1 Introduction
On 22 September 1586, indigenous city authorities executed Francisca Collocâs last will and sold portions of her estate at public auction. Among the belongings of this resident of the semiurban parish of El Hospital in Cuzco was âa ball of yarn to measure plotsâ which one MarÃa Pasña bought on the spot for a tiny fraction of a peso.1 We do not know what made this particular string suitable for that specific purpose. Nor do we know of any occasions on which Francisca may have laid the yarn over her fields or those of others. Perhaps she sold such balls of yarn to other parish residents, for her relatively small estate included wool and pieces of cloth. Whether Francisca and MarÃa were relatives or neighbours is not specified either but, based on the formerâs possession of the ball of yarn and the latterâs wish to purchase it, presumably for her own use, it is fair to say that measuring, and thus delimiting, agricultural tracts was of some importance for these two women, and surely many others. While our limited understanding of the mechanisms available to Native Andean women like Francisca and MarÃa for exerting control over particular plotsâthat were, in most cases, also subject to varying degrees of familial and communal oversightâdoes not allow us to say much more about Franciscaâs mysterious measuring string, in this Chapter, I explore the relationship between women like Francisca and the land ownership regimes of the pueblos de indios of their time.
Much has been written about indigenous land tenure in the colonial Americas. Regarding the Andes region and, until recently, the debate has lingered on a twin set of opposites: the private versus the communal dimension, on the one hand, and permanent and exclusive ownership versus temporary use, on the other. These basic oppositions have generally informed past historiographical assumptions about pre-Hispanic agropastoral communities, particularly the premise that such collectives held all pasture and farmland âin commonâ and, therefore, novel forms of exclusive (i.e., private or individual) control over land and its products were introduced only in the aftermath of the Iberian conquest.2 A new agrarian history has started to challenge these long-held assumptions by noting that earlier views tended to overstate the importance, and in fact the very existence, of private land regimes in early modern Spain, creating a stark contrast between the Spanish and Andean worlds of the 16th century, one that simply did not exist. In fact, as Alan Greer and others have recently noted, âSpain stood out in the European context as the kingdom par excellence of public lands, municipal commons and extensive grazing privileges.â3 Thus, ironically, the emphasis on usufruct and possession over firm property rights, as applied to Andean ownership regimes, is also largely applicable to the 16th-century Iberian world.4 A parallel critique of old paradigms has pointed out that a diversity of land ownership regimes, as defined in Manuel Bastias Saavedraâs Chapter in this volume, existed in the Andes at the time of contact and after. Karen Graubart has argued, for instance, that, â[b]eneath the archival appearance of standardized descriptions of land tenure were a whole gamut of actual relationships to property, both in terms of tenure and use.â5 From these studies, a different picture, one with a plurality of pre-Hispanic and postconquest landholding regimesâbundles of practices, rules, norms and principles mediating the relationship between people and landâis beginning to emerge.6
In this Chapter, I take on this second line of inquiry by reassessing communal ownership regimes and village customs regarding land management and inheritance through the lens of Andean colonial forms of commoning. I propose that, while it is true that ideal dichotomies and an excessive emphasis on law, doctrine, and legal theory have limited our understanding of indigenous land regimes within the context of European colonialism, the distinction between individual and collective remains methodologically relevant for our understanding of how mid-colonial Native communities held, used, and regulated land at the village level. The âindividualâ, in this context, refers to the particular; it is situational, relational, and embedded. It is, for that reason, never exempt from a social dimension, because particular historical actors were inscribed in household, ayllu (kin group), village, and colonial power dynamics. As I will show, however, the âindividualâ exists as an aspiration, a sense of entitlement, a matter of judicial rulings, and perhaps even a distinct normative subjectivity that, by strategically shifting the emphasis from the whole to the part, aimed to lessen, and in some specific instances even reduce to the minimum, temporary or permanent extended family and communal control over people, labour, and land. This is the status that the documents discussed below identify as being the dueño or owner of household fields, often termed heredades or hacienda propia in the sources, as opposed to plots considered properly communal (tierras de comunidad).7 Just as important, the particularâsomeoneâs âownâ, which usually takes the form of a hereditary claim associated with a single householdâis a necessary component of the commons, since âcommunityâ can be thought of as an aggregate of distinct households and ayllus that try to regulate each otherâs landholding rights. In his sweeping overview of âproperty formationsâ in North America, Greer argues that âthe opposition of âcommunalâ and âprivateâ property (or âcollectiveâ versus âpersonalâ) seems inadequate, if not meaningless.â8 He suggests instead that we treat these terms, ânot as poles of a dichotomy, but as different aspects of a single regime.â9 Pushing Greerâs argument further, I contend that family and collective aspects of land within Native communities were not opposite ends of a spectrum but instead coterminous and historically contingent ways of acting onâthat is, exerting power and control overâthe same resources, even after death. By way of a case study based on rare intracommunal records, I show that a dynamic, mutually constitutive relationship existed between the two. In other words, my argument is not one of mere coexistence, but of dialectical opposition. By documenting the simultaneous existence of common fields alongside plots held in severality by specific households,10 I hope to advance an alternative model for thinking relationally and dynamically about land regimes in relation to the local normative orders that regulated them.
Several formative bodies of literature have shaped my approach to communal land tenure.11 Spanning three decades, the work of John Murra was instrumental in renewing our views about indigenous understandings of territory, land tenure, and land use prior to the Spanish conquest. Drawing on recently published colonial administrative inspections, Murra highlighted the existence of multiple, overlapping regimes at the household, community, and state levels, offering one of the first classifications of a wide range of holdings. Regarding peasant subsistence and tributary ownership regimesâmy focus in this ChapterâMurra emphasised the importance of kinship for organising labour and granting community members âuniversal accessâ to both labour and, indirectly, plots and pastures, but did not delve much into the local normative orders regulating them. Murra also outlined the tension between individual and collective rights at the core of communal life, though he postponed a more in-depth discussion of community-level land tenure patterns until additional archival findings had come to light.12
Numerous studies developed Murraâs insights, although the processual aspects of his viewpoint gradually faded from the scholarship. AÂ 1644 municipal trial involving a widow from the village of Santiago de Carania and her written claims to land can help us examine the tensions between the individual and the collective that Murraâs pathbreaking analysis 40 years ago left unresolved. This file is one of only a handful surviving records that document the inner workings of Andean municipalities as courts of justice prior to 1700.13 The dossier provides a series of village stories that would be otherwise inaccessible. This record places into focus land and the regulation of the community, allowing us to think about this relationship, as others have done, as social process.14 The analysis also foregrounds the interplay between community and family holdings, allowing us to probe into what these categories and the local normativities that informed them meant to Native Andeans not only when crafting arguments with their attorneys for presentation to a judge, but also in their everyday lives outside the colonial courtroom.
To unlock ownership regimes within Andean commons, I take up Murraâs suggestion to focus on energy in flux, and I draw inspiration from Joseph Bastienâs conceptualisation of communal land rights as âflexible, reciprocal, and periodical [â¦] intimately linked to the ecological, corporate, and cultural structure of the ayllu.â15 Moreover, I build on theorisations, particularly Marisol de la Cadenaâs, of the ayllu as a mutually constitutive relation between individuals and the group, thus refraining from imposing too drastic a distinction between part and whole.16 Although this Chapter has a single case study at its heart, I have supplemented my findings for the corregimiento (judicial district) of Yauyos, where Carania is located, with examples from other midsize north central and central Andean societies, including those in the neighbouring corregimiento of HuarochirÃ, to highlight the significance of my conclusions. These societies shared basic cultural practices and historical features, such as organisation into strong, semiautonomous ayllus that endured the Inca and Spanish conquest, formal resettlement of their populations in nucleated villages between the 1560s and 1580s, steep competition for pastures and periodic land disputes between households and ayllus and, as far as we can tell, similar agricultural traditions and land management systems. In reconstructing the relationship between people and their fields in the village of Carania, I also draw inspiration from a body of ethnographic observations about land and tenure, mainly produced in the 1970s and 1980s, and largely overlooked by colonial Andeanists. This fieldwork, especially that devoted to Yauyos, noted that communal âproductive zonesâ were in fact delimited through varying degrees or levels of individual and collective oversight and authority over labour, infrastructure, agropastoral cycles, and surplus. All these zones were crisscrossed by tensions among individual households, extended families and the community.17
Moreover, to overcome the static portrait of land regimes inherited from earlier community and ethnohistorical studies, I highlight practices and strategies of commoning, uncommoning, and recommoning through individual and collective action. As Silvia Federici notes, commoning activities ârequire, as well as produce, community.â18 Indeed, by shifting the emphasis from the commons as a noun to commoning as an action, a view that resonates with recent conceptualisations of the commons as movement, process, and relation, I take the analysis beyond legal definitions of property and dominion, the appropriation of indigenous lands, and the recognition of the entangled nature of land tenure systems in villages and towns throughout the colonial world.19 Insofar as it expressed shifting social relations, commoning could be enacted, reversed, and reinstated through community and household norms and practices that necessarily took place over time and involved multidirectional shifts, regardless of whether the resulting tenure regimes found correlates in the language and genres of colonial law. This type of processual approach to land tenure claims and disputes brings the shifting realities of Andean collectives to the fore. At play in the story that follows (and likely those of many other mid-colonial Andean villagers whose disputes were never committed to writing) was the ebb and flow of the commons and its self-reproduction and regulation through practices of commoning and uncommoning.
2 The Rayas at Cancaurco
The events unfolded in an ordinary pueblo de indios (village) and común (community) named Santiago de Carania, located southeast of Lima in the upper Cañete watershed at roughly 3,800 metres above sea level.20 A colonial foundation near an old settlement, Carania sat, like most villages in the area around Huarochirà and Yauyos, in a high mountain valley.21 Surrounded by snowcapped peaks and grasslands and contained within a relatively narrow ravine (quebrada), the Carania valley was created by the river of the same name, a tributary of the Cañete that still transports meltwater from a nearby lake into the ravine and across the valley. Prized terraced and unterraced farmlands for maize, potatoes and other tubers clustered around the settlement, along the riverbanks and on the steep mountain slopes that encase the valley (see Figure 4.1).22
In August 1644, MarÃa Jamarca, a widow in the village, appeared before municipal authorities to denounce Ayllu Chacallongo for âusurpingâ two of her rayas (boundary lines), threatening her livelihood and that of her two children.23 As was customary in Carania and other places in the Andes, the rayas, named Chacasmarca and Chilcasonique, demarcated a segment of a much longer terrace (andén or tabla), one of several patches of productive land composing an agricultural sector; MarÃaâs was of unspecified size.24 Such toponyms, which Carania residents started recording in painstaking detail in their wills around this time, generally applied to both the rayas and the plots enclosed within, and were the primary means for distinguishing sectors and plots, distributing irrigation water and making landholding claims.25 The fields associated with these toponyms did not belong to Chacallongo, MarÃa protested. Rather, they had been earmarked for âherâ great-grandfather Apu (Lord) Caxauarco back âin the time of the Inca.â26 His direct descendants had been ploughing these fields for four generations uninterrupted. Apu Caxaurco likely presided over his fields, albeit in lithified form, for MarÃa referenced a stone staked in the ground as the critical marker of her ancestorsâ rights to the land.27
Map 4.1
The corregimientos of HuarochirÃ, Yauyos, Jauja, and Angaraes, part of the larger court district of Limaâs Audiencia Appellate Court the corregimiento of Yauyos, which included the village of Carania
Map by Nicanor DomÃnguez
In her petition, MarÃa argued that, to justify seizing control of the plot, Chacallongo had resorted to a recent viceregal decree (not included in the dossier) secured in Lima after the filing of a previous petition, ostensibly by its members. The decree had recognised communal control over a presumably large agricultural sector named Cancaurco (Canca mountain), a well-delimited mountainside known to all parties that included the terraced fields in dispute. The decree had allocated it for âthe benefit of the community.â MarÃa detailed in her suit that Cancaurco had eight tablas in total: seven were to be tilled as commonage, but the eighth was hers to sow.28 She beseeched the alcalde (municipal judge) to protect her right to support her family until her son turned of age by not âsuspendingâ the fields, as had been done in previous years (she was likely referring to the decision to leave the fields fallow).29 The municipal judge ruled in her favour, ordering Chacallongo to abstain from trespassing the boundary markers, âof which Diego Caxauarco [her son] is the dueño.â30 Put simply, the ruling meant that the judge (and likely others) considered Diego, the grandson of one Felipe Caxauarco, presumably Apu Caxauarcoâs son or grandson, the current owner (dueño) of the fields.31 The judge ordered Chacallongo to plant and cultivate the aylluâs seven terraces in Cancaurco collectively without invading other terraces or risk harsh punishment. The local Spanish corregidor upheld the verdict.
Even so, the following year, amidst the new agricultural cycle, MarÃa found herself before the next corregidor, again to defend the same fields and boundary lines (chacras y rayas) from Chacallongoâs attempts at domaining. Echoing the gendered aspects of the persona miserabilis status generally afforded by colonial courts to indigenous women, particularly widows, MarÃa pleaded that her rivals were taking advantage of her being a âdestitute and wrong-headed woman.â32 Furthermore, Chacallongo had resorted to the revealing strategy of scattering two almudes (about 16 kilograms) of seed over her fields. This was not ordinary but communal seed (semillas de comunidad), a crucial point to which I will return. The quantity of unidentified seed (very likely maize) is a clue as to the fieldâs size. It also speaks to the type and amount of labour needed to till it. MarÃa had probably completed the land-preparation phase or barbecho by then, which was nothing short of hard work, which made the situation all the more aggravating.33 On 3 March 1644, the Spanish magistrate sided with âthis Indian womanâ, ordering Caraniaâs Native municipal judge to uphold MarÃaâs claims and to stop Chacallongo.34 Four days later, Don Francisco Fernández Yauriuacho, the municipal judge tasked with enforcement, passed his own, lengthier judgement supporting the widowâs claims.
Much more knowledgeable than his Spanish counterpart about inter-ayllu relations, local rules of inheritance, and customary regulations regarding land and labour, the Native judge protected (amparar) MarÃaâs guardianship of her minor sonâs rights, confirming her possession of the rayas and, indirectly, the fields that they enclosed. However, he warned MarÃa not to let the seed enter the ground but to return it in full to Chacallongo.35 Rather puzzlingly to an external observer, the judge reminded Chacallongo, with several principales (lineage heads) of some of the ayllus of Carania present, not to meddle in âthe communal rayas of Ayllu Pelleâ and that anyone who did so would be lashed in the pillory and shamed by having their hair cut short.36 The judgeâs mention of Ayllu Pelle, one of the kin groups settled in Carania in the 1570s and 1580s, revealed that, at the municipal level, MarÃaâs fields, inherited by three generations of her husbandâs patriline, also belonged to this ayllu. Could the fields now be Chacallongoâs as well? The difference seemed one of perspective.
3 Caraniaâs Communal Sector
To untangle the bundle of rights over Cancaurco, we must start by defining the type of land under dispute and the nature of MarÃaâs claims to it. MarÃa had filed her complaint long after the first round of reducción general (general forced resettlement) undertaken in Yauyos by a diligent corregidor named Diego Dávila Briceño. Indeed, 60 years earlier, Dávila Briceño had boasted of having resettled more than 300 scattered hamlets into 39 newly founded villages, razing most of the old settlements to the ground.37 Undoubtedly, the aggressive redistribution of the population and its forced resettlement was to contribute to the tensions surrounding farm and pastureland over the next 300 years. Despite deep social, political, and religious transformations caused by the reducciones, however, its effects on land tenure should not be overstated. While new villages, often near roads, rivers, and ravines were to dot the colonial landscape, others were founded again on older, pre-Hispanic sites where friars had established the first doctrinas (benefices) a few decades earlier.38 Moreover, Dávila Briceño had to admit in 1586 that, given the harsh topography of the province and the scarcity of farmland, most fields had remained right where they were before, irrespective of the location of the new villages: on or around the old settlements.39 After Dávila Briceño departed the province, Native peoples themselves abandoned some officially established villages and created multiple others. Households and ayllus (but not so much municipalities, as we will see) remained paramount in exerting power over internal decisions concerning the status, allocation, and classification of a villageâs core holdings.40
Cancaurco was where household, ayllu, and community met. At the time of MarÃaâs filing, it was under the jurisdiction of the nearby hamlet (asiento) of San Bartolomé de Vaichana, a tiny settlement without municipal government, subject to Carania but not part of the original forced resettlement. Interestingly, 80 years later, San Bartolomé de Guaychana, along with Santa Ana Cancabilco (Cancaurco?) and San Antonio de Ache were included in a partial list of Caraniaâs common fields, probably signalling their gradual absorption into the larger village endowment.41 In Carania and elsewhere, so-called communal sectors, such as Cancaurco, were composed of parcels of variable size and productivity, often dependent on a combination of rain and irrigation, and sometimes scattered over one or more ecological niches. Such fields were subject to meticulous rotational fallowing and, between harvest and planting, even unimpeded grazing of family and community herds.42 These communal lands were subdivided into sectors, known until recently across the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes as suyu, aynuga, laymi, manay, muyuy, and moya, among other names. Each sector was in turn broken down into clearly bounded and individually named fields, delimited by stones, ridges and other markers, such as the ones that MarÃa mentioned in her petition. But these boundaries were not fixed or permanent. What anthropologist Ricardo Godoy called âboundary ephemeralityâ was a necessary attribute of this type of common-field agriculture, as well as a mechanism for adapting to demographic and fiscal changes.43
Thus, Cancaurco mountainside fell within a specific productive zone available to some Carania residents, one where the boundaries among household, ayllu, and community use rights to land and labour not only coexisted but were also constantly shifting. Based on need and custom, and without relinquishing the communityâs rights, local authorities periodically reassigned or confirmed some of these fields to domestic units, extended families, and ayllus, with the lands often remaining in their control for several generations.44 Caciques and principales were, in that sense, some of the greatest commoners in the Andean world. Other fields within the same sectors, generically called sapçi chacara or tierras de comunidad, were collectively but proportionately ploughed, taking turns, by ayllu members and assigned for the putative benefit of the larger commons, as will be discussed later. In both cases, the communityâthat is, an aggregate of households, and the local caciques on their behalfâretained a significant (but not total) degree of oversight over labour, surplus, crop choice, and the rhythms of the fallowing cycle.45
More importantly, for our understanding of land ownership regimes, such divisions were not static. Previously described as a âgradientâ of divisible and indivisible use rights, a âmyriad of unenclosed and inter-mixed parcelsâ, or as a âtissueâ connecting particular and collective rights and customs,46 communal sectors, such as Carania, were in fact the commons in motion. Over time, and occasionally within a single cycle, specific plots and even sectors transitioned in and out of the sapçi chacara category, as the social relationships behind community, ayllu, and household rights shifted due to internal and external forces. In other words, the entangled web of household and communal claims that constituted the commons was subject to expansion, contraction, segmentation, and, in some cases, disintegration through uncommoning and recommoning.47
As such, these fields were also ripe for conflict. Ethnographic work undertaken in the South and Central Andes by David Guillet, Ricardo Godoy and others shows that fallowing of communal sectors is critical to maintaining both soil fertility and the productive capacity of households over extended periods. Therefore, decisionsâregarding which crops to sow and which fields to fallow and for how longâmust be taken at the supra-household, often ayllu and village levels.48 Cultivating out of sequence, ignoring calls for coordination and cooperation and generally breaking other arrangements regarding cropping and fallowing are âa major source of conflictâ and âcan have disastrous effects.â49 Moreover, while periodic reallotting of land can have an equalising effect (by granting people access to lands of different quality and allowing have-nots to meet their tribute quotas), the irregular layout of holdings means that each year some families will be forced to leave a disproportionate amount of their plots uncultivated.50 Recall here MarÃaâs plea that her fields at Cancaurco not be âsuspendedââleft fallowâas in previous years.
In sum, simultaneous claims over the rayas of Chacasmarca and Chilcasonique and the land that they enclosed, made by MarÃa as well as the ayllus Pelle and Chacallongo, especially applied to communal sectors, such as Cancaurco, where, due to inheritance practices, common field and family holdings would eventually be found next to each other, and thus particular rights coexisted with collective ones at any given time. In a way, as we will see, the widowâs court case was triggered by the viceregal decree rezoning Cancaurco as part of the larger, multi-ayllu Carania commons, which included both ayllus Pelle and Chacallongo. But MarÃaâs predicament had begun earlier when, upon the death of her husband, the elder Diego Caxauarco, around 1640, her status changed from married woman ascribed to her husbandâs ayllu to that of widow with two minors. This shift unleashed the dialectic of uncommoning and recommoning, discussed in the next section.
4 Widows and the Law of Sapçi
In his expanded ruling, Caraniaâs Native municipal judge revealed some of the local, contingent norms by which the widow had remained in control of the fields for three or four years. He highlighted how, as we have already seen, Diego, son to MarÃaâs late husband, was a direct descendant of the apical ancestor, Apu Caxauarco. It is important to note that the name of MarÃaâs daughter was never mentioned in the trial, which suggests that, for the issue of securing continued access to the fields, MarÃaâs ancestry and kinship affiliation, as well as her female line of descent, mattered less than her male childâs patrilineage and her late husband being in-ayllu with Pelle.51 As discussed in the previous section, information first mined by Murra from the Huánuco and Chucuito inspections of the 1560s sheds some light on the inheritance principles likely at play: the elder Diego Caxauarco and his ancestors had probably enjoyed continuous possession of their plot within Pelleâs domain somewhat freelyâthat is, with minor communal oversight over land, labour, and productâperhaps because the plots were not considered to be in Carania originally.52 From the perspective of Ayllu Pelle, the lineageâs control over Chacasmarca and Chilcasonique rested on a discommoning of sortsâa partial disentanglement of certain fields from the nominally collective domain for several generationsâdue to a land distribution said to have occurred more than a century before.53
After Diegoâs demise, Ayllu Pelle had regained control of the plot. Instead of dividing up this portion of the tabla among Diegoâs close relatives, members of his lineage or his ayllu in common, as seems to have been the general custom, Pelle had decided to let it pass undivided to MarÃa. A crucial point to understand is that, despite the semblance of continuity in family possession since time immemorial, Pelle had communalised the land anew, placing it under much tighter communal oversight, only to give it back to MarÃa, not to her husbandâs kin, under a different regime. MarÃa, now a widow, was to enjoy the fields, though as part of a new regime, that of Pelleâs tierras de comunidad or sapçi chacaras, until her son came of age and married. At that point, both the rayas and the obligation to support an elderly MarÃa would probably be conveyed to him and his wife.54 The field would then be removed from the collective domainâcommunal supervision over labour and surplus would decreaseâas Diego reclaimed it for his own household.55 That, along with the familyâs own labour and enhanced control over the land and its surplus, would redefine this segment of the tabla as a household plot within the Cancaurco sector. Until then, the plot would remain a special category of sapçi chacara.
Likely the centrepiece of a larger conceptual universe, the Quechua term sapçi, as it applied to certain land holdings, appears scattered in a series of interrelated contexts. To our knowledge, the Jesuit priest and missionary Diego González HolguÃn offered the first textual codification of sapçi in his 1608 Quechua vocabulary, where it appears as a feature of certain nouns meaning âthat which is common to allâ (cosa común de todos), perhaps the most famous shorthand for the Native Andean commons. The lexicographer also presents sapçichacra, or âcommunal plotâ, and sapçiñam, or âcommunal roadâ, resources that resulted from the type of social relations embedded in sapçi: assets built, maintained, and controlled by people who saw themselves as part of a given community. Additional Spanish and Quechua expressions related to sapçi place communal endowments at the forefront, as in sapçi ymampas or hazienda de comunidad, which roughly translate as âcommonwealthâ or âthat which belongs to the communityâ.56 Other uses include references to sapçi infrastructure built and maintained by community members, such as common granaries (collca) and corrals (cancha).57
At any given time, sapçi fields, where they existed, were only a portion of a communityâs holdings. In 1644, for example, the lords of Luringuanca, a polity in the Jauja Valley, immediately to the east of Yauyos and HuarochirÃ, described a rather meagre communal endowment. The Luringuancasâ bienes de comunidades (notice the plural, communities) was composed of some liens of which the commons, as the corporate lender, was the beneficiary, as well as âsome parcels and sabsisâ categorised as such at the time. The sabsis (sapçi plots) differed from others, particularly in that they were worked âcommunallyâ and in equitable turns by all able ayllu members to help pay the Luringuancasâ tribute in specie.58 As noted by Guillet and others, communally ploughed plots embodied a labour regime wherein collective oversight due to fiscal exigencies was paramount. As in Carania, these properly communal fields were interspersed with, but clearly distinguishable from, family-controlled ones within the same sectors. The community contributed both seed and labour to these communal fields, making them sapçi. Through ritual and political mechanisms, the community also maintained control over these fieldsâ surplus, which could be stored in monetary form in the famous community lockboxes, and regulated planting and harvesting as well as the crop to be grown in any given year within the rotational cycle. Produce was often earmarked to meet communal obligationsâfiscal, religious, or otherwise. Common fields were also worked collectively to support those serving in positions of authority and their families (who the Spanish reimagined as the cacique class) or those rendering their labour elsewhere on behalf of the commons.59
Reciprocity extended to other groups within the community. Yxmauarmi chacran were plots of the sapçi type, but they could be set aside from the collective domain for assignment to widows, such as MarÃa, to be worked by them or others on their behalf.60 Relief of the poor was, in fact, an important communal obligation, which made the use of sapçi chacaras even more appropriate. This was not a mere hand-out, however, for, as Bianca Premo has demonstrated for Chucuito, a region heavily impacted by a gender imbalance occasioned by the Potosà mita, women played a central role as tribute producers in their community and were, often heads of households, like MarÃa.61
Some of the gendered dimensions of sapçi that shaped MarÃaâs claims in Carania can be grasped through another extremely rare document, this one pertaining to Ananguanca, a central Andean polity comprising several ayllus that neighboured Luringuanca to the immediate south. In the 1570s, the Ananguancas had received a restitution of 8,000 pesosâa recommoning of illegitimately appropriated surplus by their encomenderos. The interest was earmarked for tending to the sick and destitute as well as providing a dowry to help impoverished, orphaned girls marry well. In the 1660s, almost a century later, the Ananguancas had not yet collected on the revenues accrued by this now sizable investment fund, totalling some 45,000 pesos and administered by distant authorities in Lima.62
To determine how to best apportion these proceeds, local priests, Native municipal authorities, caciques, and commoners gathered in 1664 and prepared a comprehensive census register of the poor and needy among the Ananguancas. The list of 342 people, broken down by village and ayllu, includes 195 poor men (57 percent of those listed), all of tributary age (between 18 and 49) and presumably unable to meet their tribute quota; and 145 poor orphaned maidens (42 percent), all between 11 and 46 years of age but mostly in their mid to late teens and early 20s.63 While no further information is provided for the men, the list includes information about the parents of the 145 poor orphaned maidens (solteras güerfanas). These 103 additional individuals (22 fathers and 81 mothers) raise the total number of people included in the list from 342 to 445.64 Women (all listed as âpoorâ or âvery poorâ) now represent more than half (51 percent) of the sample. Moreover, some of those listed as poor single âorphansâ in fact lived with their two parents (11.7 percent), but these couples were always described as destitute, elderly, or disabled. Equally telling, while 40 percent of the young single women classified as poor and orphaned had both parents missing, the majority (41.4 percent) were fatherless and had a poor or very poor widowed mother. This was perhaps to be expected within Ananguancaâs villages, where years of failed crops and unattended fields, compulsory work in nearby mercury mines and onerous tribute obligations translated into high mortality and absentee rates for local men, which made it hard for impoverished women to find a partner.65 Nonetheless, destitute widows with at least one dependent daughter represented 29 percent of the total poor and more than half (56 percent) of the total women listed in the census. At the very least, these numbers suggest that although failure to meet tribute quotas (for which caciques were ultimately responsible) was likely the most urgent concern behind the Ananguancasâ efforts to collect the money then sitting in Lima, widows with young children, like MarÃa, were among the main recipients of sapçi aid.
Thus, much like MarÃa, elders, orphans, and the infirm in Carania, and those who, in the words of Murra, â[did] not have enough relatives to really make in loud tones and in an assertive way the claim to the reciprocity which [was] due themâ,66 depended for their livelihood on continuous forms of land and labour commoning, so much so that for the Native colonial author Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, supporting the aylluâs âpoor and destituteâ was the utmost reason for the existence of the agropastoral commons.67 An earlier ecclesiastical inspection in Carania had revealed 26 reservados (individuals exempt from tribute) out of a population of 407 villagers (about 6 percent of the total).68 Now reclassified as a widow, MarÃa had joined this category, gaining access to Pelleâs commons in the form of an yxmauarmi chacran. Letting a seemingly destitute widow enjoy the product of sapçi fields more autonomously, thereby loosening communal oversight over surplus, was how the whole planned to honour its duty toward one of its constituent parts.
Things did not turn out that way, however. Widowhood, possible need, and in-ayllu relationships only tell part of MarÃaâs story in Carania. Labour contributions and other obligations became equally significant in validating MarÃaâs possession of the fields at Cancaurco, especially under the new agreement. MarÃaâs contractual duties toward Ayllu Pelle are not spelled out, but they can be surmised from the precious little that we can gather from similar examples. Although specific ayllu expectations depended on age, gender, able-bodiedness and, ultimately, kinship network, widows, single women and elderly men were often required to work communal fields.69 MarÃa was likely able to till the fields, either alone or with the aid of close relatives, in which case no additional help from Ayllu Pelle would be required. In neighbouring HuarochirÃ, a tabla was understood as a piece of land that a single person could cultivate in a single day.70 Custom dictated, moreover, that she and her children contribute other age and gender-based tasks, such as weaving or guarding communal herds, for the overall benefit of the collective.71 Only if no direct descendants outlived MarÃa would the Cancaurco lands remain communal, to be reassigned by the heads of Ayllu Pelle.72
By enacting the law of sapçi, Ayllu Pelle had renewed its commitment to one of its members, though not for long. Ultimately, MarÃa was to reject this agreement, instead entering a written claim before the municipal court and thus placing herself partially outside ayllu norms as well as recruiting other legal paradigms about land and tenure to her cause. Before we discuss MarÃaâs choices, however, let us turn to Chacallongo, the collective behind the request for a new land distribution, and its stake in this matter. Considering the recent viceregal decree rezoning Cancaurco, Pelleâs previous confirmation of MarÃaâs exclusive rights looked like an attempt by this ayllu to discommon a resource from the newly defined multi-ayllu Carania commons for the sake of a single household. Chacallongoâs voice was never heard during MarÃaâs complaint, yet the ayllu spoke loudly through its attempts at recommoning.
5 Whose Commons?
The viceregal decree had reserved the eight terraces of the Cancaurco sector for âthe benefit of the community.â The intertwined issues of who could benefit from the commons and in exchange for what were now coming to the surface. For three generations, MarÃaâs fields had also been recognised as part of Pelleâs domain. Nevertheless, by virtue of some negotiated agreement predating MarÃaâs initial complaint, Chacallongo now enjoyed rights over seven of the eight subdivisions at Cancaurco, and Pelle enjoyed rights over the eighth. There was likely a proportional relationship among the parcels controlled by each ayllu, reflecting ayllu size, seniority and available resources outside Cancaurco, among other variables constitutive of inter-ayllu rank and prominence. Indeed, at least four other ayllus cohabited in Carania at this time. Under the nominal authority of the municipality, these collectives shared the villageâs municipal land reserve but probably held farm and pasture lands beyond as well.
Viceregal decree in hand, Chacallongo now wanted to see the whole of Cancaurco defined as commons. There were at play, however, interlocking understandings of the definition of communal. Although comunes de indios could share access to resources with other groups and individuals, simultaneously or sequentially, any commons is meaningful only in relation to that which is not part of it. In other words, the commons âis always governedâ, and it is rarely a synonym for open, unregulated access.73 Colonial sapçi regimes, though widespread, required some degree of enclosure and administration even if customary rights of common usage for certain individuals and collectives were preserved or negotiated anew. Although open or unclaimed resources could coexist with collectively held ones, they were not one and the same. Colonial reserves of comunes de indios, such as Carania, were exclusive to individuals within a collective. Their boundaries, however, were relational; that is, they depended on the shifting arrangements that bound old and new ayllus together for the reproduction of a specific commons.74 A 1657 loan brings the many levels through which these relationships were mediated into sharper focus. Upon lending 10,000 pesos to a Spanish resident of a nearby city, Native authorities in Luringuanca asked that an unusual proviso be added to the contract: although on paper and for legal purposes the money would be owed to the whole of Luringuanca, the funds belonged to the individual communities (comunidades) of each of its seven villages. The individual ayllus operated as the main keepers of Luringuancaâs nominal endowment.75
Susan RamÃrezâs detailed analysis of petitions for land brought before Supreme Justice Gregorio González de Cuenca in 1566 illustrates relational definitions of common and adds temporal depth to MarÃaâs mid-17th-century claims. The leader of the community of Guaman, in the Chimu Valley near Trujillo, described a type of open, apparently unclaimed land as âa common thing and open to all and of which no one could have nor acquire possession.â76 While RamÃrez interprets the caciqueâs statement as applying to pre-Hispanic land in general, other petitions filed during the same inspection underscore narrower definitions of common. Miguel Cerquen, of Ayllu Ferreñafe, complained that, to support his family, he had been toiling in âsome lands that are held in common.â However, large irrigation infrastructure was sapçi, and his caciques had denied him access to water, making cultivation impossible. Thus, he asked the judge to ease communal oversight by ordering the caciques to grant him access to the canals that watered the fields, âfor they are held in common.â77 The plots in question fell within the canalsâ reach, which indicates that the plots, while of Miguelâs exclusive use, were also in-ayllu and thus subject to commoning and recommoning. These lands were not open to the same degree as were the lands mentioned by the lord of Guaman in his 1566 petition. Properly speaking, the lands were not common but communalâthat is, exclusive to Ferreñafe.
In a similar case from the same year, Felipe Filmirref, a head of Ayllu Ferreñafe, expressed his need of a plot to pay tribute and to support his wife, four children and many destitute relatives. Although Felipe had âno known lands of my ownâ, the caciques had denied him the right to toil âin the communal lands that have no recognised dueño and are uncultivated.â Thus, he asked to be allowed to work a portion of the communal sector, then fallow or barren.78 Again, while the fields were untilled, they were not common to the point of being open range or up for grabs. Felipeâs ayllu had domained them, establishing social boundaries to claim them as tierras de comunidad. Felipe, like MarÃa in Carania, wanted the judge to intervene and secure his discommoning of the fields through family labour. Although Felipeâs petition refers to these fields ambiguously as âcommunal landsâ, they were different from sapçi lands. Rather than being set aside and laboured communally to fulfil collective obligations, they were to be worked and managed by a household or extended family, under varying degrees of communal oversight. Felipeâs complaint shows that, as in the case of MarÃa, individual work performed in common fields was supposed to guarantee access to and continued use of house plots. In referring to this social contract, which he claimed had existed before the conquest, colonial magistrate Polo Ondegardo differentiated between these two types of âlandâ. His 1561 report to the Crown explained that individuals agreed to honour supra-household demands to work in common, mainly in the form of tilling communal tracts destined to satisfy labour tribute quotas, only so their remaining time could be used to satisfy their individual needs: labouring their fields, tending their herds and weaving their clothes. Tribute in labour (and, after the conquest, in labour and specie) was supposed to be given de comunidadâthat is, by labouring the communal fields, but never from the householdâs estate (hacienda).79
6 The Casting of Communal Seed
After this necessary detour into the bundle of landholding rights that shaped the relationship between part and whole, we can now return to Carania village, Chacallongo, and the fields at Cancaurco. Already by the court caseâs starting date, Chacallongo had come to perceive the discommoning of Chacasmarca and Chilcasonique, formerly within Pelleâs domain, on behalf of Caxauarcoâs descendants as a form of temporary uncommoning, rooted in a prior enclosure of collectively claimed resources at the multi-ayllu level. Pelleâs decision seemed arbitraryâthat is, intra- rather than inter-ayllu. As Frank Salomon suggests, the commons is also a matter of perspective. Indeed, the dynamics of commoning and uncommoning fully emerge when grasped as multileveled phenomena: as social actions that link, in descending order of inclusiveness, community, ayllu, extended family, and household. Referring to present-day sociedades in Tupicocha (located in Huarochirà province), lineage-based groupings that mediate between household and ayllu, Salomon suggests that âwhen an asset of putative ayllu commons is put in use by one component sociedad, from the viewpoint of nonbeneficiaries it is privatized, but (so to speak) sapçichasqa [or] âsapsifiedâ from the sociedad membersâ viewpoint.â80 MarÃaâs predicament not only makes sense in this light but also illuminates the importance of individual and collective labour as well as communal oversight in setting the shifting boundaries between ownership normative regimes at any given time.
Indeed, alongside the more static definitions of commons discussed earlier, generally reproduced in the specialised literature, González HolguÃnâs Quechua vocabulary describes open-ended activities performed on behalf of a collective, including âcommunal tasksâ and âcommunal workâ (trechos or faenas).81 Pertinent here is Peter Linebaughâs insight that âcommoning is embedded in a labor process.â82 This explains why Native authors deeply familiar with sapçi regimes extended the notion of sapçi to mills, vineyards, textile workshops, tanneries, and even liens on real estateâall of which, more than âthingsâ or âassetsâ, represented the fruit of collective labour and supervision and, as such, were subject to temporary uncommoning and eventual recommoning.83 In the late 16th century, Ayllu Angaraes, settled near the Huancavelica mercury mines, leased a communal mine to a widow for 200 pesos, to be spent on behalf of the commons. The community of Huamachuco similarly owned a textile mill, a cattle estate, and its surrounding pastures for 200 years, working them rotationally and collectively for the benefit of the community.84 In all these cases, cooperation, regimented labour, and communal control mechanisms were the forces articulating collective rights and privative (not private) claims over time. This dialectic also accounts for the moving boundaries between resources held communally and those held particularly but in-ayllu. Seen through acts of commoning and uncommoning, they were ultimately one and the same. Ayllu holdings included both and thus were not limited to sapçi cultivation zones. Sapçi holdings, for their part, were not limited to land.
From Chacallongoâs vantage point, then, Pelleâs decision to communalise a family plot by reinserting it into its commonsâonly to give the plot back to MarÃa and her children in the form of an yxmauarmi chacranâseemed like an act of sequestering. Pelleâs decision had sown a potential source of social differentiation among commonersâ extended families within ayllus that fulfilled common obligations and owned land equitably and proportionally. The decision therefore threatened the balance between equity and inequality found within any commons.85 In this new scenario, which stemmed from the passing of Diego Caxauarco and the attendant viceregal reassignment of communal lands within the village holdings, Chacallongo probably faulted Pelle as much as it did Apu Caxauarcoâs descendants, who felt entitled to the fields by customary rights established since time immemorial, for breaking an ancient agreement. In other words, communal principles set the limits of hereditary ones, constraining the ways in which âlandâ could be disposed of within family and household.86 This clash probably explains why Chacallongo appealed to the Crown for confirmation of its ancestral rights in the first place. Pelle, in Chacallongoâs view, was extending a claim over communal plots that it was not going to work collectively but would reassign to one of its individual members. Claims of ancestral possession, while appealing to judges, seemed vacuous from the vantage of ayllu norms without the labour obligations that they carried along with the land.
The casting of communal seed over MarÃaâs holdings thus became a central piece in Chacallongoâs insistence on enforcing its collective rights. Other contemporary rulings show that local judges were perfectly aware that seed could belong to a specific household, to be brought to fruition by the labour of its members.87 But Chacallongoâs was sapçi seed, of the type mentioned in a 1657 anti-idolatry trial: seed stored in communal granary deposits after the collective harvest. During that trial, villagers in San Juan de Machaca (Cajatambo) were charged with working maize fields whose crops were earmarked for the cult of the groupâs forebears, original tillers of the plots, and therefore stored as âsaucisâ [sapçi].88 A similar judicial inquiry from 1667 regarding priestly conduct in the province of Yauyos further clarifies the special status of sapçi seed, showing that community, as Karen Spalding once noted regarding neighbouring HuarochirÃ, extended through time and space to include the dead.89 Villagers listed maize among the offerings placed on tombstones during the celebration of All Saintsâ Day (1 November). Individuals and married couples contributed one or two reales to pay for mass and eulogies in honour of âthe community of the dead of the villageâ, distinguished by ayllu. At the donorsâ discretion, small candles, wine, potatoes, and handfuls of maize were placed atop their graves. Nonetheless, collective contributions complemented particular ones, apparently to guarantee that all those departed received something. Indeed, authorities tendered a customary three pesos and three reales of limosna (alms) to the priest from the bienes de comunidad of each pueblo, paid from the sale of produce from collectively farmed chacras de comunidad. And, important for understanding Chacallongoâs strategy, each común contributed half a fanegaâs worth of âmaiz de la comunidadâ, communal maize to be placed on the tombstones.90
With his ruling, which ordered MarÃa to return the seed (or its equivalent) to Chacallongo, the municipal judge in the 1644 case simultaneously acknowledged that the seed encapsulated the aylluâs kinship ties and collective energy while recognising that only labour, MarÃaâs or Chacallongoâs, could bring about a full harvest (thus entitling that person to the produce). From the judgeâs perspective, if the seed were allowed to germinate and the seedlings to emerge, they would grant Chacallongo an initial claim to the harvest. For MarÃa to give the seeds back was a way to counteract their power to collectivise. Scattering them over the fields, conversely, was Chacallongoâs plan for redrawing the legal and physical boundaries between the individual and the collective. These actions can be read as a defence of commoning under shifting circumstances and perhaps external, unstated pressures (i.e., an increase in tribute demands).91 From Chacallongoâs viewpoint, the disputed pieces of farmland now belonged to a larger holding (a terrace) that, rather than benefiting a specific lineage or household, no matter how prominent or destitute, was meant to aid a certain commons to fulfil its collective obligations. Sapçi seed was a powerful signifier, recognised by all the parties involved, that common rights were forged through labour and cooperation, in this case performed during a previous harvest.
Thus, the counter practice of communalising advocated by Chacallongo in 1644, which on paper looks like the reappropriation of the fields by the larger Carania commons, seamlessly makes its way into the legal dossier, transmuted into an act of possession that colonial courts could understand well. By scattering sapçi seed over the disputed plot and its boundary markers and by expecting its occupants to work the fields on Chacallongoâs behalf, members of this ayllu were attempting to âsapçifyâ, or common anew, the fields in question. The harvest would belong not to one but to all its members, thus contributing to the puebloâs tribute quota. The plants and the labour that they demanded to reach full term would gradually accomplish the rest, fully dissolving MarÃaâs family rights into those of the collective. In one of the entries for sapçi in his 1608 Quechua vocabulary, a generally overlooked expression in the first person, González HolguÃn was likely referring to actions of this sort, of rendering the privative communal: sapçichani, or âI communaliseâ.92 Let us not forget, however, that Caraniaâs municipal judge sided with MarÃa, not once but twice, upholding her decision not to let the lands go fallow against ayllu and seemingly communal consensus. We now turn to this final aspect of the case.
7 (Un)Commoning: Strategy and Practice
Even after a careful reading of the record, it is hard to tease out MarÃaâs thoughts and motivations. Her two written complaints and the judgesâ subsequent rulings add up to only a handful of poorly written pages that leave many questions unanswered. From her perspective, the casting of communal seed probably meant the imposition of a male-led majorityâs will. Moreover, she was likely prompted to go to court by the dire prospect of the lands that her family had tilled for decades being reabsorbed into Pelleâs domain (if no heirs were to survive her) or, even worse, shifting to Chacallongoâs communal sector. She was, in a way, trying to escape the law of sapçi, hoping instead for a kind of exclusive guardianship over her sonâs patrimonial lands, which would resonate with Iberian practices familiar to Native and Spanish judges alike. As Wesley Chaney argues for village dwellers in Northern China, adjudication of this type âdelineated âownershipââ¯â in ways that made communal parcels under dispute âlegibleâ to the state. As such, litigants might use them âto push adversaries off the commons.â93 Thus, before the municipal judge, MarÃa questioned the amount of seed that she was expected to plant or care for on Chacallongoâs behalf by reframing her tenure within a different normative logic. Shifting the emphasis from the whole to the part, she declared instead that the boundary lines had always been her property and that the planting of communal seed, especially for Chacallongo, was none of her business. Yet, MarÃa could not make her obligations disappear without her claims on the land evaporating as well.
Memorialising her husbandâs patrilineage and the cross-generational, uninterrupted possession of individual parcels through writing was possibly another of MarÃaâs aspirations.94 Like other women in her time, MarÃa probably knew that tales of ancestral family possession and female dispossession, translated into legal writing (especially âtitlesâ to land), would resonate with municipal judges (as well as the two Spanish magistrates overseeing her case) familiar with the entanglement of Native and Spanish norms of land and tenure. She was one of the countless Native legal innovators who contributed to Yauyosâs rich colonial legal culture, always in the making.95 Similarly, Chacallongoâs collective actions show that uncommoning and recommoning were the dialectic behind land management in Carania, a dialectic that could also translate well into legal narratives and genres (i.e., a viceregal decree or a municipal ruling) available to, and perhaps even proliferating because of, individuals and collectives interacting with judges capable of accommodating multiple legal registers within Indigenous jurisdictions.96 Although rooted in Andean norms, these practices could be turned into strategies catalysed by, and legible to, the Iberian legal processes and expectations with which they constantly intersected.
Nonetheless, although MarÃaâs decision to file her complaint before the village council could be read as an effort to take advantage of a superior instance of justice to privatise a collective resource by way of colonial law, her strategic appeal was also an attempt to communalise intra- and inter-ayllu arrangementsâwithin Pelle and Chacallongo, but also between themâby subjecting these ayllusâ norms to the oversight and control of the larger Carania commons in its municipal expression. Municipal councils exerted jurisdiction over several ayllus and seem to have mainly intervened in disputes among them, but they were also more than the sum of their parts. Let us not forget that the Native judgeâs second, expanded ruling went so far as to contradict the viceregal decree favouring Chacallongo. MarÃaâs legal strategy was sound because enclosing practices were, of course, intelligible within the Iberian tradition and, in the case of Native communities, upheld by the Crown.97 However, the strategy came at a cost: MarÃa had to recast her defence of the commons in particular terms: as an affair that concerned only herself and not her ayllu. Pelle could have stood in MarÃaâs stead during the trial because, according to the rulings, it had claimed control over this parcel as commonage. Instead, it remained off the record.98
On the other hand, Chacallongoâs concerted will to overrule the municipal judgeâs mandate (not once but twice) is a reminder that while ayllu governance was included in, and in theory subject to, the municipal councilâs wider jurisdictionâas MarÃa seems to have known wellâayllu norms and practices could and did transcend the cabildo. While the record is mostly silent about local politicsâit does not even reveal the municipal judgeâs aylluâit does suggest that the cabildoâs authority over land status and allocation within the village was not paramount but partial and contested. Caraniaâs cabildo seems ill-equipped for dealing with disputes concerning two or more ayllus. MarÃaâs story thus reveals a world of agency at the ayllu level and the higher cabildo level, but also beyond the latterâs control. Indeed, in the years to come Chacallongo remained in the field between Chacasmarca and Chilcasonique despite MarÃaâs stern opposition and the municipal judgeâs ruling; the ayllu insisted that, like the other seven tablas at Cancaurco, it was âfor the cultivation and benefit of the community.â99
Yet ironically, Chacallongo was not totally successful. MarÃaâs offspring would take their defence to the high court in Lima, placing it partially outside the purview of communal justice, and insist on recognition of their ancestral possession, to little avail. Two generations later, however, another descendant of Apu Caxauarco, Don Francisco Domingo de Salazar Caxauarco, would sell the lands originally under dispute to yet another Carania aylluâTarcaâfor 50 pesos. With the sale, the fields between Chacasmarca and Chilcasonique joined Tarcaâs commonage. Don Franciscoâs actions triggered a new lawsuit, this time between Tarca and Ayllu Collana, setting in motion yet again the gruelling cycle of uncommoning and recommoning that animated village life in Carania.
8 Conclusion
The colonial Andean commons is, to a large extent, still a commons of the imaginary. It is mainly through municipal sources and local histories, such as MarÃa Jamarcaâs, that the waxing and waning of these collectives through commoning, as it applied to land, water, and other resources, begin to come to the fore. Yet, as the anthropologists Mario Blaser and De la Cadena suggest, even when the commons is âeffectively constituted by commoning [â¦] the uncommons are right below the surface.â100 Comunes de indios held the common and the uncommon together, under a multitiered system of ayllu governance and normativity trying to regulate individual and collective energies in flux. It can be argued, borrowing from Judith Farquhar, Lili Lai, and Marshall Kramerâs analysis of a southern Chinese villageâs engagements with state power, that individual and communal elements found at the intra- and inter-ayllu levels, perhaps the least theorised and least studied aspect of precontact and colonial Andean commons, existed in a mutual relationship in which they âar[o]se from each other and [we]re rooted in each other.â101
While the evidence presented in this essay is hardly sufficient to state categorically that central Andean customs of commoning / uncommoning the land predated the Spanish conquest, it seems to be a reasonable conclusion. Other testimonies describing similar practices and understandings, produced before Francisco de Toledoâs 1570s massive reducción general (general forced resettlement) of the Native population, a momentous undertaking during whichâmost scholars assumeâEuropean modes of land tenure would have been introduced and spread across the Andes, strongly suggest this might have been the case.102 As I have demonstrated, not all tracts were or became âcommon to allâ through collective labour, normative force and strict communal oversight, as is often assumed. Sapçi fields coexisted with farmlands ploughed and possessed by individuals, households, and extended families over variable periods, sometimes several generations. More importantly, lands switched regimes in response to shifting power relations and, in the longer term, state definitions of the indigenous/peasant community, entering and leaving the common-field sector periodically. Even when significant portions of ayllu agricultural lands were parcelled out or transferred via sale and inheritance among community members, as had happened in Carania already at the time of MarÃaâs court case, complex mechanisms of collective oversight governing these parcels, which we can only barely detect in the documents, remained in place and were constantly acknowledged and negotiated. Community was in no way antithetical to particular control and use, as previous ethnohistorical analyses have suggested. Within ayllu relationshipsâwhat De la Cadena calls being in-aylluâthe individual and the collective encroached on one another constantly.
Moreover, these socially constructed relations between persons and things had important but imperfect correlates in the language of Iberian law, custom, and practice; these relations often found partial expression in legal fictions and genres as well as widespread doctrines about individual and collective forms of domain. As such, they became legal strategies as well, successfully deployed by plaintiffs and defendants alike. The legal literacy of this storyâs characters and their familiarity with such forms are beyond question. In Carania and elsewhere, Native subjects constantly exploited these partial correlates or alignments in wills, titles, lawsuits, and cabildo records. Similarly, colonial officials registered, selected and even reinvented Native customs, reinscribing them in their own legal traditions.103 Their control over Native local normativity and the contingencies of a communityâs reproduction, however, was more of an aspiration than a reality. The important point to remember is that, although cases, such as MarÃaâs, can be said to reflect heterogenous (and ultimately hegemonic) paradigms about land and tenure, legal fictions and narratives do not fully capture local, historically contingent practices of commoning and uncommoning. They must be reconstructed empirically by examining novel cases and re-examining familiar ones. Indeed, the parties involved in MarÃaâs timely engagement with the courts can be said to have acted within the bounds of colonial law, but their actions repeatedly exceeded it as well.
Acknowledgments
I extend my gratitude to Tamar Herzog, Manuel Bastias Saavedra, Camilla de Freitas Macedo and the anonymous readers of Brill for their valuable comments on the original essay.
âwith Vn obillo de cabuya para medir chacaras.â âAuto de prosecución de la almoneda pública de los bienes de Francisca Collocâ, Cuzco, 22 September 1586. Archivo Regional del Cuzco, Protocolos Notariales, 4 (Pedro de la Carrera Ron/Pedro Quispe), fol. 695r. I thank Gabriela Ramos for sharing this precious information with me.
Pease G.Y., âLa noción de propiedad entre los Incasâ, 11; Hernández Astete, âLa historiografÃa andina y la idea de propiedadâ; RamÃrez, âEl concepto de âcomunidadââ¯â, 183â184; RamÃrez, âLand and Tenure in Early Colonial Peruâ, 10; RamÃrez, âDespedazando lo comúnâ, 288, 299; Noejovich Chernoff, Los albores de la economÃa americana. Although the use of the term property in Andean ethnohistory has been common, it is partially anachronistic. 16th- and 17th-century jurists would have understood tenure in terms of domain (dominio or señorÃo), which encompassed property and other related legal regimes, such as dominio directo, dominio útil, posesión and detentación. Bastias Saavedra, âThe Normativity of Possessionâ; Gonzales Escudero, âUna aproximación procesal a la defensa de la tierra indÃgenaâ. An early critique of the alleged incompatibility between widespread practices found within Andean peasant communities, such as labour exchanges among households and collective labour recruitment and self-interest and calculation survival, can be found in Guillet, âAgro-Pastoral Land Useâ, 14â15.
De Dios et al., Historia de la propiedad en España; Greer, Property and Dispossession, 16 [quote]; Herzog, Frontiers of Possession; Izquierdo, El rostro de la comunidad.
On land held as commons in Spain and other parts of Europe, see also Arguedas, Las comunidades de España y del Perú; Conte, âThe Many Legal Faces of the Commonsâ; Greer, Property and Dispossession, 249â250; Herzog, âHow did the Commons Become Terra nullius?â; Vassberg, Land and Society in Golden Age Castile, 26â64. On the type of farming known as sectoral fallowing or common-field agriculture, found in the Central Andes and the Iberian Peninsula, see Godoy, âThe Evolution of Common-Field Agricultureâ. For poignant critiques of these assumptions, see Bastias Saavedra, âThe Normativity of Possessionâ; Godoy, âThe Evolution of Common-Field Agricultureâ, 401, n. 5; Graubart, ââ¯âYnuvaciones malas e rreprouadasââ¯â, 160; Graubart, âShifting Landscapesâ, 67; Greer, Property and Dispossession, 16, 95.
Graubart, âShifting Landscapesâ, 78.
Most notably, see Graubart, Republics of Difference. For New Spain, for which this topic has been thoroughly addressed, see Gibson, The Aztecs under Spanish Rule, 257â299; Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest, 141â202; Villella, ââ¯âFor So Long the Memories of Men Cannot Contradict Itââ¯â. For Spanish and Portuguese America, see Herzog, Frontiers of Possession. For North America more broadly, see Greer, Property and Dispossession.
Medelius and Puente Luna, âCuracas, bienes y quipusâ; Puente Luna, âCustoms Apartâ.
Greer, Property and Dispossession, 53â54.
Greer, Property and Dispossession, 34â35.
Serulnikov, âThe Politics of Intracommunity Land Conflictâ. Anthropologists doing fieldwork in the Andes in the 1970s and 1980s thoroughly documented this coexistence. Albó, La paradoja aymara, 18; Benavides, âTenencia de tierras agrÃcolas en el valle del Colcaâ, 62; Cadena, EconomÃa campesina, 33â35; Cadena, âCooperacÃón y mercado en la organización comunal andinaâ, 44â43; Gálvez, Ansión, and Degregori, âLo individual y lo colectivo en la comunidad andinaâ; Guillet, Agrarian Reform and Peasant Economy; Mayer and Cadena, Cooperación y conflicto en la comunidad andina, 29; Ossio A., âLa propiedad en las comunidades andinasâ, 36, 56â57.
Readers interested in a more detailed assessment of the literature can see an earlier version of this study, published as Puente Luna, âOf Widows, Furrows, and Seedâ.
Murra, âWaman Pumaâ, 14. See also Murra, âDerechos a las tierras en el Tawantinsuyuâ; Murra, âUna visión indÃgena del mundo andinoâ.
For two examples of Andean cabildos acting as courts of law, see Mumford, âLas llamas de TapacarÃâ; Puente Luna and Honores, âGuardianes de la real justiciaâ. A handful of novel cases is presented in Puente Luna, âCustoms Apartâ. Using late-colonial records, Sergio Serulnikov offers an excellent discussion of intracommunal strife between ayllus and nuclear families in 18th-century Chayanta (Charcas). Serulnikov, âThe Politics of Intracommunity Land Conflictâ. Graubart adds yet another case to the growing corpus, this time from the Lima countryside, in Republics of Difference, 170â171.
Kosiba and Hunter, âFields of Conflictâ.
Bastien, âLand Litigationsâ, 115. Murra emphasised the negotiation and regulation of human energies after eventually moving away from a focus on formal claims to land, because without regimented access to other peopleâs labour, formal claims to land, water and pastures in this context were ultimately hollow. Murra, âDerechos a tierras en el Tawantinsuyuâ, 305â306. On property rights as âobligations owed between persons in respect of thingsâ, see the classic study by Gluckman, Politics, Law, and Ritual in Tribal Society, 46.
Cadena, Earth Beings, 12, 26, 57, 258, 274. Catherine Allen has also recently suggested that people in-ayllu âbring about each other within a relation.â Allen, âFinal Commentariesâ, 339.
Benavides, âApuntes históricos y etnográficos del valle del rÃo Colcaâ, 18â19; Cadena, âCooperación y mercado en la organización comunal andinaâ, 46; Guillet, Agrarian Reform and Peasant Economy; Izko, âComunidad andinaâ, 63â66; Mayer, The Articulated Peasant; Mayer and Cadena, Cooperación y conflicto en la comunidad andina; Orlove and Godoy, âSectoral Fallowing Systems in the Central Andesâ; Orlove, Godoy, and Morlon, âSistemas de barbecho sectorialâ; Ossio A., âLa propiedad en las comunidades andinasâ, 45â48; Stein, âLa práctica de la antropologÃa económica en los Andes peruanosâ, 557â561.
Federici, Re-enchanting the World, 166. Wesley Chaneyâs analysis of commons governance in the Tao River watershed (Northwest China) similarly shows that, âin regulating access to depletable resources, gong [commons] regimes delineated, and perhaps even played a role in defining, the boundaries of a community.â Chaney, âThreats to Gongâ, 47. See also Herzogâs reflections regarding use of land and community membership in Frontiers of Possession, Part II.
Blaser and Cadena, âThe Uncommonsâ, 190; Harvey, âThe Future of the Commonsâ, 105; Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto, 44â45. I am also influenced by Maria à grenâs verb-oriented approach to early modern womenâs work and by the story of Tsuneno, a 19th-century Japanese woman, as beautifully told by Amy Stanley. à gren, âMaking Her Turn Aroundâ; Stanley, âMaidservantsâ Talesâ.
The literature on colonial Andean comunes de indios (Indian communities), a classic subject that bridges ethnohistories about Inca and early colonial times with histories and ethnographies about modern peasant communities, is too voluminous to cite fully. Some of the landmark works include Abercrombie, Pathways of Memory and Power; Rasnake, Domination and Cultural Resistance; Spalding, HuarochirÃ; Stern, Peruâs Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest. A recent, excellent example is Penry, The People Are King. Frank Salomonâs important ethnographic work has critically expanded our knowledge of communal practices and infrastructures for managing collective resources and the legal and moral frameworks governing their use, reproduction and transfer since colonial times. Salomon, âCollca y Sapçiâ; Salomon et al., âLos khipus de Rapaz en casaâ; Salomon et al., âKhipu from Colony to Republicâ; Salomon, âGuaman Pomaâs Sapçi in Ethnographic Visionâ.
An old road still connects Carania with the archaeological site of Huamanmarca, with signs of prehispanic and early colonial occupation. EnrÃquez Tintaya, âResultados preliminaresâ, 86.
Spalding, HuarochirÃ, 13. Upper Yauyos and Lower Yauyos (HuarochirÃ) had been moieties of a single Inca administrative unit. Their inhabitants claimed a common ancestor, Pariacaca mountain. Dávila Briceño, âDescripsionâ, 65â66.
âPues no es justo ni razon que me las usurpen.â âAutos que siguenâ, fols. 11râ11v. Here I use the style for naming ayllus that appears in the original document (âayllo Chacallongoâ, âayllo Pelleâ), which follows traditional Spanish word order. In other parts of the dossier, MarÃa Jamarcaâs name appears as âMarÃa de la Concepciónâ and as âMarÃa Pachanxamarcaâ.
On the use of rayas (literally âlinesâ in Spanish) as mojones (boundaries, landmarks) in a 1595 map of nearby Santo Domingo de Cochalaraos, see Beyersdorff, âCovering the Earthâ, 158, n. 58. The original Quechua expression in this map reads âraya mojonichicâ. âTitulación de la comunidadâ. For modern surcos (furrows, another meaning of rayas) and their role in distributing water evenly within plots, see Soler Bustamante, âLa agriculturaâ, 93, 111. Solerâs ethnography also includes songs and sayings regarding the ploughing of these rayas in the neighbouring village of Huancayre. The original Quechua term being translated was probably âsuyuâ. Itier, Palabras clave de la sociedad y la cultura incas, 263â268.
Wernke, Negotiated Settlements, 260.
âAutos que siguenâ, fols. 11râv. As early as 1566, Indigenous lords and others were making similar claims about inheriting tracts of land from their ancestors. Herzog, âColonial Law and âNative Customsââ¯â, 305â306; RamÃrez, âDespedazando lo comúnâ, 296â298.
âEl mojonado con una piedra.â âAutos que siguenâ, fol. 11r. On the ongoing cult of the âantiguos dueñosâ (ancient owners) of important landmarks around Laraos (across the river from Carania), those who turned into lakes, springs and âpiedras toscas sin figura algunaâ, see âCarta del Padre José de Arévaloâ.
Notice that âCancaurcoâ is the name of a raya as well as the eight tablas.
âHasta que mi hijo aya en hedad no suspenda como en los años passados.â âAutos que siguenâ, fol. 11r.
âques dueño del Diego Caxauarco nieto.â âAutos que siguenâ, fol. 11v.
âAutos que siguenâ, fols. 11râv. MarÃa refers to Apu Caxauarco as her grandfather (âmi besagueloâ), but the succession presented thereafter suggests a shorter genealogical distance between her husband and this ancestor.
âpobre muger desatenado.â âAutos que siguenâ, fol. 12r.
Ethnographic work conducted in the 1950s in the villages of San Pedro de Huancaire and Santiago de Anchucaya (HuarorchirÃ; former Lurin Yauyos), related to the cultivation of potatoes, maize, and other crops, confirms that fieldwork was divided by sex and age. While adult men generally handled the ox plough (where available), women of different ages performed equally demanding tasks, including the planting of seed and their selection and categorisation after the harvest. Other, almost exclusively female tasks included hilling, watering and weeding. Matos Mar, Las actuales comunidades, 290; Soler Bustamante, âLa agricultura en la comunidad de San Pedro de Huancaireâ, 111â122. On the contribution of women to Andean household and communal economies in general, see Brush and Guillet, âSmall-Scale Agro-Pastoral Productionâ, 25.
âesta Yndia.â âAutos que siguenâ, fol. 12r.
An entire sentence, probably detailing what was to happen with the communal seed, is torn from the original document.
âno se entremitan el ayllo Chacallongo en las rrayas de comunidad del ayllo Pelle.â âAutos que siguenâ, fol. 12v.
Glave, âLa cuadratura del cÃrculo y las rendijas del encierroâ, 106â107; Spalding, HuarochirÃ, 178â180.
Schmitt Perea, âSan AgustÃn de Guaquisâ.
âResidencia: Diego Dávila Briceñoâ, fol. 313r. Forced resettlement, in Spaldingâs view, âdid not affect the landholding patterns of the social groups [in HuarochirÃ] to any significant degree.â Spalding, HuarochirÃ, 179.
My research on this point aligns with Serulnikovâs findings for 18th-century Pocoata, a village in Northern PotosÃ. According to this author, âcollective possession and repartition of land seems to have been mostly vested at the ayllu level.â Serulnikov, âThe Politics of Intracommunity Land Conflictâ, 122.
âJuan AgustÃn Vargas contra Sebastián Rojasâ, fol. 40v. Huaychana is recognised as one of the peasant communityâs agricultural sectors today.
Brush and Guillet, âSmall-Scale Agro-Pastoral Productionâ, 26; Guillet, Agrarian Reform and Peasant Economy, 54, 72; Guillet, âLand Tenure, Ecological Zone, and Agricultural Regimeâ, 140â141; Godoy, âThe Evolution of Common-Field Agricultureâ, 403; Godoy, Mining and Agriculture in Highland Bolivia, 40â41.
Godoy, Mining and Agriculture, 46. As Serulnikov reminds us, âthe question in the Andes is not the absence of boundaries but their flexible nature.â âThe Politics of Intracommunity Land Conflictâ, 132. âFixed and stable boundariesâ between plots were introduced in the Bogotá region during the latter half of the 18th century. Castro Benavides, âThe Enclosure of the Ejidos of Bogotáâ, 8â9.
Murra, âDerechos a tierras en el Tawantinsuyuâ, 300â301; Murra, âUna visión indÃgena del mundo andinoâ, liii. Detailed information on these distributions within the town of Sumaroâs communal sector in the 1590s can be found in Amado Gonzales, âReparto de tierras indÃgenasâ, 201â204.
This rotation of cultivated and fallowed patches is documented for the early colonial period. Falcón, âRepresentaciónâ, 465; Garcilaso de la Vega, Primera parte de los comentarios reales, Bk. 5, Chapter 1, 101; Ondegardo, âLas razonesâ, 238.
Guillet, âLand Tenure, Ecological Zone, and Agricultural Regimeâ, 140â141 (gradient); Campbell and Godoy, Commonfield Agriculture, 5, 11â12 (inter-mixed parcels), Linebaugh, Stop, Thief!, 55 (tissue). On the commons as âneither romantic nor staticâ, see also Chaney, âThreats to Gongâ, 47.
This was true of Caraniaâs sectoral fallowing system in the 1970s. Mayer and Fonseca Martel, Sistemas agrarios. For the better-documented case of Laraos, across the Cañete River from Carania, see Brunschwig, âSistemas de producción de laderas de alturaâ; Mayer and Cadena, Cooperación y conflicto en la comunidad andina, 31; Mayer, The Articulated Peasant, 252; Orlove and Godoy, âSectoral Fallowing Systemsâ. For neighbouring HuarochirÃ, see Matos Mar, Las actuales comunidades de indÃgenas, 70â71. For the Mantaro valley between the 16th and 20th centuries, see Adams, A Community in the Andes, 18â21.
For an example of this coordination in 16th-century Charcas, see Jurado (Chapter 6) in this volume.
Guillet, âAgrarian Ecologyâ; Guillet, Agrarian Reform and Peasant Economy, 76â79 [quotes].
Godoy, âThe Evolution of Common-Field Agriculture in the Andesâ, 400, note 4; Campbell and Godoy, Commonfield Agriculture, 16â17.
Evidence for a later period suggests that men in Carania could lay claim to the family lands of their wivesâ ayllu of origin; others found such claims problematic and contested them. âJuan AgustÃn Vargas contra Sebastián Rojasâ, fols. 1râv.
Murra, âDerechos a tierras en el Tawantinsuyuâ, 299â300.
Guillet, âLand Tenure, Ecological Zone, and Agricultural Regimeâ, 142; Long and Roberts, âIntroductionâ, 28. In his ethnographic work in the Mantaro Valley in the 1950s, Richard Adams described decision-making mechanisms for the one-time and gradual division of communal sectors among families and institutions, offering evidence of processes of discommoning dating back to the 16th and 17th centuries. Adams, A Community in the Andes, 18â21.
In the 1970s, in the highland community of Santa LucÃa de Pacaraos (in Canta province), communal authorities still customarily gave preference to widows and sons when reassigning plots within sectoral fallowing lands. Degregori and Golte, Dependencia y desintegración estructural, 46â48. On the reabsorption of family fields into communal parcels in Huancayre (in Huarochirà province) in the 1950s, see Matos Mar et al., Las actuales comunidades de indÃgenas, 190â191.
Bianca Premo cites the declaration of the principales of Acora (in Chucuito) to a colonial inspector in 1566: a man became an adult when he âtook a woman, received his chácara, and made a home [where they would live] until they were old people.â Premo, âFrom the Pockets of Womenâ, 71.
González HolguÃn, Vocabulario, 324. See also Guaman Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva corónica, 977. The Spanish term comunidad appears in colonial documentation almost exclusively in relation to these holdings. Zagalsky, âEl concepto de âcomunidadâ en su dimensión espacialâ.
Salomon and Urioste, The Huarochirà Manuscript, 103; Murra, âUna visión indÃgena del mundo andinoâ, lii; Guaman Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva corónica, 977; González HolguÃn, Vocabulario, 324, 333; RamÃrez, âLand and Tenure in Early Colonial Peruâ.
âResidencia: Diego de Escobarâ, Concepción, 1644, BNP, MS B1482, fols. 220vâ221r. For a description of comun kallpas or tribute common fields in present-day Bolivia, see Godoy, Mining and agriculture in Highland Bolivia, 42â44.
Benavides, âGrupos de poder en el valle del Colcaâ, 160; Serulnikov, âThe Politics of Intracommunity Land Conflictâ, 122; Zagalsky, âEl concepto de âcomunidadâ en su dimensión espacialâ, 78â79. Ricardo Godoy suggests, in this sense, that the fiscal advantages which ayllus confer on villagers help explain why this form of social organisation has survived into the present day. Godoy, âThe Fiscal Role of the Andean Aylluâ.
Guaman Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva corónica, 897 [911]; Murra, âUna visión indÃgena del mundo andinoâ, lii; Trelles, The Integration of an Andean Ethnic Group into the Early Encomienda System, 68â69.
Premo, âFrom the Pockets of Womenâ, 68, 70â72, 84. On widows as heads of households, around 20 percent of the total number of women in Sacaca and AcasioâChayanta, northern PotosÃâin 1614, see Tandeter, âTeóricamente ausentes, teóricamente solasâ.
âProvission real de los yndios de Hananguanca en rason de su rentaâ, fols. 679râ718v. Thanks to VÃctor Solier for sharing this document with me.
The two others listed were women, aged 25 and 46, respectively, of unknown marital status and listed alongside poor men. For men whose ages were recorded, the average is 30 and the mode 25. For women, these figures are 17 and 15, respectively.
Since no kinship relation is stated for poor single orphans, some sisters may have been counted twice.
The number of poor men of tributary age (195) is particularly high, considering that the male tributary population of Ananguanca between 1683 and 1687 oscillated between 427 and 1032 individuals. âAutos originales que se han seguido contra don MartÃn de Zamudioâ, fols. 2râ3v. A census conducted c. 1617 listed 3140 young (mozos) and tributary men (tributarios) as opposed to 5145 women. Vázquez de Espinosa, Description of the Indies, 457.
Murra, Reciprocity and Redistribution in Andean Civilizations, 27.
Guaman Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva corónica, 247. On Guaman Poma de Ayalaâs multiple engagements with sapçi, see Salomon, âGuaman Pomaâs Sapçiâ; Puente Luna, âThat Which Belongs to Allâ.
Libro de visitas de Santo Toribio Mogrovejo, 214.
Zagalsky, âEl concepto de âcomunidadâ en su dimensión espacialâ, 78â79.
Spalding, HuarochirÃ, 179.
Widows of tributaries sometimes paid tribute to maintain their parcels. Penry, The People Are King, 222n26; Serulnikov, âThe Politics of Intracommunity Land Conflictâ, 138. Murra recounts the 1562 case of Xeque, a poor and disabled elderly widow from Huánuco. In exchange for having her fields laboured by neighbours, she contributed ten balls of cotton yarn and a hen to her aylluâs annual tribute obligation. Murra, âDerechos a tierras en el Tawantinsuyuâ, 304.
In a strikingly similar case from 1619, the leaders in Macha (in the district of Charcas, in present-day Bolivia) petitioned a Spanish magistrate to have three plots of land that had sustained three elderly widows for several years reinstated to ayllu Sulcahaviâs domain. Jurado, âTierra, estatus y viudezâ.
Linebaugh, Stop, Thief!, 147. See also Harvey, âThe Future of the Commonsâ, 103; McCay and Acheson, âHuman Ecologyâ, 7â8. Blaser and De la Cadena make a similar point: âBoth commoning and enclosures involve domaining, and the domains thus delineated have variable reach and scope.â Blaser and De la Cadena, âUncommonsâ, 190. For forests as regulated commons in colonial Mexico, see Woolley, âThe Forests Cannot Be Commonsâ, 44â45.
As Murra has shown, moreover, multiple comunes intercommoned resources, such as the coca fields of Quivi, in the upper Chillón River, in the 1550s. Murra, Formaciones polÃticas y económicas del mundo andino, 93.
âVenta que hace la comunidad de indios de Lurin Huancasâ, fols. 140râ141v.
RamÃrez, âLand and Tenure in Early Colonial Peruâ, 38n24. See also RamÃrez, âDespedazando lo comúnâ, 288.
RamÃrez, âDespedazando lo comúnâ, 295. For irrigation and the commons, see also RamÃrez, âLand and Tenure in Early Colonial Peruâ, 39.
RamÃrez, âDespedazando lo comúnâ, 295.
Ondegardo, âInforme del licenciadoâ, 151â156. See also Trelles, âThe Integrationâ, 68â69. On the penuries of early-colonial households who, on the contrary, had to sacrifice hours of work in their family fields to meet increasing tribute quotas, see Mayer, âLos atributos del hogarâ, 582. Significantly, Guaman Poma de Ayala claims that caciques earmarked excess lands for âla comunidad y sapçiâ only after confirming or reassigning household plots. Guaman Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno, 250.
Frank Salomon, in an email to me, 19Â April 2020. See also Salomon, âThe Long Afterlives of Central-Peruvian Khipu Patrimoniesâ.
González HolguÃn, Vocabulario de la lengua general de todo el Perú, 324.
Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto, 45.
Guaman Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva corónica, 247; Puente Luna, âFelipe Guaman Poma de Ayalaâ.
Dries, âThe Indios Mineros of Colonial Huancavelicaâ; Castro de Trelles, âQuipus coloniales para el conteo de ganadoâ.
This also happened in the case of the three widows from Macha cited above. Jurado, âTierra, estatus y viudezâ.
For a more thorough discussion of this dimension of community land regimes, see Puente Luna, âCustoms Apartâ.
In 1611, for instance, a judge in the village of Socos (Huamanga province) gave possession of a series of plots to Leonor Coca Chimbo. According to this ruling, individuals who had planted crops in her fields against her will were entitled to the equivalent in seed (âlo que hubieren sembrado sin su boluntad se le boluera la semillaâ). Leonor had to return it and pay for any ploughing as well, but would enjoy the improvements as her own. âAutos seguidos por Doña Catalinaâ, fol. 24r. In 1641, another local judge, this time from the village of Anchucaya (Huarochirà province) gave possession of several plots to Magdalena Llacxa Colqui. His ruling ordered Magdalena to return to her legal rival, MarÃa Ticlla Saxa, an amount of seed equivalent to whatever the latter had planted in the formerâs fields (âno dentren mas en ella sino resiuan sus ssemillas que tienen sembrados sin obedeser la ssentençiaâ). âMarÃa Ticlla Saxaâ. fol. 14r.
Duviols, Procesos y visitas de idolatrÃas, 485, 491. I thank Susan RamÃrez for this reference. Maize stored in the common granaries is mentioned in the Huarochirà Manuscript (c. 1608) as well: Salomon and Urioste, The Huarochirà Manuscript, 103: âyngap çaranta sapçicunamantasâ. The editors of the manuscript in English translated the phrase in context as âmaize belonging to the Inca from the common granariesâ.
Spalding, HuarochirÃ, 61.
âAutos que se siguieron por el padre maestroâ, fols. 570r (âlos difuntos del Comun del puebloâ), 576r (âel comun de los difuntos del puebloâ), 741r (maize, potatoes, beans), 764v (candles and maize), 772v (âbienes and chacras de comunidadâ), 800vâ801v, 815r. (âmaiz de la comunidadâ).
More research is needed to determine if, as in the case of Pocoata, a growing imbalance between population and resources, as well as accumulation of individual parcels by local chiefs, contributed to these land conflicts. Serulnikov, âThe Politics of Intracommunity Land Conflictâ, 122. The case of the Chupaychu in the mid-16th century presents another possible scenario: too many days spent working the communal parcels destined to fulfil higher tribute quotas meant less time available for the family plots. During the 1562 inspection, at least 60 percent of the households sent one of their members to work in the common fields. Trelles, The Integration of an Andean Ethnic Group into the Early Encomienda System, 88â90.
González HolguÃn, Vocabulario de la lengua general de todo el Perú, 324. I thank Frank Salomon for his help in translating this phrase, which can also be rendered as âI add to the commonsâ. As Karen Graubart has recently noted, early colonial lordsâ bequeathing of their patrimonial lands and herds to their communities for the purpose of helping to pay tribute might be another expression of the same collectivising drive, albeit disguised as a generous donation. Graubart, ââ¯âYnuvaciones malas e rreprouadasââ¯â, 160; Graubart, âShifting Landscapesâ, 72â73.
Chaney, âThreats to Gongâ, 56.
The only surviving page of a municipal ledger from the village of Lambayeque (near the city of Trujillo) registers, in chronological order, the names of individual tillers and their plots between 1586 and 1611. One entry, dated 1609, mentions two women, Catalina Llamo and Ana Pujqui, both of whom claimed, like MarÃa in Carania, to have inherited a piece of land from great-grandparents who were alive before the Spanish conquest. RamÃrez, âLand and Tenure in Early Colonial Peruâ, 38; RamÃrez, âDespedazando lo comúnâ, 298â299.
Graubart, âShifting Landscapesâ, 63â64; Premo, âFelipaâs Braidâ, 499; Premo and Yannakakis, âA Court of Sticks and Branchesâ, 30.
Herzog, âImmemorial (and Native) Customs in Early Modernityâ, 44â46; Premo and Yannakakis, âA Court of Sticks and Branchesâ, 30â31.
Fernández, âThe Call to the Commonsâ.
The explanation takes us back ten years, to a somewhat confusing chain of events that I can only summarise here: upon Pelleâs withdrawal from an earlier intra-ayllu pact, Chacallongo welcomed MarÃaâs husband into its fold, allowing him to use the rayas unopposed in exchange for planting two almudes of communal seed in them, as dictated by custom since Inca times. Diegoâs labour obligations to Pelle, however, remained.
âpara que cultibe e benefic[i]e para la dicha comunidad.â âAutos que siguenâ, fol. 11v.
Blaser and Cadena, âThe Uncommonsâ, 190.
Farquhar, Lai and Kramer, âA Place at the End of a Roadâ, 218.
See, for instance, Ondegardo, âInforme del licenciadoâ, 178â180; Ortiz de Zúñiga, Visita, 25, 30â31, 42.
Herzog, âImmemorial (and Native) Customs in Early Modernityâ, 42.
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