As historians know well, ordinary Peruvian citizens and peasant community leaders are among the regular visitors who deposit or retrieve copies of land titles dating back to the First General Land Inspection (1594–1602) in state archives today. This Primera visita y composición general de tierras (henceforth: Composición) was a watershed moment in the agrarian history of the region about which few of these visitors, however, have ever heard. In contrast, scholars have contended for decades that, by spurring the accumulation of land, the expansion of the colonial real estate market, the development of commercial agriculture, and the consolidation of agrarian estates across the viceroyalty, particularly in areas near cities and mining centers, this massive undertaking for the “fixing” of imperfect titles, one of several throughout the colonial period, triggered a series of historical processes whose effects in the country’s land ownership regimes and agrarian landscapes are still felt more than 400 years later.Footnote 1
At the center of this administrative and judicial procedure, historians have placed the componer or composición (amending/confirming) of illegitimate or improper land titles and the acquisition of new títulos justos y legítimos (just and legitimate titles) from the king’s designated ministers, even if none existed before, via monetary compensation or direct purchase. As the main financial motivation behind the Composición, moreover, scholars have invoked King Philip’s prior bankruptcy and the Crown’s wish to assemble a large armada for the defense of the monarchy. The sale of land and the legalization of titles, especially to and by Spaniards, has been indeed identified as the Inspection’s overt goal, openly declared in the 1591 royal order, which led to widespread denunciations of abuse and illegal appropriation of land previously vacant or held as indigenous family/common lands.Footnote 2 Recent estimates place the monies collected between 1594 and 1595 alone at more than 281,000 assayed pesos. In the next 3 years, about half of that amount entered the king’s treasury in Spain for the same reason.Footnote 3
Despite the Composición’s decisive role in shaping colonial Andean land regimes, its high local variability and how these variations impacted its unpredictable outcomes have been left mostly unexamined. Works by fellow Andeanists betray an almost exclusive focus on Spanish improper titling and illegal encroachment of formerly native-owned lands. This narrow lens has resulted in the overall characterization of the Composición as a “great dispossession.”Footnote 4 Some describe composiciones de tierras generally as “consolidations of lands seized illegally from Indians,” adding that “[as] opposed to enforcing land restitutions, the composiciones accelerated the dissolution of the communal land rights well into the late colonial period.”Footnote 5 Others reduce the Composición to “a mechanism devised by the crown […] to legalize lands that Spaniards and corporations precariously possessed.”Footnote 6 For others, it was “institutionalized land theft.”Footnote 7 The Central Andean corregimiento (province) of Yauyos, the focus of this essay, provides a powerful counternarrative to deeply entrenched views of native dispossession, illegal appropriation, and communal disintegration, prompting a reevaluation of our current views (Map 1).Footnote 8
The corregimientos of Yauyos (including the repartimientos of Atun Yauyos [A] and Laraos [B]) and Jauja circa 1594. The brown line represents the itinerary of land inspector Gabriel Solano de Figueroa and his official interpreter, Felipe Guaman Poma. Map by Nicanor Domínguez Faura.
In Yauyos and adjacent highland regions such as Huarochirí and Jauja, most landholdings were to remain, with or without written title, in the hands of indigenous nobles and agropastoral communities of different scales (ayllus, pueblos, and repartimientos) until the twilight of the colonial era. As Karen Spalding noted in her classic study of Huarochirí (Lower Yauyos), the relatively few purchases of clean title (título pleno) to land by Spaniards are mostly detectable from the first decades of the eighteenth century henceforth (I can add that they appear somewhat earlier in the Jauja Valley). There was, without a doubt, dispossession and often in significant amounts, but by means other than this type of formal titling.Footnote 9 My ongoing research aligns with Spalding’s view and strongly suggests that this was so in part because, in these provinces, caciques and comunes (native communities) in flux were among the direct and indirect beneficiaries of the royal land sale and land titling policies of the 1590s. Recognition during the Composición came in two forms: implicit and general, as in lands possessed “since time immemorial” or “since the time of the Inka,” presumed to be native possessions until proven otherwise, and explicit and particular, as in lands that could be claimed as belonging to a specific, recognized común or community. These collectives leveraged the Composición against real and potential acts of dispossession by casting the granting of title embedded in the land inspection not as a mechanism that challenged previous rights but as one that reinforced them. Later land title inspections would try to unravel the land rights tacitly or positively asserted during the Composición, to the point that subsequent land sales to outsiders, largely triggered by colonial fiscal pressure and labor demands, took that prior recognition of such holdings as “native” as the basis for the regulated transfer of ownership.
Thus, in the first three sections of this essay, I will show how the Composición opened multiple avenues for Yauyos individuals and communities old and new to break into the colonial record, produce powerful legal narratives about their landholding rights, memorialize inter-communal decisions, and obtain, often for the first time, primordial titles to land that, in many cases, have endured until the present. While the particularities of these primordial titles will emerge from the analysis, I think of them in the sense in which Margarita Menegus defined a subset of the much larger corpus of Mesoamerican primordial titles: Castilian and indigenous-language manuscripts no doubt connected to other highly complex native forms of retelling the past and recreating collective memory, but distinct enough in that such formal titles were produced within a pueblo framework and in the context of the first composición.Footnote 10 As it was to happen in New Spain 40 years later, when a 1631 royal decree finally triggered the Composición there,Footnote 11 native lords and commoners in Yauyos relied on the land inspection to redefine their holdings as “possessions” subject to titling in order to protect them and challenge some of the inspector-judges’ rulings and determinations.
But that was not all. In the last two sections, I will show that, often in opposition to these more established collectives, and as a constituent part of the same generative process, breakaway groups that looked “new” on paper took the Composición as an opportunity to secure land and political status as autonomous entities. As Elizabeth Penry and Karen Graubart have noted, without community (común) and república status, the defense of collective holdings by splinter communities-in-the-making would have been seriously impaired.Footnote 12 Thus, titling, commoning, and collective property formation appear not only as mutually constitutive but also as pivotal aspects of the Composición. These breakaway groups relied on the intrinsic judicial and administrative mechanisms of the land inspection to reorganize the landscape, disrupt the General Resettlement Policy of the previous years, sanction new agreements, and secede from their ayllus and villages of residence, colonizing new lands, establishing novel settlements, and accruing further recognition as independent repúblicas, entitled to their own government and agropastoral commons. In the highland province of Yauyos, which was commissioned by the viceroy to a land inspector and a well-known indigenous interpreter-cum-chronicler between 1594 and 1596, the Composición was more a formal act of repossession of the land within a new normative idiom than an act of dispossession.Footnote 13
Thus, my analysis departs from earlier interpretations portraying the Composición in the Andes as a one-way process involving two active parties—Crown ministers of varying rank and Spanish landholders avid for land—with the native Andeans upon whose possessions they were acting often playing a secondary, reactive role.Footnote 14 This perspective has prevented Andeanists from retrieving indigenous agency, no matter how limited it may seem, from instances in which native subjects seemingly collaborated with the enactment of Crown mandates and colonial policies regarding excess and vacant lands. Generally absent in previous treatments of the General Land Inspection is the consideration of how, from the onset, native Andeans’ own interests, ownership regimes, and legal strategies for claiming individual and communal rights to land shaped the outcomes, and in fact the very archive, of the Composición. Indigenous subjects in Yauyos (and likely elsewhere) influenced the Land Inspection and its outcomes at every stage. As we will see, the land inspection in the central highlands was negotiated on the ground, repartimiento by repartimiento, and even village by village.
In the Land of the Yauyos
Little is known about the cleric and presbyter Gabriel Solano de Figueroa’s life and career before he received his commission as land judge and inspector from the viceroy in Lima, except that he traveled to Peru in December 1588, after receiving a recommendation from the Council of the Indies, and was appointed chaplain of the royal chapel in Lima, where he returned after completing his duties.Footnote 15 Solano started his tour inspection in the viceregal seat on March 9, 1594, journeying across the Andes to the east of the city (Map 1). In the following days, he reached the highland province of Huarochirí. With the aid of a surveyor, a scribe, and an interpreter, the famous Felipe Guaman Poma, Solano inspected and readjusted the lands that the natives of the three villages in Huarochirí—and likely many others—needed for their subsistence and tribute payments.Footnote 16 He also undertook the amojonamiento (general demarcation) of the whole province and, in the case of the community of Santa María de Huarochirí, he “amended” the village’s land titles according to this general delimitation.Footnote 17 By April 1, the inspector and his entourage had already crossed the cordillera of Pariacaca and descended into Jauja, entering the valley from the north.Footnote 18 Over the next 3 months, the judge and his entourage would work their way through this jurisdiction, reaching its southernmost limits sometime in May.Footnote 19 As he continued to entertain petitions from increasingly distant Yauyos and Huarochirí, Solano followed the same general titling guidelines as he moved south through the Huancavelica mining region and into Huamanga, arriving in the city district late in June 1594. He was still there in January of year next.Footnote 20
Though with some trepidation at first, inspectors such as Solano came to understand the difficult mandate to implement the Composición within the parameters of the king’s original 1591 decree.Footnote 21 Pareceres (expert opinions) had been requested from theologians and men of the law by the fourth Marquis of Cañete (1590–6). These men reflected on how to interpret and implement the king’s will, especially in what pertained to the natives of the kingdom and their lands, without risking burdening His Majesty’s conscience.Footnote 22 Nonetheless, as Solano’s journey should remind us, most arguments for claiming land and the legal doctrines that rendered such claims valid would be tried and contested on the ground and in the courtroom, as ministers and claimants met the challenges of interpreting and carrying the king’s brief order and securing clean titles to a variety of holdings.
Between the cédula’s reception sometime in early-to-mid-1592 and the fall of 1594, Cañete had appointed and dispatched seven ad-hoc judges (jueces de ventas y composiciones de tierras) besides Solano. Each was assigned to a district and received detailed instructions before departing. Upon arriving in their jurisdictions, if not before, they had assembled a team comprised of a scribe, a surveyor, and one or two interpreters. Especially if charged with covering large areas such as the Cuzco district, some inspectors were to deputize their duties onto others, generally the same scribes and interpreters, or local corregidores and other officials, drafting separate instructions for that purpose. Despite the difficult task at hand, most judges had completed their duties by late 1596 or early 1597, 5 years after the issuing of the king’s decree and some 2 years since the beginning of the inspection. They left to the incoming viceroy, Luis de Velasco (1596–1604), and the high court of appeals or audiencia over which he presided in Lima the monumental task of confirming all titles granted during the Composición and resolving any disputes arising from them. This task would keep the appellate court busy for several years.Footnote 23
Given the centrality of land for virtually all aspects of colonial life, the enforcement of the king’s orders across a vast, diverse, and loosely governed territory was bound to face multiple difficulties.Footnote 24 Fraud and abuse, notably in Charcas (present-day Bolivia), were denounced almost at every step of the Composición.Footnote 25 Cañete himself had to face accusations, serious enough to reach the Council of the Indies, of illegally awarding native lands, apparently in and around the Lima urban district, to some of his dependents.Footnote 26 In April of 1597, Viceroy Velasco informed the Council of the Indies of his having suspended some judge-inspectors. He cited high salaries and administrative costs, outstanding payments, and other irregularities, as well as rising litigation. In Velasco’s estimation, it was best to stop the composiciones until all titles granted thus far could be examined, confirmed, or voided.Footnote 27 As Velasco also pointed out, however, indigenous subjects who felt aggrieved by the inspectors’ actions and the titles awarded to their indigenous and non-indigenous neighbors were entitled to challenge these decisions and seek redress with Lima’s high court. Many took this opportunity, joining the massive flow of indigenous claimants arriving in the city every year.Footnote 28
Indeed, viceregal authorities reported to the Council of the Indies in 1597 that more than 200 such complaints by indigenous subjects awaited resolution.Footnote 29 The ministers stated that litigation had been triggered by successful parties seeking official confirmation of their new land deeds and by affected parties contesting those titles, either during the Composición or immediately after, in the confirmation phase. Scholars are familiar with one such case, which pitted Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, an interpreter during the Composición, against several Chachapoya families over the lands of Chiara, near the city of Huamanga.Footnote 30 To alter or reverse previous judgments, litigants such as Guaman Poma presented titles received from the judge-inspectors, but they also produced new evidence, in the form of previous titles, drawings, and maps, before the justices in Lima, as we will see in detail later.
In their letter to the Council, Velasco and the supreme justices explained that, while some lawsuits were frivolous, others stemmed from some of the judge-inspectors having deviated from their instructions or having misunderstood their duties. A common grievance was that inspectors had redistributed or sold lands that native Andeans claimed to possess but that were uncultivated or deemed “in excess.” The ultimately irreconcilable aims of determining which lands were “available” and “vacant” while admitting that native communities could own uncultivated land had resulted in some individuals and communities complaining of not having been assigned enough lands (“las tierras y acomodamiento necesario”), with others objecting to the sale or resizing of their original possessions or their commutation for other holdings that, though equal in size, were situated in less productive or more distant places.Footnote 31 Moreover, lawsuits could be lengthy. Many natives could not afford to stay in a distant and expensive Lima for long. Some litigants were dropping their suits.Footnote 32
As stated, many of these cases pitted indigenous subjects and communities of varying size against one another.Footnote 33 Furthermore, several native communities and individuals sent delegates or gave power of attorney to procurators to have their titles confirmed, rather than to challenge those of their immediate neighbors.Footnote 34 As Alberto de Acuña, the attorney-general in charge of representing native subjects before the audiencia and a major figure in the discussions surrounding the Composición, told His Majesty in a letter penned in April 1596, “un yndio tiene un pleito en que es demandado por las tierras que le dieron y otro en que demanda las suyas que le quitaron y los pleitos son infinitos.”Footnote 35 Lawsuits did seem “countless,” but Acuña was stressing a major aspect of the arduous implementation of the Composición: most conflicts arose due to land redistributions among native individuals and within and among collectives. A second point to stress is that, over the following years, the Audiencia reviewed, and in many cases cancelled, an unknown number of Composición land titles. The available evidence, though hard to come by, suggests that, especially after Viceroy Velasco took office in July 1596, native plaintiffs litigating against non-indigenous subjects or directly opposing the land inspectors’ administrative and judicial decisions generally won their cases.Footnote 36 In his April 11, 1596 letter, Velasco had described his approach to the thorny issues surrounding the Composición as being that of favoring indigenous communities as the default position. With the king’s approval, the viceroy and the audiencia voided titles and ordered restitution.Footnote 37
Back in Yauyos country, Solano’s land investigation, confirmation, and redistribution came to upset previous arrangements regarding people, resources, and shifting social boundaries. In May 1594, for instance, the authorities of Huañec, a Yauyos village in the headwaters of the Mala River, presented Solano with a list of lands, seeking for the second time confirmation of their immemorial possession. Solano withheld judgement until he could reconcile (“concordar”) the Huañec titles with the general demarcations of each of the larger jurisdictions then being carried out, ordering Huañec leaders to present their titles again at the inspection’s end for possible confirmation.Footnote 38 In 1596, as the inspection was coming to a close, other conflicts over lands engulfed the villages of San Agustín de Guaquis and San Lorenzo de Alis, which litigated against the paramount village of San Francisco de Atun Laraos. These lawsuits arose as some of these comunes (communities) sought confirmation of the lands and pastures formally allotted to them during Solano’s survey, while others appealed the judge’s decisions regarding their neighbors’ recently awarded titles. The Yauyos had clearly joined the wave of litigation.Footnote 39
Interesting things were happening beneath this documentary surface. Conflicts over pastures in Yauyos seemed to have been mounting after the formal establishment of 22 Spanish-style pueblos (villages) between 1578 and 1586, the so-called Reducción general (General Resettlement), no doubt in part because of changes in population and resources that are difficult to trace for this relatively early period.Footnote 40 Some of these disagreements simply continued from previous eras, morphing into colonial lawsuits as old and new communities struggled for control of resources after the General Resettlement. Diego Dávila Briceño, the corregidor tasked with the founding of these pueblos, famously boasted in 1586 of having reduced upwards of 300 hamlets scattered along the harsh terrain of the Yauyos and Huarochirí provinces into 39 newly established villages.Footnote 41 This aggressive attempt at redistributing the population into reducciones (nucleated villages) likely rekindled previous tensions, forcing many new and old communities to renegotiate their political boundaries and land entitlements.
Despite significant lacunae, we know some things about the interplay of new and old settlements, the formation of collective land ownership, and the appearance of new comunes during this time. Dávila Briceño admitted in 1586 that, given the province’s harsh topography and the scarcity of farmland, most fields (especially if heavily terraced and irrigated) had remained where they were before, near or on the old settlements, irrespective of the location of the new villages that he had tried to formally establish.Footnote 42 The same was true of pastures, though boundary markers in these jurisdictions could be, and in fact were being, readjusted, as we will see. As scholars have documented for myriad other regions, some reducciones had been founded on or next to the pueblos viejos (prehispanic settlements).Footnote 43 After Dávila Briceño stepped down from office, but also during the last years of his tenure, native people in Huarochirí and Yauyos began to abandon some of the officially established villages, now too distant from fields and pastures. Other pueblos viejos remained occupied, with the local inhabitants resisting the Reducción. Associated with these relocations, moreover, native colonizers began to create new settlements or reoccupy prehispanic emplacements and early colonial pueblos to gain or maintain control over resources, forcing Dávila Briceño to appoint an alcalde mayor de reducción (resettlement magistrate) in each repartimiento (fiscal unit) to periodically visit the pueblos viejos he had previously claimed to have razed to the ground.Footnote 44
Against this fluid backdrop of community fusion and fission, the Composición became the main institutional vehicle to continue the local undoing of the Reducción. The Land Inspection was to offer ample opportunity to memorialize or renegotiate earlier boundary agreements and, in some cases, secure written titles and recognition as a común formally endowed with fields and pastures. Not coincidentally, village legal narratives in connection to primordial land titles started to emerge in this shifting context. Given the ultimately judicial and potentially adversarial nature of the Composición, native subjects were entitled to present new evidence as they sought to challenge or reinforce titles obtained during the first round of inspection, capitalizing on the widespread review of land ownership that the Composición allowed. For splinter communities seceding from older ones and bent on accruing formal recognition and control over land, a valuable opportunity was similarly opened, as countless subjects flooded the audiencia between 1594 and 1602. Many such cases seem to have been driven by commoners, as new colonial comunes repossessing agricultural lands or expanding the agrarian frontier entered the official record to legitimize new settlements. The documents we will discuss next—one narrative account originally recorded in Quechua in 1592 and three title-maps produced by local scribe-artists between 1595 and 1598—allow a closer look, as we descend from the provinces into the repartimientos, and further, the pueblos themselves.
Silversmiths for the Inka
The earliest Yauyos documents of this sort, originally from June 1592, consisted of testimony rendered and written in a standard variety of Quechua known in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the Lengua general.Footnote 45 Page 40 of an original court case included some sort of writ “of great relevance due to its antiquity,” while page 44 contained a map of the village of Piños and its adjacent lands and pastures. Although these colonial maps can be connected to earlier pictorial, sculptural, and textile traditions, mapping of this sort seems to have been introduced in the province in full force only 6 years earlier, in 1586. On that date, a watercolor pintura (painting) of Anan Yauyos and Lurin Yauyos (increasingly known as Huarochirí) was made by native artists to accompany the Relación geográfica or geographic report of this former Inka province that the corregidor Dávila Briceño and his indigenous collaborators dispatched to Spain in response to Philip II’s famous 1577 questionnaire (Figure 1).Footnote 46 Other pages of the now lost 1592 court case contained native elder testimony “in the General Language,” the standard variety that local elites still dominated.Footnote 47
General map of the Province of Yauyos (1586). Real Academia de la Historia (Madrid), Cartografía y Artes Gráficas, C-028-004.
This legal investigation was originally meant to confirm the name and location of the boundary markers that divided the grazing grounds of two major repartimientos in the province, Ataun Yauyos, on the western side of the Cañete River, and Laraos, on the eastern side (Map 1). This was a striking (and relatively early) instance of what Frank Salomon once termed “the colonial-revoicing of an appeal to the archaic.”Footnote 48 The testimonies of Alonso Atoc Ñaupa and don Alonso, both local elite members, were instrumental for this purpose.Footnote 49 Alonso Atoc (“fox” in Quechua) had spent his entire life in the frigid puna region where these pastures were located (the generic name yauyus, in fact referred to highland grass or ichu).Footnote 50 Atoc testified to the canchas or corrals that belonged to the pueblo of Carania (and, by extension, to the Yauyos proper, the group after which the whole province had been named). Along with hills and streams, these corrals served as boundary markers separating these pastures from those of the Laraos, with which the pueblo of Guaquis was affiliated. Atoc noted that, as he had heard from his own father, six of these corrals/markers were added to Carania’s pasturage due to a “pact and agreement” that occurred while the region was under Inka control.
According to Atoc’s testimony, the lords of Cuzco had deputized his own father to rule over all other Yauyos caciques. Under his father’s supervision, it had been ordered that the cacique of the “pueblo y tierra” of Guaquis contribute four silversmiths as labor-tribute to the empire. Silversmiths were in high demand at the administrative center of Hatunxauxa.Footnote 51 But not a single person in Guaquis knew how to work the precious metal. Fearful of the punishment that the Inkas would impose on him, the cacique, named Cargua, begged Ispilco, his counterpart in Carania, to provide the silversmiths in exchange for a perpetual donation of some of Guaquis’s pastures. With Alonso’s father and many other caciques as witnesses, the cacique agreed. Cargua “swore according to his old custom that he […] would never request nor talk about these lands until the Day of Judgment.” Ispilco agreed to turn in the silversmiths and never to demand that they be sent back to Carania, “even if they had many children and grandchildren.” To seal the pact, each made a small incision in their ankle, as was their ancient custom. In closing, Alonso Atoc listed another four corrals/boundary markers, acknowledging that they belonged to Carania. He pointed at them in some kind of painting or map in which they appeared signaled with letters. That map, along with the Piños one, is now lost.Footnote 52
Another don Alonso, an elderly man and former cacique of the Yauyos during Huayna Capac Inka’s reign six or seven decades prior, gave equally remarkable testimony in Quechua in 1592. He testified that, upon conquering the region, Huayna Capac’s father and grandfather had distributed lands, cattle, and coca fields among their conquering allies the Yauyos.Footnote 53 As the previous Alonso had testified, there were several silversmiths in Carania but none in Guaquis. To obtain the four metalsmiths that the Inka overlords were demanding, the cacique and principales of Guaquis had to beseech the cacique of Carania, visiting his settlement (a pueblo viejo after the Reducción general) repeatedly. After gaining approval from principales and commoners alike, the cacique accepted. Guaquis surrendered its “tierras de puna y otras tierras,” while Carania bid four silversmith families of their own farewell. Some seven decades later, don Alonso still remembered many details, including the names of two of the craftsmen and their wives.Footnote 54
These documents are the oldest example of administrative and judicial records penned in the standard variety of southern origin favored by the colonial state and the Catholic Church. Though debilitated by the growing importance of Castilian, the Lengua general continued to serve as a lingua franca in the region until the eighteenth century.Footnote 55 The qualifier “general” distinguished this standard variety from the local or “particular” varieties of Quechua that, along with the Aru language, were spoken by the different groups that settled in Huarochirí and Yauyos prior to the Inka conquest and throughout.Footnote 56 In accordance with the two main scales in which the Composición operated—the pueblo and the repartimiento—these Quechua testimonies were likely registered by one of the Yauyos municipal scribes to settle specific pueblo boundaries across the Yauyos–Laraos subdivision.Footnote 57 The region’s five-centuries-long history with reading and writing in Quechua and Spanish is well documented.Footnote 58 Scholars have noted that, by the early 1570s, the Jesuits missionizing in Huarochirí were teaching alphabetic literacy to those native parishioners they deemed more suited.Footnote 59 While the Dominicans were in charge of the parishes in neighboring Yauyos, information from Jauja, entrusted to them (and the Franciscans), suggests that, as in Huarochirí, many caciques, native municipal judges and scribes, school teachers, and administrators of communal and ecclesiastic funds who came of age in Yauyos in the following decades were in a position to draft the 1592 declarations directly in the standard variety of Quechua.Footnote 60 The kind of narratives contained therein were of the sort that, repurposed yet again for the Land Inspection, Solano and Guaman Poma were to hear repeatedly during the Composición only 2 years later.
Other testimonies reinforce the identification of the author of the Quechua records with a local scribe, perhaps on a judicial commission. An “auto y tasacion” of ayllu Tatallanga’s collective endowment was seemingly prepared in the “lengua general de los yndios” by the cacique and the municipal authorities of the emplacement of the same name, near Santiago de Carania, in Yauyos, in 1588. This record, akin to an inventory or “will,” shows that quarreling comunes had begun preparing titles even before the Composición. This title listed individually named, inheritable fields possessed by the Tatallangas since Inka times, with their water intakes and boundary markers, and associated groves, canals, and reservoirs.Footnote 61 By 1610, the corregidor of Yauyos routinely relied on native scribes in his jurisdiction for the drafting of autos.Footnote 62 While charges were levied against him for his having appointed lieutenants, no one complained about one don Juan Yacan, the official interpreter who was also part of the corregidor’s entourage.Footnote 63 The standardized variety of choice strongly suggests that, apart from their great judicial value for the settling of boundary disputes in local and viceregal courts, proven time and again in later periods, these titles were meant not only to be internally kept but also to be periodically shown outside the community. Thus, although the great familiarity of elite individuals with alphabetic writing and judicial procedure, the pinnacle of which is the Huarochirí Quechua Manuscript, harbored the conditions for the drafting of the 1592 testimonies, it was the adversarial nature of the subject matter that explains why creating these written titles in Quechua was becoming a pressing task during the years immediately preceding the Composición.
In fact, the predominantly Quechua-speaking comunes of Yauyos would exhibit these titles to Solano during the Composición. These testimonies and likely others helped Carania maintain control of its pastures. Perhaps more subtly, however, the old compact also allowed the emerging común of Piños to gain or maintain access to its own grazing lands. During the Composición and in later years, Piños became entitled, by way of these oral traditions now committed to writing, to at least some of the pastures originally granted to the people of Guaquis by the Inka or surrendered by them to Carania, to the point that one is left wondering whether the group identified as “Piños” in these narratives were the “children and grandchildren” of the four commoner households ceded by Carania in exchange for the additional pastures.
We will come back to this crucial aspect of the Composición later, but for now, suffice it to say that, in this part of the empire, for which records of individual titling of land via monetary compensation during the Composición are yet to be found, the inspection offered some of these native communities a chance to enter their “ancient” traditions, in the form of primordial titles, into the colonial record as part of a collective effort to enforce the precarious arrangements that they contained and recast previous holdings as possessions. While these might seem as though they are internal quarrels among different Laraos villages and descent groups, the extensive pastures of the repartimiento bordered those of several comunes from Jauja, which led to an escalation of the conflict that magnified the impact of the Composición. The legal disputes ended up involving Laraos’s neighbors across the cordillera, not as litigants but as witnesses and guarantors of boundaries agreed upon by the Laraos at the onset of the Composición. Two other remarkable documents capturing the transition from memory-based perambulations of territory to more abstract representations of the landscape were produced in the context of this other court case. They remind us again that the Composición in these regions cannot be simply characterized as the appropriation and illegal sale of indigenous land for the benefit of Spanish residents.
Memorializing the Impermanent
In 1741, a century-and-a-half after Gabriel Solano de Figueroa and his entourage toured the steep ravines, terraced mountain slopes, vast grazing lands, and fertile valley bottoms between Huarochirí and Jauja, a violent dispute arose among several comunes scattered across a major boundary line—that between the colonial provinces of Yauyos to the West and Jauja to the East (Map 1). At 12,000 feet above sea level, these were not farmlands but extensive pasturelands towering over narrow valleys and ravines, surrounded by peaks and lakes of great beauty. The herding communities inhabiting this puna (or sullca) zone, of different “Yauyos” and “Huanca” ethnicity as well as distinct, deeply entrenched ayllu and pueblo loyalties, had managed to share these grasslands since the conquest of the region by Tupa Yupanqui Inka in the fifteenth century. However, conflict had been brewing for decades, threatening to upset a multi-village boundary readjustment to which their ancestors had agreed as Solano’s 1594 land inspection was unfolding.Footnote 64 Although the 1741 disagreement affected the repartimientos of Laraos, on the part of Yauyos, and of Ananguanca, on the Jauja side of the legal controversy, individual comunes specifically entitled to these pastures could be detected as the most active litigants. To argue its case before local and viceregal authorities and request that all herds and herders from Jauja be immediately expelled from their grazing grounds, the común of Santo Domingo de Laraos (or Cochalaraos) presented a series of legal instruments, most remarkably a unique “general map,” which had been produced as part of a large boundary alignment during Solano’s Composición.Footnote 65 Independent documents confirm these references, offering a unique window into the ways in which, between 1594 and 1597, established and rising communities in Yauyos, splinters of older collectives or returnees from new pueblos, relied on the inner workings of the Composición to consolidate or expand their holdings. Conflicting land claims, in an area where this type of strife was endemic, combined with pueblo rivalry, encouraged communities of the southeastern portion of the province, identified with the Laraos group, to take an active role in this process.Footnote 66
The first of the title-maps presented by the Laraos is a rare and almost unique example of early Andean cartography, even for the “lettered mountain” of Yauyos/Huarochirí.Footnote 67 It is a rectangular representation, made with black, red, and blue ink, measuring 60 × 43 cm, and bearing the date of 1595 (Figure 2). The title-map registers a string of natural features and human-made markers near or adjacent to corrals (cancha in Quechua; corral in Spanish). By extension, these markers designate and limit the pastures that extended over the slopes of the surrounding mountains and peaks, and to which the Laraos claimed to be entitled since Tupa Yupanqui Inka’s time. The map bears the same conventional orientation as the 1586 painting of the provinces of Yauyos and Huarochirí commissioned by corregidor Dávila Briceño (with the north on the left-hand side of the modern observer). It combines conical figures with Quechua and Spanish captions and a few glosses, all written in alphabetic script, to represent 39 boundary markers (mojones in Spanish; saywa in Quechua), mostly hills and lakes, but also livestock enclosures, which demarcated the pastures claimed by the Laraos. Presented in a semicircular fashion, the line of mojones runs in a clockwise fashion, following the great arc of the eastern Andes and enclosing the lower, mostly terraced farmlands of the repartimiento as well.Footnote 68
General Map of the Pastures, Corrals, and Boundary Markers of the Laraos (c. 1909 copy of the 1595 original). Archivo General de la Nación (Lima), Títulos de comunidades, 3:41, Planos / Planoteca, 53.
The pioneering work of translation, contextualization, and interpretation of Margot Beyersdorff and Gerald Taylor has been fundamental in making sense of this map and its satellite documents.Footnote 69 While these two scholars proposed that the map represented the pastures of one Laraos village, I suggest that it is not a pueblo-level but a repartimiento-level representation of this territory. As such, it must be re-inscribed in its original historical context, the Composición and Solano’s mapping of entire provinces, to fully understand what it can reveal to us about community building and collective property formation four centuries later. Indeed, apart from the properly labeled boundary markers, and in sharp contrast with the 1586 general map, the 1595 title-map was nevertheless “empty” in that it included no special symbol for any formally established village or común, signaling that this was the Laraos’s common pasturage, to be apportioned among the different ayllus and pueblos without outside interference. Only the upper Cañete River, which cuts the pastures into two sectors, is represented as a diagonal strip running northeast to southwest. The perspective seems to be that of a villager who looks up and around to get a panoramic view of the imposing peaks. The boundary line begins in the Cañete (or Lunahuaná) River, at a boulder named Ticlla Caca. After encompassing the entire pasturage from left (north) to right (south), it ends downstream, at a place identified in Quechua and Spanish as Vayllampe Ravine.
Copies of this general map were kept by the different comunes of Laraos.Footnote 70 Indeed, the absence of any specific villages on the map, especially in light of the 1586 map of the province, which includes close to 40 properly identified settlements, strongly suggests that the Laraos prepared this general map and brought it out during the Composición and after to secure confirmation of their pasturage vis-a-vis neighboring groups such as the Yauyos to the west and the Huancas to the east, perhaps in a preemptive measure against any future encroachments. The map probably commemorates the ritual perambulation of these pastures during Inka times, preserved in oral form but performed again for colonial authorities in the months surrounding Solano’s inspection tour.Footnote 71 Such instances of boundary surveying and confirmation by the judge or his aides are documented for Jauja, Huamanga, and other regions.Footnote 72 In fact, another map including boundary markers also said to have been set by Tupa Yupanqui Inka and his surveyors (and later confirmed by the Spaniards who founded the city of Huamanga) was prepared in Huamanga, where Solano ended his land inspection tour, around the same time (Figure 3).Footnote 73 This map (or an earlier version of the one extant) was probably shown to the judge there between September and December of 1594, well before Guaman Poma took it to the Audiencia to seek confirmation and denounce dispossession in August 1597. The Laraos and Huamanga maps suggest that Solano (and likley Guaman Poma) admitted and perhaps even encouraged these cartographic representations of ownership regimes and boundary arrangements as proof of ancestral possession during the Composición.
[Map of] the City of Huamanga and the boundary markers of Don Juan Tingo and Don Martín de Ayala, caciques principales, in the Chupas Valley. The Royal Danish Library, The Guaman Poma Site, Resources, Ca. 1560-1640. Legal Actions Regarding Land Titles in the Valley of Chupas near Huamanga, Peru.
The connection between the original Laraos map and the Composición is further corroborated by the map’s “title” and date (Figure 2). After properly labeling and identifying the markers on the page, its Yauyos creators added in Quechua, in the upper left-hand corner, “Caitam raquinacurcanqu tiempopi Inca Yupangui” (“This we divided during Inka Yupangui’s time”). On the upper right-hand corner, however, they included the specific date of the latest confirmation of these internal partitions, this time in Castilian: “Año de 1595.”Footnote 74 As in the case of the Huamanga map, wherein pre-Inka and Inka boundary markers are later readjusted and reconfirmed by Spanish authorities upon the establishment of the city, the inclusion of both a reference to Tupa Yupanqui’s time and the date of 1595 in the Laraos title-map suggests that this group strategically posited the confirmation of their title during the Composición as an integral part of an ongoing right to these pastures, cumulative in nature, not canceled but strengthened by the inspection. In a petition to colonial authorities from June 1597, Guaman Poma, likely the artist behind the Huamanga map, espoused the same view. This common understanding of the Composición in relation to indigenous primordial titles suggests that he was expressing ideas shared by other natives who, like the Laraos, engaged directly with the land inspection.
Indeed, in his striking defense of ownership over lands near Huamanga, Guaman Poma invoked four powerful títulos (titles). He prefaced them with the foundational declaration that he and his co-plaintiffs were natives (naturales), placed by God in these lands since time immemorial. They had taken possession of the family lands of Chupas since Tupa Yupanqui Inka’s conquest of the region, in which their own ancestors had played a key role. The first of Guaman Poma’s titles proper, however, was the Spanish king’s merced, awarded during the “conquista destos reynos” and later enshrined in royal orders, of recognizing the right of lords and “caciquez principales” to live freely and peacefully in the lands that they already possessed, granted to them by the Inka, or obtained by other means. The second formal title stemmed from viceroy Francisco de Toledo’s General Inspection Tour (1570–5), the widespread establishment of native repúblicas, and the ordinances issued in 1575 to govern these communities. All had confirmed the naturales’ right to live peacefully in their lands and enjoy these and other possessions, thus respecting any previous titles. After all, Toledo had instructed his inspectors to tell the natives “que desde luego se les han de señalar las tierras que han de ser suyas para siempre.”Footnote 75 The third title had been established by default during the Composición, for the 1591 royal decree mandated that Spanish vecinos y moradores could purchase titles to vacant lands only if they did not aggrieve the natives or disrupt their ancestral possession. As his fourth title, Guaman Poma invoked the written deed to the lands of Chupas that he obtained directly from Solano between September 1594 and January 1595, and that the viceroy confirmed the following October. The Composición did not invalidate any previous titles; it was, on the contrary, a constituent part of them.Footnote 76
Guaman Poma’s arguments to justify ownership resonate with those of attorney-general Alberto de Acuña and others who engaged in the debate regarding native possession of land and tried to enact their arguments and interpretations during the Land Inspection and later in the courts. It can be suggested, however, that this cumulative view of “title,” prehispanic in origin but strengthened time and again by the Spanish king’s mandates up to the Composición, took shape not just as reverberations of these larger debates reached Guaman Poma but also as he interacted with countless native claimants and litigants for whom he translated.Footnote 77 The 1595 map of Laraos presents the same conceptualization of colonial rights, signaling a common understanding of the importance of the inspection for the ownership of indigenous land.Footnote 78
Mapping Boundary Readjustments
Among the Laraos borderland communities, inward and outward controversies were likely triggered as the 1595 title-map was being finalized and brought out before colonial authorities to perennialize boundaries and establish permanent titles. In Guaman Poma’s case, the titles to the lands of Chupas similarly triggered a contentious process that led to a ruling against the chronicler and his ultimate banishment from Huamanga in 1600.Footnote 79 In a similar fashion, the legal reverberations of the 1595 Laraos title-map are brought to the fore by its “sister” document. Dated in August 1597 and measuring 48.5 × 34 cm, this title-map shows that, at the request of some of these Laraos comunes, the 1595 boundary line was partially redrawn in the immediate aftermath of the Composición. Exhibiting the same performative overtones of the 1595 map, the original of this legal instrument described a new linderaje or amojonamiento (perambulation or reconnaissance and demarcation) of repartimiento and village boundary markers (Figure 4).
General Map-Title of the Pastures, Corrals, and Boundary Markers of Santo Domingo de Cocha Laraos (20th-Century Copy of the 1597 original). AGN, Títulos de comunidades, 3:41, Planos / Planoteca, 53.
This new walkabout, conducted by the authorities of Laraos with the approval of those of neighboring Jauja, was part of a boundary realignment negotiation that took place sometime between 1595 and 1597. The walkabout sanctioned a new agreement that led to the reassignment of some of the old markers and the establishment of new ones. As Beyersdorff noted, only 16 of the 39 original mojones of the 1595 map appear in the 1597 map, which suggests that close to half of the boundaries fixed by Inka land surveyors and confirmed by colonial judges had to be renegotiated and reassigned. Lakes, waterfalls, creeks, and springs now outnumbered the mountain markers included in the 1595 map.Footnote 80 It can be argued that, while the 1595 map included all pastures claimed by the Laraos, the 1597 document, while presenting many of these same boundary markers, placed emphasis on those claimed by one of the villages within, Santo Domingo de Cocha Laraos, especially if they stood for mutual boundaries shared with neighbors. As in the 1595 map, placenames are presented in the inverted “U” shape preferred by the Laraos to represent boundaries. Nevertheless, Cocha Laraos’s most important markers are listed horizontally, occupying a prominent position between the Spanish and Quechua versions of the original colonial auto that opens this title and helps readers, then and now, make sense of its unusual, more text-heavy composition.Footnote 81
This boundary record starts with a transcription of a conventional auto approving a boundary readjustment. It was signed by the native municipal scribe of Chupaca, a village in Jauja, not in Yauyos, where Laraos authorities seem to have traveled for the occasion (Map 1).Footnote 82 Perhaps the Laraos and the Yauyos considered this village “neutral” territory, at least for the time being. As Beyersdorff noted, the August 1597 auto is a portion of a land adjudication proceeding that had a muyuriy or ritual perambulatory survey of boundary markers at its core.Footnote 83 Likely commissioned by a local corregidor by order of the audiencia in the days prior, it included a survey of highly coveted pastures. We cannot discard that the new map was part of the earlier Quechua–Spanish proceedings regarding Inka demands, local silversmiths, and negotiations over pastures discussed above. Be as it may, the 1597 auto explains that, on August 8, the native authorities of Laraos summoned seven “elderly men” from three villages in Jauja to witness the relocation of Cocha Laraos’s “rayas y mojones” (boundary markers). The pastures of the three Jauja villages—Chupaca, where the auto was signed; Chongos; and Sicaya—bordered some of the pastures of Cocha Laraos, which made their approval necessary. For that reason, the names and signatures of the cacique of the repartimiento of Ananguanca, whose jurisdiction extended over the three Jauja villages, and the cacique of the repartimiento of Laraos, under whose authority Cocha Laraos fell, were included. The seven elderly witnesses and the caciques solemnly swore to the validity of the boundary marker relocation being conducted by Cocha Laraos.
While the original auto probably presented the mojones of Cocha Laraos in paragraph form, the scribe who transcribed the document for the Laraos made important scriptural choices that amplified the text, turning it into a powerful visual tool that, though intimately tied to its antecedent, the 1595 general title-map, exhibited some important differences. These choices restructured the contents of the conventional auto, creating a bilingual proto-cartographic version of the new boundary agreement and presenting it in a format much more suited for its dual audience: colonial magistrates and other comunes.Footnote 84 For instance, the author distributed the sequence of mojones in the inverted “U” fashion, which resembled the 1595 title-map and had the same basic orientation. Thus, when placed side by side, the two lists could be compared. The scribe also added a handful of brief explanatory notes, akin to glosses or descriptions, mostly in Quechua, after some of the placenames. These indications might or might not have been part of the original Spanish auto, though Gerald Taylor thought they were not. These annotations reveal a first-hand knowledge of the landscape being surveyed and memorialized (and without which the map is rendered useless); they likely describe the direct observations of the party that walked through these places in 1597.Footnote 85 I suggest that they were included in the title-map to better identify these markers, should a future walkabout or readjustment be needed. The Quechua version of the text states, “Caypis chincanta huillahuanchic mana pantai pantai purinanchicpac,” which Taylor translates as “Aquí [in this auto] nos avisan verídicamente [sobre su posición] para que caminemos sin equivocarnos.”Footnote 86 Beyersdorff’s English version of the same passage reads, “This also, in truth he (the Inka) said to us so that we have to walk (our terrain) without going astray.”Footnote 87 Their differences notwithstanding, both renderings of the original Quechua agree in that the document was to be used—as it was—as a guide in future, periodical perambulations of the village of Santo Domingo de Cocha Laraos’s territory.
As mentioned, the scribe behind the 1597 record also included a Quechua version of the original auto in Spanish. The text is enclosed by the chain of boundary markers, the “raya” or “mojonera,” to highlight the integrity—and again, the summative nature—of this primordial land title. It bears the caption in Spanish, “Topa Ynca Yupangui que Dios merced” (“Tupac Inca Yupangui that God Royal Grant”), a strong, even if not fully grammatical, claim in Castilian that evokes similar invocations by other Laraos map-titles and the Huamanga map. This title-map, which references previous grants by Tupa Yupanqui Inka, God, and the Spanish king, reminds us of the triple source of the Laraos’s rights to these grazing grounds, which is likely how the scribe-artist and the caciques and comuneros who were to treasure it also perceived them.Footnote 88
Taylor has convincingly argued that the Quechua text is a word-by-word, somewhat sloppy rendering of the Spanish text, without which it is almost illegible, and not the other way around.Footnote 89 This might be explained by the subsequent, much more recent copies made of this document, which could have distorted the original Quechua text if the copyist did not fully understand that language. In any event, the inclusion of the Quechua version reinforces the argument that the scribe-artist anticipated the future need to enforce this boundary readjustment among Quechua-speaking comunes in Laraos, making them their primary audience. The Quechua text emphasizes, for example, that the witnesses of this new agreement all swore to its validity and the true location of the new boundary markers, adding their name and signature as proof. Perhaps this slight emphasis in the Quechua version was meant to make these men accountable before the different comunes should a dispute arise. As has been noted for other Andean communal maps, the Laraos documents registered the historical possession of land and the rights that assisted their owners while also prescribing any future actions, legal or otherwise, that might affect the organization of this territory.Footnote 90 These map-titles were as much a journey into a collective past as a projection into a communal, hopefully harmonious future. They were, as with other colonial artifacts, simultaneously descriptive and prescriptive.Footnote 91
While the caciques of Santo Domingo de Cochalaraos had been referencing in litigation some of the “pastos y mojones” that appear in the two title-maps since at least the late seventeenth century, the first mention to the “Mappa General de este repartimiento” that follows the 1597 auto that I have been able to locate is from February 1703. Threatened with the encroachment of their pasturelands by native residents of the village of Chongos (in Jauja), the paramount lords of Laraos and the pueblo authorities of Santo Domingo de Cocha Laraos retrieved these documents from the village archive.Footnote 92 The contextual information included in these early-eighteenth-century legal actions opens a final window into the powerful reasons behind their creation during the Composición.
Putting New Republics on the Map
Notably, although Dávila Briceño’s 1586 map and account mention the main village of San Francisco de Atun Larao, the paramount pueblo referenced in the 1597 title-map, prepared less than a decade later, is Santo Domingo de Cocha Larao(s). The new name and advocacy might be indicating a relocation of the reducción settlement established by Dávila Briceño, or perhaps a return to the pueblo viejo, a settlement that now, as then, sits right next to a lake or cocha.Footnote 93 This relocation, if that is what happened, might help explain why the boundary markers of the village’s pastures had to be readjusted and reapproved in 1597. Other details and documents I discuss below demonstrate that this would not have been an isolated case. As old comunes were renegotiating the effects of the Reducción general, breakaway comunes were on the rise and instrumentalized the Composición for their own aims.
In the case of the 1592 legal proceedings in Quechua, for example, a subtle aspect of these early titles is that the community of Piños, the litigating pueblo that brought these papers before the Audiencia in 1693, was not one of the formal reducciones established by Diego Dávila Briceño during the General Resettlement.Footnote 94 It is hard to tell whether Piños was an ayllu (although this is likely), a prehispanic settlement now being repopulated, or a new village, founded by commoner and elite families previously relocated to a colonial village or splitting from a mother community (probably San Agustín de Guaquis, located upriver and to the northeast of Piños) (Map 1). What is certain is that, during the early years of the tumultuous decade of 1590, Piños relied on a now-lost map and the local testimonies included in the proceedings to gain legal recognition as a común under Saint Peter’s advocacy. Through the village map, in particular, Piños made a visual claim to farm- and pasturelands, and therefore to a landholding status on par with that of its rivaling neighbors. Piños would redeploy this earlier dispute to obtain recognition as a landholding collective, appropriating oral traditions that had originally referred to pasture allocations and boundary markings agreed upon in prehispanic times by Carania and Guaquis, not Piños. As part of the latter’s quest to self-congregate, these Quechua records were adopted as primordial titles. In 1602, Piños’s 140 residents had managed to gain independent pueblo status and, no doubt as part of the process, build their own church and hospital.Footnote 95 In 1667, Piños was still an anexo (annex; subject town) of the doctrina (parish and head town) of Guaquis, but in 1682, thanks to these titles, it had already staked an ancestral claim to a series of pastures that bordered those of other established villages. The documentary emergence of this “new” república was one of the most salient yet overlooked outcomes of the Composición in these highland provinces and likely elsewhere.Footnote 96
A striking example of the same phenomenon of communal formation is included in another rare title-map, originally dated 1598. Organized in the now-familiar inverted “U” shape, it proclaims that the communal authorities of Guaquis (and those of surrounding villages) eventually agreed to the secession of the Alis (an ayllu), which entailed redrawing—literally and figuratively—the mutual boundaries of these two comunes and memorializing them in writing. The resulting document is akin to a self-awarded title, with the new boundary markers surrounding the text (Figure 5). The Alis had already relocated to their own asiento and, with the approval of Guaquis and other neighboring communities, were building a church and erecting their houses as they worked their potato and maize fields, and grazed their cattle in the surrounding pastures to which this newly recognized común was now entitled.Footnote 97 The situation was fluid because Alis, one of the litigating parties during Solano’s inspection in 1596, was not a reducción of the first round of resettlement but rather a común and pueblo that had emerged or resurfaced at the end of the Composición and that was now vying to secure recognition as an independent community. Similar to Piños, Alis had stemmed from the Old Guaquis, obtaining a more formal status after 1602. This title was internally prepared to notify (“serve”) God and king of these agreements.Footnote 98
Title of the Community of Alis (c. 1913 certified copy of the 1598 original). AGN, Títulos de comunidades, 3:42, f. 48r.
The creators of the 1595 and 1597 title-maps of the Laraos captured a snapshot of other comunes on the rise. The artists of the 1597 map, for instance, saw the need to clarify the limits of Cocha Laraos’s pastures in relation to those of its multiple neighbors, mostly within the Laraos territory (Figure 4). It was crucial to state that Toncori Hill was where the limits between Laraos and Huantan, a village formally established during the General Resettlement, lay. However, three other placenames deserve further scrutiny. The point between Yauricocha and Llancacocha, two lakes, was marked as “Caipim Allispa sallcan puchucan,” that is, where the pasturelands of Alis ended.Footnote 99 As explained in the previous paragraph, Alis was an unofficial settlement similar to Piños. Piños, for its part, was already featured in the 1595 title-map (and in other communal maps of the same period), though associated with Piscococha Hill, another boundary marker (Figure 2). The very inclusion of the post-reducción Alis and Piños in these general and pueblo maps continued to accrue these collectives pueblo status, so they likely partook in the negotiations behind these demarcations. Similarly, the 1597 title-map reveals that Muyo Ocupi Corral, an enclosure also included in the 1595 title-map, was where the pastures of Tomas began (“Caymantam callarin Tomaspa sallcan”). “Tomas” was yet another unofficial emplacement, represented in the 1595 map as a somewhat mysterious, separate entity (and in other maps as an estancia or cattle-raising estate). The name “Tomas” in the 1595 map was followed by five toponyms that likely represented this rising community’s own boundary markers within the Laraos territory (Figure 2). Tomas now shared Pusaccancha with four other comunes.Footnote 100
Pusaccancha was indeed an important placename, listed in both title-maps (and even in the Alis 1598 title-map), the point where Santo Domingo de Cocha Laraos’s 1597 ritual walkabout (and that of the whole repartimiento) traditionally began. As relevant, it is named and described as eight enclosures in one (pusaq = eight), a nodal point that forced different comunes to come to terms with one another. Pusaccancha was located near “Inga Yupangui corral,” an enclosure where Inka herds had been originally kept, likely by shepherds who, as with the silversmiths, were drawn as tribute-labor from different comunes. This name also suggests that the Inka were responsible for the original partition of the eight enclosures among several collectives. But Pusaccancha was also a mutual boundary that reveals yet again how the Composición became a vehicle for communities such as Piños, Tomas or Alis to establish an official, written presence, legible to state and church authorities, hopefully to be accepted, no matter how reluctantly at first, by other communities.
More than a century after the Inka apportioning of these pastures, the creators of the 1595 title-map explained that these eight enclosures had become the mutual bounds of three villages: Laraos, Mito, and Tomas (Figure 2).Footnote 101 Then, 2 years later, the 1597 title-map extends the list to include Sicaya, which, as with Mito, was a formal reducción in the Jauja valley whose pastures extended to the boundary line with Cocha Laraos (Figure 4). Each of the four comunes, one can presume, came in control of two corrals.Footnote 102 But “Tomas,” on the Laraos side of the boundary line, refers to an ayllu and, in later documents, an asiento (semi-formal settlement) that, similar to Piños and Alis, was on its way to obtaining recognition as a pueblo. Most remarkably, according to eighteenth-century documents, it had been this “aillo Tomas del pueblo de Vitis” (ayllu Tomas of the village of Vitis) that had first brought the general map of the Laraos (“Mappa General de este repartimiento”) to the attention of colonial authorities between 1595 and 1597. The map listed this collective as entitled to portions of the Laraos pasturage, granted during Tupac Yupanki’s land redistribution and confirmed by the Spanish king. The current village of Tomas sits across a mountain from Vitis, each settlement occupying its own basin. Thus, it can be argued that, as we saw in the cases of Piños, Alis, and perhaps Cocha Laraos, Tomas ayllu made strategic use of the general map (and ultimately the Composición for which it was prepared) to continue to accumulate pueblo status. Perhaps people associated with the ayllu and placename had been reluctantly relocated to the colonial village of Vitis during the General Resettlement. If so, they might have relied on the visual and textual claims made in these maps to return to an original prehispanic settlement or legitimize a new colonial one, as the people of Alis did. Either way, the map recorded Tomas’s stake to communal grazing lands as a distinct collective. The crucial year in which the ayllu and emplacement of the same name break into the historical record—1595—stands as the documented beginning of Tomas’s journey to gain formal pueblo status, and strengthen its communal claim to an agropastoral endowment by way of the Composición. Many years after the land inspection that put Tomas literally on the map, sometime in the eighteenth century, it was to achieve that status under the advocacy of the Holy Trinity.Footnote 103
Conclusion
As these subtle appearances of “Tomas” or “Alis” on the margins of the Laraos title-maps reveal, a recurrent emphasis on the pecuniary, venal, and predatory aspects of the Composición has prevented scholars from recognizing other equally significant but less visible, perhaps even counterintuitive, historical processes that were not only underway as the Land Inspection began to unfold in 1594; in some of the central provinces covered by the judge-inspectors, they were in fact enhanced and brought to a sharper focus by the largest investigation on colonial ownership regimes ever conducted. In the process, Yauyos communities appropriated the Composición, repurposing the very idea of común, shaping the inspection at different levels, and ultimately turning it into something else. In this jurisdiction, where native ancestral holdings were confirmed, boundaries readjusted, and land titles granted and regularized over the next decade, the Composición was shaped by these ongoing forces, which affected the inhabitants of the countryside but were also mainly driven by them.
The partial undoing of the Reducción general, the relentless fission of communities of varying degree of inclusiveness, the establishment of new settlements, the re-population of old ones, the negotiated emergence of new comunes, and the accrual of pueblo status by some of these new rural entities were all underlying currents that, without the Composición, would have perhaps followed a different course or been almost undetectable. These local land inspection records, when read carefully and with particular attention to the variables “on the ground,” reveal important traces of the voices and actions of indigenous subjects and communities that engaged with these proceedings almost from the start, turning them into community-centered struggles for self-determination that influenced the inspectors’ decisions and modeled the outcomes of this colonial enterprise in various, sometimes unexpected ways.
Not only did Native Andean actors fulfilling different roles during the Composición resist the sale of land and challenged prior adjudications in the courts, as others have noted; they also creatively adapted the mechanisms embedded in this massive undertaking, an administrative granting of title subject to confirmation and judicial review, to claim individual and collective—sometimes conflicting—rights to valuable agropastoral resources. Oral traditions, tales of ancestry and possession, and bilingual title-maps became the raw materials from which to elaborate early primordial titles that, with some limitations, the Peruvian government still recognizes today. Originally produced in the midst of the Composición of the 1590s, they were to be wielded to reassert territorial limits, enforce boundary agreements, preserve communal autonomy, and, equally important, secure new pueblo status within a highly competitive colonial environment.
By its very nature, the Composición also served as an opportunity for native Andean subjects to engage in ongoing debates regarding land ownership, often through the voice of communal delegates and Crown-appointed attorneys. Fragments of these voices are still heard in these documents. As Renzo Honores has shown, such debates went back to the first mercedes de tierras, granted after the Conquest, and can be detected in the first court cases involving caciques, communities, and land in the 1550s.Footnote 104 However, they became prominent in the crucial years between the Reducción and the Composición. As they seemingly collaborated with the visita, native land holders co-opted some of its inner workings to resolve local and regional disputes, and challenge prevailing arguments for native dispossession. Many embraced the Composición as a reaffirmation rather than a challenge of old and new rights. Titles came to be understood cumulatively rather than exclusively, that is, as the result of a summative process in which the Composición was to play a foundational role. As Felipe Guaman Poma wrote in regard to the family lands in Santa Catalina de Chupas for which he litigated after securing title during the inspection, such lands “came to me by right, with just title and possession since God created the earth and since the Inkas and the conquest, and His Majesty knowing the truth about it and his Audiencia by its ruling and appellate judgment, confirmed [such titles] by the authority of their lordships the viceroys.”Footnote 105 The Composición no doubt reinforced the colonial state’s role as a major arbiter in conflicts over the possession and dispossession of land, but this strengthening of state power was inextricably tied to formal recognition of native rights to agropastoral entitlements. As the historical actors themselves strategically redeployed them, native rights were inseparable from the king’s claims over vacant or excess lands, the only ones that could be the subject of composición.
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