Indigenous Peoples of the Andean Region during the Colonial Period

by

Sara V. Guengerich

• LAST MODIFIED: 24 October 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199766581-0292

Introduction

The Andean region of western South America was invaded by Spanish adventurers beginning in the 1530s. Despite swift and brutal conquests from present-day Colombia to Chile, Indigenous peoples contested and survived nearly three centuries of colonial rule. Historians, art historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, linguists, and literary scholars have long sought to recover Native histories and mentalities as they changed over the course of this long period. Yet the task of making sense of Indigenous responses to colonialism is still challenging, not only because the written records of this period are fragmentary but also because a handful of them cannot be considered either contemporary or firsthand accounts. Even after the Spanish arrival, Indigenous scribes did not produce documents in the main Andean languages, using Spanish alphabetic script, as Native peoples did in Mesoamerica. The few works produced by Indigenous authors such as Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui, and the anonymous Huarochirí Manuscript (cited under Indigenous Knowledge and Indigenous Intellectuals) only appeared in the late sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries and have caused conflicting interpretations of the pre-Hispanic past and of colonial history. Landmark studies on the history of colonial Peru, such as James Lockhart’s Spanish Peru, 1532–1560 (1968, 1994), spearheaded the use of notarial records and related documentation as indispensable sources for the study of this period. While he only dedicates a chapter to the Indigenous population, this book has been a model for the research produced afterward. Art historians, archeologists, and anthropologists have even gone beyond these textual sources to include textiles, paintings, ceramics, structural remains, and even waste materials to add a nuanced vision of the survival, resilience, and agency of Native Andeans after 1532. For the sake of brevity, this entry will cite the most representative monographs and a few focused anthologies rather than articles or book chapters on the subject. Even so, the task of gathering and summarizing such works is incomplete at best. In the progression of scholarly production, academics first evaluated the trauma, dislocation, and collapse of Indigenous societies under Spanish rule. Then, a look at the diverse experiences of Native people from cosmopolitan centers to provincial and rural areas coupled with the differences between Native and commoner elites provided fresh and enriching interpretations of this heterogeneous colonial past. Understanding the internal structures of Indigenous societies has been key to bring forth this bottom-up history of the conquest, assessing their struggles and highlighting their strategies to subvert domination.

General Overviews

Initial studies about post-conquest Indigenous Andeans pioneered interdisciplinary methodologies and examined previously neglected or scattered sources to denounce the adverse effects of the Spanish colonization. Wachtel 1977, for example, engaged the work of anthropologists to assess the gradual fragmentation of Andean social systems. Along with these fragmentations, a focus on Native depopulation, such as the one published in Cook 1981, gives us an account of population decline in 16th-century Peru. The results of this research have greatly facilitated the analysis of diverse aspects of the economic and social history of colonial Peru. Assadourian 1994 is an example of an all-encompassing analysis of the transitions from the pre-Hispanic Indigenous world to colonial society as far as economy, demography, Indigenous properties and the relationship of the ethnic lords (kurakas or caciques) to colonial power brokers. Assadourian makes use of previously neglected sources such as quipus (recording devices made from camelid fibers or cotton) as well as more traditional ones (visitas or inspections, chronicles, census and encomienda records, etc.) to uncover the experiences of the Native populations. In a similar vein, the skillful use of sources, this time notarial records—contracts, wills, marriage, sales records and so on—as in Lockhart 1994, provides major contributions to the social history of the colonial period. While the focus of works of synthesis such as Andrien 2001 have mostly focused on highland Peru, they allow the examination of a broad range of subjects from economic history to Indigenous art and cultures, religion, and 18th-century rebellions. Beyond this present list, Peruvian scholars like Franklin Pease, among many others, elevated the study of the Indigenous population to a prominent place (see Pease 2012).

• Andrien, Kenneth J. Andean Worlds: Indigenous History, Culture, and Consciousness under Spanish Rule, 1532–1825. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001.

  A fine work of synthesis of scholarship produced about colonial history and Indigenous Andean peoples. Geared mostly to undergraduate students with little or no previous knowledge of the region or the period.

• Assadourian, Carlos Sempat. Transiciones hacia el sistema colonial andino. Mexico City: Colegio de México, Fideicomiso Historia de las Américas, 1994.

  An indispensable reading about the transition process from the pre-Hispanic world to the colonial period that emphasizes Indigenous experiences. The book covers a myriad of important themes, from economic history (demography, Native trade systems, and Indigenous private property) to the sociopolitical relations of kurakas with the Crown, encomenderos, corregidores, and priests. It offers a revisionist account of demography decline, land rights, and the demise of the encomienda.

• Cook, Noble David. Demographic Collapse: Indian Peru, 1520–1620. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

  Post-conquest tax censuses and other scattered counts of this period reveal that the population of Peru before any contact with the Europeans was approximately nine million, which in the next half-century fell to slightly over one million, and by 1620 stood at about 600,000. The overall decline was approximately 93 percent for the century following contact. These calculations greatly facilitate the research of economic and social histories of colonial Peru.

• Lockhart, James. Spanish Peru, 1532–1560: A Social History. 2d ed. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994.

  First published in 1968, this book remains an essential reading in the study of the social history of early colonial Spanish America. Its wide use of previously neglected materials such as notarial records—contracts, wills, marriage, rental, and sales records, and so on—support the thesis that colonial societies like Peru, recreated Peninsular society in the Americas.

• Pease, G. Y Franklin. Los incas en la colonia: Estudios sobre los siglos XVI, XVII y XVIII en los Andes. Edited by Nicanor Dominguez. Lima: Museo Nacional de Arqueología Antropología e Historia del Perú Ministerio de Cultura, 2012.

  Examines the Inca ethnic class and other colonial actors (caciques and non-elite Natives), organized into two sections. The first is a study of colonial chronicles and Spanish perceptions of the Ancient Andes, Inca power, property, and knowledge. The second includes analyses of 17th- and 18th-century Andean society as well as reflective essays about the fields of history and ethnohistory in the second half of the twentieth century.

• Wachtel, Nathan. The Vision of the Vanquished: The Spanish Conquest of Peru through Indian Eyes 1530–1570. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1977.

  First written in 1971, this book is an exercise on early interdisciplinarity. A historian himself, Watchel was inspired and informed by the work of well-known anthropologists such as John Murra, León-Portilla, and Tom Zuidema, to mention a few. Heavily documented to analyze the Central Andean region prior to the European conquest and documenting the first fifty post-conquest years.