supporting lawyers and judges from the court, which eventually served them well.
In searching for more effective mechanisms of justice in the midst of the escalating social tensions mentioned above, El Cercado native officials worked in concert with lawyers and procuradores de naturales whom they had been sending as representatives to the court in Madrid. Following up on the state of affairs discussed in Guamanrinchi's writings, don Alberto Chosop and don Joseph Santiago Ruiz Tupac Amaru Inga carried a legal struggle from the cabildo of El Cercado to the Lima Audiencia and further, to the very royal court in Madrid. They intended to get rid of the Spanish procuradores de naturales altogether and claim the position for Indian letrados, and to make into official policy their own procuraduría de naturales. They wanted to extend to Lima what had been only occasional legal practices by Amerindians elsewhere since the seventeenth century.
Indeed, Andeans had been petitioning for the replacement of Spanish officials by indigenous ones since the sixteenth century. In the 1580s, the Jauja caciques litigated to obtain the removal of the Spanish official appointed as administrador de bienes de comunidad (the colonial official in charge of overseeing the management of community assets) and to redirect the position to caciques and the local caretakers of such assets.Footnote 33 Over time, nevertheless, this legal tradition became more centered on judicial positions. In 1632, don Pablo Vásquez Cusi Inga, from Cuzco, who claimed descent from the Inca kings, proclaimed himself to be the cacique principal y gobernador of the Yanaconas de Su Majestad of the Villa de Potosí. Referring to his skills and experience as escribano, he requested appointment in 1632 as a substitute for don Diego Camacho, the protector-general of the Indians of the Villa Imperial de Potosi, and his request was granted. In July of the same year, he himself became the principal protector de naturales, or defensor de indios, of Potosí, under a title granted and signed by the viceroy Conde de Chinchón.Footnote 34 Another important representative of Amerindians appointed by request of different native lords and himself a member of a native elite family from the Chicama Valley (Trujillo) was don Vicente Morachimo. When Morachimo became a procurador de naturales about March 1721, he was commissioned to represent Indians from Santiago de Cao, Magdalena de Cao, Chocope y San Esteban, and the Chicama repartimiento (Trujillo). He was involved in writing petitions in 1722 and 1727 to the royal inspector José Curiel on behalf of Indian authorities and the people from the towns mentioned above to stop abusive land surveys and fraudulent composiciones de tierras. He also wrote appeals to the Lima Audiencia.Footnote 35
In 1735, Chosop was supported in this effort by don Joseph Santiago Ruiz Túpac Amaru, an escribano from El Cercado cabildo, probably from a migrant family from the Cuzco area. They were advised legally by the lawyer Pedro Nieto de Vargas, who in turn was a close acquaintance of the native procurador de naturales, don Vicente Morachimo himself. While Pedro Nieto de Vargas advocated on behalf of the cabildo of El Cercado before the royal court in Madrid, Chosop and Ruiz acted in Lima and El Cercado, demanding that the procuraduría de naturales for the audiencias and the protectoria de naturales for the various provinces be staffed on a permanent basis with Indian officials, who were to be chosen from among literate, legally apt, and legitimate candidates elected by the members of the Indian cabildo. They would argue that only Indian procuradores were able to serve the Indian community effectively. Unlike the incumbent Spanish procuradores de naturales, who took for granted their salary and neglected Indian lawsuits, Indian procuradores and protectores would not have the opportunity to prevaricate, since they would be appointed solely to defend Indians and would not be permitted to assist other Spanish groups and castas.Footnote 36
Don Alberto Chosop and his supporters crafted the petition following legal prescriptions drawn from the Recopilación de leyes de Indias and the Toledan Ordenanzas, and borrowed rhetorical elements from Bishop De la Peña Montenegro's Itinerario para párrocos.Footnote 37 Interestingly, however, it was the first two pieces of legislation that spelled out the functions of escribanos as agents of social order and enforcers of conversion. What Chosop and Santiago Ruiz Tupac Amaru demanded amounted to a change in the social and racial hierarchies of the judicial system—a de facto removal of the Spanish lawyers who had been occupying and actually buying these positions for many years, holding tight to their private bureaucratic property. The writers argued that since Andeans were “capable of performing in government and ecclesiastical positions,” competent and literate Andeans, duly elected by the Indian cabildo, should be appointed as procuradores and protectores de naturales.Footnote 38 This argument was restated time and again after 1735, as the petitioners struggled for the reinforcement of the royal decree.
This crucial petition for the reorientation of justice to the cabildo authorities did not exist in a vacuum. In addition to formalizing an embryonic prior experience in which Indians acted as legal representatives of Indians in Madrid (see note 13), this petition was an almost inevitable step in the long history of troubled relationships between Spanish protectores de naturales and indigenous authorities. Toledo charged the defensores de naturales or procuradores with the legal defense of Amerindians and prohibited them to charge fees for their legal services. Defensores were also to bring to justice those who committed abuses against the Amerindians.Footnote 39
Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, Indian complaints against these officials increased, especially with the privatization of the protector's office. Seeking some return on their investment in purchasing these offices, Spanish procuradores began charging fees for every minute aspect of their legal services, including signatures, visits to the Audiencia, the composition of memoriales, and so on, prompting Amerindians to see them as vultures.Footnote 40 They also managed to represent in court Spanish corregidores, priests, and hacienda and mine owners and at the same time undertake cases brought by Amerindians.Footnote 41 Spanish procuradores manipulated the legal records of Andeans at their own convenience, while negligence and delay in the resolution of cases involving Indian justice were not uncommon. Therefore, Indian cabildo authorities and caciques themselves frequently entered into conflictive relationships with these Spanish officials. When the native lords of Lambayeque Province took stock of this reality, they sent don Vicente Morachimo, a procurador of their own, directly to Madrid. Tupac Guamanrinchi voiced in his 1720s letters to Morachimo the same reasons that later prompted don Alberto Chosop and Santiago Ruiz Tupac Amaru in the 1730s to fight for the legalization and expansion of the role that Morachimo played in Madrid during the 1720s and 1730s.
These Andean intermediaries, however, were not concerned only with justice for Indians. In fact, their advocacy for Andeans was less altruistic than it might appear. In claiming such positions in the judicial arena, they were looking out for their own social status as well. They expected these opportunities, as they let be known to the king in terms at once flattering and demanding.Footnote 42 So, in these Andeans’ understanding, the enforcement of justice for Indians could be predicated directly on the basis of their own social entitlement, namely, the right of elite members of the Indian republic to be treated as equals to the Spanish nobles. Needless to say, such a right would expand their political power but had no discernible benefit to native commoners or non-elite mestizos.
Although the king granted the petition through a real cédula on July 1, 1735, the elected Indian procuradores Chosop and Ruiz Tupac Amaru were unable for many years to perform in the capacity to which they had been elevated. The Spanish protectores de naturales Jerónimo de Portalanza and Francisco Guzmán refused to vacate their posts. Nor would they surrender the archives, arguing that they were being illegally stripped of positions that they had previously acquired, very likely through purchase, and that there was no reason to remove them.Footnote 43 The contentious litigation that ensued lasted for several decades—three consecutive viceregal terms—during which seven new cabildo members joined Chosop and Ruiz Tupac Amaru Inga in the struggle for the enforcement of the 1735 real cédula.Footnote 44 In this new stage of the process, the appeals written to the king in Spain by these cabildo leaders drew from the early Habsburg rhetoric of protecting indigenous peoples, which had given way under the influence of the protectoría de naturales in the late fifteenth century. They argued that the kings should enforce the will of their great predecessors, the Catholic kings. They quoted extensively from the Catholic Queen Isabella's testament and King Phillip II's pronouncements, stressing the royals’ benevolent mission in America and their central concern with the good treatment and protection of Amerindians.Footnote 45
The legal battles for the right to perform as procuradores and protectores also became a common ground for further claims urging enforcement of the 1697 Cédula de Honores, a highly regarded precedent and legal victory by Andean intermediaries, which remained unenforced well into the eighteenth century. El Cercado officials insisted that the enforcement of the 1735 cédula was especially appropriate in light of the privileges consecrated in the 1697 Cédula de Honores.Footnote 46 They held that the 1697 real cédula even gave them the right to be procuradores de número (court-appointed attorneys) and that such a decree empowered them to equality: “deeming them competent for any honorable position and entitled to be ordained in the sacred orders just like Spaniards and with all the benefits included in such a decree.”Footnote 47
In the meantime, Portalanza and Guzmán systematically obstructed the enforcement of the 1735 real cédula. Apparently, they hid the original document that was held by the Lima Audiencia, and it was that document that was needed to formalize the title of the position. After appealing to some contacts in Spain, the cabildo leaders in 1762 were able to obtain a copy of the original decree. But Portalanza and Guzmán then turned on Chosop and Ruiz Túpac Amaru, accusing them of having instigated the 1750 conspiracy in Lima.Footnote 48 And when these expedients did not work, the two Spaniards continued with other challenges to the election of Chosop and Ruiz Tupac Amaru as the new Indian procuradores de naturales for the Lima Audiencia.Footnote 49 Finally, on June 27, 1763, the two natives were officially appointed as procuradores de naturales by the Real Audiencia under Decree 33.Footnote 50
Conclusions
Late colonial Andean officials confronted judicial negligence and the steady obliteration of their societies under colonial policies by bringing political and legal mediation to bear in the pursuit of justice. The cases analyzed above were crucial instances in which native officers of Indian councils demonstrated that they had evolved in their consciousness of justice by the eighteenth century, not only through their redefinition of the Toledan vision of native government, but in their transformation of the cabildo as an institutional stronghold of legal activism in the very capital, at the viceregal court. These Andean letrados were colonial actors in their own right whose literacy skills, ideas of justice, and networking abilities were put into action to achieve the enforcement of laws that they and their ancestors had negotiated with the Crown. They were also instrumental in the production of new laws. As intermediaries between Andeans and the legal center constituted in the Lettered City in late colonial Peru, they endeavored to strengthen the role of Andeans in the justice system in ways that superseded the functions of their posts as initially defined in the Toledan Ordenanzas.
Thus, don Nicolás Tupac Guamanrinchi went beyond his duty as interpreter or lengua to discuss and formulate proposals that would change the administration of justice for Indians in the Lima Audiencia. He wrote to the indigenous procurador don Vicente Morachimo in Madrid to substantiate the state of injustice that existed in Lima and other provinces of the central Andes. Some of the cases he described appeared in the famous “manifiesto de agravios” (Manifesto of grievances) that Morachimo presented to the king in Madrid in 1739. It was later published in Spain and circulated widely among Andean leaders in Peru. But don Nicolás also drafted petitions on behalf and at the behest of local Andeans. In so doing, he was acting as a de facto procurador de naturales, who also used his position to build a network of personal connections to help his clients. Most importantly, his writings constituted both documentation and argumentative basis for the central project later led by don Alberto Chosop, who also went beyond his functions of supporting the alcalde in the adjudication of petty civil cases, becoming a true advocate for changes in the practices of the procuraduría and the protectoría de naturales.
This essay calls for further reflection on the changing notion of Indian authority in the colonial period. The centrality of El Cercado cabildo in the eighteenth century underscores a shift in the locus of native authority from the cacicazgo or office of the cacique, long undermined by Toledan and later Bourbon policies, to the Indian town cabildo, at least in Lima Province.Footnote 51 A different but intersecting variation was noted by Brooke Larson in the transition from cacicazgo to cabildo that occurred in the post-Independence period in Ecuador and Colombia, where mestizos and Indians joined in the bureaucratic revival of cabildos that were more closely tied to the formation of modern nation-states. For Peru, in this same period, Larson maintained that the “locus of communal self-rule was lodged in the Indian cabildos composed of various civil and religious leaders.Footnote 52 The cases I have developed in this essay show that this historical change was already taking place in Lima in the eighteenth century.
The decline of the traditional kuraka authority explains to some degree why Viceroy Santo Buono appointed Morachimo as procurador de naturales and why the latter's 1732 Manifestor de Agravios was published in Madrid with royal funds. Certainly by the mid eighteenth century, El Cercado cabildo authorities were well aware of the political potential of such representation and had begun to devise a wider project to extend the limits of the Indian republic in the face of declining native political authority in Bourbon times. They sought a more concrete re-appropriation of the Habsburg hegemonic notion of a “Republic of Indians,” this time emphasizing ethnic autonomy and aimed at extending their sphere of action into the judicial system. Native officials sought to modify the judicial structure by staffing procuradurías and protectorías de naturales with Indian letrados. Such an endeavor was given new impetus in 1749 when we find the Indian cabildo, along with other Andean elite members such as Fray Calixto de San José Tupac Inca, advocating for the introduction of Indian judges for Indian causes in the Lima Audiencia.Footnote 53
Finally, the struggles for the procuraduría and protectoría posts—which the petitioners conflated into one—were also a battle for control of the archives that held the history of indigenous legal activity at the level of the Real Audiencia de Lima. Even after the 1763 decree granting the title of procuradores to two native officials, the former Spanish procuradores Portalanza and Soriano refused to return the numerous memoriales they had collected during their years in office. When the attorney of the Audiencia commanded them to surrender the documents, Portalanza and Soriano responded: “To summon us to surrender the papers is tantamount to deprive us from the employment we enjoy [own].”Footnote 54 This certainly was a contest of power over legal writing and the ability to control the enforcement of justice for Andeans in a world wherein the privatization of the procuraduría de naturales and the increasing fiscal pressures of the Bourbon reforms led to a deterioration of the colonial judicial system as a whole and further undermined justice for Andeans.
