When Lampa's corregidor appointed Antonio Tapara as cacique of Ñuñoa Urinsaya, he articulated the cacique's three responsibilities: tribute collection, Christian rule, and good government. He started with tribute collection: he had ridden forty miles across the mountains because the earlier cacique had failed in what was, to crown officials, the cacique's central duty. What mattered most was that twice a year the cacique collected his community's tribute and delivered it to the corregidor (and, in mita areas, that he delivered his corvees). This was no easy task. Many tributaries were reluctant to pay; others fled or died, leaving the cacique to cover the shortfall. Moreover, in many areas tributaries lacked access to cash. A complex market tied together the highland cities, but barely penetrated Indian pueblos. Caciques often had to convert their tributaries' labor or produce into cash for tribute, which allowed caciques to dominate local economies, making them the nexus between the community and the colonial market. Caciques also enjoyed usufruct of communal land and used their personal wealth to dominate capital-intensive factors of production in their communities.

Cacical houses were thus by far the richest segment of Indian society. Not all accumulated wealth: the obligation for communal debts made the cacicazgo a perilous position. But successful caciques funneled the profits of office into private wealth. This created a structural conflict between communities and a cacical elite committed to familial property, and historians have argued that cacical wealth produced class stratification, and conflict, in the colonial pueblo. At the same time, the foundation of cacical wealth remained in control of the communal economy.

The social space and privileges conceded to Peru's Indian elites in the later sixteenth century remained intact for almost two centuries. However, indigenous societies underwent enormous changes in the Andes' “long seventeenth century” between the Toledan and Bourbon reforms, or the epidemics of the 1580s and that of 1720. As a result, the Indian elites of Bourbon Cusco were a creation not only of preconquest stratification and attempts by sixteenth-century officials to reform indigenous society, but also of the complex colonial society that emerged in the next century. Driving these changes were the histories of Peru's two ethnic republics: demographic, economic, and cultural collapse and contraction in the Indian, expansion in the Spanish. Catastrophic population decline, coupled with the heavy demands of the crown, provoked widespread migration, the destruction of many communities and the creation of others. Because the Indian elites of the colonial Andes were generally defined locally, and their authority and wealth stemmed from their position within their ayllus and pueblos, the dynamics of community collapse and formation affected them not as a legal estate, but as families and lineages whose privileged position was as precarious as the survival of their communities. In addition, the mass death destroyed the tributary labor on which the high civilization of the Incas had depended, and the religious practices, arts, and organization of the sixteenth-century Andes suffered terribly over the next century, as indigenous societies were now too small to maintain them. Preconquest civilization also suffered from the imposition of many aspects of Spanish civilization – Christianity, monogamy, Spanish literacy, courts of law – both through aggressive, sporadic campaigns and a gradual, and more profound, permeation.

On June 8, 1824, when Lima had fallen to Bolívar, Peru's viceroy had retreated to Cusco, and Spanish rule in the Andes had less than a year to go, Cusco's Inca nobility petitioned the viceregal court that on “… the eve and day of the glorious apostle Lord Santiago the functions of the Royal Standard be celebrated [by] … one of the Indian nobles of the eight parishes of this capital, named by the 24 electors of the [Inca] cabildo; being the said functions, the most vivid demonstration of our fidelity, gratitude, and jubilee, that are performed according to the example of our ancestors.” A reminder of the existence, nearly three centuries after the conquest of the Inca empire in the 1530s, of an indigenous Andean nobility, the request wonderfully captures the complexity of colonial Andean society. The descendants of the Inca royalty whose vast empire had been seized by the Spanish did not simply swear allegiance to Ferdinand VII as the viceroyalty collapsed, but insisted on their right to do so.With them, the highland Indian nobility generally repudiated the creole-dominated drive for independence, just as in the 1780s their fathers and grandfathers had rallied to the defense of the crown against the massive indigenous uprisings of Tupac Amaru and the Cataris. While there is a superficial irony in the transformation, over three centuries, of the descendants of the Inca royalty and other preconquest elites into “Indian nobles and faithful vassals of His Majesty,” their defense of the colonial order underscores how these Indian nobles were, simultaneously, an artifact of preconquest civilization and the continuously evolving creation of Spanish colonialism.

As much as the Great Rebellion was provoked by changes in the larger Andean political economy, it provoked a profound transformation in the local political economies of highland Indian communities. The segment of society that suffered most was the Indian nobility. The loss of life and property hit the great cacical houses of the Titicaca basin hard. The destruction of obrajes and flocks and the disruption of trade further severed the Cusqueño economy from the Altiplano, just when improvements in shipping made Buenos Aires a more attractive port-of-entry than Lima and royal policy began to encourage trade rather than limit it. Cusco's textile and sugar industries, and portage across the Titicaca basin, thus declined further. Insofar as the cacical elite had drawn its wealth and power from their control over the contact between local economies and the regional market, they suffered proportionately.

Even more damaging for the Indian nobility of Cusco was the crown's rethinking of the organization of colonial rule. Throughout the Americas, Charles III and Charles IV sought to extend royal authority in a wave of state-building that paralleled and surpassed that of the Habsburgs in the sixteenth century. While the codification of Spanish rule in the late 1500s had imposed a colonial discipline on Andean society, the inability and reluctance to enforce royal justice had created great latitude for negotiation: “obedezco pero no cumplo” served as the unofficial motto of corregidores and caciques as well as of viceroys. From the mid-eighteenth century, the crown set out to reclaim control of royal government and of Indian tribute.

The colonial Indian elite – part nobility of blood, part nobility of office – received recognition of its privileges as individuals, families, and even ayllus. But the Indian elite had no official role in the governance of Peru above the level of the pueblo: no cortes or assemblies bound them together. Nor did such institutions bind together creole Peru, but urban, provincial, and viceregal offices in the church and royal government helped to forge a more unified Spanish elite that ruled Peru. The Spanish had usurped imperial, and even provincial, government from the indigenous elite. However, extralocal alliances of Indian elites did not vanish altogether. Some sense of a shared identity, rooted in Inca ancestry, may have bound together a broad Andean elite, although archival evidence for this is very thin. Economic currents did draw migrants across the viceroyalty – with Incas from Cusco moving to Potosí and nobles from Azángaro settling in Lima. Presumably they maintained familial ties with their native communities, although these do not appear to have been sufficiently dense to create the solidarities that would emerge among creoles in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Rather, at the provincial level, localized Indian elites throughout the Andes created their own networks of marital alliances that spanned pueblo, and provincial, frontiers. The result was a series of regional nobilities, in which interrelated cacical families held sway over large swaths of the highlands. In examining the organization of these nobilities, this chapter focuses on the survival or production of provincial Indian elites, the organization of cacical succession in the bishopric, and patterns of marriage alliances. Three caveats are necessary.

On November 4, 1780, Don Jose Gabriel Tupac Amaru seized Don Antonio de Arriaga, Tinta's corregidor, as he passed through Tungasuca, of which Tupac Amaru was cacique. For the next six days Tupac Amaru imprisoned Arriaga, while a huge crowd assembled in the pueblo; proclamations were read denouncing Arriaga and claiming that “[t]hrough the King it has been ordered that there no longer be sales tax, customs, or the Potosí mita and that Don Antonio Arriaga lose his life because of his harmful behavior.” Tupac Amaru forced the corregidor to send for weapons and money so that the cacique and his followers were well armed; then, on November 10, Arriaga was hung in front of the crowd. Tupac Amaru and his troops headed north down the Vilcanota valley, reaching Quiquijana in two days and sacking the obraje of Pomacanchis on their way. Caciques from nearby pueblos actively joined, or were caught up in, the rebellion, and the forces grew dramatically as they went. The upper Vilcanota was in open rebellion.

Receiving news of Arriaga's execution on November 12, the Cusco cabildo sent a regiment to quash the rebellion. At the forefront were Cusco's Inca nobles, who rejected Tupac Amaru almost to a one; so too would their peers around Titicaca. Indeed, the irony of Inca (and other Indian noble) loyalty to the crown is striking, and this chapter attempts to explain it. That loyalty was not for want of appeals from Tupac Amaru: as he marched down the Vilcanota he sent letters – alternately cajoling and threatening – to leading Inca nobles and highland caciques asking them to join him.